Abstract
Linked with the development of the French colonial empire in Indochina, the scope of the mission organized in 1866 in order to check the navigability of the Mekong River allowed Louis Delaporte to be in direct contact with the impressive remains of the Khmer temples of Angkor. His subsequent missions in Cambodia were devoted to the increase of his knowledge of ancient Khmer architecture and were intended to set up a collection of art objects, plaster casts, photographs, and drawings that would be exhibited in the Musée Indochinois du Trocadéro, a museum he curated until his death in 1925. The aim of this paper is to explain his contribution to the world of art history and museums and to show how these documents were exhibited together in a didactic way.
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Notes
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Editor’s note: As a surface-copying technique, plaster casts followed an approach quite comparable to colonial photographs of archaeological sites (see the contribution of Weiler in this volume). Both techniques served as a translation for original parts and their re-montage or display in occidental museums. Casts from Angkor were transported to France and reassembled into ideal hybrids, quite comparable to today’s virtual reconstitutions of ideal or re-imagined Angkorian temple constructions on the basis of the analysis of decorative or structural elements (see Nguonphan and Cunin in this volume. Regarding other surface-scan techniques compare Gruen, Toubekis/Jansen).
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Baptiste, P. (2013). Virtual Visions of Angkor: Plaster Casts and Drawings in the Indochinese Museum of the Trocadero Palace in Paris. In: Falser, M., Juneja, M. (eds) 'Archaeologizing' Heritage?. Transcultural Research – Heidelberg Studies on Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35870-8_4
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