What Is The Most Famous Ancient Bronze Statue?

The allure of bronze is clear whenever you see a statue or casting made from it… as clearly evidenced by our beautiful range of products!

The copper and tin alloy is a complex craft to get right and highly skilled artisans train for years to perfect the art of lost wax casting, which is why Image Casting works with one of the UK’s best foundries to create our personalised casts. Exceptionally strong and hard-wearing there are examples of bronze artefacts surviving thousands of years due to its corrosion-resistant properties.

However, this amazing functionality is ironically a double-edged sword, as many early bronze artefacts were melted down and turned into not only swords but also armour and other tools vital at the time.

It was one of the earliest examples of recycling in history because bronze was so important to the development of certain situations that an entire era of history is known as the Bronze Age for this very reason.

This means that so few complete historic examples of bronze statues exist, but one of the most famous and influential of these was Boxer At Rest, made between 330 BC and 50 BC in Ancient Greece but later discovered buried in Rome in 1885.

The Boxer, one of two bronze statues rescued from the same hiding place, was one of the earliest examples of Greek art moving from representations of gods and heroes as idealised human figures towards more realistic, grounded figures.

The ancient boxer, with his many battles depicted on his face and in his body, appears as a contemplative figure thinking about what brought him into the position of fighting for a living, leaning on a boulder and turning his head towards something.

A lot of advanced copper inlaying techniques were used, which would have been exceptionally sophisticated for the era, with different bronze alloys used to represent different parts of the body such as the lips and wounds that had emerged from the fight.

Unlike many other statues which were either melted down or destroyed during the Sack of Rome, Boxer at Rest was buried, entombed and protected until future generations could preserve it forever.