What is the oldest surviving example of sculpture?
Culture of Europe
Much surviving prehistoric art is small portable sculptures. It includes the oldest known representation of the human body, the Venus of Hohle Fel, dating from 40,000-35,000 BC, found in Schelklingen, Germany. It is part of a small group of female Venus figurines found in Central Europe. The Löwenmensch figurine, from about 30,000 BC, is the oldest undisputed piece of figurative art. The Swimming Reindeer of about 11,000 BCE is among the finest Magdalenian carvings in bone or antler of animals in the art of the Upper Paleolithic. At the beginning of the Mesolithic in Europe figurative sculpture greatly reduced, and remained a less common element in art than relief decoration of practical objects until the Roman period, despite some works such as the Gundestrup cauldron from the European Iron Age and the Bronze Age Trundholm sun chariot.
Ernesto de la Cárcova Museum of Reproductions and Comparative Sculpture
The oldest and most important of type in Latin America, the museum includes over 700 sculptures, all replicas of the originals made by die casting or copied from a mold taken from the original. Many are "first castings" of original works in the Berlin State Museums, the British Museum, the Louvre, or L'Accademia, Florence. The museum also maintains a library and an art print collection displaying works by artists trained at the institution.
Swabian Jura
In a number of caves (including Vogelherd, Hohlenstein-Stadel, Geißenklösterle and Hohle Fels), all just a few kilometers apart, some of the oldest signs of human artifacts were found. Best known are: a mammoth, a horse head, a water bird, and two statues of a lion man all of surprising quality and all more than 30,000 years old. The oldest known musical instruments have been found here, too: flutes made from the bones of swans and griffon vultures, some 35,000 years old, and in 2004 a flute carved from the tusk of a mammoth dating from the Ice Age, around 37,000 years ago, and the oldest representation of the human body, the Venus of Schelklingen.
Laocoön and His Sons
The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group (), has been one of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican, where it remains. It is very likely the same statue praised in the highest terms by the main Roman writer on art, Pliny the Elder. The figures are near life-size and the group is a little over in height, showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents.
Ruthwell Cross
It is the most famous and elaborate Anglo-Saxon monumental sculpture, and possibly the oldest surviving "text", predating any manuscripts containing Old English poetry. It has been described by Nikolaus Pevsner thus; "The crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell ... are the greatest achievement of their date in the whole of Europe."
Lion-man
The lion-headed figurine is the oldest-known zoomorphic (animal-shaped) sculpture in the world, and the oldest-known uncontested example of figurative art. It has been determined by carbon dating of the layer in which it was found to be between 35,000 and 40,000 years old, and therefore is associated with the archaeological Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic. It was carved out of mammoth ivory using a flint stone knife. Seven parallel, transverse, carved gouges are on the left arm.
Prehistoric art
One of the oldest undisputed works of figurative art were found in the Schwäbische Alb, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The earliest of these, the Venus figurine known as the Venus of Hohle Fels and the Lion-man figurine, date to some 40,000 years ago.
Nunivak Island
The art of Nunivak Island has its roots in the ancient past. The oldest known sculpture is thousands of years old.
Culture of Japan
Traditional Japanese sculptures mainly focused on Buddhist images, such as Tathagata, Bodhisattva, and Myō-ō. The oldest sculpture in Japan is a wooden statue of Amitābha at the Zenkō-ji temple. In the Nara period, Buddhist statues were made by the national government to boost its prestige. These examples are seen in present-day Nara and Kyoto, most notably a colossal bronze statue of the Buddha Vairocana in the Tōdai-ji temple.
Mexican art
Non-ceramic sculpture in Mesoamerica began with the modification of animal bones, with the oldest known piece being an animal skull from Tequixquiac that dates between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE. Most Mesoamerican sculpture is of stone; while relief work on buildings is the most dominant, freestanding sculpture was done as well. Freestanding three-dimensional stone sculpture began with the Olmecs, with the most famous example being the giant Olmec stone heads. This disappeared for the rest of the Mesoamerican period in favor of relief work until the late post-Classic with the Aztecs.
The majority of stonework during the Mesoamerican period is associated with monumental architecture that, along with mural painting, was considered an integral part of architecture rather than separate. Monumental architecture began with the Olmecs in southern Veracruz and the coastal area of Tabasco in places such as San Lorenzo; large temples on pyramid bases can still be seen in sites such as Montenegro, Chiapa de Corzo and La Venta. This practice spread to the Oaxaca area and the Valley of Mexico, appearing in cities such as Monte Albán, Cuicuilco and Teotihuacan.
Marcus Aurelius
The Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome is the only Roman equestrian statue which has survived into the modern period. This is perhaps due to it being wrongly identified during the Middle Ages as a depiction of the Christian emperor Constantine the Great and hence spared destruction, unlike some other statues associated with paganism. Crafted of bronze in circa 175 AD, it stands and is now located in the Capitoline Museums of Rome. The emperor's hand is outstretched in an act of clemency offered to a bested enemy, while his weary facial expression due to the stress of leading Rome into nearly constant battles perhaps represents a break with the classical tradition of sculpture.
Marcus' victory column, established in Rome either in his last few years of life or after his reign and completed in 193 AD, was built to commemorate his victory over the Sarmatians and Germanic tribes in 176 AD. A spiral of carved reliefs wraps around the column, showing scenes from his military campaigns. A statue of Marcus had stood atop the column but disappeared during the Middle Ages. It was replaced with a statue of Saint Paul in 1589 by pope Sixtus V. The column of Marcus and the column of Trajan are often compared by scholars given how they are both Doric in style, had a pedestal at the base, had sculpted friezes depicting their respective military victories, and a statue on top.
Ndop (Kuba)
The durable hardwood and the palm oil anointments underscore the longevity of these works, the earliest examples of which, such as the ndop in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, are among the oldest surviving wood works from the continent. Three wooden Ndop figures from the Kuba kingdom currently reside in the British Museum. Collected by the Hungarian explorer Emil Torday, one of them is estimated to date back to the eighteenth century, making it one of the oldest wooden sculptures extant from Sub-Saharan Africa. Two similar figures are in the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium.
George Washington (Brown)
George Washington is an outdoor sculpture by Henry Kirke Brown (1814–1886), located in Union Square, Manhattan, in the United States. The bronze equestrian statue was dedicated in 1856 and is the oldest sculpture in the New York City Parks collection.
Sculpture
Renaissance sculpture proper is often taken to begin with the famous competition for the doors of the Florence Baptistry in 1403, from which the trial models submitted by the winner, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Filippo Brunelleschi survive. Ghiberti's doors are still in place, but were undoubtedly eclipsed by his second pair for the other entrance, the so-called "Gates of Paradise", which took him from 1425 to 1452, and are dazzlingly confident classicizing compositions with varied depths of relief allowing extensive backgrounds. The intervening years had seen Ghiberti's early assistant Donatello develop with seminal statues including his "Davids" in marble (1408–09) and bronze (1440s), and his Equestrian statue of Gattamelata, as well as reliefs. A leading figure in the later period was Andrea del Verrocchio, best known for his equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice; his pupil Leonardo da Vinci designed an equine sculpture in 1482 "The Horse" for Milan-but only succeeded in making a clay model which was destroyed by French archers in 1499, and his other ambitious sculptural plans were never completed.
