Never Identical: Multiples in Pre-Modern Art

In the last fifteen years replicated objects have gained an increasingly central position in the discourse about pre-modern art. This contribution questions first why the study of works of art made in more than one original currently piques the interest of very different scholarly traditions, such as connoisseurship, Mediengeschichte, art theory, the study of political communication, the history of archaeology and the geography of art. Secondly, this essay attempts to fill a gap in the scholarship through its focus on the reception of pre-modern ›multiples‹ (a term whose choice is also here discussed).