RELIEF. - In the figurative arts it is distinguished from the statuary group by being attached to a background plane from which figures, architecture and landscapes emerge: it can be divided into high relief or full relief, half relief, low relief, and flattened or stiacciato relief.
High relief has no reduction of perspective planes: it represents a single order of planes, while the rear ones are superimposed or treated conventionally as in low relief, with perspective reduction. Half relief, on the other hand, already implies a need for perspective, and the areas of the second plane are partly occupied, according to the point of view, by those of the first plane. Low relief and stiacciato, to a greater degree, no longer present figures or volumes in the half-round. There is precise drawing and a very low relief with respect to the surface of the background plane. This distinction of genres, made by Vasari and then repeated by Baldinucci, corresponds to the practice of every sculptor from ancient times to our own day.
High relief is very frequent in Roman-Christian sarcophagi from the 11th century onward and continued throughout the early Middle Ages in the copious harvest of sculptural decorations of churches, both in architectural members and in ciboria, ambos, iconostases and balustrades. Low relief nevertheless prevailed for the most part. In the Byzantine age, the calligraphic decorative taste of Eastern art corresponded well to this kind of sculpture, whether in marble or stone or in other materials for the industrial arts, such as ivory, alabaster and precious metals.
In the Romanesque age low relief triumphed absolutely everywhere, interpreting one of the most characteristic and singular elements of the architecture of that period. One recalls the sculptures of Wiligelmo and of Antelami, of the Roman marble-workers, of Bonanno Pisano at Pisa and at Monreale, and those of many anonymous carvers.
High relief, on the other hand, prevailed in the Pisan sculpture of the 14th century, above all with Nicola, who achieved effects of surprising vivacity, dynamism and tension in his pulpits at Pisa and Siena. Giovanni Pisano too knew how to maintain equal vigor in high relief, and so did Arnolfo di Cambio.
The Renaissance, with its canons of the strictest perspectival requirement and with its preference for pictorial solutions, limited the use of high relief; but Ghiberti, in the figures inscribed in the mixtilinear frames of the south door of the Florentine Baptistery, as Andrea da Pontedera had already done in the first door, still felt the vigor of high relief. So too did Donatello in the cantoria of S. Lorenzo, and the della Robbia in the many glazed terracotta friezes
In the second door, however, Ghiberti preferred flattened relief, which enabled him to achieve a great pictorial delicacy in the backgrounds of the ten panels. An attentive follower of the rules of low relief was also Jacopo della Quercia, especially in the Old Testament stories carved on the portal of S. Petronio in Bologna, and Donatello in the works of his maturity, among them the reliefs of the altar of the Saint in the Paduan Basilica. From him all the other sculptors of the Renaissance took their example.
In the 16th century, with the predominance of grand architecture, high relief was generally preferred, and very often sculptures in the round assumed the appearance of true high reliefs, conceived as they were in a clearly architectural function. Low relief was confined to decorations of pilasters, candelabra, architraves and portals, and found exquisite expressions in works by Cellini and Giambologna.
In the Baroque age the need for both one and the other genre was likewise understood as ornament of scenographic and complex architectures. In Bernini, for example, statuary even in the round implied solutions linked to the effects of relief, as is particularly evident in the sculptural group of the Ecstasy of St. Teresa at S. Maria della Vittoria in Rome.
Neoclassical taste favored certain linear low-relief solutions, almost stiacciato, as in the funerary stelae of Canova (see, for example, the monument to Giovanni Volpato in the SS. Apostoli in Rome), and the background was smoothed and reduced to a simple supporting plane from which the figures took shape. High relief was much used in commemorative sculptures (the triumphal arch in Paris). In contemporary art relief is often treated by sculptors: generally the preference goes to low relief. - See plate XLVIII.
Bibliography8 works
Giovanni Carandente