Aphrodite
In BC, the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles carved the marble statue "Aphrodite of Knidos", which Pliny the Elder later praised as the greatest sculpture ever made. The statue showed a nude Aphrodite modestly covering her pubic region while resting against a water pot with her robe draped over it for support. The "Aphrodite of Knidos" was the first ever full-sized statue to depict Aphrodite completely naked and one of the first sculptures that was intended to be viewed from all sides. The statue was purchased by the people of Knidos in around 350 BC and proved to be tremendously influential on later depictions of Aphrodite. The original sculpture has been lost, but written descriptions of it as well several depictions of it on coins are still extant and over sixty copies, small-scale models, and fragments of it have been identified.
Figurative art
In November, 2018, scientists reported the discovery of the oldest known figurative art painting, over 40,000 (perhaps as old as 52,000) years old, of an unknown animal, in the cave of Lubang Jeriji Saléh on the Indonesian island of Borneo.
Doryphoros
The Doryphoros (Greek Δορυφόρος Classical Greek , "Spear-Bearer"; Latinised as "Doryphorus") of Polykleitos is one of the best known Greek sculptures of classical antiquity, depicting a solidly built, muscular, standing warrior, originally bearing a spear balanced on his left shoulder. Rendered somewhat above life-size, the lost bronze original of the work would have been cast "circa" 440 BCE, but it is today known only from later (mainly Roman period) marble copies. The work nonetheless forms an important early example of both Classical Greek "contrapposto" and classical realism; as such, the iconic "Doryphoros" proved highly influential elsewhere in ancient art.
Sculpture
There are fewer original remains from the first phase of the Classical period, often called the Severe style; free-standing statues were now mostly made in bronze, which always had value as scrap. The Severe style lasted from around 500 in reliefs, and soon after 480 in statues, to about 450. The relatively rigid poses of figures relaxed, and asymmetrical turning positions and oblique views became common, and deliberately sought. This was combined with a better understanding of anatomy and the harmonious structure of sculpted figures, and the pursuit of naturalistic representation as an aim, which had not been present before. Excavations at the Temple of Zeus, Olympia since 1829 have revealed the largest group of remains, from about 460, of which many are in the Louvre.
Venus figurines
Most of them date from the Gravettian period (26,000–21,000 years ago), but examples exist as early as the Venus of Hohle Fels, which dates back at least 35,000 years to the Aurignacian, and as late as the Venus of Monruz, from about 11,000 years ago in the Magdalenian. These figurines were carved from soft stone (such as steatite, calcite or limestone), bone or ivory, or formed of clay and fired. The latter are among the oldest ceramics known. In total, some 144 such figurines are known; virtually all of modest size, between 3 cm and 40 cm or more in height. They are some of the earliest works of prehistoric art.
Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge
The Peplos Kore is perhaps the best known exhibit in the museum. It is a plaster cast of an ancient Greek statue of a young woman painted brightly as the original would have been, which was set up on the Acropolis of Athens, around 530 BCE. In 1975, the museum attempted to replicate the sculpture’s original appearance by painting a cast of the figure. The replica was then displayed next to a second, unpainted cast as a challenge to the erroneous equation of ancient Greek sculpture with pure white marble.
Art of Europe
The Minoan culture is regarded as the oldest civilization in Europe. The Minoan culture existed in Crete and consisted of four periods: Prepalatial, Protopalatial, Neopalatial, and the Postpalatial period between 3650 BC and 1100 BC. Not much of the art remained from the Prepalatial times, and most of artefacts still existing today are Cycladic statuettes and pottery fragments. The most prosperous period of the Cretan civilization was Neopalatial period and most of the artefacts are from this era. A large number of artefacts from the Protopalatial can be seen today in Cretan museums.
Pottery – most popular in the Protopalatial period (1900-1700 BC) – was characterized by thin walled vessels, subtle, symmetrical shapes, elegant spouts, and decorations, and dynamic lines. Dark and light values were often contrasted in Minoan pottery. The spontaneity and fluidity of the Protopalatial period later were transformed to a more stylized form of art with dissociation of naturalism in the Neopalatial period.The palaces served as organizational, commercial, artistic, worshipping, and agricultural centres in the Cretan civilization. Cretan palaces were built without defensive walls and exhibited a central courtyard which was embraced by a number of buildings. The central courtyard served as the main meeting place of the people. The palaces had throne rooms, cult chambers, and theatres where people could gather at special events. Columns and staircases were part of the artistic expression and it is believed that they served as metaphorical elements.The Minoan palaces are richly painted with paintings. Minoan painting was unique in that it used wet fresco techniques; it was characterized by small waists, fluidity, and vitality of the figures and was seasoned with elasticity, spontaneity, vitality, and high-contrasting colours.Not much of the sculpture survived from the Minoan civilization. The best known example of sculptures is the Snake Goddess figurine. The sculpture depicts a goddess or a high priestess holding a snake in both hands, dressed in traditional Minoan attire, cloth covering the whole body and leaving the breasts exposed. Exquisite metal work was also a characteristic of the Minoan art. Minoan metal masters worked with imported gold and copper and mastered techniques of wax casting, embossing, gilding, nielo, and granulation.
Sculpture
Portrait sculpture began in Egypt, where the Narmer Palette shows a ruler of the 32nd century BCE, and Mesopotamia, where we have 27 surviving statues of Gudea, who ruled Lagash c. 2144–2124 BCE. In ancient Greece and Rome, the erection of a portrait statue in a public place was almost the highest mark of honour, and the ambition of the elite, who might also be depicted on a coin. In other cultures such as Egypt and the Near East public statues were almost exclusively the preserve of the ruler, with other wealthy people only being portrayed in their tombs. Rulers are typically the only people given portraits in Pre-Columbian cultures, beginning with the Olmec colossal heads of about 3,000 years ago. East Asian portrait sculpture was entirely religious, with leading clergy being commemorated with statues, especially the founders of monasteries, but not rulers, or ancestors. The Mediterranean tradition revived, initially only for tomb effigies and coins, in the Middle Ages, but expanded greatly in the Renaissance, which invented new forms such as the personal portrait medal.
Classical sculpture
Classical sculpture refers loosely to the forms of sculpture from Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, as well as the Hellenized and Romanized civilizations under their rule or influence from about 500 BC to around 200 AD. More precisely it refers to Ancient Greek sculpture from around 500 BC to the onset of the Hellenistic style around 323 BC. It may also refer stylistically to later sculpture done in a Neoclassical or classical style. Classical sculptures have been popular since the Renaissance. Only those works that closely follow the canon of classical forms would fall under the term.
