The Best Artists

This is an ancient Roman statue, one of the few original bronzes that have survived.

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How did it manage that?
For centuries the rider was thought to be Constantine, the emperor who made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. So it was not melted down like other pagan works.
By the time it was found out that the rider was the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, the old pagan world was actually venerated and those Renaissance Humanists were delighted to have not only a beautiful relic from their ideal world but the portrait of one of its greatest “philosopher-kings”.

Michelangelo’s design for Capitol Hill

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A replica stands in the middle of the main square of the Capitoline Hill of Rome. The whole square, including the facades of those buildings and the statue’s pedestal, was designed by Michelangelo. The statue makes a strange impression. The rider seems too big for the animal and his feet hang as though he were riding a donkey. Don’t forget that all the riders of the ancient world, including emperors, rode without stirrups, which hadn’t been invented. There is a twist or side-ways movement to the horse, as you sometimes see when real horses pass by in a parade; and it is easy to imagine you are standing there 1800 years ago, watching the emperor come.

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Michelangelo said those doors were beautiful enough to be the Gates of Paradise. He may have thought that or he may have said so just to be nice. It is hard to believe that he would have made the same mistakes Ghiberti made.

What doors? Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze doors of the Baptistry of St. John’s in Florence. They are covered with gilded bronze reliefs showing scenes from the Old and New Testaments and they are some of the most famous sculpture ever made.

Painters weren’t the only ones to go crazy over the newly discovered laws of perspective: sculptors tried to use them too. Ghiberti had an infallible eye and probably no one could make relief pictures that followed those laws better than his bronze plaques. But rather than prove that using those laws you can have depth in a relief, including landscape in the background, Ghiberti’s doors show that you can’t—at least that you probably shouldn’t. Good as the doors are, they seem to be simply in the wrong medium. They should have been paintings.

Those laws of linear perspective were not made for sculptural relief. There is too much plain drawing on Ghiberti’s bronze; and the trick of lower and lower reliefing as the figures and buildings recede into the background doesn’t really work unless one’s eye has already been educated by looking at a lot of paintings and is willing to play along. When the sun shines on the flat bronze slabs and casts its inevitable shadows, the whole trompe l’oeil is exposed: the half-modelled figures in the distance cast their shadows the same as the fully-modelled figures in the foreground and pop right out of the plaque. And their shadows don’t give a hoot for the careful perspective lines that were laid down to guide the eye. Those shadows obey the sun. You might be reminded of the problem desert soldiers had to camouflage their trucks and artillery so that enemy airplanes wouldn’t see them. They painted them the same color as the sand but still the planes had no trouble spotting them because of their stubborn shadows.

See what you think when you come down the Strada dei Fiorentini of Florence and spot the Perseus in the corner of the Loggia. If you’ve read Benvenuto Cellini’s book, you must admit you didn´t expect THAT—you didn´t know it was going to be so good, though Cellini swore it was. Of course how could you take his word for anything—such a liar, such a divine liar—such a glorious fairy tale, his book.

And now you see it was true and better than true. You might as well be discovering on a trip to England Jack´s very beanstalk—fresh, giant, CLIMB-ABLE.

Perseus was the biggest statue Benvenuto ever tried in Florence and it almost did him in. And wouldn´t his enemies have liked THAT? They smirked and grinned when they heard his claims and said he was a little-figure man, not a sculptor. How was that little goldsmith going to model a figure twice as big as life and cast it too? Always the bigtime with Benvenuto. What he had was a big mouth.

But like all the Renaissance greats, Cellini trusted in himself. Let the experts cast his giant figure? Not on your life—he would do it himself. He´d get a handful of boys to help him and cast the darn thing in his house. He was sick of experts.

You pay a price for doing things your own way. And at the last minute everything went wrong and Benvenuto collapsed from the strain. He left the boys with his statue while the cauldron was a-bubble and ran off to bed, pale as death. While he was gone the boys lost control, the roof caught fire and the liquid bronze caked in the crucible. “All is lost, Master,” one of them came to tell him. But a ghost or a hallucination warned Benvenuto, told him to hurry back to the workshop—there was time to save the Perseus. Up he sprang and in a twinkle was there shouting orders—Make for the pile of old oakwood by the shed! Gather all the pewter in the house and throw it into the crucible of clotting bronze! Get moving, boys—we´re going to save her!

