Leo Steinberg was one of the most original and daring art historians of the twentieth century, known for taking interpretative risks that challenged the profession by overturning reigning orthodoxies. In essays and lectures that ranged from old masters to contemporary art, he combined scholarly erudition with an eloquent prose that illuminated his subject and a credo that privileged the visual evidence of the image over the literature written about it. His works, sometimes provocative and controversial, remain vital and influential reading. For half a century, Steinberg delved into Michelangelo's work, revealing the symbolic structures underlying the artist's highly charged idiom. This volume of essays and unpublished lectures explicates many of Michelangelo's most celebrated sculptures, applying principles gleaned from long, hard looking. Almost everything Steinberg wrote included passages of old-fashioned formal analysis, but here put to the service of interpretation. He understood that Michelangelo's rendering of figures as well as their gestures and interrelations conveys an emblematic significance masquerading under the guise of naturalism. Michelangelo pushed Renaissance naturalism into the furthest reaches of metaphor, using the language of the body and its actions to express fundamental Christian tenets once expressible only by poets and preachers--or, as Steinberg put it, in Michelangelo's art, "anatomy becomes theology." Michelangelo's Sculpture is the first in a series of volumes of Steinberg's selected writings and unpublished lectures, edited by his longtime associate Sheila Schwartz. The volume also includes a book review debunking psychoanalytic interpretation of the master's work, a lighthearted look at Michelangelo and the medical profession and, finally, the shortest piece Steinberg ever published.

Figural and non-figural supports are a ubiquitous feature of Roman marble sculpture; they appear in sculptures ranging in size from miniature to colossal and of all levels of quality. At odds with modern ideas about beauty, completeness, and visual congruence, these elements, especially non-figural struts, have been dismissed by scholars as mere safeguards for production and transport. However, close examination of these features reveals the tastes and expectations of those who commissioned, bought, and displayed marble sculptures throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Drawing on a large body of examples, Greek and Latin literary sources, and modern theories of visual culture, this study constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of non-figural supports in Roman sculpture. The book overturns previous conceptions of Roman visual values and traditions and challenges our understanding of the Roman reception of Greek art.

An annotated inventory of works by architectural sculptor Walter Gilbert and associates

Inn-keepers and prostitutes, kings and cardinals, artists and soldiers rub shoulders in the pages of Cellini's notorious autobiography. Benvenuto Cellini was a celebrated goldsmith and distinguished sculptor, yet it is on his autobiography that much of his fame rests. Begun in Florence when he was fifty-eight, it was primarily intended to be the story of his life and art, his tragedies and triumphs. However, as he was an active participant in the wars and struggles of the period, and drew his friends and enemies from all levels of society, it became a vivid and convincing portrait of the manners and morals both of the rulers of the sixteenth century and of their subjects.

With enviable powers of invective and an irrepressible sense of humour, reflected in an equally vigorous and extravagant style, Cellini has provided an intriguing and unrivalled glimpse into the palaces and prisons of the Italy of Michelangelo and the Medici. For this edition, George Bull has revised and expanded his Introduction, added comprehensive notes and updated the Bibliography.

In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice ''good to think with.''

Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within.

By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.

Learning to Look at Sculpture is an accessible guide to the study and understanding of three dimensional art. Sculpture is all around us: in public parks, squares, gardens and railway stations, as part of the architecture of buildings, or when used in commemoration and memorials and can even be considered in relation to furniture and industrial design. This book encourages you to consider the multiple forms and everyday guises sculpture can take.

Exploring Western sculpture with examples from antiquity through to the present day, Mary Acton shows you how to analyse and fully experience sculpture, asking you to consider questions such as What do we mean by the sculptural vision? What qualities do we look for when viewing sculpture? How important is the influence of the Classical Tradition and what changed in the modern period? What difference does the scale and context make to our visual understanding?

With chapters on different types of sculpture, such as free-standing figures, group sculpture and reliefs, and addressing how the experience of sculpture is fundamentally different due to the nature of its relationship to the space of its setting, the book also explores related themes, such as sculpture s connection with architecture, drawing and design, and what difference changing techniques can make to the tactile and physical experience of sculpture.

Richly illustrated with over 200 images, including multiple points of view of three dimensional works, examples include the Riace bronzes, Michelangelo s "David," Canova s "The Three Graces," medieval relief sculptures, war memorials and works from modern and contemporary artists, such as Henry Moore, Cornelia Parker and Richard Serra, and three-dimensional designers like Thomas Heatherwick.

A glossary of critical and technical terms, further reading and questions for students, make this the ideal companion for all those studying, or simply interested in, sculpture."

