You get credit for:
- checking the facts;
- acknowledging your mistake;
- Feeling shame for jumping to conclusions like that.
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It’s not exactly fake shit. The casts were made a long time ago to educate people. They are important to art history and provide an ability to see the details of sculptures that are either in another location or held in a private collection
No different than the bunch of Rodins the thinker.
From a old article
The Gilded Age Revisited: Boston and the Museum Movement
That last sentence is interesting from the perspective of Polychromy
Kind of a quaint idea for a museum, but besides the transmission of culture to the masses, sculptors learning new techniques often used plaster casts of the ancient originals.Perhaps Gipsoteca Antonio Canova used these casts to learn from the ancients.
In the states, after art schools began to employ live models, these newly obsolete pedagogical tools often formed the basis of public art galleries.
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Thanks for this article. I live in Missouri and MU’s art archeology and anthropology museums are basically all wings of the same second floor museum. The first floor is FILLED with these plaster casts from the 1800s. It’s crazy beautiful
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Th ewax museum is clearly billed as a wax museum, so you’re not tempted to think you can break the toes off of the actual Ed McMahon. Likewise, this place is called the Gipsoteca, from gipso, as in gypsum or plaster, and teca from biblioteca or library. So plaster museum. So I agree with you.
They still form the basis of many atelier-style courses which will not allow you to draw from life until you have mastered drawing from plaster. Plaster casts are ideal because they have almost flawless surfaces so all the student worries about is the tone/shadow.
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It’s a 200 year old plaster that was used to create one of Canova’s more famous pieces. It gives insight into the techniques used by neo classical sculptors.
kind of like a animated film museum exhibiting footage that was rotoscoped. Or an art gallery keeping the studies, or perhaps even the photographic references used to create a far more famous work.
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