After the death of Michelangelo sculpture declined, for art turned to effects of light and space which favoured painting. This phase reached a climax with impressionism, and with its exhaustion painting returned to object and picture plane and sculpture recovered. Its modern history is the story of that recovery, largely through movements launched by painters.

It began with Rodin, who in himself summed up romanticism, realism and impressionism, but who joined his use of these to a fresh understanding of Michelangelo, from whom he learned something purely sculptural—the expression of movement through tactile values. Like Degas, he never forgot inner muscular tension even while his surfaces expressed the play of light; but unlike Degas he preserved not only the Renaissance technique but its full heroic humanism, and this, while it added to his stature, made him the culmination of an old rather than the primitive of a new tradition.

Maillol led a reaction to neo-classicism, the only movement Rodin had not absorbed. His re-working of Greek sculpture was in terms of nature, so that his ‘Chained Action’ (1905) combines generalised and static volumes with the animality of Courbet, but his revival of humanism kept Maillol also within the nineteenth century.

German expressionism was in sculpture a classic heresy, so that Lehmbruck, its most talented exponent, preserved Maillol's clarity even through elongated and emotive forms.