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.

II

I am told on high authority that there are many persons who think that a bas-relief in sculpture is a form resulting from an exactly proportioned flattening of the same subject in the round. It is also dismaying to find that there are those who would invent a machine whereby on some principle of proportionate recession from the eye a bas-relief could be produced from a form in full-blown dimensions. Is not the art of sculpture already sufficiently mechanized? And surely a good look at a fine relief should dispel mechanistic illusions. For in relief, if nowhere else, live sculpture laughs at the despotism of mathematics. Even the tyro in relief portraiture soon finds that he cannot give the human ear the projection from background that a proportional representation would demand; he sees that to do this would exalt that whimsical volute beyond its merits, and divert attention from other and perhaps more delightful, more characteristic features of a face. If his portrait is in profile, as is not unlikely, he discovers that this profile is in itself a very telling thing, and that he can make it interesting or lively by softening a contour here, by hardening it there, by letting it alone somewhere else, by sinking or by raising parts of his background; before long he has discovered, as Egyptians and Italians and Frenchmen and Americans before him have discovered, a thousand devices of art, not algebra, that give his relief a look of life and truth. In short, his work will never seem so false and so far from sympathetic as when its chief quality is that it is topographically true in its proportionate flattening. Of course I feel ashamed to say such things baldly, when so many of our American bas-reliefs have said them poetically. My excuse is that my words may drive some unbeliever to look at the works. For, as the Metropolitan Museum’s curator of prints lately said in an address, “Art in this country doesn’t need to be talked about; it needs to be seen.”

III

Someone promptly asks what are the rules of relief. But are rules of much use here? Rules of relief are seldom mentioned by the sculptor; never until after they have been patently transgressed. He has of course his standards; he allows to his reliefs some of the privileges of painting, such as perspective and distance, but he does not presume too far with these borrowings, lest his work lose its sculptural style. A relief is largely a matter of innate artistic feeling, as well as of trained taste. And quite as much as a work in the round, it tells the personality of its maker. A Saint-Gaudens relief, whether the monumental bronze Shaw, or the marble portrait, slightly under life-size, of Mrs. Stanford White, or the little reduction, “about as large as the hand of a child of twelve years,” made from the bas-relief of the baby Homer, reveals the artist’s temperament, shows his principles and prejudices in art.

Many of this master’s pupils have made memorable reliefs in various styles from medallic to monumental. The medals and portrait-reliefs of Martiny, Flanagan, Fraser, and Weinman are well-known. Less familiar to the general public because kept in private collections are the admirable bronze or marble portrait-reliefs by Frances Grimes. After the mechanical roughing-out of the pointing-machine is over, Miss Grimes herself finishes all her marbles, whether created in the round or in relief. She does this oftener in her studio than in the Sunday picture papers; and because her designs for marble are from their first rude beginnings in the clay imagined with a full realization of their final possibilities in marble, they naturally have an integrity not always attained in the work of sculptors unfamiliar with the chisel.

IV

Most artists would probably agree with Saint-Gaudens that “the great coins are the Greek, ... just as the great medals are those of the fifteenth century by Pisanello and Sperandio.”

But he who designs the modern American coin, however enthusiastic he may be in his admiration of the Greek high relief masterpieces of monetary beauty, must take serious and constant thought of the curiously un-Greek conditions confronting him. His coin must work harder than the Greek coin; it must “stack” properly; it must be struck in numbers undreamed of in Hellas. Our difficult modern ideal calls alike for quantity and for quality. Comparatively limited as was the circulation of our recent Victory medal, four million copies were considered necessary. One of the good precedents introduced by Roosevelt, in consultation with Saint-Gaudens, was that of entrusting the designing of our coins to our most talented sculptors; the resulting improvement in our coinage, on the æsthetic side, has been one of our twentieth-century triumphs. And the “great medals” Saint-Gaudens loved are still influencing the medallic art of the Western world.

The candor and warm simplicity of Pisanello and Sperandio were perhaps lost sight of during those years while the earlier French master-medalists of the nineteenth century, David d’Angers, Oudiné, and Ponscarme, were paving the difficult way for a later and more sympathetic flowering of the medallic art in the hands of Roty, Chaplain, and Charpentier. But the delightful quality of the Renaissance medal was never more deeply appreciated in France than at the time when a goodly number of our American sculptors were studying there, and shared in that appreciation; and now that the modern reducing-machine allows the artist fully to develop his design for a medal in a fairly large size before bringing it within the final small circumference, it is certainly well for him to bear in mind the admirable results obtained by the less sophisticated quattrocento methods. Never before has the medalist had at hand as many excellent mechanical aids as at present. Never before has he faced a greater need of remembering the value of clarity in his vision, of simplicity and sincerity in his touch.

Some of our purists maintain that every medal should be modeled from first to last in its ultimate size, however trying and meticulous this task may be. But does not such strictness denote a rather rabid hostility to mechanical contrivances? There are medals whose intricate yet logical design could hardly be carried out by the human hand, no matter how skilful, within the narrow limits thus prescribed. Of this type is the plaquette designed by Saint-Gaudens as a token of gratitude to all who took part in the Masque of the Golden Bowl, offered to him on a famous anniversary.

“Within its harmonious oblong are shown the columns and the blazing altar and the Greek seat that figured in the scene, framed by the proscenium arch of great New England pines, and by the stage-curtains crowned with masks invented by the joyous fancy of Maxfield Parrish; below is the triumphal chariot; and, as a symbol of the love that prompted the pageant, there stands by the altar the winged figure of Amor, who has borrowed the lyre of Apollo. The names of the seventy figurants are beautifully inscribed, making a decoration for certain spaces in the background; this feature, naturally prized by those who received the medal, was made possible by modeling the original on a large scale. Here is no hodge-podge of unrelated symbols, but a beautiful and lovingly considered arrangement of deeply significant things. We associate with it the same sculptor’s Columbus medal-obverse, and many reductions, in plaquette form, from his portrait reliefs. While delighting in the conceptions of antiquity and of the Renaissance, Saint-Gaudens, more than any other master of his day, made a faithful study of all the conditions of the modern portrait relief.”

The fact that this sculptor not only prized the bas-relief form, but also achieved a beautiful originality in it has of course turned many Americans to the same path of expression. It is one of the delightful ways in which modeling can take an occasional half-holiday from the facts of form.