Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of 19th-Century Britain

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 migr formatori and collaborated with other makers of facsimilesincluding Elkington the electrotype manufacturers, Copeland the makers of Parian ware and Benjamin Cheverton with his sculpture reducing machineto bring sculpture into the spaces of learning and leisure for as broad a public as possible. Bruccianis plaster casts survive in collections from North America to New Zealand, but the extraordinary breadth of his practicemaking death masks of the famous and infamous, producing pioneering casts of anatomical, botanical and fossil specimens and decorating dance halls and theatres across Britainis 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 Bruccianis sculptural practice to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and beyond.