History of life casting

Life casting in the 19th Century

The practice of life casting was wide spread in the nineteenth century, and was considered a standard part of the sculptor's technique.

A documentary piece or an testimony of affection, the life cast, in its extremely accurate representation of reality, soon gave birth to a violent polemic in the history of European sculpture, the unjust scandal orchestrated around Rodin's L'Age d'Airin being the best known.

The technique of life casting shared the same stakes as realism in sculpture and the representation and appropriation of the human body or its fragments, appropriations that scientific, or considered as such, disciples, used systematically throughout the 19th century with a didactic purpose.

Excerpt from Musee d'Orsay's website

 

 

 

Auguste Clésinger (1814-1883)Woman Bitten by a Snake, 1847
Paris, Musée d'Orsay

 

Alexandre Falguière (1831-1900)The Dancer (Cléo de Mérode 1881-1966)Circa 1896

Life cast plaster model
Paris, Musée d'Orsay