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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;DonnaML, post: 6719161, member: 110350&quot;]A couple of months ago, I saw a small bronze ancient Egyptian Apis bull for sale at a gallery where I&#039;ve been making occasional purchases for almost 15 years now:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270982[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;ve wished I had an artifact like this one for years, and the price was in the affordable range for me.&nbsp; Plus, it&#039;s intact except that its left ear is missing -- it&#039;s unusual to find these without one or more missing ears, horns, or feet, or without the uraeus broken off the sun disk.&nbsp; However, when I looked closely at the photos on the website, I saw a lot of suspicious-looking pale green spots on both sides:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270984[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270985[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>I wondered if the spots might be signs of bronze disease, since I saw no reason why it can&#039;t occur in bronze artifacts as easily as coins, even though I&#039;d never encountered it. So I emailed the dealer and asked if that&#039;s what the spots could be, and he wrote back to tell me that indeed, the bull had active bronze disease which he&#039;d intended to get treated after he bought it last year, but that doing so fell by the wayside along with a lot of other things during the pandemic. I told him that I might still be interested in buying the bull if he had it treated, so he said he&#039;d send it to a professional art conservator he uses, although she was very busy and might not get to it for a while.</p><p><br /></p><p>A couple of months passed, and the dealer responded to my inquiry by telling me that the conservator had finished the job and returned the artifact to him. So I went down to his store in midtown the other day, and he showed me this report:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270988[/ATTACH]</p><p>Here&#039;s a link to her background and qualifications: <a href="http://artconservationatelier.com/bio/" target="_blank" class="externalLink ProxyLink" data-proxy-href="http://artconservationatelier.com/bio/" rel="nofollow">http://artconservationatelier.com/bio/</a>.</p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;d be very curious to know if her methods sound familiar to those of you who&#039;ve treated BD in ancient coins, and are anything like what you might have tried yourself.</p><p><br /></p><p>He showed me the bull as it looks now, and although many of the same spots are still somewhat visible, they&#039;re no longer flaky and don&#039;t look as &quot;angry&quot; to me as they did in the &quot;before&quot; photos.&nbsp; And I still really liked the piece overall. If the conservator had dug out the green spots entirely, there would probably be pitting all over the place. The dealer gave me a 20% discount from the price on the website (which I had been prepared to pay), and told me to bring the bull back in if the bronze disease showed any signs of recurring. So I bought it, and took it home. (No shipping charges!)&nbsp; Just in case, I&#039;m keeping it in its own individual miniature glass dome, so nothing can spread to my other bronze artifacts kept on the same shelf.</p><p><br /></p><p>Interestingly, I didn&#039;t realize, until the dealer showed me, that the bull was made with an integral peg for inserting into a base. (Obviously, the wooden base it has now is not the original one; it probably dates to the 1950s or 1960s!)</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270991[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270992[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>Note that the green spots are still there, but less visible in hand than in the before photos; the most prominent one still visible is on the right flank.</p><p><br /></p><p>Here are the sun disk and uraeus, which you can&#039;t really see in the profile photos:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1271007[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1271008[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270995[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>On the left side, the only green spots I can really still see as very noticeable, even if if I dial up the contrast all the way, are on the insides of the right foreleg and back leg:</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1270997[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p>However, even though they don&#039;t look bad in hand, the green spots on the right side are still all quite visible when I dial up the contrast all the way:</p><p><br /></p><p>[cont][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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