The Fantasy of the Imperishable in the Modern Era

At M. Bernard's I saw several magnificent paintings on porcelain by Monsieur Constantin. In two hundred years, Raphael's frescoes will be known only through Monsieur Constantin.Stendhal, Voyage en France, 1837If we compare the forms that the act of copying has assumed in various civilizations, we cannot fail to notice that a certain number of phenomena are specific to European culture since the Renaissance. Perhaps one of the most singular of these phenomena is the will to create and to possess imperishable reproductions of works that have been singled out, at a given moment, as the brightest jewels of Western art. The history of the fortune of Graeco-Roman sculptures has been masterfully related by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny in Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, even if it would no doubt be worthwhile to give further consideration to the critical fortune of materials used for reproduction, and particularly to the particular prestige attached to bronze-from the Mantuan works of Antico to the reconstitutions of Greek Urbilder in bronze, instead of the plaster used earlier, which were executed at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as the two Doryphoros that Georg Römer realized from various ancient marble copies of Polyclitus's athlete. But, in fact, it was not only in modern Europe that copies were made in bronze. The production of copies using this alloy was particularly prevalent in imperial China after the rediscovery, in the second half of the eleventh century of our era, of a collection of archaic bronzes from the Shang era. This is why I prefer to call attention to a practice that appears to me, in contrast, to be unique to the Western world: the copying of renowned paintings in materials that are supposed to defy time

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