Visual Arts II: Sculpture, Film, Architecture & More

Since we have a Visual Arts thread dedicated to painting and I don't want to derail it, I thought it might be nice to open another thread dedicated to all the other Visual Art forms and media.

I'm going to get things started by posting a few pictures of what I personally consider the ultimate Art form - Sculpture - and I thought it would be appropriate to begin with the man who is widely considered the greatest sculptor of all time: Michelangelo Buonarroti. To accurately draw and paint the human form is one of the greatest challenges one can present to an artist, but to sculpt it in three dimensions takes that challenge to the ultimate level, and no one did it better than Michelangelo.

First up, and deservedly so, is a tastefully cropped photo of Michelangelo's iconic David, 1501-1504 (if you want to see the Full Monty version you'll have to look that up yourself):



What I didn't initially know about this piece, depicting the young King David of Old Testament fame, was the political message associated with the sculpture and the Florentine Republic:

(Michelangelo continued below)

 

(cont.)

Two more of Michelangelo's most famous sculptures, first Moses (1513-15) and second his most renowned Pietà, La Madonna della Pietà (1498-99):

 

If you haven't seen David in Florence, it's an amazing experience. The statue is pretty big, something like seventeen feet tall.

 

I would love to see it in person.

The closest I've gotten is a concrete reproduction of David's head that I have in our backyard garden. Not quite the same experience!

The most famous sculpture I've seen in person is Rodin's Burghers of Calais:

 

And now for one of my favorite pieces of Architecture, Antoni Gaudi's Basílica de la Sagrada Família in Barcelona, Spain - still under construction after 140+ years.

https://sagradafamilia.org/en

Starting with the exterior....



...in keeping with the Spanish tradition of incredibly elaborate carvings and sculpture....



(cont.)

 

(cont.)

...moving to the interior...



...and its exquisite stained glass....



(cont.)

 

(cont.)

 

I wonder if it's more difficult to make sculpture from solid Stone or cast bronze?

I would think metallic sculptures would require a mold to pour the molten metal into. It seems like that would be less forgiving than carving from Stone

 

Is this something you might be interested in having in this thread? Like I said, I suck at skin tones. I tried to colorize every last detail and most of it was using channels.

 

Not that making a cast is easy, but I would say carving a sculpture out of stone is more difficult.

 

I cast things in metal, as long as we are talking about small spheres of solid lead! Lol.

I also did some ant mound casting in the past. That's one way to get rid of ants.

 

Pretty much anything goes here but paintings....and you are a glutton for punishment.

Any idea how long it took you to colorize that photo?

 

Ah yes, your finely cast...um...never mind.

As you can see from the Bronze Casting video, there's a lot that goes into making a cast, but the actual sculpting part is a lot easier and more forgiving than working in stone:



Donatello was a great sculptor, and he worked in both marble and bronze. Arguably his most famous sculpture is a bronze David, and as you can it's quite different and much more feminine than Michelangelo's muscular David :

 

Personally, when it comes to sculpture, I think Michelangelo had only one rival and that was Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Bernini is most famous for the work he did in St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican:



The Chair of St. Peter

(cont.)

 

(Bernini cont.)


Ecstasy of St. Teresa


Saint Longinus

 

I recall reading somewhere that one of the biggest challenges with stone was that you don't know what defects are underneath the surface. You could be half way through and hit a pocket of sand, a big crack, or some other defect and have to start all over again with a different block of rock.

 

Bernini ran into that problem with a bust of Cardinal Scipione Borghese that he was sculpting. All was going well and then *crack*



...he had to sculpt a second bust. He knocked it out in three days which is testimony to his remarkable skill...

 

That photo probably took about two months to complete. I don’t have any statues or anything like that.

 

While I don't know anyone who considers this Bernini's best work it is arguably his most famous, and the Catholics out there would probably recognize this prominent feature inside St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, St. Peter's Baldachin (Bernini's Chair of St. Peter is in the background):



St. Peter's Baldachin (Italian: Baldacchino di San Pietro, L'Altare di Bernini) is a large Baroque sculpted bronze canopy, technically called a ciborium or baldachin, over the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, the city-state and papal enclave surrounded by Rome, Italy. The baldachin is at the center of the crossing, and directly under the dome of the basilica. Designed by the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, it was intended to mark, in a monumental way, the place of Saint Peter's tomb underneath. Under its canopy is the high altar of the basilica. Commissioned by Pope Urban VIII, the work began in 1623 and ended in 1634.[1] The baldachin acts as a visual focus within the basilica; it is itself a very large structure and forms a visual mediation between the enormous scale of the building and the human scale of the people officiating at the religious ceremonies at the papal altar beneath its canopy...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter's_Baldachin

 

Thoughts on this colorization? It’s the best colorization I’ve seen, too bad I didn’t do it. The woman who did it told me it took her two years and the file size got so large that she had to flatten it a few times and then continue on. Zoom in and look at the incredible detail and how she did the reflections.

 

@Talon

Wow, this looks like a cooler thread than I imagined it would be! It is a really good idea of yours, IMO, to include architecture, along with sculpture.

To explain my opening comment, for which I hope you take no offense: what I had been thinking, was of the difficulty of the two dimensional, and static, imaging device which you are using to present statuary and other sculpture, to well represent three dimensional works, which are meant to be seen from all angles. With even relatively small changes in perspective, a work of sculpture can change much more markedly, than a flat painting (which still can be frustrating, to well represent, due to other considerations). Truly appreciating a work of sculpture, I was thinking, could only come from aggregating multiple viewpoints.

The sculpture I had chosen to represent this idea, and so of which I'd had grabbed images from off the internet, turns out to be one that you have already used, in post #4, Rodin's Les Bourgeois de Calais-- so why don't I start with your image:







For a sculpture such as this, the interplay of positive and negative space, is going to be a big part of the overall artwork. Yet, that will vary drastically, depending on one's position, especially in a work which has no definite "front." For instance, this point of perspective is only raised, and just slightly counter-clockwise, from the one, above.







Moving only slightly clockwise from your original perspective (and on level ground with the sculpture, as opposed to viewing it from below), looks like this:






Even from the same direction, just moving closer, presents a different appearance:







I'm sure I've made my point, and don't need to narrate the differences, in these additional views of the work:
















While these next two, are not perspectives that Rodin probably would have imagined most viewers would have considered front-facing, still, that is one of the challenges posed to a sculptor, that he must consider every angle from which his work may be seen.











Nevertheless, I did glimpse some nice looking images, in your earlier posts, so I guess the challenge, is for you to find those photographers who'd chosen the best perspectives, for their images.

I'm looking forward to seeing what else, you come up with!

 

I can’t imagine the kind of skill and talent a person has to have to make those statues.

 

Here’s Errol Flynn in a movies whose name I forgot. The garment on the far left guy was done manually and you can see I sucked at skin tones.

 

I've always marveled at the great sculptors, particularly the ones like Michelangelo and Bernini who worked in stone.

 

It's a magnificent sculpture, isn't it?

You did a nice job of pointing out the things that make it special and later on I'm going to expand on some of your thoughts in another piece by Rodin that shares several important qualities with The Burghers of Calais.

Incidentally, I was just pondering what it took to make such a large cast. If I recall correctly there are 12 original copies of the Burghers on display around the world.