To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The artistic category of relief has long dominated scholarly discussions of ancient Greco-Roman art for good reason: images in relief pervaded ancient visual culture from the rise of the Greek city-state through to the Christian era. They are witnessed in public and private contexts; terracotta, bronze, and stone media; techniques as varied as incision, modelling, or repoussé; and scales from the miniature to the monumental. Precisely because of the ubiquity and fluidity of ancient relief, the category as such has not been given full consideration in own right, and many questions have remained under-theorized. Boasting an international cast of contributors, this volume addresses key questions about relief across the geographic and temporal scope of the ancient world, including how relief was conceptualized within antiquity, what role materials and techniques played in its creation, and what the relations were between relief media and their effects on viewers.
This chapter examines attitudes to ancient relief sculpture through a comparison with painting. Focusing on the art of Rome, and especially on the representation of relief sculpture in Roman mural painting of the first centuries BCE and CE, the chapter looks to how ancient painting and relief fed off and reverberated around each other, to the ways in which they both overlapped and, ultimately, sought to distinguish themselves. Drawing on modern media theory, the chapter proposes that Roman relief and painting remediated one another through a double, oscillating logic of immediacy and hypermediacy – through the iterative alternation from communicative transparency to opacity and back. Thinking through relief and painting as reciprocally related media reveals the consistent blurring of boundaries between apparent opposites: two and three dimensions, real and pictorial space, haptic and optic, form and color, and illusion and fiction. The chapter further argues that the representation of relief sculpture within Roman murals permitted painters to explore the boundaries of their capabilities by offering both a material limit to pictorialization and providing ways in which the pictorial could seek to outflank the material.