Cutting Edge of Sculpture

Sculpture, probably the oldest of human arts produced

Michelangelo's David, Trafalgar Square's Lord Nelson and the Statue of

Liberty. But how were the sculptors able to create such gigantic figures. This

was the question Manhattan sculptor Meredith Bergmann faced in creating an

eight-foot bronze portrait of the first African-American opera singer Marian

Anderson.

The first step is to make a maquette, a clay model few feet high-large

enough for detail work, but small enough to see around. Once the maquette is

finished, the technical fun starts. Of the many steps, the one being changed by

computers is the intermediate one of scaling up the maquette to the sculpture's

final size.

Traditionally, this was done by 'pointing up,' which

recreated the sculpture point by point. In one of the methods used in15th

century, craftsmen built a box around the maquette and placed a second,

scaled-up box around a block of granite.

The computers have now solved this problem. Bergmann had sent

the Anderson maquette to Kreysler and Associates, a small company north of San

Francisco who painted it gray and placed it in front of a laser scanner made by

Cyberware.

This computer enlargement method is much more faithful and the

laser gives many more points. Thus, computer milling has re-ignited an old

debate that how much of the tooling process should show on the finished work?

Should there be joint marks between the pieces or should it be a smooth mystery?

The debate goes on even as the artistic community is divided over the opinion.