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.