Replicas: architecture as copy or invention

The history of the copy is as old as the history of architecture itself. While Pliny the Elder considered the origin of painting to be the desire to reproduce the outline of a shadow, and Vitruvius did the same for sculpture when he described the Corinthian order as life emerging from death, the model as copy of the natural highlights the synthesis of the two disciplines as the boundary between any creative act and mimesis. An appropriate example is Roman architecture conceived as an aide-mémoire of the Greek model, with signs distinguishing between originals and replicas recognized only in the details of words and their formal variations. In the endless list of models of imitatio to which architecture originally refers, the model as a full-scale replica has responded to different interests and contexts over the centuries. Giorgio Vasari gives an account of a widespread practice in Florentine workshops in the fourteen-hundreds. Then, reproductions of fragments of ruins were taken as the manifesto of an anachronistic Renaissance, laying the bases for the diffusion and circulation of antiquity and its imaginaries. The Baroque extended its use to the world of stage sets and theatre, like some of the creations of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. Then, in the 18th century, academies added their renewed pedagogical interest in a total architecture, in which the copy and displacement of the original guaranteed learning, laying the foundations for the successful future Beaux-Arts current. Examples include the duplication of the Sainte-Geneviève façade by Jacques-Germain Soufflot and the numerous campaigns carried out in Rome. Later, the technical reproduction introduced with the international expositions gave rise to the culture of fragment and detail at the first museums of artistic reproductions in cities such as London, Madrid, Barcelona and Paris. In the 20th century, the architecture avantgarde, pushing back against academia, rejected the art of the copy as dogma, heading high-pr
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