And the miracle happened. The oakwood fire melted the bronze again and all the pewter Benvenuto had added. Would it be enough to fill the mold? It was a one-shot job. With a cry he ordered the boys to tip the crucible. And the red-hot bronze poured in—all of it, down to the last fiery drop. And when everything had cooled down and the bronze had hardened in the mold, Benvenuto began with great suspense to dig up his statue (for it was buried in the ground) and to knock away the burnt clay jacket that enveloped it.

And if you remember that far, you´ll remember the rest and get up on the stone railing to have a look at the toes of the Perseus.

Some people believe that a sculptor “works in bronze”—that just as he chips and polishes a block of stone to create a marble statue, he somehow hammers and twists and welds metal to produce a bronze statue. Not so. A bronze statue is only a reproduction of some figure he has made in another material. It is as hollow as a bell and is made in the same way: by filling a mold with liquid metal.

Casting, as the making of that bell/statue is called, is a technical affair in which at least four or five different specialists take part: and the modern sculptor usually leaves it all up to them—he doesn’t even watch them while they make his bronze statue.

If you’ve read Benvenuto Cellini’s Autobiography you will remember how complex and exciting the casting of his big bronze Perseus was; things went wrong at the critical moment and he almost lost the statue. And earlier in the book, when he wrote of his stay in France, he tells how the French foundrymen ruined a bronze of his through incompetence. Michelangelo had to model his twelve-foot statue of Pope Julius a second time because the foundry technicians botched the first version. It was and still is a very complex thing to cast a figure in bronze, even a small one; and the sculptor, though he must know how to work in many materials and with all kinds of instruments, has traditionally drawn the line here. He takes his plaster model to the foundry and turns it over to the specialists. He gives a few orders about the base it is to have (wood or marble) and the color of the patina, and goes home until they call him to come and pick it up.

A sculptor’s foundry—where they make bronze statues—is like no other place you’ve ever been.

If there is a yard in front of the factory building, you might already get your first glimpse of a giant statue peeking over the wall while you ring the bell at the gate. A colossal green horse might look down on you: a funny kind of welcome. Then as you are led through that patio-yard you will see finished statues all pushed together just any way to make room for more, some hiding in the ivy and with their backs to you so that they are partly unintelligible—a haranguing politician is that?, a soldier with lifted sword, a dictator looking benevolent—all of them frozen in action.

And inside the big hall of the works men will sit at long tables with little figures in their hands, like elves in a fairy-tale or helpers in Santa’s workshop. They work with miniature tools—fairy tools, they might be. Some hold little red wax figures stuck through with pins, like voodoo dolls. By their side are bunsen burners with a flame dancing, and from time to time the men hold a spatula to the flame and then touch it to the wax figure which goes shiny where the wax melts it. Some put varnishes and liquids onto plaster molds with mysterious markings and seams.

You won’t ever have smelled such smells as fill the halls: hot wax, hot metal, stearine, fish glues, acids, plaster, sands.

Careful: you must move out of the way of an eerie, slow procession, like a funeral procession, of men carrying an orange-hot cauldron of bronze, hanging from long poles.

And the director’s office is full of sculptural goodies. On his desk and all along the walls are shelves choc-full of things that just holler to be picked up and looked at and talked about (“What a beautiful horse! Who made it? What kind of patina is that? Is that one of Pablo Serrano’s things?”); but there is no time—there’s never time. It’s simply impossible to keep your eyes off all the figures in bronze and wax and clay and plaster, in all styles, by all kinds of sculptors; even while the director asks you unexpected questions about how your own humble creation is to look. You never knew there were so many options, so many treatments.

On your tour of the foundry he will introduce you to the foreman and to some of the men: the elves at the tables, the welders, the burr-removers, the chisellers, the men or women who put on the patinas. They heat up the naked-bronze figures with a torch and spray on the acids. There are one or two sculptors about. They smile and shake your hand. Welcome to the club. Foundries are a good place to meet real sculptors. They all go there, though most don’t stick around.