From Northern Italy to Hungary: medieval and Renaissance monumental casts between the Campi Carlo Museum in Milan and the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Campi Carlo - privileged formatore of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and trusted collaborator of the institutions responsible for the protection of monuments in Lombardy - set up a rich collection of plaster casts in Milan, alongside the effigy of the masterpieces of ancient Greek and Roman art to replicas taken from medieval and Renaissance artworks by the great Lombard masters.

The latter constituted the peculiarity of the Campi Carlo Museum, attracting the interest - among foreign museums - of the newborn Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest which, between 1907 and 1909, commissioned ten casts on a monumental scale, some already available in the rich catalog of the Milanese gipsoteca, while others were expressly cast from the originals for the occasion: an operation of great technical complexity, resolved thanks to the development of the molding methods achieved in those years - in particular, the gelatin mold technique - to which Campi himself contributed.

Among the replicas that survived the Second World War devastation, five casts from Campi manufacture have been selected for the new exhibition and populate the large hall in the inner courtyard of the Star Fortress in Komárom.