In the same year that the Great Exhibition of 1851 united the ‘Works of all Nations’ in Hyde Park, Ferenc Pulszky (1814–1897), the exiled Hungarian politician and scholar, used a lecture at University Hall, London to make an impassioned plea for a new kind of museum collection that would present ‘a perfect view of the history of art in every civilized nation’. Pulsky acknowledged the difficulty of bringing together all those ‘marble and brass’ monuments ‘on which the artistical instinct of bygone centuries has exerted itself’ and suggested making up the ‘deficiency’ with plaster casts.1Ferenc Pulszky, ‘On the Progress and Decay of Art. And on the Arrangement of a National Museum’, a lecture delivered at University Hall in 1851, The Museum of Classical Antiquities. A Quarterly Journal of Ancient Art V, II, March 1852, pp. 1–15, (pp. 12-13).
Pulszky’s vision of synoptic and programmatic collections of plaster casts intended to educate and inspire is the starting point for Eckart Marchand’s essay analysing the rise and decline of the Universal Museum as a concept through the history of exemplary museums in Hungary, Paris, Vienna and Chile. His text provides an excellent opening to this handsome, generously illustrated book which contains the published proceedings of a conference held at the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest in 2022.2Plaster Casts and Cast Collections across Europe: History and Future, Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, 24 May 2022. That event took the restoration and redisplay of the Museum’s internationally important cast collection at the Star Fortress, Komárom as the starting point for a broader reflection on the past, present and future of reproductive plaster cast collections in Europe and the Americas.3https://www.mfab.hu/the-museum-of-fine-arts-collection-of-plaster-casts-in-the-star-fortress-in-komarom/. In 2022 more of the collection was opened at the National Museum Conservation and Storage Centre in Budapest https://www.mfab.hu/exhibitions/european-architectural-sculpture-visible-storage/ (both accessed 19 July 2024).
The story of what happened after Pulszky returned to Hungary in 1866 is picked up in the essay by Géza Andó and Eszter Süvegh. Three years after he re-entered public life, Pulszky was made director of the Hungarian National Museum where he began putting his ideas about cast collections into practice. In 1904, a few years after Pulszky’s death, the National Museum began to run out of gallery space and so transferred its cast collection to the newly founded Museum of Fine Arts Budapest. But only part of the collection was retained, the Museum quickly handed over 106 of the casts to the Royal Hungarian Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár. Although this action undermined the integrity of the collection Pulszky had formed, the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest remained committed to his vision of a comprehensive chronological display of ‘the plastic power of mankind’. Indeed, as Miriam Szőcs shows in her essay, the new institution made a significant investment in purpose-built galleries and specially commissioned casts in the early 1900s. Her case study centres on the stately Renaissance Hall which was designed around casts of the Colleoni Monument and Medici Tombs that, uniquely, include casts of these imposing sculptures’ architectural elements.
Belief in the value of exhibiting architectural casts was shared by other Hungarian institutions, notably Budapest University of Technology and Economics which formed an important educational collection towards the end of the nineteenth century. Eszter Hajós-Baku and Beáta Szűts delve into the University’s archives to unearth the full history of this collection and share their research methodology. The intricacies of selecting original architectural details for casting and how the resulting casts influenced the design of new buildings is explored in an essay by Júlia Katona. Between 1900 and 1904, the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest commissioned the architectural sculptor Ignácz Langer to design and carve eight stone capitals and bases in the style of Pécs Cathedral for a new Romanesque gallery. He was required to start by making full-sized plaster models so that his interpretation of the design could be checked by the Museum. After the completion of the job, casts of Langer’s models were offered for sale to other institutions by the Plaster Casting Workshop of the Budapest National Higher School of (Building) Industry which was an important supplier of educational casts.
