Born near the Tuscan province of Lucca in 1815, Domenico Brucciani
became the most important and prolific maker of plaster casts in
nineteenth-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
nineteenth-century periodical press and dispersed archival sources,
Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain
establishes the significance of Brucciani’s sculptural practice
to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and
beyond.
General
Imprint: |
Bloomsbury Visual Arts
|
Country of origin: |
United Kingdom |
Release date: |
February 2024 |
Authors: |
Rebecca Wade
(Assistant Curator (Sculpture))
|
Dimensions: |
234 x 156mm (L x W) |
Pages: |
216 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-350-43578-0 |
Categories: |
Books
|
LSN: |
1-350-43578-3 |
Barcode: |
9781350435780 |
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