Ashmole and Yalouris figs. H and I.
H 36 in., W 52 in., D 20 in.
Metropolitan Catalogue: Cast no. 469.
Cast Location: DeLaskey Bldg- front hall

In this group, a centaur attacks a Greek woman who attempts to fight him off. The centaur is intended to look barbaric: he has disheveled hair and beard and a vicious expression. The face of the Lapith woman, however, is smooth and untroubled by expression of any sort, as if to show that the Greeks are above all this barbarity.

~Nathan Barber


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Bibliography
See Bernard Ashmole and Nicholas Yalouris, Olympia. The Sculptures of the Temple of Zeus (London, 1967), figs. H and I, pls. 110-117.]]>
Parian marble.
Ca. 456 BCE.
Olympia, Museum.
Metropolitan Catalogue: Cast numbers 468 and 469.

The first Olympic games were held at Olympia, supposedly in 776 BCE, and every four years thereafter until pagan celebrations were banned by the Roman emperor Theodosius in 391 CE. The temple of Zeus, built in the fifth century BCE, was the major building in the sanctuary, known as the Altis. The huge temple of Zeus is in the center of the sanctuary, and the gold and ivory statue of Zeus that it housed was one of the seven wonders of the world. The temple itself was constructed of plastered limestone, its sculptures of white marble from the Aegean island of Paros. The sculptures from the west pediment (gable) of the temple illustrate the Centauromachy, the war between the Greeks and their neighbors the centaurs, a mythical race said to be half man and half horse. The occasion was the wedding of King Perithoos, grandson of Zeus and king of the Lapiths. He invited the centaurs, who had too much to drink and began attacking the women and boys at the party. The sculptures in the east pediment (gable) of the temple illustrate the chariot race between Pelops and Oenomaus. Pelops was the suitor of Hippodamia, daughter of king Oenomaus, who did not approve of Pelops, and challenged him to a chariot race, as he had done with all previous suitors of his daughter. When he won those races, Oenomaus killed the suitor. Pelops defeated Oenomaus by replacing the linch-pins holding the wheels on the chariot of Oenomaus with wax: after the race, he killed the father of the bride. According to one story, that race was the founding event of the ancient Olympic Games.


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Bibliography

See Bernard Ashmole and Nicholas Yalouris, Olympia. The Sculptures of the Temple of Zeus (London, 1967), figs. H and I, pls. 110-117 (2);fig. N, pls. 31-40 (3); fig. E, pls. 41-43, and fig. B pls. 50-52 (4); and fig. L, pls. 58-61, and fig. N pls. 31-38 (5)]]>
Plaster original.
Incised on top of neck: "Gordon Ross/19 years old/cast from life/1938."
H 23 in.
Not in Metropolitan cast catalogue.
Long-term loan.
Cast Location: Robinson B359 hallway

This physically fit male torso, from the neck to below the navel, arms only to the upper biceps, was cast from life. Notwithstanding the inscription, nothing is known about Gordon Ross or the mold-maker. In keeping with traditional practices, his body may have been used as an "ideal" male form for teaching purposes.

The process of casting from life has a long history as an art form. Florentine painter Cennino Cennini (c. 1370-1440) wrote a handbook for artists in 1400. The sections on making casts from life give a good sense of the concerns. Noting particularly the model's social status, the materials used, and the methods, the section entitled "How to Take a Life Mask" reads "If you wish to have a face of a man or woman, of any rank, adopt this method. Get the young man or woman, or an old man, though you can hardly do the beard or hair, but have the beard shaved off. Take rose-scented, perfumed oil, anoint the face with a good-sized minever brush."

Then Cennini describes the method of winding bandages around the head and other preparations, followed by instructions for making breathing tubes of brass or silver. In the midst of explaining how to apply the plaster, he reminds the reader thus: "And bear in mind that if this person whom you are casting is very important, as in the case of lords, kings, popes, emperors, you mix this plaster with tepid rose water; and for other people, any tepid spring or well or river water is good enough." In order to "Make a Cast of Your Own Person," the reader must first have the plaster prepared, then "have it spread out on a good broad table, such as a dining table. Have in placed on the ground; have this plaster or clay spread out on it a foot deep. Fling yourself on it, on whichever side you wish, front or back or side. And if this plaster or clay takes you well, get yourself pulled out of it neatly, pulling yourself out straight, so as not to shift it in any direction."

