Relief sculpture

In relief sculpture created by Florentine artists in the period 1400-1430 many of the most significant advances of Renaissance art were initiated long before painters took them up. In the works of Donatello (c. 1386-1466) and Lorenzo Ghiberti (c. 1381-1455) the antique became an important source of inspiration and the use of artificial perspective was introduced. Relief sculpture is a sometimes neglected aspect of the general subject of Renaissance sculpture. Because the appearance of freestanding statues in the fifteenth century is one of the most significant results of the renaissance of classical ideals in Italy, other types of sculpture tend to receive less attention. Yet, primarily through the efforts of Donatello and Ghiberti, much of the relief sculpture of the first decades of the Quattrocento was as forward-looking as anything produced in the other mode. This achievement consisted of Donatello's introduction of artificial perspective in low relief (both carved and cast) at a time when painters were not yet interested in, or not yet allowed to make, such experiments. Ghiberti, on the other hand, added an evolving interest in experimenting with pictorial means--including perspective--to the classicism that emerged in his early work and re-emerged a decade later.

Perhaps because it was Donatello who led the way in transforming the antique in his larger works, his achievements in low-relief sculpture have been somewhat overshadowed. In addition the subsequent d

Related Essays

Archaic Sculpture of the Middle Period .... But while the repetition (and slight variations) of this image dominates freestanding sculpture, relief work had its own rules. .... (1550 6 )

The Olympia Site in Greece .... Greek relief sculpture differs from that of Egypt in that Egyptians tend to present historical figures in their sculpture, while the Greeks tend to present .... (1888 8 )

Mayan Empire .... Architectural stelae, hieroglyphic text, and relief sculpture have suggested that rituals were linked to elaborate religious doctrine. .... (1613 6 )

Ancient Art .... Assyrian relief sculpture, as in Ashurnasirpal II at War (c. 875 BC) is complex and is composed in a less geometric way than most Egyptian works of a similar .... (3971 16 )

Notre Dame Cathedral .... Relief sculpture is found in Notre Dame around the portals, where a number of traditional motifs are presented in a new way. The .... (3006 12 )

ints of the classical that it introduced. Basically, like other earlier Gothic artists, Ghiberti, at this point, relied on "small figure-dominated fields and fourteenth-century agglomerations of landscape particles that stand out against the flat surface of the door" (White 160). Indeed Ghiberti was not to return to his early interest in the antique until he "came under the twin spurs of Donatello and Rome," which, probably, he first visited in 1416 (Greenhalgh 76). There was some effect on the North Door reliefs that were created after this visit. Seymour has noted the shift in the Flagellation and the Arrest of Christ reliefs (both done after 1416) away from the "maximum linear grace, willowy proportions, and swaying movement," of the reliefs of 1410-15 and toward an increased interest in "the mimesis of action and interaction of the human will and passions" (44, 46). In the Flagellation, for example, the figure of Christ is isolated and given a scale and dignity worthy of the freestanding statuary that other Florentine artists had begun to create. Certainly the influence of the classical was apparent in Ghiberti's breakthrough statue of St. Matthew for the Orsanmichele (1419-21). But by this time he was following the t

Category: Arts - R