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EARLY P AINTINGS OF THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE IN FRANCE BY CHARLES STERLING Senio

EARLY P AINTINGS OF THE COMMEDIA DELL' ARTE IN FRANCE BY CHARLES STERLING Senior Research Fellow, Department of Paintings Among the many interesting paintings the Metropolitan Museum has recently had the good fortune to receive as loans from Mrs. Payne Whitney there is one that is not only entertaining but also somewhat puzzling.' It shows a pair of young lovers. The man is pay- ing court to the woman by putting his arms tenderly round her, and she shows her satisfac- tion in a rather surprising way, pressing his little finger with the finger and thumb of her right hand; at the same time she holds in her left hand a pair of spectacles, which she seems to have just taken off or to be offering to some one. Her intent and mischievous eye seeks ours as if to tell us the hidden meaning of her two apparently diverse actions, lest we see in them only thoughtless feminine inconse- quence, the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. The lovers are dressed in a rather strange style, and one suspects a fanciful version of mediaeval costume, some- what like that worn in Burgundy at the begin- ning of the fifteenth century. Fortunately it has been possible to clear up all this mystery. In the Cabinet des Estampes in the Bibliotheque Nationale there are two engravings very much like our picture, one of them anonymous, the other, in reverse, signed P. Perret sc. 79 and Le Blond excude. (illustrated on the following pages). The lov- ers are exactly the same in these prints as in the painting, except for a very slight difference in the position of the hand that holds the spectacles; but they have facing them a dis- consolate old man, to whom the lady is pre- senting this symbol of old age. Immediately the enigma of our painting is solved: it is a copy of the anonymous engraving; we have only the left half of the picture; the right half, showing the old man, has been cut off, per- haps because of damage, perhaps because the indiscreet witness was thought to lessen the sale value of the young lovers. When we look carefully at the canvas we see that the old frame mark is on three sides only, proving that the right side was not framed until recently. We can also see, near the spectacles, the out- line of the old man's coat just as it appears in the engravings. The meaning of the scene is now clear: it is, following the vigorous paganism of the Renaissance, both a com- mendation of young love and a satire on the unseemly ardors of love in old age. A legend in French on the prints, followed in the anony- mous one by a German translation, develops this idea, not without wit and a certain charm of orthography. Here is the text: Voiez ce viel penard enulope dans sa mante Les bras croisez gemir ce quil veut et ne peut La belle gentiment de deux dois luy presente Ses lunettes disant qua grand tort il se deut Dailleurs rend son mignon pleyn dune amour plaisante Serre son petit doit et veult tout ce qu'il veult. Bonhomme tenez vos lunettes Et regerdez bien que vous nettes De l'age propre au Jell d'amours Un chacun cherche son semblable Souffrez qu'un autre plus valable Cueille le fruit de mes beaus Jours. The. arrangement of this satirical subject that we have in our picture and the two prints must have been well known. There is another example of it in a painting of much higher quality in the Museum at Rennes (illustrated on p. 13, above). The same characters and the same poses, except that the hand holding the spectacles is slightly different and the old man, instead of muffling his hands in his cloak, makes the eloquent gesture of counting money -the final argument of the particular kind of old rake he is. But the costumes are entirely different. The lover appears as a French noble- man of the time of Charles IX and Henry III 1 On canvas, 351/4 x 32 in. Illustrated on p. 12, above. 