The process of turning bars of bronze into detailed sculpture is mind-bending. How do artisans realize an artist's intricate vision in a substance that only exists as an intractable solid or a molten liquid?

A bronze sculpture by one of Russia's best known turn-of-the-century artists, Evgeni Alexandrovich Lanceray, which will be offered in our upcoming Signature Summer Auction, made us want to see exactly HOW it's possible to turn bronze into the locks of a horse's mane, the furrowed brow of a horseman, or the embroidery on his cape.

Lanceray used the same method to cast his sculptures of horses and their riders, cavalrymen, and farmers, that bronze artists do today. The lost wax casting method is a process by which a wax model is used as the basis for a shell of the finished sculpture and then the wax is melted out, or "lost," leaving behind the negative space into which to pour molten bronze.

Lanceray worked through most of his career with the bronze caster Frederic Chopin. To understand their process we visited Carolina Bronze Sculpture, the East Coast's premier bronze foundry. Just as in Lanceray's day, Carolina Bronze takes artists' models and uses the lost wax method to render them in bronze. Watch below to see exactly how a bronze artist's vision becomes sculptural reality.