Narrative Relief Sculpture

How can relief sculptors use composition, line, and space to create tension in a story? How do they communicate who the "good guys" and "bad guys" are?

   To answer the question about using composition, line, and space to create tension in a story is illustrated perfectly in the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus. This relief sculpture exhibits tension perfectly. What we see when we look at the sarcophagus is the lines or the lack thereof. In this sculpture there is a lack of straight lines across the entire piece. Only straight lines are found on the people and so without a continuous set of lines across the art work we get this jumbling of lines and it just looks like one big mess. This mess adds to the tension. Furthermore there is the lack of space. The depiction of the battle has no openness to it at all. People are piled upon each other and there is absolutely no room to move. The horses, romans, and gauls are in a tight squeeze. What this does is make it claustrophobic which results in increased tension. The composition is about a battle and so there will be of course tension as the two opposing forces try and kill each other.
   They way that an artist conveys who the good guys are is by the physical depictions. To make people look like the good guys they illustrate them to appear noble. The bad guys on the other hand look like savage wild men. Another way to distinguish between the good and bad is who are the gods backing up. If a good is helping one side it is pretty much granted that they are the good guys. Furthermore this is true almost all the time in which it could be considered an archetype; good guys always win. Because of this look at who's winning and they will probably also one hundred percent of the time be the good guys.