The Challenges of Casts: From Cultural Heritage to Contemporary Creativity

The Challenges of Casts: From Cultural Heritage to Contemporary Creativity

Guest Editor: Maria Luigia Pagliani

Editorial Team: Irene Di Pietro, Federico Maria Giorgi, Alessandro Paolo Lena, Martina Manfredi

 

Plaster casts of ancient statuary have represented, since the Renaissance, the foundation for transmitting Greco-Roman aesthetic values and, through the exercise of copying, a fundamental tool for teaching drawing to young artists. In the 18th century, throughout Europe, the aesthetics of the fragment and tactile experience accompanied the collecting aspirations of many intellectuals, from Sloane to Goethe, reshaping the experience of Antiquity through plaster casts within the cosmopolitan dimension of the Grand Tour. Beginning in the nineteenth century, in European academies, works from antiquity were joined – thanks to new directions in scholarship – by copies of medieval and Renaissance sculptures and bas-reliefs, while archaeology departments at universities created new and increasingly extensive collections of casts from ancient works originating across the entire Mediterranean area for humanistic studies and training in art.

The teaching tradition that privileged the cast as a model was undermined between the 19th and 20th centuries by anti-academic movements and the emergence of modern reproduction techniques, such as photography. Cast collections were thus relegated to a secondary and purely documentary role in the collections of fine arts academies and museums. Meanwhile, however, they acquired a new role in other museums, such as ethnographic museums, contributing to studies in demo-anthropology.

In the 20th century, with the changing course of scholarship increasingly oriented towards the social history of art, the history of taste, and the history of techniques, the cast became the object of renewed attention and began to face new challenges. No longer regarded as mere copies, plaster casts came to acquire an original value of their own. Their high artisanal quality, the value of their workmanship, and their role as testimony to the era that produced them came to be recognized.

From the second half of the 20th century onward, collections of casts have been the subject of numerous cataloguing, reorganization, restoration, and exhibition projects within dedicated museum itineraries. In addition, studies of historical and contemporary systems of collecting and display, together with analysis of related archival documentation, have highlighted a complex system of production, acquisition, circulation, and exchange involving institutions, instructors, artists, and collectors.

This issue of MMD aims to open a broad interdisciplinary discussion on the subject of casts, especially within public and private collecting, over a chronological span from the 19th to the 21st century. Attention will focus on the ways casts have been displayed, received, conserved, and used, including within the context of new digital reproduction techniques and contemporary art.

Contributions may address, though not exclusively, the following topics:

• collecting and acquisition policies
• the dimension of museum display and its evolution, redisplays, and new exhibition designs
• the circulation of casts between the 19th and 20th centuries, and exchange among institutions, including from the perspective of cultural diplomacy
• methods of display and use, including in non-traditional contexts
• the passage of plaster casts from the workshops of cast-makers to academies and museums
• the use of casts in the age of digital reproduction
• restoration practices in museum contexts
• the reception of casts in historical and artistic contexts, with particular attention to casts of medieval and Renaissance works
• the reception of casts of works from the past in contemporary creativity

Contributions must be submitted as an abstract (maximum 3,000 characters including spaces), or as a full article (maximum 45,000 characters including spaces), in English, French, or Italian, accompanied by a short biography of the author (maximum 1,000 characters including spaces), to the editorial team (mmdjournal@unibo.it) and to the guest editor (marialuigiapagliani@gmail.com) by 1 October 2026.

Timeline:

• abstract submission: 1 October 2026
• notification of acceptance: 30 October 2026
• submission of full article, including images: 1 March 2027
• reviewers’ report for revisions: 30 April 2027
• submission of final text: 30 May 2027
• publication of the issue: September 2027