Casson, Stanley: The technique of early Greek sculpture (Oxford, 1933)

232 FOR WORKS IN BRONZE
io. The Simple Burin (Fig. 93). This was the bronze-
engraver ’s principal tool. It was a blade of steel, mounted in a
wooden handle, with a cutting-point. The cutting face of the
blade was either rectangular or triangular,
the actual cutting being done with one of
the pointed angles. The groove so made
was, as a result, a V-shaped groove. Where
the groove is semicircular in section the
instrument that made it is called a gouge.
That is in effect the only difference be-
tween the two tools, gouge and burin.
The process by which the bronze is re-
moved and the tool employed is the same
in both cases, though the gouge, having
a less fluent blade, because of the wide
area of resistance which it meets, is usually
Modern driven by a hammer and the burin by
bronze-worker’s simple hand-pressure.
hand-burins or ‘scor- _ . ,
pers> ffurins can vary enormously, i hey
can be of minute size, like copper-plate
engravers’ burins, or they can be large and heavy, strong
enough to remove quite thick strips of bronze from a smooth
surface. Heavy and light burins alike are best driven by
hand. Tremendous pressure and great control can be obtained
if the burin has a broad handle shaped rather like a flattish
door-handle. The ball of the thumb and much of the palm
of the hand can be used to control its direction and give it
pressure, by leverage.
Actual representations of burins are lacking, but the
evidence for their variety in antiquity is enormous. All
surviving bronze statues, with a very few exceptions, testify
to their continuous use from the earliest times down to the
latest. Artists in the early times never left the hair untouched
after casting. The practice developed only at a later date
when impressionistic influences were aimed at, or careless-
ness had set in. There is no actual proof that wooden