Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun Any of the spaces between two triglyphs on a Doric frieze.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In architecture, a slab inserted between two triglyphs of the Doric frieze, sometimes, especially in late work, cut in the same block with one triglyph or more.
- noun In zoology, same as
facies. Huxley .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Arch.) The space between two triglyphs of the Doric frieze, which, among the ancients, was often adorned with carved work. See
Illust. ofentablature . - noun (Zoöl.) The face of a crab.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun architecture The architectural element between two
triglyphs in a Doric frieze.
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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"metope" is used of the intervals between dentils as well as of those between triglyphs.
The Ten Books on Architecture Vitruvius Pollio
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The new museum, in fact, tried to recreate the exact same vantage points from ground to frieze, metope and panel.
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Then, in the evening's coup de théâtre, the minister put on a pair of white conservator's gloves, lifted a fragmentary marble relief of a boy's head toward the massed photographers, inserted the shard into a shattered metope, and beamed like a child who had completed his first jigsaw puzzle.
Grading the New Acropolis Filler, Martin 2009
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Phèdre; and he told me that in the scene in which she stood with her arm raised to the level of her shoulder — one of those very scenes that had been greeted with such applause — she had managed to suggest with great nobility of art certain classical figures which, quite possibly, she had never even seen, a Hesperid carved in the same attitude upon a metope at
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The most famous example of this is the metope at the Parthenon's northwestern corner, which was read in Christian terms as the Annunciation, and thus spared.
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The 'thirty-two full-page plates' with which Covici-Friede tried to spice the rather stolid fare served up by Brandt-Licht included such daring images as the Medici Venus, the Hermes of Praxiteles, the Louvre Diana, a Parthenon metope, and, for a real thrill, the Naples Aphrodite Kallipygos.
The Socratic Method Knox, Bernard 1979
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The difficulty was, that if the triglyph was placed on the angle of the building (the practice of the Greeks) and the next triglyph was placed over the axis of the column, the metope (or panel) between these two triglyphs would be larger than the metopes between the triglyphs axial over the other columns.
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In case of the metope, the square field is filled with two or three figures balanced about a central line, a scheme self-contained and harmonious, which may be compared to a geometrical diagram, and carries simplicity to the farthest point.
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In the same way the somewhat rigid laws of composition of pediment metope and frieze compelled the Greek artist to think out schemes suitable to those forms.
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Only in parts of the building which were from the point of view of construction otiose, such as pediment and metope, was the art of the sculptor allowed to play; and even then it was bound to play appropriately to the nature of the deity within and the festivals of which the temple was to be the focus.
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