ABSTRACT
The texts of this chapter describe the technologies employed to make statues and sculpture. A variety of materials (wood, bone and ivory, clay [terracotta], metal [bronze, gold, silver], and stone), sometimes in combination, as layers, inlays, or attachments, were utilised in their production. The great gold and ivory (chryselephantine) statues of Pheidias and acroliths of stone and other materials are prominent examples of combinations.
Each type of material requires different handling. Organic materials such as wood, bone, and ivory require cleaning and treatments of oil, varnish, paint, or wax to preserve the sculpted images (xoana). Clay and stone, especially marble, require prospecting, and for stone careful selection of grain and colour, then quarrying, while clay needs to be purified, aged, and then mixed with water prior to sculpting and subsequent firing in a kiln, where the malleable clay is transformed into durable terracotta (Italian for “cooked earth”). The making of metal statues employs various subsidiary technologies. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was the most common material, but statues were made also of silver and gold. Prospecting, mining, smelting, and alloying are all employed to produce the working material alone. Creating the metal statue, then, requires skills in metalworking (rolling, chasing, riveting, soldering, hammer welding, and casting). Early metal statues, called sphyrelata, were made of bronze sheets hammered into the desired shape around cores of wood and then riveted together. Later statues were cast from models of wax or clay, requiring cores and moulds as well as heat sources sufficiently strong to melt the required quantities of bronze.
Much of the material relevant to this topic appears also in Chapter 10 (A. Metalworking, B. Woodworking, and D. Ceramics and Glass).
