Brazen Images

The latest Royal Academy show goes by the very simple name of “Bronze”.   A pedant might argue that this slightly infringes the Trades Descriptions Act as careful examination of the catalogue shows that some of the items in the exhibition are, in fact, brass or some other copper alloy rather than bronze in the proper metallurgical sense of the term.    I suppose a more accurate name might be “150-odd beautiful objects that happen to be made of bronze and other copper alloys”, but that would hardly have pulled in the crowds.

As the above suggests, this is very much a high level survey based on the artistic use of a specific material- bronze and related copper alloys- across cultures and covering some four thousand years.   Apparently it had to be put together in a hurry when a planned show majoring on the role of Syria as an artistic and cultural crossroads was pulled as the first shots of that country’s descent into chaos were heard.   This rather fraught genesis isn’t obvious; the exhibition has managed to gather top quality material from museums and galleries from all round the world (Italian collections have been particularly generous in this regard, as has the National Gallery in Lagos).   

The show is laid out by theme rather than, say, chronologically or by region.  The themes, however, are very broad and clearly overlap (in the sense that quite a few items could easily figure in more than one gallery)- “Animals”, “Figures”, “Objects”, “Gods” and so on.   This creates some nice juxtapositions across the centuries and cultures, particularly in the animal section, with slightly dopey looking lions (or are they leopards?) from Benin looking hungrily across the gallery at Giambologna’s strutting turkey while Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider crawls malevolently up the wall.   A strange attenuated figure from an Etruscan tomb stands alongside a similarly elongated Giacometti created some 2500 years later.   The wonderfully expressive portrait of King Seuthes III of Thrace dating from around 300BC (see above) looks slightly wistfully at Georg Petel’s impossibly pompous and triumphalist depiction of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden- in turn flanked by a much smaller bust of Charles I, looking edgy and harassed.

This approach could also be seen as a clever way of making artistic bronze work look a little more universal in human cultural expression than it actually is.   Obviously the early Americas and Oceania are out of the frame as neither region went in for bronze casting.   All the items from Sub-Saharan Africa come from a limited range of West African cultures in the Niger Delta.  A strong focus on figurative works (for which bronze is indeed a wonderful medium) leads to the Islamic world being somewhat under-represented.    Areas not blessed with the right mix of mineral deposits or isolated from trade routes which would have enabled them to overcome this problem are obviously also excluded.    One can play endless “spot the gaps” games even within regions which are represented.  Coverage of China is oddly patchy (some items from the very earliest semi-mythical Shang dynasty back around 1500 BC, a few very Indian-inflected Buddhist items linked to Tantric Tibetan cults in vogue under the Ming dynasty around 1500 CE and not much from the intervening three thousand years).   The Egypt of the Pharaohs comes down to one cat.    In the end however one has to take the selection at face value; this isn’t really an encyclopaedic view of every way bronze has ever been used for artistic purposes anywhere on Earth but rather a very general overview of certain artistic uses of the material.

Indeed I wonder if the show might have held together even better if it had explicitly focused on figural depictions; the “Objects” section is the most random element in what could be seen as a pretty random show.   Its primary focus (particularly for pre-modern cultures) seems to be mostly on items which had some kind of ritual significance- for instance the famous Battersea shield fished out of the Thames in 19^th century is now assumed to be a ritual deposit as there is no evidence it ever saw combat.  On that basis I’d have liked to see a few classic European Bronze Age socket axe heads to play off the ancient Chinese axes included in the show- the argument now seems to be that many of the ones which have been found in archaeological contexts may have been as much ritual items used to display power as practical tools for cutting down trees or weapons for use in combat.  

To its credit the exhibition devotes one gallery to illustrating the techniques of bronze making and bronze casting.  This brings home just what a mysterious and even magical process this can be even in contemporary environments; no wonder many cultures regarded metal workers as special people with closer links to the gods than the average mortal.  No doubt metal workers were not backward in cultivating this aura by ensuring that their trade secrets were well kept- and no doubt they prayed especially hard to their gods when doing something complex in case it went horribly wrong and damaged their reputation.   The show also encourages a degree of engagement with the tactile aspects of bronze by providing replicas of some of the smaller items on display for the visitor to handle.  Sadly one isn’t encouraged to take this approach with the main exhibits even though it’s clear that some of them must be used to this treatment- the wonderful 17^th century “Piglet” (in fact a massive boar) from Florence shows clear signs of regular stroking of his snout (as well as other parts of his anatomy….).   Bronze is such a wonderfully tactile material that this is a real loss.

