Seems to be suffering from the same over-rubbing issue as this statue in a Paris cemetary:
Here’s another notorious statue from the world of soccer football.
English club Southampton FC commissioned a statue of club legend Ted Bates, who had played for and then managed the club for four decades.
This was the result:
Not only was everything out of proportion, it looked nothing like Ted Bates and uncannily like the owner of their long-standing South Coast derby rivals Portsmouth FC (below):
Eventually, Southampton FC commissioned a new statue of Ted Bates, which was pretty good:
I’ve rarely worked in 3D and only once in bronze. I’ll echo again that bronze is a weird medium. The bare spots and the oxidized spots really mess with the depth of everything. On top of that, the eyes are a weird thing to sculpt. You can have smooth, blank eyes on a stone or clay sculpture just fine without disturbing anyone. But the Fonz’s eyes that are both blank and reflective above? Nope, that’s disturbing as hell.
ETA: Anything done with lost wax casting that you’ve sculpted by hand seems to come out exaggerated and strange. Tiny imperfections in the surface seem to become huge.
One thing that seems to be pretty common is that teeth do not render well in bronze. Almost every bronze face I see with teeth showing is creepy as fuck.
Okay, I’ll say it. They’re horrible because people aren’t telling the artist, “Wow, dude. That’s really bad. Take it down and give me my money back.” And if someone does express reservations, The Art World labels the unhappy viewer a troglodyte with no understanding or appreciation, it’s tougher than it looks, blah blah blah. Which may or may not be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that Joe Public, who has to look at these disturbing wrecks, still doesn’t like the work–so, know your audience maybe? I have pretty much no talent when it comes to visual arts. If I try to draw a face it ends up looking like…real bad. I would NEVER show it to anyone, not even the cat. Way I see it, the only difference between me and the above-referenced sculptors is I possess a modicum of honesty when it comes to my abilities.
Thanks for the OP. I’ve wondered the same thing.
And then there is the genius of Michelangelo who carved David out-of-proportion to make him look in-proportion.
To me, it’s not so much a problem of making them in a particular style that is not true to life, but quite the opposite: they are making them in true-to-life style, but without respecting the medium. Specifically, by working in bronze, they are appealing to something classical (think Ancient Greece and Rome), but then they are depicting them in a more or less contemporary-to-us photographic style. They’re showing Lucy as she appeared in an episode of I Love Lucy (the vitameatavegimin episode). They’re depicting Oprah as if she’s stopping for photographs on the red carpet. They’ve got the Queen of England as if she is smiling, in the style of our time, for a photographic portrait.
By contrast, you look at ancient bronze statues and the figures are stoic. Not necessarily motionless (they might be in the midst f athletic activity, for instance), but emotionless. I think that’s the problem: we’re used to seeing people cast in bronze depicted stoically. But in all those examples there was an effort to achieve some kind of emotional representation. Specifically to not depict their subjects as cold and without feeling.
It is exactly this:
Also (sorry for the double post), I don’t know that I buy the argument that bronze is particularly tricky to work with. There are literally TONS of bronze confederate war memorial statues, in action poses as well as just standing there, that look not only good, but inspiring. Even the horses posing with the people look like living tissue transmogrified into bronze. Perfect? No. Ronaldo goofybad? Not even close.
I was just watching a show about Renaissance art that included a close view of Donatello’s bronze David , and I thought of this thread. It’s extremely lifelike and the eyes don’t seem creepy at all (the hat may help). He’s described as having “an enigmatic smile,” but it’s barely a smile at all. I think the key is to keep an extremely neutral facial expression and never, ever depict teeth (that’s also a good rule for portraits, from what I’ve seen). And if you can manage to be incredibly talented and have a rich patron, that would probably help as well.
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Rubbing a statue for luck - obviously what has happened to sweet Molly Malone in Dublin!
That link doesn’t work.
Hope this one works
I wonder what his hat was supposed to be made of?
I’d never thought about that. But boy this makes a lot of sense.
(I’d also never really noticed the issue with bronze-sculpture facial expressions. I think I haven’t seen very many when you come right down to it. The example images in this thread were therefore eye-opening.)
The hat… bronze? I’ve never thought this much about that sculpture! Let’s see, that top bit looks very much like a pumpkin or some kind of other squash, but I’ve never seen a pumpkin with a brim. I’m assuming the garland is laurel leaves, since the style is classical and he just vanquished Goliath. Leather? I used to have a jaunty little leather hippie-style hat that looked something like it.
It’s like Mr. Rogers had a baby with The Thing from “Fantastic Four.”
I know. Hideous.
I was in Pittsburgh for the first time earlier this summer and made a point of visiting the site and the statue. I thought the poor man had been tarred and feathered.
That’s exactly it. People are afraid to say that it looks like a big comical turd because they’re afraid that the sculptor had some sort of ‘artistic vision’ thing going on, and it’s supposed to look like that.
There are plenty of good looking statues out there- they just got cruddy sculptors to do the ones that are infamous.
Works for Me!