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Course: Special topics in art history > Unit 2
Lesson 8: Sculpture- Working jade
- Quarrying and carving marble
- Carving marble with traditional tools
- Casting bronze: lost-wax method
- Casting bronze: direct lost-wax casting
- Making a Spanish polychrome sculpture
- Making a Spanish polychrome sculpture: Saint Ginés de la Jara
- After the Fall: The Conservation of Tullio Lombardo's "Adam"
- Object Conservation - Salisbury Cross
- Contemporary Art Conservation at Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum
- Conservation: Cast of the Pórtico de la Gloria
- Conservation: The Nasrid plasterwork collection at the V&A
- Conservation: Playing Tipu’s Tiger
- Conservation: The Wolsey Angels
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Conservation: Cast of the Pórtico de la Gloria
By the Victoria & Albert Museum. The Portico de la Gloria is one of the most remarkable monuments of Romanesque art. It is intricately carved with biblical scenes, interspersed with prophets, saints and angles.
In 1866, the Museum commissioned the Italian plaster maker, Domenico Brucciani, to journey to Spain to produce a copy of it. This cast is over 17 metres wide. It determined the dimensions of the Cast Courts, which were built in 1873 to display this and other monumental copies of architecture and artworks from around the world.
Find out more about our Cast Courts: https://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/cast-collection. Created by Smarthistory.
Want to join the conversation?
why are the statues cheeks so red?(2 votes)
It appears that much of the statuary was originally painted. Could it be that such red pigment as was mixed into the colors put on the hands and feet somehow penetrated the stone, but most all of everything else flaked off over time? In other words, the other stuff merely got painted, but hands and feet got stained.(1 vote)