Bronze
Art in the foundry
Conversation 10
| Bronze
Art in the foundry
edited by
James M. Bradburne
This publication was written
to coincide with the exhibition
Power and Pathos.
Bronze Sculture
of the Hellenistic
World
Florence
Palazzo Strozzi
14 March—21 June 2015
Los Angeles
J. Paul Getty Museum
28 July—1 November 2015
Washington, DC
National Gallery of Art
6 December 2015
20 March 2016
curated by
Jens M. Daehner
and Kenneth Lapatin
Under the High Patronage
of the President of the
Italian Republic
With the patronage of
Ministero dei Beni e delle
Attività Culturali e del Turismo
Ministero degli Affari Esteri
Consulate General of the
United States of America
in Florence
Expo Milano 2015
PROMOTED AND
ORGANISED BY
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
J. Paul Getty Museum
National Gallery of Art,
Washington
with the collaboration of
Soprintendenza per i Beni
Archeologici della Toscana
With the support of
Comune di Firenze
Camera di Commercio
di Firenze
Associazione Partners
Palazzo Strozzi
Regione Toscana
With the contribution of
Ente Cassa di Risparmio
di Firenze
Vera R. Campbell Foundation
Sponsor
Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane
Ataf Gestioni
Busitalia – Sita Nord
Ufficio del Turismo della Città
Metropolitana di Firenze
Società Aeroporto Toscano
Unicoop Firenze
Firenze Parcheggi
A PUBLICATION OF
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi
CONCEPT AND CREATIVE
DIRECTION
James M. Bradburne
EDITED BY
James M. Bradburne
The conversation was recorded
on 5th February 2015 at the
Fonderia Artistica Ferdinando
Marinelli Firenze, Barberino
Val d’Elsa premises
PARTECIPANTS TO THE
CONVERSATION
James M. Bradburne
Mario Iozzo
Ferdinando Marinelli
Nicola Salvioli
Ludovica Sebregondi
TRANSCRIPTION
Caterina Rocchi
EDITORIAL
COORDINATION
Ludovica Sebregondi
GRAPHIC DESIGN
RovaiWeber design
ACKNOLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank
Fonderia Artistica Ferdinando
Marinelli Firenze for their
collaboration.
We are grateful to the
Vera R. Campbell Foundation,
proud to be a supporting
partner of Fondazione Palazzo
Strozzi, and to Baron Lorne
Thyssen-Bornemisza.
www.palazzostrozzi.org
PHOTOGRAPHIC
CAMPAIGN
James O’Mara/O’Mara
& Mc Bride
© 2015 Fondazione
Palazzo Strozzi, Firenze
Graphic design
© 2015 RovaiWeber
Design
All rights reserved.
No part of this book
may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or
by any means, electronic
or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording,
or any information storage
and retrieval system,
without permission in
writing from the copyright
holders and the publisher.
|
Listening to bronze
James M. Bradburne
This is the tenth in the Palazzo Strozzi’s series of oral histories known as
Conversations. Since its inception, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi has pursued an
explicit cultural strategy of “visible listening”, of looking for silent voices, of making
visible experiences that would otherwise be forgotten or swept away with time.
The series, begun in 2008, was born from the recognition that experts often speak
in conversation more freely and intelligibly than they write, and of the need to
make otherwise little known aspects of an exhibition accessible to a broad public.
In the case of this conversation, it was inspired by the presence in Florence of one
of the countries leading bronze foundries, the Fonderia Artistica Marinelli, who also
possesses one of the world’s largest private collections of original casts made from
Classical and Renaissance sculpture. The foundry has been extensively used by the
Italian state museums to create reproductions of major works, including the Chimera
at the Archaeological Museum in Florence, or Donatello’s David for the Bargello.
The conversation created an opportunity for the participants to experience
the casting process at first hand, surround by casts, moulds and partially finished
bronze sculpture. It also gave them the chance to discuss the issues surrounding
bronze sculpture from antiquity to the present, from recent discoveries, new
conservation techniques, to the issues of reproductions, copies and forgeries.
Intelligent conversation is one of the central values of the daily ‘renaissance’ of our
world, complete with its complications, conflicts and contradictions. The American
philosopher Nelson Goodman said in 1980 that our museums must actively
participate in “the making and re-making of our worlds”. This book – and the
conversation it records – is part of the on-going discovery and rediscovery of our
cultural heritage, and of finding ourselves within it. Every reader is also a part of the
process – so welcome to the conversation!
7
|
Founders and Foundries
|
Conversation recorderd on 5 February 2015 at the Fonderia Artistica
Ferdinando Marinelli Firenze, Barberino Val d’Elsa premises
Participants
is a British-Canadian architect, designer and
museum specialist who has designed World’s Fair pavilions, science centres and
international art exhibitions. Educated in Canada and England, he obtained a degree
in architecture from the Architectural Association and a doctorate in museology
from the University of Amsterdam. Over the past twenty years he has developed
exhibitions, research projects and symposia for UNESCO, national governments,
private foundations and museums worldwide. He was the director general of the
Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi from 2006 to March 2015, devoting his energy to
transforming the Palazzo into a dynamic cultural centre.
JAMES M. BRADBURNE
Mario Iozzo is an archaeologist. A member of the Soprintendenza per i
Beni Archeologici della Toscana since 1987, he is currently director of collections
with the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence. An expert in Greek art
(specifically in vase painting and sculpture), he obtained his first degree in Florence
in 1981 and a postgraduate specialisation in Pisa in 1982, going on to work with
the Scuola Archeologica Italiana in Athens from 1982 to 1985 and successfully
completing a “Dottorato di Ricerca Università Toscane” research doctorate in
1986–9. He has written several monographs and contributed numerous articles to
Italian and international periodicals and journals.
13
|
was born on Christmas Day 1949. He studied
medicine until the age of twenty-six when, on his father’s death, he was appointed
to the post of manager of the Fonderia Artistica Ferdinando Marinelli and of the
Galleria Bazzanti. He enrolled in the Faculty of Architecture and sat twenty-one
exams, though in the end he chose not to complete his degree. He moved the
Fonderia from Rifredi to new premises comprising three purpose-built sheds in
Poggibonsi in 2001. He collects medieval and Renaissance majolica from Florence
and the surrounding area.
Ferdinando Marinelli
|
is an art historian. Specialising in the history of lay
associationism and in the art history of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, she
has published several books and curated a number of exhibitions, also exploring
the iconographic fortunes of such figures as Girolamo Savonarola and lecturing at
both Italian and foreign universities. She designed the new Museo del Tesoro in the
San Lorenzo complex in Florence and is currently working on the project for the
new Museo degli Innocenti. She is in charge of scientific and editorial coordination
for the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi in Florence and curates exhibitions on themes
relating to the Renaissance.
