art of sculpture

thumb|Dying Gaul, or The Capitoline Gaul, a Roman marble copy of a Hellenistic work of the late 3rd century BCE, [[Capitoline Museums, Rome]] thumb|upright=1|Assyrian sculpture|Assyrian [[lamassu gate guardian from Khorsabad, –721 BCE]] thumb|Michelangelo's Moses, (), [[San Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, for the tomb of Pope Julius II]] thumb|Netsuke of tigress with two cubs, mid-19th-century Japan, ivory with shell inlay thumb|The Angel of the North by [[Antony Gormley, 1998]] thumb|The Litlington White Horse, a monumental work of stone sculpture created by exposing the underlying chalk bedrock. Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional artwork which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving (the removal of material) and modelling (the addition of material, as clay), in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been almost complete freedom of materials and process. A wide variety of materials may be worked by removal such as carving, assembled by welding or modelling, or moulded or cast.

Sculpture in stone survives far better than works of art in perishable materials, and often represents the majority of the surviving works (other than pottery) from ancient cultures, though conversely traditions of sculpture in wood may have vanished almost entirely. In addition, most ancient sculpture was painted, which has been lost.