FOOTNOTES:
[125] Fornello a foggia di una meta.
[126] E cosi lo andai ristringendo.
[127] Io lo avevo congegnato drento di modo che.
[128] Terra mescolata.
CHAPTER XXII. HOW TO FASHION VESSELS OF GOLD AND SILVER, LIKEWISE FIGURES AND VASES, & ALL THAT PERTAINS TO THAT BRANCH OF THE CRAFT CALLED ‘GROSSERIA.’
When the silver is cast in the manner described above, in the first furnace, it is as well to let it cool on the iron plates above mentioned because by so doing it contracts better.[129] When it is cold you clean off the rough edges from around it. This done, you make a scraper[130] about two-and-a-half fingers broad, & it should be blunted; to it you attach a stick shaped with two handles, and these are distant about half a cubit from the point of the scraper. Note that the scraper should be bent about three fingers,[131] and such as is used for sgraffito work, graffiare.[132] With this scraper the silver plate is to be planed, and in this wise: You make your silver plate red hot & place it on one of the iron plates you used for casting it on; fastening it on tightly with certain iron tools used for nailing or fastening,[133] then setting the handle of the scraper to your shoulder with your two hands to the two handles that you fastened to it, so that it comes to be in the form of a cross, you pare off the surface of your silver plate with very firm pressure till it is thoroughly clean.[134]
I won’t omit to tell you of a method I once learnt. Whilst in Paris I used to work on the largest kind of silver work that the craft admits of, and the most difficult to boot. I had in my employ many workmen, and inasmuch as they very gladly learnt from me, so I was not above learning from them; the plates I planed with such diligence gave them cause for much marvelling; but, none the less, one charming youth, on whom I set great store, said to me, with the utmost modesty, that in Paris it was not customary to plane the plate in the way we did it, and albeit our method seemed very clever, he would undertake to produce the same result without all this planing, and so gain much time.
To this I replied that I should only be too delighted to save any time; so I gave him a pair of vases to do, weighing 20 lbs. a piece, and my models for them. Before my very eyes the youth melted his silver in the way I told above, & cast it between his iron plates. Then he cleaned some of the edges off and set to right away to hammer it into shape & give it its rotundity (of which more anon) without paring it in any way. Both vases he turned out in this way with great care and admirable technique.[135] It is just because in Paris more work of this kind is done than in any other city of the world that the craftsmen, from constant practice, acquire such marvellous technical skill. I should never have believed it had I not seen it for myself. Then, at first, I thought that it was the quality of silver that gave them a vantage, because they work here with a finer quality of silver than anywhere else; but my workman said no, & that silver of baser alloy would serve his purpose equally well. I tried him and found that it was so. From which I conclude, therefore, that a man can start straight away with shaping what he wants out of his silver without wasting needless time in planing it up first. Of course care has to be taken to remove certain little blemishes[136] from time to time. I do not go so far as to say that it is bad to plane the metal first: nay, I have found either way good.
Now let us consider how to make a vase in the shape of an egg. I follow, as always, my promised method of giving you of my own creations for different princes & great persons. In Rome I made, among many other vases, two big ones in the form of an egg each about a cubit high, with lips and handles spreading out from the top.[137] One was for the Bishop of Salamanca, a Spaniard, and the other for Cardinal Cibo; both were elaborately ornamented with foliage and animals of various kinds. These vases were called ewers,[138] ] and were used by the Cardinals on their credence tables on occasions of state.
