Ancient plaster: casting light on a forgotten sculptural material

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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]

Once you start noticing them, plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture are everywhere. They can be found not only in museum collections and art schools, where they might be expected, but also decorating libraries, academic offices, and other campus buildings or neglected in storerooms and basement corridors. For most of the mid-twentieth century, the dusty storeroom was a more likely place to find casts than a museum gallery, but in the past forty years, a burst of curatorial and academic interest has brought these objects back into focus.[1] Ancient Plaster introduces a new topic into this conversation: the material from which casts, and sometimes sculpture, are made, gypsum or (less commonly) lime plaster. Plaster becomes not just an inert material inferior to marble or bronze, but a character in the story—as the editors call it, “a dynamic and truly valuable material within the sculptor’s arsenal” (11).

The book falls into four parts: “Modeling and Moulding in Plaster,” “Plaster in the Sculptor’s Workshop,” “Life Casting in the Classical World,” and “Ancient Subjects, Modern Eyes.” I found something worth attention in every one of the twenty articles, but in this review I will concentrate on just a few. Many of the articles that caught my attention were contributions by working artists with first-hand knowledge of what working with these media is like. Their lived experience enriches the cultural and archaeological approaches of the other articles, and readers should not pass over the supplementary videos, available on YouTube and linked from the British Academy’s web page for the book. These enhance the artists’ articles; in fact, a video sometimes seems to be the primary “text” to which the published article stands as a kind of footnote. Chapter one, for example, Claire Venables’ “Freehand Modeling with Lime Plaster,” is only ten pages long, and about four of them are taken up by illustrations. Her 17-minute video gracefully repeats the essential points of the article and offers a vivid demonstration of just what kind of skilled, artisanal labor lies behind a simple statement like “The lime … was then worked hard for a good length of time to achieve the best texture and an even mix” (27).

The equally brief lead article in the second section, Thomas Schelper’s “Plaster Piece Moulding,” takes the opposite approach to integrating text and video. Here the video plays a supporting role, but it and the text together give the clearest explanation that I have found of the piece molding process that produced all those casts in our museums and elsewhere. How well this process and the other steps in making a cast are executed makes a difference in the quality of the final product; as Jean-Antoine Houdon wrote in 1772, “The quality of the plaster can contribute a great deal to this [excellence of a cast], as can the skill of the molder, which consists in judging the number of pieces needed and placing them in such a way that they can be removed without breaking, and in not putting in more than is necessary.”[2]

Of the academic articles, one by the late Amanda Claridge (compiled from her drafts and edited by Janet DeLaine) stands out for its invitation to rethink a piece of received knowledge. Ever since the discovery in 1954 of a group of plaster molds in a subterranean room of a bath complex at Baiae and the analysis of one of them by Gisela Richter in 1970, scholarly consensus has taken them as evidence for how Roman marble copies of Greek bronze sculpture were made: by first creating a plaster cast of the bronze original, and then by using a mechanical pointing system to reproduce the plaster copy. A pointing system, however, leaves traces on an unfinished statue, and, Claridge argues, such traces are either absent on extant copies or, if present, so placed as to indicate some other system than mechanical pointing. Furthermore, when ancient duplicate statues exist, they are often twins, like the “Kleobis and Biton” from Delphi, or otherwise related, so that “the fact of duplication was iconographically significant.” In other cases of serial production, the copies are not exact matches of the kind that would be expected if a pointing system was used. Claridge then argues, with less confidence, that the mold found at Baiae of Aristogeiton’s head from the Tyrannicides group was taken not from some lost bronze original, but from a statue of unknown provenance now in the Vatican Museum—and if it is, “then the cast is almost certainly modern, taken in the 18th or 19th century” (175). The archaeological context of the finds makes dating them difficult, if not impossible, and so, Claridge concludes, the burden of proof has now shifted to those who believe that the Baiae molds are ancient: “On balance, I would say that we really do need scientific proof of their antiquity before we go any further” (178).

Two essays that make the case for plaster as a medium of sculpture bracket and complement Claridge’s contribution. Eckart Marchand’s “Italy, France and the Origin of the Full-Scale Plaster Cast Model” explores the development and use of full-size plaster cast as objects for display and use. He connects them to the use of clay, wax, and other temporary materials in Renaissance, and particularly Italian, pageantry but places the origin of the process in France, where the demand for large-scale sculpture and the centralization of artistic production under royal and then revolutionary and imperial patronage, along with the availability of high-quality gypsum, created a demand for such casts. A world away and at a different scale, Abbey Ellis’s “The Function of Ancient Plaster Casts from Metalwork: A Reconsideration” takes its departure from two small (ca. 12 and 8 cm in diameter) plaster medallions of—possibly—Medusa, one from Memphis in Egypt and the other from Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan, to argue that such objects were not limited to a single use, either workshop models or sculptures for display, but that they could have multiple functions, and that a single object might serve multiple purposes in different contexts during its life of use. “Pigeonholing objects” into a single function—assuming, for example, that plaster casts were always or mostly tools in sculptors’ workshops—“can be detrimental to our understanding not only of the objects themselves but of the ancient world more broadly” (202).

