FIGURES AND VASES, & ALL THAT PERTAINS TO THAT BRANCH OF THE CRAFT
CALLED ‘GROSSERIA.’
When the silver is cast in the manner described above, in the first
furnace, it is as well to let it cool on the iron plates above
mentioned because by so doing it contracts better.[129] When it is
cold you clean off the rough edges from around it. This done, you
make a scraper[130] about two-and-a-half fingers broad, & it should
be blunted; to it you attach a stick shaped with two handles, and
these are distant about half a cubit from the point of the scraper.
Note that the scraper should be bent about three fingers,[131] and
such as is used for sgraffito work, _graffiare_.[132] With this
scraper the silver plate is to be planed, and in this wise: You make
your silver plate red hot & place it on one of the iron plates you
used for casting it on; fastening it on tightly with certain iron
tools used for nailing or fastening,[133] then setting the handle of
the scraper to your shoulder with your two hands to the two handles
that you fastened to it, so that it comes to be in the form of a
cross, you pare off the surface of your silver plate with very firm
pressure till it is thoroughly clean.[134]
I won’t omit to tell you of a method I once learnt. Whilst in Paris I
used to work on the largest kind of silver work that the craft admits
of, and the most difficult to boot. I had in my employ many workmen,
and inasmuch as they very gladly learnt from me, so I was not above
learning from them; the plates I planed with such diligence gave them
cause for much marvelling; but, none the less, one charming youth,
on whom I set great store, said to me, with the utmost modesty, that
in Paris it was not customary to plane the plate in the way we did
it, and albeit our method seemed very clever, he would undertake to
produce the same result without all this planing, and so gain much
time.
To this I replied that I should only be too delighted to save any
time; so I gave him a pair of vases to do, weighing 20 lbs. a piece,
and my models for them. Before my very eyes the youth melted his
silver in the way I told above, & cast it between his iron plates.
Then he cleaned some of the edges off and set to right away to hammer
it into shape & give it its rotundity (of which more anon) without
paring it in any way. Both vases he turned out in this way with
great care and admirable technique.[135] It is just because in Paris
more work of this kind is done than in any other city of the world
that the craftsmen, from constant practice, acquire such marvellous
technical skill. I should never have believed it had I not seen it
for myself. Then, at first, I thought that it was the quality of
silver that gave them a vantage, because they work here with a finer
quality of silver than anywhere else; but my workman said no, & that
silver of baser alloy would serve his purpose equally well. I tried
him and found that it was so. From which I conclude, therefore, that
a man can start straight away with shaping what he wants out of his
silver without wasting needless time in planing it up first. Of
course care has to be taken to remove certain little blemishes[136]
from time to time. I do not go so far as to say that it is bad to
plane the metal first: nay, I have found either way good.
Now let us consider how to make a vase in the shape of an egg.
I follow, as always, my promised method of giving you of my own
creations for different princes & great persons. In Rome I made,
among many other vases, two big ones in the form of an egg each about
a cubit high, with lips and handles spreading out from the top.[137]
One was for the Bishop of Salamanca, a Spaniard, and the other for
Cardinal Cibo; both were elaborately ornamented with foliage and
animals of various kinds. These vases were called ewers,[138] and
were used by the Cardinals on their credence tables on occasions of
state.
Inasmuch as I made numbers of these for King Francis, in Paris, and
as they were all larger and more richly wrought, I shall draw my
illustrations from them. You take your plate & trim off the rough
edges, plane it on both sides, & slightly round the edges off,[139]
and forasmuch as the plates are cast in somewhat oblong shapes, you
beat them into a rounded shape with your hammer, and this is how you
do it: you take your red hot plate, not too red, for then it would
crack,[140] but sufficient, I would say, to burn certain little
grains of powder or dust thrown on to it; & put it on the stake,
and you beat it very firmly with the thin end of the hammer from
one angle to the other driving the metal well to the centre,[141]
so that when all the four corners of your plate are done it will be
marked somewhat the shape of a cross.[142] After this you reverse
the process and work with the hammer outwards, annealing the plate
some four times, till it is of such roundness as your good craftsman
may see fit. And when it is rounded into the shape of the vase you
have in mind you must see that the measurement of the diameter of
your plate exceeds that of the future vase by about three fingers,
and that the plate must be kept as thick as possible in the middle.
