This introduction opens the volume by considering the inherent multiplicity of the idea of relief, which even in the limited purview of the visual arts crosses boundaries of material, form, technique, genre, scale, and style. As a technical term referring to art, moreover, relief is not an ancient idea but a modern one, which first emerged from specific discourses surrounding Italian Renaissance art. The introduction briefly surveys the significance of the historiography of relief in discussions of ancient art before turning to three case studies of ancient vessels decorated in relief – an Archaic Greek pithos from Mykonos, the Derveni krater, and the Townley Vase – which concretely articulate the complexity and variety of ancient relief practices. It then concludes by introducing and offering a synopsis of the ten chapters that follow.

This chapter seeks to relate the toolmarks observable on sculpted objects to the ways of making and understanding that sustained ancient marble carving as a generative strand of cultural production. The discussion concentrates on the carved lines and planes that came to constitute Athenian stelai as standard material supports for inscribed texts, sculpted figurations, or combinations thereof. It begins by highlighting the contradiction between human creativity and material determinism in previous literature on Greek sculpture and the opportunities that enactive notions of knowledge present for evaluating ancient craft in cross-disciplinary debates about human technicity. The two subsequent sections examine how grooves were carved into planes and what this procedure might reveal about the epistemic affordances of linear marks. The conclusion connects the finished carvings with their origin in quarry-bedded marble blocks to bring out the broader arc of cultural knowledge involved in accommodating natural fissures in stone into the spatial projections of Athens’ evolving monumental landscapes. The exploration was made possible through collaborative replication experiments with a contemporary stone carver, which aimed to foreground lines and planes as mutually dependent phenomena, creating varying ontological conditions for telling things with stone.

What is classical relief? Can “relief” ever be spoken of as a single category? Is it a “medium” in itself? If so, what exactly does it “mediate”? And how does the notion of artistic medium (which art history tends to use in relation to materials) relate to the more theoretical concept of “media” as tools or channels for the storage and transmission of information? This chapter attempts to crack open such questions by examining the terminology that is applied to relief work in Greek and Roman texts, focusing in particular on the problematic term typos, which is applied to relief sculpture, repoussé metalwork, terra-cotta moldings, engraved gems and (perhaps) sculptors’ models. Developing J. J. Pollitt’s foundational chapter on typoi in The Ancient View of Greek Art, it explores how technologies of making, materiality, and dimensionality contribute to the particular instability of the typos as a category of object and, in turn, the peculiar ontology of relief as a category of ancient art.

The background of a relief sculpture is often seen as a stable plane from which the foreground figures emerge. But this is a viewer’s perspective, possible only once the carving is finished. In this chapter, I consider sculptural relief through the lens of stone carving processes in order to better understand the nature and possibilities of the background. In part one, I consider how stone relief sculptures were carved. Carving generally moved from outside in and from front to back; the background was not finalized until quite late in the process, often long after the foreground figures were finished. In part two, I focus on a marble calyx krater from Villa A at Oplontis. Reconstructing its carving not only highlights the skill required but also connects this krater to the larger play of remediation in the villa. Considering the background thus helps us understand sculptural relief in new ways. The background is not a stable plane for the articulation of the foreground figures; rather, the foreground anchors the background. Within sculptural relief, the background has a unique status; it is a place of potential, instability, and dynamic change.

Sculpted funerary monuments from Archaic Attica have traditionally been divided into two categories: those taking the form of a stele sculpted in relief and those taking the form of freestanding statues. In iconographical studies of these monuments, the distinction in medium has often been assigned interpretive weight, with those monuments carved in relief regarded as representing the deceased in a fundamentally different manner than those carved in the round. In contrast to such approaches, I attend in this chapter to points of continuity between relief and freestanding monuments in order to consider how they engage complementary forms of visualization. To do so, I focus on three case studies: the Gorgon stele from the Kerameikos in Athens, the Hoplite stele now in New York (together with its associated sphinx in Boston), and the “Hockey Player” base also from the Kerameikos. Ultimately, I argue, all sculpted funerary monuments from Archaic Attica mobilize aspects of relief sculpture, insofar as they position the body of the deceased between another world and our own.

This chapter analyzes the aesthetic strategies of the funerary portraits of ancient Palmyra, examining how their status as relief sculptures – the relationship between the sculpted image and the stone slab that supports it – mediates their messaging. Taking the portrait of a Palmyrene woman in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology as a starting point, I demonstrate that the purposes of these works cannot be recognized unless their status as a corporate body of relief sculptures is further held in view. I reinsert these portraits into an original tomb context of display, reconstructing the powerful visual effects these works were designed to create when operating together as an ensemble: at once concealing and revealing, affectively engaging and emotionally withdrawn, individual and defined by group dynamics. Palmyrene funerary sculptures emerge as both participating in many of the broader discourses of Greco-Roman artistic production, as well as in a Parthian visual tradition, while ultimately achieving a highly distinctive and semantically complex localized visual impact. The chapter underscores the visual strategies of these reliefs as a creation of the Syrian desert oasis of Palmyra.

With their shallow reliefs, depictions of contorted movement, and a historically inflected formal style, first century BCE and CE Neo-Attic reliefs are distinct among Greek and Roman relief sculpture. Primarily made for an elite Roman audience, the reliefs invoke stylistic techniques from different periods of Greek art and creatively combine figural types taken from earlier objects. The scenes are also characterized by a sense of spacelessness, established by the representation of figures, objects, and landscapes in shallow relief and by the frequent distorted play with depth and space. By considering a select number of examples, this chapter argues that the reliefs’ formal elements work together to evoke multiple temporalities and spaces, so that the distinct time and space created by and in these reliefs allowed them to become powerful sites of contact. In connecting their audience with an idealized past that takes place in a generic space, the reliefs offered viewers the opportunity not only to engage visually with the past temporalities of Archaic and Classical Greece, but also to become immersed in them by sharing the same space as the stylized figures, who could slip from their timeless and spaceless background to the Roman world in which they were displayed.

This chapter examines the relief effects, multiply understood, of late antique numismatic and nummiform gold jewelry. It discusses coins and coin-like objects decorated in relief and embedded within frameworks such as necklaces, bracteates, and rings meant to be worn on the body. These objects, the chapter argues, not only employ relief to adorn the body; they also offer aid and protection to the wearer through a set of typological associations connected to notions of authority. Such typologies could be literal, both as official coins and medallions, which were made into relief objects through the process of striking precious metals in carved dies in the imperial mint, and as unofficial, imitative, coin-like objects, which were produced from molds or direct impression from these original issues. But metaphorical typologies were equally important, as the source of authority for both the coins and their amuletic power moved between the imperial and the Christian.