SCULPTURE REPLICAS

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29912, 28 August 1962, Page 12

SCULPTURE REPLICAS

Museum’s New Process The British Museum has greatly improved on the plaster cast as a reproduction of sculpture in the replicas of small works of marble and bronze recently produced and now placed on sale in the museum, says “The Times.” It has been found that casts made in oxychloride cement, a mineral acidfused material, with suitable additions of colour pigments and aggregates, are able to simulate any opaque stonesandstone. bath, hoptonwood, basalt, granite, marble. The marble-like effect of the replicas of the statuette of Socrates, a Roman copy of a Greek original of the fourth century 8.C.. and the head of Eros, Greek work of the same period, comes remarkably . close to the original. Equally satisfactory is the simulation of bronze by a cold-metal process, in which metal powder suspended in a solution of synthetic resin is changed into a solid catalysis The process gives so convincing a version of celebrated Benin bronze head (probably sixteenth-century) that the need for the word “replica” cut in the base at the back, becomes the more apparent. The beautifully , clear-cut impressions to be obtained from Near-Eastern cylinder seals are among subjects for other casts now in prospect. The methods used are applicable on any scale. -