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_.” [Illustration: WELCH MONUMENT BY HERBERT ADAMS] III