Why artists and designers love bronze

Bronze has been around for at least 5,000 years, and was employed so widely in ancient cultures that it gave its name to the Bronze Age. An alloy of copper and tin, its strength lies in its durability: bronze is harder than gold and silver, and can survive for centuries, even on the seabed, where it is relatively immune to salt water. Thanks to its enduring monumentality, we know today what the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius looked like 1,900 years ago.

Christie’s Design specialist Capucine Tamboise says that it is the mutability of the material that attracts artists. It can be heavy and solid, like one of Rodin’s glossy black sculptures; light and fragile, like a Degas dancer; or roughly textured, with a brown-green patina, like the Riace bronzes recovered in 1972 from the Ionian Sea.

When artists in the 20th century were seeking to break down the barriers between art and design, bronze became a favoured medium. ‘It allowed people to do so much more with their imagination,’ says Tamboise. This ingenuity is evident in the Design sale on 24 November 2026 at Christie’s in Paris, where a selection of works in bronze from the 1920s onwards are offered for sale. Among the highlights are pieces by Alberto Giacometti and his brother Diego, Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, Ingrid Donat and Maarten Baas.

The appeal of bronze to designers began with modernist pioneers such as Armand-Albert Rateau, who used the material to create botanical and animal forms, and Albert Cheuret, who explored the medium’s sculptural possibilities to create lamps, combining the metal with translucent alabaster.

Many designers employed the lost-wax technique, which involves creating a wax model around a core, enclosing it in a heat-resistant mould and then melting away the wax before molten bronze is poured into the resulting cavity. The process requires extreme skill and can easily go wrong — a tension beautifully portrayed by Andrei Tarkovsky in his 1966 film Andrei Rublev, in which a young foundry worker stakes everything on his ability to cast a great bell, without knowing whether he will succeed.

The technique can also preserve evidence of the creator’s hand, in the form of fingerprints or the contours of a thumb pushed deep into the wax. These marks can be seen in some of the bronzes by Diego Giacometti, a genius modeller who worked for his brother Alberto as a master caster. Diego’s skills were all the more remarkable given that he had suffered an early injury to his right hand, caused by a threshing machine, which led him to develop extraordinary dexterity in the fingers of his left.

Offered in the sale is a candle-holder with two horse heads and five branches, made by the sculptor for his brother’s 50th birthday in 1951. Alberto considered it one of Diego’s most poetic works, saying that the horses appeared to be ‘galloping through the forest, still foaming at the mouth’.

In contrast to Diego’s more animated creations is an oval cup by Alberto, whose minimalism evokes a primeval simplicity consistent with the artist’s iconic figures. That primitivism can also be seen in the designs of Ingrid Donat (Diego’s protégée), who draws on ancient practices such as scarification and incising, shaping the bronze into a skin alive with texture.

Contemporary designer Maarten Baas creates a similar membrane-like impression with his ‘Carapace’ bar and armoire, made from welded bronze plates that form a protective, armour-like shell. Tamboise also singles out Hubert Le Gall’s ‘Pasiphaé’ sofa — made for his 2021 exhibition Une fantaisie grecque at the Villa Kérylos in Beaulieu-sur-Mer — as an example of a designer operating at the height of his imagination. ‘He really blurs the boundaries between sculpture, furniture and fantasy,’ she says.

Finally, no design sale would be complete without the work of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. ‘Their creations seem to challenge the very properties of metal,’ says Tamboise of their animal and vegetal forms. ‘In their hands, bronze seems to acquire a life of its own.’

What unites all these works, she says, is ‘an enduring mystery’. How bronze was first discovered remains uncertain, yet this material, transformed by fire and shaped by hand, continues to surprise. As the specialist observes, ‘It has proved remarkably receptive to the imagination of successive generations of artists.’

Design is on view 19-24 November 2026 at Christie’s in Paris

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