1. That followed by the Greeks, in which the figures are left standing out from a smooth bed, sometimes slightly hollowed near the contours (see illustration, p. [196]).
  2. Where the figures are modelled in relief in a sunk hollow, from an inch to one and a half inch deep.
  3. Where the surface of the figures and the bed or field of relief are kept on one level (see illustration, p. [196]), the contours indicated by hollow lines cut into the stone; very little modelling, little more than silhouette, in which the outline is shown by a hollow instead of by the stroke of a pencil or brush.

One would be inclined to reverse the order of these three processes, on the supposition that No. 3 was the earliest process, and that it arose, as I have conjectured, from the practice of representing forms by incised lines only.

There is certainly a strong family likeness as to method between the Egyptian reliefs and the Assyrian, the Persian, and the archaic Greek; and there is a far greater difference in treatment between archaic Greek relief sculpture and the work of the Phidian period than between the archaic work of the three races named.

The strictly mural and decorative conditions which governed ancient sculpture no doubt gave to Greek sculpture in its perfection a certain dignity, simplicity, and restraint, and also accounted in a great measure for that rhythmic control of invisible structural and ornamental line which asserts itself in such works as the Pan-Athenaic frieze. It was strictly slab sculpture, and became part of the surface of the wall.

Gothic Sculpture

The structural and ornamental feeling also asserts itself strongly in Gothic sculpture, owing to its close association with architecture, as, when it was not an integral part of the structure, it was always an essential part of the expression of the building, and it was this which controlled its treatment decoratively, in its scale and its system and degree of relief.

In the porches of the Gallo-Roman churches of France of the twelfth century, the figures occupying the place of shafts became columnar in treatment, the sinuous formalized draperies wrapped around the elongated figures, or falling in vertical folds, as in the figures in the western door of Chartres Cathedral (p. [199]). The lines of the design of the sculptured tympanum were strictly related to the space, and the degree and treatment of the relief clearly felt in regard to the architectural effect (p. [201]).