Abstract Between 1890 and 1895, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) engaged in a campaign to purchase plaster casts under the supervision of a special committee created to enlarge the existing Collection of Casts. This article examines how the acquisition of reproductions functioned as an institutional practice through which the museum sought to position itself within an international field of artistic and archaeological institutions. Rather than treating plaster casts as mere substitutes for originals, the campaign mobilized collecting to articulate ambitions of universality. The first part of the article analyses the formation of the Special Committee, its agents and the discursive, administrative and financial mechanisms employed to justify and execute the purchasing campaign. The second part focuses on the dynamics of acquisition, highlighting the role of European workshops, regulatory frameworks and transnational networks of exchange that shaped the constitution, display and subsequent fate of the cast collection.
Abstract Scholarship addressing the nineteenth-century British reception of the Italian artist Giotto's (c.1267–1337) oeuvre tends to focus on his notable works in Italy. This article moves attention away from these to objects in British collections that were ascribed to Giotto in the nineteenth century and are now attributed to other artists. Through focusing on one of these so-called ‘Giottos’ that was prominently displayed to mark the beginning of the sequence of paintings at the Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester in 1857, The Coronation of the Virgin now attributed to Lorenzo Monaco (c.1370–c.1425), this contribution argues that its symbolic, dialogic function at the exhibition relied upon its misattribution to Giotto. By overturning the usual emphasis on authorial authenticity, this article demonstrates the importance of misattributions for observing aesthetic bias, evaluating art-historical knowledge, and understanding social and political ideologies.
Abstract The last five years have seen several high-profile museums in Europe and North America return items from their collections to the African continent. While Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes have dominated headlines and public attention, we have chosen to focus on the return of collections from the University of Cambridge to the Uganda Museum. Public debate has often centred on the morality and ethics of return. Here, we speak with two colleagues, Nelson Adebo Abiti, Curator of Ethnography at the national Uganda Museum; and Eva Namusoke, Senior Curator, African Collections Futures, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge, about return as the latest phase in the history of these collections.
