Pastoral and Pulcinella: Representations of a Commedia Dell’Arte Character in the Countryside, 1791- 1793

Pastoral and Pulcinella: Representations of a Commedia dell’Arte Character in the Countryside, 1791- 1793

Hayley Eaves

Department of Art History & Communication Studies

McGill University

Winter 2019

A Thesis Submitted to McGill University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree of Master of Arts in Art History

ABSTRACT

This thesis offers a new interpretation of a ceiling fresco entitled L’altalena dei Pulcinella (The Swing of

Pulcinella) (c. 1791-93) by Venetian draftsman and painter, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804).

It considers Tiepolo’s portrayal of commedia dell’arte street performer Pulcinella (Punch, in English) in the countryside, where his role as incorrigible scamp appears as if affected by the effects of his natural stage.

Approaching the fresco from the perspective of its mismatched setting and subject, I venture to consider how the intricate interplay of pastoral, a space of great spiritual possibility in the

Venetian imagination, and Pulcinella, a comic fool with marked spiritual poverty, might affect the meaning we ascribe from Tiepolo’s ceiling.

In lieu of a protracted account of my argument, I offer a précis of the matter: The implicit realism of pastoral signals a physical movement of retreat, renewal, and return, with an eye especially to renewal. Likewise, Venetian pastoral, from its genesis as a pictorial and literary genre in the sixteenth century required of its visitors – poets, lovers, lunatics – a real transformation of some kind, be it moral, spiritual, or intellectual, as discerned in the cerebral rippling of Giorgione’s urban poet in the Pastoral Concert (c. 1505). Tiepolo’s ceiling substitutes contemplative men with a brood of insipid Pulcinelli, figures traditionally ascribed with vapid expenditure and festive time. The Swing thus signals a disruption in the transformative powers of the green place, while bringing to trial the comic’s capacity for renewal as a surrogate of his society and their feigned relation to the world.

With these ideas in mind, my interdisciplinary thesis in two parts establishes, first, a brief history of commedia dell’arte actors transforming in the wilderness, as read in early modern commedia pastorale (pastoral comedies), or magical pastorals. From here, I develop a new theory for interpreting

Tiepolo’s comics in the countryside. As part of this theory called ‘pastoralesque’ I consider the

comic’s role in altering the natural landscape from a locus amoenus (delightful place) to a second carnival. I then demonstrate how his figuration signals a disruption in the shared function of these particular spaces for societal resumption. In the second section, I question the conditions of

Pulcinella’s retreat as a participant in the annual villeggiatura (country holiday) alongside his subsequent potential for renewal. I close by thinking of Pulcinella’s Swing within the context of a second swing in the villa’s Sala dei Satiri (Room of Satyrs), occupied by a half-wild hirsute savage, interpreted here as Pulcinella’s primordial ego.

In writing Pastoral and Pulcinella, I aim to decipher the meaning of Tiepolo’s yet unperceived fusion of urban and pastoral realities. Seen within the context of this telling juxtaposition, the otherwise unthinking scenario that unwinds on Tiepolo’s ceiling proves to capsule a far more troubling reality, first teased via the image of a gauche hunchback wielding his playmate to-and-fro over a vertiginous cliff.

RÉSUMÉ

Nous offrons ici une nouvelle interprétation de la fresque L’altalena dei Pulcinella (La balançoire de

Pulcinella) (v. 1791-1793) de Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804). Nous examinons ici la représentation d’un comique urbain, Pulcinella à la campagne, où ses basses aspérités et ses petits défauts semblent influencés par les effets de la scène naturelle où il se trouve.

Sous l’angle de cette étrange dichotomie entre un comique spirituellement pauvre dans un lieu de grande richesse spirituelle dans le discours vénitien, j’examine pour la première fois la manière dont l’interaction ironique entre le sujet et le décor a offert à l’artiste un canal idéal pour parler de la société de son époque.

En tant que parcours physique et intellectuel de retraite, de renouveau et de retour, avec un regard particulier sur le renouveau, la pastorale vénitienne, depuis sa genèse comme genre pictural et littéraire au XVIe siècle, a exigé de ses hommes une véritable transformation. Cependant, dans son exhibition mièvre et son insouciance, la Balançoire de Tiepolo juge de la capacité du comique pour s’épanouir, comme substitut de la ville en dépérissement du personnage.

Dans ma thèse interdisciplinaire en deux parties axée sur cette question, je définis en premier lieu le rôle de Pulcinella dans le théâtre comique traditionnel, où ses visites à la campagne ont une importance particulière qui mérite d’être examinée en profondeur. J’examine ensuite les similitudes entre le cadre naturel de Pulcinella à la ville et son nouveau cadre dans la représentation de Tiepolo, pour montrer que la version créative de la pastorale de l’artiste, peuplée d’hommes masqués, fonctionne comme un second carnaval avec fonction partagée de libération et de renouveau de la société. Dans la dernière section, j’examine les raisons pour lesquelles l’image de Pulcinella remet en question tous les espoirs de changement et de progrès. Je sonde notamment les conditions possibles de la retraite de Pulcinella, en parallèle avec le symbolisme d’oisiveté de la balançoire. Pour finir, je

III

mets en lumière la comparaison de Pulcinella faite par Tiepol avec l’occupant d’une deuxième balançoire dans la Sala dei Satiri de la villa (salle des satyres), demi-sauvage hirsute, interprété ici comme le moi primordial de Pulcinella.

Dans la présente thèse, je vise à démontrer que la Balançoire de Pulcinella, dans la perspective de l’interaction complexe de la pastorale et de Pulcinella, modifie le sens que nous donnons à la fresque. En effet, vue de cette manière, l’image de la joyeuse balançoire visant à nous amuser se transforme en une vision plus sinistre – celle d’un inconscient comique oscillant au-dessus d’une falaise vertigineuse entre peur et espoir.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... I

Résumé ...... III

Table of Contents ...... IV

List of Figures ...... V

Acknowledgments ...... VIII

I. Introduction ...... 1

i.i Pastoral ...... 7

i.ii Pulcinella...... 11

i.iii Literature Review ...... 18

II. Carnival, Comic Theatre, and Pastoral ...... 31

ii.i Commedia pastorale...... 31

ii.ii Pastoralesque ...... 39

III. Narratives of Villeggiatura ...... 49

iii.i Goldoni, Gozzi, and l’opera buffa ...... 49

iii.ii Satyr ...... 58

IV. Conclusion ...... 63

Figures ...... 65

Bibliography ...... 84

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1 Floor-plan of the North-East wing of the Villa at Zianigo, 1759-1797, reconstructed in 1925 at the Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 2 Floor-plan of the Museum reconstruction of Tiepolo’s camera dipinte from the Villa at Zianigo, Museo Ca’Rezzonico, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 3 View into the Sala dei Pulcinelli, Museo Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 4 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), Pulcinella in Love, 1797, detached fresco, Museo del Settecento Veneziano Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 5 G. D. Tiepolo, Pulcinella’s Departure, 1793-97, detached fresco, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice.

Fig. 6 G. D. Tiepolo, Pulcinella sull’altalena; or, The Swing of Pulcinella, 1791-93, 200 x 179 cm, detached fresco from the villa at Zianigo, 200 x 170 cm, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 7 The Swing showing surrounding tondi and scenes of Pulcinelli in the countryside.

Fig. 8 Giorgione (1478-1510), Pastoral Concert, c. 1509, oil on canvas, 105 x 137 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Fig. 9 Giorgione, The Three Philosophers, 1508-09, oil on canvas, 124 x 145 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

Fig. 10 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1969-1770), Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Pulcinella morto, c. 1755, acquaint cut into the outline of the black border, Centro Vittore Branca, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 11 G. D. Tiepolo, Satyr on a Swing, c.1759, detached fresco from the Villa at Zianigo, Sala dei Satiri, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 12 [Detail] G. D. Tiepolo, Pulcinelli toiling the Soil, 1793-97, Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice.

Fig. 13 Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569), The Fight between Carnival and Lent, 1559, oil on panel, 118 x 164 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.

Fig. 14 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, A Dance in the Country, c. 1756, oil on canvas, 75.6 x 120 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, USA.

Fig. 15 Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), The Shepherds, 1717-19, oil on canvas, 56 x 81 cm, Schloss Charlottenburg, Berlin, Germany.

Fig. 16 Jean-Honoré Fragonard, The Swing; or The Happy Accidents of the Swing, 1767, oil on canvas, 81 x 64 cm, The Wallace Collection, London, England.

Fig. 17 G. D. Tiepolo, The Swing, eighteenth century, wash etching, 29 x 37.4 cm, Museo Correr, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 18 G. D. Tiepolo, Recreation, eighteenth century, wash etching, 29.2 x 37.1 cm, Museo Correr, Venice, Italy.

Fig. 19 [Detail] Monochrome, tondo from The Swing of Pulcinella, 1791-1793.

VII

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The lectures and seminars of Professor Chriscinda Henry introduced me to the Venetian school and to the importance of close visual analysis. The enthusiasm and care Professor Henry demonstrated during teachings on specifically Giorgione mark a foundational point of departure for this thesis, the product of exemplary supervision. The seminars of Professor Matthew C. Hunter proffered further inspiration still, for which I am perpetually grateful. I am equally beholden to the

Director of the Visual Arts Collection, Gwendolyn Owens, for many special opportunities.

It is upon the fortuitous receipt of a Max Stern Museum Fellowship, a Joseph Armand

Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship – Masters, a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement, a

Graduate Research Enhancement and Travel Award, and a Graduate Mobility Award that my visit to the Sala dei Pulcinelli and my consultation of collections at McGill’s Rosalynde Stearn Puppet

Collection, the Getty Research Institute, the Morgan Library & Museum, the Centro Vittore Branca, the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, the Museo Correr, and the Casa di Carlo Goldoni was realized.

I would like to extend additional thanks to Mum, Nan, Amanda, and to Eric. It is to Sooty and to Archer that this thesis is affectionately dedicated.

VIII

INTRODUCTION

Following a lengthy inheritance squabble in 1772, Venetian draftsman and painter, Giovanni

Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) came into possession of his father’s villa at Zianigo, a small town near Mirano.1 Having retired there in around the year 1790, the seasoned artist spent his final years decorating the ground-floor rooms of the country home, filling each ceiling, wall, and the occasional door frame with lively animals, plants, trees, and creatures of all kinds.2 Rendered in a light genre- based vein, the villa’s verdant views dignify the fresh and intoxicating delights of the country retreat, blurring the lines between realism and ideality. Advocating the dream, scholars have described

Tiepolo’s picture world as a sort of Arcadia domestica (domestic Arcadia) for the delicacy of the artist’s brush and the unspoiled complexion of his subjects.3 “Whenever there was simplicity of costume, a rustic quality” observes Venetian critic Gasparo Gozzi (1713-1786),4 “there is the golden age.”5 As a link to this bygone world, the wistful occupants of Tiepolo’s frescoes appear as if to relish unperturbed in the comforts of their natural surrounding; they dance, sing, and frolic with an unauthorized zeal that beguiles the eye of the beholder.6

In lieu of the villa’s visual delights and diversions, the frescoes at Zianigo proffer insights that are far are greater than the bucolic simplicity of country life figured as part of Tiepolo’s nostalgia for a paradise lost. Perhaps better defined as a private museum, personal memento, or an

1 Steffi Roettgen, Italian Frescoes, the Baroque Era, 1600-1800. New Haven, CT; London, UK: Yale University Press, 1982, 453. 2 Antonio Morassi, “Zianigo di Mirano, Villa Tiepolo,” Frescoes from Venetian Villas. Mercedes Precerutti Garberi (ed.). New York: Phaidon, 1971, 144. 3 Annalia Delneri, “Un’ Arcadia domestica: Fauni, satiri, centauri, e ninfe,” I Tiepolo: Virtuosismo e’ ironia, Dario Succi (ed.). Mirano: Barchessa Villa xxv, 1988, 88. 4 This is an insert from Gozzi’s La Gazzetta Veneta, a popular chronicle on Venetian life during the eighteenth century. 5 Gaspare Gozzi, La Gazzetta Veneta. Florence: Sansoni, 1957, 33. 6 Together, these especial features are seen to evoke the peak of Venice’s golden age during the thirteenth century, a past time when life was prosperous and untroubled. 1

erupted porte crayon, the villa’s themed camera dipinte (painted rooms) capsule specific moments from the artist’s career spanning over fifty years.7

Detached from Zianigo in 1906 and transferred to the Museo Ca’ Rezzonico in 1925,8

Tiepolo’s painted rooms can now be viewed in a makeshift villa that constitutes a main attraction of the Museo today (fig. 1-2).9 In near lifelike fashion, visitors to the collection step first into an entrance corridor decorated with Tiepolo’s Rinaldo Leaving the Garden of Armida (c.1770),10 a lucid piece initially adjacent to the Sala dei Satiri (Room of Satyrs) and/or Sala dei Centauri (Room of

Centaurs) with scenes of half-wild denizens and a rectangular frieze overhead with narratives taken from Roman history.11 Leading from Armida, visitors are then led through another two rooms, as would have been the case at Zianigo. The first of these rooms, the so-called Camerino del falchetto

(Little Room of Falcons) contains two frescos, a falcon swooping down on a flock of sparrows and an exotic parrot perched on a door frame. The second room, entered through a door crowned with a decorative sovraporta, possibly representing Mother Nature, contains Tiepolo’s now-famous Il

Mondo Nuovo (c. 1791), depicting a Venetian crowd enjoying a public peep show. Continuing past Il

Mondo Nuovo and the ceiling fresco The Triumph of the Arts (c. 1790) visitors are then invited to enter through a little door to a modest12 room13 having “nessun precedente” (no precedent).14

7 For example, Tiepolo’s Via Crucis (Stations of the Cross) (1749) share stylistic elements with later frescoes in the villa’s chapel. His series of over one-hundred drawings of centaurs, fauns, and satyrs (c. 1780) are also re-imagined on the walls of the villa’s Sala dei Centauri. His sketches of animals and scenes of everyday life have echoes in the frescoes Il Mondo Nuovo (c. 1791) and Passeggiata in Villa (c. 1791), among others. And finally, the artist’s early easel paintings and drawings of commedia dell’arte comic Pulcinella are re-invented in the Sala dei Pulcinelli, the last of all the room to be decorated. 8 The frescoes were almost sold to a foreign dealer prior to the First World War (c. 1914), though were fortunately rescued by the Italian Government. Shortly thereafter, they were restored and reassembled. See: James Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, 1962, 54. 9 Morassi, “Zianigo di Mirano,” 10. 10 This was a popular theme in Italian painting, taken from the epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581) by the poet Torquato Tasso (1544-1595). Tiepolo portrays the scene with irony, perhaps to demonstrate, as Árpád Szakolczai has argued, his disillusion, regretting the coming of an age, which gives us an early snapshot of his mood. This observation is echoed by Tiepolo scholar Antonio Mariuz, who argues that the artist had a singular acumen of perception of contemporary historical reality, which he shared to the world through his works. See: Árpád Szakolczai, Comedy and the Public Sphere, 2013, 264; Antonio Mariuz, G.D. Tiepolo, 1971, 81. 11 “Tiepolo Room,” Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museum Pamphlet, 2018, 10. 12 While the room in question is modest in its reproduction at the Museo Ca’Rezzonico, it was originally the largest room on the ground-floor of Tiepolo’s villa. 2

