The Victories: From Samothrace to Buenos Aires. Plaster casts in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes and the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in the first half of the twentieth century

Abstract

The Winged Victory of Samothrace has become one of the most recognised works of art worldwide. The Louvre Museum managed to place it as a canonical piece given the prominence it acquired within the institution’s museography and, at the same time, through the sale and circulation of plaster casts produced by its own casting workshop. The main aim of this article is to link the case of the copies of the Winged Victory of Samothrace with the consumption and exhibition of two of these casts in the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (MNBA) and the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes (ESBA) in Buenos Aires, both collections created in the first decades of the twentieth century. Contrast the role each cast fulfilled within each institution will allow us to elucidate the functioning dynamics of a museum and a venue dedicated to artistic education. In the context of the museum, by analysing its institutional profile and the variations in the exhibition policies, it can be said that there was a general displacement of plaster casts that had as counterpart the emphasis of the individual piece of the Winged Victory. On the other hand, in the collection of the Museo de Calcos of the ESBA, the piece was exhibited based on a construction of the history of art that accounted for a succession of styles through time.