The first depiction of female pointwork? - Giovanna Baccelli, Italian ballerina in London and Paris: Women’s History in Dance, 2021
Women’s History in Dance 124; 125; 126; 127; 128; 129. What’s the earliest depiction of female pointwork? There are many reasons to be fascinated by the ballerina Giovanna Baccelli (1753-1801), but one is that 124, the drawing of her reproduced here, shows her on point: which may make it the earliest depiction of pointwork we have. It doesn’t look like the pointwork of today, but I’ve discovered from Edmund Fairfax’s writing in Facebook’s Baroque Dance group that Baccelli was known as one of the rare eighteenth-century exponents of dancing “sur l’orteil” - literally, on the toenail: that expression became a standard one for what we now call pointwork.
She’s dancing in “Les Amants Surpris”, a ballet she danced in 1780 in London. In 125, the celebrated Thomas Gainsborough depicted her in the same ballet (pointe tendue croisée en avant), in a memorable blue-and-white dress. (It anticipates the dress designed by Julia Trevelyan Oman for Natalia Petrovna, heroine of Frederick Ashton’s 1976 ballet “A Month in the Country”.) His painting now hangs in Tate Britain: I love 126, where Parisa Khobdeh, formerly of the Paul Taylor Dance Company poses before it. Look at the nearest tree, just behind her: Gainsborough paints its trunk as if it’s echoing Baccelli’s tendu front.
Baccelli (née Giovanna Zanerini - Baccelli was her mother’s name) was born in Venice; but danced in her prime years - from the late 1770s to perhaps the early 1790s - in London. There, she caught the most illustrious era of the senior choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre; she appeared in the same company as Gaétan Vestris and his son Auguste Vestris, the two most idolised dancers of the day. 127 is a famous 1781 caricature engraved by John Boydell of Noverre’s classic dramatic ballet “Jason et Médée”: Baccelli (right) is Medea; Gaétan Vestris is Jason; Adelaide Simonet (left) is his new bride, Creusa. Pointwork seems to have been just another of her resources: she’s not usually shown on point, and pointwork didn’t play the transformative part in her effect that it would with later ballerinas.
In the late 1770s, Baccelli became the last and most important mistress of John Sackville (1745-1799), third duke of Dorset and hereditary owner of the vast country house of Knole (365 rooms, 52 staircases, so it’s often been claimed). The portrait of the duke by the great Joshua Reynolds, 128, shows that the Duke was quite a looker; he was also a celebrated cricketer. He, the Duke, gave her her own suite of rooms at Knole: the Knole servants knew her as “Shelley”, and so her part of the house was - is - called “Shelley’s Tower”. She had a son by the Duke; whom he brought up at Knole after their affair, which lasted perhaps twelve years, came to an end.
The duke also commissioned the great Joshua Reynolds to paint 129, a more intimate yet more theatrical portrait of Baccelli, holding up the mask of tragedy as she turns her head to look at the painter. (This painting has always been in the private rooms at Knole. My thanks to the present Lord Sackville for letting me take this photograph of it in February 2017.) The duke also commissioned the sculptor Giovanni Battista Locatelli to depict Baccelli lying nude on her stomach, head raised, her backside tenderly exposed: this sculpture, 130, remains in the public rooms at Knole, at the base of the wonderful gilded staircase. In 1989, the wife of the previous Lord Sackville told me that family legend had it that Knole guests would pass the nude statue to be received at the top of the stairs by the Duke and Baccelli, “whether nude or not I can’t say.”
The Duke was a member of the Order of the Garter, traditionally the most select and distinguished group in Britain since the Middle Ages. The motto of the Garter is “Honi soit qui mal y pense”: “Shame on him who has wicked thoughts.” In the mid-1780s, the Duke was made Ambassador to France; he took Baccelli with him , very much his official mistress. This, the period immediately building up to the 1789 storming of the Bastille and the ensuing French Revolution, was a sensational time in Anglo-French relations, with Paris society often setting the “ton” for high society in London, a keen friendship between queen Marie-Antoinette and the leader of London “ton”, the duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, a close friend of the duke of Dorset. Baccelli danced at the Paris Opéra: legend has always had it that, on that occasion, she wore the duke’s Order of the Garter around her brows - surely the most outrageous use to date of an order founded on the idea of chivalry. (The Duke did all he could to establish cricket as a popular sport in Paris.) The duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana, a beloved celebrity in her own day, is the subject of an acclaimed 1999 biography by Amanda Foreman; I can’t help wishing that some researcher would now cast light on the interest Baccelli and Georgiana showed in each other, celebrities of different kinds but both close to the duke of Dorset, and both in London and then Paris in the same periods.
The duke of Dorset was ambassador when the French Revolution broke out: two days after the storming of the Bastille, he reported to Britain’s official foreign secretary: “Thus, my Lord, the greatest revolution that we know anything of has been effected with, comparatively speaking — if the magnitude of the event is considered — the loss of very few lives. From this moment we may consider France as a free country, the King a very limited monarch, and the nobility as reduced to a level with the rest of the nation.”
Finally, the Duke and Baccelli parted ways. She moved on to other gentleman protectors; he married in 1790, and had three legitimate children by his young wife. He died in 1799, she in 1801. The dance historian Keith Cavers in recent years has located two further portraits of Baccelli: 131 is a French oil portrait from c.1790; 132 is a miniature set in gold (with her initials in seed pearls on the reverse, surmounting a lock of her hair. More than two centuries after her death, we are coming to know Baccelli better than our parents’ generation did.
At this stage of ballet, pointwork seems to have been an occasional effect: not a characteristic condition. We go on to hear of it with a series of ballerinas of various nationalities; but until the late 1820s or early 1830s
Thursday 1 April
124: the first visual depiction of female pointwork? Giovanna Baccelli in 1780 dancing “Les Amants surpris”.
125: Giovanna Baccelli, again dressed for “Les Amants surpris”, depicted by Thomas Gainsborough as if dancing as if in the grounds of Knole. (The tree behind her echoes her tendu.) It is remarkable how her costume anticipates that worn by Natalia Petrovna in Frederick Ashton’s ballet “A Month in the Country” (1976).
126: Parisa Khobdeh, many years a leading dancer of the Paul Taylor Dance Company, before Gainsborough’s portrait of Giovanna Baccelli at Tate Britain
127: John Boydell’s satirical engraving of the 1781 London production of Jean-Georges Noverre’s ballet tragique “Jason et Médée”, as performed at His Majesty’s Theatre at the Haymarket, London. Gaétan Vestris is Jason (centre); Giovanna Baccelli is Medea (right); Adelaide Simonet is Creusa (left).
128: Giovanna Baccelli depicted by Joshua Reynolds as if turning away from her duties with the tragic mask to cast a more intimate look at us, or rather at her lover, John Sackville, third duke of Dorset. This painting still hangs in the private rooms at Knole, his vast country house in Kent. By kind permission of the present Lord Sackville.
129: Locatelli’s nude statue of Giovanna Baccelli, one of the most public works of art at Knole, placed at the base of the famous Painted Staircase.
130: a French portrait of Giovanna Baccelli, c.1790. By kind permission of Keith Cavers.
131: a miniature of Giovanna Baccelli, with her initials in seed pearls on the reverse above a lock of her hair. By kind permission of Keith Cavers.