Focus on Chimera of Arezzo and explore the Methods and materials.
In the 3rd millennium BCE ancient foundry workers discovered by trial and error that bronze had distinct advantages over pure copper for making artistic statuary. Bronze stays liquid longer when filling a mold due to its lower melting point. Bronze is a superior metal to copper for sculpture casting because of its higher tensile strength. The island of Cyprus supplied most of the bronze used for artistic purposes throughout the ancient Mediterranean region.
The earliest forms of Greek bronze sculptures were simple, hand-worked sheets of bronze known as sphyrelaton (literally, "hammer-driven"). Like modern clay sculpture, these metal sheets could be embellished by hammering the metal over various wooden shapes made with textures that created a desired look or depth. This was later adapted to become the technique known today as tracing. By the late Archaic period (c. 500–480 BCE) sphyrelaton lost popularity as lost-wax casting became the primary means of producing bronze sculpture. Lost-wax casting of bronze was achieved in three different ways, each with its own desired effects. The first and earliest method was solid casting, which required a model of the sculpture to be fashioned in solid wax and then carved. The second method was hollow lost-wax casting, which was created by a direct process. Finally, the third was hollow lost-wax casting by an indirect process. The model is packed in clay, and then heated in what today would be similar to a kiln to remove the wax and harden the clay. Then, the mold is inverted and metal poured inside it to create a cast. When cooled, the bronze-smith cracks open the clay model to reveal a solid bronze replica.For smaller details, sculptors often made eyes out of glass and painted on body hair, clothing details, and skin color. Lost in antiquity, most historical knowledge of how certain bronze statues would have looked comes from studying surviving Roman marble copies.
lost-wax Mediterranean kiln Bronze Lost-wax casting copper marble melting point bronze tracing smith Cyprus solid