Occasionally sculptors let the materials express the character of the figure, releasing the ‘statue from the stone’ as Michelangelo put it. In this talk Justin discusses the developing realism in marble and bronze of archaic and classical Greece, Rome, the Renaissance and the Baroque, comparing this with the expressiveness of Gothic wooden sculpture, Michelangelo’s non-finito pieces, the abstraction of Rodin and the Modernists, and the experimental forms.