Relief

Relief (French: le relief "elevation, that which is raised", from Latin: relevare "to lift up") is a pictorial artistic form of representation that stands out plastically from the background, and thus stands as an independent art form between surface-based painting and spatially designed sculpture. According to the height of the sculptural elevations, one speaks of a low relief or bas-relief, a half-relief or a high relief. The Greco-Roman culture was a heyday of relief art. A special feature of ancient Egyptian art were the sunk reliefs, where the image is made by cutting the figures itself into a flat surface. In a simpler form the images are usually mostly linear in nature, like hieroglyphs, but in most cases the figure itself is in low relief, but set within a sunken area shaped round the image, so that the relief never rises beyond the original flat surface. They must not be confused with counter-reliefs in which the depicted figures were worked into the material in a completely negative manner as hollow forms.

• 

  Animal relief from the Neolithic Göbekli Tepe

• 

  A sunk-relief depiction of Pharaoh Akhenaten with his wife Nefertiti and daughters. The main background has not been removed, merely that in the immediate vicinity of the sculpted form. Note how strong shadows are needed to define the image.

• 

  High relief metope from the Classical Greek Parthenon Marbles. Some front limbs are actually detached from the background completely, while the centaur's left rear leg is in low relief.

• 

  A common mixture of high and low relief, in the Roman Ara Pacis, placed to be seen from below. Low relief ornament at bottom

See also

• Relief - Article in the English Wikipedia

Literatur

• Rudolf Steiner: Wege zu einem neuen Baustil, GA 286 (1982), ISBN 3-7274-2860-0 English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org

References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated. Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com. Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English. Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA) Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.