Century-old replicas are themselves historical

PITTSBURGH -- Industrialist Andrew Carnegie wanted working-class people who couldn’t afford trips around the globe to be able to see the world’s architectural masterpieces.

So 100 years ago, Carnegie built a large hall and installed in it a church’s facade from France, intricately detailed doors from Italy, statuesque maidens from Greece and dozens of other architectural masterpieces. Not the originals, but casts that were perfect reproductions, made of plaster.

This year, the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Architecture is celebrating its centennial, and an exhibit focusing on the museum’s extensive and well-preserved cast collection is drawing attention to this once-popular art form.

“When people came to museums a hundred years ago, they came to see casts,” said exhibit organizer Mattie M. Schloetzer.

Over the years, the casts were replaced in museums by original works of art. Many museums sold or destroyed their casts.

“The Carnegie’s timing was either very good or very bad. [Its cast collection was] assembled in 1907, just at the moment that originality was pouring forth,” said Franklin Toker, a University of Pittsburgh professor of the history of art and architecture who has studied the Carnegie’s cast collection. Instead of destroying its casts, the Carnegie kept its collection in the cavernous halls built to house them.

The collection is believed to be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, and the third-largest in the world behind collections in France and England.

The most dominating cast in the Carnegie’s Hall of Architecture is the large facade of the French Benedictine Abbey Church of St. Gilles from Gard, France, which measures nearly 40 feet high and about 78 feet wide. The facade features a center archway door, or portal, flanked by two smaller ones; its plaster finish is a reddish brown.

Visitors can also view a replica of the Porch of the Maidens cast from the Acropolis. Towering overhead, some of the features on the maidens’ faces appear smashed or flattened.

At the real Acropolis in Greece, some of the maidens’ faces are completely worn off because of years of exposure to the weather, pollution and natural vibrations, Schloetzer said. That’s one thing that makes the Carnegie’s collection so significant, she said.

“These are copies, yet they have more information, better information, than the original works do,” she said.

In one corner of the hall, capitals and columns of different styles from English Gothic to Italian Renaissance are displayed next to each other. A massive, intricately carved cast of the pulpit from Santa Croce in Florence, which dates to 1475, hangs from the wall.

“It’s so dark in those churches, you can’t make out the level of detail like you can here,” Schloetzer said.

The casts are hollow inside but still very heavy. They are also delicate, and can be damaged by vibrations in the museum; it’s not uncommon to see gloved museum employees gently working on the casts to fix cracks or broken pieces.

On a recent day at the museum, two conservators worked on a column at the facade of St. Gilles, which is not only the largest in the Carnegie’s collection but also believed to be the largest cast in the world. It was made from hundreds of individual casts shipped from Europe to New York by boat, then put on a train to Pittsburgh; two French craftsmen helped assemble the pieces in the hall 100 years ago.

Carnegie was given permission to make a cast of the facade after donating 2,000 gold francs to the town of Gard. Townspeople thanked Carnegie in a letter from the mayor, saying the money helped the town immensely because of a poor grape harvest that season. The letter is part of the exhibit “On a Grand Scale: The Hall of Architecture at 100,” which runs through next year. The exhibit details the history of casts and how the Carnegie’s collection came to be.

In one room of the exhibit, visitors are encouraged to sit at a wooden drafting desk near a white cast statue and draw the figure with pencil on white paper. The exercise harks back to classrooms of the past, where children were taught drawing using casts as their inspirations.

In the adjacent Hall of Sculpture, the cast sculptures on display are juxtaposed against a large modern cast that rises up from the floor of the hall. Done by British artist Rachel White- read, the snow-white cast of a staircase, with its straight lines and simple form, shows how casting is still a relevant art form today, Schloetzer said.

“I think that people are more interested [today] in preserving their history,” she said.