Category: metal work

Cast Bronze Lord Vishnu

Cast Bronze Lord Vishnu, Lost Wax Method in the Hoysata Style

Vishnu’s face is perfectly shaped giving him a truly divine appearance. His face is angular and sharp with his oval eyes almost looking through you with the power of his gaze. He is dressed in royal silk garments and holds in his four hands the sankha (conch), chakra (discus), gada (mace), a fly whisp in his front right hand.

The conch represents “Om”, the first sound of creation and also the beginning of matter, since sound and matter are consider to be synonymous. The discus is thought to represent the sun. Vishnu’s weapon, the mace, represents the elemental force from which all physical and mental powers derive.

His head dress design is called a Kirita Makutam, a head dress in the shape of a large puja bell. Both in his head dress and on his belt is a carving of the god of time Mahakala. Vishnu’s large mace was cast separately and can be removed from the piece.

French Encryption Machine

French Encryption Machine, !6th Century, Court of Henry the Second

This is in collection of the Musée National de la Renaissance in Paris.

Essentially all ciphers remained vulnerable to cryptanalysis using the frequency analysis technique until the development of the polyalphabetic cipher, most clearly by Leon Battista Alberti around the year 1467, though there is some indication that it was already known to Al-Kindi.

Alberti’s innovation was to use different ciphers (i.e., substitution alphabets) for various parts of a message (perhaps for each successive plaintext letter at the limit). He also invented what was probably the first automatic cipher device, a wheel which implemented a partial realization of his invention.

In the polyalphabetic Vigenère cipher, encryption uses a key word, which controls letter substitution depending on which letter of the key word is used. In the mid-19th century Charles Babbage showed that the Vigenère cipher was vulnerable to Kasiski examination, but this was first published about ten years later by Friedrich Kasiski.

Sutton Hoo Helmet

Sutton Hoo Helmet, Detail, Anglo-Saxon Ship Burial, Sixth Century AD

Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge, East Anglia, is the site of two Sixth and early Seventh Century cemeteries. One contained an undisturbed ship burial, including a wealth of Anglo-Saxon artefacts of outstanding art-historical and archaeological significance, most of which are now in the British Museum in London. The site is in the care of the National Trust.

Sutton Hoo is of primary importance to early medieval historians because it sheds light on a period of English history that is on the margin between myth, legend, and historical documentation. Use of the site culminated at a time when Rædwald, the ruler of the East Angles, held senior power among the English people and played a dynamic if ambiguous part in the establishment of Christian rulership in England; it is generally thought most likely that he is the person buried in the ship. The site has been vital in understanding the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of East Anglia and the whole early Anglo-Saxon period.

Sir Frederic Leighton

Sir Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron PRA, “The Athlete Wrestling a Python”, Bronze, 1877

Frederic Leighton was an English painter and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter. Leighton was bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history.  Leighton was the first painter to be given a peerage, in the New Year Honours List of 1896. The patent creating him Baron Leighton, of Stretton in the County of Shropshire, was issued on 24 January 1896; Leighton died the next day of angina pectoris.

Leighton received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. At age 17 in the summer of 1847, he met the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer in Frankfurt and painted his portrait, in graphite and gouache on paper—the only known full-length study of Schopenhauer done from life. In Florence at the age of twenty-four, Leighton studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti and painted his 1853-1855 “Cimabue’s Madonna Carried in Procession”, a large-scaled work which originally hung in the Music Room at Buckingham Palace in 1862. From 1855 to 1859, Leighton lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.

The supposition that Frederic Leighton may have been homosexual continues to be debated today. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton with letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries and his letters are telling in their lack of reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself, although it is clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.

Troy Morrison

Troy Morrison, “Earth Whale”, Steampunk Sculpture

Steampunk is an inspired movement of creativity and imagination. With a backdrop of either Victorian England or America’s Wild West at hand, modern technologies are re-imagined and realized as elaborate works of art, fashion, and mechanics. If Jules Verne or H.G. Wells were writing their science fiction today, it would be considered steampunk.

Troy Morrison is an Australian sculpture who works in the steampunk mode. The whale sculpture took three years to complete. The body of the whale is made from an old Ford Gearbox while the rest of the whale comprises of copper and vintage parts from trains, WW2 planes, cars and boats.

James Havard Thomas

James Havard Thomas, “Thysis”, 1912, Tate Britain Museum, London

James Havard Thomas trained in Paris and then in 1889 moved to Italy, where he lived for seventeen years. In 1905 he sent a male nude ‘Lycidas’ to the Royal Academy, where its rejection caused a scandal. In 1912 Havard Thomas returned to the theme with ‘Thyrsis’. The title comes from the poem of 1866 by Matthew Arnold of that name, and Arnold’s poem had itself been based on Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ written in 1637.

Thyrsis was an ancient Greek shepherd. Arnold chose to commemorate in his poem a friend from Oxford as this pastoral character. The shepherd’s pipe was for Arnold a symbol of his own youth, and Havard Thomas’s figure itself commemorates Italy and classical art. This bronze was cast in 1948, from the original in wax.

Romain Langlois

Stone and Bronze Sculptures by Romain Langlois

A self-taught sculptor, Romain Langlois studied medical books and anatomical charts to understand the human body, building his first sculptures using only plaster and clay. Seeking a more permanent material, Langlois turned to bronze, a metal he now incorporates into works that are inspired by nature rather than man.

His pieces visually pull apart the natural objects that surround us—building works that appear as bisected rocks, boulders, and tree trunks. These sculptures showcase glistening bronze protruding from their insides, unleashing the perceived inner energy of each object.

Bethsheba Grossman

Sculptures by Bethsheba Grossman

According to Bathsheba Grossman, a Santa Cruz, California artist, her art is about life in three dimensions: working with symmetry and balance, getting from the origin to infinity, and always finding beauty in geometry.

Using a background in mathematics and computer programming, Grossman creates intricate and complicated designs. 3D printing in bronze and stainless steel is her main medium – in many cases this is the only way her creations could be represented by an actual object. Traditional sculpture technology simply doesn’t operate on un-moldable objects.

Selling her designs through Shapeways and her site, Grossman’s pieces are widely available, as she eschews the limited editions common in tradional art-making.  Croudsourcing lets Grossman pursue her dream and continue to produce these facinating pieces.

Ceremonial Kapala

Ceremonial Kapala, Tibet, southwestern China, Ca 19th century CE.

Used in both Hindu, Tantra, and Buddhist tantric ceremonies, the kapala is a cup used as a ritual bowl. They are usually carved or elaborately mounted with precious metals and jewels. Many of the deities of Vajrayana, or tantric Buddhism, or depicted carrying the kampala, usually in their left hand.

The ceremonial kampala shown here is a horned goat skull ornamented with white metal applique and glass. 12″L x 6-½”H.

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