SCULPTURE, the art of representing observed or imagined objects in solid materials and in three dimensions. The field of sculpture is so vast that it cannot be conveniently covered in a single article. It has therefore been divided into a number of parts incorporated under various subjects.
Undoubtedly the beginnings of sculpture may be explained by that spontaneous delight which all men find in the imitation of natural objects. Sculpture would seem to be almost inevitably conceived as a realistic art, since it offers us, not appearances, like painting, but actual forms reproduced from nature and placed, like nature's forms, in space. Vet the power of sculpture to em body also an abstract beauty, like music or architecture, seems to have been felt at a very early date. The use of sculpture for the decoration of objects, such as the bone handles of weapons, in which imitated natural forms had to be fitted to the contours of geometric forms, may have led to the discovery of that ar ranged beauty that arises from a rhythmic disposition of line and mass. Purely representative sculpture, cut into the wall of a cave or carved from a tree-trunk, assumed immediately a correspond ing tendency towards the creation of abstract harmonies. Com position, which implies a conscious selection and arrangement of observed objects and demands an adjustment of nature to fit an assigned space, became a necessary part of artistic effort. That idealization of nature, which selects from her seeming chaos laws which are in harmony with his own needs and desires, prompted the artist to insist upon those laws in his descriptive art, which was thus diverted from its original intent—the literal rendering of natural form. Throughout its history, sculpture has thus offered two kinds of beauty: the sensuous beauty of imitated natural forms and the imagined or religious beauty of natural forms made harmonious with man's spiritual needs.
This dual role of sculpture is illustrated in the art of Egypt. In the decorative sculpture of Egypt, natural forms, or forms derived from nature, are oftentimes perfectly adjusted, through elimination or arrangement of parts, to the shape and material, the structure and function of furniture, weapons, fabrics, and architecture. The world of chiselled forms which peoples the
tombs of the Nile valley, although ritualistic and useful in its purpose and hidden for ever from the eyes of men, shows a per sistent search for harmony in arrangement and for the idealization of nature. The power of these abstractions is most evident in the great seated statues of the Pharaohs, which are neither decorations nor illustrations, but monuments. The compact and definite forms, the economy of detail, the great scale and the emphasis upon the inner structure of the body, endow these heroic figures with the architectonic grandeur of abstract forms; and the characterization of the figure, ignoring physical peculiari ties to insist upon spiritual realities—upon the dignity, reserve, and power of sovereignty—informs them with the majesty they were intended to celebrate.
Egyptian sculpture illustrates also the way in which the re production of nature is limited, in sculpture, by artistic or social conventions. Sculpture, in spite of its objectivity is necessarily a conventional art, limited in range by the need for equilibrium and by the nature of its materials. Conventions, arising in primi tive times from inadequacy of technique, or invented by some artist as an expedient for the realization in stone of that pattern which he perceives in nature, are continually being crystallized into precedents or even into social or religious laws. From the repetition of conventions there arise traditions which interpose themselves between the individual artist and nature. The monot ony of the sculpture of Egypt, which for forty centuries observes the same iron convention, is perhaps its most amazing character istic; yet there is no sculptor, except the first sculptor, who has not felt to some extent the generalizing influence of tradition. Of all the arts, sculpture is, excepting only architecture, the most traditional.