The Riace Bronzes

Two over-life-size Greek bronze warriors, lifted out of eight to ten metres of water off Riace Marina in Calabria in August 1972 and kept from the public for nine years. They are catalogued as Bronze A and Bronze B, they were made about a generation apart, and they are among the very small number of large-scale Greek bronzes that survive at all.

Almost nothing else about them is agreed. The finder's own sworn report, filed the day after the discovery, describes a group of statues and gives a depth and a distance from shore that no later account uses. What the Florence restoration of 1975 to 1980 removed from inside them cannot be put back. Whether they may ever leave Reggio Calabria has been argued over for forty years.

This record keeps A and B apart on every line. Published accounts routinely do not, and a fact about one is regularly printed under a photograph of the other.

What the finder actually wrote down, the day after

Almost every account of the discovery gives the same figures: 16 August 1972, two hundred and thirty metres off Riace Marina, eight metres of water, an arm protruding from the sand. Those numbers do not come from the finder.

Stefano Mariottini, a chemist from Rome diving on holiday, filed a declaration at the superintendency of antiquities for Calabria at Reggio on 17 August 1972, protocol number 2232. In it he stated that on the sixteenth, during a dive for fishing, in the locality of Riace, about one hundred and thirty kilometres along the Ionian state road, at a distance of about three hundred metres from the shore and at a depth of about ten metres, he had found a group of statues, presumably in bronze. Of the two emerging, one lay on its back, its face covered with a flowing beard of curls, arms open, one leg advanced beyond the other; the other lay on its side with a leg bent, and carried on its left arm a shield. The statues were dark brown except for some lighter parts, perfectly preserved, cleanly modelled, without obvious concretion. The dimensions were approximately one hundred and eighty centimetres.

Three hundred metres, not two hundred and thirty. Ten metres, not eight. One hundred and eighty centimetres, against measured heights of one hundred and ninety-eight and one hundred and ninety-seven. A group of statues, of which two were emerging. And a shield on the left arm of one of them, which nobody ever recovered.

Down the left-hand margin of that typed sheet is a handwritten note in red, signed by the superintendent Giuseppe Foti: the present notification follows the telephone communication of 16 August 1972, received at nine in the evening, which reported the discovery. Foti died shortly before the bronzes came back to Reggio, and the museum's underwater section is dedicated to him.

The recovery, and which statue came up when

The underwater unit of the Carabinieri raised the statues using a balloon inflated from the divers' own air cylinders. Bronze B came up on 21 August 1972. Bronze A came up the following day, and fell back to the seabed once before it was brought safely to the beach.

The English-language accounts sometimes give 23 August for Bronze A. The Italian account, which follows the Italian records, gives the day after the twenty-first. The discrepancy is one day and it is recorded here rather than smoothed over, because a reader checking this record against another will find the difference and is entitled to know that this publication saw it.

It was Bronze A that Mariottini saw first: the left arm was the only element showing above the sandy bottom.

Bronze A and Bronze B are two different objects and this record will not merge them

Bronze A is one hundred and ninety-eight centimetres tall, with an average metal wall thickness of about eight and a half millimetres. He is the younger of the two, il giovane. The musculature reads as more nervous and more vital. The head carries a thick band a little above the temples, and the band is not smooth: it has a triangular projection pointing upward, which fits the angle formed on every Corinthian helmet between the neck-guard and the cheek-pieces. There is a broad bearing surface on the nape as well. A pin in the crown of the head, which has attracted some very strange explanations including a small parasol to keep birds off, is more simply read as the fixing for that helmet. Bronze A wore a Corinthian helmet pushed up on the forehead, in the convention used for a heroised warrior, so that the face remained visible and the individually cast hairs showed under the rim.