Sperlonga sculptures
"Pasquino group" is the name given to a sculptural group in Hellenistic style depicting a warrior supporting the dead body of a comrade, from the fragmentary but well known sculpture nicknamed the "Pasquino" still erected on a street in Rome. Though it shows some differences to other versions, the Sperloga group are sufficiently close to be regarded as adaptations of the same original if, as most assume, Sperlonga is not the prime version of the composition, though it is the earliest to survive.
Sculpture
Stone sculpture is an ancient activity where pieces of rough natural stone are shaped by the controlled removal of stone. Owing to the permanence of the material, evidence can be found that even the earliest societies indulged in some form of stone work, though not all areas of the world have such abundance of good stone for carving as Egypt, Greece, India and most of Europe. Petroglyphs (also called rock engravings) are perhaps the earliest form: images created by removing part of a rock surface which remains "in situ", by incising, pecking, carving, and abrading. Monumental sculpture covers large works, and architectural sculpture, which is attached to buildings. Hardstone carving is the carving for artistic purposes of semi-precious stones such as jade, agate, onyx, rock crystal, sard or carnelian, and a general term for an object made in this way. Alabaster or mineral gypsum is a soft mineral that is easy to carve for smaller works and still relatively durable. Engraved gems are small carved gems, including cameos, originally used as seal rings.
Sculpture of a horse (Olympia B 1741)
The Sculpture of a Horse is an Archaic bronze sculpture. It was discovered at Olympia during excavations in 1939 and is now displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Olympia. The sculpture's creation is dated to the early 7th century BC.
Rosenborg Castle Gardens
The oldest sculpture in the garden is "The Horse and the Lion", commissioned by Christian IV from Peter Husum in 1617 and completed in 1625. A near copy of an antique marble sculpture at Capitoline Hill in Rome, it depicts a lion with a humanoid face which is tearing apart a horse which it has just brought down. The subject is associated with a Persian legend about the battle between light and darkness. The statue was probably placed in the garden after its completion but temporarily moved to Glückstadt in 1643 in connection with Prince Frederick (III)'s marriage to Sophie Amalie of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1643, supposedly as an expression of the king's aggravation over his cousin George, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg's failure to assist him in the Battle of Lutter in 1626 with the lion representing the Coat of arms of Denmark and the horse that of the Duchy. The statue was moved back to the garden at Rosenborg Castle when Frederick III ascended the throne and is now located between the two ring riding columns in the southern section of the park.
Anthropomorphism
From the beginnings of human behavioral modernity in the Upper Paleolithic, about 40,000 years ago, examples of zoomorphic (animal-shaped) works of art occur that may represent the earliest evidence we have of anthropomorphism. One of the oldest known is an ivory sculpture, the Löwenmensch figurine, Germany, a human-shaped figurine with the head of a lioness or lion, determined to be about 32,000 years old.
Statue
Statues have been produced in many cultures from prehistory to the present; the oldest known statue dating to about 30,000 years ago. Statues represent many different people and animals, real and mythical. Many statues are placed in a public places as public art. The world's tallest statue, Statue of Unity, is tall and is located near the Narmada dam in Gujarat, India.
Brazilian sculpture
Most surviving pieces from the Baroque era do not record authorship, and only a few names are known: Francisco das Chagas, Manuel Inácio da Costa, Francisco Xavier de Brito and Francisco Vieira Servas. Above them all stands Aleijadinho. He was active in Minas Gerais where he left his greatest works, considered the glory of Brazilian Baroque sculpture: six groups of wooden carved statues known as the "Via Sacra cycle" and the "12 Prophets" carved in soapstone, all at Bom Jesus de Matosinhos Sanctuary in Congonhas do Campo, now a World Heritage Site. The Baroque tradition survived until the beginning of the 20th century, albeit more and more sparsely and mainly in Bahia, despite the introduction of Neoclassicism in the 1820s.
Christ Pantocrator
The oldest known surviving example of the icon of Christ Pantocrator was painted in encaustic on panel in the sixth or seventh century, and survived the period of destruction of images during the Iconoclastic disputes that twice racked the Eastern church, 726 to 787 and 814 to 842. It was preserved in Saint Catherine's Monastery, in the remote desert of the Sinai. The gessoed panel, finely painted using a wax medium on a wooden panel, had been coarsely overpainted around the face and hands at some time around the thirteenth century. When the overpainting was cleaned in 1962, the ancient image was revealed to be a very high-quality icon, probably produced in Constantinople.
The Seated Scribe
The sculpture of the Seated Scribe or Squatting Scribe is a famous work of ancient Egyptian art. It represents a figure of a seated scribe at work. The sculpture was discovered at Saqqara, north of the alley of sphinxes leading to the Serapeum of Saqqara, in 1850 and dated to the period of the Old Kingdom, from either the 5th Dynasty,  2450–2325 BCE or the 4th Dynasty, 2620–2500 BCE. It is now in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Sculpture garden
Sculpture gardens have a long history around the world - the oldest known collection of human constructions is a Neanderthal "sculpture garden" unearthed in Bruniquel Cave in France in 1990. Within the cave, broken stalagmites were arranged in a series of stacked or ring-like structures approximately 175,000 years ago.
Bronze sculpture
The great civilizations of the old world worked in bronze for art, from the time of the introduction of the alloy for tools and edged weapons. "Dancing Girl" from Mohenjodaro, belonging to the Harappan civilization and dating back to c. 2500 BCE, is perhaps the first known bronze statue. The Greeks were the first to scale the figures up to life size. Few examples exist in good condition; one is the seawater-preserved bronze "Victorious Youth" that required painstaking efforts to bring it to its present state for museum display. Far more Roman bronze statues have survived.
Ancient Greek art
Some of the best known Hellenistic sculptures are the Winged Victory of Samothrace (2nd or 1st century BC), the statue of Aphrodite from the island of Melos known as the Venus de Milo (mid-2nd century BC), the Dying Gaul (about 230 BC), and the monumental group Laocoön and His Sons (late 1st century BC). All these statues depict Classical themes, but their treatment is far more sensuous and emotional than the austere taste of the Classical period would have allowed or its technical skills permitted.
Armento Rider
The Armento Rider is an ancient bronze sculpture of a rider and a horse that was originally found in the town of Armento in southern Italy. Now part of the British Museum's collection, it is considered one of the oldest works of art from Western Greece or Magna Graecia.
Dagenham idol
The Dagenham idol is a wooden statue of a naked human figure, found in Dagenham in 1922. The statue has been carbon dated to around 2250 BC, during the late Neolithic period or early Bronze Age, making it one of the oldest human representations found in Europe.
Niederstotzingen
The cave was discovered in 1931 by a senior railroad clerk and historian, Hermann Mohn, as he explored the hills above the city. An expedition in 1931, led by Gustav Riek discovered eleven carved animal figures that dated from around 32,000 years ago. A 2005/2006 expedition by the university of Tübingen discovered several additional statues including one, an ivory horse, which may be one of the oldest human artworks in the world. Then, in 2006 another sculpture was discovered. This one, a mammoth carved from mammoth ivory, was dated from 35,000 years ago making it the oldest artwork in the world.
