Classical statues were painted, and brightly
The white marble we associate with ancient Greece is an accident of survival. Greek and Roman statues were painted in strong colours — red lips, tanned skin, patterned clothing, sometimes inlaid eyes and metal eyelashes. The paint weathered off over two thousand years, and what was left looked austere and pale.
Renaissance sculptors dug up the bare marbles, assumed that was the intention, and built a whole aesthetic on a misunderstanding. Reconstructions using ultraviolet light to find pigment traces are routinely described as garish by people seeing them for the first time, which says more about four hundred years of training than about the Greeks. PHIDIAS, who oversaw the Parthenon sculptures, was working in colour.
A customs officer decided what counts as art
In 1926 Constantin BRANCUSI shipped *Bird in Space* to New York — a slender polished bronze with no head, wings or feet. Sculpture entered the United States duty-free. Manufactured metal did not. A customs official looked at the object, declined to accept that it was a bird, and charged import duty at forty per cent under the heading of kitchen utensils and hospital supplies.
Brancusi sued, and the trial turned into a public argument about what art is, with sculptors called as witnesses to say whether the object counted. The 1928 judgment accepted that a work need not resemble its subject, provided it was made by a professional artist and intended as art. It is an odd origin for a principle — an argument about import duty — but it is roughly the legal moment at which abstract sculpture became sculpture.
The blackest black and the pinkest pink
In 2016 Anish KAPOOR acquired exclusive artistic rights to Vantablack, a coating of carbon nanotubes that absorbs almost all visible light and makes a three-dimensional object look like a hole cut out of the world. No other artist could use it.
The response from the artist Stuart Semple was to develop the most intense pink pigment he could and put it on sale to everybody on earth except Kapoor, with a declaration at checkout confirming you are not him and will not pass it to him. Kapoor obtained some anyway and posted a photograph of his middle finger dipped in it. The argument is silly and the underlying question is not: whether a material can belong to one person.
The Thinker is only part of a door
RODIN did not make *The Thinker* as a standalone figure. He is one element of *The Gates of Hell*, a vast bronze doorway commissioned in 1880, seated above the panels and looking down at the figures writhing below — a poet contemplating the scene he has created. Rodin worked on the doors for thirty-seven years and never finished them.
Casting the figure separately at three times the size turned a detail into the most reproduced sculpture in the world, now sitting alone in dozens of cities and meaning something vaguer. The rest of the grid runs from PHIDIAS and DONATELLO through MICHELANGELO, BERNINI and CANOVA to RUDE and EPSTEIN, then into the modern: MOORE, HEPWORTH, GIACOMETTI, CALDER, ARP, NOGUCHI, BOURGEOIS, SMITHSON, OLDENBURG, GORMLEY, KOONS and HIRST.