FOOTNOTES:
[157] Rappigliare.
CHAPTER XXIV. A THIRD METHOD FOR SIMILAR THINGS.
In the third method the wax models are cut into small pieces, powdered and moulded in clay, and set in the troughs as described above. When the moulds are made, with due observance to the undercutting (I say this advisedly), lead castings are made from them, and these as well cleaned and worked up as the master may be minded; then they are cast in silver in the same troughs as I told you before. This is a particularly good way, because when the master has his lead model and has finished it up to suit his purpose, it can serve ever so many more times than a single casting.
CHAPTER XXV. OF FIGURES MADE IN SILVER & GREATER THAN LIFE SIZE.
Now as to the way of making a great statue of silver; and when I say a great statue I mean as big as a live man or bigger. Statues of one-and-a-half cubits high I have of course seen plenty of in Rome on the altar of St. Peter’s, and albeit the making of these is pretty difficult and many excellent masters employ on them much admirable work, still these smaller statues present no great difficulties in the way of soldering, because they can be handled in the furnace entire; moreover they are made of thinner plates[158] of silver than the large ones. The actual process of both is much the same, but the large ones are so much harder to manage that I for my part have never seen any that were presentable. According to my promise of giving you some practical example either of work I have seen of others or of my own making, I’ll tell you the following.
The Emperor Charles V. was passing through France in the time of Francis I., for the great war had ended, and Francis, my glorious king, among the other wonderful presents he had given to the Emperor, gave him a silver statue of a Hercules with two columns, which was about three and a half cubits high. You remember how I described above the beauty of all the things made in that great city of Paris—well, I have never seen anywhere else in the world such perfect hammer work as in that city, but with all their technique (in the methods of embossing) not even the best masters were able to give to that statue either grace, beauty or style;[159] and for the simple reason that they did not know how to solder properly, and so had to stick on the legs and the head and the arms by means of fastening[160] them with silver wire. Now King Francis wanted to have eleven statues like this made, and he complained to me that those men of his had not been able to undertake such a job, and he asked me if it lay in the art to do it & if I saw my way through. I replied that most assuredly did I see my way through, that I could do these things much better than talk about them, and that when done they would be one hundred times finer than was anticipated. And this was the way in which I began explaining it to that great king, and quoth I:
‘There are many different ways of doing the thing & each master chooses the method to which his technical excellence or his fancy guides him. First of all you make a statue in clay of the size you want your silver statue to be, then you make a gesso mould of it in many pieces, and this is the way: The whole breast to the middle of the ribs at the sides, & to the juncture of the throat above & the legs at the groining below, forms one piece. The next piece comprises the back from the juncture of the neck and contains the shoulders and down to the buttocks. These are the two main pieces. In like manner must the arms, legs, and head all be formed into two pieces. And because the undercuttings would impede the removal of the pieces, these are filled up with wax. The gesso moulds are then respectively cast in bronze. And you have your sheet of silver handy of such size as may be deemed expedient by the skilful master, & commence to hammer it over the bronze with wooden hammers, carefully rounding the silver over the various forms; by means of frequent annealing these forms come to be beautifully covered. The discreet and cunning master in order to just connect separate pieces together[161] applies a few additional hammer strokes to their edges, and expands them to about two knife backs one over the other. These edges he cuts into jags about two fingers apart with a pair of scissors, fits the one into the other, and with nice judgment tightens them with a hammer, holding them over a round stake, or some other piece of iron as shall hinder the hammer from indenting the silver where it has nothing to back it. In this way all the pieces are done, first the body, then the legs, arms and head. After this they are filled with pitch, and wrought over with hammer & punches to an exact likeness with the original clay model, & finally soldered together into one.’
When I had delivered myself of these words to the King, he said it was all so clear & he had understood it all so well that he very nearly thought he would himself be able to undertake such work. Then I told his Majesty that there were other methods which a master thoroughly conversant with his craft might employ, and that these methods were really easier in execution though they seemed harder of explanation. Whereupon his Majesty retorted that verily he was a great lover of genius,[162] that I had spoken so convincingly of the first that he would willingly take my word for the other.