Emma Willard Memorial
This sculpture was documented as well maintained in 1992 as part of Save Outdoor Sculpture!, a campaign organized by Heritage Preservation: The National Institute of Conservation partnered with the Smithsonian Institution, specifically the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Throughout the 1990s, over 7,000 volunteers cataloged and assessed the condition of over 30,000 publicly accessible statues, monuments, and sculptures installed as outdoor public art across the United States. In Vermont, the survey was sponsored by the Vermont Museum and Gallery Alliance from 1992-1993 where 110 volunteers surveyed 242 sculptures dating from 1740 to 1993. The archives from the project are maintained by the Vermont Historical Society.
Gislebertus
Of the main figures that adorned this entrance, only Eve has survived. She disappeared for years, having been carted down to the foot of the hill where the large stone on which she is carved served as building material for a house constructed in 1769. There she remained hidden for a century until that dwelling in turn was torn down." Eve is considered one of the greatest art works in the Western tradition. It is the first large scale nude sculpture produced since Roman times. T. S. R. Boase, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, said "Eve has a seductive quality that no other 12th-century artist has equaled. If the other block (Adam) had survived, we would most certainly have had in it the completion of a great masterpiece" (Introduction to Giselbertus Sculptor of Autun, The Orion Press, 1961). Until now no image of the Adam has been seen in any library or museum until the Yuko Nii Foundation alabasters of Adam and Eve came to light.
Sculpture
Byzantine art, though producing superb ivory reliefs and architectural decorative carving, never returned to monumental sculpture, or even much small sculpture in the round. However, in the West during the Carolingian and Ottonian periods there was the beginnings of a production of monumental statues, in courts and major churches. This gradually spread; by the late 10th and 11th century there are records of several apparently life-size sculptures in Anglo-Saxon churches, probably of precious metal around a wooden frame, like the Golden Madonna of Essen. No Anglo-Saxon example has survived, and survivals of large non-architectural sculpture from before 1,000 are exceptionally rare. Much the finest is the Gero Cross, of 965–970, which is a crucifix, which was evidently the commonest type of sculpture; Charlemagne had set one up in the Palatine Chapel in Aachen around 800. These continued to grow in popularity, especially in Germany and Italy. The rune stones of the Nordic world, the Pictish stones of Scotland and possibly the high cross reliefs of Christian Great Britain, were northern sculptural traditions that bridged the period of Christianization.
Palanpur
Mithi Vav, a stepwell is the oldest surviving monument of town. It is situated in the eastern part of the town. The five storey stepwell can be entered from the west. Based on its architectural style, it is believed that it is constructed in late medieval period but the sculptures embedded in the walls may belong to earlier period. The sculptures include that of Ganesha, Shiva, Apsaras, dancing figures, worshiping couples and floral or geometrical patterns. A worn out inscription found on one sculpture embedded in left wall can not read clearly but the year Samvat 1320 ( 1263 AD) can made out.
Cubist sculpture
The origins of Cubist sculpture are as diverse as the origins of Cubist painting, resulting from a wide range of influences, experiments and circumstances, rather than from one source. With its roots stemming as far back as ancient Egypt, Greece and Africa, the proto-Cubist period (englobing both painting and sculpture) is characterized by the geometrization of form. It is essentially the first experimental and exploratory phase, in three-dimensional form, of an art movement known from the spring of 1911 as Cubism.
Cleopatra
Cleopatra was depicted in various ancient works of art, in the Egyptian as well as Hellenistic-Greek and Roman styles. Surviving works include statues, busts, reliefs, and minted coins, as well as ancient carved cameos, such as one depicting Cleopatra and Antony in Hellenistic style, now in the Altes Museum, Berlin. Contemporary images of Cleopatra were produced both in and outside of Ptolemaic Egypt. For instance, a large gilded bronze statue of Cleopatra once existed inside the Temple of Venus Genetrix in Rome, the first time that a living person had their statue placed next to that of a deity in a Roman temple. It was erected there by Caesar and remained in the temple at least until the 3rd century AD, its preservation perhaps owing to Caesar's patronage, although Augustus did not remove or destroy artworks in Alexandria depicting Cleopatra.
Stone sculpture
Carving stone into sculpture is an activity older than civilization itself, beginning perhaps with incised images on cave walls. Prehistoric sculptures were usually human forms, such as the Venus of Willendorf and the faceless statues of the Cycladic cultures of ancient Greece. Later cultures devised animal, human-animal and abstract forms in stone. The earliest cultures used abrasive techniques, and modern technology employs pneumatic hammers and other devices. But for most of human history, sculptors used hammer and chisel as the basic tools for carving stone.
Djoser
The painted limestone statue of Djoser, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, is the oldest known life-sized Egyptian statue. Today at the site in Saqqara where it was found, a plaster copy of the statue stands in place of the original. The statue was found during the Antiquities Service Excavations of 1924–1925.
Prehistoric art
Belonging in the Lithic stage, the oldest known art in the Americas is the Vero Beach bone, possibly a mammoth bone, etched with a profile of walking mammoth that dates back to 11,000 BCE. The oldest known painted object in the Americas is the Cooper Bison Skull from 10,900–10,200 BCE.
Goa State Museum
The Sculpture Gallery predominantly exhibits artifacts of Hindu and Jain sculptures, including bronzes, from the 4th to the 8th centuries. The ancient sculptures are of Kubera, Yakshi, Uma and Mahishasuramardini from Netravali. There are two undated stone sculptures of the Southern-Silahara period, one of two warriors from Kundai called Kantadev which was earlier located in front of the Navadurga temple, and another of Surya which was earlier part of the circumbulatory ("pradakshinapath") of the Shri Chandreshwar Bhutnath Temple. There are also bronze sculptures which are copies of European artists including Claude and Dalon. The gallery has an inscription dated to 1049 on a copper plate of Vira Varma, the Kadamba king.
In the Christian Art Gallery, there are many types of wooden sculptures of saints, and devotional paintings and some wooden furniture of the colonial period. There are also exhibits of Jain busts, three large raised works of art in relief, busts of Luís de Camões, Afonso de Albuquerque, and Dom João de Castro, which was earlier on the walls of the Municipal Gardens.
Shigir Idol
The Shigir Sculpture, or Shigir Idol (), is the oldest known wooden sculpture in the world, made during the Mesolithic period, shortly after the end of the last Ice Age. The wood it was carved from is approximately 11,500 years old.
It is displayed in the in Yekaterinburg, Russia.
Pedimental sculptures in the United States
Pedimental sculptures in the United States were rare prior to the 1880s, most surviving examples in cities along the east coast. The earliest seems to be Whitehall (1765), outside Annapolis, Maryland, attributed to English architect Joseph Horatio Anderson and English-born carver William Buckland. Greek Revival architecture was dominant throughout the first half of the 19th century, but almost always with chaste, blank pediments. It was only post-Civil War, with the advent of the American Renaissance and the City Beautiful movement – especially the architectural vision of "The White City" presented at Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 – that the use of sculpture in pediments increased dramatically. The advent of the Great Depression of the 1930s largely brought the use of pediment sculpture to a halt, with the exception of federal government buildings in Washington, D.C.