The Sala dei Pulcinella (Room of Clowns)15 was most likely started in around the year 1757 to 1759,16 shortly following Tiepolo’s return from Bavaria in 1753, at which time the villa belonged to the artist’s father, Venetian Master Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770) (fig. 3).17 The comedy- infused Sala features numerous monochrome sovraporte and tondi, in addition to four principle frescoes depicting commedia dell’arte character Pulcinella during his villeggiatura (country holiday) on the

Veneto (Venetian mainland territories) (fig. 4-5). The attractive scenarios portray the freedoms of the holiday, a time that was full of joy with an ease of accessibility where even Pulcinella, a zanni

(peasant) performer, is invited to enjoy all the looser aspects of eighteenth-century villa life – pleasures of the flesh, chicanery,18 and drunkenness, to name a few.19 By way of illustration, a wall fresco in the Sala entitled Pulcinella in Love (1797) captures the enthusiasm of an almost life-size party al fresco wherewith Pulcinelli cavort in sweet oblivion, accompanied by a noblewoman and her yapping lapdog (see fig. 4). Satiating his gnawing hunger for pleasure, the ever cheeky Pulcinella grabs at the breast of our young woman in masquerade; she too appears liberated, as her exposed ankle and painted fan hoisted for our delight confidently suggest. A second wall fresco in the Sala entitled The Departure of Pulcinella (1793-97) captures the capricious Pulcinella in one of his more

13 The Sala dei Pulcinelli was initially located to the south-east quarter of the Villa at Zianigo. See: Filippo Pedrocco (ed.), Satiri, Centauri e Pulcinelli: Gli affreschi restaurati di Giandomenico Tiepolo conservati a Ca’ Rezzonico, 2000, 53. 14 Adriano Mariuz, Tiepolo. Venice: Cierre Edizioni, 2008, 375. 15 The Sala is described as a bedroom, a dressing room, or a place of meditation. See: Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella ovvero Divertimento per li regazzi, 2016, 11; Adriano Mariuz and Filippo Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo: Les fresques de Zianigo à Ca’ Rezzonico, 2004, 3. 16 Adriano Mariuz and Filippo Pedrocco, Giandomenico Tiepolo: Les fresques de Zianigo à Ca’ Rezzonico, 2004, 3. 17 Tiepolo’s intrigue in the figure of Pulcinella is chiefly attributed to the close working relationship he shared with his father, Giambattista Tiepolo. A second possible source of inspiration for the Sala dei Pulcinelli may have been the five large tapestries showing commedia dell’arte scenes for the ‘Venetian Room’ at the Residenz of the Prince-Bishop Carl Philipp von Greiffenklau at Würzburg, which he would have seen when working on a substantial fresco commission at the Palace with his father in around the 1750s, when the tapestries were installed. The tapestries were designed by Bavarian artist Joseph Scheubel II and were likely inspired by a set of engravings by Johann Jacob Schübler. Meredith Chilton, Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture, 2001, 230. 18 Eighteenth-century villeggiatura was a marker of status; though, as seen in dramatic plays from the period, nobles often faked their wealth through trips to the countryside, where their indulgence in the expensive villa life resulted in their bankruptcy. Pulcinella reflects a similar sort of trickery or deceit in his being a comic peasant appearing to enjoy the elite holiday of villeggiatura. 19 Morassi, 146. 3

grotesque roles (see fig. 5). Here, the comic is draped across the ground in sleepy-sweet quiescence, resembling a puppet following human activation; or indeed, a drunkard.

These tellurian portrayals of villeggiatura were the final installments to the Sala’s Pulcinelli epic and attend to a far more airy and intoxicating work that betides overhead, the ceiling fresco L’altalena dei Pulcinella (The Swing of Pulcinella) (c. 1791) (fig. 6-7).20 Let us for a moment consider the formal qualities of the work, which is the focus of this thesis: On nature’s side of an oval oculus, denizens gather to inhale the salubrious mountain air while the blithe Pulcinella swings on a tenuous rope between two trees, accounting for nothing but the cerulean sky beyond his beak (see fig. 6).

Diagonal lines ripple through the fresco’s surface to reveal multiple registers of meditation in a single frame. A precipice marks an opening to the scene, scaled with the use of a rudimentary ladder that curiously juts into view. Atop the natural precipice, clusters of identically-clad Pulcinelli engage in conversation to reveal a second-world reality unfurling above our terrestrial world in the remodeled Sala. Cobalt shades on the precipice are stroked vertically and graduated into buff, leading the eye skyward to a section of off-white costumes. Meeting horizontally their vertical action, cloudy clusters enter like a single linen screen from the conifers at right, brushing across the surface like a second canvas for the action. Contour lines on the hunchbacks’ costumes suggest movement and wear to substitute the painterly sculpt of muscles in motion. The urban comics enjoy a moment of relaxation atop the natural cliff’s edge. The mood of the scene is absorbing, jocular, and just a touch dizzying.21

In the ceiling’s curious juxtaposition of setting and subject, The Swing reflects a new idiom for

Northern Italian villa décor of the eighteenth century. Indeed, as a space traditionally prescribed for the display of classical learning and virtue, Tiepolo’s portrayal proves inconsistent with the

20 Giorgio Agamben, Pulcinella ovvero Divertimento per li regazzi. Rome: Nottetempo, 2016, 11. 21 Atmospheric perspective is not wholly achieved here. The levels of meditation are realized in solid color and the figures share a comparable size throughout the composition. The lack of spatial verisimilitude makes the scene appear as if to be parallel to my face. My gaze is, thus, not swallowed into a recessional sky. 4

“extremely regal” character of especially Venetian villas during the period,22 and remains one of the very few examples where commedia figures are moved indoors in this marked fashion.23 This relatively new style of low subjects being treated in villa décor was intimated, perhaps for the first time,24 at the Villa Valmarana ai Nani where Tiepolo painted charming scenes of villeggiatura, of gentlefolk at work and at play, of peasants, and of the Carnival at Venice, proclaiming a new genius and a modern taste for reality, all the while maintaining a degree of the refinement and sophistication conducive to villa life. At home in Zianigo, where no rigid etiquette required the artist to keep a safe distance from fawning, fatuous, or plebian subtexts, we are invited to view the full force of his creative imagination at play; here, the artist imagines new themes very little imitated or developed in succeeding Venetian art. His paintings reveal an almost obsessive attraction to a sphere of reality generally considered inferior, a “wholly natural” world that found expression in his

Pulcinella epic, which he paints with great care and unflagging wonder.25 This is not to say that

Tiepolo’s agenda at Zianigo was a simple one though, for while Pulcinella was an inferior soul on stage he was also an exceptionally versatile fool, wearing many hats and conjuring multiple meanings. This brings us, once again, to The Swing. Here, Tiepolo works the comic into the vita contemplativa (contemplative life) on the ceiling, where he appears as if mythologized.26

22 Like the Villa Pisani on the Veneto, for example, where Tiepolo had worked previously. See: Morassi, 11. 23 Of the examples we know are the commedia-inspired frescoes at Trausnitz Castle in Narrentreppe in Landshut, Germany where a trail of comic-buffoon scenes decorate a secondary staircase in the Italian Wing of the castle. Daniele Vianello has observed that the frescoes celebrate Prince Wilhelm’s love of Italian comedy, with great symbolic potency. The walls express comic attitudes also found in the extra-theatricality of the masks and refer to other experiences such as fancy dress parties and carnival disguises. The comics here are, thus, autonomous, being released from the shows. Another example includes the comic sculptures of Giovanni Bonazza (1654-1736) at the Villa Wildmann Borletti, Dominio di Bagnoli in Padua, Italy. See: Daniele Vianello, L’Arte del Buffone, 2005, 168; Margherita A. Visentini, “A Garden Sculpture and Fresco Decoration in 17th and 18th Century Venetian Villas,” 1007, 88. 24 James Byam Shaw refers to these as “the most original contribution to Venetian painting of the period” James B. Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, 1962, 47. 25 Adelheid Gealt and George Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996, 31; Shaw, 1962, 47. 26 Identified by Michael Levey as an image of “resurrection,” Tiepolo’s Pulcinelli appear as if they have arisen from the tempestuous world they once occupied as urban performers. Echoing this observation, Tiepolo scholar Adriano Mariuz extracts the following elements from the scene: “What opens at their feet? It would appear to be a pit, from which they have just emerged using the ladder, almost chthonic creatures ascending into the light.” Still, there is something almost touchable about our comic hero. Swinging overhead, he is close to breaching the ceiling and entering into our room. He 5

In effect, Tiepolo’s ceiling modernizes the space by exalting a figure of local, cultural- geographical meaning who is deliberately natural, ungrammatical, and caustic. In so doing, the artist finds a channel to parody the annual villeggiatura, typically experienced by a set of exemplary and wealthy individuals, while at the same time freeing the spirit of the dilated commedia dell’arte.27 It is here that Pulcinella, rather than a hero or an ancient god, allows us to bask for a moment in the fantasy of the ancient otium (leisure time)28 lost with history.29 Indeed, while otium enjoyed the protection of the Lares – heroic female guardians of nature – Tiepolo’s vision of leisure time falls under the protection of Pulcinella, a figure derived from the ancient Oscan mask of Macchus, though he is by no means heroic, which is to say that our time in the country is always under threat.30

The potential of our retreat coming to an abrupt end comes to light in the Pulcinelli’s dislocation from the earth, where they appear as if hypnotized by their surrounding, showing no natural immunity to nature’s power. More than this, their costumes do not suggest that they belong to nature, but rather, that they are enjoying a momentary retreat to the countryside. They wear identical larve (beaked masks), long socks, and frilly-trimmed suits, for clowning. One Pulcinelli’s hat is cocked off, signaling rest or rehabilitation from the heat, following an arduous climb atop a cliff’s edge, an altogether human activity. Together with his comrades, he enjoys an escape from reality, evoked for a second time in the symbolism of the swing – a melodic activity being literally paused in

Tiepolo’s portrayal. Amidst the confusion, and for just a moment, the world and all its troubles stop. is, thus, more of a liminal figure than a hero, and more akin to a caged bird than to a wild and mythic creature. See: Michael Levey, Painting in XVII Century Venice, 1959, 36; Adriano Mariuz and Giuseppe Pavanello, Tiepolo: Ironia e comico, 2004, 62. 27 Commedia dell’arte was thought to be dead by the mid-eighteenth century. 28 The ceiling fresco in the Stanza del Bacco at the Villa Barbaro on the Veneto by Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) alludes to the enjoyable aspects of the holiday, reserved for the husband. It might be odd, then, that Pulcinella, a figure with feminine attributes is here depicted enjoying the holiday, akin to Veronese’s husband. The fresco characterizes the villa as an ideal place of otium, or leisure, and of artistic and intellectual activity. See: Julian-Matthais Kliemann, Italian Frescoes, High Renaissance and Mannerism, 1510-1600. New York: Abberville Press, 2004, 414. 29 An invitation further exaggerated in the symbolism of the ladder, suggesting that we too might take a ride on the rudimentary rope to nowhere. 30 Mariuz, Tiepolo, 195. 6

The Swing appears to impart the stirrings of the artist’s surrounding countryside on a troupe of unassuming urban comics. Absorbed in their sleepy-safe suspension, the ceiling’s untroubled occupants appear as if affected by the animation of nature;31 the wind’s gust drives a sail through the legs of our Pulcinella on a swing, while his amici have been called from their journey, in the name of fresh air.32 As the comics surrender to the paradox of the tranquil rest stop at the tip of a vertiginous cliff, we are invited to ruminate on the feeling of a ceiling as it comes to imitate the impressions of a natural world, immortalized here in the sensation of pastoral bliss.33

i.i Pastoral

The idea of an efficacious countryside had deep roots in Venetian pastoral from its genesis34 as an established genre in art and drama during the sixteenth century.35 In Venetian painting of the High

Renaissance, this natural animation or movement can be seen in moody landscapes with foreboding lightening skies, in the pulsating and kinetic effects of light, and in pensive pastures with hypnotic effects.36 In the cryptic Pastoral Concert (1505-09) by Venetian Old Master, Giorgione (1478-1510), for example, an urban poet nests in the grass, suggesting that he is privy to the magic of this fantasy (fig.

31 The animation of nature according to pastoral literature and philosophical speculation during the sixteenth century was believed to alter situations and subjects. Leonardo da Vinci showed an interest too in the effects of nature, whether his subject was the Virgin Mary, a moving dust storm, or a ‘pulsing’ Mona Lisa, as Vasari described her. See: John K. G. Shearman, Mannerism. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967, 49-50; Kristin Philipps-Court, The Perfect Genre: Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy, 2011, 159. 32 Akin to the frescos of his father, the younger Tiepolo’s Swing has the power to immobilize viewers with the kind of experiential pleasure described by Immanuel Kant’s vision of art as a source of pleasure, in addition to Michael Fried’s “pastoral conception” wherewith vacant scenes and green pastures call upon us to enter and to become part of them. Martin Heidegger, too, observes that we should treat the poem as a work of art that can be inhabited. See: Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, 1994, 9; Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1760, 20; Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 1908, 132; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 1971, 181-182. 33 Cicero introduction to Book III of his Tusculanae Disputationes (45 BC) contrasts care of the body with carelessness of the soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero and Margaret Graver (ed.), Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 3-8. 34 I take the time to re-interpret Venetian pastorals as far back as the sixteenth century as they are instrumental in the way that Arcadia was collectively envisioned in Venice during the early modern period. 35 Kristin Phillips-Court, The Perfect Genre: Drama and Painting in Renaissance Italy. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, 159. 36 In order: Giorgione’s, The Tempest (1505-1508), Tintoretto’s (1518-1594) St. Mary of Egypt in Meditation (1582-87), and Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert (c. 1505). 7

8). As he strums on his lute, he is taken by the sights and insights offered by his natural setting. He is not a mere spectator, then, but posits a real effort of mind and spirit that visually distills pastoral’s affective powers.37 It is the hope that he will learn from his sojourn to the countryside and that he will return some discovered insights to his urban world, depicted on the horizon.

Once again, in Giorgione’s Three Philosophers (1509) a young philosopher appears as if enraptured by his thoughts against a backdrop of leafy trees and a towering rock formation (fig. 9).

