Casting the Parthenon Sculptures from the Eighteenth Century to the Digital Age

Emma M. Payne

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350120365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Through the 19th century, as archaeology started to emerge as a systematic discipline, plaster casting became a widely-adopted technique, newly applied by archaeologists to document and transmit discoveries from their expeditions. The Parthenon sculptures were some of the first to be cast. In the late 18th century and the first years of the 19th century, the French artist Fauvel and Lord Elgin's men conducted campaigns on the Athenian Acropolis. Both created casts of parts of the Parthenon sculptures that they did not remove and these were sent back to France and Britain where they were esteemed and displayed alongside other, original sections. Henceforth, casting was established as an essential archaeological tool and grew exponentially over the course of the century. Such casts are now not only fascinating historical objects but may also be considered time capsules, capturing the details of important ancient works when they were first moulded in centuries past. This book examines the role of 19th century casts as an archaeological resource and explores how their materiality and spread impacted the reception of the Parthenon sculptures and other Greek and Roman works. Investigation of their historical context is combined with analysis of new digital models of the Parthenon sculptures and their casts. Sensitive 3D imaging techniques allow investigation of the surface markings of the objects in exceptionally fine detail and enable quantitative comparative studies comparing the originals and the casts. The 19th century casts are found to be even more accurate, but also complex, than anticipated; through careful study of their multiple layers, we can retrieve surface information now lost from the originals through weathering and vandalism.

1

The Emergence of Fauvel and His Successors

The earliest full-sized casts created of the Parthenon were those made by Fauvel, working for Choiseul-Gouffier in the late eighteenth century, some years before Elgin’s campaign. This chapter will explore these casts and the later evolution of moulding and casting methods in the field. First, however, it is important to outline the context in which these casts emerged. Though not always illustrious, plaster casts have a very long history. Setting aside their ancient roots, we may look first to the fourteenth-century artist Cennino Cennini, who created casts and provided instruction for others to do so in his book Il libro dell’Arte. By the fifteenth century, the use of casts by sculptors and painters became increasingly common in Italy, with study casts made both from pieces of sculpture and from body parts (Marchand 2017). From the Renaissance onwards, casts were not only used to copy sculptures and create anatomical casts but to transmit and display famous classical works. In the sixteenth century, King François I secured the services of the Italian artist Francesco Primaticcio to mould and cast the best ancient statues at the Vatican to adorn the gardens at the Château de Fontainebleau (Haskell and Penny 1981, 6). These were cast in bronze, but in 1550 the moulds were sent to the Habsburg Court where casts in plaster were made for Mary of Habsburg. In Britain, King Charles I followed the same tradition and, upon his accession in 1625, ordered bronze casts of a number of the most famous classical statues, including the Borghese Gladiator, the Belvedere Antinous, Commodus as Hercules, Diana the Huntress and the Spinario (Haskell and Penny 1981, 31). This list of kings and queens hints at the prestigious and exclusive nature of these cast commissions, which would become much more democratic in the eighteenth century.

Following the growth of the Grand Tour, casts of classical sculpture were increasingly sought after and a growing number of specialist casters were only too happy to oblige. At first, these remained available only to a marginally wider group of privileged classes. Massimilio Soldani (1656–1740), the Master of the Mint in Florence, supplied bronze casts to clients including John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Johann Adam of Liechtenstein (Avery 2005, 11–13; Coltman 2006, 131–4). However, Soldani also opened a more accessible studio opposite the entrance of the Uffizi, where he produced smaller bronze casts of ancient and Renaissance statues (Avery 2005, 8). By the mid-eighteenth century, bronze statuettes had gained wide appeal. In the 1760s and 1770s, casters included competitors Giacomo Zoffoli and Francesco Righetti, both of whom provided the Swedish Court, among other wealthy Europeans, with small bronze copies after the antique, but also opened workshops in Rome producing statuettes for Grand Tourists. As more ancient sculpture was uncovered and as travel around the Continent became easier, the practice expanded and the collection of casts filtered further through society.

