In the mid-late nineteenth century, Domenico Brucciani - a distinguished plaster caster serving several of Britain’s foremost art institutions - had established a highly successful business specialising in the reproduction of architectural monuments. Among these was his 1868 plaster cast copy of the Flå Stave Church portal, now housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Cast Courts. The cast reproduces a doorway originally carved in wood between 1080–1120 from a Norwegian stave church demolished in 1859.

Architectural historian, Mari Lending, notes that >Norwegian stave churches provide one example of architectural structures that were designated as monuments – serialised on paper and in plaster – at the very moment that their originals were being destroyed.

Lending observes that casts of the Flå, Sauland, and Urnes portals (which are all on display within the Cast Courts) became “portable documents in three dimensions” - objects whose multiplication allowed the invention of new monumental contexts. They became crucial for the invention of their lost contexts as monuments, as the multiplied originals toured the world through museums and catalogues’. These casts circulated through the western museums, generating a curated alternative histories, identities, and narratives.