It might seem like brown would be an easy patina to make and sell, but brown can be reddish, it can be greenish, it can be yellowish. Almost all of the Chinese bronzes have one type of a patina - their version of Renaissance brown. The Chinese are making fewer and fewer options for wholesalers to pick from. This resulted in the mass of silly bronzes you can buy online. You can see this in "reproductions" of ancient Greek or Roman bronzes with big breasts or improved facial features to make them more attractive to the guy in China who was making the model. In many cases the Chinese made the terrible mistake of attempting to "improve" or modernize the originals. If an item is not reproduced from a mold taken from an original it will not be the same. Their molds weren't taken from original items they were obviously modeled from pictures. Most of the Chinese bronzes that were reproductions of famous statues, vases, clocks and lamps. If you tried to order a lot of things it turned out almost nothing was in stock and everything had to be produced to ship. They all looked the same because they used the same molds - or bought their casting waxes from the same sources. In the beginning the Chinese offered catalogs of hundreds of different bronzes. I suspect the Chinese foundries mix in other metals to extend the "bronze" available. The biggest cost is the metal and the ingredients for bronze can be expensive in China and hard to get. They mass produce the waxes and their low labor costs mean the cost of casting and finishing is as low as it could possibly get. If you pay $100 for a Chinese bronze the net cost at the foundry is $10 or less. Those guys were mostly based in Spain and Portugal. Twelve years ago the Chinese flooded the market with these and wiped out all of the European producers within a year or two. They are really cheap you can buy a decent sized desktop bronze for around $100.00. Virtually all of the small bronzes sold on Ebay are from China. There have been no problems with the second 'coat' ten years later and the bronzes are all outside in the elements. I made a bad mistake in the patina I had ordered from a Chinese foundry on a dozen bronzes. Mix the chemicals up, add fire and you might totally ruin a bronze. Sometimes it is possible to apply a second patina over the first, but you can't be sure of the results because there is a chemical reaction in the patina when it is applied. Those who are need to carefully consider the patinas that are available to them because once a foundry patina has been applied it is irreversible. Very few people today are ordering or commissioning bronzes directly from the foundry. Most people who visit this page are trying to identify a patina on a bronze they have bought - or are thinking of buying or people who have bronzes with damaged surfaces that they want to repair. There are two types of patinas, those applied though firing on or chemical reactions in the foundry and artistic patinas that are applied with colors, varnishes and waxes. It still has it's original patina, the surface is natural, the result of people touching it over the years. Another ancient bronze that has been known since ancient times is the famous "Thorn Picker" - "the Spinario" from Rome. These bronzes are in a remarkable state of preservation and have been on view ever since their creation. Later on I will talk about the horses of St. The only reason the statue of Marcus Aurelius was saved from the melting pot was that in medieval times that thought he was the Christian Emperor Constantine. Only a few ancient statues - like the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius from Rome have survived without ever being buried or immersed in the sea and thus still possess their original surface. Some ancient statues, like the bronzes from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum have been restored and in the process have had new patinas applied. Those bronzes have natural patinas that have taken hundreds of years to develop. Now we are not talking about ancient statues that have been dug up from the ground or raised from the seabed. Most people do not realize that bronze statues have artificial patinas applied to their surfaces. I have just published a "My Favorite Semi-Precious Stones for Hardstone Animals" - click here if you want to read it. Bronze gilding is discussed at length and there is an introduction to the bronzes of Constantinople. This blog article discusses the types of bronze patinas and how to recognize them.
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