Monuments in motion: exhibiting the full scale replicas from the Barcelona School collection, 1817-1929

Antoni Cellers (1775-1835), architect and founder in 1817 of the first Class of Architecture in the Barcelona Academy of Fine Arts, spent the last years of his life redrawing the ruins of the Temple of Hercules in the city. Among the several documents he produced, the full scale plaster cast of one of its columns was the first ideological model for the future Barcelona School collection. Following his steps, architects like Elias Rogent (1821-1897) and Lluis Domènech i Montaner (1850-1923) used the scientific trip to catalogue the unknown Catalan heritage through photographs, draws and the plaster casts as a double-edged sword: the models were advocated by these scholarly elites as a medium for teaching and disseminating historical architecture, and also like a register to question the significance of the lives before, during and after their construction. During their stay at the Barcelona School, the artefacts accumulation in the Hall of Models became an oneiric symptom of time (Image 1). The tribune in the Romanesque monastery of Sainte Maria in Serrabona (France), the fragments from the Choir of the Barcelona Cathedral or the keystones in the triumphal arch from the Salvador Sacred Chapel in Úbeda (Spain), were only some examples of models that, out of time and place, reproduced buildings parts on a new anatomy of a hypnotic space. A dark room waiting for new meanings. Arabian, Romanesque, Gothic and Renascence style were displayed in a universal and perfect atmosphere, similar to one that Marcel Proust experienced coming into the Musée de Sculpture Comparée in Paris (1879-1882). In Barcelona, the diversity of styles had their equivalence between the pages of fundamental treatises, blowing-up the Owen Jones’s illustrations from «The Grammar of Ornament» (1856), or the Antoni Rovira i Rabassa studies from «The Stereotomy of Stone» (1897). The limit between the teaching imaginaries and the invention of modern heritage became a very thin threshold under the ideas of Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. A threshold where to interpret the afterlife of these models through the four exhibitions that featured the historical collection: The Philadelphia World's Fair (1876), the Spanish Monumental Art Exhibition (1904), the National Salon of Architecture in Madrid and Barcelona (1911, 1916) (Image 2), and The Art of Spain in the Barcelona International Exhibition (1929), are only some examples of theses ideological displacements in the search for a national identity style during almost half a century of revivals. The Barcelona casts collection teaches us an anachronism lesson: that the monuments and their representations are in constant motion, and their change in meaning depends on the ways they worked, or meant to work. The paper aims at anatomizing the documents, books, catalogues and exhibitions that allow us to illuminate the afterlife collection, fostering of future imaginings beyond their original contexts. Currently, some of them still can be read between the walls of our School