Gaudenzio Marconi

[1] 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.

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.

Rodin also commissioned Marconi for a photographic reproduction of the finished work, in its preview in Brussels in January 1877 prior to its submission to the Salon of Paris.

The Rodin Museum holds two reproductions of L’Âge d’airain (front and back views) labelled with Marconi's stamp with the studio address "Place Grand Sablon 19, Bruxelles," as well as two standing portraits of the model.