Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of 19th-Century Britain : Bloomsbury Visual Arts : 9781501332197 : 1501332198 : 18 Oct 2018 : 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