ABSTRACT
The intricate relationship between original works and their reproductions lies at the heart of nineteenth-century cast culture. From the mid-nineteenth century, new casting techniques enabled bigger and lighter casts, which allowed for the multiplication and circulation of enormous parts of architectural structures at full scale. The German excavations at Pergamon resulted in the appearance of a long-lost, brand-new, Hellenistic monument. Architecture and art have always travelled, in time, place, and media, and under a number of labels. Reconstructions, casts, models, facsimiles, reconstitutions, replicas, repetitions, multiples, doubles, fakes, substitutions, surrogates, echoes, and clones may signify differently across languages and time. Like oral recitations in antiquity performed by professional rhapsodes, reproductions aim at keeping deteriorating and lost works alive for new audiences, inside and outside the museum. Through time, reproductions might become irreproducible originals in their own right, exactly as the works that made the subject matter and the lost continent for Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s invention of art history.
