Giannis vs Polinik on the color of bronze :)

[Gregory J. Liebau]

Some good examples of polished bronze made with typical bronze age alloys would be from Jeroen Zuiderwijk's and Neil Burridge's reproduction castings. The two men cast using historic methods and often smelt their own bronze using period-correct percentages of alloy. As far as I'm aware, all of the images I linked below are hand-polished. I own some bronze reproductions that maintain their shine if they are wiped down with oil or even just buffed every month or so. A very gold-like finish can be achieved and maintained with relative ease as long as the bronze is not neglected for long periods of time in poor conditions. I cannot see how anyone could ever consider it logical to allow bronze that was in use to develop its natural patina... This finish would long periods of time to create and would also be extremely hard to maintain during use.

As to the example about the helots and their confusion of the metals... Well, the helots would hardly have any contact with gold, as even their Spartan masters had little use of the metal considering their Lycurgan attitude towards superfluous material wealth. If helots were suddenly put into contact with typical polished bronze and gold items, I can see it being very easy to mistake one for the other. If they were used to bronze being green on the other hand, it would be obvious what was gold or not...

Anyway, some of the men's bronze work.

Jeroen's Site

Neil's site

Some examples of the finish on their hand-polished works.

Jeroen...





Neil...