Chapter 26: Sculpturing Machines

The savage who, with a flint point or bone splinter, laboriously scratched rude figures on the walls of his cave dwelling, did the best he was capable of to express the emotions which affect the splendidly equipped sculptor of to-day; he wished to record permanently some shape in which for the time he was interested, religiously or otherwise.

The sun, moon and stars figure largely in primitive religions as objects of worship. They could be easily suggested by a few strokes of a tool. But when mortals turned from celestial to terrestrial bodies, and to the worship of human or animal forms--the “graven images” of the Bible--a much higher level of art was reached by the sculptor, who endeavoured to give faithful representations in marble of the great men of the time and of the gods which his nation acknowledged.

The Egyptians, whose colossal monuments strew the banks of the Nile, worked in the most stubborn materials--basalt, porphyry and granite--which would turn the edge of highly tempered steel, and therefore raise wonder in our minds as to the nature of the tools which the subjects of the Pharaohs must have possessed. Only one chisel, of a bronze so soft that its edge turned at the first stroke against the rock under which it was found, has so far come to light. Of steel tools there is no trace, and we are left to the surmise that the ancients possessed some forgotten method of hardening other metals--including bronze--to a pitch quite unattainable to-day. Whatever were their implements, they did magnificent work; witness the splendid sculptures of vast proportions to be found in the British Museum; and the yet huger statues, such as those of Memnon and those at Karnak, which attract tourists yearly to Egypt.

The Egyptians admired magnitude; the Greeks perfection of outline. The human form in its most ideal development, so often found among a nation with whom athleticism was almost a religion, inspired many of the great classical sculptors, whose work never has been, and probably never will be, surpassed. Great honour awaited the winner in the Olympian games; but the most coveted prize of all was the permission given him--this after a succession of victories only--to erect a statue of himself in the sacred grove near the shrine of Olympian Jove. Happy the man who knew that succeeding generations would gaze upon a marble representation of some characteristic attitude assumed by him during his struggle for the laurel crown.

Until recently the methods of sculpture have remained practically unaltered for thousands of years. The artist first models his idea in clay or wax, on a small scale. He then, if he designs a life-size or colossal statue, erects a kind of iron skeleton to carry the clay of the full-sized model, copied proportionately from the smaller one. When this is finished, a piece-mould is formed from it by applying wet lumps of plaster of Paris all over the surface in such a manner that they can be removed piecemeal, and fitted together to form a complete mould. Into this liquid plaster is run, for a hollow cast of the whole figure, which is smoothed and given its finishing touches by the master hand.

This cast has next to be reproduced in marble. Both the cast and the block of marble are set up on “scale-stones,” revolving on vertical pivots. An ingenious instrument, called a “pointing machine,” now comes into play. It has two arms ending in fine metal points, movable in ball-and-socket joints. These arms are first applied to the model, the lower being adjusted to touch a mark on the scale-stone, the upper to just reach a mark on the figure. The operator then clamps the arms and revolves the machine towards the block of marble, the scale-stone of which has been marked similarly to its fellow. The bottom arm is now set to rest on the corresponding mark of the scale-stone; but the upper, which can slide back telescopically, is prevented from assuming its relative position by the unremoved portions of the block. The workman therefore merely notices the point on the block at which the needle is directed, and drills a hole into the marble on the line of the needle’s axis, to a depth sufficient to allow the arm to be fully extended. This process is repeated, in some cases many thousands of times, until the block has been honeycombed with small holes. The carver can now strike off the superfluous marble, never going beyond the depth of a hole; and a rough outline of the statue appears. A more skilled workman follows him to shape the material to a close copy of the cast; and the sculptor himself adds the finishing touches which stamp his personality on the completed work.

Only a select few of the world’s greatest sculptors have ventured to strike their statues direct from the marble, without recourse to a preliminary model. Such a one was Michelangelo, who, as though seized by a creative frenzy, would hew and hack a block so furiously that the chips flew off like a shower, continuing his attack for hours, yet never making the single false stroke that in the case of other masters has ruined the work of months. He truly was a genius, and must have possessed an almost supernatural faculty of knowing when he had reached the exact depth at any point in the great block of marble from which his design gradually emerged.

The formation of artistic models will always require the master’s hand; but the reproduction of the cast in marble or stone can now be performed much more expeditiously than is possible with the pointing machine. We have already two successful mechanisms which in an almost incredibly short time will eat a statue out of a block in faithful obedience to the movement of a pointer over the surface of a finished design. They are the Wenzel Machine Sculptor and Signor Augusto Bontempi’s Meccaneglofo.

THE WENZEL SCULPTURING MACHINE

In the basement of a large London business house we found, one dark November afternoon, two men at work with curious-looking frameworks, which they swayed backwards and forwards, up and down, to the accompaniment of a continuous clattering of metal upon stone. Approaching nearer, we saw, lying horizontally in the centre of the machine, a small marble statue, its feet clamped to a plate with deep notches in the circumference. On either side, at equal distances, were two horizontal blocks of marble similarly attached to similar plates. The workman had his eyes glued on a blunt-nosed pointer projecting from the middle of a balanced frame. This he passed slowly over the surface of the statue, and simultaneously two whirring drills also attached to the frame ate into the stone blocks just so far as the movement of the frame would permit. The drills were driven by electric power and made some thousands of revolutions per minute, throwing off the stone they bit away in the form of an exceedingly fine white dust.

It was most fascinating to watch the almost sentient performance of the drills. Just as a pencil in an artist’s hands weaves line into line until they all suddenly spring into life and show their meaning, so did the drills chase apparently arbitrary grooves which united, spread, and finally revealed the rough-hewn limb.

Every now and then the machinist twisted the footplates round one notch, and snicked the retaining bolts into them. This exposed a fresh area of the statue and of the blocks to the pointer and the drills. The large, coarse drills used to clear away the superfluous material during the earlier stages of the work were replaced by finer points. The low relief was scooped out, the limbs moulded, the delicate curves of cheek and the pencilling of eyebrows and lips traced, and in a few hours the copies were ready for the usual smoothing and finishing at the hands of the human sculptor.

According to the capacity of the machine two, four, or six duplicates can be made at the cost of a little more power and time. Nor is it necessary to confine operations to stone and marble, for we were shown some admirable examples of wooden statues copied from a delicate little bronze, and, were special drills provided, the relations could be reversed, bronze becoming passive to motions controlled by a wooden original.