LUDOVICA SEBREGONDI
Nicola Salvioli,
who hails from Emilia, was born in Modena in 1976
and has been working in the field of restoration since 1998. After graduating from
the Opificio delle Pietre Dure’s Scuola di Alta Formazione, he settled in Florence
where he has been working free-lance since 2004, for and in conjunction with
prestigious Italian and international museums both as a restorer and as a lecturer. He
devises conservation projects and executes them in the first person, also conducting
technological research into works of art and objects in metal and bronze, examples
of the goldsmith’s art, and arms and armour. He has worked on masterpieces by
leading sculptors, restoring the Museo Archeologico di Firenze’s extremely famous
Medici-Riccardi Horse’s Head expressly for the exhibition.
14
15
|
BRADBURNE | The purpose of this conversation is to bring different ideas and
different viewpoints together to discuss a topic related to the exhibition. Obviously
in this case the topic is bronze as a material and in all its various different aspects,
be they technical, intellectual or material. It’s a conversation amongst different
voices. Why did we invite both experts and laymen? Well, because it makes for a
more open conversation. I allow myself to ask naive questions because for a reader,
unlike a curator who already knows everything, it’s a way of it provides answers
to questions non-experts might also have. Turning to the issues for discussion, I
thought we might first talk about the materials before moving on to techniques and
then addressing the various different aspects of bronze, its patinas, and the tradition
of replicas, copies and forgeries, in other words how an expert can tell if a bronze
is genuine or a replica produced at a later date, in the Roman era or even in our
own day. Perhaps we can start with techniques, then we can go on to talk about
the material, about why a sculptor uses bronze rather than brass or copper, about
why he chooses bronze. The idea of today’s conversation is to provide answers to
the questions normal people ask. So why bronze? Bronze was the artists’ material by
definition, but why not brass? Or copper? Why are there no large works in copper?
MARINELLI | Because you can’t cast copper.
BRADBURNE | Well that already answers my question “why bronze?” Because
it has a certain plastic flexibility?
MARINELLI | Also, they didn’t know zinc or tin. Bronze was the first metal
to be discovered...
BRADBURNE | But it isn’t a metal, is it?
MARINELLI | No, it’s an alloy.
BRADBURNE | It isn’t a metal found in nature, so someone must have invented
it, is that right?
MARINELLI | Of course.
BRADBURNE | That’s a major discovery in itself because, unlike other metals
such as gold or silver, bronze doesn’t exist – it isn’t listed in the periodic table.
MARINELLI | No, it isn’t an element.
BRADBURNE | So bronze is a miracle of our civilisation in and of itself.
MARINELLI | And sure enough, it gave its name to an era.
SEBREGONDI | The Bronze Age.
17
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
IOZZO | It’s a discovery that goes back a very long way because the use of
bronze was already consolidated as long ago as the second millennium BCE.
BRADBURNE | Here’s a naive question: how?
IOZZO | It was unquestionably a chance discovery.When people lit a fire and
surrounded it with random stones, they must have found stones that contained the
two different minerals, copper and tin, which are two soft metals. With a roaring
fire, two pebbles containing those minerals fused, and when the fire went out they
realised what they’d done because what emerged was a very hard material they
didn’t know. But it was sharp, with a cutting edge, so they tried to make it again.
MARINELLI | I have a feeling that they were far more technologically
advanced than we think. For instance, they managed to temper bronze till it was
almost as hard as steel, because if the Egyptians didn’t have iron, as people say, then
they needed bronze to be tougher in order to carve granite. So the method they
used to temper it consisted of beating it hard over and over again, the way swords
were made in the Middle Ages, then heating it and plunging it in cold water, heating
it again and plunging it in water again, because the metal gradually softens as you
beat it, so in adopting an empirical approach they were already very advanced.
BRADBURNE | Yes, but what you’ve just said is a miracle in its own right,
in my mind, because the chance discovery of two metals fused together around a
fire that they’d lit to cook their mammoth steaks led to a systematic analysis of the
percentage of two elements, and that’s no chance occurrence.
MARINELLI | They must have experimented a lot, done a lot of tests. For
example, ancient bronzes contain lead and other impurities.
BRADBURNE | Yes, that’s true. There was a great deal of experimenting,
because those elements had been discovered...
IOZZO | Experiments lasting centuries. It was an era of experimentation.
MARINELLI | And besides, you find rust everywhere, but iron melts at such a
high temperature that it was impossible to use. So they’d found the metal that best
suited the context.
BRADBURNE | And through these experiments, they tried to make metals
with very specific characteristics so they could make their large granite statues, right?
MARINELLI | A harder metal to allow them to carve granite.
18
|
BRADBURNE | But for sculpture, for art, for a totally different purpose, I
suppose they added lead to make the material melt at a lower temperature?
MARINELLI | Mostly to make it flow better during casting.
BRADBURNE | So bronze plays a crucial role in every history of technology,
because it isn’t an element in itself, it’s an alloy made up of different metals.
That’s why I consider bronze to be more than just a material defining an age;
it’s a technological discovery that allows us to analyse different cultural goals and
different social developments.
IOZZO | Of course. The discovery of bronze marked a pivotal revolution for
the world as a whole. But in the Mediterranean basin we shouldn’t immediately
think of large statues. Experiments were conducted with small objects like buttons,
bells and fibulae for fastening garments for centuries because they didn’t have our
button technique. And weapons too, until iron came along. Tribes came down from
central Europe who’d already discovered iron in around 1000 BCE, so the Bronze
Age was immediately supplanted by the Iron Age.
BRADBURNE | Tell me about this prehistory, about the discovery of bronze
19
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
and how it spread.What happened? The statues in the exhibition we’re talking about
come from a much later era, but wasn’t bronze discovered two thousand years earlier?
IOZZO | Yes, at least two thousand years earlier and unquestionably in the
Caucasus region. It came down to Greece from the northeast, via the east, and then
it spread from Greece to the broader Mediterranean area. The Egyptians and the
Hittites already knew bronze. All the civilisations a few thousand years before Christ
already had bronze.
BRADBURNE | How long did it take for knowledge of the technique used to
make bronze to spread? Because I suspect some techniques were closely-guarded
secrets, weren’t they?
IOZZO | They were indeed, but once the cat was out of the bag, they spread
very rapidly because they changed people’s lives. And the same happened with iron
in around 1000 BCE. In the space of a single generation everyone had iron because
no one could hold out without it.
MARINELLI | Iron’s stronger than bronze.
IOZZO | Yes, an army showing up with iron swords would slice through five
bronze swords like a knife through butter, so everyone had to rapidly make the change.
BRADBURNE | So when iron became the military metal par excellence, bronze
began to be used for art, is that it?
IOZZO | Yes, only for art and for everyday use.
MARINELLI | With iron, the innovation was the ability to melt if, because
coal, if you can manage to make coal, well, coal was always vegetal; they certainly
didn’t mine for it at this point. But vegetal coal such as peat or wood doesn’t burn
at very high temperatures so they had to learn how to make coal that would rise to
temperatures of 1100° to 1200° Celsius when it was oxygenated with a bellows.That’s
the temperature it needs to reach in order to melt iron. And that’s not all. Coal residue
mixed with iron creates steel. So they discovered these things by trial and error.
BRADBURNE | So did the development of foundries go hand in hand with
the development of metal?
MARINELLI | Undoubtedly.
