For practically a millennium, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, with its columns, colonnades, and gleaming pyramid for a crown, neglected the capital of the province of Caria in Asia Minor, earlier than a collection of earthquakes within the thirteenth century leveled the monument. Within the first century, Roman historian Pliny the Elder commemorated the architects liable for constructing it, Pythios and Satyros, in addition to the artists who embellished it, calling the constructing a “memorial of their own fame and of the sculptor’s art.” From Pliny’s Pure Historical past (77–79 CE), we are able to get a precise sense of the scale of the constructing: He information the inside as having a 440-foot perimeter and a peak of 140 toes (in Roman measurements). Greater than two millennia later, the metal magnate and robber baron Andrew Carnegie would fancy himself a Gilded Age King Mausolus — these measurements turned the premise of the Pittsburgh agency Longfellow, Alden, & Harlow’s gargantuan Corridor of Structure on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork.
Because it opened in 1907, the Carnegie’s Corridor of Structure has been just about unchanged: It’s a cavernous house embellished with huge plaster casts of sculptural and architectural treasures of the Mediterranean, Western Asia, and Western Europe. Even whereas Carnegie’s unique imaginative and prescient of his museum has been significantly expanded over the previous century, significantly with the 1974 opening of the Scaife Galleries in a Modernist addition to the Beaux Arts construction, the Corridor of Structure has endured as an interesting, stunning, and under-praised facet of that advanced.
Set up view of the Corridor of Sculpture on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork, Pittsburgh (1907)
In an period earlier than transatlantic flight, Carnegie’s imaginative and prescient for his establishment was in step with a preferred pattern all through Western museums whereby elaborate and infrequently gigantic plaster casts of famed architectural options and sculptures from world wide could be exhibited to audiences. As artwork historian Mari Lending explains in Plaster Monuments: Structure and the Energy of Copy (2017), such collections have been mainstays of each main museum within the nineteenth century — intricate casts of sculptural and architectural masterpieces might even be bought by curators by way of catalogs. “The cast business was orchestrated by prominent museum directors, archeologists, architects, art and architecture historians, and antiquarians,” Lending writes, with the concept being that these areas offered guests with as near a “real” expertise as doable. She provides that in 1853, the British Museum antiquarian William Richard Hamilton would even opine, considerably cryptically, that “casts are preferable to originals, because they cast a purer and more original shadow.” On the Carnegie Museum of Artwork, then, a metal employee from Hazelwood might stand earlier than the Venus de Milo, a glass blower from Greenfield the Victory of Samothrace, a coal miner from Tarentum the Florentine Baptistery Doorways of Ghiberti.
Lending supplies a litany of examples that nod to the sheer bounty of (imitation) wealth within the Corridor of Structure, together with “Egyptian capitals, Assyrian pavements, Phoenician reliefs, Greek temple porches, Hellenistic columns, Etruscan urns, Roman entablatures, Gothic portals, Renaissance balconies, niches and choir stalls; parapets and balustrades, sarcophagi, pulpits, and ornamental details.” At one level, such a set, assembled beneath a skylight in a corridor the scale of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus with smaller items organized across the perimeter, would have been de rigueur at any main museum.
Oronzio Lelli, “Cast of Gates of Paradise (by Lorenzo Ghiberti), Baptistery of San Giovanni Battista” (picture by Tom Little)
But within the first many years of the twentieth century, such collections started to be interpreted as an “intellectual and artistic embarrassment,” Touchdown writes. Within the subsequent few many years, they have been “subjected to neglect, denial, and violent destruction.” By the Nineteen Fifties, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork had eliminated all of its casts. As Jane Margolies explains in a 2016 New York Occasions article, they “ended up stored under the West Side Highway in Upper Manhattan, where the drip-drip-drip from a leaky roof and vibrations from traffic took their toll,” earlier than being moved to a Bronx warehouse. The Artwork Institute of Chicago had eradicated its assortment of casts by 1952, seeing it each as an archaic holdover from the institutional previous and extra pragmatically, a fireplace hazard. Boston’s Museum of Effective Arts eradicated its assortment even earlier, having bought or destroyed most of these objects within the Nineteen Twenties.
