Introduction

In 2011, the French art dealer Guillaume Duhamel agreed to finance the creation of 12 posthumous casts of one of the most iconic monumental sculptures in the world: Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty. Using then state-of-the-art 3D-scanning techniques, at a substantial cost, a near-perfect replica was made of Bartholdi’s long-archived plaster model of 1878 without touching and risking damage to it. Both the steel structure and the lightness of the metal, created and chosen as responses to structural problems, allowed the famous statue to be transported to the United States, expand in warmer temperatures and sway gently in the winds of New York Harbor. Art historians note and often question the significant differences that can exist between lifetime and posthumous casts, and how these differences are often avoided in discussions of the posthumous works. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.