Here, in the safety of this natural frame, he is invited to reminisce on the place from whence he has journeyed – a village on the horizon – and to then ruminate on his future,38 the favorable destiny of every learned man, wisdom in old age.39 These images of nature present the wilderness as an independent reality of its own,40 as a place where anything might be possible.41 As a state of mind, though, Arcadia was neither only the real world nor only the pastoral one, 42 but something in- between worlds, representing a continuous and perpetually unfinished reality, aptly captured in

David Rosand’s concept of Natura Naturans, whereby nature is in a constant state of becoming, being always active, generative, and life-supporting. 43

37 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, 70. 38 A future perhaps embodied in the aging figures at his rear. 39 As per the platonic ideal, pastoral was seen as a transformative world, where all men could change together. These ideas are reinstated by Italian classical scholar, Angelo Poliziano (1545-1494), who possibly wrote the first pastoral play in around 1480. Pastoral also imitates the original Academy outside Athens. Sophia Howlett, Marsilio Ficino and His World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 20, 154. 40 Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Laurence King Publishing Limited, 1997, 113. 41 Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice. 1997, 138. 42 In secular literature, the idea of an efficacious place or person was highlighted in Erasmus’ Folly. Folly was a powerful fool, tempting men into rowdiness, laziness, forgetfulness, flattery and madness. And she was not a guise, but was always fully herself, exclaiming that she never worse disguises, nor “do I say one thing and think another.” She is, in this way, a heedless fool distinct from Feste in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; or’ What you Will (1602) who proves himself a thinking fool when prophesying to Olivia: “What’s to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty; Then come kiss me, sweet-and-twenty, Youth a stuff will not endure (II, iii, iii). William Shakespeare, “Twelfth Night; or What you Will,” in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2015, 649; Desiderius Erasmus, Praise of Folly. Public Domain: Christian Classicals Ethereal Library, 1990, 13. 43 David Rosand, “Venetian Painting of the Cinquecento,” Venice: Art and Architecture, ed. Giandomenico Romanelli. Konermann, Italy, 2005), 336, 348. 8

Together, these early pictorial pastorals bring to light larger philosophical speculations in

Venice and elsewhere in Italy on the inspiration of nature; notably, the elevation of the spirit and the state of the soul through ritual visits to the countryside.44 Oft emphasized in these pictorial interpretations is the affectivity of pastoral to incur a change of some kind, be it moral, intellectual, or spiritual, as evinced most notably via the image of dislocated urban figures in the countryside, where their civic worlds are, for the most part, always in sight. As a surrogate of his Serenissima (the Most

Serene Republic), then, Giorgione’s urban poet and his accompanying friends have a role to play in upholding the pastoral fiction, an ideal reiterated for a second time in the clever rendering of a crystal flute from which running water,45 as a marker of renewal, change, and cleansing, spills (fig.

8).46 David Rosand too identifies a “feeling of movement”47 in the Pastoral Concert that we can link to the implicit realism of the place as a topos of extension that naturally summons the physical movement of retreat, renewal, and return, with an eye especially to renewal. This reality was part of the viewing experience too. Indeed, Ars potentior natur (art is more powerful than Nature) was the motto on Venetian artist Titian’s (1488-1576) heraldic insignia, representing a reliance on the power of the object that is surely backed by Carlo Ridolfi (1594-1658) writing in Giorgione’s time. When visiting Titian’s mythical pastoral Venus and Adonis (1554), for example, the Italian biographer Ridolfi

44 Venice’s secure position during the sixteenth century also had practical consequences for art, as seen in the number of pastorals being produced in Venice during this period. Though, as Patricia Fortini Brown has shown, it was already in the thirteenth century that Franciscan teachings were making people aware of the spiritual quality of nature. Such views were brought to life in the paintings of Giovanni Bellini (1430-1516) and Lorenzo Lotto (c. 1480-1556), for example. In Bellini’s Madonna of the Little Trees (1487) the landscape background is more than just a setting, but a space with affect on the composition as a whole. Similarly, Lotto’s Jerome in the Wilderness (1506) was a metaphor of atonement, of the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, and of the virtue of separation from the world and worldly concerns; in other words, being one with nature and thought. See: Patricia Fortini Brown, Art and Life in Renaissance Venice, 1997, 113-115. 45 The idea of renewal is raised too by Venice’s annual aqua alta, when citywide floods engendered spring; this event was seen as the annual rebirth of the city following the floods, akin to carnival, which enabled a release of the old to make room for the new before Lent. 46 Just as water is conscious to the power of music, as argued by Philipp Fehl, and too, to the power of love, as read in Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505) when Lavinello proclaims that the presence of his lover gave the fountain a livelier flow, so too is it sensitive to nature’s powers. See: Philipp P. Fehl, “Farewell to Jokes: The Last “Capricci” of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1979), 158. 47 David Rosand, “Giorgione, Venice, and the Pastoral Vision,” Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape. Robert Cafritz, (ed.). Washington, D.C.; New York: Phillips Collection in Association with the National Gallery of Art: C.N. Potter, 1988, 59. 9

remarks that he felt “moved to eloquence” by simply standing in its presence.48 As a genre or mode, the potency of pastoral was to be found not only in its pictorial poesie, sharply observed by Rosand and others, but also in its requirement of transformation.

As a precursor to the pictorial pastoral, visions of the countryside were first elaborated in pastoral fiction of the sixteenth century.49 The two most influential of these texts in Venice were

Jacopo Sannazaro’s (1458-1530) pastoral poem Arcadia (written in around 1480 and published in

1504) and, to a lesser degree, Pietro Bembo’s (1470-1547) dialogues Gli Asolani (1505), set in the lush gardens of a villa in Asolo on the Veneto. Beginning with topoi of change in Arcadia, the protagonist and poet Sincero determines to abandon his hometown of Naples and his father’s house for the countryside, believing, in his own words, that he was “leaving love and my thoughts at the same time.”50 We seen in Gli Asolani many overlaps between pastoral and love, which would appear to characterize the space as somewhere out of control, perhaps even weak, but Sannazaro does not see it this way; his paradise is not a “mindless Eden,” but an active sphere where knowledge is found, where the intellect is exercised, and where energized shepherds gather for sporting contests – archery, jumping, wrestling, singing, playing the sampogna, and playing pan-pipes with seven reeds, not altogether unlike Tiepolo’s troupe of Pulcinelli.51

In Book III of Gli Asolani, the lover Lavinello describes his falling enamored in the Spring upon seeing his lady, with her blonde hair unconfined on the green bank of a stream.52 Akin to the coming of Spring, Lavinello describes the presence of his fair lover as altering the physical world: the fountain had a livelier flow, the branches were burgeoning, the grass flowered beneath her feet, and

48 Carlo Ridolfi, The Life of Titian, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, 47. 49 Literature was a precursor to the paintings, as argued by Rosand; though Kristin Phillips-Court’s study demonstrates instances where the literature was inspired by the art, in Tasso’s Lagrime di Maria Vergine Santissima (1593), for example. See: Kristin Phillips-Court, The Perfect Genre, 2011, 178. 50 Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, prose 7, ed. Enrico Carrara. Torino, 1948, 57.60. 51 Carol Kidwell, Sannazaro and Arcadia. London: Duckworth, 1993, xi. 52 A Petrarchan, not Venetian setting, where a Botticelli-like Venus might arrive, though, there were many streams in the Veneto too. See: Kidwell, 107. 10

the winds stilled at her voice. He goes on to proclaim that his love for her, next to the raptures of

Nature, would eventually lead him to heaven (Gli Asolani III, 8-10). This is the ideal feeling of a space with “grass, perfumes, songs” and “endless pleasure” that Lionardo so powerfully prizes in

Leon Battista Alberti’s Dialogo della Famiglia (1434).53 Yes, by Heaven! A very Paradise!” he continues “And, too, what is most pleasant, one can at the villa escape from the noise, uproar, and tempest of the city, square, and palace.”54 We see this passion for pastoral again a little later in the writings of Giovanni Battista Birago Avogadro (1634-1699) who compares the country to a

“staircase” by which “we can ascend and enter the holy courts of heaven.”55

As the above examples show, the dramatic and fictional pastoral modes were formed to give

(stage) presence to invisible realities of divine providence and human self-discovery. While the writer

Avogadro reserves nature’s gifts only for those “pure in spirit,” though, the transformative affects of the countryside were rarely limited to urban poets and to lovers alone, but was a space of acceptance for un-verisimilar and marginal figures too, including comics, peasants, shepherds, and even lunatics, as deduced by Theocritus56 and Theseus57 centuries earlier.58

i.ii Pulcinella

Tiepolo’s substitution of urban poets, love-sick men, mythic creatures, and shepherds as the personifications of virtue in green pastures for the sly devil Pulcinella atop a steep cliff’s edge is a

53 Leon Battista Alberti and Anicio Bonucci (ed.), “Dialogo della Famiglia,” Opere vogari, Bk III, Vol. II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1843, 284. 54 Alberti, “Dialogo della Famiglia,” 284. 55 Giovanni Battista Avogadro, Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura e piacere della villa, Day III. Agostino Gallo (ed.). Venice: Giovanni Bariletto, 1566, 127. 56 The Arcadian vision of landscape on stage harkens back to the Idylls of Theocritus (c. 316-260), poems based on the shepherds’ songs considered as the foundational bucolic text. 57 Exhibition Brochure, The Pastoral Landscape; or, The Legacy of Venice; or, The Modern Vision – Two Part Exhibition. National Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., from Nov. 6, 1988 to Jan. 22, 1989, 1. 58 While the basic lyrical strain and metaphor for Renaissance pastoral were classical in origin, critics of the Italian Renaissance had only eclogues, fragments, and notions about Greek satyr plays from which to craft their new genre of drama. Working with these fragments, in connection with the traditional understanding of pastoral as a locus amoenus or delightful place, theatrical scientists gathered to explain the “green place” as a space of movement and transformation between comedy and tragedy, death to resurrection, boyhood to manhood, and from youth to wisdom, for example. 11

curious one.59 As a pictorial touchstone for later interpretations of the actor, the artist’s frescoes appear to conclude that Punch, much like Tiepolo himself, has now retired from his working life where he performed in the main piazzas and piazzettas of Venice, to enjoy the pleasures of villa life on the Veneto. As an accepted cipher of festive time, Pulcinella’s elevated station in The Swing would have been absurd by eighteenth-century standards. Indeed, the comic’s unfavorable stereotype was by this time well established – a grotesque fool with trifling faults, a repertoire of vile aspersions, and the possessor of many other, equally ungainly behaviors.

On the comic stage, Pulcinella was a toadying, lecherous, and gluttonous zanni60 (peasant) trickster, shape-shifter, and everyman, sometimes clever, sometimes not, but always getting out of difficult situations. Invented in 1628 by Neapolitan actor Silvio Fiorillo (1560-1632)61 for the commedia dell’arte, while another actor and tailor, Andre Calcese, called Ciuccio was known for reinventing the role,62 Pulcinella represented the fickle and, at times, ferocious nature of human emotion and behavior, signaling all the negative traits of humanity, as Thelma Niklaus describes:

Beneath an apparent good humour lurked a cynical depravity and the smoldering volcano of his brutal personality. His megalomania was wonderfully exposed in his song: ‘When I march along, the whole earth trembles. I am master of the sun’. He delighted in sowing seeds of dissension among his fellows, fomenting discord, provoking violence.63

As played out on the commedia stage during lazzi (comic tricks), 64 Pulcinella was often seen, in one moment bursting out laughing or uttering intelligent words, while in the other he would pull down

59 Robert C. Cafritz, “Introduction,” Places of Delight: The Pastoral Landscape. Washington, D.C.; New York: Phillips Collection in Association with the National Gallery of Art: C.N. Potter, 1988, 17. 60 There were two comic servant characters in commedia dell’arte; one was Harlequin and the other Pulcinello. See: McHale, “Child’s Play?,” 99. 61 Writing in 1628, Piermaria Cecchini credited the Neapolitan actor Fiorillo, active 1500-1632, with the first stage portrayal of the comic. See: Pandolfi, op, cit., vol. IV, 104. 62 Meredith Chilton, Harlequin Unmasked: The Commedia dell’Arte and Porcelain Sculpture. New Haven, CT; London: George R. Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art with Yale University Press, 2001, 93. 63 Thelma Niklaus, Harlequin Phoenix: Or, the Rise and Fall of a Bergamask Rogue. London: The Bodley Head, 1956, 39. 64 Images were inspired by Jaques Callot’s Asinine Dances, or Dances of Idiocy, having influence on eighteenth century. See: Michele Scherillo, La commedia dell’arte in Italia. Studi e profili. 1884, viii-4; Chilton, Harlequin Unmasked, 94. 12

trousers, defecate on stage, curse, and spew rude blazons.65 It was in his liminal status that Pulcinella came to be a figure of great intrigue for artists, for despite his fixed persona(s) on stage, his pictorial representation could signal a thousand meanings, depending on a given setting or situation.

In his series of one-hundred-and-four drawings of Pulcinella’s life entitled Divertimento per li

Regazzi (Fun for the Children), started in around the year 1791, Tiepolo multiplies Pulcinella into an entire peoples, portrayed as such so to mime the lives of everyman, as Tiepolo specialists Gealt and

Knox observe, with the sole purpose, it seems, of “revealing all its [life’s] comic absurdity.”66 While created years following his father’s engraved series Scherzi di fantasia (Jokes of Fantasy)67 (from c.

