DEVELOPMENT OF A BOTTLE IN SPACE
Sculpted in 1912, destroyed in 1927 in Acquabella, Milan but almost immediately restored from the broken pieces.
Boccioni's first bottle
Boccioni sculpted Development of a Bottle in Space (1) in 1912. It has a very convoluted history and there have been at least five casts made. Boccioni had originally sculpted two plaster variants of this work, one entitled Development of a Bottle in Space through Form and the other painted red with an orange-peel texture, entitled Development of a Bottle in Space through Colour. The red version of the Bottle was salvaged in 1927 by Marco Bisi, a young relative of Boccioni. He found the red fragments in a pile of all the other destroyed Boccioni sculptures, and subsequently glued it back together.
One of the casts, currently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, was digitised in high resolution and is currently going through the same "reverse engineering" process as the other lost sculptures (2). There are four historical photos of the original plasters, the most famous being from the Paris exhibition at Galerie La Boëtie in June 1913.
[Published June 2025]
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