Further study may one day localise or date certain alloys or techniques of facture, but until then, dating of bronzes will remain an extremely inexact science. No wonder Ms Mattusch chose to exclude dates from the object labels. There are only a few survivors, and those tend to be badly corroded from bronze disease, a pernicious process of internal oxydation that only recent advances in treatment have curtailed. If somebody said, 'Here, I have all the money you want. Go build me a collection of lifesize bronzes,' I doubt whether anybody could put together five or six pieces from all the dealers in the world.
Archaeological discoveries are very infrequent and invariably appropriated by local governments.
Whereas a marble head could be a few thousand dollars, or it could be half a million, a lifesize bronze head could be a few hundred thousand dollars or it could be a million. It all depends on the piece. Ms Mattusch observes that some of the collections in America are equal to those in Europe, but she cannot cite a single large bronze in the US which is securely documented as from a specific find sight.