Sculpture has been central in religious devotion in many cultures, and until recent centuries, large sculptures, too expensive for private individuals to create, were usually an expression of religion or politics. Those cultures whose sculptures have survived in quantity include the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean, India, and China, as well as many in South America and Africa. Aniconism remained restricted to the Jewish, Zoroastrian, and some other religions before expanding to early Buddhism and early Christianity, neither of which initially accepted at least large sculptures. In both Christianity and Buddhism, these early views were later reversed, and sculpture became very significant, especially in Buddhism. Christian Eastern Orthodoxy has never accepted monumental sculpture, and Islam has consistently rejected nearly all figurative sculpture.
Many forms of Protestantism also do not approve of religious sculpture. There has been much iconoclasm of sculpture from religious motives, from the Early Christians and the Beeldenstorm of the Protestant Reformation to the 2001 destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan by the Taliban. The Western tradition of sculpture began in Ancient Greece, and Greece is widely seen as producing great masterpieces in the classical period. During the Middle Ages, Gothic sculpture represented the agonies and passions of the Christian faith. The revival of classical models in the Renaissance produced famous sculptures such as Michelangelo's David. Modernist sculpture moved away from traditional processes and the emphasis on the depiction of the human body, with the making of constructed sculpture and the presentation of found objects as finished artworks.
One of the most common purposes of sculpture is in some form of association with religion. Cult images are common in many cultures, though they are often not the colossal statues of the deity that characterized Ancient Greek art, like the Statue of Zeus at Olympia; the actual cult images in the innermost sanctuaries of Egyptian temples, of which none have survived, were evidently rather small, even in the largest temples, and the same is often true in Hinduism, where the very simple and ancient form of the lingam is the most common. Buddhism brought the sculpture of religious figures to East Asia, where there seems to have been no earlier equivalent tradition, though again, simple shapes like the bi and cong probably had religious significance.
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions and is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving and modeling in stone, metal, ceramics, wood, and other materials, but since modernism, shifts in sculptural processes have led to an almost complete freedom of materials and processes. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal, such as carving; assembled by welding or modeling; or molded or cast. Sculpture in stone survives far better than works of art in perishable materials and often represents the majority of the surviving works (other than pottery) from ancient cultures, though conversely, traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished almost entirely. However, most ancient sculpture was brightly painted, and the art has been lost.
Dr. K.M. Suresh (Born 1952), former Director (Museum) in the Kannada University, Hampi in Karnataka, obtained his M.A. from Karnataka University, Dharwad in 1974 and P.G. Diploma in Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi in 1986. He obtained a Ph.D. Degree from Utkala University, Bhubaneswar, Odisha in 1992 on "Sculptural Art of Hampi", under the guidance of Late Prof K.S. Behera. Dr. Suresh has published more than 18 books on Sculptures and Temples from Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. He is a member of many academic societies and guide to Ph.D. and M.Phil scholars at Kannada University, Hampi, and is an examiner for other Universities. He is a UGC Expert Committee Member for Museology and Conservation and Archaeology, and also an Expert Committee Member for History and Archaeology.
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