Although the texts and the monuments which have survived give us a full idea of the materials used in sculpture, they tell us little about the methods of working them. Classical literature provides almost no information on the subject, and votive inscriptions still less; finds of tools are rare, and so are depictions of sculptors at work. And it is not easy to interpret the depictions that do exist. Pot instance, the bottom of a cup now in Copenhagen, dating from the earliest period of red-figure pottery (late sixth to the early fifth century), shows a sculptor carving a herm, and the two outer sides of a cup now in Berlin depict several bronzesmiths working around a furnace, while others are finishing off a large statue. Such sparse information is complemented chiefly by what study of the works themselves can tell us. Moreover, technique varied from period to period.

We know that solid bronze casting and hammering was the practice in ancient times, and that subsequently the technique known as eke perdue or “lost wax” casting became widespread — some of the moulds used in casting have survived. The completed work was then artificially patinated. As for the techniques of working stone, particularly marble, the unfinished sculptures which have come down to us in considerable numbers -such as the relief from a house at Delos retain tool marks and so -provide information about the intermediate stages of carving. Many examples throughout antiquity show that it was common to use additional sections for projecting parts such as outstretched arms (as with the Archaic korai of the Acropolis) or the penis. Work in marble was finished by polishing with wax or encaustic, a process called ganosis, in the same way as bronzes were finished by patination. Even in Archaic times, sculptors were very skilful: the three great unfinished Archaic kouroi at Naxos, left lying where work began, show that enormous monoliths could be carved where the block of stone was quarried, and the dedication of the Naxian Colossus of Apollo at Delos, though enigmatic, suggests that working such huge blocks gave sculptors much satisfaction. We may set beside this the famous achievement of Telekies and Theodoros, who made the statue of Pythian Apollo at Samos in two halves, fitting them together when they had finished the work.

The sculptor does not simply practise an art -in sociological terms he also exercises a craft. Here again there are great gaps in our knowledge. In principle, nothing was more foreign to ancient Greece than the idea of art for art’s sake. Sculpture, therefore, was usually the outcome of a commission from a public body such as a city or confederation or (with increasing frequency in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods) from an individual. We may assume that it was not Phidias’s own idea to create the chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia; dedications regularly confirm that patrons commissioned works, although the details of the procedure are usually vague. We do not often get even as much information as is provided by a decree of Delos in the third century, which tells us that “Telesinos of Athens was commissioned by the people to make the statues of Asklepios and Queen Stratonice, and he made the people a present of them, having executed the statue of Asklepios in bronze and the statue of the Queen in marble, and at no charge he also saw to the preservation and restoration of all the statues in the sanctuary which required it.”

Commissions can provide information about relationships between famous sculptors. Literary tradition mentions several competitions: one such, according to Pliny :he Elder, was held to provide the votive offering of Amazons at the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The artists who competed gave Polyclitus the verdict over Phidias and Kresilas, and on that basis modern criticism rather fruitlessly endeavours to attribute the wounded Amazons in our museums to one or other of those sculptors. Similarly, the story goes that Phidias and Alkamenes were each required to make an Athena to stand on a tall column. To correct the optical effect such a height would produce, Phidias gave the goddess a large head which shocked viewers when they first saw at, while Alkamenes, respecting the natural proportions of the body, drew high praise at first, but then laughter when his statue was put in place on top of its column. These stories of rivalry, however authentic, are complemented by accounts of collaboration; the most famous case is the Mausoleum which Artemisia, wife of the Carian ruler Mausolos, commissioned at Halikarnassos mid-fourth century BC. Pliny tells us that Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos and Leochares worked together on the carving of its decoration.

Skopas was from Paros and the other three sculptors were from Athens. At the Ephesian competition, similarly, Polyclitus was from Argos, Phidias from Athens and Kresilas from Kydonia in Crete. In all the cases just cited, we find sculptors working, outside their native cities. Votive dedications confirm this mobility: the funerary statue of Phrasikleia, a woman of Athens, dating from Archaic times, is the work of a Parian, and it seems that an itinerant way of life was widespread in the Hellenistic period, when numbers of bases bore signatures. For instance, we have seven signatures of Thoinias who describes himself as from Sicyon: two are in Sicyon itself, two in Oropos, one in Tanagra, another at Delos, and there is probably a seventh at Pergamum. However, it was not essential to travel: in the second to first centuries BC there was much signed statuary on Delos, and the sculptors were all Delians. This was because Delos had a large, prosperous population, providing sufficient custom. Getting commissions was the important factor.

