DIFFERENCES IN VIEWPOINT AND MODELLING A study of portrait heads produced throughout the ages reveals a rich variety of viewpoints and of modelling. Everyone is familiar with the unanimated face. You see it sitting opposite you in the public conveyance. Its expression has settled to that of hopeless, inactive monotony. For purposes of characterization it might be termed a 'street-car face." This aspect of portraiture may have a variety of underlying causes. The sculptor may be frankly bored with the subject. He may lack understanding of the subject and be unwilling to exert himself sufficiently to establish mutual sym pathy. He may be faced with a personality that refuses to give that sympathy. Or, through lack of experience and inability to handle his medium, he may neglect the life-giving structural essen tials.
In his effort to achieve simplicity a sculptor often gives the big essentials of head construction but so covers them with a general modelling that the richness of surface is lost. This type of
portraiture reminds one of a figure neatly enveloped in a veil, or generalized by the use of tights. It is the antithesis of rich form sculpture in which detail is held in perfect scale to and is supported by the mass (Pl. XV., fig. 2).
At the other pole is the portrait head that achieves likeness and individuality by thinness of form, as if the artist were working with a drawn line upon the clay, emphasizing detail rather than construction, a type of work implying a pen and ink mental ap proach and readily defined as "pen and ink sculpture" (Pl. IX., fig. 6).
The exaggeration of individual characteristics with extreme emphasis upon striking details supplies another classification under the head of caricature (q.v.).