11 The Metropolitan Museum of Art is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin www.jstor.org ® THE M E T RO P OL I TAN M U SE U M BULLETIN Summer 1943 O.F ART The Lovers. French, late XVI century, a copy after the engraving below. Lent by Mrs. Payne Whitney Woman Choosing between Youth and Age, an anonymous copy after the engraving by Perret on the opposite page oaParsoc i J i? f M Wf^?jeO84 A "tk , -uf p * On= > el -qwfa -W [. -tP*" E ngraving by P. Perret Cdated 579 and based on the Engraving by P. Perret dated 1579 and based on the painting above Woman Choosing between Youth and Age, a scene from the commedia dell' arte. French painting, about 1570-1580. In the Museum at Rennes (about 1570-1580), the old man in Venetian costume with red jacket and close-fitting trousers, black cloak and cap; the lady is dressed, if one may use the word, only in jewels and a very diaphanous veil. There is an archi- tectural background with classic moldings that suggests the interior of an Italian palace. The traditional name of the picture at-Rennes, La Femme entre les Deux Ages, sums up the scene. But there seems to be more in these pictures than a casual representation of a sa- tiric theme. Surely there is some definite source. I believe that we have here a scene from the Italian comedy, the commedia dell' arte, which, just at the end of the reign of Charles IX, was making a brilliant entrance in France. Of these first connections of France with the Italian theater we have today some knowledge. Old texts, paintings, and engravings were brought to light by a number of the older scholars, particularly Armand Baschet, and of recent years, when the interest in the com- media dell' arte was suddenly revived by Diaghileff's related researches for the Ballet Russe, by Mic, Beijer, Schwartz, and above all Duchartre.2 We are not here concerned with the players, professional or amateur, who spoke the literary comedies called by the Ital- ians scritte or sostenute, but with those, almost all professional, who played comedies all' im- proviso or dell' arte or a maschera. In this kind of theater the actors improvised the dialogue within the framework of a plot laid out in broad lines but allowing complete liberty of 2 Among the works published are the following. Those by Baschet, Beijer, and Duchartre are standard for the subject. F. Bartoli, Notizie istoriche de' comici italiani ... (Padua, 1781); A. D'Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, 2 vols. (Florence, 1877, and Turin, 1891); L. Rasi, I comici italiani (Florence, 1897-1905) and Catalogo generale della raccolta drammatica italiana di Luigi Rasi (Florence, 1912); A. Baschet, Les Comediens italiens a la cour de France (Paris, 1882); C. Mic [Miclascevsky], La Commedia dell' arte (Paris, 1927); A. Beijer, Recueil de plusieurs frag- ments des premieres comedies italiennes qui ont ete representees en France sous le regne de Henri III- Recueil dit de Fossard, conserve au Musee National de Stockholm, presente par Agne Beijer, Conservateur du Musee National de Drottningholm, suivi de Com- positions de rhetorique de M. Don Arlequin pre- sentees par P.-L. Duchartre (Paris, 1928); P.-L. Du- chartre, La Comedie italienne (Paris, 1928), Les Com- detail. They played stock characters, among which the most famous and the oldest were Il Pantalone, or Il Magnifico, the irascible old dupe; the Zany Corneto, the Zany Harlequin, II Francatrippa, and II Brighella, rustic valets and clowns; II Capitano, the braggart soldier, usually Spanish; II Dottore, the pretentious savant; L' Innamorato and L' Innamorata, the young lovers; La Franceschina, the malicious servant; and the old procuress La Ruffiana. There were set costumes for each of these, several of them including a mask. Italian players of this type undoubtedly ap- peared in France at an early date. Already in 1538, under Francis I, there are mentions in contemporary records of actors that may have been commedia players.3 Brantome recounts that Catherine de' Medici from her youth was fond of the Zanies and Pantaloons and "en riait tout son saoul tout comme une autre." As he accompanied the queen in 1548 to Lyons, where there was a numerous and rich colony of Italian merchants and where a Florentine troupe was playing La Calandria, a comedy by Bibbiena, it was probably at this early date that Catherine had occasion to laugh so whole- heartedly. We are not certain, however, that these Zanies and Pantaloons were members of com- plete troupes, and the first mention of an or- ganized company of Italian comedians in France dates only from 1571. They played at Nogent-le-Roi, not far from Chartres, for the court of Charles IX. A legal document names the uploads/Litterature/ commedia-dell-arte-in-france.pdf