Peggy Bolton
Bolton was a president and chairman of board of the restored Kent Plantation House in Alexandria, the oldest known standing structure in Rapides Parish, completed in 1800. Bolton was a member of the boards of the Alexandria Historical and Genealogical Library and the Anglo American Art Museum in Baton Rouge. She donated two sculptures, "Moses" and "John the Baptist," by Charles Umlauf to Louisiana College in Pineville and the sculpture "Angels" by Lyn Emory to Emmanuel Baptist Church, her home congregation in downtown Alexandria.
John Bell (sculptor)
In 1844 Bell entered his "Eagle Slayer" and "Jane Shore" in the competition held for sculpture for the new Houses of Parliament. A cast-iron version of the "Eagle Slayer" - the first statue ever to be made from the material - was produced for The Great Exhibition of 1851, where it stood under a canopy surmounted by the eagle. It was later placed outside the South Kensington Museum, and is now in the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. He also exhibited a sculpture of Shakespeare at the 1851 exhibition, which was widely reproduced, for example on the front page of "Recollections of the Great Exhibition". It was also used by John Leech as the centrepiece of his cartoon "Dinner-time at the Crystal Palace", published in "Punch".
David (Donatello)
Donatello's bronze statue of David (circa 1440s) is famous as the first unsupported standing work of bronze cast during the Renaissance, and the first freestanding nude male sculpture made since antiquity. It depicts David with an enigmatic smile, posed with his foot on Goliath's severed head just after defeating the giant. The youth is completely naked, apart from a laurel-topped hat and boots, and bears the sword of Goliath.
The creation of the work is entirely undocumented, and it has been given a range of datings. According to one theory, it was commissioned by the Medici family in the 1430s to be placed in the centre of the courtyard of the old Medici Palace. Alternatively it may have been for that position in the new Palazzo Medici Riccardi, where it certainly was placed later, which would place the commission in the mid-1440s or even later. The statue is recorded there by Vasari and other sources. The Medici family were exiled from Florence in 1494, and the statue was moved to the courtyard of the Palazzo della Signoria (the marble "David" was already in the palazzo). It was moved to the Palazzo Pitti in the 17th century, to the Uffizi in 1777, and then finally, in 1865, to the Museo Nazionale del Bargello, where it remains today.
Sanchi
Although the initial craftsmen for stone reliefs in Sanchi seem to have come from Gandhara, with the first reliefs being carved at Sanchi Stupa No.2 circa 115 BCE, the art of Sanchi thereafter developed considerably in the 1st century BCE/CE and is thought to predate the blooming of the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, which went on to flourish until around the 4th century CE. The art of Sanchi is thus considered as the ancestor of the didactic forms of Buddhist art that would follow, such as the art of Gandhara. It is also, with Bharhut, the oldest.
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery
In 1996, the Sackler hosted the oldest sculptures to be found in Western Asia. The sculptures, found in 1974 outside of Amman, Jordan, were sent to Washington, D.C. for research and conservation. The exhibition, "Preserving Ancient Statues From Jordan," exhibited eight pieces dating from 6500–7000 B.C. "King of the World: A Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle", in 1997, exhibited the "Padshahnama" Mughal manuscript owned by the British Royal Family.
Apollo
The earliest examples of life-sized statues of Apollo, may be two figures from the Ionic sanctuary on the island of Delos. Such statues were found across the Greek speaking world, the preponderance of these were found at the sanctuaries of Apollo with more than one hundred from the sanctuary of "Apollo Ptoios", Boeotia alone. The last stage in the development of the "Kouros type" is the late archaic period (520–485 BC), in which the Greek sculpture attained a full knowledge of human anatomy and used to create a relative harmonious whole. Ranking from the very few bronzes survived to us is the masterpiece bronze Piraeus Apollo. It was found in Piraeus, the harbour of Athens. The statue originally held the bow in its left hand, and a cup of pouring libation in its right hand. It probably comes from north-eastern Peloponnesus. The emphasis is given in anatomy, and it is one of the first attempts to represent a kind of motion, and beauty relative to proportions, which appear mostly in post-Archaic art. The statue throws some light on an artistic centre which, with an independently developed harder, simpler and heavier style, restricts Ionian influence in Athens. Finally, this is the germ from which the art of Polykleitos was to grow two or three generations later.
Art Deco
One of the best known and certainly the largest Art Deco sculpture is the "Christ the Redeemer" by the French sculptor Paul Landowski, completed between 1922 and 1931, located on a mountain top overlooking Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. François Pompon was a pioneer of modern stylized animalier sculpture. He was not fully recognized for his artistic accomplishments until the age of 67 at the Salon d'Automne of 1922 with the work "Ours blanc", also known as "The White Bear", now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.
Aldgate
In 2013 in Minories, Aldgate - on the last day of excavations - archaeologists found a 1,900-year-old Roman sculpture from the late 1st or early 2nd century AD in what was Roman London's 'Eastern Cemetery'. 'The Minories Eagle', hailed by experts as one of the rarest and finest artefacts ever unearthed in Britain would have stood in a niche in a mausoleum above the tomb of a very powerful and wealthy man. Carved in Cotswold oolitic stone and rich in iconography it shows an exquisitely carved and outstandingly preserved eagle with a serpent in its beak. It was exhibited at the Museum of London in October 2013.[16]
Sculpture
Wood carving has been extremely widely practiced, but survives much less well than the other main materials, being vulnerable to decay, insect damage, and fire. It therefore forms an important hidden element in the art history of many cultures. Outdoor wood sculpture does not last long in most parts of the world, so that we have little idea how the totem pole tradition developed. Many of the most important sculptures of China and Japan in particular are in wood, and the great majority of African sculpture and that of Oceania and other regions.
Warrior of Hirschlanden
The Warrior of Hirschlanden ("Krieger von Hirschlanden" in German) is a statue of a nude ithyphallic warrior made of sandstone, the oldest known Iron Age life-size anthropomorphic statue north of the Alps. It was a production of the Hallstatt culture, probably dating to the 6th century BC. It is now in the Württembergisches Landesmuseum in Stuttgart, with a copy at the Hirschlanden site (now Ditzingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany), where it was found. The preserved height is 1.50 m, but the feet have been broken off.
Christian art
Early Christian art survives from dates near the origins of Christianity. The oldest Christian sculptures are from sarcophagi, dating to the beginning of the 2nd century. The largest groups of Early Christian paintings come from the tombs in the Catacombs of Rome, and show the evolution of the depiction of Jesus, a process not complete until the 6th century, since when the conventional appearance of Jesus in art has remained remarkably consistent.
Dura-Europos
The building consists of a house conjoined to a separate hall-like room, which functioned as the meeting room for the church. The surviving frescoes of the baptistry room are probably the most ancient Christian paintings. We can see the "Good Shepherd" (this iconography had a very long history in the Classical world), the "Healing of the paralytic" and "Christ and Peter walking on the water". These are the earliest depictions of Jesus Christ ever found and date back to 235 AD.
