Deceptive Romantic Ballet Prints: Three Images Wrongly Associated with Flora Fabbri

The development of lithograph printing and romantic ballet are closely linked: Lithographers found the ballerinas and their tulle costumes the perfect models to reveal the potential of their printing technique. Vice versa, ballet dancers discovered how iconographic material could add to their fame or myth. Madison Sowell describes in Icônes du ballet romantique: Marie Taglioni et sa famille (Rome: Gremese, 2016) Filippo Taglioni’s clever orchestration and control of prints showing his daughter performing his works. One could almost say that he “institutionalised” (if we thought of a family business) his daughter’s iconography. In consequence, ballet prints are sometimes less of a capture of a historical event than the result of career marketing—and are therefore deceptive. This paper investigates three images associated with the romantic ballerina Flora Fabbri (1822-1880) which turned out to show different individuals than one thought so far. In two cases, observers misread the images; in one case, the publisher fooled his customers by reprinting an older image while exchanging the inscription. Identifying the illustrated subjects correctly paves the way for new research on their respective careers. 

Thierry Jaquemet, born and raised in Switzerland, graduated as a classically trained dancer from the Zurich University of Arts. He was a member of the National Ballet Company of Győr (Hungary) between 2015 and 2019, where he was named honorary citizen in recognition of his “outstanding contribution to the city’s cultural life.” He then joined the Josef Kajetán Tyl Theatre’s ballet company in Pilsen (Czech Republic) as a demi-soloist. He is the author of Flora Fabbri’s first biography Flora Fabbri: Eine Kämpferin trägt Tüll (Zurich: Rüffer & Rub, 2022), a member of the Italian Association for Research in Dance (AIRDanza) and holds the 2023-24 Howard D. Rothschild Fellowship in Dance at the Harvard University’s Houghton Library.