Architectonics of the Relief: Stokes, Ben Nicholson, and Barbara Hepworth

In 1971 — the penultimate year of his life — while proofreading Richard Wollheim's edited selection of his writings The Image in Form (1972), Stokes recalled his fascination with low relief in a letter to his friend Ben Nicholson: ¹

Reading the proofs for a week now of my Pelican (which is to be called The Image in Form), ² I was re-struck how obsessed I was for years, to the point of dottiness, with low relief, in the Quattro Cento (1932) & Stones of Rimini (Jan 1934), much of it written in the twenties. Of course the early Renaissance low relief on which I relied to define 'the carving attitude', not in sculpture only but in painting, was of no interest, to you, though you were sometimes intrigued by architectural detail of this kind (the pilasters on the wall at Urbino). I like to think I may have contributed something to the evolution towards relief, however indirectly. And of course I was immensely stimulated by you & Barbara [Hepworth]. ³

An earlier letter confirms how in Stokes's mind this fascination with low relief was connected to the planimetries of quattrocento architecture: when looking at Ben Nicholson's work he is 'reminded of my own formative years in Italy in the late twenties when my foremost interest was low relief of the welling kind unknown to the Greeks, & the steps of architectural surfaces'. ⁴ Here, initially in relation to Nicholson's work, I want to examine the architectonic aspects of Stokes's confessed obsession 'to the point of dottiness with low relief'. As Stokes's letters confirm, the maturation of his thesis of 'the carving attitude' relates to prolonged meditations throughout the 1920s and early 1930s on early Renaissance low relief — particularly in relation to Agostino di Duccio's carvings in Alberti's Tempio Malatestiano at Rimini.