In Britain, popular appetite for the collection of classical statuary was first satiated by early eighteenth century mass production of lead casts by John Nost and Andrew Carpenter at Hyde Park. Around 1738, John Cheere took over this business and developed his own recipes for bronzing, gilding and painting plaster casts such that they might resemble marble for commercial marketing (Clifford 1992, 40). From the 1760s, his output shifted away from small-scale rococo plasters to life-sized figures and groups as demand grew for attainable collections to compare with those acquired by wealthy men like the Duke of Marlborough (Friedman and Clifford 1974, 14–15). Cheere’s pioneering work made bronzed sculptures much more affordable and accessible to British clients. He quickly acquired competitors like Peter Vanina. Vanina was also based in London and, among other subjects, produced moulds and casts in plaster of ancient sculptures, sometimes using bronzing finishing techniques (Roscoe et al. 2009, 1310). Other competitors included partners James Hoskins and Benjamin Grant (former employees of Cheere), and John Flaxman, who produced casts of relief work. These men acquired an international market, with William Cheere (son of John) supplying plaster copies of ancient sculptures ‘finisht neat & bronzd w’copper’ to George Washington for his estate at Mount Vernon in 1760 (Clifford 1992, 41).¹ Following their early establishment in the art studio, casts came to be favoured as training materials by the art academies founded in the mid-eighteenth century. They were acquired, for example, by the Royal Academy founded by George III in 1768/9, and in this case white casts were preferred (Haskell and Penny 1981, 79). Their clean lines and clear areas of light and shade were thought to be more instructive than marbles for training students in the art of drawing (Cupperi 2010, 84).

The development of the Grand Tour and the concurrent spread of cast collecting led to a growing fervour for all things Greek and Roman. The establishment of the Society of Dilettanti in London in 1734 reinforced the idea that the collection and study of classical art constituted the epitome of refined taste (Kelly 2009). Yet it also ensured that the classical became widely fashionable and well-known, supporting projects like the now renowned The Antiquities of Athens: Measured and Delineated (1762–1794) by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett. It was through works such as this that archaeology as a scientific, academic discipline came to be born, along with a new role for plaster casts as objects for study, investigation and re-creation. The systematic measurement and recording of ancient buildings was found now not only in texts but also through meticulously created scale models. From the 1760s, Charles Townley commissioned models of the temples at Paestum and Thomas Jenkins had the round temple of Vesta at Tivoli modelled by Giovanni Altieri, a craftsman from Naples (Kockel 2010, 421). These early models were typically made of cork – the crumbly, soft, warm material thought to befit the ancient stone ruins. However, from the 1790s, plaster of Paris was also employed, primarily by the Parisian modeller Jean Pierre Fouquet and his son François (Kockel 2010, 423). Jean Pierre worked closely with the French artist and collector Louis-François Cassas, making a number of models based on his architectural drawings (Thornton and Dorey 1992, 118). These models were highly precise and a distinction in usage was developed and maintained quite consistently through to the mid-nineteenth century: the cork versions were employed to show the current, ruined condition of the buildings, while the pristine white plaster models came to be used to show how they were presumed to look when first constructed.

Sir John Soane was a great collector of the models and had cork and plaster versions set side-by-side (Kockel 2010, 422–4). Soane bought twenty of Fouquet’s models from the architect Edward Cresy, and positioned these in his north and south drawing-rooms including one of the Parthenon and one of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, a building for which he also owned one of Altieri’s cork models (Connor 1989, 199).² Again, this was a carefully produced scale model, probably created using measurements taken by the Italian architect Giovanni Stern (Thornton and Dorey 1992, 80). Such models were enormously popular during this period and, as well as becoming desirable collectors’ items, they were used for the instruction of students. In 1806, Cassas put seventy-six of his models of ancient buildings on display in his gallery in the rue de Seine (Thornton and Dorey 1992, 118). Here he followed the earlier example of Richard Du Bourg’s popular ‘Classical Exhibition’ held in London, which was dedicated to models of Greek and Roman monuments and opened in the 1770s before being destroyed in 1785, perhaps caused by the model of Vesuvius catching light (!) (Thornton and Dorey 1992, 67; Gillespie 2017). Du Bourg rebuilt his collection through the 1790s and opened a new exhibition that ran from 1798 to 1819 (Gillespie 2017, 261).

