Relief

About

Relief sits between drawing and free-standing sculpture: forms rise from a ground that stays part of the work. Sculptors describe its depth in grades. Low relief, or bas-relief, stays close to the plane; high relief lets bodies project and overlap; sunken relief, common in ancient Egypt, cuts figures into the surface so they remain inside its outline.

Reliefs have lined palaces and temples for millennia, from the lion hunts carved for Ashurbanipal at Nineveh (c. 645 BCE) to the galleries of Borobudur in Java and Angkor Wat. Donatello developed rilievo schiacciato, a flattened relief in which fine gradations suggest deep space, as in his St George and the Dragon (c. 1417) for Orsanmichele in Florence. Modern artists opened the form to new materials: Jean Arp's painted wood reliefs, Ben Nicholson's white reliefs of the 1930s and Günther Uecker's boards studded with nails. Raking light brings out the shallowest cuts.