The Frieze of Parnassus is a large sculpted stone frieze encircling the podium, or base, of the Albert Memorial in London, England. The Albert Memorial was constructed in the 1860s in memory of Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria.
The Frieze of Parnassus encircles the base of the Albert Memorial in London and consists of 169 life-size full-length sculptures of individual artists from history. The total length of the frieze is approximately 64 metres (210 feet). Depicted from top: South side: musicians and poets East side: painters North side: architects West side: sculptors
The frieze in its context; the Albert Memorial as seen from the south side
Relief is a sculptural method in which the sculpted pieces remain attached to a solid background of the same material. The term relief is from the Latin verb relevare, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane. When a relief is carved into a flat surface of stone or wood, the field is actually lowered, leaving the unsculpted areas seeming higher. The approach requires a lot of chiselling away of the background, which takes a long time. On the other hand, a relief saves forming the rear of a subject, and is less fragile and more securely fixed than a sculpture in the round, especially one of a standing figure where the ankles are a potential weak point, particularly in stone. In other materials such as metal, clay, plaster stucco, ceramics or papier-mâché the form can be simply added to or raised up from the background. Monumental bronze reliefs are made by casting.
Side view of Lorenzo Ghiberti's cast gilt-bronze Gates of Paradise at the Florence Baptistery in Florence, Italy, combining high-relief main figures with backgrounds mostly in low relief.
A common mixture of high and low relief, in the Roman Ara Pacis, placed to be seen from below. Low relief background
A low-relief dating to c. 2000 BC, from the kingdom of Simurrum, modern Iraq
"Blocked-out" unfinished low relief of Ahkenaten and Nefertiti; unfinished Greek and Persian high-reliefs show the same method of beginning a work.