SEAN HEMINGWAY: I'm Sean Hemingway, Associate Curator in the Department of Greek and Roman art. We're here as part of the scientific Investigations Tour, which you can find in many other galleries of the Museum. Often we have Roman marble copies of Greek bronze statues. Here we're looking at a Roman bronze copy of a Greek bronze statue.

RICHARD STONE: My name is Richard Stone. I'm from the Department of Objects Conservation, and my main field of interest is the history of the technology of art, especially bronze casting. This bronze torso at first glance is Greek from the early fifth century B.C. However, if you look closely at it, you can see there are a lot of little rectangular patches, that some of them have fallen out. This is a traditional way of making restorations to small damages to bronzes after casting by both the Greeks and the Romans. Actually, there are two sets of repairs to this statute, this torso. One is genuine repairs that are physically separate pieces of metal, some of which have fallen out, clearly. And others are not actually repairs but the impressions that the rectangular repairs made when somebody made an indirect cast of this torso, probably in Roman times.

If you walk around to the left side of the case and look at the hip towards the buttocks, you'll see that there's a large flaw in the bronze, right at the lower edge. Originally the Romans made a repair and inserted a bronze blank of the same color, and hammered it in so you'd never see the difference. But underground corrosion has caused it to fall out. This is a Roman repair, not an original Greek one.