La collection de moulages de l’université de Bordeaux, première gypsothèque universitaire française ?

Abstract

On 17 January 1886, the University of Bordeaux inaugurated a new kind of museum in France. In one of the courtyards of the recently built ‘palace of the Faculties’, Pierre Paris had installed some plaster-cast copies of Greek and Roman statues and architectural sculptures from the most important European collections and the principal Greek archaeological sites. This young professor, who had studied previously in the French School of Athens, was in charge of the archaeology courses, a recent academic discipline founded in Bordeaux in 1876 by Maxime Collignon. At that time, in France, the reform of higher education carried out by the Ministry of Public Instruction according to the German model had led to the adoption of these new subjects of study and the installation of scientific collections, seen to be essential. Maxime Collignon had demonstrated their necessity in a report he had written after a mission to Germany in 1882. But in fact, it was some years before the universities could launch such facilities, due to lack of space, of money and of incentive. The University of Bordeaux was the first to open a real and official ‘Plaster cast museum’ when such places were only in a process of conception at other universities. The study of this collection helps us to understand the diffusion of this idea of a plaster cast museums in the late nineteenth century in France, its appropriation by the Universities and the various stages of the process of development at the heart of education system.

Keywords

• Bordeaux
• history of art
• France
• Paris
• Louis Liard
• archaeology