Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and tough, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much that the Bronze Age was named after the metal. However, historical pieces were often made interchangeably of bronzes or brasses with different compositions, so modern museum and scholarly descriptions of older objects increasingly use the more inclusive term "copper alloy" instead. Historically the term latten was used for such alloys.
The word bronze is borrowed from French: bronze, itself borrowed from Italian: bronzo (compare Medieval Latin: bronzium), whose origin is unclear. It might be connected with Venetian: bronza "glowing coals", or German: Brunst "fire", but it could equally go back to or be influenced by the Latin name Brundisium of the city of Brindisi (aes Brundusinum, meaning "copper of Brindisi", is attested in Pliny). Alternatively, it could derive from the Persian word for brass, birinj.
Read more about Bronze: History, Composition, Properties, Uses
Famous quotes containing the word bronze:
“Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“What will our children remember of us, ten, fifteen years from now? The mobile we bought or didn’t buy? Or the tone in our voices, the look in our eyes, the enthusiasm for life—and for them—that we felt? They, and we, will remember the spirit of things, not the letter. Those memories will go so deep that no one could measure it, capture it, bronze it, or put it in a scrapbook.”
—Sonia Taitz (20th century)
“Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)