posted on 2017-06-30, 00:00authored byG. Massiot & cie
In the late Victorian era, plaster casts of outstanding classical, ancient, and medieval works were produced by various vendors for museums (and world's fairs), spurred by an initiative of Prince Albert in Great Britain. Just a few museums, like Carnegie Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert, and the Mus\u00E9e national des Monuments Fran\u00E7ais went to extraordinary lengths to develop their own large, unique casts. The (entire) West Portal of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard (in PIttsburg), paid for by Andrew Carnegie, is one of a kind, and is one of the largest architectural casts ever made. The west portal cast is 38-feet high, 87-feet 3-inches wide, and the molds were destroyed when removing the plaster replicas. The plaster cast in the Mus\u00E9e national des Monuments Fran\u00E7ais, Galerie Davioud is smaller; the cast is only the central part, and only going up halfway the tympanum. This cast collection was proposed by Viollet-le-Duc in 1879.
History
Alt Title
Plaster cast of West Portal of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard
Date Created
1910-01-01
Date Modified
2017-06-30
Spatial Coverage
Paris
+48.8627+2.2885
Palais de Chaillot, (Paris, Île-de-France, France)
Temporal Coverage
before or circa 1910
Cultural Context
['Romanesque', 'Nineteenth century']
Rights Statement
To view the physical lantern slide, please contact the Architecture Library.