Fisherman catches 2,500 year old bronze sculpture

A statue thought to be an ancient bronze of Apollo, Greek God of poetry and love, has dropped off the radar after being found in the sea off Gaza last summer and surfacing briefly on eBay. It is 2,500 years old and priceless.

Bronze sculptures last forever as they still dig up castings from the Roman era.  Many other materials would have fallen apart in the sea but not bronze.  This amazing work of art was listed on eBay some time ago with a price of $500,000.000 USD and then it disappeared.

Jawdat Abu Ghurab used to be a builder but in 2007 Israel restricted the delivery of building materials to the Gaza strip, so he became a fisherman like his father.
He only has a small boat so never goes out far, and catches only small fish. One day last August, though, the 29-year-old from Deir al-Balah ended up with a very different haul.
His uncle was also fishing that day, but gave up early. Ghurab kept going.
"I stayed alone in the sea with a small boat and paddle, I waited for hours and did not imagine what fate had in store for me in the depths of the sea," he says.

metimes waves move the bottom of the sea, small fish go to that spot in search of food, I saw the fish congregate in an area not far from the coast, only 100m out, so I rowed out there and, immersed in the sea, I saw the body of a person, half-buried under the sand."

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My wife covered her face when she saw him lying naked in the house - she begged me to cover it”

Jawdat Abu Ghurab

At first Ghurab was scared. He stared into the water but did not recognise the man's face. When he dived in and touched the body it felt like stone.

"I tried to move it, to make sure that it was a statue, but it was too heavy," he says. "The colour was golden so it was easy to think it was gold."
Ghurab marked the spot and went back to the beach to fetch his relatives. They returned and dived down together - it was at a depth of about four metres, Ghurab estimates.
"We were able to slide it under the water for a metre or two metres and then go up again to take a breath and try again," he says.
After four hours they succeeded in getting the object out of the water. It was the statue of a naked man. They loaded it on to a cart and took it to Ghurab's house.

"My wife covered her face when she saw him lying naked in the house. She begged me to cover it," he says, laughing.
Ghurab's uncle, Atef, proposed cutting the statue into small pieces and selling it.
"After I saw the yellow colour at the head of the statue I thought it was made of gold, but one of my sons suggested cutting off the finger and taking it to the market to check.
"We remembered that one of our relatives worked in the neighbourhood selling gold. We called him and he examined the statue and told us that it was made of bronze."
But he also said the bronze statue could be even more precious than if it had been made of gold.
Ghurab considered trying to smuggle the statue into Egypt to sell it, but the smugglers' tunnels - dug to circumvent restrictions put in place by Israel and Egypt after the Islamist movement Hamas came to power in Gaza - have been out of action since they were closed by the Egyptian army last summer.
Neighbours started asking questions, so Ghurab asked a relative - a commander in Hamas's military wing, the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades - to help him hide it.
"The people who took the statue said they would send me a handsome reward after they sell it, but we have not got anything yet," he says.

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Never seen in public bronze sculpture now showing

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304181204579371464010790606
For those who are not $millionaires you can always shop at www.bigbronze.com and www.allclassics.com to find bargain hand crafted bronze sculpture. Many are artist exclusives designed and made by owner Darren Hussey.

Resplendent in Bronze

By

Barrymore Laurence Scherer

Updated Feb. 11, 2014 5:38 p.m. ET

The labors of Hercules from the Hill Collection, including 'Hercules and Antaeus' at center. Michael Bodycomb

New York

When J. Tomilson Hill, vice chairman of the Blackstone Group, was growing up along Fifth Avenue, he would enjoy visiting Henry Clay Frick's collection of bronzes at the Frick Collection. "They were accessible," he recently observed to the Frick's director, Ian Wardropper. "You could actually walk around the tables in the main rooms and see how the Turner or the Rembrandt interfaced with the bronzes there."

Renaissance
And Baroque Bronzes From the Hill Collection
The Frick Collection
Through June 15

Those early experiences profoundly influenced Mr. Hill. For the past two decades, he and his wife, Janine, have collected Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, as well as Old Master and postwar paintings. Their bronzes, which include superb works by masters of the Italian, French, German and Dutch schools, have never been shown publicly—until now.

Through June 15, the Frick is exhibiting all 33, including statuettes, larger sculptures and a bas-relief, together with several works from the Hills' other collections. The exhibition was organized by the Frick's curator of Renaissance painting and sculpture, Denise Allen. And she, along with other scholars, has contributed entries to the sumptuous and rigorously documented exhibition catalog. Emulating the accessibility of the Frick's own bronzes, the Hills have allowed theirs to be displayed without vitrines, enabling viewers to examine each work in great detail.

