For artists and sculptors, bronze represents a wonderful medium for producing sculpture. While marble may be tough to work with, and simple to break and damage, bronze is a hard and ductile metal.

Bronze is also wantable to other metals because, within the casting process, it is possible to achieve each detail and consistency.

As molten bronze solidifies in a mould, it expands slightly, thereby permitting for every element of the mould to be captured. Equally, as it cools further, it will once once more contract, subsequently allowing for the straightforward removal of the mould.

Depending on how the mould is made, this last property of bronze can mean that some moulds will be reused – so bronze sculptures, unlike stone ones, can simply be reproduced.

Lastly, bronze is esteemed by artists because of its rich colouring. Over time, bronze develops a particular patina, or burnish, which gives many bronze items the intensity for which they’re so typically lauded.

And as well as being patinated, bronze sculpture can also simply be silvered (producing silvered bronze) and gilded (producing gilt bronze, or ormolu), giving it an extraordinary number of makes use of, from furniture to clock-making to jewellery and far more.

How is bronze sculpture made?

Bronze sculpture will be forged utilizing a number of various techniques.

All of those techniques, nonetheless, utilise the basic principle of applying molten bronze right into a mould and leaving it to set, earlier than removing the mould, chasing the completed piece (refining and defining the thing using a hammer) and making use of a patina.

Precisely how the moulds are made, and exactly how the liquid bronze is applied to the mould, is where the technical variation occurs.

In Europe, for hundreds of years bronze moulds were produced in workshops known as foundries: a founder is somebody who makes a mould for bronze-casting.

The foundries utilised a set of established techniques for making bronze sculptures, and these included sand-casting, ‘lost-wax’ casting, and centrifugal casting. Most of those strategies were strategies utilised in antiquity.

By far the most common technique for producing bronze sculpture, nonetheless, is the ‘lost-wax’ method.

Lost-wax bronze casting

Misplaced-wax casting is probably the oldest and most primitive form of casting, and yet is still the most widely-used today. It’s also typically referred to as ‘funding casting’, or by its French name, cire perdue.

It is universally favoured by bronziers because of the fineness of detail which could be achieved by means of using wax and moulds.

The below video demonstrates the whole process of misplaced-wax bronze casting, from start to finish. This method (sometimes known as ‘hollow lost-wax casting by the indirect method’) is the most commonly-used form of misplaced-wax casting, however there are some variations.

Probably the most primitive and crude lost wax approach is known as stable misplaced-wax casting; simply achieved by making a model in wax, making a mould round it, melting out the wax and pouring within the bronze.

Because of the way that bronze sets, it is extraordinarily troublesome to make large pieces utilizing this form of the technique. More commonly, then, bigger bronze items will be made using the method known as ‘hollow lost-wax casting’, which entails more steps.

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