The Museum of Fine Arts Budapest not only acquired casts from local sources but also worked with many European workshops. The Museo Campi Carlo, one of the leading formatori in Milan, was the source of an important group of Renaissance sculptures and monuments. Flavia Berizzi recounts the challenges faced by the Campi firm in securing the special permission required by the Italian authorities to make ex novo casts on behalf of the museum in Budapest, the practicalities of working direct from the original monument, and the task of preparing and packing these fragile and costly objects for international shipment. She shows that any technical issues were offset by the prestige and profitability of such major commissions. Jean-Marc Hofman provides further insight into the commercial aspects of making and marketing casts in his essay about the Musée de Sculpture Comparée’s moulding workshop. He ascribes its success to the museum’s policy of keeping a strict monopoly on the production and sale of casts, ensuring that the cost of making the master moulds was passed to other institutions, and then cannily reusing these moulds for years to come. Importantly, special orders of this kind also helped to disseminate the museum’s collection of French monuments abroad via major institutions like the South Kensington Museum (Victoria and Albert Museum), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.
The market for plaster casts declined steeply in the 1920s and 1930s at the same time that support for the Universal Museum as a project ebbed away. Eckart Marchand’s opening essay reveals two key factors that determined what happened next to plaster casts collections. First and foremost, their fate was heavily dependent on the willingness of governments to maintain financial support and how far the public remained committed to the educational value of the Universal Museum. Marchand’s second, more surprising discovery is that the way cast collections were displayed had an impact on their survival. Casts were far more likely to be banished from public display when they were installed alongside original objects; in contrast, there was a far greater chance of survival where a collection was shown in a space exclusively for casts. The relationship between the original and the copy is discussed more fully by Lorenz Winkler-Horaček. He suggests that disenchantment with cast collections was triggered by technological changes which made photographic and printed reproductions widely accessible, and by modernist artists’ rebellion against academic teaching methods especially the requirement to draw from casts. Winkler-Horaček also argues that casts suffered because art critics increasingly emphasised the ‘uniqueness’ of the original work, and fostered the idea that only direct contact with the ‘real thing’ could provide an authentic emotional experience for the viewer. The corollary of this changed attitude to objects was that plaster casts came to be seen as mere ‘copies’ that only provided a second hand, second-rate visual encounter.
The nadir of cast collections in the decades after the Second World War is well known. Winkler-Horaček’s research indicates that only a few institutions actually destroyed their collections, far more often casts deteriorated because they were put in substandard storage. This was the case at the Museum of Fine Arts Budapest where serious damage to the galleries during the war was compounded by decades of neglect. Marjorie (Holly) Trusted’s essay brings the reader into the present when plaster casts are once again recognised as objects in their own right with the potential to unlock forgotten material and cultural histories. In a thoughtful account of her work as lead curator of the restoration of the Cast Courts at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Trusted discusses the challenges museums face in restoring historic gallery spaces and deciding how casts are reinterpreted and re-presented to modern visitors.
The remaining essay by Rune Frederiksen is a thought-provoking discussion of the role plaster casts have played for millennia. He makes a forensic examination of the language used in the ancient world to describe working in plaster as the means of uncovering the techniques known to Egyptian, Greek and Roman sculptors. The book is also dedicated to his memory because sadly Rune Frederiksen died soon after the conference in 2022.
There are many reasons to recommend this book to readers. It is an attractive, elegantly designed volume that contains over one hundred images many of which are reproduced in colour. The authors are a distinguished group of scholars whose valuable new research raises awareness of one of Central Europe’s most important cast collections and, in doing so, presents the first rounded history of plaster cast collections from their rapid expansion in the nineteenth century, through decades of obscurity, to their rediscovery and resurrection.
Miriam Szőcs and Márton Tóth, Eds., Casting a New Light: Plaster Casts & Cast Collections in Europe and Beyond, Budapest: Museum of Fine Arts Budapest, 2024.
Paperback, 178 pages, 230 x 268mm, about 100 illustrations, many in colour, includes a bibliography and index. Published 31 July 2024. ISBN 978 615 6595 23 2.
