Introduction: In this book, we evaluate the ancient testimonia; investigate production materials from Greek and Roman casting debris; look at bronzes inside and out; apply modern technology to reconstructing the ancient industry; and assess the impact of technique on the way in which we understand classical bronze statuary. Furthermore, recognizing post-antique features in restoration, patina, and display can help to correct long-held misconceptions.

Chapter 3: Out of the Rabbit Hole. The scenes on the Berlin Foundry Cup illustrate activities in a workshop during the joining and finishing of statues and reveal the nature of the now-lost aboveground spaces of an ancient foundry. The scenes confirm use of the indirect lost-wax process in the early fifth century BC. The simultaneous production of two statues of different stylistic types, one archaic and the other classical, is a reminder that one style did not supplant another. Votives behind a furnace ward off the dangers of working with molten metal, although the conventionally naked participants in the scenes overlook that risk. Workshop practices were designed to suit specific commissions – a purple bruise in the cheek of a boxer, a colossus, the materials used for inlaid eyes. From normal procedures in a modern workshop to Benvenuto Cellini’s Renaissance description of tackling immediate problems, we see how little materials and procedures have changed since antiquity.

Not the Conclusion. Romans acquired ancient Greek statues to exhibit in public spaces, and they used classical sculptural styles and types in their own works. They made exact copies by overcasting old bronzes, and dealers probably fooled them into thinking these were antique. We are just as enthusiastic about undersea finds today as were the Romans. Statues described as “brasses” in the eighteenth century are now described as bronzes or more specifically as copper alloys. New technologies have widened the scope of our studies, but analyses of the bronze or of the clay core cannot distinguish Greek from Roman bronzes, but they can sometimes link two or more bronzes to a single foundry or lead us to where a bronze was produced. Noninvasive studies are being developed for the study of ancient bronzes, inside and out. There is still much to investigate.

Chapter 5: Cast from Life? We begin with the statues represented on the Berlin Foundry Cup and then advance to the Livadhostro Poseidon, an early indirect casting. Myron and Polykleitos, the fifth-century-BC artists whose names are most closely associated with the rise of athletic statuary, would have used this process, and they probably used living models, enabling them to repeat anatomical features, as on the Riace Bronzes and the bronze Apoxyomenos. These repeated bronze images surely represented the statuary industry as a whole. Did the industry go downhill in the third century BC, as Pliny claimed that it did (NH 34.53) after reaching its apogee in the fourth-century workshop of Lysippos? Were Pliny’s contemporaries more interested in the values of bronzes than in genius (NH 35.50)? Perhaps producing a statue from many small solid-cast pieces was the key to the future of the lost-wax process.