Let's understand what a masterpiece is and how it originated

Venue: Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design, Jaffna on November 2025 Tamil Interpreter: Jasmine Nilani Joseph Special Thanks: Prof.T.Sanathanan and Prof.Sarath Chandrajeewa. (First part of this article appeared in The Island yesterday)

- Text of a lecture conducted by Bhagya Rajapakse.

What constitutes a piece of art, a masterpiece?

There are three common elements that act as crucial in elevating a piece of art to the level of a masterpiece.

1. A Work of Art That Did Not Exist Before.

2. A Work of Art that is Not Bound by Time.

3. A work of art that Establishes a Benchmark for future generations of artists.

Something new and unconventional always catches our attraction.

Exceptional creativity, craftsmanship, and innovativeness provide impetus for an artist to create something new and unconventional.

This is how originality comes in.

How would we define exceptional creativity, craftsmanship, and innovativeness?

Let's understand this with a few examples.

On one occasion someone inquired of Michelangelo about how his sculpting process goes.

And the immediate answer of Michelangelo was, "I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."

In the subject of marble sculpting, the meaning of creativity for Michelangelo was to remove the unwanted chunks and pieces from the marble block and save the figure he imagined on it. In his words, it’s liberating the figure from the marble that imprisons it.

Any masterpiece by Michelangelo was a clear and prime example that demonstrates how exceptional creativity, craftsmanship, and innovativeness converge in a single piece of art.

Another example is the 1942 sculpture by Pablo Picasso, 'Bull's Head.'

It's nothing more than a merger of a bicycle seat and a bicycle handlebar. In this sculpture., Picasso converts two ordinary, unrelated objects into a unique and evocative structure within which unrelated objects form a correlated entity. A BULL'S HEAD.

That’s all about Picasso’s exceptional creativity, craftsmanship, and innovativeness.

Let’s move to another example.