Frieze in the context of Plasterwork

Phidias or Pheidias (/ˈfɪdiəs/; Ancient Greek: Φειδίας, Pheidias; c. 480 – c. 430 BC) was an Ancient Greek sculptor, painter, and architect, active in the 5th century BC. His Statue of Zeus at Olympia was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Phidias also designed the statues of the goddess Athena on the Athenian Acropolis, namely the Athena Parthenos inside the Parthenon, and the Athena Promachos, a colossal bronze which stood between it and the Propylaea, a monumental gateway that served as the entrance to the Acropolis in Athens. Phidias was the son of Charmides of Athens. The ancients believed that his masters were Hegias and Ageladas.

Plutarch discusses Phidias's friendship with the Greek statesman Pericles, recording that enemies of Pericles tried to attack him through Phidias – who was accused of stealing gold intended for the Parthenon's statue of Athena, and of impiously portraying himself and Pericles on the shield of the statue. The historical value of this account, as well as the legend about accusations against the 'Periclean circle', is debatable, but Aristophanes mentions an incident with Phidias around that time.

Plaster is a building material used for the protective or decorative coating of walls and ceilings and for moulding and casting decorative elements. In English, "plaster" usually means a material used for the interiors of buildings, while "render" commonly refers to external applications. The term stucco refers to plasterwork that is worked in some way to produce relief decoration, rather than flat surfaces.

The most common types of plaster mainly contain either gypsum, lime, or cement, but all work in a similar way. The plaster is manufactured as a dry powder and is mixed with water to form a stiff but workable paste immediately before it is applied to the surface. The reaction with water liberates heat through crystallization and the hydrated plaster then hardens.

The Samnites (Oscan: Safineis) were an ancient Italic people who lived in Samnium, which is located in modern inland Abruzzo, Molise, and Campania in south-central Italy.

An Oscan-speaking people, who originated as an offshoot of the Sabines, they formed a confederation consisting of four tribes: the Hirpini, Caudini, Caraceni, and Pentri. Ancient Greek historians considered the Umbri as the ancestors of the Samnites. Their migration was in a southward direction, according to the rite of ver sacrum.

Trajan's Column (Italian: Colonna Traiana, Latin: Columna Traiani) is a Roman triumphal column in Rome, Italy, that commemorates Roman emperor Trajan's victory in the Dacian Wars. It was probably constructed under the supervision of the architect Apollodorus of Damascus at the order of the Roman Senate. It is located in Trajan's Forum, north of the Roman Forum. Completed in AD 113, the freestanding column is most famous for its spiral bas relief, which depicts the wars between the Romans and Dacians (101–102 and 105–106). Its design has inspired numerous victory columns, both ancient and modern.

The structure is about 30 metres (98 feet) in height, 35 metres (115 feet) including its large pedestal. The shaft is made from a series of 20 colossal Carrara marble drums, each weighing about 32 tons, with a diameter of 3.7 metres (12.1 feet). The 190-metre (620-foot) frieze winds around the shaft 23 times. Inside the shaft, a spiral staircase of 185 steps provides access to a viewing deck at the top. The capital block of Trajan's Column weighs 53.3 tons, and had to be lifted to a height of about 34 metres (112 feet). Ancient coins indicate preliminary plans to top the column with a statue of a bird, probably an eagle. After construction, a statue of Trajan was put in place; this disappeared in the Middle Ages. On December 4, 1587, the top was crowned with a bronze figure of Saint Peter the Apostle by Pope Sixtus V, which remains to this day.

The Frieze of Parnassus is a large sculpted stone frieze encircling the podium, or base, of the Albert Memorial in London, England. The Albert Memorial was constructed in the 1860s in memory of Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria.

The frieze is named after Mount Parnassus, the favorite resting place in Ancient Greek mythology for the muses. It contains 169 life-size full-length sculptures, a mixture of low-relief and high-relief, of individual composers, architects, poets, painters, and sculptors from history. The depictions of earlier figures necessarily, were imaginary, although many of the figures were based on materials contained in a collection of artworks and drawings gathered for the purpose of ensuring authentic depictions, where this was possible.

The Doric order is one of the three orders of ancient Greek and later Roman architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian. The Doric is most easily recognized by the simple circular capitals at the top of the columns. Originating in the western Doric region of Greece, it is the earliest and, in its essence, the simplest of the orders, though still with complex details in the entablature above.

The Greek Doric column was fluted, and had no base, dropping straight into the stylobate or platform on which the temple or other building stood. The capital was a simple circular form, with some mouldings, under a square cushion that is very wide in early versions, but later more restrained. Above a plain architrave, the complexity comes in the frieze, where the two features originally unique to the Doric, the triglyph and gutta, are skeuomorphic memories of the beams and retaining pegs of the wooden constructions that preceded stone Doric temples. In stone they are purely ornamental.

A metope (/ˈmɛtəpi/; Ancient Greek: μετόπη) is a rectangular architectural element of the Doric order, filling the space between triglyphs in a frieze, a decorative band above an architrave.In earlier wooden buildings the spaces between triglyphs were first open, and later the free spaces in between triglyphs were closed with metopes; however, metopes are not load-bearing part of a building.Earlier metopes are plain, but later metopes were painted or ornamented with reliefs. The painting on most metopes has been lost, but sufficient traces remain to allow a close idea of their original appearance.

