The Museum of Casts at Athens

Journal of the History of Collections 10 no. I (1998) pp. 87-91

T H E M U S E U M OF CASTS IN A T H E N S (1846-1874) ANDROMACHE

GAZI

Nineteenth-century Europe manifested a real zeal in the production of casts after antique sculpture and many European museums had as a nucleus such a collection of casts. This article discusses the formation of an early cast collection in Athens and its display in a temporary 'museum'.

Cast Collections in Europe IF the eighteenth century had been the era of the private collector, the ninteenth century was characterized by a more altruistic desire to acquire casts for public enjoyment and instruction. Germany lay at the centre of this movement. Throughout the nineteenth century, most German universities had significant collections of casts, used mainly for the teaching of classical archaeology. The earliest such collection was created in the university of Gottingen, while others were to be found in Tubingen, Kiel and Bonn. It has been observed that 'studying from casts was easily accepted as natural and proper, because the notion of the 'plastic' played such a central role in humanistic education of the time'.1 By far the most important collection of casts in Germany was that of the Kunstakademie in Berlin, initiated in the seventeenth century by Friedrich I, King of Prussia. In the 1840s, this collection was passed to the Altes Museum, where a workshop for making moulds and casts to sell to other museums was also established. For many years, there was a dominant notion that new finds would not displace casts. When a German expedition began excavating at Olympia in 1875, they obtained the right to make casts and moulds from every find within five years of its discovery. The casts of the sculptures found at Olympia were to be exhibited to the public in 1878 in the Dombaustatte in Berlin.2 In England, cast collecting was associated more strongly with training in art and design and with the education of public taste, than it was with instruction in archaeology. The premier museum for casts in England was the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), which had an active reproductions department selling copies for 'the use of schools of art, for prizes and for general © Oxford University Press 1998 0954-6650 96

purposes of public instruction'.3 More closely similar to the German university collections was the important cast collection founded at the Museum of Classical Archaeology in Cambridge, which can still be seen today. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was no display of casts at the British Museum, where a policy operated that no cast of any sculpture, the original of which could be seen in another European museum, should be exhibited in the galleries. Exceptions were made only for casts of the pediments from the temple of Athena Aphaia on Aegina and of the metopes from Selinus. In any case, it was not until the end of the century that the British Museum acquired a representative cast collection such as those created in other European museums. However, following demands by foreign institutions for casts of the Elgin Marbles, the museum had established a workshop for making casts and moulds.4 It was through this workshop that the collection of casts in Athens came to be formed.

First efforts at the protection of Greek antiquities Modern Greece was established as an independent state in 1830, following the Greek Revolution against the Ottomans (1821-9). The first decades after the foundation of the new state were characterized by assiduous efforts to secure the social order and to resurrect a ravaged economy. At the same time, considerable efforts were made to collect antiquities scattered around the country and to secure them in safe places. Large-scale excavations were carried out in Athens (such as those on the Acropolis, which were started in 1839-40), alongside the first restorations (such as that of the Parthenon and of the temple of Athena-Nike in the 1840s), and the first museums

ANDROMACHE GAZI

were established. The main agent of all this activity was the Archaeological Society in Athens, a private society founded in 1837 with the aim of assisting the Greek Government in the recovery and restoration of antiquities.5 Acquisition and display of the cast collection As early as 1837, Kyriakos Pittakes, keeper of the Athenian antiquities, had expressed a wish that the British Museum should send casts from the Parthenon sculpture to Athens.6 A few years later, in 1844, a request by the Archaeological Society was officially submitted to the British Museum for replicas of some of the Acropolis sculptures; namely, the Elgin Caryatid, one column and capital from the Erechtheion and four pieces of frieze from the temple of AthenaNike.7 Following the efforts of the Society's corresponding members in London, the Trustees of the Museum agreed to undertake the expense of making and sending casts from the four parts of the frieze of the temple of Athena—Nike, the one Caryatid from the Erechtheion, along with one column drum and a capital from the Erechtheion.8 The casts had reached Athens by late spring 1845. In the meantime, following a further letter from the Archaeological Society, the British Museum decided to present the King of Greece with a full set of casts of the Parthenon sculptures. A sum of £500 was set aside for this purpose and the casts sailed to Athens on a specially chartered vessel, The Moor of Venice, in Autumn 1846.9 This second consignment consisted of casts from the pedimental sculpture, the fifty metopes removed by Elgin and the part of the frieze taken to England. The prominent Greek scholar Rangaves, who characterized the replicas as 'dark shadows of their splendid originals',10 gives a vivid account of the enthusiastic reception of the ship's precious cargo by the Athenians at the port of Piraeus." Finally, in 1847 the British Museum decided to send casts from the sculpture of the temple of Apollo Epicurus at Bassae in Phigaleia.12 There seems to have been some confusion about the material from which the casts were made, as Greek sources refer to them as both 'clay' and 'plaster' replicas.13 Recently, however, Ian Jenkins has provided information which shows that the casts were in cement.14 All the casts in question were made by W. Pink, who acted as aformatore in the British Museum in the 1840s and 1850s. The casts were accommodated in a Turkish bath at

