When I started looking for a title for my works I was debating whether to call my work sculpture, can the preservation and painting of tree cuttings, interesting as they may be, be considered an artistic sculpture? In trying to understand the origins of my deliberations I found that indeed painted sculptures were for several centuries considered an inferior art form. This is what I found.
The Greeks and Romans painted their statues to resemble real figures. Lightning was often added to them to liken them to gods and lift them out of everyday life. If so, why is every museum on earth full of white marble sculptures? After the fall of Rome, ancient statues were buried or left in the open air for centuries until their color completely disappeared. At the beginning of the Renaissance they began to reveal, explore and copy the art of classical sculpture and these were probably just white sculptures made of white marble. White has become the right thing in art.
Although there has been evidence of past sculpture painting, artists and art historians have chosen to ignore it. Western culture seems to have collectively internalized that white marble is more beautiful. Perhaps this was due to a desire to differentiate the new Renaissance art from pagan arts and Christian aesthetics. "High art" had to be sophisticated, and a sculpture is considered as such only if it is colorless. From around the 15th century onwards painted sculptures were accepted only as part of extra-ecclesiastical prayer accessories and as means of decoration. Metropolitan Treasurer Luke Sison wrote: "Color sculpture is considered too easy and too popular to be good art, high art, or even art at all."
It seems that with modern sculpture the situation has changed and color has returned to being a legitimate means of sculpture, especially in abstract sculpture.
