Sculptures of the external tabernacles of the Church of Orsanmichele

Since the 19th century, copies of some of the statues have been made and secured in the museum on the first floor of the building. Moreover, only three original statues are in bronze: those of the richest Arts (Calimala, Cambio and Lana), since the cost of a bronze statue was at least 10 times higher than that of a marble one. However, copies were sometimes made in a different material from the original: in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the combination of marble and bronze was considered disharmonious, so copies were made in bronze instead of marble, and some marble statues were even blackened with oily substances to achieve uniformity, a careless process that has irrevocably stained some of the statues (especially Lamberti's San Jacopo).

Photo Credits: I, Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons - Text Credits: Wikipedia