1743), including Plate Number 17, The Discovery of Pulcinella’s Grave (c. 1750), the Divertimento boasts many of the same absurd aspects via the series’ shared and pompous exaltation of marginal figures, who gather and converse amidst classical ruins set in the great outdoors. Still, the younger Tiepolo’s

Pulcinelli are notably elongated, multiplied, and elevated when compared to earlier portrayals of the comic by his father, especially Giambattista’s caricatures, which exaggerate Pulcinella’s grotesque features, as in Pulcinella morto (dead Pulcinella), which is more likely a portrayal of Pulcinella ubriaco

(drunken Pulcinella) (fig. 10).68 In his series of drawings, as in his little Sala, Tiepolo appears as if to re-imagine Pulcinella as a figure of renewed hope. Indeed, he is revived to the skies with a “virtuous silence” where he is portrayed as the chosen representative of his kind.69 He is, in this sense, akin to

Jesus, who descends from Heaven to teach a lesson to all mankind.70 Like Jesus, Pulcinella was also

65 Lazzi means ‘turn’ or ‘trick’ or ‘Italian business’ and an actor would resort to lazzi whenever a scene began to drag or his eloquence gave out. The set-pieces abound with examples of status reversal, in which the downtrodden are suddenly empowered and revel in it unashamedly. The ceiling, then, could be a pictorial lazzi, an idea not yet considered. See: Pierre-Louis Ducharte and Randolph T. Weaver, The Italian Comedy: The Improvisation, Scenarios, Lives, Attributes, Portraits, and Masks of the Illustrious Commedia dell’Arte. New York: Dover Publications, 1966, 36; Peter Jordan, The Venetian Origins of the Commedia dell’Arte. London; New York: Routledge, 2014, 50. 66 Gealt and Knox, Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman, 18. 67 After a series of paintings by Giambattista entitled I Capricci (c. 1742). 68 Duchartre, The Italian Comedy, 220. 69 Giovanni Bonifacio, L’Arte de cenni, con la quale formandosi favella visibile, si tratta della muta eloquenza, che non è altro che un facondo silenzio. Vicenza: Appresso Francesco Grossi, 1616, 111. 70 John 3:13; John 6:62. 13

an ancient figure, whose costume was likely copied from the attire in general use among the peasants of Acerra, Southern Italy.71

In her innovative work La maschera e il Viaggio: sull’origine dello Zanni, Alessandra Mignatti identifies zanni (Pulcinella’s type) as a northern dialect version of Gianni, or Johnny.72 The zanni, just like John the Baptist are introduced as messenger figures, only of a more distant, wild, and demonic nature, connected with ancient apotropaic and fertility rituals.73 Still, the particular features of the

Baptist – his long beard and his ragged cloths – represent his liminal status as a desert hermit, closely evoking the ‘wild man’ figure. Thus, in carnival celebrations, the two figures, John and Pulcinella, as

Mignatti discerns, were fused.74 The zanni, then, emerged when the carnival figure, which combined a variety of archaic and Christian meanings, left the rite and entered the theatre as a magical assistant, where he took on his many animal associations, attaching him once and for all to the earth and to the terrestrial, if not chthonic, realms.75 In this sense, the secularization of the comic pronounced the judgment of his life; a birth to be followed by sin, which would be spread among his numerous offspring. His figuration, after all, would appear to represent the negative aspects of humanity, complicating further the meaning of The Swing. Rather than a return to the Heavens,

Pulcinella’s image would appear to celebrate a joyous return to chaos. With this, it is not sure whether Tiepolo means to specifically undermine the value of culture and nature, by generating a contrast between the two, as suggested by Ágnes Horváth, or whether he asks us instead to ponder the possibility that there is a special power in that which is undercut.76

71 Ducharte, 220. 72 The reason being is that the feasts of St. John the Baptist coincided with two major fairs, the Twelfth Day and especially Midsummer Night. See: Alessandra Mignatti, La maschera e il Viaggio: sull’origine dello Zanni, 2007, 65-78. 73 Alessandra Mignatti, La maschera e il Viaggio: sull’origine dello Zanni. Bergamo, IT: Moretti & Vitali, 2007, 153. 74 Mignatti, La maschera e il Viaggio, 2007, 223. 75 Not to forget that Pulcinella was an early modern prototype for the comic grotesque. 76 Ágnes Horváth, Modernism and Charisma. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 77. 14

To be sure, Tiepolo’s Pulcinella belongs to a time and a place marred by decay.77 Venice was in its final deformed phase during the late 1790s, when the once Splendid Republic had slipped into what Rosand has termed the Silver Age of Venice, representing the fateful years leading to her conquest by Napoleon Bonaparte’s (1769-1821) army in 1797.78 “Venice, the Queen of the

Adriatic,” opines George A. Simonson, “no longer held the aegis of empire, but had become frivolous, and was seen in mask and domino leading, as it were, the gay national dances la manfrina and la furlana, accompanied by the rolling of the drum and the rhythmical song of her daughters, until from sheer giddiness and dissipation she swooned and surrendered to Bonaparte.”79 Inspiring said sort of interpretations was a general critique by contemporaneous visitors to Venice on the contrived nature of the city, whose inhabitants went about their normal days in masquerade. “The entire town is disguised” observed French traveler Maximilien Mission, writing in the late seventeenth century.80 Echoing Misson’s disenchantment, English travelers Joseph Addison and

Isaiah Thomas commented in like fashion on the “hodgepodge of diversions,” the many “false personages,” and the “lewd” entertainments of Venice’s carnival season, which were, by this time synonymous with the economic, moral, and societal decay of the place.81

As a famous stock type in the streets of Venice,82 Pulcinella was a cipher for festive time and was seen to embody all of its negative associations – licentiousness, escapism, intellectual degeneration, and a looseness of morale. The comic’s recognizable hunchback, beaked nose, and paunch were features replicated in costumes during carnival and beyond, so much so that Pulcinelli

77 The myth of Venice projected the city as an illustrious place of peace. Due to the myth, Venice became known primarily for art and music. According to John Ruskin, the myth was formed at the time of the city’s utmost power (but this is not necessarily the case). See: Ackerman, 87-88. 78 Linda Wolk-Simon, “Domenico Tiepolo: Drawings, Prints, and Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, Vol. 54, No. 3 (1996), 4. 79 George A. Simonson, Francesco Guardi 1712-1793. London: Methuen & Co., 1904, 9. 80 Maximilien Mission, Nouveau Voyage d’Italie, avec un Mémoire contenant des avis utiles à ceux qui voudront faire le meme voyage, 3. vols. The Hague: Chez Henry van Buldereu, 1698. 81 Joseph Addison, The Miscellaneous Works, in Verse and Prose, of the Right Honourable Joseph Addison, Esq […]. London, MDCCLXV, 1765, 63; Isaiah Thomas (printer), The Armours and Adventures of Two English Gentlemen in Italy: With a Particular Description of the Diversions of Carnival […]. Worcester, MA: Printed and sold at the Worcester Bookstore, 1795, 7. 82 Though, Pulcinella is Neapolitan. 15

proliferated in the city streets during the eighteenth century, garnering, as a result, the status of pesky nuisances or indeed, something more sinister.83 Following an encounter with Pulcinella in Piazza San

Marco, French philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) remarked that he had witnessed the “true

Pulcinella.”84 Pulcinella is treated in Diderot’s excurses like a phantom, a sign, or a symbol of something terrible to come. Akin to an eidolon, the comic’s presence sends chills, even in the warm airs of Tiepolo’s envisioned pastures at Zianigo, which turns out to be a place more direful than appearance would have it.

Subsumed under the heading of the country holiday, the Veneto had become by Tiepolo’s time a “rural heaven of the rich,”85 a place where nobles would philander, flaunt their wealth, and eat and drink all day under the scorching summer sun.86 Denounced as a wasteful pursuit by visitors, dramatists, and artists of the period, the countryside was beginning to show its vulnerability, becoming an ideal setting for serious commentary on social inadequacy.87 Thus, while the pretense of pastoral relies on the natural setting to transport us to a new realm, these not-so-distant worlds do not always contain the green comforts of the locus amoenus observed by Robert Cafritz and Rosand, and are not always populated by virtuous souls.88 This idea was not new to the eighteenth century, of course, as the landscape had always been a liminal space where animation and enervation converged.

It was a space too of great loss, as seen again in Arcadia, where against the backdrop of a protean canvas, there are lamentations over lost love, lost leaders, lost mothers, and the loss of sophistication of Naples in what Sannazaro suddenly finds to be the depressing tedium of rural life where even the

83 And in puppet theatre, not just as figures in costume and/or actors. Puppet shows could be found on all the main piazzas of the city, until about 1760 when the authorities insisted that they take place in closed booths with an admission charge and limited them to the period between sunset and the beginning of the performances in the other theatres. A celebrated puppeteer in San Marco was Alberto Borgogna, who is portrayed in a painting by Longhi standing by his puppet booth, selling wares and hawking. See: John McCormick, Alfonso Cipolla, and Alessandro Napoli, The Italian Puppet Theater: A History, 1938, 17; Johnson, Venice Incognito, 2011, 233. 84 Mariuz, 195. 85 Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Muller, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture. Atlantic Highlands. NJ: Humanities Press, 1992, 79. 86 Bentmann and Müller, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture. 80. 87 Philipps-Court, The Perfect Genre, 12. 88 Cafritz, Places of Delight, 17. 16

wild beasts must have died of boredom.89 In the end, Arcadia proves to illustrate episodes of failures: failures in human relationships, personal inadequacies, frustrated aspirations, and hopes and trust deceived.90 Arcadia, then, is not a happy book, and Pulcinella’s Swing is not a happy ceiling.91 Indeed, while equally poetic in appearance, the fragility of The Swing and the unrighteousness of its occupant call to mind Giorgione’s fateful prospect of the Veneto, which represents “both the bucolic realm to be forsaken and the space to be traversed, towards a future full of suffering and bereft of otium.” 92

This key insight by Jonathan Unglaub moves beyond the pictorial poesie and shifts the “feeling of movement” Rosand observes in the Pastoral Concert from something prosperous and promising, to a different kind of journey that ends, inevitably, in death – Et in Arcadia ego (death, too, is in Arcadia).93

Giorgione’s antithesis brings us now to the following hypothesis on Tiepolo’s Swing:

Beyond the poetical associations of the countryside retreat in painting, the implicit realism of pastoral entails a real movement of retreat, renewal, and return, with an eye especially to renewal. This requirement of the green place is not achieved in Tiepolo’s Swing as in other pastoral portrayals, I discern, as a result of Pulcinella’s unconscious absorptions and vapid expenditure, which sedates the frequency, in turn paralyzing its transformative powers. The Swing, thus, exhibits an end to pastoral’s fruitful flow that de-manifests from Tiepolo’s substitution of contemplative philosophers and poets prone to intellectual, spiritual, and moral transformations, for a troupe of artful and inherently deceptive Pulcinelli, whose uncanny placement in the countryside is to be noticed as it functions to posit, ironically so, a new and wickedly intelligent commentary on the society of his time. More than this, Tiepolo’s observations ask us to consider whether his band of Pulcinelli, as surrogates of their

89 Carol Kidwell, Sannazaro & Arcadia. London: Duckworth, 1993, 9. 90 Kidwell, Arcadia, 9. 91 Ibid., 9. 92 Mathilde Skoie and Sonia Bjøornstad-Velásquez (eds.), Pastoral and the Humanities: Arcadia Re-Inscribed. Exeter: Bristol Phoenix, 2005, 142. 93 Skoie and Bjøornstad-Velásquez, Pastoral and the Humanities, 142. 17

decaying Serenissima might still be capable of renewal, or whether, on the contrary, they retreat only into a closed past.

Evidence in support of my argument that Tiepolo’s Swing is a fateful remark on the Venice of his time is organized into two key sections. I begin by establishing a brief history of commedia dell’arte figures performing visits to the countryside, where they were almost always transformed in some way, but not willingly. From here, I then play with the idea, still in the first section, that

Tiepolo’s Swing is, what I refer to as ‘pastoralesque’, borrowing from Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of

‘carnivalesque’, used to describe the intricate pulse of Renaissance carnival. In simpler terms, I develop the theory that the portrayal of commedia figures in pastoral settings shifts its meaning from a locus amoenus to a second carnival, with the shared function of licensing un-verisimilar subjects, immoral behaviors, philandering, and societal release. If my theory is successful, it stands to advance a new interpretive framework for the elucidation of other works by Tiepolo, in addition to the host of pastoralesque images produced in Venice during the eighteenth century.94

In section two, I consider further the conditions of Pulcinella’s retreat, attached to villeggiatura, a noble activity scorned by artists and dramatists of the period. I close by placing a spotlight on Tiepolo’s comparison of Pulcinella to the occupant of a second swing in the villa’s Sala dei Satiri (Room of Satyrs) – a half-wild hirsute savage, interpreted here as Pulcinella’s primordial ego. We will begin by considering some relevant insights on Tiepolo’s Swing in the form of a literature review.

i.iii Literature Review

Only by assessing the major works on Tiepolo’s Swing do I stand to say something about it that has not already been said. While the intricate structure of my argument stands alone from other writings

94 I am thinking here of works by Antonio Diziani (1737-1797), Francesco Zuccarelli (1702-1788), and Giambattista Tiepolo, among others. 18

on the fresco, my observation that Tiepolo means to comment on the society of his time is an accepted one. This literature review will, thus, start there, by considering what Tiepolo’s ceiling means to achieve, and how. From here, and given that my focus looks especially to the artist’s use of subject and setting, I have read and transcribed all relevant works on the following topics: Tiepolo’s portrayal of Pulcinella, a comic figure to whom he was “literally obsessed;” Commedia dell’arte and street life in Venice during Tiepolo’s time, and finally, Venetian pastoral. As scholars before me have observed, the timing of Tiepolo’s painting, at around the same time as the collapse of the Republic, is “not surprising.” Still, his picture world, while dreamy, may be less of an escape from reality than it is a “proximity to reality and history that belonged from the beginning of the sphere of comedy.”95

The ways in which Tiepolo achieves his social commentary sets my thesis apart from the varied interpretations thus far advanced.

a. The Pulcinelli Frescoes at the Villa Zianigo

Published in the Italian language in 2001, the exhibition catalogue Satiri, Centauri, e Pulcinelli by

Filippo Pedrocco96 is the most elaborate illustrated work on the Sala dei Pulcinelli to date. The catalogue of the exhibition is parsed into smaller essays written by leading scholars in the field, beginning with Giandomenico Romanelli’s97 essay entitled “Pulcinella sull Attesa: La Delusione della

Storia” on the ceiling as “una profonda delusione.” Romanelli interprets the Pulcinella epic as a profound disappointment or degradation of the heroism and grandeur of history, as seen in the artist’s replacing real historical figures and people with the artificial comic.98 His dramatic take

95 Agamben goes as far as to compare Tiepolo’s Swing to the plays of Aristophanes which were written at a decisive moment, even catastrophic in the history of Athens. See: Agamben, 16. 96 Pedrocco is a scholar of Venetian art and from 1983 was the conservator of the Ca’ Rezzonico Museum in Venice. See: marsilioeditori.it for Filippo Pedrocco’s profile. 97 Since 1979, Romanelli was Director of Civic Museums of Venice, Director of Cultural Heritage and Activities of the City of Venice, and from 2008-2011 the Civic Museums Foundation. He currently teaches the history of urbanism at Università Ca’ Foscari. See: marsilioeditori.it for Giandomenico Romanelli’s profile. 98 Giandomenico Romanelli (ed.), “Pulcinella sull Attesa: La Delusione della Storia,” in Satiri, Centauri, e Pulcinelli: Gli affreschi restaurati di Giandomenico Tiepolo conservati a Ca’ Rezzonico. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2000, 17. 19

compares the inconsistency of the rope to a mute deflagration, driven by what he sees as a

“drunken” Pulcinella.99 To Romanelli, The Swing presents, in no uncertain terms, an end, perhaps the end of Venice, or at least, the end of her myth. 100 The series, he continues, is a reduction of truth in that it presents the issues, not in a negative sense like the heroic Piranesian ruins, or the sublime tragedies of Goya, but as playful allegories of Venice and her history.101

In a similar vein, the next essay entitled “Le ultime feste di Venezia” by Swiss literary critic

Jean Starobinski refers to Tiepolo’s Pulcinelli as “un’orda parassitaria” (a parasitic horde).102 They make up a sort of comic nightmare, he argues, as an invading race, for which life is limited to derisive games, busy driving out the rest of mankind.103 Starobinski characterizes Tiepolo’s Punch as a baby, birthed in every family, who is forced to be idle for his entire life, not to work for productive employment, but to submit to the absurd gesticulation of a perpetual party made apparent via his image.104 He then arrives at his thesis, which I have paraphrased: Tiepolo mixes some figures of childhood with a senile world, to make us realize that Pulcinella constitutes the profound truth of a society whose historical role is now finished.105 This compelling insight on the Sala, with an eye to

Venice’s political climate, is followed by a lengthy entry by Pedrocco, including a historiography on the Sala and a bibliography containing information on the restoration of the frescoes by Franco

Steffanoni in 1893. Pedrocco’s essay is complete with vivid photographs of frescoes as they would have appeared in situ, in addition to individual color plates of all the frescoes from Zianigo.

