 |
| Donatello Madonna and Child before 1466 bronze relief Victoria & Albert Museum |
 |
| Galeazzo Mondella (called Moderno) St Sebastian before 1487 bronze relief Harvard Art Museums |
 |
| Anonymous Italian sculptor Portrait-medal of Sulaiman the Magnificent, Sultan of Turkey ca. 1520 bronze relief Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 |
| Valerio Belli Adoration of the Shepherds ca. 1526-46 gilt-bronze relief Harvard Art Museums |
from Among School Children
Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.
Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts – O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise –
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
– William Butler Yeats (1926)
 |
| Guglielmo della Porta Vulcan capturing Mars and Venus ca. 1553-55 bronze relief National Gallery of Art, Washington DC |
 |
| Hubert Gerhard The Resurrection 1581-84 gilt-bronze relief Victoria & Albert Museum |
 |
| Niccolò Roccatagliata Annunciation before 1636 bronze relief Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 |
| Antonio Montauti Triumph of Neptune and Europa ca. 1735-40 bronze relief Los Angeles County Museum of Art |
 |
| Georg Raphael Donner Apollo slaying Python before 1741 bronze relief Victoria & Albert Museum |
 |
| Antoine-Louis Barye Milo of Croton devoured by a Lion 1819 bronze relief Walters Museum of Art, Baltimore |
 |
| Thomas Eakins Arcadia ca. 1883 bronze relief Philadelphia Museum of Art |
 |
| Elihu Vedder Faces in the Fire 1887 bronze relief Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
 |
| Constantin Meunier The Miner 1904 bronze relief Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Bronzes
I
The bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln Park
Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr by in long processions going
somewhere to keep appointments for dinner and matinées and buying and selling
Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling
On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by
I have seen the general dare the combers come closer
And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs and guns of the storm.
II
I cross Lincoln park on a winter night when the snow is falling.
Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow, his bronze forehead meeting
soft echoes of the newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser, his
bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.
A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with long legs in bronze, Garibaldi
in a bronze cape, they hold places in the cold, lonely snow to-night on their pedestals
and so they will hold them past midnight and into the dawn.
– Carl Sandburg, from Chicago Poems (Henry Holt, 1916)
 |
| Fernand Léger Relief conceived in plaster ca. 1953, cast in bronze 1960 bronze relief Minneapolis Institute of Art |