The great Michelangelo claimed that sculpture is "the foremost of the arts," explaining that the first sculptor was God, who sculpted Adam from clay. Archaeologists also agree with him: at the sites of primitive people, they found figurines made several tens of thousands of years ago.
The ancient Greeks, in whose mythology one can find a beautiful explanation for any phenomenon, told the story of the appearance of the first sculpture. Before parting with her lover, the young Greek woman Kora decided to make herself an image of him. She outlined the contour of the young man's head using the shadow cast on the ground, and the girl's father filled the silhouette with clay.
Of course, the first sculptural images appeared long before the ancient Greeks. Primitive sculpture is represented, first of all, by female figurines made of soft stone, limestone, in rare cases - of mammoth bones. They were of a cult nature and were revered as shrines. Archaeologists named them "Palaeolithic Venuses". The appearance of the most ancient "Venuses" is peculiar: they have no faces, feet, hands are poorly worked out. The main focus is on the parts of the body directly related to childbirth - the abdomen and chest. According to scientists, they represented a generalized image of the keeper of the hearth, the embodiment of fertility.
The history of sculpture in its modern sense begins with one of the earliest civilizations - Ancient Egypt. Initially, like all Egyptian art, it was an integral part of the funeral cult. The Egyptians believed that, in addition to the soul and body, there is a ghostly double of man, his life force, called Ka. When a person died, Ka left his body, but then returned to it again so that the person could be resurrected for the afterlife. In order for Ka to easily recognize his body, in addition to the mummy, a portrait statue of the deceased was placed in the tomb. At the same time, the sculptor tried to achieve maximum similarity.
From this tradition, the ancient Egyptian art of sculptural portrait grew. Later, Egyptian sculptors began to create images of pharaohs, their wives and other noble people. It should be noted that their works were notable for their realism and a rather high degree of external resemblance to the original, but they were completely static and seemed frozen.
The art of sculpture reached perfection in Classical Greece (5th century BC). The great sculptors of antiquity created the figures of the gods and heroes of the Olympiads, who were distinguished by an ideal physique. In addition, for the first time in history, they learned to convey movement. The works of Miron, Polycletus, Phidias and other great masters of antiquity became an unsurpassed model for sculptors of subsequent eras.
