'Connecting with Collections' concludes

Rebecca Wade, a Visiting Lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies (and PhD graduate of the School), reflects on her research on the work of Brucciani, which she recently delivered as a paper at a 'Connecting with Collections' symposium in Cambridge.

'On 27 September 2013 the AHRC Connecting with Collections programme, coordinated by University of Cambridge Museums, concluded with a symposium that communicated the findings of our individual research projects with the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Museum of Classical Archaeology, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Museum of Zoology, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and the Botanic Gardens.

'Our Keynote speaker was Dr Sam Alberti, Director of Museums and Archives at the Royal College of Surgeons, who gave an excellent paper titled ‘Objects of Knowledge: Using Material Culture in Twentieth-Century Museums’, a recording of which is available here.

'My paper, Casting Brucciani: Death Masks, Tightrope Walkers, Boxers and Murderers, was based on my research on the cast collection of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, which investigated the production of plaster casts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focused specifically on identifying the casts made by Domenico Giovanni Brucciani (ca.1815-1880) and his firm of formatori D. Brucciani & Co.

'Brucciani was an Italian who settled in London to work for his uncle Luigi ‘Lewis’ Brucciani, going on to build the most extensive collection of reproductions in the country displayed at his Galleria delle belle Arti at 40 Russell Street, Covent Garden. His firm supplied the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum), regional museums and art schools and institutions in North America, India and Australia.

'The scope of Brucciani’s activities was much more diverse than has been described in the limited literature on the subject: in addition to the reproduction of classical sculpture and architectural ornament, Brucciani made waxworks and death masks of Victorian heroes and villains and decorated the interiors of dance halls, casinos and theatres around the country. He was also skilled in modelling in clay and wax and carving in marble, crossing the boundary between artisan and artist. This body of research identified over fifty casts at the Museum of Classical Archaeology produced by D. Brucciani & Co. between 1879 and 1922. Using the archives of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Glasgow School of Art and nineteenth-century periodicals supplied by the British Library, it has been possible to construct a comprehensive and contextualised account of an important career that had not received substantial scholarly attention.

'The symposium was brought to a close with a lively roundtable discussion chaired by Dr Liz Hide, University of Cambridge Museums Officer. The Connecting with Collections group will reunite as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas for a free event called ‘Museum Mixology’ which can be booked here.

'I am looking forward to extending my work on Brucciani through a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute, beginning in October 2013.'