“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element,” writes the German thinker Walter Benjamin in his seminal 1936 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” Artwork historians and museum directors’ aversion to inauthenticity — their perception within the thought of an “aura,” as Benjamin would possibly say — was arguably a motivating issue within the elimination of such collections.
And but this new acquainted mannequin does a disservice to the craftsmanship and ingenuity of manufacturing and assembling these casts — the employees who approached the marble works on the Uffizi and the Prado, the limestone partitions of Chartres and Notre Dame, with an alchemy of moist molds and plaster of Paris, and duplicated masterpieces. On the Carnegie, a wonderful centerpiece of that misplaced craft is the 87-foot facade of the Twelfth-century Romanesque Abbey of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, reproduced by a group of European molders and shipped throughout the Atlantic in 200 separate containers in 4 steamers to New York, then despatched by rail to Pittsburgh, the place it was reassembled alongside the again wall of the Corridor of Structure. The most important solid in historical past, it was bought by Carnegie, Lending writes, in partial contravention of a French legislation that restricted the casting of originals within the nation.
Set up view of The Trocadéro (solid maker), “Cast of west portal, Abbey Church of Saint-Gilles” (1905) (picture by Tom Little)
Within the ensuing sculpture, no element is obscured, no characteristic ignored — the impact is of being transported to southern France. These fake artifacts induce a sense of not solely spatial sublimity because of their towering sizes, but additionally a temporal and historic sublimity of their invocation of a yawning expanse of historical past, Benjamin’s argument however. The one place to face earlier than the abbey church of Saint-Giles-du-Gard is both on the unique, or in entrance of its skilled simulation in Pittsburgh. In his In Search of Misplaced Time (1913), Marcel Proust would even goes as far as to commend the everlasting perfection of a plaster solid of a church, whereas suggesting that the unique had been “reduced to nothing but its own shape in stone.”
Reticence concerning the apply was already widespread when Carnegie started amassing his personal artifacts, with Lending remarking that this “world-class architecture collection [was] installed in his hometown at the very moment when these displays were falling out of vogue.” Whether or not as a result of Carnegie cared much less about artwork than he did the pure historical past assortment he was assembling subsequent door, or due to innate curatorial conservatism, the Corridor of Structure survived unscathed whereas museums from New York to San Francisco, London to St. Petersburg, destroyed theirs in acts of unpublicized iconoclasm. Consequently, the Carnegie assortment is as we speak the third largest on the planet, rivaled solely by these of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Museum of French Monuments in Paris, and by far the most important such assortment within the Americas.
Set up view of Carnegie Timber: Vacation Splendor (November 19, 2022–January 8, 2023) (picture by Sean Eaton)
By no means a very notable establishment for historical, Medieval, or Renaissance artwork, the Carnegie nonetheless made up for such deficits with crafty simulacra. Even whereas it developed a fame for Modernism — bolstered specifically by its periodic worldwide exhibition, arguably the oldest recurring occasion of its sort because it started in 1896 — the Corridor of Structure has quietly endured out of the highlight as an area for concert events and wedding ceremony receptions, fundraisers and artwork courses. Generations of Pittsburghers made a practice of viewing the museum’s annual Christmas tree show in that appropriately spectacular house, alongside the 18th-century Neapolitan presepio Nativity scene, among the many most full of its sort in a public assortment.
But now, as in a century in the past, these casts appear to be more and more obscured from view: Over the previous few years, the presepio has been demoted from its conventional place within the Corridor of Structure to hard-to-find rooms of the Scaife Galleries, and infrequently embody fewer figures. That is in step with a regrettable pattern on the museum of seemingly minimizing their collections from earlier centuries: Many Medieval and Renaissance items have apparently been moved into storage, with the second room of the Scaife Galleries being became a complicated exhibition introducing the gathering entitled “What Brings Us Here?”
