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Benin artists excelled at brass casting, made with a lost-wax process.

Get up close and you’ll see that the bronze is abraded and unfinished, especially on Orpheus’s lyre and on the animal pelt draped over his chest — the result of an only partial mastery of the lost-wax process of metal casting, which involves forming a clay mold around a wax figure, heating it so the wax melts away, and then filling the cavity with liquid metal.

It was a shock to discover that the mistakes I hadn’t made would now never be made but would exist as negative shapes, cast in a kind of lost-wax process.

The process for creating the bronze bust, explained Palm, is called the lost-wax process.

Eliscu decided to make the trophy by using a metal-casting method known as the lost-wax process.