Principles of literary criticism

by I. A. Richards

CHAPTER XIX
Sculpture and the Construction of Form

Thus men forgot
That All Deities reside in the Human breast.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The initial signs from which the work of art is built up psychologically in the case of sculpture differ in several respects from the initial signs of painting. There are of course forms of sculpture for which the difference is slight. Some bas-reliefs, for example, can be considered as essentially drawings, and sculpture placed as a decorative detail in architecture so that it can only be viewed from one angle has necessarily to be interpreted in much the same manner. Similarly some primitive sculpture in which only one aspect is represented may be considered as covered by what has been said about painting, although the fact that the relief and the relation of volumes is more completely given and less supplied by imaginative effort is of some consequence. Further, the changes, slight though they may be, which accompany slight movements of the contemplator have their effect. His total attitude is altered in a way which may or may not be important according to circumstances.

With sculpture in which a number (four for example) of aspects are fully treated without any attempt to fill in the intermediate connecting aspects, the whole state of affairs is changed, since there arises the interpretative task of uniting these aspects into a whole.

This connection of a number of aspects into a whole may be made in varying ways. The signs may receive a visual interpretation and the form be mainly built up of visual images combined in sequences or fused. This, however, is an unsatisfactory method. It tends to leave out or blur too many of the possible responses to the statue and there is usually something unstable about such syntheses. The form so constructed is insubstantial and incomplete. Thus those sculptors whose work primarily asks for such a visual interpretation are commonly felt to be lacking in what is called a ‘sense of form’. The reasons for this are to be found in the nature of visual imagery and in the necessarily limited character of our purely visual awareness of space.

But the connection may be made, not through visual combination, but through combination of the various muscular images whereby we feel, or imaginatively construct the tensions, weights, stresses, etc. of physical objects. Each sequence of visual impressions as we look at the statue from varying standpoints calls up a group of these muscular images, and these images are capable of much more subtle and stable combinations than the corresponding visual images. Thus two visual images which are incompatible with one another may be each accompanied by muscular images (feelings of stress, tension, etc.) which are perfectly compatible and unite to form a coherent whole free from conflict. By this means we may realise the solidity of forms far more perfectly than if we rely upon visual resources alone, and since it is mainly through the character of the statue as a solid that the sculptor works, this muscular interpretation has, as a rule, obvious and overwhelming advantages.

None the less a place remains for sculpture whose primary interpretation is in visual terms. Looking at any of the more recent work of Epstein, for example, a feeling of quick and active intelligence on the part of the contemplator arises, and this sense of his own activity is the source of much that follows in his response. By contrast a work of Rodin seems to be not so much exciting activity in him as active itself. The correlation of visual aspects, in other words, is a conscious process compared with the automatic correlation of muscular image responses. The first we seem to be doing ourselves, the second seems to be something which belongs to the statue. This difference as we have described it is of course a technical difference and by itself involves nothing as to the value of the different works concerned. A similar difference may be found in the apprehension of form in painting.

These two modes are not as separate as our account would suggest; neither occurs in purity. Their interaction is further complicated through the highly representational character of most sculpture, and through the interlinking of different interpretations due to the congruences and incompatibilities of the emotional responses to which they give rise.

With sculpture perhaps more than with any other of the plastic arts we are in danger of overlooking the work of the contemplator’s imagination in filling out and interpreting the sign. What we transport from Egypt to London is merely a set of signs, from which a suitable interpreter setting about it rightly can produce a certain state of mind. It is this state of mind which matters and which gives its value to the statue. But so obscure to ordinary introspection are the processes of the interpretation that we tend to think that none occur. That we interpret a picture or a poem is obvious upon very little reflection. That we interpret a mass of marble is less obvious. The historical accident that speculation upon Beauty largely developed in connection with sculpture is responsible in great degree for the fixity of the opinion that Beauty is something inherent in physical objects, not a character of some of our responses to objects.