The rich terminology associated with sculpture, and bronzes and foundry work in particular, is very specialized. It can also vary to a surprising extent across different groups of specialists such as professional foundry practitioners and historians of bronze sculpture, or even across experts focused on different chronological or geographical areas within a field. One of the main goals of the interdisciplinary CAST:ING project was to shed light on some of these ambiguities, wrangle definitions, and where possible suggest a common preferred term. The selection of agreed-upon terms offered here should be useful to a range of researchers—as an aid for interpreting written sources or features on a cast, and for recording and communicating those discoveries and observations. A shared vocabulary ultimately also facilitates a wider sharing of data. Definitions for each term are provided in English and French. Translations are provided in the three other modern languages that reflect the expertise of the CAST:ING members: Italian, German, and Chinese. Early French and Italian translations are also proposed here and there. Earlier terminology is also provided for Italian and French.
It was beyond the scope of this project to produce such a thesaurus for the more than three hundred technical terms collected by its members. We agreed on a selection of fifty-eight based on their frequency of use in the study of bronze sculpture, and on the possible definitional ambiguities. For each entry, we have aimed to include a translation in the selected languages, along with references to two or more authoritative bibliographical sources, as these terms are also to be incorporated in the structured online vocabulary of the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), which is used broadly by art historians. Where necessary, multiple translations are provided with notes to explain differences between them. Entries are illustrated with relevant images drawn from the Visual Atlas of Features. And hyperlinks to the select terms are provided throughout the Guidelines.