I
How summarize an art that shows us sculptured form, not in the faithful four-square roundness of fact, but in a subtly chosen and poetic projection of fact? For the manifestations of the spirit of relief are legion. A relief of a certain figure may have scarcely the thickness of a flower petal, or again it may have an even greater salience than life itself. All depends upon its purpose. When I am told that Mr. Aitken and Mr. MacNeil are making some studies, in relief, I do not know whether Mr. Aitken is at work on another large equestrian subject like that of his George Rogers Clark monument, or whether he is devising one of his little medallic Pegasi such as his Watrous medal; and I do not know whether Mr. MacNeil is to give us a new coin, such as his quarter-dollar of a recent series, or a new memorial as imposing as his military monument at Albany with its serried stone warriors in relief. Surely it is a Protean art that can produce the Brenner cent, the Weinman dime, the Fraser Victory medal; that can make the Saint-Gaudens portrait of Stevenson a suitable adornment for the church of St. Giles in Edinburgh; that can decorate the façade of St. Bartholomew’s in New York with bronze portals crowded with figures of the apostles and crowned with marble tympana of the saints; that may even serve the dynamic purpose of Rude’s great Chant du Départ on the Paris arch and the static majesty of Calder’s Washington and MacNeil’s Washington paired on the New York arch.
When we remember all the little coins and medals in the world, and all the architectural ornament, structural or otherwise, on the buildings of the world, and all the religious reliefs of Bible story such as those that Mino and the Della Robbias have left us, and all the patriotic and allegoric tales hoisted aloft into pediments and springing up on arches, it is clear that relief sculptures vastly outnumber the other sort. How often sculptors must have hailed relief as an escape from rendering facts in the round, to be seen all around! For commemorative portraiture in the public square, the future will probably make a wider use of high relief (or even of low relief, properly framed) to take the place of the portrait statue, often the result of a purely automatic choice. And the purely automatic choice is not a choice at all; it is a habit.