Unlike two-dimensional art, sculpture encompasses mass.
In a post-modern world where aesthetic traditions and barriers have become weakened, and subjectivity rules the day, the question of the difference between painting and sculpture has lost much of its steam. It was a major subject of discussion during the Renaissance, with Leonardo contributing his "Paragone" to the debate, and defending painting as the superior art, due to what he saw as its greater intellectual content.
Perspective
One of the primary differences between painting and sculpture lies in the question of perspective, the effect of a viewer's position on the appearance of an object. There is perspective present in sculpture, but it is the same perspective as is found in the world as a whole, due to the mass and profiles of the object. In painting, perspective is an illusion, and is created by the artist. In this sense, a painter is in control of a greater proportion of his work than is a sculptor, because the painter can alter perspective within his work to create different effects.
Altered Space
According to Dewitt Parker, sculpture is distinguished from painting because sculpture contains its own space and requires no background, while painting is inevitably set within the context of some other space. Parker equates the pedestal of a sculpture with the frame of a painting, both designed to distinguish the work of art from surrounding reality. The frame of the painting, however, by necessity exists within the context of the wall on which it is hung, while the pedestal, at least in theory, separates the sculpture completely from outer reality and allows it to exist within "the realm of contemplation."
Techniques
The techniques of traditional painting can be seen as the opposite of certain kinds of sculpture, such as wood, marble and stone carving. The painting is created on a flat surface through the addition of paint to a blank field, while the reality of the sculpture is pared down from an existing mass. The former is a process of addition and creation, while the latter is a process of subtraction, or, as Michelangelo once claimed, taking away everything that is not the sculpture. A painting is created in two dimensions through the arrangement of formerly indistinct amounts of paint, while a sculpture, at least in the case of wood and stone carving, was there all along in three dimensions, needing only to be revealed.
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