In casting in the “cire perdu” process, Benvenuto Cellini warns you to beware lest you break your crucible—­“just as you’ve got your silver nicely molten,” he says, “and are pouring it into the mould, crack goes your crucible, and all your work and time and pains are lost!” He advises wrapping it in stout cloths.

The process of repousse work is also much the same to-day as it has always been.  The metal is mounted on cement and the design partly beaten in from the outside; then the cement is melted out, and the design treated in more detail from the inside.  Theophilus tells us how to prepare a silver vessel to be beaten with a design.  After giving a recipe for a sort of pitch, he says, “Melt this composition and fill the vial to the top.  And when it has become cold, portray... whatever you wish, and taking a slender ductile instrument, and a small hammer, design that which you have portrayed around it by striking lightly.”  This process is practically, on a larger scale, what Cellini describes as that of “minuterie.”  Cellini praises Caradosso beyond all others in this work, saying “it was just in this very getting of the gold so equal all over, that I never knew a man to beat Caradosso!” He tells how important this equality of surface is, for if, in the working, the gold became thicker in one place than in another, it was impossible to attain a perfect finish.  Caradosso made first a wax model of the object which he was to make; this he cast in copper, and on that he laid his thin gold, beating and modelling it to the form, until the small hollow bas-relief was complete.  The work was done with wooden and steel tools of small proportions, sometimes pressed from the back and sometimes from the front; “ever so much care is necessary,” writes Cellini, “...to prevent the gold from splitting.”  After the model was brought to such a point of relief as was suitable for the design, great care had to be exercised in extending the gold further, to fit behind heads and arms in special relief.  In those days the whole film of gold was then put in the furnace, and fired until the gold began to liquefy, at which exact moment it was necessary to remove it.  Cellini himself made a medal for Girolamo Maretta, representing Hercules and the Lion; the figures were in such high relief that they only touched the ground at a few points.  Cellini reports with pride that Michelangelo said to him:  “If this work were made in great, whether in marble or in bronze, and fashioned with as exquisite a design as this, it would astonish the world; and even in its present size it seems to me so beautiful that I do not think even a goldsmith of the ancient world fashioned aught to come up to it!” Cellini says that these words “stiffened him up,” and gave him much increased ambition.  He describes also an Atlas which he constructed of wrought gold, to be placed upon a lapis lazuli background:  this he made in extreme relief, using tiny tools, “working right into the arms and legs, and making