Bronze B is one hundred and ninety-seven centimetres tall, with a wall thickness of about seven and a half millimetres. He is il vecchio, calmer and more relaxed in stance. His skull is unnaturally elongated at the crown, which is a solution to the same problem handled differently: the shape held the helmet steady without a pin, at the cost of hiding the hair. In compensation the sculptor gave him something else. At the level of the eye-openings of the helmet the head carries a seating for a rectangular inset, hatched with small raised points, and on the forehead a triangle over the hair worked with the same hatching, which imitates tanned animal skin. The ears are pierced for a fixing, and the beard is cut by a deep groove that reads as a chin strap. Bronze B wore a leather cap, the kyne, under his helmet. On coinage of the fifth and fourth centuries the kyne appears beneath the Corinthian helmet with ear-flaps and a distinctive curled neck-guard, and it is the mark of a strategos, the commander of a city's army. Bronze B was made to be recognised as a general.

Both have a porpax still on the left arm, the bracket through which a hoplite shield was carried, and the hand-grips. Both held a heavy hoplite spear. Bronze A held his between index and middle finger in a way that kept the butt-spike off the ground so as not to blunt it; Bronze B held his ordinarily, in the palm.

Bronze B was repaired in antiquity, and the repair is the most interesting thing about either of them

The radiographs taken at Florence produced a result nobody expected. The right arm of Bronze B, and the left forearm to which the shield was attached, are a different casting from the rest of the statue. They were welded on later, replacing the original arms, most probably to make good damage sustained while the statue was already on display. The Italian description places the intervention in the Roman period.

This is worth dwelling on because of what it implies. Bronze B was standing somewhere, in public, long enough to be damaged; somebody thought it worth commissioning replacement arms in bronze; and the repair was competent enough that it went unnoticed until an X-ray plate was taken in the late 1970s. The object has a conservation history that begins in antiquity, and the ancient conservator is the earliest named party in its treatment record even though the name is lost.

The inlays, listed by statue

The Florence cleaning identified, material by material, the parts that are not bronze. Silver for the teeth of Bronze A. Silver for the eyelashes of both. Ivory and limestone for the whites of the eyes. Copper for the lips and for the areolae of the nipples of both.

The English account gives the eyes of Statue A as calcite, noting that they had originally been supposed to be ivory. The museum's own page gives calcite and glass paste for the eyes and copper and silver for the lips and anatomical details, without separating the statues. These are not the same statement and this record does not average them. What is common to all three sources is that the eyes are inlaid in a hard white material with a separate iris, that the lashes are silver, and that the lips and nipples are copper.

One detail from the museum's own history deserves recording because it is the kind of thing that never reaches print: an eyelash belonging to Bronze B was found abandoned in the basement of the museum and reported in the local press. A component of one of the most closely studied objects in Italian archaeology spent an unrecorded period in a store room.

How they were made, and what was inside them

They were cast by the direct lost-wax method, in which the original model is destroyed in the process. That is a demanding choice: there is no second chance and no master to fall back on, and it means that whatever the sculptor built, he built once.

The 1992 to 1995 campaign, which emptied the statues, showed how the model was made. Around an initial core, the final form was built up by laying on several hundred strips of clay mixed with animal hair to make them workable. The concentric stratifications of that clay were found in the legs and the chests of both statues. It is a slow and awkward way to work and it allowed the masses of the body and the muscles to be grown outward to the shape wanted.

The 2009 to 2011 campaign, working with endoscopes once the last of the core was out of the heads, was able to observe for the first time how the eyes and the mouths had been made and to identify analytically the materials used in them. It also recorded the nails, some square in section, that the founders had used to hold the structure steady during the pour, and gammagraphy showed the cracks and fractures in both, particularly on the nose and the beard of the young one.

The clay that was thrown away was the evidence

The casting core, the terra di fusione, is not waste. It is a sample of the ground where the statue was cast, sitting inside the statue.

Analysis of the clay taken from the holes in the feet found that the material inside Bronze B came from fifth-century Athens and the material inside Bronze A from the plain of ancient Argos. The museum's own summary puts it as Attica and the Argolid. An earlier formulation in the same Italian account gives Argos and Laurion, which is not quite the same statement, and the difference is recorded here rather than resolved.

