Sculptors and Sculptures

Two marble papal busts — one in a soft cap, one bare-headed with a full beard, both wearing the ornate cope of office — are set against a smoky, fire-lit skyline of St. Peter's dome. Gian Lorenzo Bernini served as the favored sculptor to a run of seventeenth-century popes, and his papal portrait busts (Urban VIII, Paul V, and others carved across a five-decade career) remain the standard against which Baroque portraiture is measured: unlike static earlier papal effigies, Bernini's popes seem to breathe, their drapery caught mid-motion, their eyes fixed on something just outside the frame.

The burning skyline behind them turns two studies in ecclesiastical portraiture into something closer to a premonition — the seat of the Church silhouetted against fire rather than the calm daylight its official portraits usually assumed.

A seated marble woman, head bowed and hands loosely open in her lap, sits before a monumental pyramid tomb — complete with an open doorway, a relief medallion carried aloft by a winged genius, and a mourning lion at its base. The composition closely matches Antonio Canova's Monument to Archduchess Maria Christina of Austria (1798–1805) in Vienna's Augustinerkirche: a solemn procession climbs toward the tomb's dark entrance while an allegorical figure of Genius and a grieving lion flank the base, carved with the cool, restrained grace that made Canova the leading Neoclassical sculptor of his generation.

Canova conceived the monument as theater of loss rather than portraiture — no likeness of the Archduchess appears at all, only the mourners left behind and the door through which she has already passed.

Three distinct Madonna figures share this piece: an ivory-toned crowned Virgin in flowing robes, a warmly painted wood relief of Mary cradling the infant Christ against a Gothic church façade, and a bejeweled Baroque Madonna raising one hand in blessing, with a small haloed figure descending on a crescent moon overhead. The crescent moon beneath a heavenly figure is a standard attribute of the Immaculate Conception in Catholic iconography, drawn from the Book of Revelation's woman clothed with the sun.

Carving the Madonna has occupied European sculptors continuously for over a thousand years, and this piece deliberately stages three very different centuries of that tradition side by side — medieval relief, Gothic statuary, and Baroque devotional sculpture — under one Gothic ruin.

A bronze female figure kneels and reaches forward with both hands, straining toward another figure who turns away, head bowed into an arm raised in anguish. The pose recalls Camille Claudel's L'Âge Mûr (The Age of Maturity, 1899), her most autobiographical work, in which a young woman kneels and stretches her arms after a man being led away by an older woman — read by many as Claudel's own farewell to her decades-long relationship with Auguste Rodin.

Claudel spent the last thirty years of her life confined to an asylum by her family, largely unable to sculpt; the small bust and single portrait photograph tucked into this composition's corners feel less like decoration than a quiet acknowledgment of how much of her work and her story has survived only in fragments.

A gathering of small figures from very different corners of the ancient and modern world: a bronze ballerina in a tulle skirt (Edgar Degas' Little Dancer of Fourteen Years, cast from the wax original after his death), striped terracotta figures with elongated bell-shaped bodies in a style associated with Cypriot and eastern Mediterranean votive figurines, a horned dark-clay dog, a crowned female idol, and a Mesoamerican-style ceramic figure with an elaborate headdress.

None of these figures were made within the same thousand years of each other, let alone the same continent — Clay Actors treats the small votive or studio figure as a constant across human history, each one standing in for a person, a god, or a fragment of a ceremony no longer fully understood.

A bald, bearded elder in an ornate gold-trimmed cope is seized and struck by two bare-chested men, rendered with the startling, waxy realism of polychrome devotional sculpture. This kind of hyperrealistic painted figure group — real hair, glass eyes, flesh-toned skin — belongs to a tradition of Baroque and Counter-Reformation sacred-theater sculpture, most associated with Sicilian and Neapolitan workshops, built to make martyrdom and suffering as viscerally present to a congregation as possible.

A small reclining nude figure glimpsed at the edge of the frame is a quieter counterpoint to the violence at center — the same devotional realism turned toward penitence rather than punishment, which is where the piece finds its title.

A seated figure in a faceted grey coat rests his head on his hand, rendered in the broken, multi-angled planes of early Cubism, while behind him a hillside town dissolves into stacked geometric blocks of ochre and green. The landscape closely echoes Pablo Picasso's Houses on the Hill, Horta de Ebro (1909), painted during the summer that pushed him and Georges Braque from Cézanne-influenced structure into full Analytic Cubism — the moment a Spanish village stopped looking like a village and started looking like a diagram of one.

