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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;2manybooks, post: 9801266, member: 8267&quot;]Judging from the color of the metal and the corrosion, the first horse looks like bronze (or some other copper alloy), not cast iron. It may be a solid casting, which is why it is heavier. </p><p><br /></p><p>The second also looks like a copper alloy, possibly patinated brass, and is a hollow casting. Here is a similar one illustrated on a site selling handicrafts made in India -</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]486533[/ATTACH]</p><p><a href="https://rugsindia.com/handicraft/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="https://rugsindia.com/handicraft/" rel="nofollow">https://rugsindia.com/handicraft/</a></p><p><br /></p><p>India has a long tradition of making complex figures using the &quot;lost wax&quot; technique, and this horse may have been made the same way. It looks like the horse and the base are cast as one piece (in other words, the horse was not made and then attached to the base). The figure would probably have been cast upside down, with molten metal poured into the large base area and flowing down into the mold through the legs of the horse. It would have been tricky to get the metal to flow up into the raised leg, and there may be evidence that this leg was made and attached separately.</p><p><br /></p><p>The holes would have served several purposes - they would have allowed molten wax to flow out during the process of making the mold; allow gases to escape during the process of filling the mold with molten metal; and a means of extracting the core material that was probably used to make the casting hollow.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here is a basic description of the lost wax method (written for another recent thread) -</p><p>Unless the casting is intended to be solid, a wax model of the final figure is built over a core, which is made of heat resistant materials such as a combination of clay, sand and straw. The wax model is then covered with a layer of fine clay that will pick up the detail, followed by more layers of heavier clay mixtures. Small pins may be inserted through the layers into the core to hold it in place. The mold is allowed to dry, and then it is heated to melt the wax, which flows out of an opening left for this purpose. The result is a mold with a core suspended in the middle, and a hollow space between the core and the outer shell in the shape of the model, into which molten metal can be poured.</p><p><br /></p><p>Once the mold is removed, the cast object would be detailed and polished by hand. </p><p><br /></p><p>Traditionally, lost wax casting produced a single, unique object. Once the wax model was melted out, it could not be exactly reproduced. But there is a more modern technique which allows many copies to be made by first casting wax models and their cores in reusable flexible molds. Once the wax model is created, the process of building the casting mold around it (also called the &quot;investment&quot;) would be essentially the same.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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