This passage is supposed to indicate the process of casting in plaster. It is possible that it may indicate a preparation in pitch to cast in bronze, but certainly not in plaster, which is the sole question. It is not workers in plaster who are engaged on it, but workers in bronze; and what they were doing was plainly to take impressions of the intaglio chasing or engraving on the body of the figure. The description of the bronze is that it was archaic, and beautifully traced and engraved. It may have been a term engraved with verses, or figures, or inscriptions; and this is by no means improbable, as it represented Hermes, and as nothing but the breast and back was covered with pitch. At all events, the process was one which seems to have been carried on, not for once, but daily. It may have been the famous Hermes ἀγοραῖος, which was cast in the 34th Olympiad, and was a study for brass casters. Again, it may not have been a figure in the round, but merely a bas-relief, or intaglio; and this supposition would be entirely in accordance with the hieratic and archaic sculpture in brass, marble, and terra cotta. Many were executed thus in intaglio and engraved,—some of which still remain,—and others in relief. A list of such may be found in Müller’s “Ancient Art” (pp. 61–65). If the passage refers to making a mould for casting, it was for casting in bronze and not in plaster, though nothing is said about casting, but merely of taking impressions or seals. The words ἐκτυπούμενος and ἐκματτόμενος mean ex-pressions from a seal or stamp. Exactly what the sculptors were doing, however, to this statue covers the process of brass casters. Thus Lucian, speaking of a certain brass statue in the Agora, says: οἶσθα τὸν χαλκοῦν τὸν ἑσῶτα ἐν τῇ ἀγορᾷ, καὶ τὰ μὲν πιττῶν τὰ δὲ εὔων διετέλεσα,—“You know the brass statue standing in the forum, on which I was occupied pitching and drying,” or burning.
But there is nothing new in all this, and nothing which throws any light upon the subject in question. It was, as we well know, a common practice of the Greeks, in making their large statues, to build up a core of wood, brickwork, plaster, and other materials as a foundation or rough sketch. On the surface of this in their chryselephantine statues they veneered sheets of gold and ivory, sometimes covering the entire surface with these precious materials, and sometimes finishing portions of them with an exterior of plaster or clay, which was painted in imitation of life. This for instance was the case with the Dionysos in Kreusis, described by Pausanias, of which the whole figure was modeled in plaster and afterwards colored. It would also seem to have been a practice with the Greek artists to cover these roughly executed cores with a composition of resin and pitch which they indurated by fire; and afterwards to finish the surface in the same material. Such at least appears to be the process indicated by Lucian in the passage just quoted, in which he speaks of the statue he was engaged in pitching and drying; as well as by Apollodorus in a passage in which Dædalus is described as making a statue of Hercules in pitch (πίσσα). The term “pissa” in this last passage has by some translators been supposed to be a misprint for ἐν πίση, meaning that this statue was a ζόανον executed in pine wood like other Dædalian figures. As it stands in the original, certainly, it is πίσσα, and means pitch; and it is quite as probable that it is correct and means a sort of encaustic finish with resin and gum. However this may be, there is little doubt that in making their bronze statues the Greeks used a surface of wax and pitch, or some such material, which was plastic and would melt; and it is well known that they spread wax over their statues to give them a polished surface, and also finished their plaster walls with a covering of wax.
In making large statues, a skeleton framework of wood was often employed, called κίνναβος, or κάναβος, which was covered with solid material,—clay, plaster, brick, pitch, etc., all welded together to form a solid core over which the surface was finished in clay, plaster, pitch, ivory, or gold. In the “Somnium, seu Gallus” of Lucian, Gallus says, speaking of himself, “If he were king, he should be like one of the colossi of Phidias, Praxiteles, or Myron, which though externally like Neptune or Jupiter,—splendid with ivory and gold, bearing the trident or the thunderbolt,—yet if you look inside you will find them composed of beams and bolts and nails traversing them everywhere, and braces and ridges, and pitch and clay, and other ugly and misshapen things.”
It is a curious fact bearing generally on this subject that no allusion is ever made to such a person as a caster in plaster. Plutarch, enumerating the various trades and occupations to which the great public works of his time gave employment, speaks of operatives, modelers, brass-workers, stone-workers, gold and ivory workers, weavers, and engravers, but never mentions a caster. Philostratus also, enumerating the different classes of workmen in the plastic art, makes no mention of casters. Pliny never speaks of them. Indeed, their existence is never mentioned by any ancient writer.