The market had its ups and downs. The great building works eventually undertaken by Pericles on the Acropolis after its total destruction by the Persians in 480 BC are a good illustration. The accounts of the expenses for the Erechtheion frieze have come down to us, engraved on marble; they describe the payment of fees to sculptors for carving various additional figures, as follows:
“to Antiphanes of the Kerameikos quarter, who made the chariot, the young man and the team of two horses:
240 drachmae;
to Phyromachos of Kephisia, who made the man leading the horse: 60 drachmae;
to Soklos of Alopeke, who made the figure holding the bit: 60 drachmae;
to Phyromachos of Kephisia, who made the man leaning on his stick by the altar: 6o drachmae; etc.”

The accounts go on for several columns. But work on this scale could not last indefinitely, and in any case the decline of Athens, sucked dry by the Peloponnesian War, put an end to it. All those obscure sculptors whose pay is recorded in the accounts were now out of work, and it is very probable that they had recourse to what we might now call “retraining”: this is the usual explanation for the sudden reappearance of funerary stelai, absent since the end of the Archaic period and no doubt forbidden by the laws which restricted ostentatious funerals. Sculptors employed on public works had to switch over to the private sector, and it seems likely that pressure from such unemployed craftsmen contributed to a disregard for the sumptuary law which the piety (or vanity) of the bereaved in any case predisposed them to infringe. If so, it is not surprising that the funerary stele of Dexileos rivals the reliefs of horsemen on the Panathenaic frieze.

Commissions mean fees, but again, there is very little information about sculptors’ financial status. We have seen, for instance, that the Erechtheion accounts give the price paid for each separate figure, but we need to know what costs the craftsman bore and how much tithe he spent on a piece of work. However, the pay seems quite good if we remember that 60 drachmae for a statue is 180 times the sum of the two obols paid at the same period to judges as their daily fee. It is true that the judges’ fee must have been very low, since it was also the daily allowance made to the needy a little later. But in the next century Menander says that a man can live on twelve drachmae for a month and six days. Famous sculptors must have been in very comfortable circumstances; even a man like Telesinos, unknown to us from any source but the single decree cited above, was in a position to make the Delians a present of the two statues they had commissioned from him and throw in further restoration works, also at no charge. The same applies to the Mausoleum of Hali-kar-nassus: Pliny tells us that “the queen died before the work was finished” but that Skopas, Bryaxis, Timotheos and Leochares “did not, however, leave until their work was finished, believing that it would be a memorial to their glory and their art”, which suggests that they were working for nothing. At around the same time, however, Plato reports Socrates as saying that the sophist “Protagoras had earned far more money than Phidias and ten other sculptors put together”.

As for the social status of sculptors, it must have varied from one individual to another: the men who made the separate figures for the Erechtheion were not on a par with Phidias, who was a personal friend of Pericles. We need to know more about the social circles frequented by sculptors, but it is noteworthy that Plato, not a lover of the imitative arts, allows both sculptors and painters, whose position in society was certainly a comfortable one, to occupy the sixth rank of the social hierarchy, instead of relegating them to the seventh rank with other manual workers. And yet they still seem to have been regarded as manual workers. Five hundred years later, in the second century AD, Lucian described the dream which decided his profession: Sculpture personified, covered with marble dust, her hands hard with calluses, vainly tried to remind him of the glory of Phidias and Praxiteles, while the well- dressed figure of Philosophy replied that if he became a sculptor he would never be anything but a craftsman living by the work of his hands.

Sculptors, or at least the makers of statues, may not have had a desirable position in society as a whole, but they seem to have enjoyed high status among artists. The artistic hierarchy is well illustrated by the use of signatures, reflecting the status and renown not only of the signatory himself but of his entire professional category. The extreme scarcity of signed mosaics suggests that the men who made them were of no social standing, a fact confirmed by the lack of interest in them shown by Classical historians. In the same way, vase painters signed their work only during a relatively short period. On the other hand, inscribed bases show that throughout antiquity even the least famous sculptors usually signed their works.

