Page 350 - Copper and Bronze in Art: Corrosion, Colorants, Getty Museum Conservation, By David Scott

Weil (i996) has produced an interesting essay about attitudes toward the subject of patina-
tion in different periods; it should be read for its humanistic approach to the topic. Weil's dis­
cussion of the nature and attitudes toward patina has a bearing on arguments that are sometimes
made to show that ancient bronze objects were often polychrome in their surface finish as a
result of different patinas being applied or created on the bronze surface (Born 1993). Born gives
as an example the statue of Dionysis in the Museo Nazionale (Terme Museum) in Rome. This
bronze was found in the Tiber River with a fine brown-black patina. The hair region of the statue
is a deep black that contrasts with the patina on the skin. The statue has been conserved, how­
ever, and there may originally have been a dark surface coating over the entire statue. Another
possibility is that the hair region may have entrapped corrosive solutions more effectively and
thus become darker than the rest of the figure.

Ρ ATI Ν ATI Ο Ν D U R I N G T H E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U R Y

During the nineteenth century there was a revival of interest in the patination of bronze and
brass. Hughes and Rowe (i982) note that a manual of workshop receipts by Lacome (1910)
reveals that patina began to be of special interest around 1828 when a patina called Florentine
tint was popularized by the work of a metal founder by the name of Lafleur. Lafleur's patina
involved coating an object with copper and then applying a thin paste of sanguine (principally
hematite, or a red earth) and plumbago (graphite) dissolved in an alcohol or spirit-based solu­
tion; this is not unlike Soldani's rouge technique described earlier.
Later an entirely different patination technique, based on smoking the bronze using a
special smoking oven, became popular and was used extensively throughout the nineteenth
century. The smoking method was varied by employing yellow and red pigments to highlight
both green- and brown-colored patinas, marking a transition from the use of pigments within
the patina to painterly patinas, in which variations were sometimes made with the addition of
bronze powders to create a variety of surface effects. These typically greenish bronze powders
were lightly scattered over parts of the surface to create a variegated appearance, known col­
loquially as "pigeon's neck" (Hughes and Rowe 1982; Hughes 1993). Some artists, such as A. L.
Barye (i796-i875), sought to retain control of the bronze's finish rather than leave this aspect of
the work to the foundry, which was the normal practice. Consequently, these artists developed
considerable skill in the application of appropriately colored patinas.
One rather amusing set of instructions for producing a malachite patina to simulate antiq­
uity comes from a twentieth-century craft handbook (Taubes 1976). It calls for the procurement
of a large fish that is slit open and the copper object to be patinated slipped inside. The stuffed
fish is then buried in the ground for several months. After the fish is dug up, the object is
removed and transferred to a Vienna wine cellar for several weeks for carbonation of the sur­
face. Following this treatment, the object is boiled in mud and cleaned; according to the hand­
book, it now has a "natural" patina.

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