BRADBURNE | And if we look at the specifications of bronze, I should
imagine that bronze in 2000 BCE was different from bronze in 500 BCE, because
the composition had changed.
22
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
IOZZO | We can’t be that accurate. Bronze in 2000 BCE was certainly
different, but we’re only just starting to learn to identify the percentages of the
alloys used between 500 BCE and 300 BCE, to know which contained antimony...
MARINELLI | And then different foundries used different kinds of bronze in
the same period because bronze was bought in. I mean, how often do we see the word
brass used for bronze and vice-versa. Because they used to buy in bronze then too...
BRADBURNE | Why were copper and brass also used for decorative objects?
IOZZO | Brass didn’t exist yet, it’s a 19th century invention.
MARINELLI | With zinc, yes.
IOZZO | You have to remember that the discovery of bronze... well, what I
mean is that when we enter the Bronze Age, the discovery of everyone’s need for
this metal which served so many different purposes led to a kind of revolution in
the Mediterranean because basically, in the Mediterranean, it was the Etruscans
who had bronze. The Etruscans had the minerals required to make bronze and
that’s why the Greeks came to the west and founded Magna Graecia, that’s why
they conquered Sicily, so they could make contact with the Etruscans and buy these
metals, which they traded for ceramics, vases, wheat and a great deal of culture.
SEBREGONDI | But was bronze costly?
IOZZO | Yes, it was expensive.
SEBREGONDI | Actually, I read somewhere that it wasn’t so expensive and
that the sculptures didn’t cost that much either.
IOZZO | It depends on the period. Bronze generally was expensive, indeed so
expensive that occasionally, even in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, in other words
from the third and second centuries BCE on, people preferred to go looking for
basalt, basanite or special kinds of hard granite that required an enormous amount
of carving and elbow grease because, as Mr. Marinelli said, labour was cheap but the
material wasn’t, because they were the stones that most closely resembled bronze,
but it wasn’t bronze that was expensive.
MARINELLI | The first coins were minted in bronze precisely because it was
valuable.
24
25
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
The conversation carries on after they return to the chasing room
MARINELLI | (looking at a bronze seat) This is cast in bronze. This is brass
piping, which we buy in because brass is less apt to break, less brittle. If you bend
bronze it breaks. Silicon bronze, which is incredibly soft, is only used in the United
States. We don’t like it because you can’t chase it, because it’s like butter.You shape
it from the inside. It’s the kind of thing you’d use to get the job done faster, but the
result isn’t so good. So when we need to bend a pipe, we take a brass pipe and bend
it like this, because brass is much more flexible, while bronze snaps.
BRADBURNE | But getting back to our discussion, which was on bronze in
the third century BCE, I assume it was made in various different places, because
foundries, skills and human resources are an investment. And it’s part of a market.
So I should imagine that there were different manufacturing areas and that each
one had its own specific characteristics. And if that’s so, then it should be possible to
establish where a given bronze work comes from, shouldn’t it?
28
|
IOZZO | We haven’t got there yet, but we’re getting there slowly because there
are so few bronzes from the ancient world that, for instance, if we unearth thirty
bronze statues in Athens, we can’t be sure they were all made in Athens. Luckily, a
casting pit with its external casting sleeve and some casting dross has been found in
the agora in Athens. So we can analyse those, but we don’t actually have a great deal to
go on. With the Riace Bronzes there was a minor miracle because it was already clear
that they weren’t both of the same period or by the same sculptor. One was Athenian
and the other from the Peloponnese, one was made in 460 BCE and the other in
440 BCE, but there was no general agreement on this. The bronze alloys didn’t give
us any joy because they’re almost identical, because these people traded know-how.
But then the casting clay gave us different responses. It’s one of the first times that’s
happened. One was Athenian clay and the other was from Argos in the Peloponnese.
BRADBURNE | I’d like to get back to a point that isn’t very well recognised.
Often, when reading, we find there isn’t much information at all about bronzes.
Why are there so few of them?
29
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
IOZZO | There is such little information because bronzes have been cast
and melted down throughout history. Especially in the later Classical era and in
the Middle Ages, when the political situation didn’t permit free circulation and
communities were more closed. And then there were religious issues too. People
were afraid of the year 1000 because the world was supposed to end, the devil
lurked in the woods and people no longer left their homes. They’d even lost the
knowledge of certain technical details, such as where the metals were mined. For
some of them it was far easier to go and dig in archaeological areas to recover pieces
of bronze and reuse them rather than having to set up a new industrial activity.
BRADBURNE | So this dearth of information and failure to hand down skills
was a result of the basic destruction of information on bronzes and so few bronzes
have survived, is that it?
IOZZO | They really are very few compared to the huge amount of
archaeological material of other kinds that we have.
BRADBURNE | So the conclusions that we can draw, then, are still fragile,
despite archaeologists’ knowledge?
IOZZO | They are still fragile.
MARINELLI | And besides, they were idols!
IOZZO | Yes, people in the Middle Ages would have nothing to do with them.
They were idols, thus products of the devil, and they had to be destroyed.
SEBREGONDI | That’s why the exhibition is really important, primarily
because the works of art on display are so rare and they’re being displayed all
together in a single venue where they can be compared. For some of them, this is
the first time they’ve ever been put on display next to one another.
workshop of bothos
of kalchedon (attributed)
herm of dionysos (getty herm)
second century bce
bronze, copper, calcitic stone
malibu, j. paul getty museum
32
bothos of kalchedon (active early
to mid-second century bce)
herm of dionysos (mahdia herm)
second century bce
bronze
tunis, muse national du bardo
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
BRADBURNE | The curators also say that it’s important to recognise how little
we know these works. Every fragment is special in itself because there’s so little of
the original object on which to base a hypothesis regarding the civilisation that
produced it.
IOZZO | And they’re considered so valuable today, just as the Romans
considered them valuable, so valuable, that museums are loath to part with them.
That’s why having eight or ten large bronzes in an exhibition, along with a series
of other exhibits, is an event that isn’t going to happen again for at least the next
hundred years, because the museums simply aren’t going to lend them again. But
luckily, the habit of casting and recasting metal has, in some ways, also preserved
certain masterpieces for us. The bronzesmiths who went to recover a Roman statue
that had been toppled in some earthquake and had broken, left it there because
Christians refused to touch them. They took them, broke them apart and dumped
36
|
them in a pit pending their reuse. Then a war, an earthquake, a disaster, someone
dying, all kinds of nasty turns... So when we archaeologists find these bronze pits
containing pieces of large statues, small statues, bronze bars, pieces of doors and
windows, all kinds of bronze fragments and nails and so forth, it’s a real stroke of
luck because we can glean lots of information from it. That’s how the Cartoceto
Bronzes were discovered.
BRADBURNE | How about underwater discoveries?
IOZZO | Underwater discoveries happen because the bronzes are so heavy.
Ancient bronze statues are extremely heavy because they still contain all their
casting clay. They were extraordinarily heavy, so if a ship was in trouble, the first
thing the sailors threw overboard was its cargo of bronzes. That’s how the Riace
Bronzes were found.
