The following is a partial listing of significant periods in the history of figurative stone sculpture, and some of the sculptors associated with them. This is a listing of artists who worked in stone, not of sculptors in general. Artists who worked exclusively in bronze or other media are mentioned only if they were also important to the history of stone sculpture.
By way of disclaimer, this list is ideosyncratic, and neither complete nor definitive. With regard to these periods, scholars frequently differ even on basics, such as the start and end dates, as well as characterizes the periods, and what they mean in the larger context of history.
There are a host of problems inherent in the very idea of classifying artists in this way. First, the customary periods do not all refer to the same kind of divisions: some are political divisions in a particular country, others are names of historical styles in a particular time and place, and some, such as Romanticism, describe both an era and an element of style that transcends eras. Moreover, artists are notoriously cooperative, and frequently ignore the categories that critics carefully lay out for them, freqently outliving their assigned era or working in an inappropriate style.
That said, these categories are better than nothing, and most of those mentioned below would be recognized by the majority of authors.
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