On Three Bronze Statuettes

Abstract

The importance of the bronze statuette as a document for the reconstruction of early sculptural types and of the different phases through which Greek art passed is apt to be overlooked, but there is reason to suppose that the main lines of an antique conception are more likely to be preserved in it than on a marble adaptation made after a lapse of several centuries. Many of the most celebrated Greek statues were made for temples. A large proportion of the bronzes were votive offerings, and roughly reproduce a local cultus-statue, where any serious variation from the original design would not be tolerated; the difference consisting in the suppression of detail, not in the addition of it, as in a marble copy. Further, the mechanical method by which a bronze is reproduced effectually prevents the intrusion of the worker's personality, so that a second century cast from a fifth century mould is practically contemporary with the original design.