SEBREGONDI | Many of the discoveries at sea have been recent, chance events.
37
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
Chance events, just like almost everything else in archaeology.
Even more so in this case, because when fishermen pull up
their nets, they may find their catch contains a fine leg, or a body, like that of the
Satyr off the coast of Mazara del Vallo or the Apoxyomenos off Lošinj in Croatia.
IOZZO | And also the ability to scan the sea bottom with helpful electronic
instruments is a very recent development. Before that, you could do it if a statue got
caught in a net, otherwise you couldn’t.
MARINELLI | And the study of technique in ancient bronzes is very recent
too. It began about twenty-five to thirty years ago. No one bothered studying it
before then.
BRADBURNE | But this is also leading us in another direction: the move
from direct to indirect casting. That’s what allowed sculptors to produce statues
in different poses. I’d like someone to explain the difference between direct and
indirect casting, because I’m not quite clear about that yet. Direct casting is easy.
I place my hand on a mould, I take it away, I fill the mould with bronze, and hey
presto!
IOZZO | That’s only for small bronzes, which aren’t hollow. Large bronzes are
hollow so there’s a specific technique involved there.
BRADBURNE | I’d like to understand the technique from the start, from the
very first stages...
IOZZO | The first stage is directly on the mould. They’d hollow out a stone
or terracotta mould and fill the hollowed-out shape with bronze, which is why the
result wasn’t hollow. Small bronzes are like that too, generally of the twin-shell kind.
BRADBURNE | So they’re not made on any kind of cast, then? They’re carved
directly out of the mould, is that it?
IOZZO | Yes, they’re carved directly out the mould.
BRADBURNE | So they’re a kind of direct operation. But the operation’s
technically limited.
MARINELLI | Yes, because when bronze gets too thick it shrinks like mad.
Full casting can’t be used for statues over a given size because otherwise, when they
cool down, the bronze shrinks and the surface looks all pitted and split.
BRADBURNE | So how big is this “given size”?
IOZZO |
SEBREGONDI |
38
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
MARINELLI | I think the axes and small bronze statues from the Nuraghe are
about the biggest things that were ever made that way.
IOZZO | Yes, but our Romans made things that way too, while they made
large ones hollow.
BRADBURNE | So they made the parts to then assemble them into something
larger. Then at one point they had to find the next stage, didn’t they?
IOZZO | In the sixth century BCE. So up until the eighth century BCE and the
beginning of the seventh in Greece, which means the whole of the Mediterranean,
they didn’t have the technical skill to make statues larger than a given size, say 20
centimetres. There are only small bronze statues this size (he indicates a height of
about 40 cm. with his hands) but they’re sphirelata, from sphiri which means hammer
in Greek. What they did was to carve a statuette in wood and then clad it in thin
beaten bronze. The wood hasn’t survived, so we have these hollow statues which
are basically hollow bronze cladding. They’re not cast, the cladding was melted and
then hammered. Then in around 600 BCE the Greeks discovered marble and made
large marble statues. In other words, they rediscovered the marble quarries on Paros
and Naxos, which had the best marble in the Mediterranean before the discovery
of Luni marble in Carrara, but that’s different from Greek marble anyway. So they
devised these huge sculptures, they realised they could make these huge statues – for
which the Egyptians used granite – using marble, and that they’d remain erect on
their feet without cracking at the ankles. They began to experiment with metals,
with lead. There are three or four examples still extant and in fact we have one in
the museum in Florence. When they saw that it worked, they moved on to bronze
and began to make them even larger. That was when they started to experiment
with the direct casting technique.
BRADBURNE | I’d like to get a clearer picture. Tell me how a large bronze
statue is made. Tell me from the beginning how this major technical transition from
direct to indirect casting came about. It was a tremendous development and I’d like
to know how and when it took place.
IOZZO | It took place in the sixth century BCE, shortly after 600 BCE, and
it probably wasn’t a Greek invention, because the Greeks developed skills that they
learnt from the Egyptians, the Hittites and so on.
40
|
BRADBURNE |
But who made the actual discovery? Where do we first find
traces of it?
MARINELLI | Well for instance, we know extremely little about China but
they were already casting.
BRADBURNE | They have a long tradition in the field of bronze casting.
IOZZO | But there was no contact because they were too far away. The
Egyptians were probably making things already, that weren’t that big but they had...
BRADBURNE | Explain to us from the beginning what happens when you
start working with bronze?
MARINELLI | Given that bronze needs to be made hollow and you can’t make
a full statue, how did they envisage proceeding? Well, an artist would carve a very
rough clay version of the figure he had in mind. Then he’d take wax and start to
smear it all over the clay with his hands, then he’d start carving the details in the wax.
BRADBURNE | So there was a base and then the details were carved in wax
on the base, like we saw in the other room, is that it?
MARINELLI | No, that’s the indirect technique. OK, so let’s finish the direct
technique first. So that way the artist created his sculpture in wax over the clay.You
had to be very skilled because the clay couldn’t be wet, otherwise it would never
dry once it had a wax coating.These are all empirical details learnt by trial and error.
BRADBURNE | I’d like to be clear about this, because I’m sure I’m not
the only one who has to try and imagine this direct process and the way it then
developed into the indirect process.
MARINELLI | So, what happens next? Well, we now have a wax model with a
core, a clay core. At that point you insert the air vent tubes and you cover it on the
outside as well and you get a mould like ours, the same as the ones we make. You
fire it, the wax melts, you pour the molten bronze into it, smash open the mould
and out comes your cast statue.
BRADBURNE | The clay remains and the bronze coats it, taking the place of
the wax that’s disappeared. Is there only one example of the work because the wax
only survives one run, or not?
MARINELLI | You have to start all over again with every cast.
IOZZO | Yes, you lose the wax.
41
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
BRADBURNE | So let me get this straight: the sculptor makes his sculpture in
wax and once the wax is lost with the direct method, the work can no longer be
copied or replicated because the wax disappears?
IOZZO | Not with the direct method, but you can always take a plaster cast
once the statue has been cast.
MARINELLI | If you want to make another statue, you have to make the
sculpture in clay again, then coat it with wax and start all over again from scratch.
But then they began to realise that if you make a perfect, finished sculpture in any
material at all and then take a negative mould of it, when you split the mould open
you can get at least ten wax versions out of it.
BRADBURNE | But you have to fill the hollow inside, don’t you?
MARINELLI | That’s what we do now. We have a negative mould that we
make with a brush.We put a thin coating of wax on it and ... take a leg, for example.
I make a negative mould of the leg in two halves. This one’s a silicon resin but
they only used to use plaster in the old days. They made a plaster mould like this.
This is the sculptor’s original mould; we make a mother mould in plaster, because
otherwise silicon falls apart.
BRADBURNE | But this resin could originally have been...
MARINELLI | Plaster. Donatello in the Renaissance used a glue made of fish
glue and glycerin that you then rewax. We used to use it in the foundry too, before
they invented silicon.
BRADBURNE | Quite, but in Greek times moulds were only ever made of
plaster, right?
