Watteau's Italian Comedians

Abstract

FRENCH ARTISTS DEVELOPED A PENCHANT for depicting the visiting troupes of commedia dell' arte players from Italy as early as the midsixteenth century, with the results that the earliest and most copious visual documentation of their improvised skits is French rather than Italian.' Subsequent to this early phase two major artists devoted their skills to capturing such theatrical representations: Jacques Callot (1592-1635) and Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). The best introduction we have today to commedia dell'arte is what Watteau took with his, eyes and rendered with his hand. Watteau's principal picture of the Italian players was engraved under the title of L' Amour au Theatre Italien' a print advertised the Mercure de France May 1734 (Fig. 1). The engraver, CharlesNicolas Cochin, took care to make the print the exact size of the original painting, as pointed out on the caption under the title of the picture, and furthermore, he took the trouble to engrave it in the same direction as Watteau, as was pointed out the Mercure, not reversed like most engravings. Watteau's original painting has traditionally been assigned to the year 1716, when the Regent summoned a troupe of Italian players under Luigi Riccoboni to take up residence Paris. They were eventually installed the old Hotel de Bourgogne the Marais, which had been home to the Comediens Italiens du Roy before Louis XIV expelled them 1697. One of Watteau's earliest