A world full of bronze
Over more than a thousand years Greek and Roman artists made literally thousands of bronze statues of gods and heroes, victorious athletes, statesmen and philosophers, which filled temples, sanctuaries and the public spaces of cities. From the Classical period on, bronze was the preferred material for freestanding statues. Why? Bronze, an alloy of about 90 per cent copper and 10 per cent tin, melts at a lower temperature than pure copper, stays liquid longer in the mould, gives a better casting and has superior tensile strength. In practice, a bronze arm can reach out into the air where a marble one would snap.
Copper came from many places around the Mediterranean, above all from Cyprus, whose very name comes from the Greek word for copper. Tin had to travel much further, from south-west Turkey, from Afghanistan and even from Cornwall.
How was a bronze statue made?
The earliest large Greek bronzes were made by sphyrelaton (“hammer-driven”): sheets of metal hammered into shape and riveted together. By the Late Archaic period, around 500-480 BCE, a better method had taken over, lost-wax casting, so called because a wax model is melted out of a clay mould and replaced by molten metal.
Small figures could be cast solid, but large statues had to be hollow. In the direct method, the sculptor built a clay core, covered it with wax, encased it in clay, heated it so the wax ran out, and poured bronze into the gap. In the indirect method, used for most large Greek and Roman bronzes, a mould was taken from the sculptor’s clay model and lined with a thin layer of wax, so the original model survived and parts could be recast or repeated. Large statues were cast in pieces, head, torso, arms and legs, and then joined so skilfully that the joins are one of the great technical achievements of ancient bronzeworking.
Eyes of glass, teeth of silver
A finished bronze was not a single brown surface. Details of hair and clothing were sharpened with a chisel, and the makers often added eyes inset with glass or stone, teeth and fingernails inlaid with silver, and lips and nipples inlaid with copper. The result was astonishingly lifelike, a statue in several colours of metal. The Boxer at Rest in Rome even has his wounds inlaid in copper.
Did they corrode? No, they were melted
It is tempting to blame time and rust. Bronze does corrode, but that is not why the statues vanished. All but a few ancient bronze statues were lost or melted down to reuse the valuable metal, in antiquity and in the centuries after. A bronze god was, in the end, a large stock of copper and tin, and when metal was needed, statues went into the furnace. That is why Roman marble copies are our main evidence for the masterpieces of famous Greek sculptors: almost all the marble statues in the Metropolitan Museum’s Jaharis Gallery are Roman copies of bronzes made some 500 years earlier.
The few that survived
The survivors were saved by being lost. The sea kept some: the god from Cape Artemision (about 460 BCE, 2.09 metres), the youth from the Antikythera shipwreck (340-330 BCE, 1.94 metres) and the two warriors found off Riace, in Calabria, in August 1972, each nearly two metres tall. The earth kept others: the Charioteer of Delphi (478-474 BCE), found in the sanctuary of Apollo, and the Boxer at Rest, found in 1885 on the Quirinal hill in Rome.
Some smaller statues survived too. In the Metropolitan Museum a bronze Eros asleep, made in the third or second century BCE, is one of the few bronze statues to have come down from antiquity: a plump baby in a relaxed pose, clearly based on first-hand observation, the kind of natural detail that bronze made possible in Hellenistic sculpture. Next to the marble copies of Classical sculpture, these few originals show what has been lost.
Where to see them
The National Archaeological Museum in Athens has the god of Artemision and the Antikythera youth; the Charioteer is at Delphi; the Riace warriors are in the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria; the Boxer at Rest is in Rome, at Palazzo Massimo. The Metropolitan Museum in New York shows the sleeping Eros and a Hellenistic honorific bronze. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- C. Hemingway and S. Hemingway, “The Technique of Bronze Statuary in Ancient Greece” (2003) and “The Art of Classical Greece (ca. 480-323 B.C.)” (2008), Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection records 43.11.4 and 2001.443.
- Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Odysseus: Charioteer of Delphi; Artemision bronze; youth from Antikythera.
- Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Reggio Calabria, “I Bronzi di Riace”; Museo Nazionale Romano, Palazzo Massimo, “Pugilatore in riposo”.
