Art treasures in plaster: the charm of the Plaster Cast Gallery between history and didactics
The Plaster Cast Gallery, born as a section devoted to the university teaching of classical sculpture, houses a rich collection of modern plaster casts, inserted in a room that the designer Gio Ponti planned around a central impluvium, which recalls the architecture of Roman noble houses. This impluvium contains the major casts of the collection: masterpieces such as the Medici Aphrodite, the Dancing Satyr and the Apollo Sauroctonos stand out. Nearby is the hemicycle with the cast of the sculptural group of Hermes with the infant Dionysus by Praxiteles, which looks in front of itself where, exactly in the centre of the impluvium basin, a Roman floor found during the excavations for Palazzo Liviano in 1936 is exhibited.
All around the impluvium, the room offers a path that guides the visitor through the main periods of classical sculpture, illustrating the artistic evolution from Archaic Greece to the Roman age, through four main chronological stages:
Archaic Greek art (7th – first half of 5th century BC)
In this section, you can find casts of the oldest statues, such as the Kouros from Tenea (575-550 BC), a young man, in Greek kouros, depicted naked, frontal, with the left leg slightly advanced, arms along the sides, and the characteristic curvature of the mouth known as the “archaic smile”. There is also the cast of a Roman copy of Myron’s Discobolus (460 BC).
Classical Greek art (mid-5th – late 4th century BC)
This stage includes casts taken from works of the major masters of classical Greece first Pheidias, of which are exhibited the casts of the Palagi head and some copies of slabs from the frieze and pediment sculptures from the Parthenon temple in Athens. Among the casts on display are also the winged victory from the temple of Athena Nike and the funerary stele known as that of the Ilissos, the work of an Attic workshop influenced by the sculptor Skopas from Paros. There is also a series of busts including the Farnese Juno, the Zeus of Otricoli and the Capitoline Aphrodite. The Apollo Belvedere, admired for its stylistic beauty and celebrated by Winckelmann, closes the Classical section.
Hellenistic art (323 – 30 BC)
Here you can find casts of Hellenistic works such as the Grimani altar and the two dying Gauls, whose originals are preserved at the Archaeological Museum of Venice; the partial cast of the Venus of Milo from the Louvre and the Laocoön group, presented on a reduced scale compared to the original. Busts such as the pseudo-Seneca and Homer complete the exhibition in the corridor you will find behind the hemicycle.
Roman art (1st century BC – 4th century AD)
The last stage is devoted to Roman sculpture, with casts of imperial portraits, such as that of Augustus, and reliefs from sarcophagi, including a battle scene and an altar with a procession of deities.
There is also the cast of the Grimani Vitellius, whose original is at the National Archaeological Museum of Venice. Although the identification with Emperor Vitellius is now outdated, in the Renaissance it was copied and reproduced in many models, both in painting and sculpture. A Renaissance sculpture in painted plaster is also present in this museum and you can admire it by returning to the room of the Mantova Benavides collection.