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A museum guide in Rome told me most bronze statues got melted down, not lost
I was at the Capitoline Museums in Rome last month and a guide said the bronze horses up there survived because they got mistaken for something else. That one comment made me rethink every museum I've walked through. All those marble copies of Greek bronzes exist because people recycled the real ones for coins and weapons. So when we dig up a bronze statue, it's a huge deal, not just a nice find. Makes you wonder how many masterpieces got tossed into a furnace. Do any of you focus on bronze age sites for this reason?
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felix14718d ago
Wait, they got mistaken for something else? That is wild. I always figured stuff like that survived because it was hidden or buried or whatever, not because someone looked at it and went "eh, that's not worth melting." Kind of blows my mind that one wrong guess saved a whole set of statues for like a thousand years. And yeah, the whole recycling thing is nuts when you really sit with it. I don't dig or anything, but now every time I see a marble copy in a museum I'm gonna be thinking about the bronze original that got turned into some guy's sword.
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