Relief facts for kids

Relief is a way of making sculptures or carvings. You start with a flat stone or wooden base, and take small parts away until you have made the art you want.
Reliefs are found around the world. They can be used to decorate buildings, such as temples. Usually the artist makes reliefs of figures, such as people or animals.

In bas-relief, only a bit of the base is taken away. The figure is quite flat and this is especially common in friezes. An alto-relief is where the artist takes away a lot of the base material. This can be very detailed.
Famous reliefs
Famous reliefs include:
- Great Altar of Pergamon, now at the Pergamon Museum, Berlin
- Lions and dragons from the Ishtar Gate, Babylon
- Temple of Karnak in Egypt
- Angkor Wat in Cambodia
- Lion Capital of Asoka, the national symbol of India
- glyphs and artwork of the Maya civilization
- The monument to the Confederacy at Stone Mountain, Georgia
- Borobudur temple, Java, Indonesia
- The Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon now housed at the British Museum.
- The representation of Monticello on a US nickel.
Images for kids
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Lorenzo Ghiberti's cast gilt-bronze "Gates of Paradise" at the Florence Baptistery in Florence, Italy, combines high-relief main figures with backgrounds mostly in low relief.
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Low-relief on Roman sestertius, 238 AD
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Bas-relief of 9th-century Candi Borobudur. The temple possesses 1,460 panels of bas-relief narrating Buddhist scriptures.
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French Gothic diptych, 25 cm (9.8 in) high, with crowded scenes from the Life of Christ, c. 1350–1365.
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Sunk relief as low relief within a sunk outline, from the Luxor Temple in Egypt, carved in very hard granite
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low relief within a sunk outline, linear sunk relief in the hieroglyphs, and high relief (right), from Luxor
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"Blocked-out" unfinished low relief of Ahkenaten and Nefertiti; unfinished Greek and Persian high-reliefs show the same method of beginning a work.
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Bas-relief in Persepolis – a symbol of Zoroastrian Nowruz – in day of a spring equinox power of eternally fighting bull (personifying the Earth), and a lion (personifying the Sun), are equal
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Atropos cutting the thread of life. Ancient Greek low relief.
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Roman Hetaera, Relief, around 2nd century, Head is missing
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A relatively modern high relief (depicting shipbuilding) in Bishopsgate, London. Note that some elements jut out of the frame of the image.
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Art Deco tiled bas relief, old Press-Citizen Building, Iowa City, Iowa.
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Colossal Hindu rock reliefs at Unakoti, Tripura, India
