Antique Home Decoration Casting Bronze Hand Statue / Yaowarat Antique Shop

Description

What’s special about this product?

This beautiful in detail of Antique Bronze Hand Sculpture was made delicately by Thai makers. Alternating finger positioning in a delicate shape has made this hand sculpture appear to be moving tenderly and gently.

A remarkable showcase piece that suits your house. Made of bronze which will make your room look beautiful and classy!

What is bronze sculpture?

A bronze sculpture, often simply called ‘a bronze’, is a three-dimensional piece of art made by pouring molten bronze into a mould, before leaving it to solidify.

Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, made by heating the two metals together and allowing them to cool. Nowadays a metal qualifies as bronze only if it adheres to a strict ratio of 88% copper and 12% tin.

In the past, however, the composition of bronze varied widely. The earliest ‘bronze’ products were actually made from copper and arsenic, and many ancient ‘bronzes’ have later been revealed actually to be brass, an alloy of copper and zinc.

Bronze sculpture is made via a process known as casting: pouring molten metal into a mould and leaving it to solidify.

Casting is a very different technique to the chiselling and carving associated with marble sculpture, or the modelling associated with ceramics, but is used to achieve the same effects as both.

Why did artists choose to make sculptures out of bronze?

For artists and sculptors, bronze represents an excellent medium for producing sculpture. While marble can be difficult to work with, and easy to break and damage, bronze is a hard and ductile metal.

Bronze is also preferable to other metals because, in the casting process, it is possible to achieve both detail and consistency.

As molten bronze solidifies in a mould, it expands slightly, thereby allowing for every detail of the mould to be captured. Similarly, as it cools further, it will once again contract, therefore allowing for the easy removal of the mould.

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

Lastly, bronze is esteemed by artists because of its rich colouring. Over time, bronze develops a distinctive patina, or burnish, which gives many bronze pieces the intensity for which they are so often lauded.

And as well as being patinated, bronze sculpture can also easily be silvered (producing silvered bronze) and gilded (producing gilt bronze, or ormolu), giving it an extraordinary variety of uses, from furniture to clock-making to jewellery and much more.

How is bronze sculpture made?

Bronze sculpture can be cast using a number of different techniques. All of these techniques, however, utilise the basic principle of applying molten bronze into a mould and leaving it to set, before removing the mould, chasing the finished piece (refining and defining the object using a hammer) and applying a patina.

Exactly 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 centuries bronze moulds were produced in workshops known as foundries: a founder is someone 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 these methods were methods utilised in antiquity.

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

Lost-wax bronze casting

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

It is universally favoured by bronziers because of the fineness of detail which can be achieved through the use of wax and moulds.

The below video demonstrates the entire process of lost-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 lost-wax casting, but there are some variations.

The most primitive and crude lost wax technique is known as solid lost-wax casting; simply achieved by making a model in wax, creating a mould around it, melting out the wax and pouring in the bronze.

Because of the way that bronze sets, it is extremely difficult to make large pieces using this form of the technique. More commonly, then, larger bronze pieces will be made using the method known as ‘hollow lost-wax casting’, which involves more steps, demonstrated in the video.

Hollow lost-wax casting by the direct method differs from the steps in the video in that the original model is made of clay, which is then coated in wax and placed into a mould. This means that the original clay model is lost in the casting process: it becomes part of the finished piece.

For large bronze sculptures, the artist will almost certainly make the piece in separate parts which he or she will then weld together. Often, sculptors will make a large sculpture by first creating smaller figurines, which are progressively scaled up until the sculpture can become life-size or bigger.

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