Then the same must be done to the opposite side of the body, before a worker joins the two halves together and casts the whole in lead or another metal. Today's methods have greatly increased the comfort-level of the model. Making a life cast now involves spreading a coat of petroleum jelly on the model's body, thicker in the armpit and pubic areas, followed by a coat of dental alginate (a stabilizer) with the consistency of yoghurt. "When dry, the Alginate is very rubbery requiring a support shell, or 'mother'mold." Plaster-coated cloth bandages are applied over the area to be cast and removed after they have set. "At this stage the mold is held tightly against the skin by a vacuum. One must slip a hand around the edges to break the seal. The cast should then pop off. The entire modeling time is about 45 minutes.

Gone is the need for repeated efforts should the model happen to fling himself into the plaster crookedly! Modern methods are relatively easy and uneventful, but from the evidence of body hair on the inside of our cast, the method used by our model did not benefit from alginate, though the flinging was probably eliminated.

~Ellen McV. Layman



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Bibliography

See ArtMolds Sculpture Studio LLC, http://www.artmolds.com/gateway/technique/example.htm. Life-Casting.com "Creating a Torso Mold" 1998-2001; Cennino Cennini. The Craftsman's Handbook, trans. and ed. Daniel V. Thompson Jr. NY: Dover, 1954, p. 91, after Cennino Cennini, Il Libre dell'Arte, Milan, 1890 ed., Section 14.]]>
Purchase.
Italian marble.
Italian, ca. 1800.
London, British Museum.
H 14 in.
Metropolitan Catalogue: Cast no. 965.
Cast Location: Robinson B359 hallway

Thin hair combed forwards to cover his balding head, Julius Caesar's gaunt face and incised pupils give him a forceful presence and a commanding gaze. Since the Renaissance, Julius Caesar has held a powerful, yet controversial, fascination in western culture. Could Rome’s Republican government have withstood its internal political crises had Caesar not destroyed it? Or was the Republic in its death throes and was it only his seizure of control that assured Rome’s survival and opened the way for empire? Shakespeare portrayed Caesar as driven by personal ambition. Classical biographers were ambivalent, Suetonius highlighting his faults and virtues, and Plutarch focusing more on his courage and nobility.

The head typifies the traditional view of Caesar as resolute, courageous, and noble—the visionary founder of Rome as Empire. The British Museum purchased the head in 1818 from James Millingen, an English collector of antiquities. The head was said to have been discovered in Alexandria, but he had found it in Rome. It became one of the museum’s most prized and well-known classical Roman portraits. For more than a century reproductions, drawings, and photographs of the bust found their way into museums, private collections, and art books. (Its picture may still be seen on the Tufts University Perseus webpage for Julius Caesar.)

Skepticism over the bust’s origins began to surface in the 1890s when Adolf Furtwängler, a leading classical archaeologist, expressed doubts that the work was an authentic classical Roman bust. Nonetheless, the British Museum’s 1904 catalogue on classical sculpture, while noting Furtwängler’s reservations, maintained that the head was original. After all, Caesar’s hair was combed to the front, a device which Suetonius reported to have been adopted by Caesar when his baldness became an object of ridicule. The catalogue further stated that Caesar’s eyes were strongly marked. That observation should have caused hesitation since Roman marble sculpture did not show an incised iris or pupil until the time of the emperor Hadrian (r. 117-138).

The 1928 museum catalogue, again noting that some critics had doubts, confirmed it to be a genuine Roman bust of Caesar of ‘the falcon eyes’ (Dante, Inferno, IV, 123), ‘the consummate soldier, statesman, and man of letters.’ By 1953, the museum had accepted the inevitable. The head was unceremoniously moved from the Roman galleries and placed at the entrance to the museum’s reading room. What then of its origins? In 1960, the classical art historian Gilbert Bagnani called it a great piece of the Italian Renaissance. After a thorough examination, the Oxford classicist Bernard Ashmole concluded that it had been made about 1800, with the damage to the nose artificially caused by a nail-studded piece of wood or some other means of abrasion.

One expert has stated that the sculptor of the head may have borrowed features from a large statue of Caesar on Rome's Capitoline Hill and from a bust acquired by Pope Clement XIV for the Vatican in 1771. It might be said that this head of Caesar symbolized a traditional view of classical Rome’s empire and leadership which nineteenth-century England linked to a vision of its own imperial destiny. By the mid twentieth century, that vision was gone, and it was time for the demise of the head’s pedigree and its removal to the reading room.

