It is the essential irony of plaster cast reproductions of classical art as objects of study that these sculptures, originating from an impulse to document the minute surface contours of individual works of art, are frequently analyzed collectively and seldom adequately appreciated for their particularity and materiality. Enter Emma M. Payne, whose book discloses, in vivid detail, the history of casting the Parthenon sculptures (pediments, metopes, and frieze) and the means by which these objects can continue to yield new information about both ancient sculptural techniques and the singular achievement of the Parthenon itself. Compelled by her conviction that an under-estimation of the documentary value of plaster casts will have negative consequences for the future of scholarship, Payne argues that urgent measures are needed now to preserve what remains of the thousands of plaster casts created in the nineteenth century, the majority of which have degraded due to neglect in the intervening period. This view already has many supporters, as scholarly interest in casts, emerging at the very end of the twentieth century, has ballooned during the first quarter of the twenty-first.[1] The major contribution of Payne’s book is its meticulous demonstration of how, by virtue of cutting-edge imaging technology, casts taken prior to the ravages of modern deterioration can reveal otherwise “lost” surface details of the Parthenon sculptures. Of secondary, but nevertheless crucial, value is Payne’s achievement in presenting truly interdisciplinary work, integrating the varied approaches of object conservation (including 3D scanning and image processing), classical art history, classical reception, and cultural history, within a volume that is both inviting to all readers and unsparing in its documentation of evidence. Well-equipped to navigate the political sensitivity of the Parthenon sculptures as objects at the center of national identity formation and international disagreement, Payne elegantly threads together a lucid and informative historical account that empowers her readers to engage in debates surrounding the past, present, and future of the Parthenon marbles.
In the first chapters, “The Emergence of Fauvel and His Successors” and “Plaster Casts, Elgin, and the British Museum,” Payne considers the late-eighteenth- to nineteenth-century context in which casts of the Parthenon were first taken, efficiently outlining the race to investigate and publicize the ancient ruins of Greece, the popularity in England, France, and beyond of all things ancient Greek and Roman, and the artistic, educational, and decorative environments in which casts were highly coveted. Payne’s narratives of the casting projects undertaken under the auspices of Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817), and of Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin (1766–1841), set into relief larger dynamics of political and cultural rivalry between France and Britain, as each vied for primacy in the realm of archaeological exploration. In this early period, it was common practice for formatori (producers of molds and casts) to make adjustments as they worked, so as to complete or otherwise improve fragmentary sculptures. As a result, present-day analysis of casts must be grounded in awareness that when surface features of a cast differ from the “original” from which it derives, these differences may reflect restorations that were in place when the molds were made or additions made to the molds or casts independently, rather than ancient features of that sculpture now lost. Payne demonstrates the far-reaching implications of the unique motivations and circumstances of the individuals involved in documenting and dismantling the Parthenon, in every instance revealing a story more complicated than mere treasure-hunting cloaked in the language of scientific progress. Access to archival papers assembled by the curator Ian Jenkins, who predeceased the publication of this book by a year, allows Payne to complete the arc of her historical narrative by demonstrating how casts of the Parthenon marbles were first acquired, studied, and displayed at the British Museum.
The sequence of chapters in the book follows the chronological trajectory projected by the book’s title, with early historiographical chapters yielding to later discussions of Payne’s technical analysis and its findings. Mindful of the unfamiliarity many humanities-trained readers may have with stone conservation and condition studies, Payne’s third chapter offers extensive background on the physical condition of the Parthenon’s Pentelic-marble sculptures and the history of reconstruction, climatic adversity, accidental damage, restoration, and willful mutilation that led to their current state. Payne categorizes and details the mechanical stresses, chemical reactions, and biological agents that have deteriorated the stone, in the process introducing many salient terms of art (e.g. “sugaring,” “differential weathering,” 70). Likewise pitched to a non-specialist reader are pages devoted to the possibilities and limitations of 3D imaging technology, which conclude by summarizing the state of technical research on the Parthenon marbles and its casts before Payne’s 2015 campaign of scanning, for which she was awarded the Bernd Breuckmann Award 2014.
