#music

Mezzetino was a stock character in the old Italian travelling comedies — a servant type, always in love with someone who isn't having it. From what I can find, this sat in the collection of a friend who had prints made of everything, and a few decades later it was bought up for the Empress of Russia's palace.

Mezzetino was a stock character in the old Italian travelling comedies — a servant type, always in love with someone who isn't having it. From what I can find, this sat in the collection of a friend who had prints made of everything, and a few decades later it was bought up for the Empress of Russia's palace.

It got turned down by the big official Salon the year he made it, and Émile Zola wrote a defence of him in a newspaper that apparently annoyed enough readers to cost Zola the job. Wikipedia puts the flatness down to Japanese prints and Spanish painting, both of which he'd been looking hard at.

This one, from what I can find, was painted as a companion to another Watteau scene called The Surprise — the two were meant to hang as a pair.

They say the cardinal who commissioned this kept Caravaggio living in his own household — patrons like that collected talented people the way others collected art.

There's more than one of these — supposedly a first version came a few years earlier, and the garden behind was added here by an assistant rather than the man whose name is on it. He'd never been anywhere near the world he's painting; it's said the whole scene comes out of travel books and other people's prints, which was normal for this kind of picture.

Made to order for a rich Russian collector's staircase, one of a pair — the other one has people dancing instead. Wikipedia reckons he worked with no sketches at all, straight onto the canvas, moving things around until it looked right.