This triptych of essays by Marchand, Claridge, and Ellis, in fact, can by a kind of metonymy represent the strengths of this volume: its chronological, geographical, and temporal scope; its careful deployment of art historical and archaeological approaches; and most of all, its willingness to challenge what we thought we knew about plaster, its uses, and its cultural value in antiquity. It is no longer possible to think of plaster casts as only mechanical reproductions—and if that is true, do we need to rethink the boundaries that we often place between art and craft, or about concepts like “factory” and “workshop” as we apply them to antiquity?

In singling out this group of three essays, I do not mean to suggest that the others in this volume can be overlooked. There are no duds here. In particular, the papers from the perspective of contemporary artistic practice not only provide technical information, as in Schelper’s essay on piece molding, but also provoke thought; this is especially the case in the final section, “Ancient Subjects, Modern Eyes.” The volume has a coherence that conference proceedings sometimes lack. Its copious illustrations, in both black-and-white and color, enhance and reinforce the essays. Notes are at the bottom of the page, where they belong, and a list of references follows each paper. Ancient Plaster adds significantly to the growing academic literature on plaster casts and their importance in the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity.

Authors and titles

Introduction ABBEY L. R. ELLIS AND EMMA M. PAYNE

Part I Modelling and Moulding in Plaster

1. Freehand Modelling with Lime Plaster CLARE VENABLES
2. Lime Kilns and Plaster Production BETH MUNRO
3. Thoughts on the Disposition of the 1983 Cache of Plaster Figures from ‘Ayn Ghazal, Jordan KATHRYN WALKER TUBB
4. The Material Behind the Masterpiece: Plaster and the Production of Greek and Roman Chryselephantine Statues KENNETH LAPATIN
5. Sculpting with Plaster at Dura-Europos EMMA M. PAYNE
6. Discussing Middle Byzantine Stucco Production: The Case of Hosios Loukas FLAVIA VANNI

Part II Plaster in the Sculptor’s Workshop

7. Plaster Piece-Moulding THOMAS SCHELPER
8. In the Workshop of an Ancient Egyptian Sculptor: The Estate of the Chief Royal Sculptor Thutmose At Akhet-Aten – Amarna DIMITRI LABOURY
9. Plaster Casts and the Transmission of Iconography: A Central Asian Perspective RACHEL MAIRS AND LAUREN MORRIS
10. Italy, France, and the Origin of the Full-scale Plaster Model ECKART MARCHAND
11. Did Roman Marble Sculptors Work from Plaster Models? The Baiae Plaster Casts in Context AMANDA CLARIDGE
12. The Function of Ancient Plaster Casts from Metalworks: A Reconsideration ABBEY L. R. ELLIS
13. Plaster Moulds for Stone Sculpture THOMAS MERRETT AND EMMA PAYNE

Part III Life Casting in the Classical World

14. Life Casting in Antiquity: A Sculptor’s Perspective NIGEL KONSTAM
15. Plaster Life Casting and the Production of Bronze Statuary in Ancient Greece: The Early Classical Revolution W. ALEXANDER LUMSDEN AND CAROL MATTUSCH
16. Roman Non-elite Plaster Death Mask Moulds Revisited: Practicality, Purpose, and Memory preservation KELSEY SHAWN MADDEN

Part IV Ancient Subjects, Modern Eyes

17. Modern Life Casting MARTIN HANSON
18. Flexible Casting Techniques through History MARIAM SONNTAG
19. Casting from Life: A Delicate Matter VERONIKA TOCHA
20. We Contemporize, They Persist CHRIS DORSETT

References

1. Alexandridis and L. Winkler-Horaček, Destroy the Copy: Plaster Cast Collections in the 19th–20th Centuries: Demolition, Defacement, Disposal in Europe and Beyond (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2022).
2. Barbanella, ‘Le collections de moulages au xix^e siècle: Étapes d’un parcours entre idéalisme, positivisme et esthétisme’, in Lavagne and Queyrel (eds.), 2000, pp. 57–73.
3. Beard, ‘Casts and Cast-offs: The Origins of the Museum of Classical Archaeology’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 39 (1993) pp. 1–29.
4. Beard, ‘Cast: Between Art and Science’, in Lavagne and Queyrel (eds.), Les Moulages de Sculptures Antiques (2000), pp. 157–166.
5. Frederiksen and E. Marchand (eds)., Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting, and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010).
6. Lavagne and François Queyrel (eds.), Les Moulages de Sculptures Antiques et l’Histoire de l’Archéologie (Paris: Droz, 2000).
7. Lending, Plaster Monuments: Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). doi.org/10.1515/9780691239620
8. Payne, Casting the Parthenon Sculptures from the Eighteenth Century to the Digital Age (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
9. Poulet and others, Jean-Antoine Houdon: Sculptor of the Enlightenment. (Washington DC: National Gallery of Art, 2003).
10. Richter, “An Aristogeiton from Baiae,” AJA 74 (1970), pp. 296–98.

Notes

[1] See for example Payne 2021, Lending 2017, Frederiksen and Marchand 2010, Barbanella 2000, Lavagne and Queyrel 2000, Beard 1993 and 2000; for neglect and destruction, Alexandridis and Winkler-Horaček 2022.

[2] Poulet 2003, 355: La qualité du plâtre peut y contribuer beaucoup, ainsi que l’habileté du mouleur qui, consiste à bien juger la quantité des pièces nécessaires et les placer de façon à pouvoir être enlevé sans rupture, et à n’en pas mettre plus qu’il ne faut.