The collection of plaster copies was created at the beginning of the 20th century at the initiative of the former director of the Numismatic and Antiquities Collection of the Transylvanian Museum Association, archaeologist Béla Pósta (1861-1919). The copies were made for didactic purposes, the original pieces on display being complemented by a series of copies of the most significant works of Antiquity, as well as of Transylvanian medieval art, following the model of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Trocadéro Museum in Paris.
The first piece of the plaster copies collection of the Numismatic and Antiquities Collection was the famous statue of St. George, made in Prague at the order of Emperor Charles IV by brothers Martin and George of Cluj in 1373. The piece was donated to the Cluj collection by Emperor Franz Joseph himself in 1901, being one of the 20 copies commissioned by the Austro-Hungarian sovereign and donated to various cultural institutions in the country.
The collection is made up of copies of a series of Greco-Roman statues and reliefs, 15 Egyptian statues, and several copies of medieval pieces, mainly funerary monuments.
Initially, the copies were made by József Reichenberger, Hungary's most famous plaster modeller of the time, who also made the plaster casts exhibited at the 1896 Budapest Millennium Exhibition. Later, the works were carried out by the photographer and technician of the Numismatic and Antiquities Collection from Cluj, András Lehoczky.
(Illustration) Copy of the statue of Saint George in the exhibition in the basement of the university from Cluj in 1907