An article in today’s La Repubblica, written by former soprintendente ai beni culturali di Roma, Adriano La Regina, may perhaps settle once and for all a debate that’s been raging for several years regarding the date of the bronze She-Wolf in the Capitoline Museums.
Traditionally dated to about 500 BC and said to have been created by an Etruscan artist, questions regarding the sculpture’s age and provenance were made public several years ago when the findings of restorer Anna Maria Carruba — who had worked on the wolf in 1997 — were announced. Based on a close examination of the sculpture, Carruba had concluded that it was created by means of a casting technique used in the Middle Ages but not in the ancient period.
The results of Carruba’s study are published in a book titled, The Capitoline She-Wolf. A Medieval Bronze, in which she explains that the She-Wolf was created using a technique called the lost wax process. The sculptor would have begun by creating a plaster version of the work, then would have coated the plaster sculpture in a layer of wax, which, in turn, would have been covered with a clay layer. When the clay dried, molten bronze would have been poured between the plaster and clay layers, so that the wax melted and the hot metal filled the cavity between the layers, taking their shape.
While the lost wax process was used to create bronze sculptures in antiquity, the Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans cast such sculptures in pieces that were later soldered together, leaving seams that are visible upon careful examination.
But, Carruba claims, the She-Wolf was created in a different way for she is seamless, making clear the fact that the entire sculpture was created in a single cast. This variation on the lost wax technique was developed in the Middle Ages in order to cast unsoldered, seamless church bells that would ring with a pure sound.
Carruba’s theory has remained a controversial one, but La Regina’s article in La Repubblica today seems intended to close the case. The former soprintendente announces that repeated radiocarbon and thermoluminescence tests made over the past years confirm that the sculpture dates somewhere between the 8th and the 14th centuries, and was most likely made in the 1200s.
Read the whole article here.
