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In the last years replicated objects have gained an increasingly central position in the discourse about ancient, medieval and early modern art. 'Multiples', we are often told, lack uniqueness, invention, autonomy, and sometimes even authorship. Indeed, 'multiples' can be powerful multipliers - in that they enhance the 'aura of the originals' that they replicate - but they remain secondary indexes pointing to an 'original' imbued with significance. Yet, what happens if 'multiples' do not refer to other artifacts at all, or if they are associated with other 'multiples' rather than with a first version in the mind of their owners? What happened when serially-made 'multiples' were not quite identical to each other, as was the rule with pre-modern artifacts? What shaped their identity and the perception of them as identical?
This collection of essays explores different forms of interaction between the making of artifacts in more than one specimen and their reception before the nineteenth century. It addresses media such as metal, wax, plaster, terracotta, textiles, marble, ivory, porcelain, canvases and tables in an attempt to re-assess the current identification of the mediality of prints with that of pre-modern 'multiples' in general.
List of contents
7 - 30 Never Identical: Multiples in Pre-Modern Art (Walter Cupperi)31 - 58 In the Roman Empire an Aura was a Breeze (Miranda Marvin)59 - 94 Antike Reproduktionsmedien (Andreas Grüner)95 - 120 Die Magdeburger Aquamanilien des 12. Jahrhunderts als »Multiple« (Joanna Olchawa)121 - 146 Die Tapisserie (Wolfgang Brassat)147 - 172 Über die Anfänge der Reproduzierbarkeit von Kleinbronzen in der italienischen Renaissance (Claudia Kryza-Gersch)173 - 200 »You Could Have Cast Two Hundred of Them« (Walter Cupperi)201 - 228 »... Et sia ritratto nella forma medesima« (Susanne Kubersky-Piredda)229 - 244 »A Certain Livelier Quality of Expression« (Stefano Pierguidi)245 - 270 The Same but Different (Marjorie Trusted)271 - 294 Multiples, Authorship and the Eighteenth-Century Portrait Bust's Aura (Malcolm C. Baker)
About the author
Walter Cupperi studierte Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Pisa und an der Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Er ist Research Fellow am Kunstgeschichtlichen Institut der Ludwigs-Maximilians-Universität München.
