Pope Pius IX

Portrait of Pope Pius IX (31.2 × 24.2 cm), photographed at the Vatican to commemorate the pontiff's 83rd birthday on 13 May 1875, by Jean Adolphe Braun (1812-1877), the Alsatian photographer-industrialist who founded the Braun studio at Dornach in the 1850s and elevated it to a full industrial photographic enterprise by 1860. The commission is one of Braun's late masterworks and crowns his role as official photographer to the Holy See, a title that consolidated the contracts already secured with the Louvre, the Vatican Museums and the British Museum for industrial-scale reproduction of their collections. By this date, Braun had secured a licence to the Swan carbon transfer process (1864) and become the first European industrialiser of the procedure, employing up to 200 staff at Dornach to produce permanent carbon reproductions sold to scholars, libraries and the international luxury album market. The papal portrait was reproduced both as a stand-alone luxury sheet and as part of bound albums distributed across Catholic Europe, in direct competition with the carte-de-visite imagery of Disdéri and Nadar. Holdings of the Pius IX portrait are dispersed between the Civico Archivio Fotografico in Milan (which preserves this print), the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar (principal Braun studio archive), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Library of Congress and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Procédé Transposition Maison Picturale: this papal portrait is reinterpreted as a direct-monochrome charbon print using the non-toxic chemistry reformulated by Vision Picturale, with pigmented gelatin in Noir Musée or Couleur Profonde tissues transferred onto 640 g/m² cotton paper — the direct contemporary equivalent of the carbon transfer Braun industrialised, preserving the modelled flesh tones and the velvet density of the soutane without the dichromate hazards of the Swan-Braun workflow.

Reference file : Wikimedia Commons / Civico Archivio Fotografico Milano