Classical virtual reality
Cast Courts Victoria and Albert Museum
★★★★★
Once upon a time, every major museum and art college in Britain had a collection of plaster casts. Mostly of classical and renaissance sculpture, these casts were the product of a Europe-wide system whereby art institutions traded and sold each other copies of their greatest works for the advancement of mankind. The art of the future, it was believed, would be created by looking at and, to a large degree, copying the art of the past.
In the 20th century, however, with modernism’s emphasis on authenticity and originality, most of these collections were jettisoned into skips. But the granddaddy of them all, at the V&A, survived, the only such collection still housed in its original setting, not least because no other use could be envisaged for these two colossal rooms.
When I first came here at the age of eight, the casts were unpainted; the plaster was a grey, dusty white, set against walls of a pale institutional green. The sight of the enormous exhibits – the 114ft-high hulk of Trajan’s Column, the full-sized Michelangelo’s David – looming out of the half-light was awe-inspiring, bordering on terrifying.
The Cast Courts have been through a few changes since then. A 1981 refurbishment restored the casts’ Victorian-painted surfaces, so that they plausibly resemble their original materials, whether bronze, gold or marble. Now, in the last part of a seven-year redevelopment, these extraordinary galleries have been returned – as close as can be deduced – to how they looked when they opened in 1873.
The black linoleum flooring around the eclectic array of statuary and architectural “details”, from towering tombs and doorways to a whole wall of a Spanish medieval synagogue, has been removed to reveal the zigzag-patterned Victorian tiling beneath. The garish Eighties colours on the immense walls – deep maroon and canary yellow – have been replaced by more subdued, classically inspired shades – pinkish terracotta and grey-blue – while wall panels have been removed from the central corridor, restoring the vistas into these majestic spaces.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this refurbishment is the way it reveals our changing attitudes to replicating and copying. In the Thirties, when these galleries were most under threat, the fact that the exhibits weren’t “real” seemed to doom them to irrelevance. Now, however, in the age of digital imaging, virtual reality and image appropriation, the fact that something is a copy may make it sexier than the “real” thing. The prospect of looking at a Romanesque cathedral portal may be thought dull by many, but the idea of a full-sized Victorian cast of a Romanesque cathedral portal jammed into a gallery with a motley collection of other ersatz artworks has a weird kind of “steampunk” glamour.
A display in the central corridor illuminates this aspect of the experience with videos on the processes of plaster-casting and electrotyping. But the works essentially speak for themselves.
What other era would have had the hubris to put the Portal of Glory from the cathedral of Santiago Compostela bang opposite Trajan’s Column, with bits of stonework from English parish churches – all fake – packed into the space between? If you’ve never been to the Cast Courts, you’ve got a glorious adventure ahead of you. I came out just as humbled as I was by my visit all those years ago.