The Relief Problem: Some Notes from an Art Historian

This essay examines the factural and phenomenological aspects of some relief works of the remote and recent past, ranging from Buddhist sculptural and pictorial reliefs made in China, Central Asia, and India to relief works by Donatello (ca. 1386– 1466) and the American sculptor Natalie Charkow Hollander (b. 1933). While some of the works under discussion are historically connected to one another, most are not. By zooming in on relief works and the verbal descriptions about them, the essay reveals the signification that relief, as a liminal art medium between painting and sculpture in the round, enforces on its maker and viewer across cultures and throughout history, due to the visual and tactile ambiguity that it effects between concealment and disclosure. Three Experiments with Relief in Early Medieval China The introduction of Indic art practices and theories, which traveled along with Buddhism, intensified art production in early medieval China. The three artistic experiments discussed in the first half of this essay took place during this age of artistic intensification, the fifth and sixth centuries CE. They demonstrate the different ways in which artists in China, in the grip of things Indic, reflected upon and grappled with the nature and characteristics of both painting and sculpture. In different ways, these experiments were the result of new understandings about the potential of the wall surface as an artistic support, with “wall” used in its broadest sense. Such attempts were trials with modes of wall reliefs and wall paintings. The first experiment pertains to stone carving. A Buddhist stele from Chengdu (Sichuan) dated 523 can help us appreciate the tactics that the artist employed to realize an artistic ideal in stone relief carving. On the back of the stele is a relief on two planes, a mode of relief also seen frequently in preBuddhist carvings in various regions of China during the Han period (206 BCE– 220 CE), including Sichuan (fig. 1).1 Relief as such developed from outline drawing, and the end result does not go much beyond a drawing; the surface around the outline of the figures is cut back to leave raised silhouettes that are then made into more elaborate images by incising details and faintly modeling the surface. To borrow L.R. Rogers’s words in describing this kind of relief, figures are not treated “as corporeal bodies in their own right, but are, so to speak, bound to the surface, or spread upon it, or otherwise integrated with it in ways that