At the Foundry
The making of a Bronze Sculpture
The great civilisations of the old world worked in bronze.
Belonging to the Harappan civilisation and dating back to c. 2500 BC, is perhaps the first known bronze statue. The Greeks were the first to scale their figures up to life size.
Only a few examples exist in good condition; one is the seawater-preserved bronze Victorious Youth that required painstaking efforts to bring it to its present state for museum display. Far more Roman bronze statues have survived.
The ancient Chinese knew both lost-wax casting and section mould casting. The oldest known example of this technique is a 6,000-year old amulet from the Indus Valley civilisation.
It is the lost wax casting, or that to this day is the favoured method of creating intricate art works for artists and their sculptures and installations around the world.
Process
Casts can be made of the wax model itself, the direct method, or of a wax copy of a model that need not be of wax, the indirect method.
Besides the Lost wax casting in bronze with is the most widely known and applied, there is the investment casting for exceptionally fine detail and the Sand Casting, where detail is secondary. The sand cast bronze featured a highly organic surface.
At the Foundry
The making of a Bronze Sculpture
The great civilisations of the old world worked in bronze.
Belonging to the Harappan civilisation and dating back to c. 2500 BC, is perhaps the first known bronze statue. The Greeks were the first to scale their figures up to life size.
Only a few examples exist in good condition; one is the seawater-preserved bronze Victorious Youth that required painstaking efforts to bring it to its present state for museum display. Far more Roman bronze statues have survived.
The ancient Chinese knew both lost-wax casting and section mould casting. The oldest known example of this technique is a 6,000-year old amulet from the Indus Valley civilisation.
It is the lost wax casting, or that to this day is the favoured method of creating intricate art works for artists and their sculptures and installations around the world.
Process
Casts can be made of the wax model itself, the direct method, or of a wax copy of a model that need not be of wax, the indirect method.
Besides the Lost wax casting in bronze with is the most widely known and applied, there is the investment casting for exceptionally fine detail and the Sand Casting, where detail is secondary. The sand cast bronze featured a highly organic surface.