The Cast Party

 Shadows of the Past 

The Bartolini Collection at Florence's Accademia Museum

The week after my talk at the British Institute’s Harold Acton Library on 3 December, I visited the Charles Cecil Studios in Florence, where wonderful work is being done in the legacy of Charles’ mentor R. H. Ives Gammell and his forebears. On my way to the train later in the afternoon I stopped by the Accademia Museum, happily relatively empty at this time of year. After the monumental Michelangelo work, the room of Bartolini casts had new resonance for me, with its recollection of the Romanelli casts connected to the Cecil Studios in Borgo San Frediano.

Casts have become, in the contemporary parlance, “a thing;” there is a site dedicated to them qua artifacts:

http://www.plastercastcollection.org/en/database.php?d=lire&id=319

The Passagli Collection on Display at
Lucca's Palazzo Ducale

Once upon a time casts were models of excellence, the choicest examples of ancient and modern sculpture available in 3D for students, like the Passaglia collection at Lucca’s liceo artistico:

http://liceoartisticomusicalelucca.gov.it/gipsoteca

But at some point in the second half of the nineteenth century, they became white forms with complex shadows and reflected lights to be drawn meticulously in the academies; they were no longer models to aspire to, paragons of Bellori’s l’Idea del Bello, but merely forms in light to serve aspiring drawing students. That, in the end, is the difference between classicism and realism: the extent to which casts are 1. ideal models to imitate and emulate, and 2. more than stable figures without color. The casts are back after their near-eradication in the middle of the twentieth century, in particular at the many ateliers and so-called academies that have sprouted in the last two decades; but are they, in a paraphrase of the title of Michael Baxandall’s book, shadows or enlightenment?

POSTSCRIPT: The V&A's cast collection recently reopened, the media have their usual nonsensical take on things:

V&A’s cast courts of beautiful fakes reopen after three years 

"Originally opened in 1873, the galleries were conceived as a definitive collection of great works from Europe, full-size fragments of exotic cathedrals and palaces, duplicated in London for all to see. It was an aristocratic grand tour for the armchair explorer, conveniently compressed into two rooms."

I'm sorry, but who ever entered the V&A's cast gallery and was deceived into thinking he had been transported to Florence, or thought that the Florentines had sold the David to the British? I suppose calling them "fakes" imparts an edge of, well, edginess that The Guardian is expected to deliver to its readers. Never mind the reality, here's the past.... Plus, the casts were, technically, not "duplicated in London" but in Paris, where some of the greatest casters were. And aristocrats still went on actual Grand Tours to Florence itself. Whatever.