How many stories can a cast tell?

This post is about a bust currently displayed at the Antinous: Boy Made God exhibition, open until the end of February, at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. It represents Antinous, the supposed lover of Roman Emperor Hadrian (reign 117-138 CE). The label defines it as a plaster cast reconstruction.

Ludovisi-Chicago Antinous, Antinous: Boy Made God exhibition (picture taken by the author)

 

You may or may not be familiar with plaster casts. The Ashmolean Museum hosts one of the oldest and richest collections in the UK. It comprises some 900 casts, which served (and still partly do today) the role of educational tool for the students of Classical Art and Archaeology, from the end of the 19th century onwards.

Cast making is a process that implies the duplication of an object, called model or original. Since the bust of Antinous is a plaster reconstruction, we assume it is just a copy… What if I told you this is not the case? The story of this object is fascinating for many reasons. It is known as Ludovisi-Chicago Antinous. The double name refers to the collections in which the two original marble fragments composing the bust are located. Ludovisi is the surname of the Italian aristocratic family to which the original bust belonged. The Chicago Art Institute, USA, is where the face is currently held. How did that fragment end up there?

Antinous: Chicago Art Institute

The statue, at some point in its history, was separated into two pieces, the face and the bust. We know, from literary records, that the bust presented a restored face, at least from the end of the 18th century, which was restored as Antinous, but with idealised traits, quite different to the physical appearance of a boy born in Bythinia (today’s Turkey).The recorded history of the Chicago fragment begins in 1898, when it is purchased in Rome by the first president of the Art Institute. The head was then mounted on a marble panel, in the form of a relief, and the nose restored with plaster. Bequeathed by Hutchinson’s widow to the museum after his death in 1924, it was subsequently detached from the non-pertinent base and the restored nose was removed.

Something unexpected happened in 2005. An Egyptologist from the University of Chicago, while on holiday in Rome, visited the Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Altemps (Roman National Museum at Palazzo Altemps) – a museum devoted to displaying antiquities acquired from local aristocratic families. He saw the bust and, immediately, an epiphany! The peculiar marble of the statue reminded him of a head, kept at the Chicago Art Institute. He was intrigued by the shape of the cut crossing the jaw to the hair of the new head. From that moment onwards, an interdisciplinary research project began.

Antinous: Palazzo Altemps

Together with the scientific support of a conservator from the Getty Institute, a cast of the head was made and it was shipped to Rome. Digital scans were taken from both fragments, the head in Chicago, and the bust in Rome. Through the scan, the restored head of the bust was digitally removed and the Chicago one attached. The two pieces were 3-D printed and joined together with modelling clay. Such manipulation showed that there was still a significant gap that separated the two, especially close to the jawline. This could be due to the fact that some marble was removed when the two pieces were separated, but also following the restoration process of the new head: to perfectly fit it into the bust, some material must have been cut off to accommodate aesthetic needs.

On a parallel level, and by the year 2016, analyses of the stone demonstrated that the marble from the two parts likely comes from the same block, meaning that the two pieces were originally parts of the same bust, which the cast now reconstructs.

Traditionally considered second-class materials, due to their status of copies, in my PhD project, I question whether plaster casts can be regarded as objects in their own right. What is their position in museums today? What are visitors’ perceptions about these objects? To what extent do curatorial practices have the power to influence such perceptions? Labelling something as a ‘copy’ generally implies negative connotations: we associate it to a fake, forgery, a valueless surrogate. Do we really have to define an object? Can we experience it before any information about it is given, that is to say, emotionally? Research has shown that engaging with objects through our senses can foster strong responses. Is authenticity an inner quality of objects, does it have to do with authorship, or is it more related to the experience we get from an artwork?Would you agree, following this example, that plaster casts are just replicas? This bust not only tells an interesting story about two reconnected fragments, it also tells its own story, the story of an original piece, whose creation was made possible through the collaboration of scholarly research, artistic intuition, scientific analysis and modern technologies.

This entry was written by Chiara Marabelli, a PhD student at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. You can find out more about Chiara and her research here and here.