we've reached this moment of perfection of idealized male depiction but that's never enough for the ancient Greeks and in this example made from bronze we cross over into something we call hyper-reality this guy is more human than human to borrow a phrase from a well-known Greek classicist Nigel Spivey we have not really talked about the technique for how these are made we call that the lost wax technique and basically what you do is you make a sculpture from clay and then you make a plaster mold and you pour molten bronze which is an alloy of copper and tin the wax falls away and in the space that is left that is where the form is left and this is the way that lost wax technique was how bronze was made in the ancient world and it's the same technique that's used today so this pair of sculptures are known as the Rio G warriors from where they were found they were commissioned in Greece and they were probably being transported by ship and the ship went down in a storm and they were buried in the seabed for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years so many times in our class you will notice something that says Roman marble after Greek bronze that means that there were hundreds and hundreds of Greek bronze sculptures that were made in antiquity that did not survive Roman copies were made in marble and that's all we have to look at these demonstrate the hyper reality that became so important as we move to the high classic period so no matter how much time you spend at the gym gentlemen you are never going to have this perfect line down the center of your back nor this extremely exaggerated iliac crest but what the Greek artist is doing is dividing the human for into these perfect quadrants these perfect shapes and we refer to that as hyper reality in order to create even a more perfect human for a contemporary artist that also works in the lost-wax technique is Robert Graham these are the male and female nudes that are on the peristyle of the Colosseum where the Olympic Games opening ceremonies were held when they originally took place in the 1930s and then again in the 1980s and when the Olympics returned to Los Angeles they will also have their opening ceremonies here the peristyle was constructed in the 1930s and so they wanted to update it but not change it and so Robert Graham who's now passed away a prominent Latin artist here from Los Angeles chose the figures of two Olympic athletes but in order to make them a universal athlete they of course did not show the face but we do know that the male form was modeled after a water polo player and of course he doesn't look like that anymore but you know who does and so there's this connection with the Olympic Games with the Greek ideal with bronze casting that continues even to this day