Inasmuch as I made numbers of these for King Francis, in Paris, and as they were all larger and more richly wrought, I shall draw my illustrations from them. You take your plate & trim off the rough edges, plane it on both sides, & slightly round the edges off,[139] and forasmuch as the plates are cast in somewhat oblong shapes, you beat them into a rounded shape with your hammer, and this is how you do it: you take your red hot plate, not too red, for then it would crack,[140] but sufficient, I would say, to burn certain little grains of powder or dust thrown on to it; & put it on the stake, and you beat it very firmly with the thin end of the hammer from one angle to the other driving the metal well to the centre,[141] so that when all the four corners of your plate are done it will be marked somewhat the shape of a cross.[142] After this you reverse the process and work with the hammer outwards, annealing the plate some four times, till it is of such roundness as your good craftsman may see fit. And when it is rounded into the shape of the vase you have in mind you must see that the measurement of the diameter of your plate exceeds that of the future vase by about three fingers, and that the plate must be kept as thick as possible in the middle. Before you hit this size exactly you take an iron stake about a finger thick and six fingers long, as blunt as possible so as not to pierce the plate, this tool you put with its broad end on the anvil, and you very carefully balance[143] your silver plate on the point of the stake until it stands steady by its own weight. When the point is fixed, get one of your handy lads to strike it with the broad end of the hammer so that it makes a mark in the plate. I have no doubt there are masters who can find the centre point straight away without having recourse to this little dodge, especially when working on small plates, but for large pieces I have always found it very helpful. After this you turn the plate round again on the anvil & strike it in the same manner on the stake till the point, which so far was only indicated, is now boldly marked. Then you take your compasses & strike a circle which will show you how far your outline is out, and so on, hammering the silver in conformity with it by repeated heating and beating. All the while you have to be very careful not to lose your centre point, and to beat the silver out, as I said before, so that the diameter of the plate exceeds that of the future vase by some three fingers. Applying your compasses again, you strike a series of concentric circles about a half a finger apart from each other, & starting from the centre of the cup. Then you take a kind of hammer about one finger thick at the narrow end, and one-and-a-half at the broad end; this hammer is battered and rounded off[144] into somewhat the shape of the fleshy part of a finger, and with it you begin beating in the middle of the plate, at the centre point in fact, being careful always not to lose the point. The movement of the hammer should be in the form of a spiral,[145] and follow the concentric circles; you take turn about in beating and heating in this manner till you see the silver grow into the shape of a hat, or at least its crown,[146] & thus approximating to the form of your vase. The thing to observe is that the metal should spread equally all round, for if it gives more on one side than the other it would be uneven; and in this way you draw it inwards till it is as deep as the body of your model requires. Then with various different stakes, each adapted specially to the form you are at work on, you beat, now with the broad, now with the narrow end of the hammer, and right into the body of your vase till it is equally bellied all round; and when this has all been very carefully done, always working on the stakes—some of which are called ‘cows’ tongues’[147] because of their shape—you work up the neck of the vase to the necessary height, and similarly on other stakes specially curved for the purpose, you little by little narrow out the neck. Any little imperfections[148] on the surface you remove as you go on, and so finally see the neck of the vase take the perfect shape you wish it to have.
When you have thus finished the neck, you can begin to work the bas-relief on the body of the vase; like a vase, for instance, that I made for King Francis,[149] it was one among many, but it was the finest of the lot. I filled it with black pitch made in the manner I described to you before, then I divided out the body of the vase for the figures, animals & leaves, which I drew on it with a stylus of burnished steel. This done, I drew them over again with pen & ink, using all the delicacy that good drawing requires. Then I took my punches, these are of iron, about the length of a finger and about the thickness of a goose’s quill. They are all shaped in different ways, some are fashioned like a C, beginning with a small c, and ending with a large one,[150] some are bent more, some less, and some are almost quite straight.