•** FIG. 1. The Turkish bath at the Roman Agora, Athens. Temporary Casts Museum (1846—74).

the north-eastern corner of the Roman Agora, ceded to the Archaeological Society by the Government (Fig. 1). This was referred to as a 'spacious, circular vaulted room', converted by the Society into a temporary but 'appropriate' museum.15 The Society's desire to occupy the whole building was not satisfied.16 Statues and inscriptions from the Society's own collection were also temporarily placed in the bath-house from 1851 onwards.17 The building in which the museum was housed has been identified as that of the Bath of Oula Bei (Fig. 2).18 According to our evidence, only one of the rooms was used, but we do not know which one this was. A contemporary reference in the press which refers to 'passing by [the Bath]. . . and having looked through the railed door'19 suggests that the room in question was the first one, the only room which, according to the floor plan, had a door. The Society's reference to the spaciousness of the room is challenged by Edmond About, a French archaeologist and writer, who wrote when visiting Athens in 1852 that the casts were kept in 'a small mosque, as big as a

MUSEUM OF CASTS, ATHENS ( 1 8 4 6 - 7 4 )

89

17 Xpusotmrpnmeta

FIG. 2. Plan of the market during the period of the Turkish occupation of Athens; the Oula Bei bath is solid black.

hand'.20 We may imagine in any case that space was limited. Information on the interior of the museum is scarce. We know that a four-sided pedestal placed in the middle accommodated the casts of the Parthenon pedimental sculptures, whereas the statue of Iris from the west pediment21 stood at the centre of the room.22 A contemporary newspaper report,23 according to which a multitude of reliefs similar to the

surviving metopes on the Acropolis were seen along the walls, suggests that casts of the metopes were placed around the museum walls in a series of rows at differing heights. According to a more explicit source, copies of the fifty metopes were displayed on the 'highest row' on either side of the door.24 This, in turn, allows us to suppose that, given the fact that no information survives on the placement of the frieze, it may have been displayed amongst the lower

ANDROMACHE GAZI

FIG. 3. The Parthenon Room in the Acropolis museum at the beginning of the present century. Photo: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Athens.

FIG. 4. The Theseion, first state archaeological museum in Athens, c. 1850-5, from the south. Photo: Benaki Museum.

rows, that is, underneath the metopes. An attempt seems to have been made to arrange the casts around the room according to their original positions on the temple itself, that is to say, pedimental sculpture, metopes, frieze. The means for the display were, no doubt, extremely simple. The material from which the central pedestal accommodating the figures from the pediments was constructed is not recorded, but we may presume that it was wood, following the common practice in those years.25 The arrangement of the pedimental sculptures on a four-sided structure no doubt destroyed their coherence as a group, designed to be placed on the triangular surface of a pediment. This having been said, we should remember that convenience of space, rather than internal coherence, was the determining principle behind many such displays at this time. The information that the metopes were placed in rows above each other suggests two possibilities: either that they were attached to the walls themselves or that they were placed on shelves running along the walls. There is no indication that any written information accompanied the replicas displayed in the museum; we may presume that this was not the case. As far as lighting is concerned, the door and the skylight26 were probably the only sources of natural lighting in the room, which, having been a bath, would presumably have had no windows.

has not been possible to trace any records of visits to the museum. Its existence was publicized in the press, but whether it was visited by more than a very restricted circle of enthusiasts - members of the Archaeological Society, foreign archaeologists or travellers, and perhaps other scholars - is not known. In fact, it is inappropriate to apply presentday museum concepts to that pioneer period of museum development in Greece: during those years all 'museums' were characterized by a 'temporary store-room' nature, which made little allowance for further concerns. The Bath of Oula Bei, being built above more ancient structures, was demolished in 1890 during excavations by the Society.27 The majority of the museum's contents had been transported to the newly built Acropolis Museum in 1874, where they were put on display in the so-called Parthenon Room and in an adjacent room (Fig. 3).28 The casts from the temple of Apollo Epicurus were first transferred to a guard-house on the Acropolis and then in January 1878 to the temple of Hephaistos, known as the Theseion (Fig. 4).29 Evidence shows that the casts from the south and north interior frieze of the temple of Apollo Epicurus were displayed in the centre of the museum on a wooden 'scaffold', whereas a cast from the figure of Selene, from the east pediment of the Parthenon, stood along the west wall of the building.30 Many of these early casts survive today. The Parthenon casts are exhibited in the basement of the Centre for Acropolis Studies, whereas the Phigaleian casts are held in a non-public area of the National Museum.