All things considered, then, in conclusion, it seems impossible to believe that Pliny intended, in the passage relating to Lysistratus, to declare that he invented any method of casting in plaster, but rather that he intended to say that Lysistratus either modeled likenesses in wax over a core of gypsum, or, what is much more probable, that he colored his likenesses in imitation of life; and that his specialty was making accurate and literal likenesses in the round with color, thus uniting the two arts of the painter and the sculptor.
The process of casting in plaster, in our acceptation of the phrase, is of modern origin, and so far as we know was invented in the fifteenth century, a little before the time of Verrocchio (1432–1488), the master of Leonardo da Vinci. He was among the first who employed it, and may fairly be said to have introduced it. At all events, the first clear mention of this process of which we are aware is by Vasari in his life of Verrocchio; and he states that this sculptor and painter “cast hands, knees, feet, legs, even torsi, in order to copy them at his leisure; and that soon after casts began to be made from the faces of persons after death, so that one sees in every house in Florence, on mantel-pieces, doors, windows, and cornices, a great number of these portraits, which seem alive.” For some time after it seems to have been used chiefly for taking casts from dead faces,—or hands and feet,—and not to have been applied to casting from models of clay. The general practice of that period was to make a small model in clay, then to bake it, and from this model by proportional compasses to enlarge it and point it upon the marble. The process of casting from clay models seems not to have been practiced then, and so far as we know models of full size in clay were rarely if ever made, until rather a comparatively recent period.
A CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS AURELIUS.
It was a dark and stormy night in December. Everybody in the house had long been in bed and asleep; but, deeply interested in the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,” I had prolonged my reading until the small hours had begun to increase, and I heard the bells of the Capucin convent strike for two o’clock. I then laid down my book, and began to reflect upon it. The fire had nearly burned out, and, unwilling yet to go, I threw on to it a bundle of canne and a couple of sticks; again the fresh flame darted out, and gave a glow to the room. Outside, the storm was fierce and passionate. Gusts beat against the panes, shaking the old windows of the palace, and lashing them with wild rain. At intervals a sudden blue light flashed through the room, followed by a trampling roar of thunder overhead. The fierce libeccio howled like a wild beast around the house, as if in search of its prey, and then died away, disappointed and growling, and after a short interval again leaped with fresh fury against the windows and walls, as if maddened by their resistance. As I sat quietly gazing into the fire and musing on many shadows of thought that came and passed, my imagination went back into the far past, when Marcus Aurelius led his legions against the Quadi, the Marcomanni, and the Sarmati, and brought before me the weather-beaten tent in which he sat so many a bleak and bitter night, after the duty of the day was done, and all his men had retired to rest, writing in his private diary those noble meditations, which, though meant solely for his private eye, are one of the most precious heritages we have of ancient life and thought. I seemed to see him there in those bleak wilds of Pannonia, seated by night in his tent. At his side burns a flickering torch. Sentinels silently pace to and fro. The cold wind flirts and flaps the folds of the prætorium, and shakes the golden eagle above it. Far off is heard the howl of the wolf prowling through the shadowy forests that encompass the camp; or the silence is broken by the sharp shrill cry of some night bird flying overhead through the dark. Now and then comes the clink of armor from the tents of the cavalry, or the call of the watchword along the line, or the neighing of horses as the circuitores make their rounds. He is ill and worn with toil and care. He is alone; and there, under the shadow of night, beside his camp-table, he sits and meditates, and writes upon his waxen tablets those lofty sentences of admonition to duty and encouragement to virtue, those counselings of himself to heroic action, patient endurance of evil, and tranquillity of life, that breathe the highest spirit of morality and philosophy. Little did he think, in his lonely watches, that the words he was writing only for himself would still be cherished after long centuries had passed away, and would be pondered over by the descendants of nations which were then uncultured barbarians, as low in civilization as the Pannonians against whom he was encamped. Yet of all the books that ancient literature has left us, none is to be found containing the record of higher and purer thought, or more earnest and unselfish character. As I glanced up at the cast of the Capitoline bust of him which stood in the corner of my room, and saw the sweet melancholy of that gentle face, ere care and disappointment had come over it and ruled it with lines of age and anxiety, a strange longing came over me to see him and hear his voice, and a sad sense of that great void of time and space which separated us. Where is he now? What is he now? I asked myself. In what other distant world of thought and being is his spirit moving? Has it any remembrance of the past? Has it any knowledge of the present? Yet the hand that wrote is now but dust, which may be floating about the mausoleum where he was buried, near the Vatican, or perhaps lying in that library of the popes upon some stained manuscript of this very work it wrote, to be blown carelessly away by some studious abbé as he ranges the volume on its shelf among the other precious records of the past.