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28 results

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Relief in Greek, Roman, and Late Antique Art
  • Edited by Jas' Elsner, Milette Gaifman, Nathaniel B. Jones
  • Published online:
    11 October 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025
  • 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.

  • 7 - Remedial Relief

  • Edited by Jas' Elsner, University of Oxford, Milette Gaifman, Yale University, Connecticut, Nathaniel B. Jones, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book:
    Relief in Greek, Roman, and Late Antique Art
    Published online:
    11 October 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025, pp 232-258

  • Summary

    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.

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Jas' Elsner, University of Oxford, Milette Gaifman, Yale University, Connecticut, Nathaniel B. Jones, Washington University, St Louis
  • Book:
    Relief in Greek, Roman, and Late Antique Art
    Published online:
    11 October 2025
    Print publication:
    25 September 2025, pp 1-27

  • Summary

    This introduction opens the volume by considering the inherent multiplicity of the idea of relief, which even in the limited purview of the visual arts crosses boundaries of material, form, technique, genre, scale, and style. As a technical term referring to art, moreover, relief is not an ancient idea but a modern one, which first emerged from specific discourses surrounding Italian Renaissance art. The introduction briefly surveys the significance of the historiography of relief in discussions of ancient art before turning to three case studies of ancient vessels decorated in relief – an Archaic Greek pithos from Mykonos, the Derveni krater, and the Townley Vase – which concretely articulate the complexity and variety of ancient relief practices. It then concludes by introducing and offering a synopsis of the ten chapters that follow.

Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome
  • Nathaniel B. Jones
  • Published online:
    28 January 2019
    Print publication:
    24 January 2019
  • In the first centuries BCE and CE, Roman wall painters frequently placed representations of works of art, especially panel paintings, within their own mural compositions. Nathaniel B. Jones argues that the depiction of panel painting within mural ensembles functioned as a meta-pictorial reflection on the practice and status of painting itself. This phenomenon provides crucial visual evidence for both the reception of Greek culture and the interconnected ethical and aesthetic values of art in the Roman world. Roman meta-pictures, this book reveals, not only navigated social debates on the production and consumption of art, but also created space on the Roman wall for new modes of expression relating to pictorial genres, the role of medium in artistic practice, and the history of painting. Richly illustrated, the volume will be important for anyone interested in the social, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of artworks, in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond.

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