Relief in Greek, Roman, and Late Antique Art

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.

Author Biography

JAŚ ELSNER is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research fellow at Corpus Christi College, as well as being Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago. He has worked on Greek and Roman art of all periods, and especially on sculpture and reliefs. MILETTE GAIFMAN is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Classics and History of Art at Yale University. She is the author of Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (2012) and The Art of Libation in Classical Athens (2018), and served as the Coeditor-in-Chief of the The Art Bulletin in 2020-2022. NATHANIEL B. JONES is Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St Louis. He has written on painting, collecting practices, and visual narratives in Greco-Roman antiquity, and is the author of Painting, Ethics, and Aesthetics in Rome (Cambridge, 2019).