THE FREESTANDING RELIEF OF GREEK ART AND SCULPTURE

THE FREESTANDING RELIEF

Relief was not solely architectural; it was also common on freestanding stelai, but the two genres differ in several respects. In architectural relief, the frieze offered a ready— made location did not need anything to fix it in place, but it did impose the constraints of adaptation to a predetermined frame. Moreover, the subjects of architectural relief were all drawn from legend or, very rarely, from the contemporary history of Greece. Gonversely, an independent stele needed a base to stand on, but its dimensions were variable, depending on the requirements of the imagery, as we can see in funerary stelai in particular. As for location and iconography, they depended on the function of the relief

In this respect, independent reliefs can he divided into three main categories of unequal extent, which share a common factor in the combination of visual images and writing: the political inscription, the votive relief and the funerary relief.

The headings of political inscriptions make up the smallest category. From the fifth century onwards there was an established and constantly developing custom of engraving decrees, treaties between allies, etc., on marble stelai displayed to the public (like a poster permanently displayed). The text, often very long, was obviously the main thing, and is usually found on its own. Sometimes, however, it is preceded by a vignette in relief, like a pictorial title. A relief above a decree issued by the Athenians in 405 in honour of the Samian ambassadors shows Athena and Hera, the patron goddesses of Athens and Samos, shaking hands; in 450, Athena and Parthenos appear at the head of a treaty of alliance between Athens and Neapolis, their respective cities; in 336, a law against tyranny is engraved below a relief showing Democracy crowning the People (Demos), and so on.

Pictorially, since the concern was to show conceptual and not tangible realities, this kind of relief employs either the effigy of a divinity symbolizing the city of which it is patron, or those personifications whose development in the statuary of the fifth and sixth centuries we have already discussed.

The agora in particular was the place for putting up stelai bearing political inscriptions, and they were sometimes erected in sanctuaries.

The cult images of Greek religion — images which occupied temples and to which sacrifices were made were statues, hardly ever reliefs, although reliefs predominated in some religions of eastern origin, ,such as Mithraism. Cult reliefs are therefore lacking, but there were many votive reliefs. The votive relief was one of the forms of eukhe, an offering of thanksgiving dedicated to a divinity in gratitude for favours received. This category must include the great relief dating from the middle of the fifth century and showing an important incident in the theology of Eleusis, with Demeter and Kore giving Triptolemos an ear of wheat, but it was chiefly at the end of the fifth century and during the fourth that votive reliefs became widespread, especially in sanctuaries of healing.

In votive reliefs, the image predominates; inscription may be altogether lacking or reduced to the names of the person or persons dedicating the offering and the divinity or divinities to whom it is dedicated. These divinities may be shown alone, like the first-century Isis Pelagia (“of the sea”), inventor of navigation, depicted in a relief on Delos which was no doubt offered by a seafarer saved from shipwreck. But very often the relief shows what would remain imaginary without it, a confrontation of gods and their worshippers in a representation breaking with the tradition of “isocephaly”: the Thracian goddess Bendis, and Asklepios and his family, tower more than a head above the human worshippers approaching them. The relief may even show a miracle in process: the sick ritually lay in the sanctuaries of Asklepios awaiting a cure, and a relief from the Asklepeion of Piraeus shows the god himself operating on a patient.

Obviously, votive reliefs stood in the sanctuaries of the gods to whom they had been offered.

Just as the votive relief was only one kind of offering, the funerary relief was only one of the kinds of monuments used to mark an underground tomb, but just like the human statue or the painted stele, and unlike animal statues, undecorated stelai and columns, it could also commemorate the dead person whose effigy it was. The funerary relief appears in the sixth century, particularly for warriors; then, in Athens at least, at disappears again, probably under the impact of sumptuary laws forbidding ostentatious funerals. However, at the end of the fifth century and perhaps, as mentioned above, under pressure from artists left unemployed when work on the great public. buildings stopped, it reappears — usually on stelai hot sometimes on lekythoi, marble imitations of the funerary vases of that name — and from then on it becomes increasingly frequent until the cod of the period of Classical antiquity, being granted to more and more social classes; even children and slaves had their special monuments.

Obviously such a wealth of sculptures comprises considerable stylistic and iconographic diversity over time and place. Iconographically, however, the dominant and constant feature is that the dead person is shown as he or she was in life. The dead never appear in the corpse—like position of recumbent mediaeval effigies, and are seldom glorified as heroes. In any ease, in the largest group of the Classical period — the Athenian reliefs — and in the Hellenistic period, there is nothing to suggest that the characters shown as living people are already in the next world: On the contrary, the relief shows the situation ante mortem, in this world: the dead person sometimes appears alone, sometimes with one or several relations with whom he is shaking hands in farewell. Before the Imperial period it is unusual for the relief to contain any indication of the dead person’s profession unless he was a warrior (one such illustration is the stele of Dexileos), or of the circumstances of his death (here the first—century stele of the shipwrecked Kerdon on Delos is an exception). The relief was accompanied by an epitaph, which was usually a very short one.

It need hardly be said that funerary reliefs stood in cemeteries; the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens is almost the only example left to show us what they looked like.