CHAPTER 9

The nature of sculpture

Although well versed in the arts, Michelangelo always considered himself first and foremost a sculptor, and he held this art form above all the others. In this he was unique among Renaissance artists and critics, who mostly advocated the superiority of painting or drawing (disegno).²⁶⁵

This is not to say no arguments were advanced in favour of the art of sculpture; in fact, that are several worth revisiting in the present context. The most important was that sculpture was considered to be closer than painting to nature; sculpture was sited in nature. Since painting represents the world by imitation of the ideal, using more or less arbitrary signs, it has a level of abstraction that is more similar to writing. Horace’s phrase ut pictura poesis does not apply to sculpture, not only because it is seldom concerned with narratives, but also because its materials are so fundamentally different from those of poetry and painting.

The all-precious marble, but also clay, bronze, and wood are closely bound to nature. The material has to be extracted from nature, dug out of the ground, and refined with a clear understanding and respect for its characteristic qualities. Petrarch claimed that sculpture was superior to painting in this respect, a figure of thought spelt out in a dialogue between Joy and Reason:

Joy: Statues pleases me.
Reason: Sculpture is nearer to nature than painting. Pictures appeal much to the eye, but sculptures can be touched, feel substantial and solid, and are of durable body.²⁶⁶

Leon Battista Alberti, in his treatise On Sculpture written in the mid- fifteenth century, also elaborated on the theme.²⁶⁷ Less well known than his treatise On Painting, the structure of this text is also quite different. While the former focuses on perspective and narrative (historia), the one on sculpture is mostly concerned with proportion and art’s double relation to nature.²⁶⁸

The first images, wrote Alberti, were produced by observing in nature objects that, through slight alterations, could be made to look like the thing represented: from the vague chora, the first thematic figurations were produced through creative interaction. Some artists, he added, ‘proceed by adding and taking away, such as those who work in wax or clay, … others merely by taking away, like those who by removing the superfluous reveal the figure of the man they want which was hidden within a block of marble’.²⁶⁹ There was also a third group of artists, who work solely by addition, not in the least dependent on their materials, or at least so independent of them that they can be said to work only through imagination and imitation.

As for Vasari’s extensive discussion of the difference between painting and sculpture, it has been customary to emphasize his preference for the former.²⁷⁰ Nevertheless, it is worthwhile looking at his arguments in favour of the latter. ‘Sculpture’, according to Vasari, ‘is an art which takes away the superfluous from the given material and reduces it to that shape of the body which is designed in the idea of the artist’.²⁷¹ Sculptors were said to be endowed ‘by nature and by the exercise of their art, with a better habit of body, with more blood, and with more energy’.²⁷² A little later he claimed that sculpture ‘calls for a certain better disposition, both of mind and body, that are rarely found together’.²⁷³

Most of his arguments in favour of sculpture were directly related to its materiality. It was better preserved than painting and therefore used to commemorate the greatest of men, in marble and in bronze. It was also more expensive, because of the precious materials used: gold, silver, and rare stone. Another important argument was that the materials were much harder and thus more difficult to work with than those used in painting, with the hefty tools of the sculptor’s craft and the ‘extreme and grievous labour of handling the marbles and bronzes’.²⁷⁴ With its unique nearness to the materials, sculpture was closer to nature and to the fundamental and natural truths. The last and strongest argument for sculpture, Vasari concluded, was that it required ‘a perfection of judgement not only ordinary, as for painters, but absolute and immediate, in a manner that it may see within the marble the exact whole of that figure which they intend to carve from it’.²⁷⁵ From the dreamlike stages of non-culture, the artist forges a cultural object, a thesis.

In Vasari’s subsequent paragraphs on the excellence of painting, he retracted much of what he had said in defence of sculpture, but not without adding to a few of his arguments for the latter. The argument that painting only needs the aid of one of the senses, the sense of sight, while sculpture is an art of both touch and sight, could perhaps be used as a point in sculpture’s favour, it being the more naturalistic and complex.²⁷⁶ Many of the arguments are also related to the passage on sculpture, but inverted, so that its origins in nature and its materials are frowned on as inferior to the more refined crafts of perspective and narration.

The way Vasari is interpreted depends on how his general view of nature is understood. There has been a tendency in modern scholarship to read humanist ideas about art as forerunners of modernist art and abstraction. It must be kept in mind, however, that there was no such thing as abstract or conceptual art in the early modern period: an immense and unquestionable respect for nature and for the divine origin of the human body was still the cornerstone of both art theory and people’s world view.²⁷⁷ This, for example, was the argument used by Leonardo da Vinci, in claiming the superiority of the visual arts over poetry:

The works of nature are much nobler than speech which was invented by man; for the works of man are to the works of nature as man is to God.²⁷⁸

With its closeness to nature, sculpture remains today an art for decorating gardens and fountains. It is no coincidence that it has always been the favoured art for memorials, from antiquity through the Middle Ages and into our own time. Sculpture has always been considered more durable, more enduring, digging deeper into history and reaching further into the future than both writing and painting.

That capacity to hold and display the memory of its own becoming is one of sculpture’s most important qualities. Just as language is the ultimate content, the enduring and unavoidable topic of all poetry, the quarry and the block of marble are fundamental to Michelangelo’s art. Just as poetry necessarily exists in dialogue with language, sculpture exists in dialogue with nature.