The beautiful art of sculpture

Sculpture (from the Latin sculptūra) is the art of modeling clay, carving in stone, wood and other materials. The work created by a sculptor is also called sculpture.

It is one of the Fine Arts in which the sculptor expresses himself by creating volumes and shaping spaces. Sculpture includes all the arts of carving and chisel, along with casting and molding. Within sculpture, the use of different combinations of materials and media has given rise to a new artistic repertoire, which includes processes such as constructivism and assemblage. In a generic sense, sculpture is understood as the plastic artistic work made by the sculptor.

The prologue of Le vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, by Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), talks about architecture, sculpture and painting, disciplines grouped under the name "arts of design." The work is an informative and valuable treatise on the artistic techniques used at the time. In reference to the sculpture it begins like this:

...the sculptor removes everything superfluous and reduces the material to the form that exists within the artist's mind.

Since ancient times, man has had the need to sculpt. At first he made it with the simplest materials that were most at hand: stone, clay and wood. Later he used iron, bronze, gold, lead, wax, plaster, plasticine, polyester resin and plastics with fiberglass reinforcement, concrete, kinetics and light reflection, among others. Sculpture originally had a single function, its immediate use; Later a ritual, magical, funerary and religious function was added. This functionality changed with historical evolution, acquiring a mainly aesthetic or simply ornamental one and becoming a lasting or ephemeral element.