Casting Bronze

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In the past, bronze was much more expensive than stone, as it was needed for tools and weapons.

When a town was in danger, no one thought twice about melting down some bronze statues to make cannons. They even melted down one of Michelangelo’s works.

:-) It was a statue of Pope Julius. They turned it into an artillery gun and called the gun “La Julia”.

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In bronze you can do what could never be done in stone : things up in the air, things defying gravity or dancing on the point of a needle.

If you do a horse in stone, you will have to do him leaning against a wall or held up by a tree, because stone legs  would never support such a big bulky body.

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People who learn how to model find that out the hard way.

They model their first horse or cat holding him up in the air, and when finally at the end of the day they set him down on a board, what happens?

:-(

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In bronze you can also do more detail than would be nice to see in stone.

There is a famous door in Florence called “del Baptisterio” where a sculptor spent his entire life depicting every little Bible story he had ever heard of:

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There is a 1.82 MB photo at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3a/Paradies_tuer_florenz.jpg

and a 10.7 MB photo at http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Puerta_del_Baptisterio_de_Florencia.jpeg

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Bronze casting is a technically difficult 5 step operation.  Sculptors usually leave it to the technicians. And the technicians often botch a job.

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You start by modelling a figure in wax or clay ….

and when it is finished you take it to a foundry.

1. At the foundry they will bury your work in liquid plaster.

2. When the plaster sets up and gets hard, they carefully  cut it open along lines  planned beforehand.

3. They take out the clay or the wax and thereby destroy your work, but printed into the hard plaster there is now a perfect negative of your figure.

4. They paint the negative with a thin layer of wax and again fill in plaster.

5. Finally they melt out the wax layer and pour in bronze.

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Here is again Cellini’s famous Perseus in Florence, Italy.

Cellini cast it himself, very nearly ruined it, and set his house afire.

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Bronze and Cast Stone

At present, both bronze and cast stone figures can be reproduced in large numbers. In some places the law  allows up to 8 copies to be sold as original work. Besides, it is legal to sell dozens or hundreds of copies as “numbered”, for instance 34/90 meaning  that it is the 34th copy of 90 that are being made.

Everybody knows Andersen’s little mermaid cast in bronze and sitting on the seashore in Denmark or on your book shelf:

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And most people have seen a copy of Rodin’s muscular Thinker who looks like he needs a lot of strength to keep thinking:

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Cast stone is  a mix made of of cement and  stone dust.

Ever since the Middle Ages it has been used as a building material and for cemetery and garden decoration:

Fortifications of Carcassonne, France.
Photo under a GNU General Public License at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Carcassonne-vignes.jpg

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Benlliure’s little known  statue of the general and his horse is at the Retiro Park in Madrid, Spain. The great photo heading this post has been released into public domain by Daderot as General Arsenio Martínez-Campos, Parque del Buen Retiro, Madrid at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:General_Arsenio_Mart%C3%ADnez-Campos,_Parque_del_Buen_Retiro,_Madrid.JPG

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