This may be substantially
correct, but the process is much more likely to have been borrowed
from Egypt than invented independently.
In producing a bronze statue it is necessary first to make an
exact clay model. This done, the usual Greek practice seems to
have been to dismember the model and take a casting of each part
separately. The several bronze pieces were then carefully united
by rivets or solder, and small defects were repaired by the
insertion of quadrangular patches of bronze. The eye-sockets were
always left hollow in the casting, and eyeballs of glass, metal,
or other materials, imitating cornea and iris, were inserted.
[Footnote: Marble statues also sometimes had inserted eyes]
Finally, the whole was gone over with appropriate tools, the hair,
for example, being furrowed with a sharp graver and thus receiving
a peculiar, metallic definiteness of texture.
A hollow bronze statue being much lighter than one in marble and
much less brittle, a sculptor could be much bolder in posing a
figure of the former material than one of the latter.
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