Chapter 15

Plaster Life Casting and the Production of Bronze Statuary in Ancient Greece: The Early Classical Revolution

W. ALEXANDER LUMSDEN &

CAROL C. MATTUSCH

© 2025. All rights reserved W.A. LUMSDEN

About Professor Carol C. Mattusch

Mathy Professor of Art History at George Mason University (Virginia, USA.), teaches courses on Greek, Roman, and 18th-century art and archaeology. Her specialty is classical bronzes, in particular the connections among technology, artistic styles, and the market in the ancient Mediterranean world. She was guest curator of a recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Art: Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples (2008-2009). She is George Mason University’s representative to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and serves on many committees of that institution. She chaired the planning committee for the 2003 meeting of the International Association of Classical Archaeology, she chairs the oversight committee of the International Bronze Congresses, and she is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a corresponding member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Her books have won awards from the Archaeological Institute of America and the College Art Association. She and her students are responsible for the acquisition, cleaning, and installation at GMU of 65 plaster casts from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"In this chapter, we explore life casting in ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder suggests in his Natural History that the technique was practised in the workshop of 4th- century-bc founder Lysistratos, brother of the sculptor Lysippos. However, we argue that life casting also played a significant role in the much earlier move towards naturalism in early-5th-century-bc freestanding bronze and marble sculpture. This argument is made on two grounds: first, extant bronze statues of this period suggest a very clear and proficient working knowledge of mould making techniques with the use of clay plaster. In the ancient sculptor’s workshop, it is well known that master moulds were taken from inanimate models, lined with wax and replicated. We argue that it is therefore overwhelmingly likely that moulds could also be taken from a living person’s anatomical features, thereby creating directly from nature the lifelike features that appear by the early 5th century. Second, we explore how, using the materials of plaster and wax, sculptors were probably able to implement specific and innovative methods such as ‘dynamic wax life casting’ to achieve true lifelikeness in their works. To this end, our chapter combines academic research in archaeology with empirical evidence from a modern bronze casting foundry, drawing on both fields to explore the role that life casting might have played in the major aesthetic shift that occurred in early-fifth-century-bc Greek sculpture."

Proceedings of the British Academy, 274, 234–259,

© Authors 2025.