Clark Mills Studio
The Clark Mills Studio is a historic building at 51 Broad Street in Charleston, South Carolina. Built as a tenement house, it was the residence and studio between 1837 and 1848 of sculptor Clark Mills (1810–83). Mills is credited with creating the first cast equestrian bronze statue, the 1852 statue of Andrew Jackson at Lafayette Square, Washington, D.C.. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965, and now houses professional offices.
Cramond Roman Fort
The most famous sculpture is the Cramond Lioness recovered from the mouth of the River Almond in 1997. The sculpture, in a non-local white sandstone, shows a lioness devouring her prey, a naked bearded male torso. The sculpture was probably part of a large tomb monument of an important Roman officer, perhaps the fort commander or an important dignitary.
Statue
The Löwenmensch figurine from the Swabian Alps in Germany is the oldest known statue in the world, and dates to 30,000-40,000 years ago. The Venus of Hohle Fels, from the same area, is somewhat later. Throughout history, statues have been associated with cult images in many religious traditions, from Ancient Egypt, Ancient India, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome to the present.
Frisbee (sculpture)
This sculpture was documented in 1992 as part of Save Outdoor Sculpture!, a campaign organized by Heritage Preservation: The National Institute of Conservation partnered with the Smithsonian Institution, specifically the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Throughout the 1990s, over 7,000 volunteers cataloged and assessed the condition of over 30,000 publicly accessible statues, monuments, and sculptures installed as outdoor public art across the United States. In Vermont, the survey was sponsored by the Vermont Museum and Gallery Alliance from 1992-1993 where 110 volunteers surveyed 242 sculptures dating from 1740 to 1993. The archives from the project are maintained by the Vermont Historical Society.
Donatello
Around 1430, Cosimo de' Medici, the foremost art patron of his era, commissioned from Donatello the bronze "David" (now in the Bargello) for the court of his Palazzo Medici. This is now Donatello's most famous work, and the first known free-standing nude statue produced since antiquity. Conceived fully in the round, independent of any architectural surroundings, and largely representing an allegory of the civic virtues triumphing over brutality and irrationality, it is arguably the first major work of Renaissance sculpture. Also from this period is the disquietingly small "Love-Atys", housed in the Bargello.
Sculpture
From the many subsequent periods before the ascendency of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 10th century BCE Mesopotamian art survives in a number of forms: cylinder seals, relatively small figures in the round, and reliefs of various sizes, including cheap plaques of moulded pottery for the home, some religious and some apparently not. The Burney Relief is an unusually elaborate and relatively large (20 x 15 inches, 50 x 37 cm) terracotta plaque of a naked winged goddess with the feet of a bird of prey, and attendant owls and lions. It comes from the 18th or 19th centuries BCE, and may also be moulded. Stone stelae, votive offerings, or ones probably commemorating victories and showing feasts, are also found from temples, which unlike more official ones lack inscriptions that would explain them; the fragmentary Stele of the Vultures is an early example of the inscribed type, and the Assyrian Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III a large and solid late one.
Nomoli figurine
Nomoli figurines are among the earliest works of art from Sierra Leone. The Nomoli figurines and similar stone sculptures are the only known remains of an empire that existed hundreds of years ago in what is Sierra Leone and Liberia today.
Sculpture
The Western tradition of sculpture began in ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith. The revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelo's "David". Modernist sculpture moved away from traditional processes and the emphasis on the depiction of the human body, with the making of constructed sculpture, and the presentation of found objects as finished art works.
Carolingian art
Perhaps the most famous example of Carolingian spolia is the tale of an equestrian statue. In Rome, Charlemagne had seen the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Lateran Palace. It was the only surviving statue of a pre-Christian Roman Emperor because it was mistakenly thought, at the time, to be that of Constantine and thus held great accord—Charlemagne thus brought an equestrian statue from Ravenna, then believed to be that of Theodoric the Great, to Aachen, to match the statue of "Constantine" in Rome.
Victoria and Albert Museum
The sculpture collection at the V&A is the most comprehensive holding of post-classical European sculpture in the world. There are approximately 22,000 objects in the collection that cover the period from about 400 AD to 1914. This covers among other periods Byzantine and Anglo Saxon ivory sculptures, British, French and Spanish medieval statues and carvings, the Renaissance, Baroque, Neo-Classical, Victorian and Art Nouveau periods. All uses of sculpture are represented, from tomb and memorial, to portrait, allegorical, religious, mythical, statues for gardens including fountains, as well as architectural decorations. Materials used include, marble, alabaster, stone, terracotta, wood (history of wood carving), ivory, gesso, plaster, bronze, lead and ceramics.
Sculpture
The first known sculpture in the Indian subcontinent is from the Indus Valley civilization (3300–1700 BCE), found in sites at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa in modern-day Pakistan. These include the famous small bronze female dancer. However, such figures in bronze and stone are rare and greatly outnumbered by pottery figurines and stone seals, often of animals or deities very finely depicted. After the collapse of the Indus Valley civilization there is little record of sculpture until the Buddhist era, apart from a hoard of copper figures of (somewhat controversially) c. 1500 BCE from Daimabad. Thus the great tradition of Indian monumental sculpture in stone appears to begin, relative to other cultures, and the development of Indian civilization, relatively late, with the reign of Asoka from 270 to 232 BCE, and the Pillars of Ashoka he erected around India, carrying his edicts and topped by famous sculptures of animals, mostly lions, of which six survive. Large amounts of figurative sculpture, mostly in relief, survive from Early Buddhist pilgrimage stupas, above all Sanchi; these probably developed out of a tradition using wood that also embraced Hinduism.
Sculpture
Sculpture in stone survives far better than works of art in perishable materials, and often represents the majority of the surviving works (other than pottery) from ancient cultures, though conversely traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished almost entirely. However, most ancient sculpture was brightly painted, and this has been lost.
Nude (art)
Due to its durability, it is in sculpture that we see the full, nearly unbroken history of the nude from the Stone Age to the present. Figures, usually of the naked female, have been found in the Balkan region dating back to 7,000 BCE and continue to this day to be generated. In the Indian and Southeast Asian sculpture tradition nudes were frequently adorned with bracelets and jewelry that tended to "punctuate their charms and demarcate the different parts of their bodies much as developed musculature does in the male."
Bust of the Saviour
The Bust of the Saviour ("Salvator Mundi") is the last sculpture created by baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, executed in 1679, when the artist was 80 years old. He left the sculpture in his will to his friend and patron Queen Christina of Sweden. Considered lost and "rediscovered" in 2001, it is currently held in the basilica of di San Sebastiano fuori le mura a Roma.
