These two Greek bronze sculptures were found off the coast of Italy in 1972. The nude warriors’ detailed musculature demonstrates the Greek interest in the male body’s power and strength. The warriors are standing in a classic contrapposto position, with their weight mostly on one foot and their hips and shoulders held at different angles to maintain balance. The Greeks began to make hollow bronze casts in the 500s BC. The material’s lightness compared to marble was a significant advantage.
Donatello made his bronze statue of David in the 1400s, probably sometime around 1430. The Medici family commissioned the work. David and Goliath was a popular subject in 15th-century Florence. Florentines saw David as an apt symbol for their city, which they considered an underdog in the rivalry between Florence and Rome. Compared to Michelangelo’s marble David, Donatello’s bronze is more feminine, and the statue itself much smaller (just over 5 feet as opposed to 13 1/2 feet). Donatello shows David with his foot on top of Goliath’s head, whereas Michelangelo shows David poised with his slingshot, about to fight.
Degas’ sculptures were not public monuments like the works above; rather, he used sculpture in private as an alternative to sketching, or as another way to explore formal problems. He worked from observation and studied the human body in motion, making many small sculptures of dancers and women bathing. One of his most famous sculptures is The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, made in 1922 and cast into bronze multiple times. Most of Degas’ sculptures were originally modeled out of wax or clay before being cast into bronze. Most are only a few feet high.
Brancusi’s Bird in Space is an elegant and simple form, about 54 inches tall. Brancusi searched for the essence of nature’s forms, and, in Bird in Space, made in 1919, he reduced the shape of a bird to its simplest, most abstract form. The bronze is perfectly polished and smooth, so that no surface flaws or texture distract from the essential form. As Brancusi put it, “What is real is not the exterior form, but the idea, the essence of things.”