Martin Van Buren - Van Buren County Courthouse - Paw Paw, Michigan
Posted by: theHostas
N 42° 12.987 W 085° 53.412
16T E 591599 N 4674405
Bas-relief sculpture of Martin Van Buren.
Waymark Code: WM1272J
Location: Michigan, United States
Date Posted: 03/17/2020
Views: 3
A bas-relief likeness of Martin Van Buren looks out from above an (East) entrance to the courthouse in the county named for him…Van Buren, as secretary of state for President Andrew Jackson, was one of the men honored with a so-called Cabinet County in Michigan. His county was first set off, named, and attached to Cass County during Michigan’s territorial times. When Michigan became a state, Van Buren County was organized on March 18, 1837.
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Relief is a sculptural technique where the sculpted elements remain attached to a solid background of the same material. The term relief is from the Latin verb relevo, to raise. To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that the sculpted material has been raised above the background plane. What is actually performed when a relief is cut in from a flat surface of stone (relief sculpture) or wood (relief carving) is a lowering of the field, leaving the unsculpted parts seemingly raised…
A low relief or bas-relief ("low relief", from the Italian basso rilievo; this is now a rather old-fashioned term in English) is a projecting image with a shallow overall depth, for example used on coins, on which all images are in low relief. In the lowest reliefs the relative depth of the elements shown is completely distorted, and if seen from the side the image makes no sense, but from the front the small variations in depth register as a three-dimensional image…
Large architectural compositions all in low relief saw a revival in the 20th century, being popular on buildings in Art Deco and related styles, which borrowed from the ancient low reliefs now available in museums. Some sculptors, including Eric Gill, have adopted the "squashed" depth of low relief in works that are actually free-standing.
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