In terms of structure, metopes were made out of clay or stone. A stone metope may be carved from a single block with a triglyph (or triglyphs), or they may be cut separately and slide into slots in the triglyph blocks as at the Temple of Aphaea. Sometimes the metopes and friezes were cut from different stone, so as to provide color contrast. Although they tend to be close to square in shape, some metopes are noticeably larger in height or in width. They may also vary in width within a single structure to allow for corner contraction, an adjustment of the column spacing and arrangement of the Doric frieze in a temple to make the design appear more harmonious.

The Pergamon Altar (Ancient Greek: Βωμός τῆς Περγάμου) was a monumental construction built during the reign of the Ancient Greek King Eumenes II of the Pergamon Empire in the first half of the 2nd century BC on one of the terraces of the acropolis of Pergamon in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). It was described as one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by three known classical lists.

The structure was 35.74 metres (117 ft 3 in) wide and 33.4 metres (109 ft 7 in) deep; the front stairway alone was almost 20 metres (66 ft) wide. The base was decorated with a frieze in high relief showing the battle between the Giants and the Olympian gods known as the Gigantomachy. There was a second, smaller and less well-preserved high relief frieze on the inner court walls which surrounded the actual fire altar on the upper level of the structure at the top of the stairs. In a set of consecutive scenes, it depicts events from the life of Telephus, legendary founder of the city of Pergamon and son of the hero Heracles and Auge, one of Tegean king Aleus's daughters.

An entablature (/ɛnˈtæblətʃər/; nativization of Italian intavolatura, from in "in" and tavola "table") is the superstructure of moldings and bands which lies horizontally above columns, resting on their capitals. Entablatures are major elements of classical architecture, and are commonly divided into the architrave (the supporting member immediately above; equivalent to the lintel in post and lintel construction), the frieze (an unmolded strip that may or may not be ornamented), and the cornice (the projecting member below the pediment). The Greek and Roman temples are believed to be based on wooden structures, the design transition from wooden to stone structures being called petrification.

Triglyph is an architectural term for the vertically channeled tablets of the Doric frieze in classical architecture, so called because of the angular channels in them. The rectangular recessed spaces between the triglyphs on a Doric frieze are called metopes. The raised spaces between the channels themselves (within a triglyph) are called femur in Latin or meros in Greek. In the strict tradition of classical architecture, a set of guttae, the six triangular "pegs" below, always go with a triglyph above (and vice versa), and the pair of features are only found in entablatures of buildings using the Doric order. The absence of the pair effectively converts a building from being in the Doric order to being in the Tuscan order.

The triglyph is largely thought to be a tectonic and skeuomorphic representation in stone of the wooden beam ends of the typical primitive hut, as described by Vitruvius and Renaissance writers. The wooden beams were notched in three separate places in order to cast their rough-cut ends mostly in shadow. Greek architecture (and later Roman architecture) preserved this feature, as well as many other features common in original wooden buildings, as a tribute to the origins of architecture and its role in the history and development of man. The channels could also have a function in channeling rainwater.

In architecture, patera (pl. paterae) is an ornamental circular or elliptical bas-relief disc. The patera is usually used to decorate friezes and walls, and to interrupt moldings. Patera is also used in furniture-making. It can be carved, incised, inlaid, or even painted.

Scenes from the Massacre at Chios (French: Scènes des massacres de Scio) is the second major oil painting by the French artist Eugène Delacroix. The work is more than four meters tall, and shows some of the horror of the wartime destruction visited on the northern Aegean Sea island of Chios in the 1822 Chios massacre. A frieze-like display of suffering characters, military might, ornate and colourful costumes, terror, disease and death is shown in front of a scene of widespread desolation.

Unusual for a painting of civil ruin during this period, The Massacre at Chios has no heroic figure to counterbalance the crushed victims, and there is little to suggest hope among the ruin and despair. The vigour with which the aggressor is painted, contrasted with the dismal rendition of the victims, has drawn comment since the work was first hung, and some critics have charged that Delacroix might have tried to show some sympathy with the brutal occupiers. The painting was completed and displayed at the Salon of 1824 and hangs at the Musée du Louvre in Paris.

The Rozhen Monastery of the Nativity of the Mother of God (Bulgarian: Роженски манастир "Рождество Богородично", Rozhenski manastir "Rozhdestvo Bogorodichno", Greek: Μονή Ροζινού, Moni Rozinou) is the biggest monastery in the Pirin Mountains in southwestern Bulgaria, nestled in the Melnik Earth Pyramids. It is one of the few medieval Bulgarian monasteries well preserved until today.

The earliest archaeological evidence of medieval life at the place is a grave with a few coins and decorations from the time of Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos (1259–1282). Some other items also date to the 13th century while the marble frieze above the central gate of the church dates to the 13th or 14th century. A couple of new buildings were constructed in the monastery at the time of Despot Alexius Slav. The earliest written source testifying to the monastery's existence is a note on a chant book from 1551, today in the Great Lavra library on Mount Athos.

The so-called Temple of Vesta is a small circular Roman temple (so a tholos) in Tivoli, Italy, dating to the early 1st century BC. Its ruins are dramatically sited on the acropolis of the Etruscan and Roman city, overlooking the falls of the Aniene and a picturesque narrow gully.

The temple's capitals have been much admired and imitated and their variation of the Corinthian order sometimes called the "Tivoli order". They have two rows of acanthus leaves, and its abacus is decorated with oversize fleurons in the form of hibiscus flowers (probably intended to be Hibiscus syriacus) with pronounced spiral pistils. The column flutes have flat tops. The frieze exhibits fruit swags suspended between bucrania. Above each swag is a rosette. The cornice does not have modillions.