A carved stone mask-like head and a smooth, abstracted horse form in the foreground extend the same fracturing logic into sculpture, treating solid form the way the painting behind them treats a rooftop: broken into planes and reassembled on the canvas's own terms.

A slender bronze youth in a laurel-crowned hat stands with one hand on his hip, foot resting on a severed head — an unmistakable citation of Donatello's bronze David (c. 1440s), the first free-standing nude bronze statue cast in Europe since antiquity and one of the Renaissance's most quietly radical works. Framed beside it are two glazed terracotta reliefs of the Madonna and Child in the blue-and-white palette made famous by the della Robbia workshop, Donatello's Florentine contemporaries who turned devotional relief into an industry of its own.

Pairing Donatello's startlingly sensuous bronze boy-hero with the della Robbias' serene glazed Madonnas puts two very different registers of fifteenth-century Florentine sculpture in the same room — civic myth-making beside private devotion.

Four Marian figures span several centuries of sculptural style: an ivory-white crowned Virgin, a warm painted-wood relief of Mother and Child, a small figure descending on a crescent moon, and a richly dressed Baroque Madonna with a jeweled bodice raising one hand. Where Christian Charity (elsewhere in this catalog) stages three Madonnas around a single Gothic church, this piece is a broader survey — Gothic ivory carving, medieval polychrome relief, and Baroque devotional statuary shown as a continuous conversation rather than three separate objects.

The title's simple pairing, Woman and Madonna, points at what these centuries of Marian sculpture were always negotiating: the same female figure read simultaneously as an ordinary mother and as a heavenly queen.

Armor and metalwork across several centuries and materials: a fully armored horse's head, a suit of plate armor beside a resting greyhound, a bronze knight's portrait, a shirtless blacksmith bent over an anvil inside a riveted iron roundel, a wrought-iron dove, and two more tortured or crouching bronze figures at the edges. The riveted disc framing the blacksmith recalls the format of a ship's porthole or a heraldic shield — industrial metalwork quoting the decorative language of the armor around it.

From hand-forged plate armor to cast bronze figure sculpture, this piece traces one continuous material history — iron and bronze worked by fire and hammer, whether the end result is meant to protect a knight, mark a grave, or simply stand as art.

Roughly carved wooden figures — a seated hooded form, a reclining greyhound, and an embracing couple rendered in blocky, deliberately unpolished planes — sit before a row of dark cypress trees and a pale stone face suspended above them, all lit in an eerie violet twilight. The carving style, with its raw tool marks and simplified, emotionally weighted forms, belongs to German Expressionist sculptors like Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, who rejected academic polish in favor of blunt, direct carving that let the wood's own resistance show in the finished figure.

The cypress-lined backdrop and the pale floating face borrow the melancholy, dreamlike mood of Arnold Böcklin's Isle of the Dead (1880) — a Symbolist painting Expressionist sculptors of the following generation knew well, even as they pushed its mood into rougher, more physical material.

A formal double portrait of a seventeenth-century noble couple — he in a lace collar and curled mustache, she in a jeweled bodice and pearl-strung hair — is framed above a carved wooden effigy of a reclining nobleman on a tomb, small primitive wooden figures, and a pair of trumpeting cherubs. Marriage portraits of this kind were commissioned to mark a dynastic union and were meant to hang for generations; pairing one directly with a carved tomb effigy quietly completes the life the portrait only shows the beginning of.

The title's cheerful Just Married reads differently once the reclining tomb figure registers — a reminder that the aristocratic portrait tradition and the aristocratic funerary-sculpture tradition were, in practice, often commissioned by the same families for the same two people.

Two bronze casts of Auguste Rodin's Le Penseur (The Thinker, conceived 1880) sit chin-on-fist in a raw industrial interior of exposed steel trusses, flanked by two of Rodin's oversized bronze hand studies — a subject he returned to obsessively throughout his career, treating the hand alone as expressive as an entire figure. The Thinker began life as a smaller figure meant to crown Rodin's unfinished Gates of Hell, representing Dante contemplating the underworld below him, before Rodin enlarged it into the standalone icon now cast in bronze in museum courtyards worldwide.

Rodin authorized numerous full-size bronze casts of The Thinker in his lifetime and after, which is why the sculpture exists simultaneously in so many museums — this piece leans into that multiplicity rather than treating any single cast as more authentic than another.

Three works from Michelangelo's sculptural career appear together: his seated marble Moses (1513–15, San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome), horns and all, carved for the never-completed tomb of Pope Julius II; one of the unfinished Slaves or Prigioni figures originally intended for the same tomb, its lower body still trapped in raw stone; and a bronze figure echoing the twisting, muscular pose Michelangelo favored throughout his later work.

