Plaster Casts of the Portico from Aphrodisias: Archaeology, Politics, Museology

This article presents a case study that demonstrates three essential uses—archaeological, political, and museological—of plaster casts in Graeco-Roman studies. The case is the Portico of Tiberius at Aphrodisias, which the Italian archaeological mission in Anatolia excavated in 1937. Casts of the architectural elements of the portico (entablature, capital, and column) were made immediately, shipped to Rome, and employed to create a one-to-one plaster reconstruction (7.5 m tall, 5.8 m wide, and 1.6 m deep) for a Fascist-period exhibition in Rome, the Mostra Augustea della Romanita. Notwithstanding its Tiberian-period inscription, there the portico was deliberately interpreted as an Augustan monument, with a clear political intent. Both the plaster fragments and the reconstruction today belong to the collection of the Museo della Civiltà Romana in Rome. These objects are extraordinary in their versatile functions—as three-dimensional documentary replicas, propagandistic tools, and a decontextualized museum exhibit—and in their capacity to represent and misrepresent their sources.