Lepenski Vir
Still, Lepenski Vir is the oldest planned settlement in Europe and has unique, trapeze-shaped houses seen nowhere else. Its culture yielded not only the first portrait sculptures in history, but also the first sculptures in sizes larger than those in real life in the history of human art. The sculptures are the largest made by humans up to that period and among the first to have carved mouth or ears. Additionally, the skeletal remains from Lepenski Vir make almost half of one of the largest Mesolithic anthropological series, which is important for the future bio-archaeological and DNA research.
Nude (art)
The earliest Greek sculpture, from the early Bronze Age Cycladic civilization consists mainly of stylized male figures who are presumably nude. This is certainly the case for the kouros, a large standing figure of a male nude that was the mainstay of Archaic Greek sculpture. The first realistic sculptures of nude males, the kouroi depict nude youths who stand rigidly posed with one foot forward. By the 5th century BCE, Greek sculptors' mastery of anatomy resulted in greater naturalness and more varied poses. An important innovation was contrapposto—the asymmetrical posture of a figure standing with one leg bearing the body's weight and the other relaxed. An early example of this is Polykleitos' sculpture "Doryphoros" (ca. 440 BCE).
Sculpture
Much surviving prehistoric art is small portable sculptures, with a small group of female Venus figurines such as the Venus of Willendorf (24–26,000BP) found across central Europe. The Swimming Reindeer of about 13,000 years ago is one of the finest of a number of Magdalenian carvings in bone or antler of animals in the art of the Upper Paleolithic, although they are outnumbered by engraved pieces, which are sometimes classified as sculpture. Two of the largest prehistoric sculptures can be found at the Tuc d'Audobert caves in France, where around 12–17,000 years ago a masterful sculptor used a spatula-like stone tool and fingers to model a pair of large bison in clay against a limestone rock.
Ancient art
The first sculptures in India date back to the Indus Valley civilization some 5,000 years ago, where small stone carvings and bronze castings have been discovered. Later, as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism developed further, India produced some of the most intricate bronzes in the world, as well as unrivaled temple carvings, some in huge shrines, such as the one at Ellora.
African sculpture
The Nubian Kingdom of Kush in modern Sudan was in close and often hostile contact with Egypt, and produced monumental sculpture mostly derivative of styles to the north. In West Africa, the earliest known sculptures are from the Nok culture which thrived between 500 BC and 500 AD in modern Nigeria, with clay figures typically with elongated bodies and angular shapes. Later West African cultures developed bronze casting for reliefs to decorate palaces like the famous Benin Bronzes, and very fine naturalistic royal heads from around the Yoruba town of Ife in terracotta and metal from the 12th to the 14th centuries. Akan goldweights are a form of small metal sculptures produced over the period 1400–1900, some apparently representing proverbs and so with a narrative element rare in African sculpture, and royal regalia included impressive gold sculptured elements.
Ancient Greek sculpture
It is commonly thought that the earliest incarnation of Greek sculpture was in the form of wooden cult statues, first described by Pausanias as xoana. No such statues survive, and the descriptions of them are vague, despite the fact that they were probably objects of veneration for hundreds of years. The first piece of Greek statuary to be reassembled since is probably the Lefkandi Centaur, a terra cotta sculpture found on the island of Euboea, dated c. 920 BC. The statue was constructed in parts, before being dismembered and buried in two separate graves. The centaur has an intentional mark on its knee, which has led researchers to postulate that the statue might portray Cheiron, presumably kneeling wounded from Herakles' arrow. If so, it would be the earliest known depiction of myth in the history of Greek sculpture.
Bamberg Cathedral
The sculptor carved only his mark into the sculpture, leaving his identity a mystery. He may also have been involved in the creation of figures on the eastern choir screen (Mary and Elisabeth) and possibly of the Last Judgment of the "Fürstenportal". The "Reiter" is probably the oldest statue of a horseman created in post-Roman Germany.
Sculpture garden
In the United States, the oldest public sculpture garden is a part of the joint park and wildlife preserve Brookgreen Gardens, located in South Carolina. The property was opened in 1932, and has since been included on the National Register of Historic Places.
Sculpture
Sculpture has been central in religious devotion in many cultures, and until recent centuries large sculptures, too expensive for private individuals to create, were usually an expression of religion or politics. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantities include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, India and China, as well as many in Central and South America and Africa.
Sculpture
Populations in the African Great Lakes are not known for their sculpture. However, one style from the region is pole sculptures, carved in human shapes and decorated with geometric forms, while the tops are carved with figures of animals, people, and various objects. These poles are, then, placed next to graves and are associated with death and the ancestral world. The culture known from Great Zimbabwe left more impressive buildings than sculpture but the eight soapstone Zimbabwe Birds appear to have had a special significance and were mounted on monoliths. Modern Zimbabwean sculptors in soapstone have achieved considerable international success. Southern Africa's oldest known clay figures date from 400 to 600 CE and have cylindrical heads with a mixture of human and animal features.
Golden Madonna of Essen
Dated around the year 980, it is both the oldest known sculpture of the Madonna and the oldest free-standing medieval sculpture north of the Alps, and is also one of the few major works of art to survive from Ottonian times. To this day it remains an object of veneration and symbol of identity for the population of the Ruhr Area. It is the only full-length survival from what appears to have been a common form of statue among the wealthiest churches and abbeys of 10th and 11th century Northern Europe; some of these were life-size, especially figures of the Crucifixion.
Anuradhapura Kingdom
Paintings from a cave at Hindagala date back to the late Anuradhapura period, and may even belong to the same period as the Sigiriya paintings. The paintings of Sigiriya and Hindagala are the only surviving specimens of art of the Anuradhapura Kingdom. However, remnants of paintings indicate that walls and ceilings of some buildings and the inside walls of "stupas" and "vahalkadas" were also painted. Saddhatissa had employed painters to decorate the Ruwanweli Seya when his brother Dutthagamani wanted to see it on his death bed.
Statue making, most noticeably statues of the Buddha, was an art perfected by the Sri Lankan sculptors during the Anuradhapura Kingdom. The earliest Buddha statues belonging to the Anuradhapura period date back to the 1st century AD. Standard postures such as "Abhaya Mudra", "Dhyana Mudra", "Vitarka Mudra" and "Kataka Mudra" were used when making these statues. The Samadhi statue in Anuradhapura, considered one of the finest examples of ancient Sri Lankan art, shows the Buddha in a seated position in deep meditation, and is sculpted from dolomite marble and is datable to the 4th century. The Toluvila statue is similar to this, and dates to the later stages of the Anuradhapura Kingdom. Notable standing Buddha statues dating from the Anuradhapura period include the ones at Avukana, Maligavila and Buduruvagala. The Buduruvagala statue is the tallest in the country, standing at . All these statues are carved out of rock.
Contrapposto
The first known statue to use contrapposto is Kritios Boy, c. 480 BC, so called because it was once attributed to the sculptor Kritios. It is possible, even likely, that earlier bronze statues had used the technique, but if they did, they have not survived and Kenneth Clark called the statue "the first beautiful nude in art". The statue is a Greek marble original and not a Roman copy.
