In the 19th century, not only photographs and architectural drawings but also a significant collection of plaster cast copies of ancient and Renaissance art were collected for the purposes of teaching art history. Carl Gustaf Estlander had already begun the systematic collection of (mainly classical) sculptures in 1869. When the collection was expanded with copies of Renaissance sculptures in the 1880s, the responsibility for the acquisitions rested with Johan Jakob Tikkanen.

The art history collection of sculptures at the University of Helsinki consists of 73 casts from Antiquity, 52 from the Renaissance, three from early Christendom and two from Asia. The collection is well preserved, and most of it is displayed at the Main Building of the University of Helsinki, with some pieces on display at Arppeanum.

Another new teaching method at the end of the 19th century was the diapositive, and a significant number of glass slides were acquired for the purposes of art history, for instance from photography shops in Germany. A magic lantern made it possible to show the same picture to an entire lecture hall and for the teacher to combine speech with visual materials much more efficiently than was previously the case. Later on the method was improved by using two projectors, which facilitated comparisons between two works of art. From its inception, the method was used particularly in iconographic and formal analytic studies.

First published in Humanistilehti in 2008