The term bronze covets a number of copper-based alloys. In Roman times, the word aes was used for both copper and bronze, which is explained by the fact that adding another metal to copper improves its properties without changing its nature. For technical and economic reasons, there was a tendency to add more or less lead, which somewhat reduced the strength of the resulting alloy. The practice was nonetheless common, as it allowed the metal to be cast at lower temperatures, and made it flow more freely. Roman bronzes were therefore alloys of copper, tin, lead and sometimes zinc.

According to Polybius, who is quoted by Strabo, copper, lead and silver mines were intensively exploited by a large labour force. In the Republican era, mines were leased by the State. The Spanish mines supplied ingots to the whole Roman world. Bronze was used for many purposes: tableware, luxury household items, machinery, tablets of laws, architectural decoration, portraits of important people and statues to the gods. However, many bronze artefacts have not survived, partly owing to corrosion, but more often because they were melted down and recast at a later date. The value of the material and the unlimited scope for recycling it explains why so many works have disappeared. Some, of course, were transformed into bronze coins. In Classical times, bronze portraits and statues were in fact just as common as those made of stone or marble.

The recent discovery, near Cape Miseno, of an equestrian statue of Domitian, subsequently transformed into a portrait of Nerva, may be linked to the report of Dio Cassius, who states that, so the late second century AD, Didius lulianus refused the golden statue the Senate had decided to erect so his honour in these terms: “Give me a statue of bronze, which will last. I see that all the gold and silver statues in honour of my predecessors have been destroyed, while those made of bronze are still standing.” But Dio adds: “He was wrong, because the bronze statue that was dedicated to him, as he had desired, was, in its turn, destroyed after his fall.”

Examination of imperial statues shows that, after casting, bronze was often gilded, which increased its prestige. Recent restoration work has revealed traces of the layer of gold applied to the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, formerly on the Capitoline. Of the prestigious statues executed in bronze, we might mention the Capitolinc She- Wolf, the Head, of Brutus in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, the statue in the Museo delle Terme often believed to represent a Hellenistic sovereign (though in fact a likeness of Titus Quinctius Flaminius), the “Orator” in the Archaeological Museum in Florence, and a large number of imperial portraits. Whole groups of statues were sometimes executed in bronze, for instance the group of male and female figures and horses found at Cartoecto, now in the Ancona Museum. Given the large number of surviving imperial portraits from the provinces, workshops must have operated in quite far-flung places, a supposition confirmed by examination of the portrait of Hadrian recently acquired by the Louvre.

Though denying, directly or indirectly, from large-scale official sculpture, bronze statuettes were more or less mass produced in many regions. Study of those produced in an important legionary centre such as Carnuntum sheds light on the tastes and beliefs of the soldiery, trade in the region, workshops and imports. The groop of statuettes found in 1830 at Montorio, near Verona, is suggestive of a small household shrine in which Jupiter was the chief deity, surrounded by many other figures. The small bronze statuette from the Colomb Collection at Sistéron reveals that there was a trade in small—format replicas intended purely for the pleasure of the purchaser, in this case a fine new reproduction of the Farnese Antinous.

From Late Antiquity, fewer bronze statues, busts and portraits have survived. Instead, the material was used for utilitarian objects of various kinds: harnesses, tableware, weapons, knives and buckles. lo the religious field, bronze was used for many fine liturgical items; examples of these arc suspended and processional crosses, censers, vases and communion plates.