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Concept
Gaudenzio Marconi
Summary
Gaudenzio Marconi (12 March 1841, Comologne, Switzerland–1885, Schaerbeck, Belgium) was a Swiss/Italian photographer who later worked in France and Belgium.
Born into a family of probable Italian origin on March 12, 1842, in Comologne, in French-speaking Switzerland. He married Adrienne Fontaine (born Amsterdam, 1844).
In 1862 Marconi is recorded as an “artist-painter” a with studio at 11 rue de Buci. A skilled photographer, he acquired the Paris studio, and some of the merchandise, abandoned by Joseph Auguste Belloc in 1868, and listed himself in the Paris directory as photographer specialising in studies for artists, sold as académies (photographic figure studies), of nude men, women and children. In 1869 he registered his photographs in the depot legale or copyright office through which the government censorship administration approved photographs for sale. He marketed them, and some later attributed to his Austrian colleague Hermann Heid, to students at the École des beaux-arts (School of Fine Arts) in Paris.
The Marconi collection of albumen prints from wet collodion plates are among the best-known of this type of nude which relate to tableaux vivants and which imitated celebrated works of classical antiquity and Renaissance art recognisable immediately by the viewer, or at least with some certainty. Backgrounds and props were kept minimal, as they would be in a life studio, in order to support their identification as artists' reference material, not intended as pornography. Accomplished artists and students often sketched the figure from photographs when living models were not available or proved too costly. Marconi's photographs were used by famous artists to whom he offered allegorical nudes with indicative titles; "a Michelangelo" and one "a P.P. Rubens", or "a tribal woman. The académies are thus a special form of the tableaux vivants in terms of meaning and artistic purpose, and were not regarded officially as pornographic, though clandestinely, they had such a market.
Official source
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