Cast of Trajan's Column
Monduit et Béchet, Paris, after a Roman original · about 1864, after an original of about 113 AD
Two vast plaster towers rise through the full height of the Cast Court, so tall that the gallery was built to house them. Together they are a full-size copy of Trajan's Column in Rome, cut in half because even this room could not take the original height. A spiral band of relief sculpture winds up each half, telling the story of the emperor Trajan's two wars against the Dacians in the early second century in more than two thousand carved figures: soldiers building forts, crossing rivers on pontoon bridges, fighting, burning villages, receiving prisoners. On the original, most of this detail is too high to see; here it is at eye level on the stairs and balconies.
The casts were made in Paris in the eighteen sixties by the firm of Monduit, using moulds taken from the column at the request of Napoleon the Third. The plaster was cast in around a hundred and fifty sections, shipped to London and assembled around a brick core, which you can enter through a small door at the base. Look at the marching soldiers on the lowest spirals, whose helmets, shields and tools are all clearly readable, and compare the plaster surface, which keeps details that acid rain has since eaten away from the marble in Rome.
The Cast Courts opened in 1873 as a resource for students who could not travel to Italy, and they hold copies of doorways, pulpits, tombs and whole church fronts from across Europe. Casts fell out of fashion in the twentieth century and many museums destroyed theirs; the V&A kept its collection, and today it is one of the few places where you can walk among these works at their true scale. The column's halves were fully conserved in the twenty tens, when a century of grime was removed.
Did You Know? The two halves are hollow and built around a brick chimney-like core, and museum staff can climb inside them.
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