Lin Cheung & Laura Potter for museumaker

27/05/2010

Valuable copies

From an online article about a collection of plaster casts at Cornell University. Art historian Annetta Alexandridis talks about her efforts to restore the collection with help from a team of graduate and undergraduate students and the Department of Classics

Most strikingly, she said, the casts represent an accurate depiction of the original at the time the cast was made, minus the decay of the last 120 years. "The Cornell casts show objects in a state of preservation of the later 19th century; some of these originals are now lost or substantially altered due to wear, weathering, etc. In this case the casts bear more information than the original," making the copy more valuable than the original.


Full article here