The visual arts have a long and malignant history of artists succumbing to diseases likely caused or at least exacerbated by their work. However, lacking any concrete evidence such as autopsies of early modern artists who died young, I can only point circumstantially to cases where it seems probable that certain media led to health issues.

First, while you’re absolutely right to question the health of sculptors, it’s important to note that health problems are certainly not unique to sculptors and, in fact, other kinds of artists may have had more severe exposure. Take painting, for example.

Until the late nineteenth century, pre-mixed, stable paints were not commercially available. Thus, most artists purchased the raw materials for pigments (ie lapis lazuli for ultramarine, carbon black, soils from specific and sought-after locales with various concentrations of iron for ochres, etc.), crushed the material with a mortar into a fine dust, and then mixed it with a suspending medium such as linseed oil to create paint. I’m by no means an expert in respiratory health, but I imagine crushing lapis, for example, and by extension inhaling particulate matter is not altogether different for the lungs from chiseling porphyry or marble. Many of the pigments used by painters were also explicitly noxious in a way that marble is not. ‘Lead white’ was a common alternative to white chalk and popular for it’s brighter, less matte quality. Early chemical alternatives to natural pigments were also liable to off-put noxious gases. Ultramarine alternatives were particularly popular as lapis has traditionally been an extraordinarily expensive commodity, hence the sumptuous associations of ultramarine in Renaissance painting. Many of the early synthetic ultramarines that came primarily out of French experimentation were chemically unstable and plagued artists’ lungs as well as conservators today.

Again, I can’t point to an autopsy and say that ‘x Renaissance artist died of y respiratory ailment definitively caused by z artistic practice.’ But, circumstantially, we can observe the untimely deaths from respiratory ailments of certain artists and discuss the potential extenuating factors of the media they worked in.

In 1848, Thomas Cole, notable as the de facto founder of the Hudson River School, passed away after a brief bout of pleurisy, just after his 47th birthday. Cole’s primary journal, Thoughts and Occurrences, occasionally alludes to fits of coughing and a general sickliness towards the end of his life (nb I don’t have access to my transcription of T&O because of quarantine, otherwise I would’ve proffered a quotation). We know that Cole mixed his own paints, including a black derived from carbon-rich material and the aforementioned unstable ultramarines, which he used in particular to paint the first story of his Hudson Valley home (nb: ‘his’ is here used loosely as the property and home were actually owned by his wife’s family). That Cole died young of respiratory disease could absolutely be unrelated to the paints he used, but would fit a known pattern of unstable paints causing disease.

With regards to the Renaissance in particular, much of the circumstances around the deaths of individual artists has been obscured or exaggerated to the point that specific causes of death—outside of murder, and even then its’s questionable—are almost impossible to pin down. Much of the narrative biographic information of renaissance artists derives from Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Vasari’s Lives is simultaneously the modern precursor of art history as an academic discipline and arguably the most maligned text within the field. Whereas historians today are (hopefully) always trained to drape a narrative upon facts, Vasari played fast and loose with facts, provided they fit his narrative. For example, Vasari wrote of how Andrea del Castagno, an early Renaissance artist whom he characterized as having passionate, emotive subjects that contrasted with the more Classicizing austerity his contemporaries moved towards, murdered fellow artist Domenico Veneziano in a fit of jealousy. This was the generally accepted narrative until the nineteenth century, at which point it was discovered that Domenico died some four years after Andrea del Castagno. Vasari’s stories provide color; fantastic explanations for why artists worked in a certain manner or achieved the fame they did. Thus, often it is hard to discern minutiae such as the precise cause of death among renaissance artists, especially considering they did not have the medical understanding we have today.