The second major work focused on the frescoes is entitled Giandomenico Tiepolo: Les fresques de

Zianigo à Ca’ Rezzonico, published by the Musei Civici Veneziani in 2004. The collaborative work

99 Romanelli, “Pulcinella sull Attesa,” 17. 100 This is especially telling if we consider that the Neapolitan Punch is the most ancient of types. He descends in direct line from the Maccus of the Campagna, or rather, he is the same character. George Sand, The History of the Harlequinade, Volume One. London: Martin Secker, 1853, 111. 101 Romanelli, 16. 102 Jean Starobinski, “Le ultime feste di Venezia,” in Satiri, Centauri, e Pulcinelli, 2000, 19. 103 Starobinski, 19. 104 Ibid., 19. 105 Ibid., 19 20

begins with a small essay by Pedrocco, including the Museum floor-plan I have reused in this thesis

(see fig. 1), and a great amount of detail on the history of the villa itself,106 including more details on the dates of Tiepolo’s paintings. Entitled “La comédie sociale: Pulcinella” the book’s second essay by Adriano Mariuz is more contextual. He argues that while Tiepolo’s frescoes were of little interest to supporters of the new modes107 the works, on the contrary, denote a singular finesse of perception of contemporary historical reality.108 Mariuz goes into the state of the city that Tiepolo was commenting on, quoting Paolo Renier’s (119th Doge of Venice, and penultimate) testimonial that, from 1780, the diagnosis was dim, and no therapy was possible.109 Mariuz focuses largely on the societal aspects of the Sala, with primary quotes by a number of contemporaneous voices, such as the playwrights Goethe and Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806), a figure to whom we shall return.

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini published a monograph dedicated to the artist in 2008, also written by Mariuz, entitled simply Tiepolo. The rich anthology contains chapters on the artist’s complete oeuvre.110 Representing what Mariuz coins the “l’epopea di Pulcinella” (the epic of

Pulcinella), he places Tiepolo on the side of the vulgar and of the ignorant, those precisely for whom he creates fun. Considering further that Pulcinella was considered by the eighteenth-century scholars a disgrace of the ancient Osc mask of Macchus, who survived in the countryside and near the low people during the barbarian invasions, Tiepolo’s work, as Vetrocq too observes, assumed the

106 The villa was built in 1688 for a certain Cristoforo Angeloni and purchased by Tiepolo for four thousand ducats on 24th December 1757. In Antonio Morassi’s book chapter, he provides additional details, revealing that the building was a two-story linear construction, with a yellow-green marble façade and a balcony under the central window. Morassi also reveals that Giambattista did not stay long in his country house. Indeed, on March 1762, he left with his sons Giandomenico and Lorenzo for Madrid, from where he never returned. Though, in the years prior his departure, the painter carried out important works of refection on the villa, to eliminate the doors and arched windows preexisting and to make the building more elevated, so as to make it more elegant and more comfortable inside. See: Pedrocco, Fresques, 3; Morassi, 144. 107 Hyman has argued, too, that the frescoes are somewhat out of time. 108 Mariuz, Fresques, 22. 109 To be sure, he proclaims the following: “We have no forces, neither terrestrial nor maritime, nor alliances; we live by chance and by accident, and we live with the sole idea of the prudence of the Government of the Republic.” See: Renier; Mariuz, Fresques, 22. 110 Adriano Mariuz, Tiepolo. Venice: Cierre Edizioni, 2008, 375. 21

implicitly polemical meaning of an exaltation against the new barbarian invaders, the French, of the

Italian imagination.111

Now to other works that include mention of the frescoes and The Swing. In his philosophical monograph on Tiepolo’s paintings and drawings of Pulcinella entitled Pulcinella or Divertimento per le regazzi, which has as its cover a cropped version of The Swing, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argues that there is a priori or a posteriori to the Sala, and that Tiepolo wished to give his frescoes a

“unita fisica” (physical unity).112 He does not interpret the epic as a farce, tragedy, disenchantment or disappointment, as others have, but rather, a sober meditation on the end.113 He notes further that the series “implies a new, different experience of history, life and time that is worth trying to understand.”114 And to him, Pulcinella has his “own special life,” above and beyond that of the stage, hence the comic’s relevance.115 “Whenever politics passes through a decisive crisis” argues

Agamben, such as “the end of Venice's independence in 1797 […] then the primacy of praxis is put into question.” In the comic’s being a symbol of the city, then, Pulcinella recalls that there is still politics on this side or beyond of the action. Agamben is the first to consider Pulcinella as a cipher, though he is aware of his inhumanity via the action of the swing, “la corda non potra strozzarlo”

(the cord that does not strangle him); as a symbol he has an immunity, and every time, he escapes, like a puppet with eternal life via many hands.116

Agamben’s keen observations are echoed in the exhibition catalogue of Timothy Hyman entitled “A Carnival sense of the World,” in which he argues that the Zianigo frescoes appear

“somehow out of time” and yet “of all the eighteenth-century artists, none seems so timely as

111 Mariuz, Tiepolo, 195. 112 Agamben, 31. 113 Ibid., 17 114 Ibid., 18 115 Ibid., 89. 116 Ibid., 72-73. 22

Domenico.”117 Similarly, Linda-Wolk Simon’s exhibition catalogue for the Metropolitan Museum of

Art entitled “Domenico Tiepolo” describes the personal commission as a “theater of life” taken from his many satirical works over the years, in which Pulcinella plays a major role.118 The 2018

Museum pamphlet from Ca’Rezzonico entitled “Tiepolo Room” refers to Pulcinella as a figure to whom the artist was “literally obsessed,” and as the embodiment of the popular soul in an eternal parody of man and his weaknesses; perhaps this is in reference to the lovers, and the drunken

Pulcinella draped across the ground. The pamphlet then notes that The Swing imitates the actions of the nobility, and closes by remarking, once again, on the importance of the series being completed in

1797, the year of the fatal fall of the Venetian Republic.119

In Arpad Szakloczai’s work on the villa, he reveals that it was intended to be a seat of the family dynasty and a place of retreat. According to Szakloczai, Tiepolo had started painting the villa’s rooms in 1759, prior to being called to Spain in 1762, from whence he returned in 1771, following his father’s death.120 The frescos, he continues, give us a snapshot of his mood, the full meaning of which is only apparent later; he then leads us through his analysis.121 He begins by referring to The

Swing as the key to the entire decoration, and suggests, boldly so, that Plato was Tiepolo’s main source of inspiration.122 He imagines that Tiepolo’s source, in specific, was Plato’s dialogue Ion, after the dialogues’ renewed interest by Leonardo and Raphael, suggesting then that Pulcinella is an inherently platonic figure. In specific, the author links the magic of rhapsodies to the persuasive power of sophists via acting, pulling people with the divine golden strings (laws), or indeed, via the mechanisms of tricksters and charlatans (statesman). According to Plato, imitation was essential for

117 Timothy Hyman, “A Carnival Sense of the World,” in Carnivalesque, exh, cat., Timothy Hyman and Roger Malbert (eds.). London: South Bank Centre, 2000, 42, 45. 118 Linda Wolk-Simon, “Domenico Tiepolo,” 27. 119 A final source on the fresco is Johanna Fassl’s chapter in the book Gravity in Art: Essays on Weight and Weightlessness in Painting, Sculpture, and Photography (2012). 120 Árpád Szakolczai, Comedy and the Public Sphere: The Rebirth of Theatre as Comedy and the Genealogy of the Modern Public Arena. London; New York: Taylor & Francis, 2013, 264. 121 Szakolczai, Comedy and the Public Sphere, 264. 122 Szakolczai, 265. 23

humanity, but when imitation was a mere mime, humans were transformed into parrots, who imitate anything. The sophist, who is usually the main instrument of social transformation, is here represented as a falcon unleashed, not unlike Punch.123 This is significant as it intends to show that

Pulcinella, like the sophist, was deceptive. Analyzing The Swing closer, Szakloczai opinions further that Pulcinella’s posture is pretentious, even preposterous, exuding victory and pride; an ‘eternal’ and

‘sinister’ Pulcinella, expropriating the place where angels and other solar creatures are found.124

While still relying on Plato, Szakloczai makes a second crucial connection between Pulcinella and a swinging satyr in the villa’s northwest room of satyrs and centaurs, writing that Punch is “in the exact pose of the satyr” (fig. 11).125 Referring, in specific, to Plato’s Statesman (360 BC), he notes that the mingling of satyrs, centaurs, figures, mythic figures, and sophists, which again, is a type he connects to Punch, mingled freely in the city, and could, therefore, have inspired Tiepolo’s thinking across genres.126 Szakloczai concludes his creative interpretation with the following statement:

Tiepolo’s Pulcinelli represent a wholesale reevaluation of values, aspects of a world that has become a mad, permanent carnival that only Tiepolo could have understood and depicted.”127

Finally, in their collaborative monograph, Domenico Tiepolo: Master Draftsman by Tiepolo scholars Adelheid Gealt and George Knox parse the completion of the Sala into periods: 1759,

1771, 1791, 1797, which are the dates inscribed on the frescoes and provide us with a chronology.128

They observe that Tiepolo commenced his villa paintings with the chapel, dedicated to the Blessed

Gerolamo Miani, and in 1771, a year following the death of his father father’s death on 12th

September, began painting the Sala dei Centauri, a most creative endeavor.129Eduard Sack locates

123 Szakolczai, 266. 124 Ibid., 266-267. 125 Ibid., 267. 126 Ibid., 266. 127 Ibid., 267. 128 Gealt and Knox, 30. 129 Ibid., 31. 24

further the date of 1797 on one of the wall frescoes at Zianiao, which likely marks the completion of the entire decoration, coinciding, of course, with Venice’s massive defeat.130

b. Tiepolo and Pulcinella

Gealt and Knox mark the year 1770 as a time when Tiepolo entered a new realm of freedom and opportunity,131 when he transformed Pulcinella from an attendant figure, after Giambattista’s drawings, 132 to a pivotal subject worthy of a collection of independent easel paintings.133 It is not certain what they mean by “collection,” though, since, as discussed by Victoria Sears Goldman, only three paintings – The Triumph of Pulcinella, an almost-identical precursor, and the frescoes at the family Villa Zianigo – are the single examples where Pulcinella is Tiepolo’s pivotal subject in painting following this specific period.134 What is for certain is that the artist appears to use

Pulcinella as a narrator, which James H. Johnson defines as an “Everyman” with pleasures and pursuits that identify him as Venetian, despite his Neapolitan origins. Alongside the paintings were a set of later drawings, as we have seen, which Johnson continues to identify as Tiepolo’s “dark farewell to the Republic;” the “offspring of national collapse and personal withdraw.”135 These were a personal endeavor, akin to those drawings of his father.136

130 Eduard Sack, Giambattista und Domenico Tiepolo, Ihr Leben und ihre Werke. Hamburg: Clarmann, 1910,323. 131 Though, Philipp Fehl holds that Tiepolo stayed in Spain for three more years to finish work undertaken by his father as well as a number of other commissions. See: Philipp P. Fehl, “Farewell to Jokes: The Last “Capricci” of Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and the Tradition of Irony in Venetian Painting,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1797), 769. 132 After Callot is the Roman caricaturist, Pierre Leone Ghezzi (1674-1755) who expanded upon the figure in Italy. Tiepolo’s was the ‘Plato of Pulcinellas’. In this way, he was a figure of absence behind the vacancy of a mask, which happens to define the value of the figures around – the school, an academy where Punch, a figure of nothing, becomes king of educator mimes, just as Plato is the king of educator-philosophers. See: Horvath, Modernism and Charisma, 2013, 83. 133 These paintings include Il Minuetto (1756) and Il ciarlatano; or, Il cavadenti (c.1754) at the Musée du Louvre in Paris, and Una danza nel paese (c. 1755) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. 134 Victoria Sears Goldman, “The Most Beautiful Punchinelli in the World: A Comprehensive Study of the Pulcinelli Drawings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2012), 527. 135 Johnson, Venice Incognito, 218-19. 136 To be sure, there are over two-dozen documented drawings of Pulcinella by Giambattista Tiepolo, not including painted examples. While it is not entirely known what his Pulcinelli drawings were used for, Michael Levey speculates that they were “private fantasies of the artist’s, revealing almost an obsession with certain motifs which possess for him personal meaning and magic: in some ways equivalent to the inspired doodles which Leonardo da Vinci repeated again 25

In line with these observations, the article “Domenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello Drawings:

Satire, or Labor or Love?,” again by George Knox, advances the idea that Tiepolo’s portrayals of

Scenes of Contemporary Life, upon which he was engaged in 1791, may be seen as the pictorial equivalents of the Goldoni Theatre, which sought to reform society through a series of comedies focused on everyday life, issues, and people.137 This places a significant amount of hope on Tiepolo’s ability to advance his own social commentary, akin in this sense to Pietro Longhi (1701-1785), whose sober genre scenes Philip Sohm argues were inspiration for Goldoni’s plays.