That single result is the strongest localisation evidence anyone has for either object, and it exists only because clay was still inside them. The Florence restorers left some of it in place. The 1992 to 1995 campaign took all of it out, for a defensible conservation reason: the core was holding moisture and the copper was corroding. But taking it out is irreversible, and the stratigraphic relationship between the clay and the metal cannot be re-examined. Every future question that would have been answered by looking at the core in situ is now closed.

This is the ordinary condition of conservation and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than presented as a controversy or hidden as an embarrassment. A treatment that saves the object can destroy the evidence, and the profession has to choose. In this case the choice was made twice, in opposite directions, by two different institutions, seventeen years apart.

Nine years before anyone was allowed to look

They came out of the water in August 1972. The public first saw them in December 1980.

Cleaning at Reggio ran until January 1975, when the superintendency accepted that its own laboratory could not do the work. The statues went to the restoration centre of the Tuscan archaeological superintendency in Florence, an institution that existed because of the flood of 1966. Five years later, on 15 December 1980, the campaign closed with a six-month exhibition at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Florence, staged as a public tribute to the technical effort made there. Rome followed.

That exhibition is the moment the objects stopped being an archaeological find and became a national possession. The enthusiasm it started has never subsided. It is also the origin of the argument that has run ever since about whether they should travel, because it established that they could be moved and that moving them drew crowds.

The claim that something else was down there

In 2008 Giuseppe Bragho published a study of the official 1972 records and argued that they describe more than was recovered: not only a helmet and a shield but a third bronze statue with open arms, none of which was taken out of the water during the official recovery. He argued further that the positions in which A and B were found at the official recovery differ from the positions registered at the discovery, which would mean somebody had tried to move them in between. The suggestion is that the missing material was taken in the days before the official operation and sold abroad.

Mariottini's own declaration is the primary document behind this and it is quoted in full earlier in this record. It says a group of statues. It says two were emerging. It says one carried a shield on its left arm. No shield was recovered with the statues, although a bronze shield-grip is reported to have been found later on the same seabed.

The Italian Wikipedia article carries an editorial warning that the events as narrated are not supported by the source cited for them, which is a caution this record passes on rather than suppresses. A separate published note by F. Giudice, Il terzo Bronzo di Riace, appeared in Archeologia Viva in April 1993. In 2019 the Italian television programme Le Iene returned to the question and Mariottini declined to comment.

What can be said without going beyond the documents: the finder's sworn statement describes more objects than were recovered, and that discrepancy has never been explained on the record.

The reward nobody can point to

Italian law provides a finder's reward, the premio di rinvenimento, for the discoverer of archaeological material that vests in the state. Under the framework in force in 1972 and under the current cultural heritage code, the reward can run to a substantial proportion of the value of the find.

Whether Mariottini was ever paid anything, how much, and whether there was litigation about it, is not established in any source consulted for this record. For objects of this celebrity that is a striking gap, and it is the first thing this desk would ask the Ministry of Culture. It is recorded here as an open question rather than answered by inference.

The names people have put on them

Fifty years of proposals, none of them accepted. What follows is the sequence, because the sequence is the attribution history.