Before you hit this size exactly you take an iron stake about a
finger thick and six fingers long, as blunt as possible so as not
to pierce the plate, this tool you put with its broad end on the
anvil, and you very carefully balance[143] your silver plate on the
point of the stake until it stands steady by its own weight. When
the point is fixed, get one of your handy lads to strike it with the
broad end of the hammer so that it makes a mark in the plate. I have
no doubt there are masters who can find the centre point straight
away without having recourse to this little dodge, especially when
working on small plates, but for large pieces I have always found
it very helpful. After this you turn the plate round again on the
anvil & strike it in the same manner on the stake till the point,
which so far was only indicated, is now boldly marked. Then you take
your compasses & strike a circle which will show you how far your
outline is out, and so on, hammering the silver in conformity with it
by repeated heating and beating. All the while you have to be very
careful not to lose your centre point, and to beat the silver out,
as I said before, so that the diameter of the plate exceeds that of
the future vase by some three fingers. Applying your compasses again,
you strike a series of concentric circles about a half a finger apart
from each other, & starting from the centre of the cup. Then you
take a kind of hammer about one finger thick at the narrow end, and
one-and-a-half at the broad end; this hammer is battered and rounded
off[144] into somewhat the shape of the fleshy part of a finger,
and with it you begin beating in the middle of the plate, at the
centre point in fact, being careful always not to lose the point. The
movement of the hammer should be in the form of a spiral,[145] and
follow the concentric circles; you take turn about in beating and
heating in this manner till you see the silver grow into the shape of
a hat, or at least its crown,[146] & thus approximating to the form
of your vase. The thing to observe is that the metal should spread
equally all round, for if it gives more on one side than the other it
would be uneven; and in this way you draw it inwards till it is as
deep as the body of your model requires. Then with various different
stakes, each adapted specially to the form you are at work on, you
beat, now with the broad, now with the narrow end of the hammer,
and right into the body of your vase till it is equally bellied
all round; and when this has all been very carefully done, always
working on the stakes—some of which are called ‘cows’ tongues’[147]
because of their shape—you work up the neck of the vase to the
necessary height, and similarly on other stakes specially curved for
the purpose, you little by little narrow out the neck. Any little
imperfections[148] on the surface you remove as you go on, and so
finally see the neck of the vase take the perfect shape you wish it
to have.
When you have thus finished the neck, you can begin to work the
bas-relief on the body of the vase; like a vase, for instance, that
I made for King Francis,[149] it was one among many, but it was the
finest of the lot. I filled it with black pitch made in the manner I
described to you before, then I divided out the body of the vase for
the figures, animals & leaves, which I drew on it with a stylus of
burnished steel. This done, I drew them over again with pen & ink,
using all the delicacy that good drawing requires. Then I took my
punches, these are of iron, about the length of a finger and about
the thickness of a goose’s quill. They are all shaped in different
ways, some are fashioned like a C, beginning with a small c, and
ending with a large one,[150] some are bent more, some less, and
some are almost quite straight.[151] Others, again, are greater,
diminishing from the size of a man’s thumb to six different smaller
sizes, and all these selections you ought to have. With them, and
with a hammer weighing some three or four ounces, and striking most
dexterously, you beat into relief whatever you have designed. Then
you place your vase on a slow fire and melt out the pitch. After this
you heat the vase once more and clean it with a solution of tartar
and salt, in equal proportions as I described above. When the vase is
quite clean you employ a set of iron tools like stakes and with long
horns,[152] technically termed _caccianfuori_, ‘snarling irons’:
they are made of pure iron, long or short as the case may be, and
as the work may need. These _caccianfuori_ have to be fastened into
the anvil stock,[153] then you put one of the horns into the vase,
so that the point of the horn, which should be in shape and rounded
like your little finger, is applied to the inside of the vase, & to
the parts you want to beat out; and you very gently strike the other
end of it with the hammer so that the blow passing to the end of the
horn adjoining the body of the vase, bosses up the silver from within
at such points as your learned and cunning master may deem well.
