Art in the making
With a major renovation limiting exhibition space, the Harvard Art Museums can’t always show off new acquisitions these days. One example is a fragile plaster model — 34 inches high — that is a rare survivor from the rough-and-tumble sculpture studios of 17th century Italy, where new sculptures were made and ancient classical works were restored from fragments dug from the ground. Young artists often learned their trade by piecing these remnants together. Restorations required making plaster models, three-dimensional representations of what a finished work might look like. They were just templates of a sort, and were discarded once a sculpture was finished. But the half-scale example somehow survived and was donated to Harvard last year by the estate of First Amendment lawyer Daniel Paul ’46, a one-time member of the Harvard Board of Overseers who had a passion for collecting fine art. (He also earned degrees from Harvard Law School and from...