The Julius tomb was meant to be Michelangelo's masterpiece and instead became his greatest frustration — scaled down repeatedly over four decades, it left Moses as its single finished centerpiece and a scatter of unfinished Slaves now displayed, deliberately incomplete, in Florence's Accademia.

Michelangelo's Pietà (1498–99, St. Peter's Basilica) appears twice here, in full view and in close crop — the youthful Virgin cradling the dead Christ across her lap, her face serene rather than grief-stricken, the marble drapery carved with a fluidity that still startles conservators who have studied it. Michelangelo was twenty-three when he completed it, his only signed work, reportedly carving his name into the sash across Mary's chest after overhearing a visitor credit it to another sculptor.

Its deliberately youthful Mary — younger-looking than her adult son — was a conscious choice Michelangelo defended as symbolic of her purity, and it remains one of the most reproduced and most debated decisions in the history of religious sculpture.

A gathering of marble youths pour and offer wine from jugs and shallow cups, one crowned with a Phrygian cap, an eagle drinking from a bowl at their feet, all set in a Neoclassical gallery interior. The subject and the languid, smooth-limbed figures are close to Bertel Thorvaldsen's recurring treatment of Ganymede and Hebe, the mythological cupbearers of Olympus — the Danish sculptor carved multiple versions of a youth offering wine to Zeus's eagle over his long Roman career, making it one of his signature themes.

The title borrows the toast “Prosit” — cheers — turning a mythological libation scene into something closer to a raised glass, fitting for a sculptor who treated the gesture of offering a cup as worth returning to again and again.

Multiple versions of Auguste Rodin's The Kiss (1882) — in bronze, in plaster, in a softly lit gallery alcove — surround a small circular study of an embracing couple and a portrait of Rodin himself in the lower corner, while two reclining bronze figures stretch across the foreground floor. The Kiss began as a detail within Rodin's Gates of Hell, depicting the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca from Dante's Inferno, before Rodin extracted and enlarged it into a freestanding work that became, somewhat against his own intentions, one of the most reproduced images of romantic love in Western sculpture.

Rodin was ambivalent about the piece's popularity, considering it conventionally pretty compared to the raw psychological charge of his other work — a tension this piece nods to by surrounding the famous embrace with the artist's own watching face.

Two bronze portrait heads flank a rough, half-formed golden mass on a museum staircase — a shape that reads less like a finished sculpture than a face still emerging from molten material. That dissolving, unresolved quality is the signature of Medardo Rosso, the Italian sculptor who spent his career pushing bronze and wax portraiture away from Rodin-style muscularity toward soft, almost photographic blur, arguing that a sculpture should capture a fleeting impression of a face rather than its permanent form.

Rosso was largely overlooked in his lifetime next to Rodin's fame, though his soft-edged, atmospheric busts are now recognized as a direct bridge between sculpture and Impressionist painting's interest in fleeting light and movement.

Three separate Pietà groups — Mary cradling the dead Christ — appear here in painted wood and painted panel rather than marble: a warmly gilded wood carving set against sunlit ruins, a smaller wood relief tucked into an archway, and a darker Northern European panel painting with a black-robed Mary. This polychrome, emotionally raw treatment of the subject belongs to the German and Netherlandish Vesperbild tradition, a devotional type that predates Michelangelo's famous marble version by over a century and was built specifically to be wept over, not admired for technical polish.

Where Michelangelo's Pietà (shown elsewhere in this catalog) is prized for its serene restraint, the Vesperbild tradition gathered here goes the opposite direction — raw wood, visible grief, and color, meant to put the viewer directly at the foot of the cross.

A bearded, muscular marble Zeus stands beside a kneeling Ganymede in a Phrygian cap, the eagle that carried the young Trojan prince to Olympus at his side, while a tortured bronze figure and a pair of ornamental swans frame the scene. The myth — Zeus, taken with the beautiful youth, sends his eagle to carry off Ganymede and installs him as cupbearer to the gods — was a favorite subject of Neoclassical sculptors including Thorvaldsen (whose own treatment of the theme appears elsewhere in this catalog as Prosit Thorvaldsen), who found in it a sanctioned classical vehicle for idealized male beauty.

Placing the myth's central abduction beside Thorvaldsen's more genial cupbearer scene lets the two pieces read as one story told from different angles — the myth's original premise, and its softened, decorative afterlife in nineteenth-century marble.