IOZZO | Yes, that’s right.
BRADBURNE | And did that change in the Renaissance, or earlier?
MARINELLI | Before Donatello, only plaster was used. Gelatin causes
problems because you can only get one or two waxes with gelatin, certainly no
more than that, because you need to apply the wax when it’s hot and so it melts it.
BRADBURNE | Getting back to the topic of replicas, duplicates and copies,
I’m curious to find out when it became technically possible to get a second or third
run. There are examples of prints taken today from original Rembrandt engravings
but they change, and an expert can tell you that this is the umpteenth run off an
original plate.
44
45
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
IOZZO | That’s only with modern techniques, because only modern
techniques allow you to repeat a work from the same mould.
BRADBURNE | But when it wasn’t possible to take a second run from the
original, as it wasn’t in the ancient world, were there any direct copies? Copies of
the same things? Or did they have to remake them similar but not identical?
IOZZO | We don’t know. Archaeology has only recently made this discovery,
I’m talking about thirty or forty years ago. Because in Baia, near Naples in Campania,
pieces were found...They were half a face, a piece of hand and another two or three
pieces of plaster statues that were copies of fifth century BCE statues, while the
plaster pieces were first century CE. So we know for sure that, in one case at least,
they could copy by making moulds and using plaster.
MARINELLI | And in any case, while studying the Riace Bronzes, we discovered
that there were foundries in Greece that worked along mass-production lines, in the
sense that they made identical busts then changed the arms and heads.
BRADBURNE | Was that because they were moulded?
48
|
MARINELLI | They were moulded, in other words they were made with the
method we use today, the indirect method. If the mould’s plaster, for example, the
indirect method allows you to make quite a few wax runs before it starts to wear.
So the indirect method allowed them to make several replicas of a single statue in
the ancient world too.
IOZZO | An extraordinary case is the Livorno Torso in our museum. It’s virtually
unique because it was thought to be an original 5th century BCE bronze, but recent
study has shown us that it’s a Roman cast of a 5th century work, which reproduced
the Greek statue with all its flaws and repairs. And that’s unique. We always thought
the Romans did that, but we never had any tangible proof until now.
MARINELLI | They were far more advanced than people think.
BRADBURNE | Yes, I believe they were very advanced, both in their mastery
of technique and especially in their craftsmanship.
SEBREGONDI | Have you seen how amazing it is when workmen cover the
slough?
49
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
MARINELLI | That’s
the indirect method. With that cast...
Moulded directly on the sculpture?
MARINELLI | This is what we do with this cast: we brush hot wax on it, red
wax, then we remove it from the cast and thicken it up with non-red wax. So we
bring it up to the thickness it needs to be for bronze. At that point the wax, which
can be one replica, two replicas or three replicas because we have the cast, is filled
with refractory material – this stuff here – which is called slough. The slough is the
same as they used in the Renaissance, a mixture of plaster and ground brick.
BRADBURNE | Does that make it less heavy?
MARINELLI | No, it makes it more heat-resistant because brick, being fired,
holds out better, while plaster does not hold out as well.
BRADBURNE | And this is a single level, is it?
MARINELLI | Hang on, let me show you. Look, you can see it properly here.
First there’s a very thin layer, less than a millimetre, and then there’s the brown
thickening. We make it red because wax is translucent and you can’t see the volume
of the alteration very well. All the rest is done by hand. If the mould’s small, you
can make the second layer using the rinse method. First you fill it with red wax...
BRADBURNE | How about this piece here, which is moulded onto this
mould here...
MARINELLI | It’s been thickened by hand.
BRADBURNE | But is it identical to the original?
MARINELLI | Absolutely.
BRADBURNE | Whether it’s by Michelangelo or anybody else, this is the
original moulded over it.
MARINELLI | For Classical work it’s very important to have casts made on
originals, because very often they’re casts of casts of casts, and so you start losing
both the original dimensions and the freshness of the work.
BRADBURNE | I wanted to ask Mario whether there are many casts in
museums, and how many originals there are. In the Victoria and Albert Museum
in the late 19th century, for example, there were numerous casts of originals and
numerous casts made from 17th or 18th century casts – is that part of the history of
“casting”? What is it called?
SALVIOLI | “Moulding”.
BRADBURNE |
50
51
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
BRADBURNE | Perhaps you have something to add on this topic, because a
restorer should be familiar with all these stages.
SALVIOLI | Yes. An awful lot of plaster casts were made in the 18th century and
the models were used over and over again. For instance, the models of Donatello’s
David, which may well be one of the ones reproduced most often. You here at
the Marinelli Foundry have one of the oldest casts, dating back to the Donatello
exhibition at the Bargello in 1887, when they displayed Donatello’s artistic output
with all the plaster casts. And countless casts have been made of the David ever
since, and if we go and look at the various castings and various plaster casts, they’re
all different precisely because some of the definition and posture is lost on each
occasion. All it takes is minute details to change a work of sculpture and present
only an image of it.
BRADBURNE | That’s exactly what happened with the Rembrandt engravings.
SALVIOLI | The same thing.
BRADBURNE | Every time a run’s taken for these...
MARINELLI | It deteriorates a little.
SALVIOLI | Yes, it deteriorates a little. And the original deteriorates too. Many
ancient and Renaissance bronze originals have deteriorated because, when they cut
the plaster dowels to give it the finishing touches they’d scratch the surface, and
today we find many of these marks carved into the patinas.
BRADBURNE | Getting back to this, when a bronze statue was made, did the
sculptor intervene on the bronze itself, on the metal, I mean? Did he go back to it
after the bronze had been cast?
MARINELLI | Oh yes, the whole thing was chased, of course.
BRADBURNE | He returned to it to chase it, giving each piece its originality.
MARINELLI | What I was trying to say is that an object in bronze is never
original. If I bring along a wooden sculpture I’ve carved and have it made in bronze,
I’m taking a cast, so the bronze isn’t original, it’s a bronze replica of an original. So it’s
very difficult to tell when something’s original and when it isn’t. For instance, many
Roman bronzes were made by the Romans taking casts of Greek marble statues, so
are they original or aren’t they? We call them Roman copies but the originality in the
bronze version is difficult to establish. We can only say that if a sculptor comes here
and brings us a mould and says: “I want six of these, or twelve”, twelve is normally
52
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
the limit, then we break the mould in his presence. So he makes the decision and says:
“these are my twelve originals”, but then what happens if a thirteenth is made later...
SALVIOLI | Sure enough, we have to make the distinction between “copies”,
“replicas” and “variants”.
BRADBURNE | Exactly. We’ve reached an interesting point in the discussion,
because in the various phases in history when bronze was recast, such as in the fifth
century BCE, the bronze may have been old but the replica might be contemporary,
later, Roman for instance. So that’s a truly fascinating topic, in my mind, because it
also points to the growing market, especially in China, in bronzes that look antique
– because their tradition in bronze casting is very ancient – but there’s a market full
of bronzes that...
SALVIOLI | They’re in burnished aluminium.
