The remark with which Vasari opens his ‘Introduction’ to Sculpture, though it sounds rather trite, involves a point of some interest. Vasari says that the sculptor removes all that is superfluous from the material under treatment, and reduces it to the form designed for it in his mind. This is true of the technique of sculpture proper, that is stone or marble carving, but there are processes in the art other than that of cutting away a block of hard material. Michelangelo, in a letter he wrote in 1549 to Benedetto Varchi, on the ever-recurring theme of the relative dignity of painting and sculpture, notices the fact that the sculptor proceeds in two ways, by the progressive reduction of a mass, as is the case with the marble carver, or in his own words, ‘per forza di levare’; and also by successive additions, as in modelling in clay or wax, which he calls ‘per via di porre,’ ‘by the method of putting on.’ The distinction is one of fundamental importance for a right understanding of the art, and upon it depends the characteristic difference between Greek reliefs, which are almost all carved in marble, and if not are beaten up on metal plates by the repoussé process, and Italian reliefs that are very often in cast bronze, the models for which have been prepared by modelling, ‘per via di porre,’ in wax. On this point something will be found in the Note on ‘Italian and Greek Reliefs,’ postea, p. 196 f.
With regard to sculpture effected ‘by taking away,’ ‘per forza di levare,’ Michelangelo has left a famous utterance in one of his sonnets, No. XV in the edition of Guasti, which opens as follows:—
‘Non ha l’ ottimo artista alcun concetto,
Ch’ un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva
Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva
La man che ubbidisce all’ intelletto,’
and is thus translated by J. A. Symonds:—
‘The best of artists hath no thought to show
Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
Doth not include. To break the marble spell