Between 1979 and 1982 W. Fuchs argued that both belonged to the Athenian dedication at Delphi and were by Pheidias, an opinion shared by Alberto Busignani, Antonio Giuliano and Maurizio Harari. In 1982 Carlo Odo Pavese proposed two hoplite runners by two different Attic artists, 470 to 460 BC for A and 430 BC for B. Hans Peter Isler in 1983 and Paolo Enrico Arias in 1984 proposed two Athenian heroes, A by Pheidias about 460 to 450 and B by his school thirty years later. Claude Rolley in 1983 proposed two Attic eponymous heroes, A by an Athenian artist about 460 and B from the Pheidian school about 430. Enrico Paribeni rejected an Attic origin for A altogether and proposed a hero, perhaps Ajax the Locrian, by a Peloponnesian artist between 460 and 450, with B a general by an Atticising artist between 410 and 400. Antonino Di Vita proposed two victorious hoplite runners. Georgios Dontas proposed two Athenian eponymous heroes, A by Myron and B by Alkamenes, both about 450. In 1985 Evelyn Harrison assigned both to the Achaean dedication at Olympia and to Onatas, between 470 and 460, and P. C. Bol and O. Deubner agreed the following year. Sandro Stucchi proposed that both represent the boxer Euthymos of Locri Epizephyrii, A by Pythagoras of Rhegion just after 470 and B by a western Greek artist just before 425. R. Ross Holloway in 1998 proposed two founders of Sicilian cities by a Sicilian bronze-caster. Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway in 1981 stood alone in arguing that they are Roman, eclectic and classicising work of the first century BC or the first century AD; the thinness of the metal is the standard objection to her dating.

After the 1995 restoration the field narrowed. Paolo Moreno, working from the casting-core analyses, proposed Tydeus for Bronze A and Amphiaraos for Bronze B, two of the Seven against Thebes, with Hageladas of Argos for A about 450 and Alkamenes for B about 440. Daniele Castrizio, working from the marks left by the missing attributes, proposed Polynices for A and Eteocles for B, both by Pythagoras of Rhegion, and cites Tatian's taunt to the Greeks that they had not destroyed the memory of the fratricide by burying the statues of Polynices and Eteocles along with their maker Pythagoras. Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, with the support of Salvatore Settis, proposed Erechtheus and Eumolpos, from the group Pausanias saw on the Athenian acropolis, arguing from traces on the unfinished crown of B for a fox-skin cap and from the right hand for a short-handled weapon, that is, a battle-axe, which would make B a Thracian.

Nothing in that paragraph is settled. What has been effectively abandoned is the reading of the pair as athletes, because the objects held spears, and the reading of either as a historical portrait.

How they stand now, and what holds them up

The 2009 to 2013 work produced a display solution that is itself an object of interest. Each statue stands on a base of two superimposed blocks of Carrara marble, designed by ABDR Architetti Associati. Four concave cups are cut into the facing surfaces of the two blocks, mirroring each other, and four marble spheres sit between them. In an earthquake the lower block moves with the ground and the spheres roll in their cups, absorbing the horizontal movement instead of transmitting it upward. Stainless steel dissipative elements between the blocks handle vertical oscillation. The system is morphological rather than mechanical, which means it has almost nothing to maintain, and marble was chosen as the material most compatible with bronze. ENEA designed and built the bases and verified them on shaking tables at the Casaccia research centre, using full-scale resin copies of the statues.

The problem being solved is specific: a tall figure standing on a very small footprint is most vulnerable in the legs, and even minor oscillation can compromise the structure or topple it. Reggio Calabria sits in one of the most seismically active parts of Europe. The same approach has been discussed for Michelangelo's David.

They came back to the museum in December 2013, into a room kept effectively aseptic, entered by about twenty people at a time through a filter room. The Bronzes room reopened on 21 December 2013 and the rebuilt museum in full on 30 April 2016.

The corpus they belong to is very small

The reason two bronzes from a Calabrian beach could carry this weight of argument is that there is almost nothing to compare them with. Large-scale Greek bronze statuary was melted down. What survives, survives because it was lost at sea or buried.

The Italian account names the closest comparisons directly: the Charioteer of Delphi and the Artemision god at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. To those the usual list adds the Marathon Boy, the Antikythera Youth, the Getty Victorious Youth, the Piombino Apollo, the Croatian Apoxyomenos, the Porticello heads that are in the same room at Reggio, and the Hellenistic prince from Punta del Serrone.

That is the entire evidential base for an art form that dominated the Greek world for four centuries. It is why a single new find changes the field, and why the argument about whether these two objects should ever be allowed to travel is not sentimental.