The more comical aspects of Pulcinella’s figuration are discussed in the exhibition catalogue

Ironia e comico, edited by Mariuz and Giuseppe Pavanello138 In the opening of the catalogue, it is argued that comics and their extreme “sfogo d'umore” (outbursts of mood) are often interpreted at face value, but that the authors of this work consider this a marginal considerations for the adequate reconstruction of theatrical players, especially like Pulcinella.139 In a later entry by Mariuz entitled “I disegni di Pulcinella di Giandomenico Tiepolo” he argues that Tiepolo’s Pulcinelli are equally mysterious and funny, and that we are meant to be surprised at the contrast of a seemingly natural behavior being performed by Pulcinelli in their singular, even disquieting appearance.140 He goes on to refer to these comics as “larvae of a removed world,” being somehow invisible in reality,141 despite the fact that they seem to embody the behaviors of all society, with no other purpose than to reveal that life, from beginning to end, is “una comica assurdità” an absurd joke.142

and again in his notebooks.” See: Richard Donaldson, Giovanni Tiepolo: Drawings, 2015, 32; Victoria Sears Goldman, “The Most Beautiful Punchinelli in the World,” 391; and Michael Levey, Painting in Eighteenth Century Venice, 1994, 216. 137 George Knox, “Domenico Tiepolo’s Pulcinello Drawings: Satire or Labor of Love?” Satire in the Eighteenth Century. J. D. Browning (ed.). New York: Abbeville Press, 2004, 144. 138 Director of the Institute of Art History at the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice and a member of the Veneto Institute of Sciences, Arts and Letters. See: Sophia Howlett, Marsilio Ficino and his World, 2016. 139 Adriano Mariuz and Giuseppe Pavanello, Tiepolo: Ironia e comico. Venexia: Marsilio, 2004. 140 Mariuz and Pavanello, Ironia e comico, 64. 141 Agnes Horvath in her sociological book Modernism and Charisma defines Pulcinella as a figure of nothingness, being a mere symbol, and of an unidentified gender. Being a simpleton, he was a character without qualities, an alien-like creature, as explained again by Martha Feldman. 142 Mariuz and Pavanello, Ironia e comico, 64. 26

In her book chapter “Child’s Play?,” Katherine McHale examines the Pulcinella drawings to suggest that social commentaries were interwoven throughout the series, including popular reactions to the new world of Venice after the fall.143 McHale agrees with others that Tiepolo’s comics, which she refers to as caricatures, surfaced to address the political upheaval of the city during the time of the French conquest.144 She laments, though, that images with satiric content are increasingly difficult for us now to interpret as the symbols used in referring to contemporary events have lost their meaning with the passage of time.145 For example, James Byam Shaw146 advances a relatively straight-forward and confident interpretation of Tiepolo’s drawings to argue that the artist’s use of

Pulcinella reduces his social commentary to a “lavatory” joke, the kind of thing to make children laugh.147 He imagines that, like the drawings for children, the frescoes were popular with neighboring families and that the children would have asked for more. He continues to argue that Tiepolo drew these scenes in the winter evenings and told their story, simply to amuse the children that came to visit him.148 Chapter VI speaks specifically to his use of Punch, which he defines as a “happy idea,” being a familiar subject.149 These speculations stand against previous interpretations, but are nevertheless inspiring.

The versatility of interpretations is noted by Adelheid Gealt and art historian Marcia E.

Vetrocq in their exhibition catalogue on the Pulcinelli drawings. Vetrocq, like McHale, laments that all efforts to reconstruct Tiepolo’s drawings have failed. With a possible clue, Franco Greco remarks

143 Katherine McHale, “Child’s Play?: Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Punchinello Drawings and the Fall of Venice,” Master Drawings, Vol. 50, No. 1 (Autumn 2012), 96. 144 Post-revolutionary France had abolished its carnival as one of its first acts, in the belief that it was frivolous and licentious. When the French occupied Venice, commedia dell’arte figures began to appear in subversive political prints as commentators of the new order. McHale continues to argue that Domenico’s focus on familiar carnival and commedia dell’arte figures affirmed Venetian culture in the aftermath of the French invasion. See: McHale, 98-100. 145 McHale, 98. 146 Shaw was a British art historian and art dealer. He played a major role in the development of the British Museum and Ashmolean collections of drawings after WWII. See: British Museum biographical details. 147 James B. Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo. UK: Faber and Faber Limited, 1962, 59. 148 Shaw, The Drawings of Domenico Tiepolo, 59. 149 Shaw also argues that Tiepolo must have been inspired by the ingenious fashion of strip-cartoons, and, quoting Morassi, he notes that his series could derive in part from Poesie e Prose by Francesco Melosio. See: Antonio Morassi, Dessins vénitiens du dix-huitième siècle de la collection du Duc de Talleyrand. Milano: D. Guarnati, 1958, 21. 27

that, dissimilar from the mask, whose rigid determination bound itself to a single motivating quality,

Tiepolo’s Pulcinella is mercurial and versatile, and his wisdom lies outside the mask and the essence and nature of the comic stage.150 Still, that is not to say that Pulcinella does not evoke the spirit of carnival, the time of year comic scenarios were performed. Indeed, in his book Comedy and the Public

Sphere Professor of Sociology Árpád Szakolczai refers to Tiepolo’s Sala as a “permanent carnival” and claims that the figure of Pulcinella became the predominant symbol of the commedia dell’arte and of Venetian carnival during the eighteenth century, rather than a genuine participant.151

c. Street Life and Commedia dell’Arte in Eighteenth-Century Venice

An interdisciplinary perspective on Tiepolo’s Swing will be proven here necessary as the portrayal of commedia dell’arte figures in art and drama followed the pulse of contemporary street life during the eighteenth century. Venetian carnival, in specific, was a key marker of social behavior, being limited by authorities during Tiepolo’s time as a result of its being somewhat out of control, 152 akin to

Pulcinella, who was somewhat of a selvatico (wild man). But he was also humanized by the theatre and in civic life during Tiepolo’s time, having new attachments to the family that resulted from his new roles in Venetian reformation theatre. Goldoni, in particular, gave new life to commedia figures by inserting them into the daily rhythm of Venice as respectable artisans, shopkeepers, seamstresses, and washerwomen, where their proximity to humanity allowed for the more accurate parody of their lives.153 This is distinct from commedia’s figures during the Renaissance when, as M. A. Katrizky notes, “one will search in vain among professional Italian players for jokes referring to reality.”154

150 Franco Carmelo Greco (ed.), Pulcinella: Una maschera tra gli specchi. Napoli; Roma: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1990, 23. 151 Szakolczai, 237. 152 The municipal period was when Venetian authorities attempted to limit the place of entertainment via urban rationalization. As a result, carnival festivities were now tied exclusively to the theatres and that meant the death of the carnival. Stefania Bertelli, Il Carnevale di Venezia nel Settecento, 1992, 55. 153 Johnson, Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011, 154. 154 M. A. Katritzky, “The Humour of the Commedia dell’ Arte,” in The Commedia dell’arte from Renaissance to Dario Fo. Christopher Cairns (ed.). Lewiston: E. Mellen Press, 1989, 118. 28

Other notable works on Pulcinella’s role in Venetian street life, covering his role as an assistant to charlatans, as a key figure in Italian street theatre, and as a popular mask during carnival, include Michele Scherillo’s La commedia dell’arte in Italia: Studi e profile (1884), Pierre-Louis Ducharte’s

Italian Comedy (1966), Claude Bourqui’s La Commedia dell’Arte (2011), and Vito Pandolfi’s six volumes on commedia dell’arte, which are cited throughout this thesis (1956-60) which, again, considers

Tiepolo’s ceiling as a later variant on the Venetian pictorial pastoral. 155

d. Pastoral, villeggiatura, and Venetian villa life

An instrumental work on Venetian pastoral is David Rosand and Robert Cafritz’s exhibition catalogue Places of Delight. In total, the catalogue considers how artists of the High Renaissance in

Venice visualized pastoral ideals and considers further how these ideas came to shape the image of pastoral for over five centuries.156 Other works on Venetian pastoral include Rosand’s book chapter

“Pastoral Topoi: On the Construction of Meaning in Landscape” in The Pastoral Landscape (1992), and Jodi Cranston’s forthcoming work Green Worlds of Renaissance Venice (2019).

On the topic of Renaissance villeggiatura, Nadja Aksamija’s book chapter is a key source.

Aksamija overviews the villa’s traditional status as a space where leisure was “performed” as a marker of economic and intellectual privilege, but focuses instead on the the villa a space of spiritual purification, in line with Denis Cosgrove’s study of the concept of santa agricoltura (holy agriculture), with special significance on the Veneto during the sixteenth century.157 Venetians believed that in cultivating and contemplating the land, one could seek a mythical path to paradise, which required a real effort of body and mind. Pulcinella is depicted toiling the land in frescoes adjacent to The Swing, but these are rendered to look like faux marble, akin to the historical scenes, suggesting that they

155 Other sources consulted include works by Peter Jordan, Kathleen M. Lea, and Winifred Smith. 156 Cafritz and Rosand. 17. 157 Nadja Aksamija, “Defining the Counter-Reformation Villa: Landscape and Sacredness in Late Renaissance ‘Villeggiatura’,” Delize in Villa: Il giargino rinascimentale e I suoi committenti. Gianni Venturi and Francesco Ceccarelli (eds.). Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 2008, 33; Denis Cosgrove, The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its Cultural Representation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, 112-113. 29

depict a time gone by (fig. 12). In his book The Villa, James Ackerman argues that villa life was born out of castle life and the court system of the wealthy, though rather than wanting inward-looking security, the villa had an outward-looking appreciation of the natural landscape.158 The villa, as

Ackerman observes further, had remained substantially the same from Roman times because it fulfilled a need that never altered. Indeed, the villa accommodates a fantasy that is impervious to reality, akin to carnival and Pulcinella alike.159

e. Conclusion

The collective interpretation of Tiepolo’s Swing is that the artist uses the performer as a channel to communicate the social and cultural history of a city in decay, by means of the character’s comical associations. Still, as Pedrocco asserts, the ambiguity of Pulcinella both authorizes and at the same time makes suspicious any interpretations from the angle of his figuration alone.160 Thus, my aim here is not to speculate on all the possible meanings of Pulcinella as a figure in isolation, but to consider how his image effects his new stage and how he, in turn, is affected by the space. I begin now by considering how this partnership of setting and subject played out in commedia pastorale.

158 James S. Ackerman, The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, 9. 159 Ackerman, The Villa, 9. 160 Pedrocco, Fresques, 29. 30

Part II. Carnival, Comic Theatre, and Pastoral ii.i Commedia pastorale

Pulcinella’s relationship to the world of pastoral was established for wider audiences in Venice via civic performances of commedia pastorale (comic pastorals).161 Commedia pastorale scenarios were improvised on makeshift stages in the main piazzas and piazzettas of the city and were performed by commedia dell’arte troupes, including all of the main stock characters.162 Set in distant Arcadias,163 said scenarios enacted the retreat of Arlecchino, Dottore, Columbina, and others, to magical isles where they would arrive, be magically transformed, and then return to their daily lives with a greater understanding of self. While seemingly hopeful for these types, said scenarios were almost always met with questions as to what the comics could and could not achieve there.

In the scenario Gl’intricati, for example, composed and staged by Venetian author

Pasqualigo,164 there is some confusion caused by a question of who and who cannot feel the emotional sting of love. Set in a distant Arcadia, a set of refined nymphs and shepherds, two figures belonging to nature, are plagued by the arrival of low commedia intruders – a Dottore Graziano and a braggart Spanish soldier, two standard Italian professional masks, alongside a peasant (villano).165

With contentions brewing between the two groups, representing the two types of nature, a turning point occurs, which leads the pastoral characters to beg for help from the Maga, a sorceress whose

161 Favola pastorale or commedia pastorale were regular plays in the improvised and scripted repertoires of touring commedia troupes. Italian actress and writer Isabella Andreini (1562-1604) published several. See: Emily Wilbourne, Seventeenth- Century Opera and the Sound of the Commedia dell’Arte, 2016, Footnote 45. 162 Pandolfi argues that commedia dell’arte began as a learned dramatic form, and K. M. Lea holds that commedia dell’arte was created from the interaction of commedia erudita with “indigenous comic talent” and points to the sources of much commedia material in the scripts of the Erudita. See: K. M. Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, 1962, vol. 1, 228; Pandolfi, Histoire du théâtre, Volume 2, Col. 2, 1968, 9. 163 Though, Carlo Gozzi argues that commedia made but few excursions into the regions of fable, fancy, history and mythology. And Nancy Dersofi argues that idealizations of rustic life were more quickly conflated with reality in poetry and other, more serious forms of dramatic arts, as in Sannazaro’s Arcadia. See: Carlo Gozzi, The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi. The University of Michigan: John C. Nimmo, 1980, Volume 1, 55; Nancy Dersofi, Arcadia and the Stage: An Introduction to the Dramatic Art of Angelo Becolo called Ruzante. Madrid: J. Porrúa Turanzas, 1978, 27. 164 The biographical details of this author are hard to pin down, though his surname is that of a well-known noble family, and he may have fought in the Battle of Lepanto. See: Richard Andrews, “The Tempest and Italian Improvised Theatre,” Revisiting the Tempest, 2014, 54. 165 Pulcinella is a villano. 31

cave is visible on stage throughout the play.166 With the help of the usual aerial spiriti, the Maga sorts out the kerfuffle of the lovers by putting to sleep and magically redirecting their affections. 167 The three clowns are for a moment transformed into animals, so that they know what the nymphs they were pursuing really thought of them; then, restored to human form, they are dismissed to their homes with the reproof that they are too crude and vulgar to concern themselves with love:

“Non si convien l’Amor con gente vile Come voi siete…”168

[Love is not suitable for base people Such as you are]

The intention here is to suggest that the innate insensibilities of the comics renders them unable to feel such as deep an emotion as love, which Pasqualigo clearly determines as high, elevated, and moral in his relating its image to mythological figures in the play.169 It is further due to the clowns’ blissful ignorance that they find themselves at the mercy of the transformative affects of the spiriti, which reflects a type of omnipresence akin to nature. They do not exert an effort of mind or body to be transformed then, but are deemed insignificant enough to be abused by its powers.170 Put another way, they are acted upon. We see this scenario time and again in magical pastorals, which aptly shows the paradox of transformation itself – the figures are temporarily changed, despite their lowly status, at the will of the highest power in the play, the spiriti, but this only serves only to reaffirm their status as buffoons and bumpkins rather than to enrich their existence.171

166 Frank Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry from the Beginnings to Marvell. London: Harrap, 1952, 39. 167 Richard Andrews, “The Tempest and Italian Improvised Theatre,” Revisiting the Tempest: The Capacity to Signify. Silvia Bigliazzi and Lisanna Calvi (eds.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 54. 168 Andrews, “The Tempest and Italian Improvised Theatre,” 54. 169 We see many overlaps between the affects of love and nature in Renaissance literature, too. 170 This affirms again that these men are not of nature, but have instead travelled there. 171 There were many pastoral comedies, including, Alvida, opera reale (Scala, 1611), L’arbore incantato, pastorale (Scala 1611), Arcadia incantata (casamarciano; Adriani), Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali e tragici (Scala, 1611), Forza della maggia (Vaticano Barberiano), Il gran mago, comedia pastorale (Locatello; Corsiniana), La maga pastorale (Corsiniana), Il mago, pastorale (Corsiniana), La nave, comedia pastorale (Locatelli; Corsiniana), Il Pantalonicino (Locatelli, 2 versions in Corsiniana), Proteo, favola pastorale (Locatelli; Corsiniana), and Le tre Satiri, favola pastorale (Locatelli; Corsiniana). See: Silvia Bigliazzi (ed.), Revisiting The Tempest: The Capacity to Signify, 2014, 60-61. 32

The specific scenarios featuring commedia dell’arte players in “Arcadias of possibility” can be narrowed to five plays: Il Gran Mago, (pastoral comedy); La Nave, (pastoral comedy); Li Tre Satiri,

(pastoral fable); Arcadia Incantata, and L’Arbore Incantato (pastorals).172 The Arcadian settings in these works are largely identified as le isole perdute (remote islands) where shipwrecked characters would land after a storm at sea.173 Once on land, dell’arte scenarios unfold in a locus amoenus (a delightful place), animated by the arrival of the group of stock characters, including Pantalone and zanni

(commedia peasants), for example, and there is normally a provision for their return in the form of a grand transformation, which can be categorized into two types: (1) to provide untold powers and a ritual sorting out of things, or, (2) to provide forgiveness to the comics for their condition.

