INTRODUCTION
I forget who first jokingly defined sculpture as something you bump into when you
step back to look at a painting. In any case, like most witticisms, this one contains a
germ of truth: both the general public and scholars pay more attention to painting than
to sculpture. There are undoubtedly many reasons for this. We are a society geared to
experiencing things on a flat plane rather than in three dimensions. Not only do we
learn from the pages and photographs in books, magazines, and scholarly journals,
but television and now the computer play ever greater roles in our lives. As far as the
teaching of art history is concerned, we depend primarily upon the projection of slides
onto a flat screen. In colleges and universities, the overwhelming majority of art-history
courses give greater emphasis to painting than to sculpture—except, of course, when
dealing with a period or culture such as Classical Greece, from which little other than
three-dimensional objects has survived. It is not surprising, therefore, that paintings,
prints, and drawings tend to be more avidly collected than sculpture and that, in
recent decades, there has been an explosion of interest in photographs.
For anyone who doubts the relative lack of interest in sculpture, it is only necessary
to look at the art market, where the prices of sculpture purchases fall far below those of
painting, even though great sculptures are rarer on the market. From the point of view
of the private collector, it can be argued that the three-dimensional object is a more
demanding possession. Paintings, prints, photographs, or illuminated manuscripts are
usually less expensive to pack and transport safely and are easier to display. It is clearly
more difficult to hang a sculpture than a painting over a sofa or bed, and if the object
is any larger than a bibelot, it becomes a presence that invades one's space and may
require a niche or a pedestal for support.
This preference for painting over sculpture is nothing new. In 1846, the young
Charles Baudelaire, a fervent admirer of Eugene Delacroix, wrote a notorious essay
entitled "Why Sculpture Is Boring" ("Pourquoi la sculpture est ennuyeuse"). Since the
Renaissance, in fact, theoretical debates over the relative merits of the two arts (called
paragoni) have most often come out in favor of painting. Because sculpture usually
requires more manual labor, the sculptor has had greater difficulty in throwing off
his medieval "craftsman" associations, while the painter more easily, and earlier in
history, achieved the social rank of "artist." Recently, in the Times Literary Supplement, a
reviewer wrote that "it is considerably more difficult to translate three dimensions onto
a two-dimensional surface than it is to represent an object directly in three dimensions;
and neither Greek, Roman, nor Egyptian cultures ever completely achieved it, although
all of them were highly skilled at representing three-dimensional forms sculpturally."
This is not the occasion to debate this issue again, but the quotation illustrates the
INTRODUCTION 9