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CASTING A NEW CANON: COLLECTING AND TREATING CASTS OF GREEK AND ROMAN SCULPTURE, 1850–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 August 2019

Emma M. Payne
Emma M. Payne*
Affiliation:
King's College London, UK
*
*emma.payne@kcl.ac.uk.
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Abstract

From the mid-nineteenth century, it became de rigueur for Classics Departments to acquire casts of Greek and Roman sculpture to form reference and experimental collections. Recent scholarship has revived such casts, investigating their role as instruments of teaching and research, and their wavering popularity. This paper further examines the aims of those responsible for collecting casts, and discusses how these objectives influenced their materiality and treatment, as well as showing how the de facto creation of a new canon of casts through their repetition across the collections of different institutions contributed to the decline in their perceived importance.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Cambridge Classical Journal , Volume 65 , December 2019 , pp. 113 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

Research for this paper was conducted during a PhD funded by the AHRC at the Institute of Archaeology, UCL (2013–17). Writing up was completed in part during a research associateship at the Institute of Classical Studies, London and in part as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at KCL.

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