Lost-wax castingLost-wax casting - also called investment casting, precision casting, or cire perdue (siʁ pɛʁdy; borrowed from French) - is the process by which a duplicate sculpture (often a metal, such as silver, gold, brass, or bronze) is cast from an original sculpture. Intricate works can be achieved by this method. The oldest known examples of this technique are approximately 6,500-year-old (4550–4450 BC) and attributed to gold artefacts found at Bulgaria's Varna Necropolis.
Ancient RomeIn modern historiography, ancient Rome refers to Roman civilisation from the founding of the Italian city of Rome in the 8th century BC to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. It encompasses the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), Roman Republic (509–27 BC), and Roman Empire (27 BC–476 AD) until the fall of the western empire. Ancient Rome began as an Italic settlement, traditionally dated to 753 BC, beside the River Tiber in the Italian Peninsula.
Metal castingIn metalworking and jewelry making, casting is a process in which a liquid metal is delivered into a mold (usually by a crucible) that contains a negative impression (i.e., a three-dimensional negative image) of the intended shape. The metal is poured into the mold through a hollow channel called a sprue. The metal and mold are then cooled, and the metal part (the casting) is extracted. Casting is most often used for making complex shapes that would be difficult or uneconomical to make by other methods.
StatueA statue is a free-standing sculpture in which the realistic, full-length figures of persons or animals are carved or cast in a durable material such as wood, metal or stone. Typical statues are life-sized or close to life-size; a sculpture that represents persons or animals in full figure but that is small enough to lift and carry is a statuette or figurine, whilst one more than twice life-size is a colossal statue. Statues have been produced in many cultures from prehistory to the present; the oldest-known statue dating to about 30,000 years ago.
FigurineA figurine (a diminutive form of the word figure) or statuette, is a small, three-dimensional sculpture that represents a human, deity or animal, or, in practice, a pair or small group of them. Figurines have been made in many media, with clay, metal, wood, glass, and today plastic or resin the most significant. Ceramic figurines not made of porcelain are called terracottas in historical contexts. Figures with movable parts, allowing limbs to be posed, are more likely to be called dolls, mannequins, or action figures; or robots or automata, if they can move on their own.
Art in bronze and brassArt in bronze and brass dates from remote antiquity. These important metals are alloys, bronze composed of copper and tin and brass of copper and zinc. Proportions of each alloy vary slightly. Bronze may be normally considered as nine parts of copper to one of tin. Other ingredients which are occasionally found are more or less accidental. The result is a metal of a rich golden brown colour, capable of being worked by casting — a process little applicable to its component parts, but peculiarly successful with bronze, the density and hardness of the metal allowing it to take any impression of a mould, however delicate.
SculptureSculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sculptural processes originally used carving (the removal of material) and modelling (the addition of material, as clay), in stone, metal, ceramics, wood and other materials but, since Modernism, there has been almost complete freedom of materials and process.
Benin BronzesThe Benin Bronzes are a group of several thousand metal plaques and sculptures that decorated the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Edo State, Nigeria. Collectively, the objects form the best examples of Benin art and were created from the thirteenth century by artists of the Edo people. The plaques, which in the Edo language are called Ama, depict scenes or represent themes in the history of the Kingdom. Apart from the plaques, other sculptures in brass or bronze include portrait heads, jewelry, and smaller pieces.
PlasterPlaster is a building material used for the protective or decorative coating of walls and ceilings and for moulding and casting decorative elements. In English, "plaster" usually means a material used for the interiors of buildings, while "render" commonly refers to external applications. The term stucco refers to plasterwork that is worked in some way to produce relief decoration, rather than flat surfaces. The most common types of plaster mainly contain either gypsum, lime, or cement, but all work in a similar way.
TerracottaTerracotta, also known as terra cotta or terra-cotta (ˌtɛrraˈkɔtta; baked earth; ), is a term used in some contexts for earthenware. That is to say it is a clay-based unglazed or glazed non-vitreous ceramic, fired at relatively low temperatures. Usage and definitions of the term varies, such as: In art, pottery, applied art, craft, construction and architecture, "terracotta" is a term often used for red-coloured earthenware sculptures or functional articles such as flower pots, water and waste water pipes, tableware, roofing tiles and surface embellishment on buildings.
