Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 4.djvu/416

quantity, and under Caligula, Nero, Vespasian, and Domitian, coined pure copper coins; afterwards they reverted to the mixture of lead. So far the words (Greek characters) and æs may be translated as bronze. Originally, no doubt, (Greek characters) was the name for pure copper. It is so employed by Homer, who calls it (Greek characters) (red), (Greek characters) (glittering), (Greek characters) (shining), terms which apply only to copper. But instead of its following from this that the process of alloying copper with other metals was not practised then, or was unknown to the poet, the contrary would seem to be the case from the passage (Iliad, xviii. 474) where he describes Hephæstus as throwing into his furnace, copper, tin, silver, and gold, to make the shield of Achilles, so that it is not always possible to know whether when he uses the word (Greek characters) he means copper pure or alloyed. Still more difficult is it to make this distinction when we read of the mythical Dactyls of Ida in Crete or the Telchines or Cyclopes being acquainted with the smelting of (Greek characters). It is not, however, likely that later Greek writers, who knew bronze in its true sense, and called it (Greek characters), would have employed this word without qualification to objects which they had seen unless they had meant it to be taken as bronze. When Pausanias (iii. 17, G) speaks of a statue, one of the oldest figures he had seen of this material, made of separate pieces fastened together with nails, we understand him to mean literally bronze, the more readily since there exist very early figures and utensils of bronze so made. The earliest employment of bronze for artistic purposes was to hammer it out in thin plates and fasten them together with nails. This process was called sphyrelaton. The next stage was casting, in connection with which the earliest Greek artists of fame are Theodorus and Rhœcus of Samos (Pausanias, viii. 14, 8, and x. 38, 5). It has been supposed that their merit consisted in introducing the process of casting statues hollow, that is, with an inner core of some material which could afterwards be removed and leave the figure light, less costly, and no less durable. There are remains of Assyrian bronze, probably older than the time of Theodorus and Rhœcus, cast with an inner core of iron; and there is also in the British Museum an early Etruscan statuette from Sessa on the Volturno, with a core of this metal, which from its being split down the side, owing to the expansion of the iron, shows how unserviceable the iron was for this purpose. Obviously the power of casting in bronze, whether solid or hollow, was a very great gain to sculptors, whose models worked in the clay with the rapidity of their inspiration could thus be accurately and at once reproduced. The difficulty and expense of the process must have been against it as compared with marble; yet

it was frequently employed, and in the case of colossal statues it had no rival. Of these the Colossus of Rhodes – a figure of the sun-god Helios, said to have been 70 cubits high – was an example of the utmost that art could do with bronze. It was thrown down by an earthquake after standing fifty-six years. A statue of Zeus at Tarentum by Lysippus was 40 cubits high, and though it could be moved with a touch of the hand, yet it resisted the force of storms by means of a support at the point of the greatest stress. The oldest seat of bronze-founding, at least to any extent, was the island of Delos, and next to that the island of Ægina, and yet copper does not appear to have been found in either. Between the two there existed a rivalry in the time of the sculptors Myron and Polycletus, of whom the former used the bronze of Delos, the latter that of Ægina. More celebrated than either was the bronze of Corinth, which some believed to have been first obtained by the melting together of statues of ordinary bronze, gold, and silver at the burning of that town. Pliny says that it consisted of gold, silver, and copper, and was considered more precious than silver and little less valuable than gold. There were three kinds of it – ore white, having almost the appearance of silver, in which silver predominated; another yellow, because of the great quantity of gold in it; and a third in which all three metals were equally represented. But the Corinthian bronze was used rather for drinking cups and utensils than for statues. The process of casting statues as given by Pliny was to bring the mass of copper to a liquid state, and then to throw into it a third part of old bronze and 12½ per cent. of plumbum argentarium, i.e., tin and lead in equal parts.

Of the vast number of bronze statues by ancient sculptors nothing beyond a few fragments remain; but if the colossal bronze head of Venus in the British Museum be taken as a typical example, it will show with what fineness and thin ness those figures were cast; or, again, as an instance of the quality of Greek bronze we may take the bronzes of Siris, also in the British Museum, on which a very thin plate of bronze will be seen in some parts of the figures beaten out nearly half an inch till it reaches the thinness of note-paper. Works in relief (ropcu/m), whether beaten out or chased, like those just mentioned, or cast, are comparatively rare, though this branch of art was largely practised even by the greatest sculptors, On the other hand, it does not appear to have been carried out by them to the extent in which it is found in Germany and Italy after the beginning of the 11th century, – for instance, in the reliefs on cathedral gates. The temple of Athene Chalkioikos in Sparta, with its walls covered with bronze reliefs, stands out as an exception. By the time of the Byzantine empire, when the power of modelling had declined, and a taste for glittering appearance took its place, the process of ornamenting bronze with reliefs was superseded by inlaying it with silver and other materials. As to the colour of the ancient bronzes little can now be said, because from lying so long in the earth they have become covered with what is technically called a patina, which is generally some shade of green, though sometimes also nearly blue, and at other times drab. This blue colour is very brilliant in bronzes from Herculaneum and Pompeii. A difference of soil very probably makes a different patina, but something may also be due to varieties in the alloy. Perhaps the finest examples of patina are to be found among the bronze mirrors, in which there seems to have been generally a con siderable quantity of silver for the sake of obtaining a highly reflecting surface. It does not appear that the pro cess of gilding bronze was carried to any extent in classical times, unless, perhaps, in the production of finger-rings, of which a considerable number remain. But if larger works in bronze fail, there is an abundance of statuette, -, candelabra, mirrors, cistce, and vessels of all kinds – Greek, Roman, and Etruscan. One fact to be noticed is that the great number of bronze mirrors which exist are nearly all Etruscan. A few may be Roman from the Latin inscrip tions which they bear, and a few also come from Greece. But the general rule of their being Etruscan reminds us of the reputation which the Etruscans enjoyed for the produc tion of works in bronze, not of high art, but of what might be called industrial art. They were celebrated also for modelling in clay; and that, as Pliny states, was the stage of art which immediately preceded casting in bronze, and went hand in hand with it.

The art of bronze casting, which had sunk with the

Byzantine empire, was again revived with great vigour in Germany in the 11th century, from which period are tho bronze gate of the cathedral at Hildesheim (1015) and the column decorated with reliefs on the model of the column of Trajan in Rome (1022). In the 12th century the art spread southward to Italy, and at first was taken up energetically in Lower Italy. But though many interesting

works of this kind exist also from the 13th and 14th