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 included 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.

• Ancient Egyptian Monuments

  • Decoration included reliefs (bas relief and sunken relief) of images and hieroglyphic text and sculpture, including obelisks, figures of gods, sometimes in sphinx form, and votive figures.

• 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 elaborate sunken relief.
  • Great monuments and temples were often decorated with elaborate relief sculpture during the New Kingdom.

• Ancient Egyptian Art

  • Ancient Egyptians created both monumental and smaller sculptures, using the technique of sunk relief.
  • In this technique, the image is made by cutting the relief sculpture into a flat surface, set within a sunken area shaped around the image.
  • Large statues of deities (other than the pharaoh) were not common, although deities were often shown in paintings and reliefs.

• 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.

• Inversion

  • This passage above from Debussy's "Sunken Cathedral" is an example.