History
The great civilizations of the old world worked in bronze for art, from the time of the introduction of the alloy for edged weapons. The Greeks were the first to scale the figures up to life size. Few examples exist in good condition; one is the seawater-preserved bronze now called "The Victorious Athlete," which required painstaking efforts to bring it to its present state for museum display. Far more Roman bronze statues have survived.
The ancient Chinese knew both lost-wax casting and section mould casting, and in the Shang Dynasty created large numbers of Chinese ritual bronzes, ritual vessels covered with complex decoration, which were buried in sets of up to 200 pieces in the tombs of royalty and the nobility. Over the long creative period of Egyptian dynastic art, small lost-wax bronze figurines were made in large numbers; several thousand of them have been conserved in museum collections.
From the ninth through the thirteenth century the Chola dynasty in South India represented the pinnacle of bronze casting in India.
Read more about this topic: Bronze Sculptures
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“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
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—Karl Marx (1818–1883)