Sculpture

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Italy

Italian Mannerist sculptors include Benvenuto Cellini, Francesco Primaticcio, and Giambologna. Cellini is widely known for an elegant gold and enamel salt cellar (1539-1543, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), displaying graceful nude figures with elongated proportions, made for Francis I of France. Also working for the French court, among a group of artists known as the Fontainebleau School, was Primaticcio, whose elaborate stucco sculptures (c. 1540s) decorate major rooms in the Palace of Fontainebleau. Giambologna, who came originally from France, was the major sculptor working in Florence in the late 16th century. Among his works is Rape of the Sabine Women (1583, Loggia dei Lanzi, Florence), an over-life-size marble group, interesting from all angles. Consisting of three figures in twisting poses, spiralling upwards, it demonstrates the Mannerist ideal of drama and complexity of form.

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France

In northern Europe, the finest sculptors working in France during the 16th century were influenced by the Mannerism of the Fontainebleau School. Jean Goujon did some tomb sculpture, but best known are his reliefs depicting gracefully draped water nymphs for the Fountain of the Innocent (1548-1549, Louvre). Germain Pilon also executed tomb sculpture; most impressive for its realism and technical skill is his tomb figure of Valentine Balbiani (c. 1581; Louvre), in which a delicately carved marble relief portrays the decaying corpse.

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Baroque and Rococo Sculpture

The Baroque style, which dominated the 17th century, had its origins in Rome and is characterized by dynamic intensity. After the rise of free-standing sculpture during the Renaissance, the Baroque was again concerned with the close relationship to architecture, exploiting rhetorical—even theatrical—effects to impress the spectator. The more delicate, decorative idiom characteristic of the early part of the 18th century and originating in France, is known as Rococo style.

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Italy

No artist exemplified the powerful combination of sculpture, painting, and architecture better than Gianlorenzo Bernini. His works are highly dramatic, and their depth of emotional expression suited the intense spirit of the Counter-Reformation. A strong interplay of light, shadow, and movement characterizes all of Bernini's works. His Apollo and Daphne (1622-1624, Galleria Borghese, Rome) shows his technical virtuosity in handling marble, which stands equally for soft flesh and hard wood. It was crucial to his aesthetic to stretch the potential of the material as far as it would go, to work against the associations of marble with stasis and coldness. This was to damage his reputation among later sculptors who held to the ideal of “truth to material”. David (1623-1624, Galleria Borghese), one of his early works, is, in sharp contrast to Michelangelo's restrained, classical representation of David, a self-contained contemplative figure, shown before his encounter with Goliath. Bernini's figure is frozen in motion, his attention fixed on the unseen adversary, his body twisting to throw the shot.

Many of Bernini's largest sculptures are in St Peter's Basilica, the colonnaded piazza of which he also designed; these works include the gigantic baldachin, or canopy (1624-1633), over the high altar, the enormous Cathedra Petri (Chair of St Peter, 1657-1666), several monumental statues of saints, and two papal tombs. One of his most celebrated creations, however, is the ornate Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, with its spectacular Ecstasy of St Teresa (1645-1652). Bernini united the sensual with the spiritual experience in an unprecedented manner in this, his most theatrical work. His enormous output also includes portrait busts and several superb sculptured fountains in Rome, including the famous Fountain of the Four Rivers (1648-1651) in the Piazza Navona.

Bernini’s achievement has tended to obscure those of his contemporaries. The Flemish-born François Duquesnoy showed in works like Santa Susanna (1629-1633, Santa Maria di Loreto, Rome) how a more restrained classical manner co-existed with the Baroque.

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France and Germany

In France, the leading Baroque sculptors were François Girardon, who made much garden sculpture at the Palace of Versailles, and Antoine Coysevox and Pierre Puget, both of whom were influenced to some extent by Bernini. Puget's most notable sculptures are a portal for the Hôtel de Ville (1656) in Toulon and the marble Milo of Crotona (1671-1683, Louvre), whose contrapposto pose and intense emotionalism exemplify the Baroque aesthetic. Puget in turn inspired the 18th-century Rococo French sculptors Étienne Maurice Falconet, Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, and Clodion (Claude Michel).

The theatrical aspects of the Rococo were best exemplified in Germany by the colourful works of the brothers Egid Quirin Asam and Cosmas Damian Asam, who were painters and architects as well as sculptors. The ornate decoration for the Church of St John Nepomuk (1733-1746) in Munich is their best-known work.