Bronze: crossing continents, through millennia

Associated media

Clare Finn travels through the centuries at London's Royal Academy

Visually stunning,London’s Royal Academy of Arts’ current exhibition ‘Bronze’ presents a world survey of bronze sculpture. It encompasses the use of the medium across Europe, Asia and Africa, spanning millennia as well as continents. The earliest pieces included in the show are from the Nahal Mishmar hoard dating to c. 3700 BC, which are some of the earliest evidence of  copper-casting. The most recent pieces are a work titled Points of View made in 2007 by Tony Cragg and a 2012 convex bronze ‘mirror’ by Anish Kapoor.

Strictly speaking, as David Ekserdjian, one of the exhibition’s curators, freely admits, the show’s title should have been ‘Copper Alloys’ as while copper is its main ingredient bronze has never had a fixed composition and only since the 19th century has the term ‘bronze’ been used to denote alloys of copper and tin, while alloys of copper and zinc have been called ‘brass’.

Copper’s high melting point makes it a difficult metal to work. Mixing (alloying) it with other metals such as tin, zinc, lead, arsenic and, today, silicon, modifies its properties making it easier to work. These compositions have long been closely guarded by the highly skilled artisans who, in addition to the sculptor himself, make up a foundry team. The work of these mould makers, foundry men, chasers and patinators is demonstrated for both sand casting and lost-wax casting in one of the rooms used for the show, via models and videos.

The exhibition begins with a stunning example of this collaborative working process, a sculpture that was clearly made to be seen in the round. This is the two-metre high, nude Dancing Satyr. Scholars have convincingly attributed the piece to the Greek sculptor Praxiteles, active in the second half of the 4th century BC.One sees that its form is not confined within the limitations of a block as sculpture in marble can be, nor by the grain of a piece of wood. No, bronze’s strength enabled the sculptor to depict his Satyr fully in mid leap, his surviving leg flying back, the shoulders showing that his arms and hair were once also flung back behind him. 

The exhibition catalogue is arranged strictly chronologically, with full page illustrations of the 158 pieces in the show and essays tracing the use of bronze in the Ancient Near East and Egypt, through Chinese, Greek, Etrurian and Roman bronzes, to the sacred use of metals in South and Southeast Asia, to the lower Niger region in West Africa, the European Middle Ages, Italian and Northern European Renaissance, and on through the 17th century to the present.

The exhibition, however, does away with chronology, displaying the exhibits thematically as figures, singly and in groups, gods, animals, objects, bas-reliefs and heads, producing wonderful juxtapositions.

Encompassing both public, monumental sculpture and more intimate private pieces, the show displays both Benvenuto Cellini’s 85.5cms tall modello for his Perseus, made 1545–54, and a full size 19th-century cast of this, his masterpiece, which towers over the gallery at what must be five metres in height on its plinth.

In the catalogue, the statue of a rich brown pug dog and one of a ram look deceptively as though they may be 19th-century animalia made to fit in the hand, but in the gallery one sees that Pug is life size, made in 1600–10 by Hubert Gerhard, and the Ram is over life-sized, Roman from the second century BC.

The wattled and feathered textures of Giambologna’s resplendent Turkey, c. 1567–70, are a rare contrast to that sculptor’s usual matchless smooth finishes. This is an early depiction of the bird, which reached Europe only in 1511. The craggy, dark finishes of Turkey and of Germaine Richier’s 1946 Praying Mantis are in stark contrast to that of their neighbour, with its high polished mirror sheen – Brancusi’s Maiastra. This is a finish that reflects the surroundings, giving it a light, feeling of movement, very different to the solidity of the Richier and the Giambologna pieces.

There is a range of striking coloured patinas from the rich copper glow of Massimiliano Soldani Benzi’s Bacchus, after Michelangelo, to the gleam of gilding on the Nepalese goddess Uma, and the runnels of copper greens and reddish-browns on Giovan Francesco Rustici’s St John the Baptist Preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee that come from long years of standing out of doors.

This exhibition does what exhibitions should always do, it makes you look and then look again.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue,Bronze, edited by David Ekserdjian, and published by the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2012, ISBN 978-1-907533-29-7