Teachers' resource: Sculpture

Exploring sculpture

This activity encourages students to explore the qualities of the materials used to make sculpture and how they have been worked. From this they will learn about the appearance of sculpture made from wood, ceramic, bronze and stone. They will also develop appropriate art-related vocabulary.

Galleries to use

• South East Asia (Room 47b)
• China (Room 47e)
• Northern Renaissance (Rooms 25-27)
• Sculpture in Britain (Rooms 21-24)
• Gilbert Bayes Sculpture Gallery (Room 111)

Information to support this project

• Modelling and casting
• Carved sculpture
• Exploring sculpture (PDF file, 614KB)

At the Museum

Ask students to work in groups of two or three. Give each group a copy of the resource sheet Exploring Sculpture (PDF file, 614KB) and ask them to find a sculpture made from either wood, ceramic, bronze or stone. If working with younger students the list could be given to an accompanying adult to go through verbally. Students should tick the descriptions that apply to the sculpture they are looking at. Someone in the group should note the precise description from the label (e.g. limestone). Take photographs of the whole sculpture and details of the surface texture. Supplement photographs with drawings where possible, for example of colours, patterns and structural elements.

Find out more

Visit the sculpture pages to find out about the sculpture collections at the Museum.

Making plaster casts: guardian beasts

Suitable for those studying Art and Design at Key Stages 1, 2 and 3.

This activity gives students the chance to work in a focused and selective way on the popular topic of animals. Animals are often portrayed as guardians and are commonly found on buildings, especially at entrances as well as on funerary monuments and tombs, where they sometimes act also as guides to the next world. Students will discover which animals have been used as guardian beasts in Indian, Chinese and European culture and will make their own beasts based on examples in the Museum.

Galleries to use

• South East Asia (Rooms 47 a-c)
• China (Rooms 44 and 47e)
• Cast Courts (Room 46a)

Information to support this project

• Guardian Beasts
• The Cast Collection
• Making sculptures from cast plaster (PDF file, 591KB)

Before the visit

Consider taking your students outside the school to look for guardian beasts on churches, civic buildings and country houses. Your school building might even have some guardian beasts. It will give students a chance to see guardian beasts in their original setting, which will help to make their function more apparent. Some schools may be able to visit buildings such as Hindu temples, Chinatown in London or Manchester or even some Chinese restaurants. Make charts recording how often they find different types of animal.

At the Museum

Visit the Cast Courts and the China and South East Asia galleries. Please note that the plaster casts in the Cast Court are extremely fragile. Students should be carefully supervised at all times and must not be allowed to run around or to touch the objects.

You will see from the examples in the Museum that guardian beasts in China, India and Europe are remarkably similar: lions, dogs and dragons abound.

Split students into pairs and ask each pair to identify a guardian beast in the form of a lion, dog, dragon or Chinese spirit road animal. Draw them from the front and the side - one could draw the front view, one the side view. Record all moulding, surface patterns and textures and use shading to give drawings a sense of three-dimensionality. This information will help them when they come to make their own guardian beasts back at school. Black wax crayons or a range of pencils (B to 6B) are suitable drawing materials for unpainted stone or bronze sculptures. Try oil pastels for polychrome sculptures.

Back at school

Use the drawings to make plaster casts of an identical pair of guardian beasts by using moulds. Use the student resource sheet Making sculptures from cast plaster (PDF file 591KB).

Find out more

Visit the sculpture pages to find out about the sculpture collections at the Museum.

Making narrative relief sculptures

Suitable for those studying Art & Design and English at Key Stages 2 and 3.

This activity suggests ways in which students can analyse stories in sculpture and use them as starting points for their own reliefs.

