sunken relief

Examples of sunken relief in the following topics:

• Art in the Early Dynastic Period

  • The crocodile god Sobek, depicted in the sunken relief below and possibly in the imagery of the plate above, served a variety of purposes including fertility, military prowess, and protection.
  • Media ranged from papyrus drawings to pictographs (hieroglyphics) and include funerary sculpture carved in relief and in the round from sandstone, quartz diorite, and granite.

• Sculpture of the New Kingdom

  • Other deities are frequently shown in paintings and reliefs.
  • Sunken relief was widely used.
  • Like previous works, faces on reliefs continued to be shown exclusively in profile.
  • In a relief of Akhenaten, he is shown with his primary wife, Nefertiti, and their children in an intimate setting.
  • A relief of a royal couple in the Armana style.

• Sculpture of the Early Dynastic Period

  • The Egyptians used the distinctive technique of sunken relief, which is well suited to very bright sunlight.
  • The main figures in reliefs adhere to the same figure convention as in painting, with parted legs (where not seated) and head shown from the side, but the torso from the front, and a standard set of proportions making up the figure, using 18 "fists" to go from the ground to the hair-line on the forehead.
  • The figures on both sides of the palette were carved in low relief.

• Late Egyptian Art

  • A sunken relief from a chapel at Karnak depicting Psamtik III, the final pharaoh of this dynasty, displays the maintenance of traditional conventions in representing the body.

• Architecture of the New Kingdom

  • The columns of its Hypostyle Hall imitate lotus plants and contain eloborate sunken relief.
  • Great monuments and temples were often decorated with elaborate relief sculpture during the New Kingdom.

• Teotihuacan

  • Teotihuacan's principal monuments include the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, and the Ciudadela (Spanish for fortified city center), a vast sunken plaza surrounded by temple platforms.
  • Archaeological excavation of this temple's earlier-phase tableros and a stairway balustrade have revealed painted heads of the Feathered Serpent, the goggle-eyed Rain or Storm God, and reliefs of aquatic shells and snails.

• Monumental Reliefs in Southeast Asia

  • Reliefs depicting figures that are at least life-size or bigger or are attached to monuments of some sort are termed monumental reliefs by art historians, thus distinguishing them from small metal or ivory reliefs, portable sculptures, and diptychs.
  • Most of ancient Southeast Asian relief sculpture was done in bas-relief, where the projecting images have shallow overall depth, although the kingdom of Champa in southern and central Vietnam excelled in haut-relief sculpture, which was marked by much greater depth and undercut areas.
  • The most famous example of Khmer bas-relief sculpture is undoubtedly at the 12th-century Hindu temple of Angkor Wat, which has 13,000 square meters of narrative bas-reliefs on the walls of its outer gallery.
  • The reliefs have a diverse range of themes.
  • Detail of carved relief from Borobudur, depicting a figure from the Buddhist pantheon.

• Architecture in Early South America

  • It is a U-shaped plaza with a sunken circular court in the center .
  • The Circular Plaza Terrace was built up around the Circular Plaza in order to make the 21m-diameter plaza artificially sunken.

• Carving

  • Carved sculpture can be "freestanding", where the viewer can walk around the work and view it from all sides, or created in "relief", where the primary form's surface is raised above the surrounding material.
  • Relief, from the Latin "relevo" meaning "to raise", is a sculptural technique in which the surface of stone or wood is carved away, thereby causing the foreground image to appear to be raised.
  • It is a very stable form of sculpture due to the fact that reliefs are often made in stone, and the fact that it remains a solid piece.
  • There are different degrees of relief depending on the height of the sculpted form from the background.
  • The range includes high relief (where more than 50% of the depth is shown), mid-relief, and low or bas-relief (in which the image remains a very shallow extension from its surroundings).

• Art in the Second Millennium B.C.E.

  • The Assyrians, on the other hand, developed a style of large and exquisitely detailed narrative reliefs in painted stone or alabaster.
  • Intended for palaces, these reliefs depict royal activities such as battles or hunting.
  • The Burney Relief is a Mesopotamian terracotta plaque in high relief of the Old-Babylonian period, depicting a winged, nude, goddess-like figure with bird's talons, flanked by owls, and perched upon supine lions.
  • The relief is dated between 1800 and 1750 BCE.
  • Apart from its distinctive iconography, the piece is noted for its high relief and relatively large size, which suggests that is was used as a cult relief, which makes it a very rare survival from the period.