Moving from the professional activities of sculptors to their training, what little information we have is as sporadic as it is incomplete. The authors usually tell us that such and such a sculptor was the pupil of this or that man. We know that Myron and Polyclitus studied together, and the question of finding a teacher of sculpture comes up once in Plato. We may assume that sculptors were not self-taught but we have no details of how a pupil might find a master, how he would pay that master, and so on. In any case, despite the suggestion conveyed by the general terms “Argive school” or “Attic school”, there is unlikely to have been any teaching of the fine arts such as exists in today’s colleges and universities.

Finally we may also suppose that a man known for his work in sculpture was not obliged to devote himself to it exclusively: Phidias was also overseer of the architectural projects on the Acropolis, and Euphranor was said to be as good a painter as he was a sculptor.

STATUARY AND RELIEF

The single modern word sculpture in fact embraces two different arts; similarly, in ancient Greek, words of the ,glyphein family designate any form of carving and words of the grapheiu family any form of drawing. On the one hand we have sculpture in the round: free-standing statues which can be seen from any point of a 360-degree circle. On the other hand we have relief work, in which the sculpted forms are a fixed part of the block or plaque which constitutes their background; possible viewpoints move through only 180 degrees, since after that all we can see is the back of the work. The relief carving may be of greater or lesser depth, and the difference is often described in terms of “high” and “low” relief. However, it might be better to use those terms for a more important technical distinction. In what is called the “sunken relief’ of Egyptian art but might more appropriately be called “low relief” the figures are often on the same plane as the background or carved deeply into it. In Greece, however, the figures were never carved into the background, but projected from it.

Understood in this way, relief includes more genres than are covered by the term “sculpture”; relief comprehends “sculpture”, coins and pottery with moulded or applique ornamentation. We shall not be discussing such genres here, for reasons of space, but this extension of the category of “relief” does point up the technical diversity of the methods used to produce it. Whereas marble relief
was carved with a chisel, relief work on coins was stamped on metal, and ceramic relief was either moulded with the vessel itself or applied to its side later. Applique is found once in marble relief, on the frieze of the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, where figures of white marble were attached to the bluish background of the frieze, in a striking effect of contrasting colours.

Of course, it n their common features that enable us to embrace the two distinct arts of sculpture in the round and relief-work in the single term “sculpture”. These features are fundamentally technical: both sculpture in the round and relief derive from ,glyphein, not graphein. They are carved, not drawn, and exploit the third dimension. Statuary and relief work were also related in their use of the materials and tools; they were carved in the same marble, with the, same kind of chisel, by means of similar manual skills, or they were cast in the same bronze. There may also have been common sociological ground between the two crafts. Unfortunately we are nut well enough informed about the professional organization of Greek sculpture to know whether the men who made sculpture in the round also made reliefs.

There is also a thematic relationship. Our own contemporary art has taught us that sculpture in the round need not represent a human figure. Greek art can easily give us the impression that sculpture and figurative statuary were one and the same thing. It is true that the human figure, as in all Greek art, is dominant. However, the Greek column, for example, although traditionally regarded as architecture, may also be seen as a piece of non-figurative
sculpture in the round when it n carved from top to bottom and left standing in isolation as a pedestal or votive offering. Similarly, relief work is not confined to scenes with human figures, but may present geometrical motifs, particularly on buildings, where such features as the regula, the triglyph and the mutule appear — or sometimes it may be incorporated into the ornamentation of mouldings or door frames with ovolo patterns, roundels, palmettes and rosettes.

The two kinds of sculpture, statuary and relief work, are closely related by their use of the materials as well as by their subject matter. Throughout Classical antiquity, marble statues are found standing on bases also made of marble, the sides of which often bear relief work. Statues and reliefs could also alternate with each other, for instance in pediments: while some architectural pediments had relief decoration, the tympanal frame usually contained statues. Standing over thirty feet from the ground on the front of the pediment wall, however, where no one could observe them from behind, such statues were actually in a position better suited to relief Although at tint they were fully sculpted, for instance in the temple of Zeus at Olympia or in the Parthenon, it is hardly surprising that the unseen back parts of the s came to be neglected in the fourth century BC, as at the temples of Delphi and Tegea.