BRADBURNE | They’re peddled as antiques, even though they’re not. But let’s
get back to “copy”, “replica” and “variant” issue.
SALVIOLI | The first period we’re certain about these differences could be the
15th century. Take the bronze statuettes produced in the Veneto, for example. Certain
sculptors produced small figures, possibly in wax. They cut them up and obtained
several smaller pieces, for instance an arm, another arm, a leg, or a head, then they
assembled them differently, with the head facing sideways, one arm raised and the
other lowered and so on.These were all “variants” of models reused several times over
by assembling them. In the 15th century there was an ouput one might almost call
industrial, it was almost mass-production, because from a single model, sculptors like
Severo da Ravenna or bronzesmiths like Briosco or Riccio produced ten or fifteen
bronze statuettes with the same seven or eight pieces, only in different positions.
BRADBURNE | Fifteen, but not mass-produced. How big would they have been?
SALVIOLI | Twenty or thirty centimetres. Then Giambologna began to use
perfect models because, for instance, he produced three of his Christ himself. Tacca
managed to make another two, then the model broke.
BRADBURNE | The Christ in the basilica of the Santissima Annunziata?
SALVIOLI | For the Santissima Annunziata, for Pisa cathedral and for Munich.
When Tacca inherited Giambologna’s workshop, he made another one. Tacca’s next
crucifix, I’d say the one in Prato, is completely different, because Giambologna’s
model had broken so Tacca changed it.
54
55
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
BRADBURNE | I’d like to ask Mario something. You mentioned the absence
of bronzes from the ancient world, but we do have copies, variants and so on. Are
they mostly Roman because the Romans admired and copied the Greeks?
IOZZO | Yes, they’re basically marble because they’d melt down the bronzes,
and if they melted them down it was to make other statues – they used marble for
variants, copies and replicas.
BRADBURNE | So bronze originals are extremely rare, then?
IOZZO | Yes, for the same reason. Plundering and sacking was common in the
Middle Ages. When we do find them, they’re at the level you find with Roman-era
excavations.
MARINELLI | The same thing happened with marble, actually, because marble
statues were reused to make lime. Tonnes of statues were burnt for lime in Rome
during the “barbarian era”.
SEBREGONDI | That was still happening in Rhodes in the early 16th century. A
knight from Milan named Fra’ Sabba da Castiglione “reported” Fra’Aimery d’Amboise,
the Hospitaller grand master, for allowing ancient statues to be burnt for lime.
BRADBURNE | A variant has been defined as the same model with certain
parts positioned differently, but what’s the difference between a copy and a replica?
SALVIOLI | A replica could be a workshop producing a second bronze statue
based on a previous model, or a previous bronze by the same craftsmen even many
years later. A copy, on the other hand, is when the duplication has to be as faithful to
the original as possible, without falsifying its aspect, and copying its external features
without any distortion – a practice that was widespread from the 19th century on for
both marble and bronze statues, for conservation but also for commercial purposes.
BRADBURNE | There aren’t many remaining Greek bronzes, but aren’t there
many copies or replicas and so on?
IOZZO | A copy is an identical copy, while a replica can be smaller, identical
but smaller. A variant is the same figure but instead of holding a sceptre in its hand,
for instance, it may be holding a bundle of ears of corn. Or it can be a mirror image.
If it was one way in the original, then the variant is made differently because that’s
how they needed it to be.
BRADBURNE | And replicas are a different size.
56
|
IOZZO | Yes, they are, but sizes were set. The figures could be one-third the
original size, or else half-size...
BRADBURNE | But did they have techniques for producing perfect
reproductions, like a pantograph in 3D, or were they carved again from scratch, thus
becoming originals again?
IOZZO | Yes they did; they used the “pointing” technique.
MARINELLI | They were recarved with points.
IOZZO | Yes, using the pointing technique.
BRADBURNE | And were they developed with grids?
MARINELLI | No, nowadays there are machines that they use for marble
statues. To carve a marble statue, you place a plaster cast alongside your block and
use this three-point machine.
BRADBURNE | Do you have one here?
MARINELLI | No, but I’ve got one in Pietrasanta, I have a workshop there as well.
57
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
BRADBURNE | Do you always use precise proportions like a third or a
quarter? Isn’t there a broad range of possible sizes?
IOZZO | No, there’s no range. It’s either a third, half or full-size.
BRADBURNE | So if it doesn’t fit into a category, we can’t call it a replica then?
IOZZO | Yes, it is a replica, because then it depends on how good the copyist
is. In Roman copies you can tell the skilled craftsmen from those who end up
making ten of them...
MARINELLI | More slapdash.
IOZZO | We’re certain about mass production. This pointing technique made
it possible to mass produce because some Roman statues are numbered under their
base, XXIII, XXIV and so on.
SEBREGONDI | In the Opera del Duomo’s restoration laboratory they’ve got
a machine for making identical marble statues, because they have to replace worn
columns and figures in the cathedral complex.
MARINELLI | It’s a pantograph.
SALVIOLI | It’s what you see in Bartolini’s plaster casts in the Accademia, for
instance; they have reference points for the volumes.
SEBREGONDI | And Canova too, who has a plaster cast with all those black dots.
SALVIOLI | Exactly, just like Canova. Plaster allows you to work in a far
fresher and quicker fashion, so that you can then translate your work into marble
using a pantograph.
BRADBURNE | Let’s get back to my question. Someone walks into my office
tomorrow with a bronze statue and says: “This is an ancient bronze, it’s fantastic, I’d
like to sell it”. I answer: “I don’t know, I’m a museum curator and I don’t know the
piece”. What would I have to do to find out whether it’s a forgery or not? Because
forgeries do exist, there’s a whole trade in forgeries!
IOZZO | There’s a trade in deliberate forgeries and then there’s a trade in
reproductions of ancient works. In our Great Small Bronzes exhibition we had
ten small bronzes, which I’m currently studying, and which we’ve discovered
are Renaissance copies or Renaissance small bronzes based on ancient work that
imitate the originals. So were they sold to Cosimo I as genuine ancient works, or as
imitations of ancient works?
60
|
MARINELLI | The
former.
inventories mention instances of both.
BRADBURNE | There are reproductions that don’t attempt to be anything but
copies, but when these people show up, what should we be looking for? First of all,
we have to make sure it’s bronze, of course, but apart from that, how can we know
for sure that it’s a third century BCE work, or a Roman piece, a Renaissance piece
or even something that Marinelli made here last week?
MARINELLI | It’s very difficult. For instance, I don’t buy ancient bronzes
because, in my view, they’re extremely hard to come by.
SALVIOLI | There are ways of being 99% certain, but they’re a combination
of many different factors.
IOZZO | Iconography, style...
SALVIOLI | Iconography first and foremost, but as a restorer I can’t interpret
that, it’s not my field.You need an art historian or an archaeologist, because I can’t
possibly know. And then you have to observe the details of its manufacture and
conduct analytical inspections and compare your results with existing literature.
IOZZO | Forgers often get a few details wrong.
BRADBURNE | That’s very important.
IOZZO | A few details.