The first of these types is seen in L’arbore incantato (The Magic Tree), written by dell’arte actor

Flaminio Scala (1553-1624). In his pastoral scenario, an Arcadian magic spell calls upon spirits and visions to administer the “waters of oblivion,” this time to shepherds, nymphs, and to the visiting comic character Arlecchino (Harlequin).174 Despite the negative associations of the term “oblivion,” which is intended to suggest the potentially lethal powers of the tonic, these magical waters provide the lowborn characters with powers that would otherwise not be available to them.175 Not showing appreciation for his powers, and for speaking ill of love, Arlecchino is transformed into a wild crane, suggesting again that he is at the mercy of nature’s powers, in the form of a magical force, rather than being privy to its fruits by way of contemplation. His transformation is a punishment and a condition he begs to be transformed back out of. Giving in to his cries, the spirits agree to transform

Arlecchino back into a comic; the issue is eventually worked out in a “ritual sorting-out” of things.176

172 Lisanna Calvi, “From Statecraft to Stagecraft: The Tempest in the Italian Arcadia,” Shakespeare, Vol. 8, No. 2 (June 2012), 159-160. 173 The wizard is usually identified by the generic name of mago, though he is referred to as Elisabatto in Il Gran Mago; Falsicon in La Nave and Sabino in L’Arbore Incantato. See: Calvi, “From Statecraft to Stagecraft,”2012, 161. 174 Calvi, “From Statecraft to Stagecraft,”160. 175 David J. Buch, Magic Flutes & Enchanted Forests: The Supernatural in Eighteenth-Century Musical Theater. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 18. 176 Clubb, “Pastoral Jazz,” 2007, 17. 33

The point of transformation is thus used as a central hinge which moves the play from beginning to end, when hope is restored.177

Once again, in Le tre satiri (The Three Satyrs), comic actors mingle with the natives under the control of a powerful wizard (mago), who rules the island and is attended by satyrs and spirits.

The mago (male magician, this time) is endowed with knowledge and foresight, and his attributes are a book and a magic rod by which he magically directs the action, rejoicing “in the good effect of his spells.”178 The mago is ever proud of his science that makes “the wild spirits serve him” and allows him to detain the castaways on the island; he demands that that they will not leave without his consent. They cannot leave without having felt the magic, a very dramatic and forceful thrusting of the idea, suited to the absurdity and exaggeration of their type and the sort of low comedy they enact. To leave, they have to perform comedy and tricks, called lazzi (stage jests, either spoken or based on movement), in the form of conspiracy. Commedia character Pantalone, who had earlier lamented the loss of his comrades after a shipwreck, is reunited with his friend Zanni (Zany) and together they plan to rob the mago of his special book.179 Together, they are able to pull this scheme off with success and, once they discover that the wild spirits who serve the mago will now serve them, they ask them to carry out a number of peculiar tasks. In this moment, they are not terribly unlike the biblical Adam and Eve, who are tempted by the prospect of having the powers of

Jehovah. The comics are portrayed as equally contaminant to Arcadia’s pristine state of innocence, but are not perfect, and so are often forgiven for their crimes, as we will now see.

Returning to Le tre satiri, once hearing of the comics’ plot, the mago conjures a circle on the ground, which the audience anticipates he will use to punish the comics. Either by a stroke of luck,

177 Discovered in these pastoral comedies is a venue for the liberty of the imagination not elsewhere accommodated by the alta cultura, in their [the comedies] outward depiction of fulfillment, order, and providence for all classes. Like sweet airs that sweep away the stench of societal hierarchies, the plays present a form of social leveling in the countryside, but this proves to be a dream, even here. 178 Calvi, 159-161. 179 Ibid., 159-161. 34

or an act of pity due to their imperfections, the wizard forgives the comics in a ritual manner. The comics react with utter amazement at the mago’s power, stating that they are “facendosi meravigilie”

(becoming marvelous), “tutti maravigliati non sanno quello che si [sic] fare” (everybody is so amazed, they do not know how to react), and “si meravigliano” (they are surprised).180 The characters then return to their urban world, where they are free to resume their roles as street performers.181

The key point of interest in these plays for the purpose of this thesis is that the comics are subjected to the effect of some force within nature. Despite their being touched by the magic, though, they prove incapable of rich contemplation tied to conscious human improvement in the countryside. What is more, they are easy to manipulate, both as characters within a given plot and as subjects for the writer’s use as symbols. From the examples we have seen, the comics appear as if to symbolize the stasis of the human condition in lieu of spirituality and intellectual facility. Practically speaking, and as a literary device, 182 pastoral worked within a given plot to move the action between places, realities, and even genres. In his Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali e tragic, (mixed work) (scenario

XLII), for example, again by Flaminio Scala (1552-1624),183 the scenario begins with a city comedy and clowns, which then shifts to an Arcadia with shepherds, and ends at court with the deaths of royal characters, leaving the clowns to comment.184 This generative form of magical pastorals that flows from life to death was intrinsic to this specific dramatic form and revealed its significance tied

180 Calvi, 162. 181 Sophisticated urban audiences are offered country clowns as protagonists, as opposed to Shakespeare’s simples. See: Terry Gifford, Pastoral, 1999, 17. 182 Challenging the neo-Aristotelian norms of unity and verisimilitude, the pastoral mode from its development was redefined as a “third genre” to nearly combine dramatic genres, in addition to the interchange and transformation of units, figures, relationships, and topoi. See: Clubb, “Pastoral Jazz from the Writ to the Liberti,” Italian Culture in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2007, 25. 183 Commedia dell’arte actor Flaminio Scala (1552-1624) published fifty commedia scenarios in his Teatro delle Favole Rappresentative (1611). 184 We see a similar thing in Shakespeare; the playwright makes pastoral a “central hinge” between tragedy and comedy, moving from the tragic action of Leontes’ self-deluded destruction of his family, through the Bohemian pastoral idyll of Pedtia and Florizel which brings life out of death and, with the stage-managed tableau of Pauline, a maga in court costume, transforming a marble statue into the lost Hermoine, achieves the ‘comic’ reconciliation of the old and creation of a new society by marriages. See: Clubb, 2007, 25. 35

to human references, defined by the images presented of man living in harmony with the natural world.185 Far less emphasis has been drawn to the specific effects that nature has on the comic figures via which the play’s plot and the reality of the comic’s limitations as a surrogate of humanity is brought to light.186

The second realization at the core of magical pastorals is that the space cannot ameliorate the comic, who proves incapable of undergoing a real or lasting transformation of any kind. As we have seen, the key feature of pastoral was that it promoted the metamorphosis of man and un- verisimilar figures in the countryside.187 Shepherds, in specific, were recognized for uttering various kinds of moral counsel and were seen as representatives of human lives more broadly.188 Even rustics, on the grounds that they represented an equivalent type in a given society, might be used as channels via which to usher opinions or critical reflections on society.189 It is not yet certain, though, exactly who the comic is meant to represent, whether it be the lower classes in Venice or, as Tiepolo seems to suggest, the city’s elite.

In his capacity for change, Pulcinella proves to embody the paradox of pathos and parody.

He could be heroic or even angelic, or, like the human castrate, as Martha Feldman observes, he could be as vain as a rooster or as gross as an ape, he can behave like a devil, an agent provocateur, or be the mildest of creatures.190 He is capable of infinite modifications which highlights above all else his innate skills at deception. In this sense, Pulcinella might be compared to the villani (peasant)

Ruzante who undergoes many mock transformations in by Jacopo Sannazaro’s (1457-1530) La

185 Exhibition Brochure, The Pastoral Landscape; or, The Legacy of Venice; or, The Modern Vision – Two Part Exhibition. National Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., from November 6, 1988 to January 22, 1989, 1. 186 The literary pastoral allowed visual artists to imagine green spaces in their works, and stage designers alike, who created makeshift green spaces on stage. Expanding on the work of Vitruvius, Sebastiano Serlio illustrated the three types of sets that correspond to the typology of theatrical genres inherited from antique poetry, in particular from Aristotle. See: Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels, Theatricality in Early Modern Art, 2011, 65. 187 Sophia Howlett, Marsilio Ficino and His World. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 154. 188 Paul J. Alpers, What is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996, 457. 189 Alpers, What is Pastoral?, 457. 190 Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015, 20. 36

Pastorale (c. 1517-1521). Ruzante morphs from a rustic husband to a soldier-scholar gallant, to an immortal lover. His position then deteriorates from husband, to bawd, to cuckold.191 Replacing

Arcadia and commedia figures in his own unique way in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96) for ‘a wood outside Athens’ visited by English mechanicals (actors), Shakespeare shows how the power of the green place treats equally all the lower figures. As a site of interpretation, Nick Bottom, an actor in the play, has his head “translated” into that of an ass in Act III, scene I (3.1.79-100). This transformation follows from Act II, scene I, where Titania and Oberon fight for possession over a changeling boy; their arguing causes a disruption in the weather and angers the moon, under whose light Bottom is physically transformed and Titania, Demetrius and Lysander are rendered spellbound.192

Despite Bottom’s access to Titania’s bower and the delicious foods prepared by her fairies, the queen has a difficult time accepting Bottom’s inherent quirks.193 In Act III, scene I Titania asks her fairy Mustardseed to silence Bottom: “Tie up my love’s tongue; bring him silently” (3.1.191).

Titania’s request is uttered in response to Bottom’s inability to stop nattering to her fairies:

I pray you commend me to Mistress Squash, your Mother, and to the Master Peascod, your father. Good Mas- ter Peaseblossom, I shall desire you of more acquaint- ance, too. – Your name, I beseech you, sir? (3.1.176-180).

191 Nancy Dersofi, Arcadia and the Stage: An Introduction to the Dranatic Art of Angelo Becolo called Ruzante. Madrid: J. Porrua Turanzas, 1978, 111. 192 The “distemperature” described by Titania in act II, scene I can be understood to mean ‘disorder in nature’ or a ‘loss of temper’, as seen in the moon’s apparent anger. See: Peter Holland (ed.), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1994), 160. 193 In addition to the quirks of his personality, Bottom’s body is compared to a monster (3.2.6). The correlation of Bottom’s body to a monster can be compared to Michael Camille’s discussion of Gargoyles in his book The Gargoyles of Notre Dame. In his work, Camille likens gargoyles on the medieval Parisian Cathedral of Notre Dame to monsters who spurted from “gaping gullets both human and dragonish but others invert the bodily topography of ejection and turn their bottoms out to the street.” Thus, medieval gargoyles, like monsters, were closely aligned to the idea of expulsion, which is akin to Rabelais’ notion of the grotesque body; not to mention an inherent quality of Bottom whose name alone evokes images of expulsion. See: Michael Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre Dame (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009).

The structured repetition of Bottom’s conversations with Titania’s fairies, whereby he asks each one their name before pretending to know at least one of them and their family members personally, suggests that he is still in ‘performance-mode’, despite existing in and experiencing an alternate reality. For Bottom, the play continues, which further suggests that there is nothing changed in him other than his physical appearance. Moreover, we learn that there is nothing inherently wrong with him, but rather, with the fairy world, brought into disruption by an invisible and seemingly powerful changeling boy.

Utterly ordinary in this sense, yet suffused with light and air, The Swing anticipates achievement, and a way forward, but proves to be a false promise, after all. Calling to mind the comic’s role in commedia pastorale, the fresco and its Pulcinelli bring into question the legitimacy of the scene, which we now understand to be fleeting, at the very least. Just as the ladder represents activity before and after the swing, we know that the journey will come to an eventual end, and that

Pulcinella’s elevated station and noble transformation under the effects of his natural stage will not last. Akin to Bottom, Pulcinella is an actor, not a poet or a philosopher, nor does his countryside possess all the magical aspects of Giorgione’s poetic Renaissance pastoral, which is profitable only to those who are privy to its powers.194

Exactly who Pulcinella represents has to do with the space that he usually occupies – not the landscape like the shepherds, but the city streets of Venice. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the commedia was at the centre of social life, not only theatrical life, and the masks related to the drama’s stock figures became somewhat of a social custom, especially during carnival.195

Carnival helped to transform society, and to reinforce hierarchy by offering the “people” an

194 The literary pastoral allowed visual artists to imagine green spaces in their works, and stage designers alike, who created makeshift green spaces on stage. Expanding on the work of Vitruvius, Sebastiano Serlio illustrated the three types of sets that correspond to the typology of theatrical genres inherited from antique poetry, in particular from Aristotle. See: Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels, Theatricality in Early Modern Art, 2011, 65. 195 Panfoldi, Histoire du théâtre, vol. 2, coll. 2, 94. 38

experience of utopia, working like a built-in mechanism of social reform. Sharing a number of the same features as pastoral, carnival offered transformation for all men and is an equally inverted world in which Pulcinella’s symbolic renewal takes place. He is a member of this carnivalesque community, which represents everyman and all peoples in Venice during a festival marked by social leveling and widespread gratification.

ii.ii Pastoralesque

Perceptions of renewal in Venice were all linked to the city’s festive perception of the world, and the most celebrated of these festivals was Carnevale. Venice’s carnival season lasted from the Feast of

Saint Simon on December 26th to Shrove Tuesday in February or March.196 Martedì Grasso197 as it was known in Italy (Fat Tuesday, in English) was the final and most celebrated day of the season, when even the more modest of Venetians would enter the streets to do a little revelry prior to the sobering holiday of Lent.198 This different level of intensity is artfully organized in the oil-on-panel painting

