Editing Plaster cast (section)

===Classical sculpture===
[[File:The Royal Academicians in General Assembly.png|thumb|''[[The Royal Academicians in General Assembly]]'' by [[Henry Singleton (painter)|Henry Singleton]]. A number of casts of classical statues are on displays behind the artists.]]
Use of such casts was particularly prevalent among [[classicist]]s of the 18th and 19th centuries, and by 1800 there were extensive collections in Berlin, Paris, Vienna and elsewhere. A museum or gallery of plaster casts may be called by the French term '''''gypsotheque'''''. By creating copies of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures held at various museums across Europe in this way, a reference collection of all the best and most representative sculptural types could be formed, at a fraction of the cost of purchasing original sculptures, which scholars could consult without necessarily having to travel abroad to see all the originals.  These casts could also be used in experiments in [[polychromy]] (reconstructing paint layers found on sculptures), reconstruction (e.g. [[Adolf Furtwängler]]'s reconstruction of the [[Lemnian Athena]] from pieces found in different places), and for filling holes in a museum's collections of actual sculpture (e.g. the British Museum sent casts of some of its Mesopotamian collection to [[the Louvre]] in return for a cast of the Louvre's [[Code of Hammurabi]]).