Set up view of Louvre Museum (solid maker), “Cast of Winged Victory [Nike of Samothrace]” (c. 1905) (picture by Bryan Conley)
Even whereas classicist Mary Beard would opine within the Occasions Literary Complement that the Corridor of Structure comprised “one of the most stunning groups of plaster casts anywhere in the world,” it will possibly seem as if the Carnegie doesn’t completely acknowledge the treasure that’s the corridor (although in equity, there have been retrospectives about it previously). Removed from being antiquated and fussy, the Corridor of Structure supplies a mannequin for museums within the up to date second, throughout a reckoning about how artifacts have been acquired. Even accounting for Carnegie’s personal (ample) moral lapses, nothing within the Corridor of Structure will be mentioned to have been unceremoniously filched from its rightful proprietor. You’ll be able to view the Elgin Marbles in Pittsburgh and in London, however the former isn’t perpetuating an act of imperial plunder in opposition to the folks of Athens. The identical is true with the Corridor of Structure’s Monument of Lysicrates or the Lion Gate of Mycenae, the caryatides of the Erechtheion or the Sienese Cathedral pulpit. Seen on this manner, the Corridor of Structure could possibly be seen as a vanguard, a forerunner of future exhibitions world wide displaying 3D-printed replicas whereas originals are returned to their nation of origin.
Ethics is one factor, however aesthetics is one other, and from that latter perspective, it’s my rivalry that the Corridor of Structure, in all its archaic and weird glory, is an attractive triumph. The impact of getting into this huge house — populated with an assortment of what seems to be a number of the most well-known objects ever carved by human hand — is breathtaking. That’s as a result of the curatorial work of assembling the corridor greater than a century in the past have to be understood as an inventive work in its personal proper. This isn’t merely a hodgepodge of knockoffs, however reasonably a painstakingly assembled bricolage, a form of architectural mixtape rendered in three dimensions. As Lending places it, “We find ourselves in a hypnotic space fabricated from reproduced building parts from widely various times and places.” With some opprobrium, she describes the items as “decontextualized, dismembered,” in addition to “mute and ghostlike… programmed to evoke the experience of the real thing.” But even the artwork historian’s criticism of this or that wall textual content, or the verisimilitude of sure reproductions, can’t reduce her sense of the general have an effect on of the house, the place “strange constellations and bewildering juxtapositions cause time and space to bend and fold inside the four walls of the Hall of Architecture,” a spot the place the “dizzying sensation of time travel was inescapable.”
As a result of that’s what the Corridor of Structure gives: a singular aesthetic expertise of artwork historical past as a form of monad, the exhibition itself as a portal or vortex by way of generations, an imagined and improbable house that’s each past time and out of doors of house, a glimpse of eternity itself. Towards the tip of Julian Schnabel’s 1996 biopic Basquiat, Andy Warhol, as performed completely by David Bowie, remembers the museum the place he took artwork courses in his youth, surrounded by the treasures of the Outdated World left behind by his immigrant mother and father. “We could go to Pittsburgh!” he says. “They have this room with all of the world’s famous statues in it, so you don’t even go to Europe anymore … just go to Pittsburgh.” It’s a room that one way or the other accommodates an entire world.
Set up view of Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris (solid maker), “Cast of Porch of the Caryatids, Erechtheion” (c. 1905) (picture by Tom Little)
Left: Louvre Museum (solid maker), “Cast of Naxian Sphinx, Votive Column” (c. 1906) (picture by Tom Little); proper: set up view of P. P. Caproni and Brother (solid maker), “Cast of Aphrodite of Melos” (c. 1895) (picture by Bryan Conley)
Set up view of Corridor of Structure on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork (2007) (picture by Tom Little)
Set up view of Corridor of Structure on the Carnegie Museum of Artwork, Pittsburgh (2007) (picture by Tom Little)
