Trajan's Column - Casts and Reproductions

Casts and Reproductions

Plaster casts of the relief were taken in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After a century of acid pollution, they are now more legible in some details than the original, and the way they are displayed offers students a closer look at the reliefs than at the original site. Examples can be studied at:

• Museum of Roman Civilization in Rome, where each "frame" of the narrative has been cut into a separate section and the sections are then displayed horizontally in order
• National Museum of Romanian History, Bucharest, Romania, which displays the frieze horizontally in segments
• Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Displayed in column form and, including the base, the column is chopped into two halves.
• Archaeological Collection of the University of Zürich, University of Zurich

Additionally, individual casts of the frieze are on display in various museums, for example, in the Museum for Ancient Navigation in Mainz. A complete survey in monochrome was published by the German archaeologist Conrad Cichorius between 1896 and 1900 (see Commons), still forming the base of modern scholarship. Based on Cichorius's work, and on the photographic archive of the German Archaeological Institute, a research-oriented Web-based viewer for Trajan's Column was created at the German-language image database Arachne.