Victories for exchage: plaster casts and originals' travels in the context of the discovery of the Victoire de Samothrace

GALLIPOLI, MILENA

São Paulo

Congreso; 35th CIHA World Congress - Motion: Migrations; 2022

Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art (CIHA)

In 1863, a French archaeological mission lead by consul Charles Champoiseau dug out a sculpture of a female figure from the now Greek island of Samothrace. Currently, the Victoire de Samothrace is one of the most famous and reproduced artworks of the world, but its initial moment of coming to light was filled with institutional occurrences and political intrigues. A subsequent exploratory phase was set out, but policies from the Ottoman Empire regarding the granting of access into archaeological sites and the extraction of antique objects became an obstacle. In consequence, in order to pave his way into Samothrace one more time, Champoiseau started a series of negotiations with Osman Hamdi Bey, painter and director of the Musée Impérial Ottoman, in which copies acted as an attractive bait. The main aim of this proposal is to analyze the political agency of the plaster casts of the Victoire that traveled between France and the Ottoman Empire. By looking into a series of epistolary exchanges found in the Archives Nationales de France and writings from Champoiseau I will examine a double migration. On the one hand, I will analyze the internal movements of the Victoire inside the Musée du Louvre that lead to the conversion of the piece from anonymous discovery to one of Paris? leading ladies. This process culminated in 1884 with the installation of the piece in the architectural frame of the Daru stairs, one of the main points of the museographic display. On the other hand, in parallel, the Atelier de Moulage du Musée du Louvre started casting plaster copies of the Victoire. This precise moment coincided with the negotiations with Hamdi Bey since the arousal of its new masterpiece status lead the sculpture to become an attractive piece to appropriate. Thus, some of them became diplomatic gifts that Champoiseau sent to Hamdi Bey with the explicit intention of unlocking political tensions so as to continue the exploration of Ottoman territory. Nonetheless, I will argue that this agency cannot be reduced to a logic of center/periphery or dominant-dominated since Hamdi Bey?s responded with a strategy of obtaining resources that would legitimate his own museum and the status of the Ottoman capital. In this way, both parties gained leverage from the situation. These traces account for a complex geopolitical scheme and how objects take on an active role within them. In this sense, this study case allows me to examine how circulations and transits of copies responded to an explicit political agenda, which ultimately reinforced and spread canonic artworks and their models.