Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain

Description

Born near the Tuscan province of Lucca in 1815, Domenico Brucciani became the most important and prolific maker of plaster casts in 19th-century Britain. This first substantive study shows how he and his business used public exhibitions, emerging museum culture and the nationalisation of art education to monopolise the market for reproductions of classical and contemporary sculpture. Based in Covent Garden in London, Brucciani built a network of fellow Italian émigré formatori and collaborated with other makers of facsimiles—including Elkington the electrotype manufacturers, Copeland the makers of Parian ware and Benjamin Cheverton with his sculpture reducing machine—to bring sculpture into the spaces of learning and leisure for as broad a public as possible. Brucciani’s plaster casts survive in collections from North America to New Zealand, but the extraordinary breadth of his practice—making death masks of the famous and infamous, producing pioneering casts of anatomical, botanical and fossil specimens and decorating dance halls and theatres across Britain—is revealed here for the first time. By making unprecedented use of the 19th-century periodical press and dispersed archival sources, Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of 19th-Century Britain establishes the significance of Brucciani’s sculptural practice to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and beyond. Title Page Copyright Page Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction Wandering Italians The fortunes of Brucciani’s formatori Chapter 2: Object Lessons The context of the Schools of Design Brucciani and the educational market The contested classical in industrial education Plaster casts as teaching objects The Leeds School of Design: A case study Chapter 3: Exhibitions Great and Small Brucciani’s Apollo Belvedere at the Great Exhibition of 1851 Brucciani’s Greek Slave and the International Exhibition of 1862 Brucciani beyond London The Galleria delle Belle Arti Exhibiting plasters in parks and gardens Plaster casts and production of ceremonial space Decorating the Alexandra Palace (twice) Chapter 4: Death Masks and Dance Halls Posthumous plaster heads and hands The places of plaster and the spaces of rational recreation Chapter 5: Building Museum Collections of Plaster Casts The British Museum The South Kensington Museum The National Portrait Gallery The Natural History Museum Plasters in ‘provincial’ museums: Leeds Art Gallery Australasia North America Chapter 6: Casting Aside The death of Domenico Brucciani D. Brucciani and Company Limited The first rescue mission The second rescue mission The Department for the Sale of Casts Conclusion Notes Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Bibliography Primary sources Secondary sources Index