Bloomsbury Academic Casting the Parthenon Sculptures from the Eighteenth Century to the Digital Age

About the Author Dr Manpreet J. Singh has done her PhD in English Literature from University of Mumbai. Most recently, she taught with the Department of English, Mata Sundri College for Women, University of Delhi. In 2014, the centenary year of the Komagata Maru incident, she was awarded senior fellowship for research on the Sikh community by the Indo-Canadian Studies Centre, University of Mumbai. It was funded by British Columbia province, Canada. Her report on the Sikh diaspora in British Columbia is being published in a forthcoming title by CoHaB, Indian Diaspora Centre, University of Mumbai (2020). Her interests centre around contemporary literature, gender studies, ethnic identities, popular culture, postcolonial perspectives and their intersections. Her previous works include a collection of poems titled The Golden Arc (1991) and Male Image Female Gaze: Men in the Fiction of Shashi Deshpande (2012). She currently resides in Mumbai, India. Product Description Through the 19th century, as archaeology started to emerge as a systematic discipline, plaster casting became a widely-adopted technique, newly applied by archaeologists to document and transmit discoveries from their expeditions. The Parthenon sculptures were some of the first to be cast. In the late 18th century and the first years of the 19th century, the French artist Fauvel and Lord Elgin’s men conducted campaigns on the Athenian Acropolis. Both created casts of parts of the Parthenon sculptures that they did not remove and these were sent back to France and Britain where they were esteemed and displayed alongside other, original sections. Henceforth, casting was established as an essential archaeological tool and grew exponentially over the course of the century.Such casts are now not only fascinating historical objects but may also be considered time capsules, capturing the details of important ancient works when they were first moulded in centuries past. This book examines the role of 19th century casts as an archaeological resource and explores how their materiality and spread impacted the reception of the Parthenon sculptures and other Greek and Roman works. Investigation of their historical context is combined with analysis of new digital models of the Parthenon sculptures and their casts. Sensitive 3D imaging techniques allow investigation of the surface markings of the objects in exceptionally fine detail and enable quantitative comparative studies comparing the originals and the casts. The 19th century casts are found to be even more accurate, but also complex, than anticipated; through careful study of their multiple layers, we can retrieve surface information now lost from the originals through weathering and vandalism. Review This book is an interesting research monograph, but may be worth reading for everybody who would like to learn something about the history of the Elgin marbles or about 3D scanning as well. --András Patay-Horváth, Assistant Lecturer in Ancient History, Institute of Ancient History, University Eötvös Loránd, HungaryPayne is to be praised for raising the profile of archaeological casts as a source of information about the often endangered objects they reproduce and she demonstrates how modern digital technology can be used to read them. This is a major achievement. --The Burlington Magazine