Public reception and subsequent history Although emphasis was laid upon the fact that the collection of casts was to be enjoyed by the public, it

MUSEUM OF CASTS, ATHENS ( 1 8 4 6 - 7 4 ) Address for correspondence Dr Andromache Gazi, Lemessou 43, 15669 Athens, Greece. Notes and references 1. P. Connor, 'Cast-collecting in the nineteenth century: scholarship, aesthetics, connoisseurship', in G. Clarke (ed.), Rediscovering Hellenism. The Hellenic inheritance and the English imagination (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 187— 2 352. Connor, op. cit., (note 1), p. 196. 3. Connor, op. cit., (note 1), p. 214. 4. I. Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum r8oo-igjg (London, 1992). 5. For a history of the Archaeological Society see E. Kastorches, IoroptKri Exdeots TCOV Ilpd^ccov TTJS ev Aftr\vais Apxaiokoyucqs Eraipeias airo TIJS ISpvoews AVTT/S TO 1837 fxexpi TOV i8yg TeXevrwvTos (Athens, 1897); P. Kavvadias, IoTopta r~qs ApxdioXoyiK^s Eraipclas airo TYJS ev 'ETZI

6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

1837 I&pvoews AVTTJS M^\pi

TOV igoo

(Athens, 1900); V. Petrakos, H ev ASr/vats ApxaioXoyixri ETatpeta 1837-^87 (Athens, 1987). FlpaKTiKO. Tt\s ev ASyvais Apx&toXoyitcqs ETaipeias 1837, p. 28, no. 1. See TIAE 1844, p. 182; I. Jenkins, 'Acquisition and supply of casts of the Parthenon sculpture by the British Museum', Journal of the British School of Athens (1990), p. 106; Petrakos, op cit. (note 5), p. 29. TIAE 1845, p. 202; Kastorches, op. cit. (note 5), p. 29; Kavvadias, op. cit. (note 5), p. 27; Petrakos, op. cit. (note 5), p. 31. Jenkins, op. cit. (note 4), p. 107. Quoted in Petrakos, op. cit. (note 5), p. 31.

11. TIAE 1847, p. 296. 12. See Jenkins, op. cit. (note 4), p. 107; TIAE 1848, pp. 1012; Kastorches, op. cit. (note 5), p. 33. 13. See TIAE 1845, p. 202, and TIAE 1858-59, p. 23, respectively. 14. Jenkins, op. cit. (note 4), p. 106, no. 151. 15. TIAE 1845, p. 204; TIAE 1847, p . 297. 16. TIAE 1847, p. 297. 17. A. Kokkou, H Mepi/iva yta ns ApxawrrjTes arrjv EXXdSa Kai TO. Tlpwra Movaeia (Athens, 1977), p. 184. 18. J. Travlos, TIoXeohofiiKr) E£c\i£is TUIV A8T)VU>V airo TUIV TIpoiaTopiKwv Xpovojv Mexpi TCOV Apx&v TOV igov AIOJVOS (Athens, i960), pp. 184, 211, fig. 140. 19. Quoted in Kokkou, op. cit. (note 17), p. 180. 20. E. About, La Grece conlemporain (Paris, 1858), p. 255. 21. Figure N; See F. Brommer, The Sculptures of the Parthenon, (London, 1979), pp. 122, 123 (1,2). 22. TIAE 1847, p. 300. 23. AB-qva IE, no. 1374, 19-12-1846; quoted in Kokkou, op. cit. (note 17), p. 180. 24. TIAE 1847, p. 304. 25. For a discussion of early display practices in Greece, see A. Gazi, 'Archaeological Museums in Greece: 1829—1909. The Display of Archaeology'. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Department of Museum Studies, University of Leicester Leicester, 1993. 26. TIAE 1858-59, p. 23. 27. TIAE 1890, pp. 12-13. 28. Gazi, op. cit. (note 25), vol. 1, pp. 143, 148. 29. The Theseion was the first state archaeological museum in Athens. It was established in 1834 and functioned as a museum until 1935. See Gazi, op. cit. (note 25), vol. 1, pp. 87-100. 30. Gazi, op. cit. (note 25), vol. 1, pp. 96-97.