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Born near the Tuscan province of Lucca in 1815, Domenico Brucciani became the most important and prolific maker of plaster casts in nineteenth-century Britain. This first substantive study shows how he and his business used public exhibitions, emerging museum culture and the nationalisation of art education to monopolise the market for reproductions of classical and contemporary sculpture. Based in Covent Garden in London, Brucciani built a network of fellow Italian émigré formatori and collaborated with other makers of facsimiles-including Elkington the electrotype manufacturers, Copeland the makers of Parian ware and Benjamin Cheverton with his sculpture reducing machine-to bring sculpture into the spaces of learning and leisure for as broad a public as possible. Brucciani's plaster casts survive in collections from North America to New Zealand, but the extraordinary breadth of his practice-making death masks of the famous and infamous, producing pioneering casts of anatomical, botanical and fossil specimens and decorating dance halls and theatres across Britain-is revealed here for the first time. By making unprecedented use of the nineteenth-century periodical press and dispersed archival sources, Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain establishes the significance of Brucciani's sculptural practice to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and beyond.
Born near the Tuscan province of Lucca in 1815, Domenico Brucciani became the most important and prolific maker of plaster casts in nineteenth-century Britain. This first substantive study shows how he and his business used public exhibitions, emerging museum culture and the nationalisation of art education to monopolise the market for reproductions of classical and contemporary sculpture. Based in Covent Garden in London, Brucciani built a network of fellow Italian émigré formatori and collaborated with other makers of facsimiles-including Elkington the electrotype manufacturers, Copeland the makers of Parian ware and Benjamin Cheverton with his sculpture reducing machine-to bring sculpture into the spaces of learning and leisure for as broad a public as possible. Brucciani's plaster casts survive in collections from North America to New Zealand, but the extraordinary breadth of his practice-making death masks of the famous and infamous, producing pioneering casts of anatomical, botanical and fossil specimens and decorating dance halls and theatres across Britain-is revealed here for the first time. By making unprecedented use of the nineteenth-century periodical press and dispersed archival sources, Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain establishes the significance of Brucciani's sculptural practice to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and beyond.
Based on two international conferences held at Cornell University and the Freie Universität of Berlin in 2010 and 2015, this volume is the first ever to explicitly address the destruction of plaster cast collections of ancient Mediterranean and Western sculpture. Focusing on Europe, the Americas, and Japan, art historians, archaeologists and a literary scholar discuss how different museum and academic traditions – national as well as disciplinary –, notions of value and authenticity, or colonialism impacted the fate of collections. The texts offer detailed documentation of degrees of destruction by spectacular acts of defacement, demolition, discarding, or neglect. They also shed light on the accompanying discourses regarding aesthetic ideals, political ideologies, educational and scholarly practices, or race. With destruction being understood as a critical part of reception, the histories of cast collections defy the traditional, homogenous narrative of rise and decline. Their diverse histories provide critical evidence for rethinking the use and display of plaster cast collections in the contemporary moment.
This volume explores innovative ways of expanding classical languages and cultures to educational and museum audiences. It shows that classical subjects have an important role to play within society and can enrich individuals’ lives in many different, and perhaps surprising, ways. Chapters present projects covering literacy and engagement with reading, empowering students to understand and use new types of vocabulary, discovering the personal relevance of ancient history and the resonance of ancient material culture and stories. Contributors demonstrate that classical subjects can be taught cost-effectively and inclusively by non-specialist teachers and in non-traditional settings. In their various ways, they highlight the need to rethink the role of Classics in twenty-first-century classrooms and communities. Recommendations are made for further development, including ways to improve research, policy and practice in the field of Classics education. Expanding Classics presents an important series of case studies on classical learning, of interest to museum educators, teacher trainers, school leaders and curriculum designers, as well as those teaching in primary, secondary and further education settings in the UK and worldwide.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italian Renaissance art, objects, and even the idea of Italy itself figured heavily both in the dynamic international art market and in the eyes of the general public. The alternative objects that were actively dispersed and collected -- authentic works, pastiches, Renaissance-inspired counterfeits, and reproductions -- in the diverse media of paint, plaster, terracotta, and photography, had a tremendous impact on visual culture across social strata. These essays examine less studied aspects of this market through the lens of just a few of the countless successful sales of objects out of Italy.