Gallery to use

• Cast Courts (Room 46a )

Please note that the plaster casts in the Cast Courts are extremely fragile. Students should be carefully supervised at all times and must not be allowed run around or touch the objects.Information to support this project

• Narrative reliefs
• Making plaster reliefs (PDF file, 186KB)
• Making sculptures from cast plaster (PDF file, 591KB)

Materials and equipment

You will need:

• Plaster of Paris
• Cardboard
• Plasticine or cold clay
• Blunt knives, old paintbrushes, modelling tools
• Petroleum jelly

Before the visit

Narrative sculpture often comes in the form of a relief panel. Narrative reliefs were important in times when few people were literate and Bible stories and other morality tales were learnt from public paintings and sculptures. These were often incorporated into architectural schemes. They tend to depict either religious or mythological subjects, or the deeds of the good and the great. The Cast Courts contain a wealth of European narrative reliefs since many of the casts were taken from buildings and other architectural features.

Ask students to think about the practicalities of making plaster casts from large objects and buildings by setting them a problem-solving exercise. Explain the principles of plaster-casting with a sample original relief and cast. Then show students the engraving of the original Trajan’s Column in Rome and tell them that they have been sent by the Museum to make a plaster cast copy of it for the collection. How will they do it? They will have to work out exactly how to cast it and how to display it in the Museum. Including the base it is approximately 36 metres high. The height of the gallery in which it will be displayed is 25.5 metres to the centre of the ceiling.

When the cast of Trajan's Column was made for the Museum in the nineteenth century the original was coated with a separating agent such as wax to prevent the plaster sticking to it. The cast was made in numbered sections so that it could be assembled in the right order. These numbers can still be seen in many places. The cast was installed in the gallery by assembling the sections round a brick core. Because of the height of the Column, the cast is in two parts.

Make sure students are familiar with the details of the Nativity story before they come to the Museum if you want them to study scenes from the early life of Christ from church architecture.

At the Museum

Narrative sculpture lends itself to activities based on discussion and writing. The two approaches suggested below are applied to specific works in the Museum but could be adapted to other examples.

First-person narrative based on Trajan's Column (Room 46a)

Trajan's Column is a memorial to the Roman emperor. Trajan's two military campaigns in Dacia (modern Romania). Use the depictions of Roman and Dacian children on the Column as the starting point for students' creative writing. It is best for students to work from the upper part of the Column (without the square base) as here they can see the bottom two levels of the spiral reasonably well. Give students a story line to develop, such as:   

• You have never seen the emperor so your mother has taken you to see the procession of Trajan and his army. Describe your day out.
• Your father has been called up to join Trajan's army. You go to see Trajan's arrival but cannot enjoy the procession because you are worried about what will happen to your father.
• You are a Dacian child. Describe your feelings as the man who conquered your people makes a visit.

Start by referring to what they can see on the Column and then imagine what happened before and after from the child's point of view. Remember - they are telling the child's story not Trajan's, so the preceding and following scenes will differ from those they can see. Make a drawing to work from back at school, focusing on the area of the scene immediately around the child whose story they are telling. Use photographs to supplement drawings - a camera with a zoom lens would be helpful for recording details.

Comparison of different representations of the same story based on two pairs of bronze doors from Hildesheim Cathedral and Pisa Cathedral (both in Room 46a)

These two sets of medieval cathedral doors depict some of the same biblical stories, in particular the Nativity and related events. The relevant panels are conveniently located low down in both cases.

Find the following scenes on both the Pisa and the Hildesheim doors and compare the way they are depicted:

• the Annunciation
• the Nativity
• the Adoration of the Magi
• the presentation at the Temple

List the elements that are shown in each version and make drawings demonstrating the differences. Examine the sculptural style looking particularly at the height of relief used.

Back at school

Design and make narrative relief panels based on those studied at the Museum. To make a replica of Trajan’s Column, use a cardboard tube from a roll of carpet as a base. Build up a simple relief by sticking on shapes cut out of card or thick paper. As the original Column was painted when it was first erected (this later wore off) pupils' columns could first be whitewashed to simulate marble and then colour could be added. Trajan would probably have been dressed in purple - only emperors wore purple as the dye was very expensive.

Students who developed a first-person narrative story can make an updated version with characters depicted in modern dress. Those who worked on a comparison of the same story in different reliefs can select the bits they liked best from each and use them to make their own version. Both these activities could be made as plaster reliefs, which would be appropriate given that the sources were plaster casts.

Find out more

Visit the sculpture pages to find out about the sculpture collections at the Museum.