I USED TO be almost embarrassed to admit to friends and colleagues the place where I spent so many hours with things medieval. It was constructed to be, and can still be construed as, celebrating those aspects of art history that I had despised—triumphant nationalism, a purely stylistic taxonomy of objects, and a rigidly chronological system of their classification. The place was not even medieval, but a modern museum, and to make matters worse, none of the canonical works exhibited there was real. The pantheon of simulacra I am talking about is the collection of plaster casts at the Musée des Monuments français. More recently I came across some old photo-graphs showing how the moulages there were arranged before 1937, when the collection, opened by Viollet le Duc in 1883, filled a wing of the old Trocadéro Palace. It was then called the Musée de Sculpture Comparée. These photographs show how the canon of French medieval sculpture was then displayed, not along stylistic and chronological lines as it is today. As its title suggests, the museum's purpose was to allow the visitor to compare, as in a museum of natural history, one species of carving to another—the Romanesque to the Gothic leaf, for example. One photograph shows the juxtaposition of the statue of Isaiah from Souillac, which would today be considered key in any canon of medieval sculpture, hanging next to a work which would not have so central a place today—part of the damaged, late thirteenth-century sculpture added to the south porch of Chartres cathedral and representing four of the mechanical arts (Figure 6.1). On my last visit these two casts were still on show, one in the Romanesque Room and the other farther along, in the Early Gothic Room.

Now I am less inclined to downplay my desire to behold plaster of Paris in Paris than I used to be. This is partly because the history of how objects were collected and reproduced—how canons were created—has become a major focus for art-historical research. This museum is now itself a monument (along with another favorite, the two vast Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) to the nineteenth-century interest in mechanical copies made for pedagogical purposes.