MARINELLI | In statues that have been remade. But what if it’s a cast, a copy
of an existing statue? Giambologna made smaller ones with Pietro and Ferdinando
Tacca and then with Susini.
SALVIOLI | That’s the most difficult area. Giambologna’s school is the
trickiest of all.You can get close, thanks precisely to his use of models. It’s common
knowledge that Giambologna used his models only twice or three times, then he
either gave them away or put them aside. So the people who used them afterwards...
MARINELLI | Models become worn.
SALVIOLI | Models do become worn, and besides, we know the details
of Susini’s and the Taccas’ work. And we can always glean something from the
differences…
MARINELLI | In the way the wax is finished and in the chasing.
SALVIOLI | The chasing and the overall anatomy.
IOZZO | The
61
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
BRADBURNE | There’s an interactive game in the exhibition, in which visitors
can try to resolve the mystery of the missing statue, because the curators don’t know
what it was or what it looked like. But let’s imagine that a statue comes onto the
market. How can I tell whether a statue claiming to be by Lysippos is definitely a
forgery or whether it’s genuine?
SALVIOLI | By stylistic comparison...
BRADBURNE | Because an archaeologist has a trained eye. There are the
patinas...
IOZZO | Yes, the patinas, the corrosion, the alloy analyses. There are endless
technical factors.
BRADBURNE | There are endless patinas too – we haven’t discussed patinas yet.
IOZZO | They change with every century.
BRADBURNE | But were bronzes given a patina to achieve an artistic effect, or
did they just acquire them by accident as a result of the passage of time?
IOZZO | Both. Some bronzes were given a deliberate patina.We know that in
Greek times they used to give them a patina using pitch from the Sila region. Ships
would sail from the four corners of the Mediterranean to get the pitch from those
particular pine trees, because they used it to achieve an artistic effect. And then there
were other kinds of patina too.
MARINELLI | As Pliny tells us.
SALVIOLI | There are endless kinds of patina. Ghiberti used to send for
newborn babies’ pee for his first patina, the first layer for oxydisation. So there
are countless types of patina. There’s the patina that forms naturally over time, and
there’s the artificial patina which is the artist’s original finish.
BRADBURNE | Can a restorer usually identify the difference between the two?
SALVIOLI | There are huge differences between the two. Forgers usually
always try to reproduce them, but they hardly ever manage because the expert eye
and analytical inspections can easily detect an artificial patina trying to imitate an
ancient one. There are differences in the thickness, the body and the colouration of
the patina. There are numerous things that need to match in a technological as well
62
|
as well as in a stylistic comparison. If you were to come up to me and you tell me
that you have this bronze statuette by Giambologna, it’s twenty centimetres tall and
it weighs three kilos, I’d say “no, it isn’t”, because Giambologna’s would’ve weighed
a hundred grams, or a hundred and twenty; so either it’s full of lead...
MARINELLI | Or clay.
SALVIOLI | But even so, it’d never be as heavy as that, so there’s an endless list
of things you have to look at.
BRADBURNE | And thank heavens they’re not in resin. They do exist, you
know, because on the Internet you can find things that are obviously in resin but are
being peddled as small bronzes.
SALVIOLI | For example, large numbers of “ancient” Chinese horses on
the market, which are typically green from corrosion, are actually green from real
copper corrosion being applied with glue onto an aluminium casting. I’ve come
across several such items being sold as the genuine article.
IOZZO | Yes, but even without going to that extreme, there’s this famous
bronze in the museum in Cleveland which popped up a few years ago. It’s a fabulous
statue, the Apollo Sauroctonos, Apollo killing a lizard, symbolising the dragon, which
Cleveland supposedly bought from a German collector who had it in East Germany.
It was an odd story, but that’s what it was, and there was no documentation. The
whole world is still debating whether it’s an original by Praxiteles, but I don’t think
it is. I think it’s a good copy of the Hellenistic era. In other words, this is one of those
cases in which someone in, I reckon, around 150 BCE took a cast of Praxiteles’
work and reproduced it perfectly, devoting greater attention to the head, which
is very fine indeed, but the ankles look like sausages, and in my view it isn’t by
Praxiteles at all. It isn’t because none of the Roman copies of statues by Praxiteles,
for which we no longer have the originals but which we know only from Roman
copies, have these cylindrical ankles. They have ankles like today’s top models.
MARINELLI | They all have twelve millimetre pipes for ankles. (laughter)
BRADBURNE | But getting back to the antiquities in the exhibition.
MARINELLI | How about going to see the plaster casts?
63
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
The group moves from the bronze workshop to the large warehouse where the Fonderia
Marinelli keeps its plaster casts
I’d like to go back to something you said about forgeries and
the use of modern techniques to analyse statues. You mentioned the use of X-ray.
What does this new technology give us to help us determine whether a statue’s an
original, a copy, a replica, a variant or a recent forgery?
SALVIOLI | X-ray allows us to see inside the bronze, so we can see the
casting core, if it’s there, or the arrangement of the armature; and those techniques
undoubtedly changed over time and from one artist to the next. Also, with the
more detailed digital X-ray method we use these days, we can select small parts of
the bronze to identify flaws in the casting, bubbles and the seams in the wax. These
are all minor features that allow us to distinguish the period the bronze was made
and the technique used to make it, or the problems it encountered during casting,
because bronze is always subject to flaws.
BRADBURNE | Can you tell the period in which a statue was made according
to the particular stage in the development of technology?
SALVIOLI | Of course. And then there’s a whole series of analyses, even of
the non-destructive kind. Today we can almost do without taking a sample of a
sculpture, just by analysing its surface with instruments that only delve a few tenths
of a millimetre into its surface.That’s enough to tell us the materials in the alloy and
to allow us to identify the period it was cast, the origin of some of the materials and
their state of corrosion. Because if we analyse lead, for instance, we can tell whether
it comes from Sweden or from England. These are all features in an increasingly
well-defined hypothetical grid of knowledge we’re building.
BRADBURNE | Isn’t the carbon analysis used accurate enough?
SALVIOLI | No, it isn’t accurate because, well, let me give you an example.
If there’s nickel or chrome inside a bronze statuette, then it certainly can’t be a
Renaissance work. Just as we can tell that a very high percentage of lead is more
likely to point to a Roman statuette than a Greek one. These are all clues. But then
there’s a problem...
BRADBURNE |
64
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
BRADBURNE | There’s the recasting problem. Because if a bronze is recast,
that creates another problem.
SALVIOLI | Exactly. For instance, at certain periods in history, statues were
made by melting down Ottoman cannons, so the provenance and materials are
different. Recycling material brings impurities into the picture.Whereas casting clay
is really important, because it changes from one foundry to another, it’s different from
one area to another. For example, we know the origin of the clay, we know that a
certain type of clay comes from, say, the bed of the Arno, upstream or downstream of
Florence.The materials that the foundrymen used allow us to tell where the bronze
statuettes come from, because a typically Florentine clay certainly can’t belong to a
bronze statuette made in England. There are very many features that are important
from a statistical standpoint.
