Sphyrelaton

A type of bronze hammered statue, made by hammering bronze plates over a core, which were secured by nails. It is an early form of art manufacture in metal, the precursor to the lost wax (cire perdue) technique. The temple of Apollo on Crete (8th century BC) has three statues of this type. The technique was also used to produce colossal statues. Another definition is repoussé work in Minoan or Etruscan art.

"The earliest large-scale Greek bronze statues had very simple forms dictated by their technique of manufacture, known as sphyrelaton (literally, “hammer-driven”), in which parts of the statue are made separately of hammered sheets of metal and attached one to another with rivets. Frequently, these metal sheets were embellished by hammering the bronze over wooden forms in order to produce reliefs, or by incising designs using a technique called tracing."