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.
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