The fourth chapter, “3D Imaging the West Frieze,” presents the scientific results of Payne’s research on corresponding casts and originals at the British Museum and the Acropolis Museum, on which she used a Breuckmann smartSCAN to create 3D models of the sculptural surfaces. Her scans focused on heads of sculpted figures in four blocks of the West Frieze and in one block of the North Frieze of the Parthenon, with comparison being drawn between marble surfaces at the Acropolis Museum and the plaster surfaces of casts (when possible, across multiple versions) at the British Museum. The revelations emerging from this scanning are too numerous to summarize. They include confirmation of the presence of surface working (nearly impossible to detect by human sight alone) to create a distinction between roughness in areas depicting hair and clothing, and smoother planes for skin and the background, a discovery with important implications for our understanding of polychromy on the frieze (101–102).[2] Reflecting on her results, documented in figures, tables, and written analysis, Payne states:
The obvious verdict to draw is that there was a period of particularly rapid deterioration between 1802 and 1872. It is noteworthy, however, that this timeline suggests that the decay of the sculptures appears to have slowed during the twentieth century precisely when problems with sulphurous emissions and acid rain were most acute. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the most significant type of deterioration enacted on the sculptures was that of deliberate human attack through the nineteenth century, rather than the more insidious effects of the environment. The almost absent level of change between the [1872] Merlin casts and the marble sculptures suggests that these attacks subsided through the later nineteenth century following Greek independence and increased restoration efforts (110–113).
Nevertheless, Payne immediately complicates this view by asserting that such a conclusion must, in some cases, be tempered in light of restorations performed on the casts themselves, which are not detectible by machine analysis of the 3D models, but instead require human intelligence to interpret (113–120).
The book’s fifth chapter, “3D Imaging and Cleaning the Parthenon Sculptures” presents Payne’s research findings concerning one of the most notorious moments in the history of the Parthenon marbles (and of museum conservation writ large), the 1930s “cleaning” undertaken by the British Museum. Payne provides a potted history of the field of objects conservation, and situates this unfortunate episode within common practices of the time. Building on Ian Jenkins’ research into the 1930s events, which demonstrated that the loss of patina suffered through the British Museum’s program of conservation was not as extensive as some feared, Payne investigates the capacity of casts to document the impact of that cleaning.[3] Payne focuses her efforts on Figure G, the head of Selene’s horse, and the Helios group from the East Pediment, where the effect of the cleaning has raised significant concern. While she is slightly more hesitant about the reliability of data produced using the casts and scans to answer the research questions of Chapter 5 than she was for Chapter 4, Payne concludes that “the impact of the 1930s cleaning on the surface morphology of the Parthenon sculptures was minor. Although the manner of cleaning would certainly no longer be employed, it must be considered in the context of its time and the damage caused was less severe than feared” (156).
With the final body chapter of her book, “An Authentic Source of Evidence,” Payne widens her lens to consider some of broader implications of her technical analysis for our understanding of competing notions of authenticity, as pertained to casts, in the nineteenth century. She contrasts casting with other indexical means of reproduction prevalent during that period, including “sculpturing machines” and photography, and distinguishes between two functions that plaster casts performed: that of recording archaeological specificity, and that of providing a “tool of conjecture used to recreate sculptures either lost or fragmentary” (173). This discussion, while briskly paced, is perfectly framed to showcase how the nineteenth-century technological advancements at the center of Payne’s research in many ways set the terms for debates about the relationship between humans and machines that continue to this day.
This book is so detailed, thorough, and thoughtful in its presentation of a complex topic that it can serve as an introduction to the technology of plaster casting and its history, even as it offers a blueprint for advancing the field considerably. There is no question that the past and future of the Parthenon marbles, and of cast collections of Greek and Roman sculpture themselves, will continue to loom large in discussions of classical antiquity, European nationalism, and the formation of ideas of “the West.” Payne’s book provides a model for the sound and comprehensive presentation of interdisciplinary scholarship and should be essential reading across the many subjects that it so deftly weaves together.
Notes
[1] See, among others, Henri Lavagne and François Queyrel, eds. (2000) Les moulages de sculptures antiques et l’histoire de l’archéologie: actes du colloque international, Paris, 24 octobre 1997. Geneva: Droz; Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, eds. (2010) Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter; Annetta Alexandridis and Lorenz Winkler-Horaček, eds. (2022) Destroy the Copy – Plaster Cast Collections in the 19th–20th Centuries Demolition, Defacement, Disposal in Europe and Beyond. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter.
[2] For previous hypotheses concerning this surface working, see Wolfgang Maßmann (2014) “Steinbildhauerische Bearbeitung, Formensprache,” in Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer and Wolfgang Maßmann, eds. Die ‘Berliner Göttin’: Schicksale einer archaischen Frauenstatue in Antike und Neuzeit. Allgäu: Kunstverlag Josef Fink: 88–93.
[3] Ian Jenkins (2001) “Cleaning and Controversy: The Parthenon Sculptures 1811–1939,” Occasional Papers 146. London: The British Museum.