Copper is, in metalworking terms, a forgiving material. It is soft enough to be worked cold, it anneals at relatively low temperatures, and it holds form well once shaped. These properties made it the dominant material for domestic vessel production across Europe for centuries before industrial manufacture. In Italian workshops, the techniques for working copper developed into a coherent set of practices — planishing, raising, chasing, repoussé, and spinning — each with its own tool vocabulary and sequence logic. Understanding these techniques separately and in combination is the basis for reading any Italian copper object with any accuracy.
Annealing: The Enabling Step
Before any of the major forming techniques can be applied, copper must be annealed. Work-hardening occurs rapidly in copper — repeated hammering without heat treatment causes the metal's crystalline structure to lock up, making further deformation difficult and eventually causing cracking. Annealing reverses this: the copper is heated to a dull red (approximately 400–650°C, well below its melting point) and then either air-cooled or quenched in water. Either method restores malleability.
In Italian workshops of the 18th and 19th centuries, annealing was done over an open forge or, for smaller pieces, with a hand-held blowpipe directing flame from a coke or charcoal fire. Knowing when the copper had reached the correct temperature — by colour, by the behaviour of the surface scale, by sound — was knowledge acquired through long practice rather than instrumentation. Workshop apprentices spent considerable time observing this step before being allowed to perform it independently, because over-heating degrades the metal's surface and under-heating wastes fuel without achieving the desired result.
Raising
Raising is the technique of forming a three-dimensional vessel from a flat disc of sheet copper by working it over a series of iron stakes. The smith starts at the edge of the disc and works inward in concentric courses, each hammer blow slightly overlapping the last. As the metal is displaced upward and inward, the flat disc gradually assumes a bowl or cylinder form. The stakes — typically a set of a dozen or more in varying profiles, from broad flat-faced planishing stakes to narrow mushroom-headed raising stakes — determine the interior curve of the vessel at each stage of work.
Raising is slow. A medium-sized paiolo of 30 cm diameter might require six to eight annealing cycles and several hours of work per cycle. The technique produces vessels with a characteristic rippled inner surface — the visible marks of successive hammer courses — which distinguishes hand-raised work from spun or machine-pressed equivalents. In Italian domestic copperwork, these marks were generally refined away through planishing on the exterior, while the interior was left with a more textured surface that was considered acceptable for cooking vessels.
Planishing
Planishing is the surface-refining step that follows raising. Using a flat-faced or slightly crowned planishing hammer against a smooth polished stake, the smith works the exterior of the vessel systematically, overlapping blows to eliminate the coarser marks left by raising hammers. Good planishing produces a surface covered in small, even, slightly overlapping facets that catch light uniformly — what is often described as a "planished finish." Inferior planishing leaves visible ridges or uneven facet patterns that read as tool marks rather than finished surface.
In Italian workshop practice, planished finish was expected on vessels intended for household display or gift use. Functional cooking vessels — paioli, caldaie — received a rougher finish because the interior accumulated carbon deposits in use anyway, and the exterior was frequently exposed to fire. The distinction between display and functional copperwork was both an aesthetic and an economic one: a finely planished vessel took substantially longer to produce and commanded a higher price.
Repoussé and Chasing
Repoussé and chasing are the two techniques for producing relief decoration on copper surfaces. They are often described as a pair because they complement each other in the production of a finished decorated piece, but they operate on opposite sides of the metal and with different tools.
Repoussé works from the reverse side of the sheet. The metal is laid on a yielding surface — traditionally a bowl of pitch or a sandbag — and the smith uses blunt-ended punches and a hammer to push the metal forward from behind, raising a relief on the face side. The pitch supports the metal evenly during this work, preventing distortion beyond the intended design area. Larger raised areas — the curve of a leaf, the dome of a boss — are established in repoussé before any fine detail is added.
Chasing then works the face side of the same metal to refine the forms produced by repoussé and to add crisp surface detail. Chasing tools are harder-ended and more varied in profile than repoussé punches: tracers cut outlines, modelling tools push background areas down to create depth against raised forms, and matting tools create textured backgrounds. Italian decorative copperwork of the 17th through 19th centuries typically shows both techniques in combination, with repoussé establishing the primary relief and chasing defining the detail.
For comparative examples of Italian chased metalwork in bronze and copper, see the collection at the Laura Morelli guide to Italian metalsmiths, which covers the historical distribution of these practices across Italian regions.
Spinning
Spinning is a later addition to the Italian coppersmith's technique repertoire, becoming common in workshops from the second half of the 19th century as foot-powered lathes became more widely available. In spinning, a disc of sheet copper is pressed against a rotating wooden form (the mandrel) using a smooth steel burnishing tool. The friction and pressure of the tool against the spinning disc forces the metal to conform to the mandrel's shape — typically a symmetric form such as a bowl, cup, or flared vessel.
Spun copper vessels are distinguishable from raised ones by their interior surface, which shows spiral rather than concentric marks, and by the consistency of wall thickness, which is more even in spun work than in raising. Spinning is faster than raising for simple symmetric forms — a bowl that takes several hours to raise can be spun in fifteen to twenty minutes by a competent operator — which contributed to the gradual displacement of raising as the dominant technique for domestic vessel production in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Persistence of Hand Techniques
Despite the efficiency of spinning, raising and planishing persisted in Italian workshops for forms that spinning could not produce: large-diameter vessels where no lathe was large enough, asymmetric or faceted forms, and architectural elements such as panels and flashings. The Sacro Monte workshops in Varallo, for example, commissioned hand-raised copper flashings and ornamental finials well into the 20th century because the specific profiles required were impractical to spin. The technique was kept alive by this kind of specialised demand even as it disappeared from general domestic production.
Today, the handful of Italian coppersmiths who still practise traditional hand-forming techniques — documented in accounts such as the Italian Stories workshop profile — generally work across multiple techniques depending on the commission. Raising, planishing, chasing, and spinning coexist in active workshops, chosen according to the demands of each piece rather than as competing alternatives.
Last updated: May 3, 2026