Sometime around 3,000 BC, metallurgists in Mesopotamia discovered that if they added a small amount of tin ore to the copper ore during smelting the resulting metal was harder and thus more useful than either tin or copper alone. They had created the alloy bronze. Furthermore, the addition of the tinstone reduced the temperature required to melt the metal and, once melted, the bronze was more fluid and easier to cast.
Scholars who study Classical sculpture have always attempted to identify artists and subjects, and to assign dates to works. When looking at Roman sculptures, we are prompted to seek the "Greek bronze originals" from which they are derived, though there may be no evidence for any prototypes.
The relatively recent discovery of the Riace bronzes sparked a major scholarly debate along the same traditional lines. Who made them, when, and for which site and which monument? In fact, there is no evidence to allow us to answer any of these questions (Oliver, 1996). Why is it that we want "the best" statues to be Greek? How did we arrive at this way of thinking? It may now be time to abandon those terms which are so laden with meaning as to be misleading - the "Greek original" and the "Roman copy."
The mystery of the Riace bronzes, discovered by chance 300 meters from the coast by Stefano Mariottini, a scuba diver from Rome, on August 16th 1972, is now 30 years old (Cleere, 1996). The beautiful statues of the two Grecian heroes were at a depth of 8 meters and the scuba divers of the Carabinieri immediately began operations to recover them.
The majority of the large-scale bronze statues produced by the Greeks and Romans were made using the indirect method of hollow-casting. In this process, the clay core......