Reflecting European sculpture's embrace of mythology, religion, history and allegory, as well as the sculptors' keen interest in human and animal anatomy, the bronzes provide a wealth of imagery and points of comparison from the moment you arrive. Facing one another in the foyer between the lower-level galleries are two striding figures, each with wonderfully expressive hands: "Mars" (c.1600-08), by the Florentine Antonio Susini, shows the burly yet graceful musculature and refined facial expression typical of the Italian Renaissance ideal. Probably cast in the late 1560s, "Mars Gradivus," by Willem Danielsz. van Tetrode, with its wild hair, flowing mustache and heavier musculature, evokes the somewhat less elegant Northern European male ideal, which we also find in the works of Albrecht Dürer, Jan Gossaert and others.

Both figures symbolized princely power, especially in times of war. Both statuettes were produced in Florence and influenced by the Flemish-born sculptor known as Giambologna, who became a leading Florentine figure and is something of an overriding spirit in this exhibition. Susini was Giambologna's chief assistant, and his "Mars" reproduces Giambologna's model of c.1565-70. Tetrode is assumed to have composed his Mars in Florence just when Giambologna was working on his.

"Bronze," notes Ms. Allen, "is a reproductive medium," meaning that these works in metal represent the final stage in a process that begins with an artist's original model in clay or wax and proceeds in stages to the casting, sometimes by the same artist, sometimes by another. The Hill collection includes some of the finest examples of works extant in multiple castings.

A detail of 'Mars Gradivus' by Willem Danielsz. van Tetrode Maggie Nimkin Photography

The exhibition reveals how the medium's reproductive nature fostered a constant exchange of ideas between sculptors. Susini's "Rape of a Sabine" was cast c.1585, roughly two years after Giambologna completed his celebrated marble original. Their richly lacquered patination gleaming, Susini's three intertwined figures create a vortex of activity based on a spiraling configuration that Giambologna had invented years earlier to produce sculpture without a single dominant viewpoint.

Giambologna's own bronze statuette of "Astronomy," an elegant female allegory cast in the early 1570s, represents an earlier stage in his invention of the "serpentine figure." Leaning on a plinth and resting her foot on a celestial globe, she twists like a flame, her pose balanced and beautiful from any angle.

We also see this flamelike twist in the epic wrestling match of "Hercules and Antaeus," cast by Susini's nephew Gianfrancesco between 1625 and 1650. It had initially been designed by Giambologna as part of a set of silver groups, now lost, representing the Twelve Labors of Hercules.

Half a century later, this twist imparts the energy of a coiled spring to the human and animal figures in "Hercules and Iolaus Slaying the Hydra" by Giuseppe Piamontini. Cast c.1700-20, Piamontini's bronze was based on a lost model of c.1630 by the great Bolognese sculptor Alessandro Algardi. Apart from the eloquent rendering of the heroes' faces, Piamontini subtly worked the intricate bronze surfaces to emphasize the varied textures of heroic flesh, animal skins and especially the Hydra's powerful claws and multiple serpent heads.

More lyrical bronzes offer a respite from all this bellicose muscle. "Ceres and Bacchus" (c.1635-40) by Ferdinando Tacca shows the goddess of agriculture walking in quiet conversation with the god of wine and revelry. As they smile demurely at each other, Bacchus offers his companion a cup of godly vintage. The two figures gently drape their arms around one another, their affectionate gesture linking the masses of the two figures so that their metallic weight is securely reinforced and balanced.

The Hills' sacred works are displayed in their own room and dominated by Algardi's cast of his 1646 "Cristo Vivo," which we view as the sculptor intended, from below, as in a church. A masterpiece of graceful Baroque pathos, it shows the crucified Christ resigned to his suffering, his open mouth and lowered eyelids suggesting the final moment of supreme exhaustion. Nearby is the glazed terra-cotta "Crocifisso" (Christ on the Cross, 1950-52) of Lucio Fontana, and as one's eye darts between it and the Algardi bronze, Fontana's Christ figure seems to emerge from the ceramic folds of this polychrome abstraction. The gilt-touched swirl of reds, yellows and blues of "Crocifisso" echoes similar elements in the superb oil sketch of the "Assumption of the Virgin" (c. 1620) by Peter Paul Rubens hanging across the room. These fervent works proffer a quiet but grand finale to this resplendent show.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.