Through the 19th century, as archaeology started to emerge as a systematic discipline, plaster casting became a widely-adopted technique, newly applied by archaeologists to document and transmit discoveries from their expeditions. The Parthenon sculptures were some of the first to be cast. In the late 18th century and the first years of the 19th century, the French artist Fauvel and Lord Elgin's men conducted campaigns on the Athenian Acropolis. Both created casts of parts of the Parthenon sculptures that they did not remove and these were sent back to France and Britain where they were esteemed and displayed alongside other, original sections. Henceforth, casting was established as an essential archaeological tool and grew exponentially over the course of the century. Such casts are now not only fascinating historical objects but may also be considered time capsules, capturing the details of important ancient works when they were first moulded in centuries past. This book examines the role of 19th century casts as an archaeological resource and explores how their materiality and spread impacted the reception of the Parthenon sculptures and other Greek and Roman works. Investigation of their historical context is combined with analysis of new digital models of the Parthenon sculptures and their casts. Sensitive 3D imaging techniques allow investigation of the surface markings of the objects in exceptionally fine detail and enable quantitative comparative studies comparing the originals and the casts. The 19th century casts are found to be even more accurate, but also complex, than anticipated; through careful study of their multiple layers, we can retrieve surface information now lost from the originals through weathering and vandalism.
In 1970 a concrete replica of the St John’s Cross arrived in Iona sitting incongruously on the deck of a puffer delivering the island’s annual supply of coal. What is the story behind this intriguing replica? How does it relate to the world’s first ringed ‘Celtic cross’, an artistic and technical masterpiece, which has been at the heart of the Iona experience since the eighth century? What does it tell us about the authenticity and value of replicas? In this fascinating book, Foster and Jones draw on extensive interdisciplinary research to reveal the composite biography of the St John’s Cross, its concrete replica, and its many other scale copies. They show that replicas can acquire rich forms of authenticity and value, informed by social relations, craft practices, creativity, place and materiality. Thus, the book challenges traditional precepts that seek authenticity in qualities intrinsic to original historic objects. Replicas are shown to be important objects in their own right, with their own creative, human histories — biographies that people can connect with. The story of the St John’s Cross celebrates how replicas can ‘work’ for us if we let them, particularly if clues are available about their makers’ passion, creativity and craft.
This book offers a fresh perspective on Michelangelo’s well-known masterpiece, the Vatican Pietà, by tracing the shifting meaning of the work of art over time. Lisa M. Rafanelli chronicles the object history of the Vatican Pietà and the active role played by its many reproductions. The sculpture has been on continuous view for over 500 years, during which time its cultural, theological, and artistic significance has shifted. Equally important is the fact that over its long life it has been relocated numerous times and has also been reproduced in images and objects produced both during Michelangelo’s lifetime and long after, described here as artistic progeny: large-scale, unique sculpted variants, smaller-scale statuettes, plaster and bronze casts, and engraved prints. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, early modern studies, religion, Christianity, and theology.
Digital technologies have profoundly impacted the arts and expanded the field of sculpture since the 1950s. Art history, however, continues to pay little attention to sculptural works that are conceived and ‘materialized’ using digital technologies. How can we rethink the artistic medium in relation to our technological present and its historical precursors? A number of theoretical approaches discuss the implications of the so-called ‘Aesthetics of the Digital’, referring, above all, to screen-based phenomena. For the first time, this publication brings together international and trans-historical research perspectives to explore how digital technologies re-configure the understanding of sculpture and the sculptural leading into the (post-)digital age. Up-to-date research on digital technologies’ expansion of the concept of sculpture Linking historical sculptural debates with discourse on the new media and (post-)digital culture
We are taught to believe in originals. In art and architecture in particular, original objects vouch for authenticity, value, and truth, and require our protection and preservation. The nineteenth century, however, saw this issue differently. In a culture of reproduction, plaster casts of building fragments and architectural features were sold throughout Europe and America and proudly displayed in leading museums. The first comprehensive history of these full-scale replicas, Plaster Monuments examines how they were produced, marketed, sold, and displayed, and how their significance can be understood today. Plaster Monuments unsettles conventional thinking about copies and originals. As Mari Lending shows, the casts were used to restore wholeness to buildings that in reality lay in ruin, or to isolate specific features of monuments to illustrate what was typical of a particular building, style, or era. Arranged in galleries and published in exhibition catalogues, these often enormous objects were staged to suggest the sweep of history, synthesizing structures from vastly different regions and time periods into coherent narratives. While architectural plaster casts fell out of fashion after World War I, Lending brings the story into the twentieth century, showing how Paul Rudolph incorporated historical casts into the design for the Yale Art and Architecture building, completed in 1963. Drawing from a broad archive of models, exhibitions, catalogues, and writings from architects, explorers, archaeologists, curators, novelists, and artists, Plaster Monuments tells the fascinating story of a premodernist aesthetic and presents a new way of thinking about history’s artifacts.