- Bill Pierce


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Bibliography

See Gilbert Bagnani, "On Fakes and Forgeries," Phoenix XIV, 4 (Winter, 1960), 228-244; Otto Kurz, Fakes (New York, 1967); Plutarch, Fall of the Roman Republic: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero: Six Lives, trans. Rex Warner (Harmondsworth, 1972); Jeffrey Spier, "Blinded with Science: The Abuse of Science in the Detection of False Antiquities," The Burlington Magazine, CXXXII, 1050. (Sept., 1990), 623-631; Sepp Schüller, Forgers, Dealers, Experts: Strange Chapters in the History of Art (New York, 1960); A. H. Smith, A Catalogue of Sculpture in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum (London, 1904), vol. III, no. 1870, p. 146, pl. XIII; Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, trans. Robert Graves (New York, 1989); Henry Beauchamp Walters, A Guide to the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum, 6th ed (London, 1928).]]>
From Cairo, Qa'it Bay mosque.
Stone.
1468-1496 CE.
Cairo, Mosque in the mausoleum complex of Qa'it Bay.
Each panel ca. 36 x 48 in.
Metropolitan Catalogue: Cast no. 1622(?).


Qa'it Bay was a Mamluk ruler whose legacy included an architectural complex containing a religious college (madrasah) and his tomb. Both exterior and interior surfaces of the structures are highly decorative, including tiles, colored marbles, floral architectural sculpture, and relief carving. The symmetrical floral lattice-like patterns on these two relief panels are reminiscent of textiles, manuscripts, and woodwork.



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Bibliography

 See Barbara Brend, Islamic Art (Cambridge, MA, 1991).]]>
From Cairo, Qa'it Bay mosque.
Stone.
1468-1496 CE.
Cairo, Mosque in the mausoleum complex of Qa'it Bay.
Each panel ca. 36 x 48 in.
Metropolitan Catalogue Casts no. 1622(?).

Qa'it Bay was a Mamluk ruler whose legacy included an architectural complex containing a religious college (madrasah) and his tomb. Both exterior and interior surfaces of the structures are highly decorative, including tiles, colored marbles, floral architectural sculpture, and relief carving. The symmetrical floral lattice-like patterns on these two relief panels are reminiscent of textiles, manuscripts, and woodwork.



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Bibliography

See Barbara Brend, Islamic Art (Cambridge, MA, 1991).]]>
Findspot unknown.
Stone.
Gandhara (Modern Pakistan)
Second to third centuries CE.
Location unknown.
H 23 1/2 in., W 26 1/2 in., D 17 1/2 in.
Not in Metropolitan cast catalogue.
Cast Location: SUB I 2nd floor

The Buddha is the central figure in the various sects of the Buddhist religion. He can be recognized by the ushnisha, a protuberance atop his head which symbolizes his great intelligence and wisdom, by the urna, a tuft of hair in the center of his forehead which is said to radiate his intense inner light to the world, and by his elongated earlobes, which symbolize his renunciation of wealth and worldly items.

The Gandharan style of Buddhist sculpture was influenced by trade on the Silk Road that passed through this northern region of India. Those carrying goods along the road also brought examples of Greco-Roman styles in art, which influenced the style of this region. The influence is evident in the Buddha’s classical wavy hair that is quite different from the tight and simplified curls of other Indian styles.

~Nathan Barber]]>
Findspot unknown.
Gray schist relief.
Ghandara (modern Pakistan)
ca. first to third century CE.
Lahore Museum, Pakistan
H 24 in., W 26 in.
Not in Metropolitan cast catalogue.
Cast Location: Krasnow Bldg

The false stupa gable is a Gandharan decorative sculpture-type belonging to a Buddhist shrine. This example, dated between the first and third centuries AD, has three narrative registers flanked by two devotional figures. In the lower register, the Enlightened Buddha delivers his first sermon: he is seated; his gesture is that of teaching; the bodhi tree spreads over him; and the wheel of the law is on the platform beneath him.

The top register depicts the veneration of the Buddha’s bowl. Incised lines on the enshrined bowl suggest the bowl with multiple rims known from one story of its origins. In this version, each of the four Lokapalas, or directional guardians, presents the Buddha with a bowl. Not wanting to choose between the gifts, the Buddha fuses the bowls into one with four rims (Kuwayama). Worshippers and a pair of icthyocentaurs venerate the bowl at the center, resting on a curtained pedestal (Ingholt). Reports by Chinese monks Faxien and Xuanzang suggest that the Buddha’s bowl was enshrined in Gandhara.

