Bas-relief is a sculptural method in which figures project only slightly from a flat background, somewhere between drawing and full sculpture.
Bas-relief (French: 'low relief'; Italian: 'basso rilievo') is sculpture in which figures and forms project only slightly from a flat background plane — by contrast with high relief, in which forms project more than half their depth, and free-standing sculpture, which is fully three-dimensional. The technique is among the oldest in art: the carved walls of Egyptian tombs, the Assyrian palace reliefs at Nineveh, the Parthenon frieze (438–432 BCE), and the column of Trajan in Rome (113 CE) are landmarks. In the Renaissance, Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (1425–1452) for the Florence Baptistery used a special low-relief technique called 'rilievo schiacciato' (squashed relief) to create the illusion of deep architectural space within a few millimetres of bronze. Bas-relief continues into modern public sculpture and coinage; almost every coin you have ever held is a tiny bas-relief portrait.