This course takes a broad approach to the materials, theories, knowledge bases, genres, techniques, authorship, and ideological resonances of bronze and bronze casting of sculptures and other types of objects in Early Modern Europe, with some concentration on 17th-century Rome. At the same time, the course will emphasize the study of casting techniques made possible through technical studies. The medium of bronze casting is the most complex and collaborative amongst the early modern sculptural media, starting with a model produced by a sculptor to a largely anonymous work force that carried out the numerous phases of direct and indirect lost wax casting. Although there are notable examples of sculptor-founders, design was often distinct from manufacture. The layered authorship of these works, alongside the structural possibility of casting multiples from the same models and molds, has often made bronzes seem somehow less original or autograph, a problematic art in the historiography of even the most prominent artists. Rather than running from these judgments, this course runs at them, developing a critical perspective on the authorship of bronzes by valorizing the very aspects of bronze casting that have proven troubling in the historiography. Technical studies offer key tools to recover and uncover the work of these foundries and workers. This course also introduces the technical study of art and brings the research questions, methods, visual assets, and results of the Technical Study of Bernini’s Bronzes research project as resources to the seminar.