How to cast bronze? This complete tutorial will show you a simple, safe and easy way to cast a small, fist size sculpture in bronze at little cost and little effort. The method described in this manual is called the thin ceramic shell, lost wax technique. This is the same technique implemented by modern art foundries; it has simply been adapted to make it possible in the backyard and is the easiest way for the home founder to make a small sculpture to a high degree of quality at little cost and with easily found tools and materials. This manual focuses on a simple yet rewarding 5 days project that will allow the home enthusiast to cast a small piece safely, quickly, cheaply and to a high standard of quality. The manual will introduce you to the basics of wax working, sprueing a wax model, mixing and applying a ceramic slurry, making your own crucible and making an efficient yet affordable furnace, melting and pouring the metal and finally chasing and fettling the bronze before applying a simple patina. The second part of the manual discusses more advanced casting techniques and gives further advice and guidance on how to set up a small scale home foundry. The tools and materials necessary are easy to find. An appendix lists many stores where specialised materials can be purchased in different countries.

A daring reassessment of Louise Nevelson, an icon of twentieth-century art whose innovative procedures relate to gendered, classed, and racialized forms of making In this radical rethinking of the art of Louise Nevelson (1899–1988), Julia Bryan-Wilson provides a long-overdue critical account of a signature figure in postwar sculpture. A Ukraine-born Jewish immigrant, Nevelson persevered in the male-dominated New York art world. Nonetheless, her careful procedures of construction—in which she assembled found pieces of wood into elaborate structures, usually painted black—have been little studied. Organized around a series of key operations in Nevelson’s own process (dragging, coloring, joining, and facing), the book comprises four slipcased, individually bound volumes that can be read in any order. Both form and content thus echo Nevelson’s own modular sculptures, the gridded boxes of which the artist herself rearranged. Exploring how Nevelson’s making relates to domesticity, racialized matter, gendered labor, and the environment, Bryan-Wilson offers a sustained examination of the social and political implications of Nevelson’s art. The author also approaches Nevelson’s sculptures from her own embodied subjectivity as a queer feminist scholar. She forges an expansive art history that places Nevelson’s assemblages in dialogue with a wide array of marginalized worldmaking and underlines the artist’s proclamation of allegiance to blackness.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Puget Sound's rich abundance of life - from mammals to birds - can be attributed to the fact that the region is far more than just a body of water. Edged by an extraordinary range of habitats, this region is visited and occupied year-round by species that are finely tuned to exploit the resources here that are necessary for their survival. Birds are among the most obvious occupants of these communities, and witnessing their dynamic lives has been a source of inspiration for artist and naturalist Tony Angell. For nearly fifty years Angell has used Puget Sound's natural diversity as his artist's palette. In this book, he describes the living systems within the Sound and shares his observations and encounters with the species that make up the complex communities of the Sound's rivers, tidal flats, islands, and beaches: the fledging flight of a young peregrine, an otter playfully herding a small red rockfish, the grasp of a curious octopus. Angell goes on to explain the methods he uses in his art. The shapes, movements, patterns, and even temperatures and smells that he experiences in the field are all brought to bear on his work. His drawings bring clarity to his visual and emotional memories, and his sculptures allow him to approach a memory from many directions and retain that memory in his hands. In all of his work, he lets the passion and excitement of his discoveries drive his artistic expression. Angell augments his descriptions of the wildlife of the Puget Sound region and his working methods with two appendices listing guides and references to this and other regions by other artists and naturalists. These resources not only put wildlife viewers in touch with the times and places to view particular species, but also speak to the patience and willingness to be delighted that are necessary to increasing the understanding of our wild neighbors. See Tony Angell on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCemt7hVK_4

An Unreasoned Act of Being is an account of the life and career of Himmat Shah. Shah was a major sculptor and draughtsman of twentieth-century India. He was born in 1933 and rejected traditional schooling, opting instead to train at art school. He spent time in Paris discovering the canon of western art but also founded Group 1890, established to promote a form of Indian art distinct from the western schools. The most recognizable of his work is the series of heads sculpted in bronze and terracotta. As emblems of masculinity they appear totemic and phallic. He uses printmaking techniques to score the surfaces of these pieces. This book looks in depth at his life and work, along with stylistic aspects and technique. It offers an account of a seminal Indian artist.

Over the course of 60-plus years, Erwin Hauer has created modular sculptures that feature penetrations and prominent interior voids yet, remarkably, are bonded by continuous surfaces. The modules of these sculptures contain the seeds of infinity: what Hauer calls 'continua'. Still Facing Infinity covers the full scope of Hauer's artistic oeuvre, from early two-dimensional works that double as room dividers to three-dimensional, space-filling sculptures that are conceptually similar to innovative architecture and engineering (works by Antoni Gaudi, Felix Candela, and Frei Otto) as well as advanced mathematical concepts (triply periodic infinite surfaces without self-intersections). Hauer offers detailed presentations in writings as well as in abundant photographs of a number of significant works, including Jerusalem Tower and Infinite Surface I-WP, the basis for numerous tabletop and large-scale sculptures as well as for two independent series that explore multiple iterations of the infinite surface concept.

A unique anthology of articles on contemporary sculptors drawn from the 25-year history of Sculpture magazine, A Sculpture Reader offers a valuable overview of three dimensional art since 1980. Focusing on individual artists rather than themes or movements, the 42 essays in A Sculpture Reader capture the wide-ranging possibilities that characterize contemporary sculpture.

