From Alexandria to Hyde, via Bovillæ and Rome, London and Birmingham: a biography of an electrotype of The Apotheosis of Homer

This essay is an object study of a new acquisition by the Victoria and Albert Museum. In February 2020, just before the Covid pandemic and national lockdown in the UK forced the Museum to close, it acquired The Apotheosis of Homer; An Electrotype, from the Celebrated Original Bas-Relief in the British Museum, with a Descriptive Elucidation by Emile Braun. Few objects encompass such a profound and wide-ranging panorama across European history. This multi-layered interdisciplinary history represents a captivating social, political, literary and art historical journey, beginning c.225 BC at Alexandria in the Nile Delta of Lower Egypt, via Bovillæ and Rome, London and Birmingham, to the cotton mills and calico printworks of Hyde in Cheshire and Clitheroe in the Ribble Valley of Lancashire amidst the bourgeois industrial and political revolutions of the late 1840s. Underpinning the essay is a challenge to the generally accepted view that copies – replicated, reproduced, or rescaled objects – are in anyway inferior to the original artwork, artefact, or archetype from which they emerge. They are not. Each finds its own place in the world by making its individual social journey, which informs and shapes its cultural and political interpretation. The ‘prime object’ may be the idea and product of an inspired moment of skilled labour and technique, touched by creativity and genius, but an archetype can soon become a prototype, a pattern or model in the design process of an industrialised copyist culture.