Belvedere Torso

A new understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture began to emerge in the second half of the eighteenth century. The real issue here is not the distinction as such. Sculpture had always been thought of as different, if only because its execution required different skills, it was made of different materials and existed as solid thing rather than painted surface. In art theory, where painting and sculpture were seen to be grounded in a common mastery of drawing or dessin or …

In theory, the Greek ideal should appear entirely whole and centred, its harmoniously poised body the very model of a similarly constituted ideal subjectivity. It still needed, however, to bear some trace of the deep-seated disturbances that motivated the fantasies of ideal oneness it embodied. It had to appear untouched by contradiction and difference even as its affective power drew upon anxieties associated with the ‘real’ divisions of the self, for only on condition that it did not entirely …