Low-relief

The low-relief is a type of Sculpture or Modelage, which can be painted.
Sa characteristic is to present only one weak relief, the subject represented being detached only slightly bottom. There remains committed there with half-length. An effect of depth can be created by a simulated prospect, decreasing sizes characters or elements of decorations.
On speaks about “half sculpture in the round” if part of the relief is detached from the bottom.

It can be isolated and fit in medallions, hollows, decorate lintels, posts, pilasters, or any element of architecture, until encircling a building or a part in a large plank for example.

The techniques of Medal or Camée utilient a very discrete relief, often of with some dizièmes of millimetres thickness only.

Use

The low first reliefs are the engravings deepened on the rocks.
Des low-reliefs then decorated frontages, ceilings, caves, pieces of furniture, trunks or objects various.
Ils decorative, is abstracted, or descriptive (ex-voto, scenes, commemoration, etc). One finds them many on the monuments and places of worships.

In the European religious art, the low-relief is an architectural element characteristic of the Romance period, but the plank of the Panathénées carved by Phidias was a low-relief already very famous more than 2000 years before our days. It was moved Parthenon of Athens in a museum.

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