Alexander Conze, “Greek Relief Sculpture”. Originally published as ‘über das Relief bei den Griechen’, Sitzungsberichte der K niglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Gesammtsitzung vom 25. Mai, 1882, no. 26, pp. 1-15 (pp. 563-577).

On the basis of a corpus edition of Attic grave stelae, it becomes possible to make certain broad observations about the nature and development of Greek relief sculpture, a branch of the arts in which the Greeks are admitted to have excelled. Archaeology has added so much to our knowledge in the course of the 19th century that we can dismiss the earlier assumption that these sculptures did not have colour. In fact they were painted, and the evidence shows that in spite of its severe technical limitations, Greek relief sculpture developed in an increasingly painterly direction, in tandem with the development of Greek wall and panel painting as we know it – more so than vase painting. St. Remy and Pergamon provide examples of the prodigious Greek application of the genre, where ‘there were no innovations left for Roman art to make’.