Deceptive Romantic Ballet Prints: Three Nineteenth-Century Dance Images Recontextualized

Prints are undoubtedly an important archival source for scholars of nineteenth-century dance. They offer a relatively clear image of a depicted dancer’s physicality and costume and may even transmit a sense of the cultural context in and for which they were created or consumed. However, iconographic material can be misleading, as it may have been produced for varying purposes, such as documentation, career management, or commercialization. This article contextualizes the publication of three images associated with the ballerina Flora Fabbri (1822–1880). Matching the images with biographical information about the dancer reveals that they may not, after all, depict Fabbri. This article examines these three images with special attention to the use of iconography as a historical source and reveals obstacles in researchers’ reliance on lithographs, as well as suggestions for overcoming these barriers: it is still possible to gain new information from iconographic sources that are seemingly well researched already.