During classical antiquity, it was the Romans who made the first collections of Greek art models to be copied. One of the safest and least expensive means of obtaining perfect copies was to make plaster casts, as modest as they were precious spokesmen of the values they aspired to own.
In modern times, in France, the search for the same moral and political values gave rise to a new movement of appropriation of antiquity, with the aim of creating a similar repertoire for the King's Antiquities Hall, in the Louvre Palace, and the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.
The catalogue illustrates with essays and a very generous set of images the selection of works chosen to tell the history of French creativity from the 17th to the 20th century through the history of the transmission of models.