Chapter 2: Notes from Underground. Excavations in the Athenian Agora have revealed the most important site in the classical world for evidence from more than twenty metalworking establishments. All the bronze statues that Pausanias noted after his visit to Athens are gone, but some of the clay molds that were broken up and discarded in casting pits can be identified: a sixth-century-BC kouros, and a standing male wearing Classical drapery, the casting dated by fourth-century-BC pottery buried in the same fill. Processes and materials remained the same over the centuries. To corroborate the evidence from foundries, and to search for clues to wax, the lost ingredient in the lost-wax process, we examine not only the molds but also fragmentary bronze body parts. To judge from lead curse tablets recording adverse reactions to a few Athenian bronze-workers, there was rivalry between workshops. Finally, we investigate a Roman statue recovered in modern times from a riverbed in Syria.

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 1: Notes from the Field. Homer and Hesiod describe how Hephaistos worked in his fabled smithy. Later texts from Athens to Rome to Byzantion cover myth, history, and technology and introduce Pliny, Pausanias, Christodoros, and many other writers. We shall consider how they responded to bronze statues from what was to them ancient Greece, and their interest in lifelikeness, alongside their fascination with production – from wax to alloy to surface detail – and the effects of corrosion. Authors faced the conundrum of statues that looked alive because they were made of bronze or that were prevented from living for the same reason. Some statues were protectors, others were threatening enough to be punished, and a few were even destroyed so as to remove their evil influence.

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.

Chapter 8: Byzantion, Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. In this chapter I introduce three of the city’s main public spaces, the Hippodrome, the Forum of Constantine, and the Baths of Zeuxippos, all of them decorated with classical Greek statues collected by Constantine in the fourth century AD. Many of them were bronze and had once adorned public places in Greece and Asia Minor; they served to preserve the classical tradition in the emperor’s new eastern capital, his Deutera Roma. The Bronze Athena brought from the Akropolis of Athens was destroyed in 1304 because her Classical gesture seemed to be summoning support from the Western world. The Serpent Column, imported from Delphi and still standing today, might be seen as a protector or as a threat. In AD 500 Christodoros raved about the Greek statues in the Baths of Zeuxippos, but they are all gone, and we can identify only a few classical types, even fewer of the Trojan heroes.

Chapter 4: Early Histories. The name of the legendary craftsman Daidalos appears in ancient texts denoting skill in many media, but particularly in bronze and in wax. Xoana and sphyrelata were wax-free, but then came Rhoikos and Theodoros of Samos and their educational travel to Egypt. In the Greek world, the transition to a wax-based process for statuary began on a small scale and was linked to the need for multiples, such as protomes to decorate the shoulders of dedicatory caldrons. New technology was also applied to bronze statuary, which came to be preferred over stone. Small bronze statues appear first, their “carved” appearance a stylistic trait. A story about Kanachos reveals his reuse of a model for a statue of Apollo: He was noted for having made two copies of the same statue for different cities, one in wood and one in bronze. In contrast, two heads from Olympia, 200 years apart, were individually produced. Finally, the Piraeus Apollo, its date disputed since its discovery in 1959, is certainly archaistic, not Archaic.

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 7: Pausanias in Athens. Here we see what statues stood in Athens during the second century AD – those that Pausanias saw on his walk through the city, from the Piraeus to the Agora to the Akropolis. We can picture those portraits that he mentions that are today well-known types. But we can only imagine the appearance of many of the gods and heroes whose images he mentions. Sometimes his narrative matches reports by other writers. Sometimes surviving inscriptions can be linked to texts or to actual sculptures. Even where material evidence parallels what Pausanias remarks upon, almost no freestanding sculptures are visible in Athens today.

Chapter 6: Celebrating and Collecting. Costly Greek dedications such as the Charioteer group in Delphi preceded Hellenistic and Roman processions and triumphs – showcases for antique Greek statuary in Rome. Public displays of Roman emperors, and the private collections of Verres, Cicero, and the Younger Pliny are known primarily from literary sources. Piso’s private collection of statuary, however, survived largely intact until its rediscovery in the eighteenth century. Technical features and analyses help us to categorize works that were purchased from local workshops. We also find sculptures in transit, in ships of unknown origin that were carrying art to Italy and North Africa but that went down before reaching their destinations. Single or multiple objects from their cargoes have been netted by fishermen in the present day and in antiquity. A Roman relief from Ostia foreshadows the discovery and contents of the Artemision shipwreck in the early twentieth century.

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.