Answers:
We just don't know, within the sense of being competent to put a name to the individual. (I'm assuming you mean fondant icing here.) Sugarwork didn't gain main culinary focus till the mid 18thC for the simple eonomic reason that sugar be ferociously expensive and/because in short supply, and have to be shipped huge distances in harmfully dangerous conditions.
The first icings be in effect of the royal icing sort, using egg white and icing sugar, and this of course be an icing that went rock easier said than done with time -- that be its purpose where 'sculptures' contained by icing were concerned. In the 1740s you'll be thorny pushed to find any mention of icing work in culinary tracts, but by the 1770s it is appearing in 'bourgeois' cooking manual as well as within professional treatises, where you would first expect to find them.
Even contained by early icing work, nearby was a desire, already rash on, to delay the harden effects of the royal icing mixture, for instance by mixing a percentage of 'fine starch' (1) or similar non-glutenous farinaceous matter to 'dilute' the 'cement effect' of sugar mixed near albumen. Gum arabic featured too, though Carême preferred that (2) for greater plasticity to knead his 'pastillage' in the creation of his staggeringly complex, 4-6ft high-ceilinged architectural Grandes Pièces Montées, rather than for any enhanced, 'melting' drinking qualities.
Meanwhile, Italian kitchen masters have been forging ahead near syrups and icing sugars and albumen from, let's say, the 1670s onwards -- Venice have, comparatively speaking, a reasonably respectable supply of sugar which the aristocracies governing the different city states didn't hesitate to avail themselves of -- and somewhere around the 1720s, let's voice, those two approaches must have met and melded, more credible than not in the get up of the frequent exchanges of kitchen masters between Italian and French aristocratic households and, of course, repeated intermarriages between the French royal house and Italian princesses, who tend to arrive in Paris 'fully kitted up' beside their Italian master cooks in tow. That's our current best guess that I am aware of.
Hope this help.
I'm not sure but I do know that Lindt invented chocolate fondant.
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