These models were accompanied by the now direct use of plaster to mould and cast accurate, full-sized copies of ancient architectural ornament. Soane likewise came to collect such casts, acquiring those of the architects James Playfair and Willey Reveley in 1795 and 1801. Alongside these British architects, the French sculptor and draftsman Nicolas-François-Daniel Lhuillier had collected casts from Rome in the late 1770s, followed by the French architect Leon Dufourny from 1782. Lhuillier was himself a specialist worker of plaster and also created models for relief work at Bagatelle on the outskirts of Paris (Draper 1992). Such casts were used both for academic study and for the practical training of stonemasons. In 1790, for example, Guillaume Couture ordered 144 casts of capitals and details found on Italian monuments for the French craftsmen working on the Madeleine to learn from. On the more academic side, Dufourny’s casts were acquired by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which made a concerted effort to build up a sustained collection of all of the most important aspects of ancient architecture, replacing casts as they were damaged (Kockel 2010, 427). In Soane’s collection, he gathered casts of capitals and ornaments not just from buildings in Rome, such as the temple of Castor and Pollux, but also the temple of Mars Ultor and the temple of Vesta at Tivoli, and even the Erechtheum at Athens (Connor 1989, 198). Compared with those from Rome, however, the collection of casts from Greece occurred later and more infrequently. In the eighteenth century, Greece was still relatively off the beaten track and often left unexplored by Grand Tourists. Yet as architects like Stuart and Revett published their observations on Athens, the acquisition of all things Greek became ever more desirable.

There was a measure of competition between the French and the British in the exploration of Greece. Stuart and Revett’s project on Athens had been conceived around 1748 and inspired by a comparable publication dedicated to Rome published in 1682 by the Frenchman Antoine Desgodetz. Desgodetz’s Les édifices antiques de Rome provided descriptions and engravings of ancient structures in Rome, including the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the baths of Diocletian and the arches of Titus, Septimius and Constantine, together with detailed engravings of aspects of ornament annotated with measurements. Starting later than Stuart and Revett, but pipping them to the post for a publication on Greek monuments was their French counterpart Julien David Le Roy. Le Roy published his book Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments in 1758, just four years before Stuart and Revett’s first volume. While the latter had been supported by a small subsidy from the Society of Dilettanti, Le Roy’s became more of a national project, supported by the eminent figure and wealthy antiquary the Comte de Caylus, and was intended to beat the British. The two publications were, in fact, rather different with Stuart and Revett’s focused on providing accurate, measured drawings of the monuments, while Le Roy’s included more historical discourse (Bergdoll 2000, 16–20). It is in the context of this race to explore and record the ancient ruins of Greece that we must view the campaign of the Comte de Choiseul-Gouffier (1752–1817).

Marie-Gabriel-Florent-Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier was a French aristocrat with a keen interest in the investigation of Greece. Choiseul-Gouffier first travelled to Greece in 1776, accompanied by the architect Jacques Foucherot and started to collect material for the first volume of his Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce. In 1780, Foucherot recruited the twenty-seven-year-old Fauvel and introduced him to Choiseul-Gouffier. Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel was born on the 14 September 1753 in Picardie, Clermont-en-Beauvais. His was a family of the bourgeois and the young Fauvel received an education in the arts, although we have no details of this early training. He was received onto the registers of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in March 1773, at the age of nineteen. There he was taken under the wing of the painter Gabriel-François Doyen, who had also worked for the Choiseul family (Zambon 2014, 27–30). Fauvel set out with Foucherot on his first voyage to Greece in 1780, primarily to examine and draw its monuments to form supplementary material for the second volume of Choiseul-Gouffier’...