Bonalumi is one of the figures who has made the most significant marks on the Italian artistic scene starting from the 1960s. He took part in the cultural debate that developed in those years, contributing decisively, together with Enrico Baj, Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, to the transcending of informal language in the name of a new objectification of the artwork. Starting from 1959, Agostino Bonalumi began to create shaped works using convex canvas obtained through the use of wooden or steel elements positioned behind the canvas itself. This is a stylistic characteristic that was to remain unchanged over the years and that would lead to the artist testing his skills in both the sculptural and the environmental/architectural fields. Through a special selection of works of small dimensions, created by the artist during the entire course of his career, one can look back to his conceptual and project path, from the convex canvases to his sculptural production. The sophisticated results of the artist's research are achieved here also thanks to a more intimate dimension, in which he employs his own methodological approach. The works presented here are neither preparatory models nor sketches of works of larger dimensions: rather, they have come about from the same practice and sometimes share the conformation of the larger works. The small format works were often realised following the larger ones, as if the reduced dimensions enabled the artist to better delineate the project idea lying at the basis of the latter. Text in English and Italian.

Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

Teresa Moorehouse's "narrative sculptures" tell deep, often timeless stories in cold cast bronze, with patinas of copper, silver, or gold. Some draw on traditional myths or legends. Others discover new voices for contemporary experience of spiritual mysteries. Her images weave a language of symbols that surpasses logic and speaks directly to intuition and spirit. Soul Stories elegantly displays thirty-nine of the artist's favourite works in cold cast bronze. Her own brief narratives companion the photographs, to lead us by the hand into each sculpture's magical world.

A critical primer on artist Richard Serra's work. Richard Serra is considered by many to be the most important sculptor of the postwar period. The essays in this volume cover the complete span of Serra's work to date-from his first experiments with materials and processes through his early films and site works to his current series of "torqued ellipses." There is a special emphasis on those moments when Serra extended aesthetic convention and/or challenged political authority, as in the famous struggle with the General Services Administration over the site-specific piece Tilted Arc. October Files October Files is a new series of inexpensive paperback books. Each book will address a body of work by an artist of the postwar period who has altered our understanding of art in significant ways and prompted a critical literature that is sophisticated and sustained. Each book will trace not only the development of an important oeuvre but also the construction of the critical discourse inspired by it. The series editors are Hal Foster, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, and Rosalind Krauss.

For the first time, the 92-metre frieze of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, one of the largest historical narratives in marble, has been made the subject of a book. The pictorial narrative of the Boer pioneers who conquered South Africa's interior during the 'Great Trek' (1835-52) represents a crucial period of South Africa's past. Conceptualising the frieze both reflected on and contributed to the country's socio-political debates in the 1930s and 1940s when it was made. The book considers the active role the Monument played in the rise of Afrikaner nationalism and the development of apartheid, as well as its place in post-apartheid heritage. The frieze is unique in that it provides rare evidence of the complex processes followed in creating a major monument. Based on unpublished documents, drawings and models, these processes are unfolded step by step, from the earliest discussions of the purpose and content of the frieze, through all the stages of its design, to its shipping to post-war Italy to be copied into marble from Monte Altissimo, up to its final installation in the Monument. The book examines how visual representation transforms historical memory in what it chooses to recount, and the forms in which it is depicted. The second volume expands on the first, by investigating each of the twenty-seven scenes of the frieze in depth, providing new insights into not only the frieze, but also South Africa's history. Francois van Schalkwyk of African Minds, co-publisher with De Gruyter writes: From Memory to Marble is an open access monograph in the true sense of the word. Both volumes of the digital version of the book are available in full and free of charge from the date of publication. This approach to publishing democratises access to the latest scholarly publications across the globe. At the same time, a book such as From Memory to Marble, with its unique and exquisite photographs of the frieze as well as its wealth of reproduced archival materials, demands reception of a more traditional kind, that is, on the printed page. For this reason, the book is likewise available in print as two separate volumes. The printed and digital books should not be seen as separate incarnations; each brings its own advantages, working together to extend the reach and utility of From Memory to Marble to a range of interested readers.

For three months Biel, Switzerland, hosted a special kind of sculpture. It was special not simply because it was by one of Switzerland's most famous contemporary artists-Thomas Hirschhorn-and dedicated to one of the most prominent authors in the history of Swiss literature, Robert Walser. Beyond that, this sculpture was a redefinition of sculpture itself, because what takes on a plastic form here is not made of stone, steel, or bronze. It is society itself that helped to develop this work of art. In 2016 Thomas Hirschhorn and the curator Kathleen Buhler began doing field research in Biel, the city of Robert Walser's birth, connecting with residents, clubs, artists, literati, and experts. This resulted in a multifaceted agenda. Every day the two offered events such as readings, walking tours, lectures, and children's activities. All of this ultimately comprised the Robert Walser-Sculpture. Never before has an entire city been integrated into a temporary work of art in this way.