Walter Benjamin observed that copies do not have ‘the here and now of the work of art’, but in this innovative study of the ‘cast culture’ of 19th-century Europe and North America, Mari Lending argues that casts create their own here and now, thereby reframing our understanding of originality, geography and history.

The Erechtheion caryatid, purchased from the British Museum and displayed in the 12th-century gallery of the Trocadéro, adjacent to the smiling angel from Reims Cathedral. From P. F. J. Marcou, 'Album du Musée de Sculpture Comparée', vol. 2 (Paris, 1897).
The Erechtheion caryatid, purchased from the British Museum and displayed in the 12th-century gallery of the Trocadéro, adjacent to the smiling angel from Reims Cathedral. From P. F. J. Marcou, 'Album du Musée de Sculpture Comparée', vol. 2 (Paris, 1897). © Princeton University Press SHARE

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By charting the institutional fortunes of architectural plaster casts, from the genesis of architectural museums in the early 19th century to the destruction of cast collections a century later, as well as their renewed resonance in the digital era, Lending demonstrates that ‘both monuments and their representations are in constant flux’ and that tradition is ‘a process of continual reinvention’.

The 19th-century status of architectural casts was as didactic objects of the highest quality and the methodological priorities that underpinned institutional displays were chronology and comparison. From Sir John Soane’s idiosyncratic collection (left to the nation in 1837) to the Hall of Architecture at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (which opened in 1907), cast collections in Europe and America aimed to be comprehensive and authoritative.

In London, the British Museum, the Royal Architectural Museum and the Crystal Palace all took a picturesque approach to the arrangement of their casts. The Trocadéro in Paris, by contrast, adopted a critical approach, emphasising great monuments of Gothic architecture to underline the importance of France’s medieval past. The staging of casts was not only a retrospective exercise, however. Lending argues that since ‘circulation is a condition of modernity’, the casts’ very mobility made them contemporary objects, even as they documented the past.

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Lending is concerned with both the casts’ 19th-century context and their powerful legacy. This is manifest in a case study of Yale University’s architecture department, where in 1950 Josef Albers exiled the casts from the teaching regime and the building. Paul Rudolph reclaimed the same casts in 1963 when he reincorporated them into the Art and Architecture Building with an allusive rather than a didactic agenda.

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