History cast in plaster
MúzeumCafé 13.
Budapest’s first historical collection of sculptural copies was established by Ferenc Pulszky (1814–1897) in the Hungarian National Museum between 1870 and 1875. The majority of the collection included plaster casts of statues and reliefs from Athens, which a formatore from Rome who settled in Athens, Felice Napoleone Martinelli (†1891), had made. He originally worked for the British Museum but took a series of casts to the 1873 Vienna World Expo. They were bought by the National Museum and complemented with plaster casts of original Greek works held in European museums, as well as with a series of the most famous Antique statues, namely casts of Greek sculpture remaining in Roman marble copies held in collections in Rome, Naples, Florence, Munich and Berlin. The argument, also expressed later, for the plaster casts and thus the presentation of the history of sculpture with these means has been that Hungary has not and will not have in the foreseeable future enough funds to purchase high quality original works of art in such a quantity that the history of a culture and genre could be presented in continuous ‘phylogenetic series’. However, the building of the National Museum was already short of space by the end of the 1870s. Thus the ground floor of the Fine Arts Museum was constructed for the collection. The antique copies were moved from the National Museum and a large number of further casts were purchased, initially from Italian family workshops of several generations, such as Giuseppe Lelli in Florence, the Milanese Carlo Campi, the Brucciani firm connected to the British Museum, Antonio Vanni of Frankfurt, August Gerber of Cologne and cast workshops of Europe.