An interesting relationship between statuary and relief is the transcription of the same subject from one genre to the other. However, transcription from relief to statuary is in fact very rare; far more frequent is the move from statue to relief, as we shall see in those ceramic or numismatic reliefs that illustrate statues now lost. It is not difficult to find reasons for this one-way traffic: sculpture in the round was much more expensive, which encouraged the reproduction of expensive items in the cheaper format, and the iconographic resources of relief were much greater. Relief work can present one or several people
against a background which will accommodate accessories or landscape features, and is suited to showing a very precise scene, such as the centauromachies or Amazonomachies (battles with centaurs and Amazons) from various temples, the Panathenaie procession on the Parthenon, the farewells of a dead person to his family on funerary stelai, as well as less challenging scenes: a god or human at rest. Sculpture in the round, on the other hand, is suited to the depiction of an isolated figure but has very little narrative potential, unless it resorts to the formula of the so-called “statuary group”. This term is an ambiguous expression designating two very different technical procedures: either the same block is sculpted to show two or more figures, whose relation to each other is thus permanently fixed, as in the Laocoon and the abduction of Antiope by Theseus , or separate statues are placed together to form a scene, as in the group of Harmodios and Aristogeiton .

In short, the isolation of figures sculpted in the round and the incorporation of figures in relief work into their background, combined with the different iconographic possibilities that result from this, make for very distinct genres. Nor are the relationships of the two genres with the other arts necessarily the same.

Relief stands firmly with painting from at least two points of view. First, it shares with painting a certain similarity of procedures and iconography. When the sixth- century sculptor of the metope on the Sicyonian Treasury at Delphi depicted a cattle raid and wanted to depict several cattle walking forward in profile, he was faced with a problem that also confronted contemporary vase painters, and solved it as they did. He moved the animals slightly out of alignment so that their legs were not superimposed but formed parallel lines. Also in the sixth century, painted inscriptions on vases identified the characters depicted: the sculptor of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi painted the names of the gods on the marble of the background.

These inscriptions are now obliterated, but a special photographic technique has recently allowed us to read them. Iconographically also, relief work, because it too shows figures against a background, draws naturally on the same repertory as painting: in the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, most of the Labours of Herakles, illustrated on twelve metopes, elicited original designs, but the episode of the Erymanthian boar is shown exactly as in contemporary vase paintings.

Secondly, relief alternated with painting on items such as vases. We think primarily of “painted” vases, which constitute a majority, but we should not forget that ceramic relief had an important role in vase decoration, particularly during the Archaic period (in such works as the vase showing the Trojan horse discovered at Myconos) and the Hellenistic period. Painting also alternates with architectural relief The oldest example dates from the seventh century BC and comes from the metopes of the temple of Thermos, which are plaques of painted terracotta showing Perseus, Orion, Chelidon, etc. All later temples had their metopes in relief work. Alternation was equally common in funerary art: here there are countless reliefs -enough good examples to fill several rooms in the National Museum at Athens — but painted stelai must also have been frequent from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods. We simply happen to have relatively few of them, for the usual reason that painting can not withstand the ravages of time and is obliterated or very indistinct unless special circumstances have preserved it for us; this is the case with the stelai now in the Volos Museum, which were re-used in a fortification not many years after they were made.

A curious occurrence of painting in relief work occurs in the late fourth-century Macedonian tomb at Lefkadia Naoussis. Here painting is used not to replace but to imitate sculpture, almost certainly because it was less expensive than carving; the metopes are painted in grisaille to create an illusion of marble relief

Relief and painting are related in showing figures against a background, statuary is related to architecture. It was pointed out above that statue and column are basically both rounded plastic forms, one figurative and the other not. In fact statues sometimes replaced columns in the architectonic function of supports for an entablature, under names which became traditional and are known to us from authors of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. They describe masculine statues as “atlantes”, with reference to the myth of Atlas who carried the world on his shoulders, or as “telamons”, meaning simply “supports”, while feminine statues were called “caryatids”, literally “women of Caryae”, a city in Laconia. This term has never been fully explained, and in the fifth century the administrators of the building works on the Acropolis called the caryatids of the porch of the Erechtheion just “korai” (“young girls”).

At least two monuments of the last quarter of the fifth century, one of them the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi, had two caryatids where similar buildings usually had columns, and there were two sets of twelve atlantes in the Temple of Olympian Zeus at Akragas (modern Agrigento) at the beginning of the fifth century. The practice of using such figures was never abandoned, and as we shall see below, it was imitated in the middle of the Imperial period by a caryatid from Eleusis, the tritons of the Odeon of Agrippa in the agora at Athens, and the barbarian prisoners in a monumental facade at Corinth.