2020 Essays

Creating Original Patterns for Casting in Ms. Fr. 640

Landsman, Rozemarijn; Rowen, Jonah

Despite the quantity, detail, and breadth of entries about metalworking in Ms. Fr. 640, most instructions for casting presume that the object to be cast—usually medals, animals, or plants—already exists. The entries thus very rarely address the fabrication of the original pattern for making the mold. Medals are frequently reproduced or made in serial production in Ms. Fr. 640, but the actual procedure for making that first model is left mostly unmentioned. This essay investigates the few instances in the manuscript for creating patterns, including fols. 50r and 156r, and compares them to other sixteenth-century sources that treat molding and casting.