Date

Circa 1910

In the late Victorian era, plaster casts of outstanding classical, ancient, and medieval works were produced by various vendors for museums (and world's fairs), spurred by an initiative of Prince Albert in Great Britain. Just a few museums, like Carnegie Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert, and the Musée national des Monuments Français went to extraordinary lengths to develop their own large, unique casts. The (entire) West Portal of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard (in PIttsburg), paid for by Andrew Carnegie, is one of a kind, and is one of the largest architectural casts ever made. The west portal cast is 38-feet high, 87-feet 3-inches wide, and the molds were destroyed when removing the plaster replicas. The plaster cast in the Musée national des Monuments Français, Galerie Davioud is smaller; the cast is only the central part, and only going up halfway the tympanum. This cast collection was proposed by Viollet-le-Duc in 1879.