With a Wax Nativity Scene
[WAX MODELS.] Gaetano PECCI.
Broadside advertising an itinerant show of wax models. [Incipit:] ‘L’Artista Gaetano Pecci, nativo di Milano, arrivato in questa illustre Città, avrà l’onore di esponere le sue fatiche a questo rispettabile pubblico con un copioso gabinetto di statue di cera della grandezza al naturale …’ [Venice], Casali stampatore, [c. 1815].
Letterpress broadside (c. 480 x 360 mm); text in two columns within double decorative typographic border; some slight signs of old folding, a few pale stains; else very well preserved.
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Broadside advertising an itinerant show of wax models. [Incipit:] ‘L’Artista Gaetano Pecci, nativo di Milano, arrivato in questa illustre Città, avrà l’onore di esponere le sue fatiche a questo rispettabile pubblico con un copioso gabinetto di statue di cera della grandezza al naturale …’
A seemingly unrecorded broadside advertising the Venice dates of a touring show of life-sized wax models of the Nativity, notable politicians and philosophers, and anatomical figures by the Milanese wax sculptor Gaetano Pecci, as well as an (apparently living) two-headed boy.
In addition to a large Nativity scene comprising thirty figures, the exhibition included a group of statues depicting European monarchs (Francis I, Emperor of Austria; Alexander I, Emperor of Russia; Frederick William III, King of Prussia; Louis XVIII, King of France; Joachim-Napoleon, King of Naples; Ferdinand IV, King of Sicily); some of the protagonists of the Napoleonic Wars (Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich of Russia; Prince Mikhail Kutuzov, commander-in-chief of the Russian Army; Marshal Étienne Macdonald; and General Tadeusz Kościuszko, Polish commander who fought for the Patriots in the American Revolutionary War); the philosophers Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu; the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon; the composer Joseph Haydn; female and male anatomical models, featuring a detailed model of a human head; a figure of the artist himself, together with his manservant; and a table set with delicious dishes and fruits, all carefully made of wax.
Furthermore, among the sculptures is listed ‘a boy with two heads, originally from Tyrol’, with the note that the boy is in fact alive and not a model (likely a case of conjoined twins, assuming that this was not a hoax). Admission tickets to the exhibition, on display in a house on Riva degli Schiavoni, had a price of 20 soldi, with reduced rates for both servants and children (dogs are specifically forbidden from attending). Finally, the artist offers to make a wax portrait of any person who might wish to have one, for a modest price and in only two short sittings.
An exhibition of Pecci’s models held in his native Milan in April 1820, featuring some slightly different models, is described by Giuseppe Chiappori in his Serie cronologica delle rappresentazioni drammatico-pantomimiche poste sulle scene dei principali teatri di Milano (1821), p. 84.
We are unable to trace any other copies. A copy of a smaller broadside advertising Pecci’s show in Bologna, listing completely different wax figures, is recorded at the Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio, in Bologna.