Modeling Sculpture

In eighteenth-century Europe, connoisseurs, financiers, artists, and aristocrats alike all avidly collected the terracotta vases and statues made by Claude Michel, called Clodion. Yet, despite the widespread enthusiasm for his work, Clodion's terracottas have since then been largely dismissed as decorative, feminine, or mere luxury. Modeling Sculpture, the first English-language monograph dedicated to Clodion's terracotta oeuvre, counters such conventional narratives. Against the understanding of "serious" sculpture as works that publicly perpetuate the heroic actions and virtues of great men, author Elizabeth Saari Browne argues instead that philosophically engaged sculpture might be found in materials, forms, and places where one least expects it. Across this richly illustrated, multi-disciplinary study, earthen clay emerges as a medium suited to the flexible modes of thought advocated by some of the period's most renowned philosophers, naturalists, and even arts reformers. This book therefore foregrounds clay's potential to challenge the perceived primacy of white figurative statuary in art historiography, emblematic of hierarchical notions of class, power, learning, and prestige.