Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell 'Arte and Porcelain Sculpture by Meredith Chilton (review)

394 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Meredith Chilton. Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell=Arte and Porcelain Sculpture George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art with Yale University Press. xvi, 368. US $65.00 Imagine Watteau=s Plaisirs du bal come to life B the fashionable guests intermingle with members of the commedia dell=arte cast still in costume after their performance. On the palatial terrace, the central couple performs a court dance, while musicians entertain from the sidelines, next to a sideboard piled high with sweetmeats. Hold that gaze, for it was precisely at that historical moment, just before 1720, when the technique of hard-paste porcelain was perfected at the Meissen factory in Saxony and Augustus the Strong commissioned sets of exquisite commedia porcelain figures, to be used as centrepieces on dessert buffets like the one in Watteau=s picture. Those eighteenth-century porcelains and the social and cultural context for their creation form the basis for a fascinating book by Meredith Chilton, Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell=Arte and Porcelain Sculpture. Splendidly illustrated by the art objects from the collection of the George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art, which are scrutinized in the accompanying catalogue raisonné, it documents the taste for the commedia in European culture during the early modern period through comparative costumes, garden sculptures, prints, paintings, and even danced movement. In Chapter 1, Domenico Pietropaolo provides the historical background for the development of the commedia dell=arte as a staged performance all=improvviso from its inception in the mid-sixteeenth century to its senescence two hundred years later. Known for their ribald humour and physical comedy routines called lazzi, these professional actors made text into performance. The Italian comedians exploited topical subjects and through humour ridiculed the power of the monied and educated classes, country bumpkins, the lovelorn, and absolutist oppression. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the commedia dell=arte played on marketplace platforms or palace stages; its improvised scenarios transgressed the social and political order. The stock characters B the Captain, Pantalone, Harlequin, the Doctore, Pulcinello, and the lovers and zanni B evolved over time and took on local accents. They became part of panEuropean popular culture. The old roles took on new fictive life in prints and paintings, in costumes for aristocratic masked balls, and in porcelain figures and dessert ware. During the eighteenth century, the stock plots and characters gave way to Enlightenment demands for fully written out plays; realistic action, character development, and settings; and shared bourgeois values. The auteur replaced the actor. Marivaux and Goldoni animated the old characters with sensibility and civilized manners. The subversive element of the old commedia became refined and commodified; the political contestation lost its sting to ornament and leisured entertainment. humanities 395 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 In chapters 2 through 5, Chilton analyses the cast of commedia characters, the gestures and movement vocabulary associated with each role, and their dissemination to the court and masquerading amateurs. Backed by extensive research, her investigation of the integration of the commedia among the arts and within broader society brings pleasure to the eye and the mind. Well-known and obscure illustrations, beautifully rendered in half-tone or colour reproduction, reinforce the excellent textual analysis: here a surviving eighteenth-century dress is compared to a portrait by Antoine Pesne, there an actor=s pose, known from large-scale or miniature sculptures, is linked to a Callot print. The characters come to life in the frescoed Hall of Masks at Cesky Krumlov Castle, the Italian garden sculptures, or the porcelain figures from the Duke of Weissenfels=s series. Her section on gesture and dance make the postures of the Meissen sculptures all the more >readable.= Certain body language was attached to each stock character B Harlequin=s bow, the forlorn stance of Pierrot, or the dancing figure of Columbine B each has hermeneutic significance across national or class boundaries. In Chapter 4, Chilton discusses the court of Augustus the Strong of Saxony, where the formula for true porcelain technique was perfected. The porcelain figures invented and produced by such artists as...