Prior to the introduction of contrapposto, the statues that dominated ancient Greece were the archaic kouros (male) and the kore (female). Contrapposto has been used since the dawn of classical western sculpture. According to the "canon" of the Classical Greek Sculptor Polykleitos in the 4th century BC, it is one of the most important characteristics of his figurative works and those of his successors, Lysippos, Skopas, etc. The Polykletian statues – for example, Discophoros ("discus-bearer") and Doryphoros ("spear-bearer") – are idealized athletic young men with the divine sense, and captured in contrapposto. In these works, the pelvis is no longer axial with the vertical statue as in the archaic style of earlier Greek sculpture before "Kritios Boy".
Sculpture
The first distinctive style of ancient Greek sculpture developed in the Early Bronze Age Cycladic period (3rd millennium BCE), where marble figures, usually female and small, are represented in an elegantly simplified geometrical style. Most typical is a standing pose with arms crossed in front, but other figures are shown in different poses, including a complicated figure of a harpist seated on a chair.
Brevard Museum of History &amp; Natural Science
The Brevard Museum of History & Natural Science is located at 2201 Michigan Avenue, Cocoa, Florida. The 14,750 sq/ft facility houses artifacts from the region. The displays included a Florida timeline and rotating temporary exhibits. The museum features the remains of the "Windover Woman", the oldest human remains found on the North American continent, and a re-creation of the Windover Dig, a "wet" archaeological site. A visitor may see how Native Americans lived and Florida pioneers survived. As of 2013, the museum had over 3,000 artifacts.
Adam of Macedonia
The Adam of Macedonia, earlier often referred to as the Adam of Govrlevo, is a neolithic sculpture found by archaeologist Milos Bilbija of the Skopje City Museum where it now resides. More than 7,000 years old, it is the oldest artwork and artifact found in the Republic of Macedonia. Dating from the 6th millennium BC, the sculpture's creator represented a sitting male body, and showed details in the spine, ribs and navel, and erect phallus.
Catholic art
Christian art is nearly as old as Christianity itself. The oldest Christian sculptures are from Roman sarcophagi, dating to the beginning of the 2nd century. As a persecuted sect, however, the earliest Christian images were arcane and meant to be intelligible only to the initiated. Early Christian symbols include the dove, the fish, the lamb, the cross, symbolic representation of the Four Evangelists as beasts, and the Good Shepherd. Early Christians also adapted Roman decorative motifs like the peacock, grapevines, and the good shepherd. It is in the Catacombs of Rome that recognizable representations of Christian figures first appear in number. The recently excavated Dura-Europos house church on the borders of Syria dates from around 265 AD and holds many images from the persecution period. The surviving frescoes of the baptistry room are among the most ancient Christian paintings. We can see the "Good Shepherd", the "Healing of the paralytic" and "Christ and Peter walking on the water". A much larger fresco depicts the two Marys visiting Christ's tomb.
In the 4th century, the Edict of Milan allowed public Christian worship and led to the development of a monumental Christian art. Christians were able to build edifices for worship larger and more handsome than the furtive meeting places they had been using. Existing architectural formulas for temples were unsuitable because pagan sacrifices occurred outdoors in the sight of the gods, with the temple, housing the cult figures and the treasury, as a backdrop. As an architectural model for large churches, Christians chose the basilica, the Roman public building used for justice and administration. These basilica-churches had a center nave with one or more aisles at each side and a rounded apse at one end: on this raised platform sat the bishop and priests, and also the altar. Although it appears that early altars were constructed of wood (as is the case in the Dura-Europos church) altars of this period were built of stone, and began to become more richly designed. Richer materials could now be used for art, such as the mosaics that decorate Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome and the 5th century basilicas of Ravenna, where narrative sequences begin to develop.
Geissenklösterle
In the argument why these sites deserve recognition as a part of the universal human heritage, the area is described as the source of the currently oldest known (non-stationary) works of human art in the form of carved animal and humanoid figurines as well as the oldest surviving musical instruments. Their creators lived, were inspired and worked in and around these caves. The caves also served as the repositories of the figurines which may have been used in a religious context. In addition, they were the venue where performers used the excavated musical instruments and where the social groups lived from which the artists sprang.
Romanesque architecture
With the fall of the Roman Empire, the tradition of carving large works in stone and sculpting figures in bronze died out. The best-known surviving large sculptural work of Proto-Romanesque Europe is the life-size wooden Crucifix commissioned by Archbishop Gero of Cologne in about 960–65. During the 11th and 12th centuries, figurative sculpture flourished in a distinctly Romanesque style that can be recognised across Europe, although the most spectacular sculptural projects are concentrated in South-Western France, Northern Spain and Italy.
Rembrandtplein
The statue of Rembrandt was made in 1852 by sculptor Louis Royer and is of cast iron. It was cast in one piece and it is Amsterdam's oldest surviving statue in a public space. The current design of the square is the result of a €3.5 million renovation completed in December 2009. The statue is on a grey granite base bearing a replica of his signature. It occupies a space in the centre of the square facing a plaza paved with matching gray granite slabs accented by planters, trees and a small fountain. The perimeter of the square is bordered by grass and trees.
Jordan Archaeological Museum
The museum formerly housed some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the only copper scroll, which are now on display in the newly established Jordan Museum, along with the Ain Ghazal statues, which are among the oldest statues ever made by human civilization..
Elk's Head of Huittinen
The Elk's Head is the oldest stone sculpture found in Finland. It was discovered in 1903 by a farm worker in a potato field in the village of Palojoki near Huittinen. A year later the figurine was sold on a market in Turku. It was placed in the collection of a local historical museum and eventually came into the possession of the Finnish National Museum.
Suleymans Eagle
In the world survived three more similar in shape figurines (in Museum of Islamic Art (Berlin), in the city of Lucca in Italy and in Saint Catherine's Monastery in Egypt), but only on a copy that is stored in the "Hermitage" the date of manufacture, and perhaps it is the oldest of the four curved vessels.
Lao Buddhist sculpture
Lao Buddhist sculptures were created by the Lao people of Southeast Asia. They are typically made of bronze, although gold and silver images can also be found. The Vat Manorom is believed to be the oldest colossal Lao Buddhist sculpture. Today, the sculpture gardens of Luang Pu Bunleua Sulilat provide a modern twist to the ancient tradition.
Golden Madonna of Essen
The Golden Madonna is both the oldest known sculpture of the Madonna and the oldest free-standing sculpture north of the Alps. It is also one of only two extant medieval gilded cult images. Gilded sculptures are frequently mentioned in medieval documents, but apart from an image of Saint Fides in the abbey of Saint-Foy in Conques in Southern France no such artifacts survive (the Madonna of Hildesheim was stripped of its original gold-leaf covering at some time). We know Charlemagne had a life-size crucifix with the figure of Christ in gold in his Palatine Chapel in Aachen, the oldest such object to be described, and many similar figures in precious metal, all now vanished, are recorded in large Anglo-Saxon churches and elsewhere. Most often they are crucifixes, and sometimes accompanying figures of Mary and John the Evangelist are mentioned, as for example those by Spearhafoc in the 11th century.