When this process has been applied to all the figures, animals, and
foliage, you heat and cleanse the vase once more, once more fill it
with pitch, and with other sorts of punches, similar in all respects
to the first, but having their ends shaped like beans, and large or
small as the case may be, you begin the bossing again. Each master
uses his own particular punches, & all have their own little ways
of working, but all have this in common that the punches do not cut
but only press the metal. The process of melting out & re-applying
the pitch may now be repeated two or three times as may be thought
necessary, till you have got your figures and foliage to the highest
point of workmanship, then melt it out for the last time. After this
you may proceed to fashion in wax whatever graces may have place
at lip or handle, improving on the model or design with which you
started. These finished, you can make them in all sorts of different
ways, ways so many, that they were wearisome to recount. The easiest
of these was the one I usually employed, and particularly in the
vase I made for King Francis.[154] I took earth, such as the makers
of artillery use, dried it and sifted it well, then I mixed it with
fine cloth shearings and a little cows’ dung sifted through a sieve,
then I beat it all well together. After this I took some tripoli,
such as jewellers use to polish their gems with, pounded it up very
fine & made from it a pigment as for painting, streaking it over the
wax ornaments. This I also did to the inlet holes and vent channels
after I had duly affixed them to the models. I always took care
to fix these vent holes down below, and pass them upwards, but at
such distance from the inlet channel that none of the silver should
spill into them, and thus prevent them doing their work. When I had
applied the first coat of tripoli I let it dry. Then I took the clay
of which I told you before & coated the work over to the thickness
of a knife’s back, letting it dry again, and repeating this process,
till the different coats were about a finger thick. Then I bound it
all round with iron bands as many as it could hold, over these iron
bands I put more coats of clay, this time mixed up with rather more
cloth shearings than I had used previously, & applied another coat
again of a knife’s back thickness. Then I applied the whole to a slow
fire, holding the vent holes downwards, and so gradually melted out
the wax, which I caught in a little receptacle down beneath. One has
to be very careful not to have the fire too hot, for that would make
the wax bubble, and so damage the mould within. When the wax is quite
melted out, you remove the mould from where it is attached to the
vase, clean it carefully of all wax, and close up the place where
it is attached to the vase with the same earth that is used above.
This done, you bind the whole thing round again with fine bands of
iron wire, & cover it up completely with a further coating of the
tripoli mixture. Then you heat it on charcoal, firing it and the
charcoal together in a brick furnace; and mind to get it well baked,
for this kind of earth differs from others, in that it should all
be fired at one turn. Meantime, have your silver ready for casting,
or I would say molten, and while this is in progress put your mould
into a large receptacle filled with sand, which should be moist,
not wet; & fix it in well as do the casters of artillery into their
troughs, but with the greater delicacy that the handling of lighter
metal requires.[155] When your silver is well molten, throw finely
powdered tartar over it to keep it fresh. Then take a piece of linen,
the size of the crucible, folded into four and soaked with olive
oil, and spread it over the tartar that covers the silver; and grip
the crucible with the tongs called _imbracciatoie_. You ought to
have many kinds of these, small, medium, great, and adaptable to the
quantity of silver you have to melt; they hold the crucible together
and prevent it breaking—that happened to me many a time. Just as
you’ve got your silver nicely molten and are pouring it into the
mould, crack goes your crucible, and all your work and time and pains
are lost! Take note therefore of this, while pouring your silver
into the mould, let one of your assistants hold the linen rag from
slipping from the crucible, for by so holding the rag on, it has two
good results; it keeps the silver warm and it prevents the little
bits of coal from falling into the mould. This also you may take note
of: if you have little masks and such-like conceits to apply to your
vase, when you have fashioned them all carefully in wax and taken
them off the vase having made moulds of them as above described, you
lay in the hollow of the moulds a coating of wax, a thin knife’s back
more or less in thickness, or of such thickness as you wish your mask
to be. This coating you spread equally all over. In the craft it is
called the _lasagna_. When you have fixed on to it the inlet channel
& the vent holes—just as I told you above, the latter fixed at the
bottom & turning to the top—you fill in the whole with the clay,
bind around with wire, and cast in the same way as before.[156] This
method you can employ in the handles & the feet of your vase, where
you find the hammer difficult to work with, and I counsel you in
working large vases always to employ this method of casting.
FOOTNOTES:
[129] _Meglio e’ si condensa._
[130] _Rasoio_: _literally ‘a razor.’_
[131] _Vuole essere piegato tre dite_: _perhaps, ‘inclined.’_
[132] _This may mean only hatching or cutting generally._
[133] _Conficcare o congegnare._
[134] _Mr. Heywood Summer tells me that the tool here described is
not used in modern sgraffito work; it would by the description,
however, be something like the diagram here shown._
[Illustration: Diagram illustrating the _rasoio_ for paring metal]
[135] _Pratica._
[136] _Sfogliette_: _probably little surface scalings of the metal_.
[137] _Strette di sopra._
[138] _Aquereccie._
[139] _Alquanto scantonato un poco._
[140] _Spezzerebbe._
[141] _E far che l’entri bene._
[142] _Verrà ferito in riscontro di croce._
[143] _Si congegna._
[144] _Scantonato e tonda._
[145] _Chioccola._ _We had the word above as applied to the female
screw._
[146] _Coppa._
[147] _Lingua di vacca._
[148] _Sfogliettina._
[149] _See ‘Vita,’ p. 321._
[150] _What our metal workers call semi-ring tools._
[151] _Curved chasers._
[152] _Con le corne lunghe._
[153] _Brinckman translates, ‘a vice.’_
[154] _This is the ordinary_ ‘_cire perdue_’ _process_.
[155] i.e., _smaller work_.
[156] _This is probably what we should call a cored casting._