MARINELLI | That’s the bronze alloy we use. We use 90:10, i.e. 90% copper
to 10% tin and nothing else. It costs us an arm and a leg.
68
|
SALVIOLI | It’s the sculptor’s alloy. The deliveries are analysed. It can contain
up to 0.1% impurity of various kinds at most, and even then...
IOZZO | The Greeks certainly had indirect casting.
MARINELLI | Undoubtedly.
IOZZO | Yes, but almost immediately after they’d discovered direct casting.
MARINELLI | If what it says in the publication on the state of the Riace
Bronzes is true, then these mass-produced busts with mass-produced arms applied in
different positions already existed in Greek times.
SALVIOLI | And besides, the fact that a bronze is very light is due precisely to
the fact that there’s a negative.
MARINELLI | Yes, because if direct casting’s used, the statue comes out thick.
SALVIOLI | If the “Medici Riccardi” Horse’s Head on display in the exhibition,
which weighs 70 kilos, were a Renaissance work of the same size, it would weigh
at least 100 kilos.
69
|
MARINELLI | The foundrymen were skilled because, as we were saying, it was
the material that was expensive; labour was cheap, so to save on the bronze, they
worked hard.
SALVIOLI | And then their great skill lay in managing to achieve thin casting,
in other words in managing to get the molten metal to flow into a very narrow
space. That’s where we see great technology and great skill, because achieving thin
casting takes time and money, and getting the metal to flow into a narrow space,
well, that’s pure technology.
MARINELLI | Using an alloy with not much lead to make sure it flowed.
And they probably used reverse casting, in other words they cast the bronze, and the
bronze rose up from the casting.
IOZZO | Because that part drew in the metal better.
SALVIOLI | And then they broke the mould. All these operations...
MARINELLI | It’s funny, because direct sculptures were made in the pit where
they were then cast, while indirect ones weren’t.
IOZZO | Of course, you could make indirect ones in separate pieces outside
the pit.
SALVIOLI | And all of this was later handed down through bell-casting,
which was crucial because the skill was lost in the Middle Ages; a whole range of
technical skills were lost after the fall of the Roman Empire. Bell-casting, which was
handed down by Byzantine craftsmen, is a special skill because the bell-caster led a
nomadic life. Gone were the days of the artist who had his own foundry because it
was easier to carry disassembled pieces than a bell. So bells were usually cast inside
the bell tower. It’s extremely common during restoration to find casting pits inside
bell towers, at least up until the 14th century, because they’d lift the bell up from one
floor to the next as the tower rose. It’s astonishing. And bell alloys are a very different
matter from the alloys used for cannons or for statuary.
71
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
BRADBURNE | Getting back to what we were discussing earlier, you
mentioned that Giambologna had his own foundry, but didn’t Lysippos and the
other great sculptors of the ancient world also have close ties with a foundry? How
did they work? Because I see Lysippos everywhere in Greece…
IOZZO | They had foundries, and in fact they were foundrymen themselves.
They were a bit like Giambologna or Cellini. They were the boss.
BRADBURNE | So did Lysippos travel around to different cities and produce
his statues there?
IOZZO | No, his assistants did. But he was the one who had to have all the
material, the furnace, the wood.The city would commission the work from him and
he had to produce it. They gave him all the money, but...
BRADBURNE | So would Alexander the Great say: “I want this Heracles on
my table” and then Lysippos would produce it?
IOZZO | Yes, he’d produce it.
BRADBURNE | Did he show up with his assistants and produce the work?
IOZZO | Yes, what he would do would be to choose where to site the large
casting pit, where to stockpile the wood and everything else.
BRADBURNE | All of this under Lysippos’ supervision?
IOZZO | Yes, of course. He had a master craftsman and a site foreman, of course.
BRADBURNE | And did he then intervene on the finished bronze to chase it?
IOZZO | I think so, yes.Yes, he certainly did.
BRADBURNE | Do we have any evidence, because you say there are so few
bronzes of the period left?
74
75
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
IOZZO | Yes, we do have evidence because there are the casting pits; although
we may not know who...
BRADBURNE | Do we have a statue by Lysippos with traces of hammering
and chasing on it, chasing on the bronze?
IOZZO | No, no originals by Lysippos. We just have the signed base.
BRADBURNE | I know we do, and we have a major mystery to solve around
it (laughs).
IOZZO | If the Cleveland statue really is by Praxiteles, then there could
now be an original. One, just one. There are those who believe, for instance, that
the so-called Boxer is a Greek original. Just to show you the state of art history in
the world where Greek bronzes are concerned. We’re accustomed to attributing
the many world-famous Greek artists’ works to them through Roman copies. As
soon as I came into this room, for example, I recognized the Diana of Versailles,
as it’s known, this Diana holding her mantle, which is by Praxiteles. So we’re
instantly capable of recognising them thanks to Roman copies. Praxiteles’ Pouring
Satyr, this one by Lysippos, this one portraying Pythagoras... As soon as we find
two originals, outstanding originals, or outstanding for us at any rate, like the
Riace Bronzes, we don’t just not know the name of the sculptor – Myron, Phidias,
Cleanthes, Pythagoras of Reggio – but we don’t know the chronology – 460
BCE, 440 BCE, 430 BCE, Argos, Athens, Polykleitos, just to give you an idea.This
whole grid that we’ve made, that we’ve reconstructed through Roman copies, is
probably a bit lame in part, in fact it’s unquestionably lame.
76
77
| Bronze. Art in the foundry
|
Selected bibliography
Luciano Canfora, La biblioteca scomparsa, Palermo, Sellerio Editore, 1986.
Paolo Moreno, Scultura ellenistica, Roma, Libreria dello Stato,
Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1994.
Paolo Moreno, Alessandro Magno. Immagini come storia, Roma, Libreria dello Stato,
Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2004.
Marina Belozerskaya, Art, Architecture, and History, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2004.
Power and Pathos. Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World catalogue of the exhibition
(Florence Palazzo Strozzi 14 March–21 June 2015; Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty
Museum, Getty Center 28 July–1st Novembre 2015; Washington DC, National
Gallery of Art 8 December 2015-13 March 2016) curated by Jens M. Daehner
e Kenneth Lapatin, Florence, Giunti, 2015.
Piccoli, grandi bronzi, catalogue of the exhibition (Florence, Museo Archeologico
Nazionale, 20 March–21 June 2015) curated by Andrea Pessina, Mario Iozzo,
Giuseppina Carlotta Cianferoni, Firenze, Polistampa 2015.
Fabio Isman, I predatori dell’arte perduta. Il saccheggio dell’archeologia in Italia,
Milano, Skira, 2009.
La Minerva di Arezzo, curated by Mario Cygielman, Firenze, Polistampa, 2010.
Massimiliano Papini, Città sepolte e rovine nel mondo greco e romano,
Bari, Laterza, 2011.
Francesca Bertini, Il bronzo.Tecniche e materiali, Firenze, Polistampa, 2013.
Arte della Magna Grecia. La Collezione Colombo nel Museo Archeologico Nazionale
di Firenze, a cura di Mario Iozzo, Firenze, Polistampa, 2013.
78
79