Bartolomeo Bosco

The cups and balls is among the oldest routines in magic; something very like it appears in Roman-era accounts. One man reset that ancient piece for a nineteenth-century stage, and his name was Bartolomeo Bosco.

Key achievements

1. An Italian conjurer widely known across mid-nineteenth-century Europe.
2. Made his name as a master of the classic cups and balls.
3. Took the routine to a theatrical scale and devised sleights that have since become standard.

The oldest routine

He was born Giovanni Bartolomeo Bosco in Italy on 3 January 1793.

What he spent his life refining was the cups and balls — inverted cups and small balls, among the very oldest categories of conjuring.

Its age is extraordinary. Similar descriptions appear in ancient accounts, and the routine ran continuously through the medieval and Renaissance periods as street work. Bosco, in other words, took on something that had already been performed for centuries.

Making an old thing new

Reworking an old routine can be harder than inventing a new one, because the audience already knows it.

What Bosco did was lift the piece from street scale to theatrical scale, and in doing so he devised several sleights.

Here is what matters: the sleights he devised have become standard for present-day performers. Something worked out two hundred years ago is still in daily use.

Some techniques in magic are inherited this way. A single movement, worked out by one person, travels down the generations attached to a name. Tenkai Ishida’s palm and Bosco’s sleights arrived in the present by the same route.

Europe in the early nineteenth century

Bosco was widely known across mid-nineteenth-century Europe.

It is worth placing him. Pinetti reached the summit at court at the end of the eighteenth century; Bosco made his name on sleight of hand in the first half of the nineteenth; Robert-Houdin opened his own Paris theatre in 1845. Bosco stands between the two.

In making his name on work complete within the hands rather than on machinery, he sits very early in the line that runs on through Hofzinser to Dai Vernon.

He died on 7 March 1863.

On the record

Less material survives about Bosco than about performers of the later nineteenth century, and this archive states only what could be confirmed.

Even so, his name survived attached to the routine. Performers remembered alongside a piece of material are not common.

Notable works

• The cups and balls — his staging of it, and the sleights he devised that are still in use

Chronology

Only years that could be verified are listed.

1. 1793 Born in Italy on 3 January
2. 1863 Dies on 7 March