“ Up to this time, also, repoussé instead of casting in metal was practised for large work, and Limoges became a centre for the manufacture and exportation of sepulchral figures in repoussé bronze. These were affixed to wooden cores. By the time of Benvenuto Cellini the art was confined almost entirely to goldsmiths and silversmiths (who, except Cellini himself, rarely cast their work) ; and to them the sculptors and artists of to-day are still content to relegate it. ”

“ A blow of a hammer on that part of the anvil where the prolongation first projects from it, produces, by the return spring, a corresponding blow at the point which the operator desires to apply within the vase. The same effect is produced by the modern “snarl” or “snarling iron”—a bar of steel, with an inch or two of the smaller end upturned and ending in a knob—held firmly in a tightly screwed-up vice, whereby the blow is similarly repeated or echoed by vibration. ”

“ The same vase, to be worked up by embossing, would be filled with “cement” and laid on a sand-bag, and finally the whole would be heated and the cement run out. In the case of repoussé the vase itself may be beaten up out of the metal on the pitch-block. It must be understood that in order to obtain a result not merely excellent in technique but artistic and unmechanical in effect, the blows of the hammer must be made with feeling and “sentiment,” otherwise the result cannot be a work of art. ”