No other Buddhist art has images of the bowl, indicating that its representation and veneration are restricted to Gandharan art. The middle register is more problematic: rows of worshippers flank the only clearly identifiable figures: the standing Buddha in the center and to his left Vajrapani, the Buddha’s club-wielding guardian in Gandhara. One of the two large devotional figures at the sides is haloed, the other is not: their identity remains a mystery. The style of the relief is quintessentially Gandharan. Once dubbed Greco-Buddhist, scholars emphasized the Greek influences on the style and saw Greek art as the impetus behind the first iconic representations of the Buddha. Shifting understandings now focus on the blending of Indian, Greek, and Persian styles inherited from the various polities that controlled the region. Unified in the Gandharan style, they spread along the Silk Roads with Buddhism itself.

Elements of Hellenistic influence in the Gandharan style include the “straight, sharply chiseled nose and brow, classical lips and wavy hair” of the Buddha. Other Mediterranean influence appears in his “diaphanous, toga-like robe” (Hopkirk, 23). These elements spread to the East and back into greater India where they were again transformed. The original sculpture is in the Lahore Museum, Pakistan. It may have been acquired by way of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 1802, the Punjab government had casts of 24 schist sculptures manufactured for the V&A (V&A accession numbers 3308-1883; 3380-1803; 3206-1883; and 3307-1883) (Errington).

~ Anne Brennan Hardy



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Bibliography

See Kurt Behrendt, Buddhist Architecture of Gandhara (Leiden, 2003); Elizabeth Errington, “Site Provenance of Gandharan Sculpture,” in Taddei ed., South Asia Archaeology Conference (PLACE, 1987); Peter Hopkirk, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road (Amherst, 1980); Harold Ingholt, Gandharan Art in Pakistan (New York, 1957); Shosin Kuwayama, “The Buddha’s Bowl in Gandhara and Relevant Problems,” in Taddei ed., South Asia Archaeology Conference (Place, 1987).]]>
Findspot unknown.
Grey schist.
Ghandara (modern Pakistan)
ca. first to third-century CE.
Location unknown.
9 1/2 x 16 in.
Not in Metropolitan cast catalogue.
Cast Location: Robinson B359 hallway

The lower register of this two-register relief panel may show a narrative depicting the brothers Jaya and Vaijaya watching their parents place offerings in the Buddha’s bowl.

Attempting to emulate their charitable behavior, the young boys offer him some of the dust with which they have been playing. Impressed by their behavior, the Buddha predicts that Jaya will be reborn as the future king Asoka, Buddhist ruler of North India in the 3rd century BCE, and his Brothers as Asoka’s chief vassal Radhagupta. Several devotees accompany the Buddha including Vajrapani, a Gandharan version of the Greek hero Herakles, who is often shown guarding the Buddha in Gandharan sculpture. In the upper register, the seated Buddha is seated on a lotus throne flanked by royal or divine devotees. The two men closest to him are seated in a pose associated with kingship and may represent the kingly reincarnations of the two boys in the bottom register. However, this representation would be highly unusual.

~Anne Brennan Hardy]]>
Part of a relief by Luca Della Robbia.
In the Duomo (Cathedral) of Florence.
Resin.
1431-1438.
Florence, Duomo, choir loft.
H 42 in., W 39 in.
Gift to George Mason University from an anonymous donor.
Cast Location: College Hall ground floor

The choir loft or cantoria for the Duomo in Florence is the earliest known work by the sculptor Luca della Robbia. This cantoria was never intended to hold a choir, but was designed by Della Robbia as an organ loft for the Chapel of St. Zenobius, the patron saint of Florence. A second loft was designed by Donatello. Both of them are now in the Museum of the Opere del Duomo. Luca della Robbia designed eleven carved panels depicting Psalm 150. The panel reproduced in this cast shows children in celebration. Three boys at the left play trumpets - traditionally associated with festivals - and two of them wear laurel wreaths, suggesting that they have won prizes for music. Four little girls dancing beneath the trumpets may be derived from classical representations of maenads or bacchants and would have been recognized as such during the fifteenth century. On the right, three more boys holding recorders watch the others.

~Ashley Simpson]]>
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