Joseph Pinetti
Italian magician
Giovanni Giuseppe Pinetti, (Joseph Pinetti Willedall de Merci) was known in France as Chevalier Joseph Pinetti (1750–circa 1803). He was born in Orbetello (in Tuscany, Italy) and probably died in Berdychiv (Russian Empire, now a part of Ukraine). He was known as The Professor of Natural Magic and was a complex flamboyant personage. He performed in the later part of the 18th century and was the most celebrated magician of his time. He was the first magician to take advantage of advertising for the theatre.
Biography
The magician of the court of Louis XVI and then under the Directoire and First Empire, author of the Physical Amusements (1784), helped expand the art of magic and also created new effects. At the time, magicians performed in the streets as troubadours. While other performers carried their equipment in bags tied around their waist and carried their tables under their arms,
Pinetti brought his experiments as he called them, into the theatre. His predecessors performed with brass and tin gadgets, while Pinetti's was made of gold and silver. In his cabinet of curiosities, he claimed his tricks where based on controlled principles and presented them as scientific experiments.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joseph Pinetti” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.