One of them was as follows: when I had cast the King’s silver into sheets in the way I told above, and had my clay model of the subsequent size of the silver ready completed, I went straight at the job, with sheer ability of hammer work[163] together with my general skill of craftsmanship, striking from front and from back in whatever way the art demanded. By this method I got through much quicker than the first. Arms, legs and body I hammered out in separate pieces, and the head in one whole piece just as it were a vase, & in the manner I told of once before. When I had given them all their shape I soldered & fitted them together as before. The solder I used was ottavo, that is a solder composed of one-eighth part of an ounce of copper to one of silver. To do the soldering I had fixed to the tube of my big bellows several channels of such length as I deemed necessary for the purpose of blowing from below on the beds of coal that I had placed under the back of my work. When this and the coal was aglow, that is, of a golden colour, I blew the bellows on it gradually and made the solder run, and I kept on with this, now applying it from above, now from below, wherever I thought it necessary, and going from point to point.[164] I have said nothing about borax, for it stands to reason, as anyone who knows anything about his business is aware, that no soldering can be done without it. If it turn out that, owing to the length of the pieces, some of them are not completely soldered and that fresh solder and borax is needed, I used instead of water to take a bit of tallow candle in order not to have to cool the whole of my large piece, & on this ointment I put my new solder and borax, and this had the same effect as the water. Thus did I solder all the different members, head, arms, feet, each for itself, filled them with pitch, & with my punches gave the last finish but one[165] to my work. Then came the job of soldering the big pieces together, & that was where those great French experts failed.
I built in the middle of one of my large rooms—and I mean exactly in the middle—a little wall about one cubit from the ground, four cubits long, and one-and-a-half wide; and after fitting the parts to the body I bound them on with silver wire instead of iron wire which is usually employed, and in this way, doing three fingers’ width at a time, and not without the greatest difficulty, I bound the two legs to the body. Then I laid it on the wall over a good fire, and applied quinto to it, i.e., solder composed of one-fifth of an ounce of copper to one of silver—I say copper not bronze,[166] because copper is easier to treat with the punches and holds better, albeit it does not run quite so easily. As I worked with eleven-and-a-half silver to half copper[167] I had nothing to fear as far as the latter was concerned; & I would have everyone aware that if he wish to make his job succeed he must not employ inferior silver.
When my work lay in position I began, with four of my young men, to blow the fire with the aid of fans and hand-bellows until I saw the solder run, when I every now and then sprinkled a little soft ash over it, for if one were to use water instead of ash, one would not be able to add fresh solder where the old has run imperfectly. In this manner, following just the method I have described, I happily succeeded in soldering the whole piece with breast, legs, arms, & head; & ere ever a piece cooled I managed to solder it on; the whole thing succeeded most admirably, & was just lovely! So the entire statue, which was about four cubits high, was lifted off the fire all soldered; I cleaned it up with the tools for cleaning, which I described before, filled it with pitch, and gave it the final polish with the punches. Then I fixed it on a base of bronze, the latter about two-thirds of a cubit high, with sundry little subjects in bas-relief gilded and beautifully executed. The statue in question was a figure of Jupiter[168] holding the lightning bolt in his right hand, and from the lightning a torch was kindled; in his left he held a ball to symbolise the world. Round the head and the feet was abundance of ornamental detail; & all this was admirably gilded, the which was most difficult to do.
Nor will I omit to tell how I cleaned[169] up the silver of so large a piece of work, albeit I have already described to you the process of cleaning silver, for there were exceptional difficulties in this case. I did it thuswise: I went to the shop of a dyer of woollen cloth and got one of his big vessels,[170] large enough to put my figure in, which, as I said, was about four cubits high, and weighed about 300 lbs.; then I took four iron rods, each about four cubits long, and four chestnut staves, somewhat longer than the iron rods. When the figure was carefully cleaned of its solder, and made smooth and polished and carefully pumiced over, we lifted it with the four iron rods on to a big bed of coal spread out on the ground, and large enough to hold the figure. This we did not do, however, till the coals were burnt out, had lost their vigour, and were well spent; then we covered the figure all over, shovelling the embers upon it, a very tiring job this, as you may imagine, because of the heat and fume of the embers. We went on shovelling them about over the statue wherever the need was, till the whole piece was of an equal red heat all over. Then we raised it with the four iron rods, let it cool, and when it was cold had ready our vessel[171] with the blanching solution,[172] that is to say, water with tartar and salt composed as I described to you above, and into it we placed the figure by means of the four wooden staves, for the solution must not be touched by iron. When inside we stirred it about and scrubbed it all over with certain big hog sable brushes much like those used for whitening walls & objects of similar size. When we saw it getting white, we took it with great care out of this vessel and put it into another similar one, but filled with pure water, & here we carefully washed all the blanching solution off it. Then we poured off the water and dried it very carefully; after which we set to gilding whatever parts had to be gilded. Though the gilding of this statue was a much harder job than you can possibly imagine, I do not intend here to enter into those difficulties of detail, but will confine myself to saying a word or two about gilding in general. Forsooth, it is a beautiful and marvellous craft this, & it well becomes your big masters to know of it, so that they may guide such as practise professionally. I knew many, both in France and in Rome, who applied themselves only to gilding. But none the less I say that great masters ought not to practise this themselves, for the quicksilver that has to be used for it is a deadly[173] poison, and so wears out the men that practise in it that they live but a few years.