Maria Ines Aliverti_The Miniatures of Jean Louis ... - Acting Archives

AAR Acting Archives Essays Supplement 10 – April 2011
Università di Pisa and from my own personal collection, and have been catalogued
by me in the Dionysos digital archive on theatre iconography. 4
Although not published, the paper I gave in Wassenaar attained a certain degree
of diffusion thanks to the detailed handout which I distributed in typescript form.
However, precisely because it was heard only by a small audience, it has not managed
to bring wider attention to the work of Faesch, and in particular on the “dual
personality” – that of Faesch and/or Whirsker – generally referred to in connection
with the miniatures and the relative printed vignettes attributed to them. Thus,
although the miniatures continue to be appreciated, 5 as do the printed versions, in
the curious libretti that contain them, these, too, the object of antiquarian interest,
knowledge of Faesch seems, with rare exceptions, to have made little progress. These
delightful pictures continue to be used without being carefully studied or evaluated in
terms of their documentary value. 6
Invited on 2 April 2008 by my colleagues Lorenzo Mango and Claudio Vicentini
to give a lecture to the students of the postgraduate course at the Università di
Napoli “L’Orientale” (Dipartimento di Studi Letterari e Linguistici dell’Europa), I
took the opportunity to dust off my paper on Faesch, which seemed to me to be still
far from obsolete. I am therefore extremely grateful to my colleagues in Naples, and
in particular to Claudio Vicentini, for having invited me to publish this material on
Faesch.
I would also like to thank the colleagues, curators and scholars who over the years
have given me suggestions and help in my study of these images, and who may
appreciate the publication of this work: Robert Erenstein, Odile Faliu, Renzo
Guardenti, Noëlle Guibert, Joël Huthwohl, Claire Lloyd-Jacob, Cesare Molinari,
Martine de Rougemont, Colette Scherer, and Laurence Senelick. The librarians of the
Civica Raccolta Bertarelli in Milan, the Bibliothèque-Musée de la Comédie Française
and the Harvard University Theatre Collection in Cambridge, Mass., were extremely
helpful when I was studying gouaches by Faesch housed in their collections: to them
all I express my sincere gratitude. Geoffrey Ashton and John Cavanagh, to whom
theatre iconography is so especially indebted, are no longer with us. I always
remember their prompt response when I asked for their advice and expertise. The
Libreria Gonnelli in Florence allowed me to consult a precious copy of the Album
Dramatique in its possession.
Without the collaboration of the Library, and the Photographic and Digital Labs
of the Dipartimento di Storia delle Arti of the Università di Pisa this work would not
4 Dionysos Archivio di iconografia teatrale/Theatre Iconography Archive, directed by Cesare Molinari and Renzo
Guardenti, DVD, (Corazzano) Pisa, Titivillus, 2006. The records concerning the series of printed
vignettes drawn by Faesch include the Métamorphoses, the Dramatic Characters and Les Souvenirs et les
regrets.
5 And continue to appear, albeit rarely, on the art market.
6 One exception is the recent contribution by Joël Huthwohl, director of the Département des Arts du
Spectacle of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ‘Les costumes des Lumières: la collection de
miniatures de Fesch et Whirsker de la Comédie-Française’, Art et usages du costume de scène. Proceedings of
the Conference, Nancy-Metz, March 2006, ed. by Anne Verdier, Olivier Goetz, Didier Doumergue, Dijon,
Lampsaque, 2007, to which I will refer many times in these pages. Huthwohl is the first scholar to
have attempted a systematic analysis of the corpus of gouaches of the Comédie Française from the point
of view of theatrical costume.
2