It’s almost impossible to produce a very structured review of this kind of show.  I’m going to post a number of favourite pieces on my Flickr site (which is probably how most readers get to this blob anyway) so I’ll simply pursue one aspect which struck me when looking at the show.

Bronze is both very durable and terribly vulnerable as a material.   The durability is self-evident when in the presence of items four thousand years old looking almost as they must have done when they first emerged from the caster’s mould.  The vulnerability is more complex and, in a slightly metaphysical sense, relates to all the items which could have been in the show if they hadn’t been lost in the intervening years.  Bronze is a valuable material, not least because, while copper is reasonably common, tin deposits are much rarer and more scattered across the earth’s crust (indeed it’s always intrigued me to speculate on just how the whole concept of making bronze ever got going, especially in places where the tin had to come from far away lands like Cornwall or Central Asia).  The most convenient source of bronze in any culture which has become accustomed to its use is going to be existing bronze objects- which means that items may be melted down and reused several times over. 

It’s clear that bronze as a material has traditionally had a particularly close association with power and authority (secular and spiritual), no doubt because of its relative rarity as a material and the artist’s need for a certain amount of infrastructure to undertake work on any scale in the medium.  This close association with power and authority can have ambiguous consequences here- the great and powerful may be able to demand that they are memorialised in bronze but their statues are vulnerable to regime change and bronze can be a great deal easier to break up and dispose of than, say, marble (Eisenstein played up that image when mythologizing the 1917 Revolution on film, echoed, perhaps unconsciously, by the Hungarians in 1956 when they made short work of the massive bronze statue of Stalin in Budapest).   From the 15^th to the early 19^th century bronze objects were especially vulnerable because bronze guns were for many years the best artillery pieces available and statues or church bells might be melted down for conversion into armaments in times of crisis.    Other factors could place bronze monuments in danger.  The exhibition includes a number of exquisite mourning figures (“pleurants” in the jargon) from the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon, second wife of Charles the Bold, the last Valois Duke of Burgundy.  These originally decorated her tomb in Antwerp Cathedral but were looted when the tomb was smashed up by Protestant Iconoclasts in a surge of image breaking in 1566.   They (or at least some of them) appear to have survived, perhaps because they weren’t explicitly devotional images, but were stolen and re-emerged many years later in the modern Netherlands.   It’s not clear, however, just how many items may have vanished into the furnaces of gun founders or other utilitarian users of bronze in that crisis- itself just one of many across the bronze-using world which might see yesterday’s cherished item lined up for conversion into something else

Losses to the furnace can however be compensated elsewhere, as the (admittedly fragmentary) statue which opens the exhibition shows (see below).  It’s a dancing maenad (a follower of Dionysus, god of wine).   This is Greek in origin and dates from perhaps some time in the 4^th century BC and was found by Sicilian fishermen under the sea as recently as 1989.   It was salvaged, subjected to conservation measures and now lives in a museum in a small Sicilian town.   Evidently the surviving piece was just part of a much bigger ensemble (which must have been quite something).   When it went into the sea and under what circumstances are unclear.  It might have been on a ship which went down off the Sicilian coast- or it may have been thrown overboard in a storm to lighten ship in a storm.   It may have gone into the sea not long after it was cast or it may have been just one part of the insatiable Roman appetite for Greek art which saw massive displacements and relocations of pieces in the years after 150 BC.    It is just part of an ongoing situation in which advances in marine archaeology are allowing the recovery of lots of items lost in transit between the Greek speaking world of the Eastern Mediterranean, with a corresponding rewriting of our knowledge of classical Greek art.

There is much more that could be said- every item has a fascinating story of its own.    I won't even draw too much attention to the presence of one of the iconic artefacts of Italain Futurism in the show.... Perhaps the best thing any readers can do if they’re anywhere near London is try to see this exhibition before it closes in early December.

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