The Patina

The liver of sulfur arrived in dry flakes the color of old teeth, and Oren Bask dissolved a thumbnail's worth in a glass jar of warm water, watching the solution bloom amber, then deepen toward something between tea and

Every sculpture begins with the thing you will never see. The armature — the internal skeleton of steel rod and wire and sometimes aluminum mesh that gives the wax its shape and the mold its structure and the eventual br

A bronze sculpture is hollow. This is the thing that surprises people who have never worked with the material, who assume that the solid-looking figure in the museum or the garden or the plaza is solid all the way throug

The sprue system was the plumbing of the lost-wax process, the network of wax rods and cups and channels that would, when the wax was burned out and the ceramic shell remained, become the pathways through which two thous

The ceramic shell was built in layers the way a pearl was built in layers, which was to say slowly, by accretion, each coat a thin deposit of material that added almost nothing by itself but that, accumulated over seven

The burnout kiln at Fonderia Mariani was a steel box the size of a small room, lined with firebrick, heated by gas burners that ran along the floor and that could raise the interior temperature from ambient to thirteen h

The road to the quarries above Carrara climbed in switchbacks through chestnut forest, the asphalt narrowing at each turn until it became a single lane of cracked and potholed concrete that the marble trucks had been des

Bronze was not a metal but a marriage. It was an alloy, a union of copper and tin in proportions that varied depending on the purpose — bell bronze was roughly eighty percent copper and twenty percent tin, which gave it