Figurative Sculpture

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The human figure has been sculpture's main subject for most of its history. In the 4th century BC Greek sculptors such as Praxiteles carved gods in relaxed, weight-shifting poses that later ages copied endlessly. Donatello's bronze David revived the free-standing nude in Renaissance Florence. Around 1800 Antonio Canova polished the classical ideal to a cool marble sheen, while Jean-Antoine Houdon made vividly lifelike portrait busts of figures such as Voltaire.

Auguste Rodin broke that smooth finish in the late 1800s, leaving bronze surfaces rough and bodies fragmentary. After 1945 Alberto Giacometti stretched figures into thin, scarred verticals. Others went the opposite way: Duane Hanson cast ordinary Americans in resin and dressed them in real clothes, and Maurizio Cattelan uses hyperreal figures for dark jokes. Look at how each maker handles surface, scale and the base the figure stands on.