Chiselled to life

By showing what he could achieve in stone, Tullio Lombardo pushed the limits of realism.

Around 1500, in Italy, a bunch of talented artists set things up so that when people heard the word "art", they automatically thought "painting". We are barely out of that mindset today. That gets me thinking back to the moment just before painting's PR victory and to the poor sap who decided sculpture was the way to go. He must have imagined he could put a brake on painting's rise or at least pull even with it.

Tullio Lombardo was that sculptor, born in Venice around 1455 and dying there in 1532. The heart of his career landed at just the moment when Venetian painters such as Giorgione and Titian - not to mention central Italians such as Leonardo and Raphael - were nailing down their art form's triumph.

Today, there is sure proof they succeeded: Though Lombardo is one of the world's great sculptors, the National Gallery of Art has just launched his first museum solo. An Antiquity of Imagination: Tullio Lombardo and Venetian High Renaissance Sculpture is a modest two-room affair, with sculptures by Lombardo and colleagues (including a younger brother, Antonio, who was almost as good) plus a few works by painters of their time.

Some of this show's outsize impact comes from Lombardo's competition with painting. Renaissance painters had made such undeniable advances in realism - in storytelling, the treatment of space, the rendering of light and shade and bodies - that "lifelikeness", in any and every sense of the term, had become the crucial measure of every artist's success in all media. Lombardo goes to stunning lengths to make his sculpture, done in lifeless marble, rival painting's liveliness.

One of this show's treasures is a bust-length image of a loving couple, carved in ultra-high relief around 1495 and on loan from the Ca' d'Oro palace in Venice. Like many other objects in this show, it is full of telling details meant to bring its stone to life. Lombardo makes his figures' lips, though barely parted, reveal perfectly carved teeth.

He also captures the creased little mounds of flesh that bridge the space near the underarms. These mounds are not memorable, necessary features of human anatomy (do we even have a name for them?). Instead, they are the kind of incidental, unexpected, surplus detailing that flags an artist's commitment to capturing the way things are.

The soft tissue of the tear ducts that is rendered in the corner of almost all his figures' eyes play the same role. He even uses his carved stone to capture the reflection of a light source in his subjects' pupils. He makes hard marble stand for immaterial sparkle, in just the kind of artistic prestidigitation that was normally reserved for painted works.

Lombardo's figures also get an added dose of energy from their very active glances. They are never passively waiting to be looked at, as a statue might; they are always caught in the act of looking out into the world, like a real or painted human. Their roving gazes signal that Lombardo's figures are animate - as animate as the painted character studies just then being perfected and put on to the market by Venetian painters.

When it came to pleasing sophisticated connoisseurs, sculpture had an advantage over painting. More than any other medium in Renaissance Italy, sculpture had close ties to the consummate art of ancient Greece and Rome.

Painters could only read reports about, and try to re-imagine, the extraordinarily realistic but entirely vanished pictures of their classical predecessors. Sculptors could take inspiration from actual surviving works and try to rival them.

Lombardo takes care to cast his sculptures as remnants of the classical past. The arms of Bacchus in his relief are illogically cut off just below the shoulder, as in surviving Roman busts, and so are the arms of a gorgeous young man in a portrait relief from a museum in Sibiu, Romania. Instead of reading as visions cropped out of a continuous reality, like we get in painting (or photos, for that matter), these works make absolutely clear that they are fragmentary objects, such as the precious ones that came down from antiquity. And then, in rivalry with painting, Lombardo gives these objects more life than they ever had before.

The true aim of Renaissance neoclassicism was to bring a vanished Roman culture fully back to life. He even gives his classical figures hairdos and outfits from his own time, borrowing from painting's skill at capturing the everyday. In Lombardo's hands, classically inspired sculpture is more time machine than archaeologist's dig site.

An Antiquity of Imagination is on until November 1 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.