[151] Others, again, are greater, diminishing from the size of a man’s thumb to six different smaller sizes, and all these selections you ought to have. With them, and with a hammer weighing some three or four ounces, and striking most dexterously, you beat into relief whatever you have designed. Then you place your vase on a slow fire and melt out the pitch. After this you heat the vase once more and clean it with a solution of tartar and salt, in equal proportions as I described above. When the vase is quite clean you employ a set of iron tools like stakes and with long horns,[152] technically termed caccianfuori , ‘snarling irons’: they are made of pure iron, long or short as the case may be, and as the work may need. These caccianfuori have to be fastened into the anvil stock,[153] then you put one of the horns into the vase, so that the point of the horn, which should be in shape and rounded like your little finger, is applied to the inside of the vase, & to the parts you want to beat out; and you very gently strike the other end of it with the hammer so that the blow passing to the end of the horn adjoining the body of the vase, bosses up the silver from within at such points as your learned and cunning master may deem well. When this process has been applied to all the figures, animals, and foliage, you heat and cleanse the vase once more, once more fill it with pitch, and with other sorts of punches, similar in all respects to the first, but having their ends shaped like beans, and large or small as the case may be, you begin the bossing again. Each master uses his own particular punches, & all have their own little ways of working, but all have this in common that the punches do not cut but only press the metal. The process of melting out & re-applying the pitch may now be repeated two or three times as may be thought necessary, till you have got your figures and foliage to the highest point of workmanship, then melt it out for the last time. After this you may proceed to fashion in wax whatever graces may have place at lip or handle, improving on the model or design with which you started. These finished, you can make them in all sorts of different ways, ways so many, that they were wearisome to recount. The easiest of these was the one I usually employed, and particularly in the vase I made for King Francis.[154] I took earth, such as the makers of artillery use, dried it and sifted it well, then I mixed it with fine cloth shearings and a little cows’ dung sifted through a sieve, then I beat it all well together. After this I took some tripoli, such as jewellers use to polish their gems with, pounded it up very fine & made from it a pigment as for painting, streaking it over the wax ornaments. This I also did to the inlet holes and vent channels after I had duly affixed them to the models. I always took care to fix these vent holes down below, and pass them upwards, but at such distance from the inlet channel that none of the silver should spill into them, and thus prevent them doing their work. When I had applied the first coat of tripoli I let it dry. Then I took the clay of which I told you before & coated the work over to the thickness of a knife’s back, letting it dry again, and repeating this process, till the different coats were about a finger thick. Then I bound it all round with iron bands as many as it could hold, over these iron bands I put more coats of clay, this time mixed up with rather more cloth shearings than I had used previously, & applied another coat again of a knife’s back thickness. Then I applied the whole to a slow fire, holding the vent holes downwards, and so gradually melted out the wax, which I caught in a little receptacle down beneath. One has to be very careful not to have the fire too hot, for that would make the wax bubble, and so damage the mould within. When the wax is quite melted out, you remove the mould from where it is attached to the vase, clean it carefully of all wax, and close up the place where it is attached to the vase with the same earth that is used above. This done, you bind the whole thing round again with fine bands of iron wire, & cover it up completely with a further coating of the tripoli mixture. Then you heat it on charcoal, firing it and the charcoal together in a brick furnace; and mind to get it well baked, for this kind of earth differs from others, in that it should all be fired at one turn. Meantime, have your silver ready for casting, or I would say molten, and while this is in progress put your mould into a large receptacle filled with sand, which should be moist, not wet; & fix it in well as do the casters of artillery into their troughs, but with the greater delicacy that the handling of lighter metal requires.[155] When your silver is well molten, throw finely powdered tartar over it to keep it fresh. Then take a piece of linen, the size of the crucible, folded into four and soaked with olive oil, and spread it over the tartar that covers the silver; and grip the crucible with the tongs called imbracciatoie. You ought to have many kinds of these, small, medium, great, and adaptable to the quantity of silver you have to melt; they hold the crucible together and prevent it breaking—that happened to me many a time. Just as you’ve got your silver nicely molten and are pouring it into the mould, crack goes your crucible, and all your work and time and pains are lost! Take note therefore of this, while pouring your silver into the mould, let one of your assistants hold the linen rag from slipping from the crucible, for by so holding the rag on, it has two good results; it keeps the silver warm and it prevents the little bits of coal from falling into the mould. This also you may take note of: if you have little masks and such-like conceits to apply to your vase, when you have fashioned them all carefully in wax and taken them off the vase having made moulds of them as above described, you lay in the hollow of the moulds a coating of wax, a thin knife’s back more or less in thickness, or of such thickness as you wish your mask to be. This coating you spread equally all over. In the craft it is called the lasagna. When you have fixed on to it the inlet channel & the vent holes—just as I told you above, the latter fixed at the bottom & turning to the top—you fill in the whole with the clay, bind around with wire, and cast in the same way as before.[156] This method you can employ in the handles & the feet of your vase, where you find the hammer difficult to work with, and I counsel you in working large vases always to employ this method of casting.