About the Plaster Cast Collection

Set up in the late 17th century for study purposes, the Plaster Cast Collection was expanded systematically around 1800 to include casts of works from Greek and Roman antiquity. The Collection was opened to the public as a museum in 1851, and today its roughly 450 preserved plaster casts offer an unparalleled overview of the history of European sculpture.

Many great artists from antiquity to the present are represented in the Plaster Cast Collection with casts of their works. The Collection boasts icons of Classical Antiquity such as the so-called Capitoline Venus after Praxiteles or the Medusa Rondanini, partial casts of pediment figures and friezes from Pergamon, medieval pieces such as the cast of the tombstone slab of Frederick III from St. Stephen’s Cathedral, but also casts of Michelangelo’s Pietà, his Moses and the Dying Slave created for the tomb of Pope Julius II and busts of Friedrich Schiller, Emperor Franz II (I) and Mozart