Italian Copies of Italian Art: Producers, Consumption, and Circulation of Casts in Buenos Aires

Milena Gallipoli (Museo de la Cárcova, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Temperley, Buenos Aires)

The installation of the plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David at the Museo de la Cárcova, Buenos Aires, 1980, photographs from Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Libro nº 4. Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Museo de la Cárcova, Fondo histórico Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes, Inv. 59.2238_A. — The installation of the plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David at the Museo de la Cárcova, Buenos Aires, 1980, photographs from *Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Libro nº 4*. Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Museo de la Cárcova, Fondo histórico Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes, Inv. 59.2238_A.

The installation of the plaster cast of Michelangelo’s David at the Museo de la Cárcova, Buenos Aires, 1980, photographs from *Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Libro nº 4*. Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Museo de la Cárcova, Fondo histórico Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes, Inv. 59.2238_A.

Between the 19th and 20th centuries, purchasing and exhibiting casts became a recurrent strategy for building up art collections that presented the main manifestations of exemplary art to educate the taste of both artists and the public. The Museo de la Cárcova (Argentina) has an important corpus of casts that are either copies of Italian art or were produced by Italian manufacturers (or both). The main aim of this research project is to explore the connections between Italian producers of casts, copies of Italian art, and Buenos Aires’ acquisitions to contribute to the institution’s catalogue. The variety of study cases makes it possible to reconstruct the competitive dynamic and a market logic that characterized this moment of circulation of casts. Italian manufacturers and formatori such as the Malpieri family in Rome, the Manifattura di Signa, and Ferdinando Marinelli in Florence were important firms that provided international clients with copies, whilst foreign producers managed to obtain molds from canonical sculptures. Special attention is given to the casting of Michelangelo’s David in 1928, which derived from the acquisition of a life-size plaster for Buenos Aires. Traditionally, casts have been inserted in a conceptual pairing of original/copy, whereas this proposal seeks to forge an expanded appreciation of reproduction by modelling it in terms of a chain and network of objects (the original, its molds, its models, sales catalogues, and its casts) and agents (producers, consumers).