The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525-1569) (fig. 13). In his portrayal, which depicts the final day, or days, of carnival in the Low Countries, carnival goers are portrayed bashing about, scoffing food, and drinking to excess while personifications of carnival and lent trade furious blows in the foreground, to exaggerate the seasonal conflict. Together, they are surrounded by many little details and types of people that speak to the ambiguity and to the intricacy of the holiday itself.199 This ambiguity was due, in part, to the fact that carnival, akin to pastoral,

196 The season of festivity was thought to be protracted during the eighteenth century due to the city’s masking traditions which lasted up to six months out of the year. This misconception has been further explained as a result of nostalgic reports by contemporaries like Giovanni Rossi. See: James H. Johnson, Venice Incognito: Masks in the Serene Republic, 2011, 49; and Eleanor Selfridge-Field, Song and Season: Science, Culture, and Theatrical Time in Early Modern Venice, 2007, 291. 197 As Lamberti outlines in his Memorie, there was a peak of the party, recognized in the last week of carnival. In the last days, he writes, people no longer thought of the altars, and the forum was silent. Goldoni also notes that there was a temporal limitation to carnival fun, and also a non-homogeneity, which emerges in Una delle ultime sere di Carnevale (1762) and Chi la fa l’aspetta (1764), for example. See: Lamberti, Memorie cit., IX, cc. 207-8; Bertelli, 1992, 36. 198 Bertelli, 43. 199 From 1559 to 1563, Bruegel produced a unique group of paintings that were innovative in subject and showed a radical departure from the dominant style, including Carnival and Lent (1559). See: Margaret A. Sullivan, Bruegel and the 39

licensed un-verisimilar and marginal subjects to enter in a ritual playtime on an outdoor scale and stage. Writing in the eighteenth century, Maximilien Mission, the Protestant tutor from Lyon, gives an account of what he sees during the event in Venice:

The Carnaval [sic] begins always the second Holiday after Christmas; that is, from that Time people are permitted to wear Masks, and to open the Play-Houses and the Gaming-Houses. Then they are not satisfied with the ordinary Libertinism, they improve and refine all their Pleasures, and plunge into them up to the Neck. The whole City is disguis’d. Vice and Vertue are never so well counterfeited, and both the Names and Use of them is absolutely chang’d. The Place of St. Mark is fill’d with a Thousand sorts of Jack-Puddings. Strangers and Courtesans come in Shoals from all parts of Europe: There is every where a general Motion and Confusion, as if the World were turn’d Fools all in an Instant.200

This image of carnival gives the impression that the space was a force that could alter humanity, rendering them dumb, and stupid, but this transformation was not always negative, nor was it ever straight forward. Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1895-1975) 1965 publication Rabelais and his World allows us to access the complex and deep nature of carnival via the phenomenon of ‘carnivalesque’. As a concept, carnivalesque allows us to untangle the compound nature of Renaissance carnival, as interpreted from Francois Rabelais’201 (1494-1553) pentalogy under the title The Life of Gargantua and

Pantagruel (c.1532- c.1564). In his novels, Rabelais recounts the tale of two giants, the father and son duo, Gargantua and Pantegruel as they set out on wild adventures marked by fighting, decapitations, and the natural expulsion of bodily fluids.202 Stemming from these low texts written in a distinctly scatological, satirical, and crude manner, Rabelais coined the concept of carnivalesque, which speaks

Creative Process, 1559-1563, 2017; and Matt Kavaler argues that his interest in ethnographic detail chose the observance of carnival and lent, the occasion to explore the common traditions and customs of the city, precursor to Humanism. See: Ethan Matt Kavaler, Pieter Bruegel: Parables of Order and Enterprise, 1999, 111 and 119. 200 Noble Venetian, A New Voyage to Italy: with a description of the chief towns, churches, tombs, libraries, palaces, statues, and antiquities of that country; together with useful instructions for those who shall travel thither. London: Printed for R. Bently, 1695, 265. 201 Who wrote under the anagram Alcofribas Nasier, and has been described as “the most difficult classical author of world literature.” See: Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin. 1984, 298; Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 1984, 192. 202 Bakhtin’s grotesque canon, distinct from the classical canon, ventures, in Bakhtin’s own words “to show the oneness and meaning of folk humor, its general ideological, philosophical, and aesthetic essence,” as evoked by the dimensions of Rabelais’ novels to create a bottom-up picture of sixteenth-century civic and community life which he calls “carnivalesque.” See: Katerina Clark and Michael Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin. 1984, 298; Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 1984, 192. 40

to the collective spirit of the people and to the sanctioning of common desires, whereby life and its hardships were for a moment, inverted – good was bad, bad was good, beggars were kings, and kings were beggars. The temporary freedoms offered by carnival speak to a specific period in the history of the festival, prior to the consolidation of state and class structure, which made such inversions practically impossible.203 Carnivalesque is a bottom-up concept and one that aims at eradicating hierarchies. It considers the people as equal, with no barriers of class, profession, or age.

Carnivalesque can only exist in fantasy, then, or during festive time, akin in this way to Arcadia, which is a fictional universe, a ‘possible world’ that offers a credible alternative to the real world through its ‘make-believe’ games.204 Of course, carnival did take place during festive time, and was marked by real mock celebrations acted out by clowns, to parody the high ideal or serious ceremony conducted by dignitaries.205 Said celebrations were, as Bakhtin understood them, inherently positive, speaking to the freedoms of a time that led to a sanctioning of society and widespread renewal.

According to carnivalesque, carnival society is a generative one, giving life to new generations via the grotesque figuration of carnival-goers, as seen again in Brueghel’s interpretation where crippled men drag across the floor, a man dances on a barrel as he chugs alcohol from a pitcher, and even a pig can be seen hurling, to be sure we understand the sheer excesses of the moment (see fig. 13).206 Said images speak to Bakhtin’s material bodily principle, or ‘grotesque canon’ whereby grotesque figures, linked to the earth with a focus on the orifices – mouths, bottoms, and other generative organs, are interpreted as always conceiving.207 The lower-bodily topography of Bakhtin’s material bodily principle whereby all that is low is made high – the buttocks

203 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984, 21. 204 For a discussion of country games, see Francoise Lavocat’s book chapter “Playing Shepherd: Allegory, Fiction, Reality of Pastoral Games,” in Pastoral and the Humanities, 2006, 65. 205 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. London: Routledge, 2016, 261. 206 Pulcinella is grotesque, too, not just due to his potbelly and beak, but also due to other deformities not apparent in Tiepolo’s portrayal: facial warts and a strange chicken breast, for example. 207 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 21. 41

and genitals are not interpreted with disgust, but are seen as generative and life supporting.208 This idea also speaks to carnival itself, which follows a similar pattern to pastoral of retreat, renewal, return, or, life, learning, and death. The only discrepancy in carnivalesque is that there is no death, for the people are constantly regenerating themselves, not altogether unlike Tiepolo’s Pulcinelli, who are an entire people in and of themselves, and always reproducing replicas. What is more, Pulcinella exaggerates the most basic bodily functions, akin to Bakhtin’s grotesque realisms – eating, drinking, intense sexuality,209 and the most superhuman ability: fertility.210 Indeed, Pulcinella’s enormous potbelly does not just represent his appetite for pasta and for wine, but is also a sign of pregnancy, from where the little Pulcinelli are born, and so again marks an outright non-human status, while at the same time affirming the vulgar character of the popular entertainment of which he is a part.

Finally, he has a long and crooked nose that can be interpreted as a phallic symbol, linked again to reproduction and animal-like lust.211Alpers and Baxandall concur when they describe Punch as “a visually regarding animal”212 The comics, being identical in appearance, behavior, and language experience the countryside as a collective. They enjoy it alone, not as an alternate race, but one that encompasses all of humanity; 213 in this case, all of Venice.214

As we have seen, Renaissance visions of men visiting the countryside share a similar generative property to that of Bakhtin’s grotesque canon and carnivalesque social institution. Poets and philosophers enter the countryside, are affected, and then exit, returning to their normal lives

208 Bakhtin, 19. 209 These are the major themes of carnival according to Burke, alongside violence. Burke, 265 210 Horváth, Modernism and Charisma, 77. 211 Horváth, 76. 212 Alpers and Baxandall, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994, 161. 213 Just as carnival helped to transform society, so too did pastoral figure as a mechanism of social reform. It can do this by permitting the Pulcinelli to organize themselves in their own way, just as later carnival reinforced the social hierarchy by offering the people an experience of utopia. 214 The grotesque canon also speaks to pleasures of the flesh that are conducive to a freedom of sexual license – drinking, scoffing, excessive consumption, dancing, and fighting – behaviors associated with this specific comic, who can be all of these things, but can also be polite, refined, and intelligent, as would be expected in everyday decorum. As a cipher of carnival and festive time, Pulcinella’s image is alone enough to carnivalize space, suggesting that we cannot pinpoint carnivalesque to carnival. A preliminary example of this can be seen in Francesco Guardi’s (1712-1793) Parlor of the Nuns (1745-50) where Pulcinella’s likeness in a puppet show works to carnivalize the sacred space. 42

with some great insights for re-teaching in the urban world to which they belong. These fruitful aspects are echoed in the writings of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). In Alberti’s Della famiglia

(1433-34), for example, young Lionardo exclaims the following: Abound with untold “pleasures, perfumes, babbling rivulets, and grass,” the Venetian terraferma (mainland) proffered sweet refuge from the odors, congestions, and “encounters with a thousand dangers” in the city.215 “Yes, by

Heaven! A very Paradise!;” “how happy our sojourn at the villa will be!,” he continues. 216 Next to its status as a social utopia, villa life was almost always conducive to learning, being an Arcadia ripe with lessons, or a second school outside Athens.217 Remarking on the holiday in his architectural treatise of 1570, Venetian architect Palladio (1508-1580) writes the following:

The soul weary from the bustling city can find relaxation and solace in the villa and devote himself quietly to the study of science and to contemplation just as the wise men of antiquity had done – for these men frequently withdrew to their country houses and there, visited by friends and relatives, left as happy a life as is possible to attain on this earth, earthly, domestic happiness.”218

Likewise, the Italian naturalist Giovanni Fabbroni (1752-1822) writing in the eighteenth century describes the space as somewhere visited on occasion, as part of a cyclical time akin to carnival. This notion of pastoral is represented in the Italian holiday, or villeggiatura, which was an event that was longed for, alongside the arrival of Spring called the good season, for it was a time when society, next to nature, was rejuvenated. “The men themselves feel invigorated” writes Fabbroni; he continues with the following:

The cares of the many needs that life demands end: the poor find it easier to subsist; they feel less the concerns of their state in wine: and they console themselves by calculating the hopes of the nascent collections. All the grasses are alive; green trees; those of the

215 Leon Battista Alberti and Anicio Bonucci (ed.), “Dialogo della Famiglia,” Opere vogari, Bk. III, Vol. II. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1843, 284. 216 Alberti and Bonucci, “Dialogo della Famiglia,” 284. 217 Shakespeare notes the powers of the natural landscape in his ‘woods outside Athens’ where the power of the deep pastoral did not depend on the names and costumes of comic actors, but was steered by the natural landscape (favola boscareccia). See: Clubb, 2007, 23. 218 Andrea Palladio (ed.). The Four Books of Architecture. Second Book, Chapter XII. 43

impatient almond blossom with the first flowers: and everywhere the earth covers itself with varied, and not sterile, beauties, which attract the eye to the countryside.219

He goes on then to write that the holiday was refreshing, since the evening imposes rest on the chores, made the holiday interesting and beautiful, near-perfect, from which he recommends we return to the fresh earthly rooms of the city, as an equally refreshed self.220 Conceptualizing the holiday from the perspective of nature, and against the concept of society, the similarities are clear.

We might consider, then, the notion of this change, of cyclical time conducive to pastoral, as pastoralesque, borrowing from Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalesque. Indeed, akin to carnival, pastoral represents an escape and a stoppage of time, for the rejuvenation of its visitors. The countryside too invited periodic release, and pastoral literature especially licenses un-verisimilar subjects, just as carnival gives freedom to marginalized figures in a second-world reality.

Tiepolo’s frescoes in the Sala dei Pulcinelli can be described as pastoralesque, for they intimate the notion of pastoral as a season of release, experienced via leisure. Tiepolo also hints that the comics are not from nature, but have sojourned there, as seen specifically in The Departure of Pulcinella

(see fig. 5). The fresco proffers a sheltered view to the verdant outdoors where a visitor with hunchback trails deeper into the landscape.221 We are not quite sure where he is headed, but the theme of mobility is clearly evoked. Tiepolo then reminds us why he has journeyed there, as suggested in his uncanny choice and placement of domestic props: an egg that has rolled to the utmost periphery of centre, an abandoned shuttle and a racquet, a decorative jug that is propped upright despite its position on a slanted surface, a powder-blue blanket settled on a bundle of straw, a casual racquet and shuttle tossed to the ground as a signal of villa life, and a pearl-white greyhound

219 Giovanni Valentino Mattia Fabbroni, Gli ozj della villeggiatura, o, Discussione libera di alcuni argomenti popolari. Florence, 1800, 1. 220 Fabbroni, Gli ozj della villeggiatura, o, Discussione libera di alcuni argomenti popolari. Florence, 1800, 3. 221 I spot a triumphal flag in the distance. An artificial light hits the fresco from a top-right angle; it downcasts sprinklings of tense shadow on figures in the fore and middle-grounds. Sunlight illuminates the background. Its natural beams hit a musical hunchback whose costume becomes terribly radiant. 44

stalled at right, tail between legs. Said items speak to the vapidity of his time here, a space where he is free to enjoy empty games.

Seen this way, it is not sure whether Tiepolo’s pastoralesque images boast the same properties of renewal as carnival does. Indeed, with regards to carnival, figures were expected to actively participate, and the same can be said for pastoral. Indeed, while a temporary liberation from life, these spaces always had an essential nature, with meaningful, philosophical content. And to be sure, no rest period can be rendered festive or generative – a spiritual and/or ideological dimension needs to be added. According to Bakhtin, carnival communities must be sanctioned, not by the world of practical conditions, but by the highest aims of human existence. Without this sanction, there can be no festivity.222 Pulcinella brings this into question via his image, as suggested by Ágnes

Horváth when she writes the following:

The ultimate tragedy of Pulcinella might be that he desperately tries to imitate humans, but is not one of them, only a figure stuck in liminality. In order to become human, something else would be needed: a whole process of encoding or, as it is called in anthropology, a transformative rite of passage.223

The paradox is such that we expect a transformation via his image, but not a fruitful one. Pulcinella is not a reveler, but an actor, and we cannot be certain that his journey or performance will end, or even if it can. This is a question that pastoralesque demands be answered, though not one that is equally inherent in carnivalesque, a form that is never ending and always renewing itself, akin in this sense to Rosand’s vision of nature as natura naturans – nature in a state of perpetual becoming.224

The stakes in pastoralesque are a little different as the implied realism of return is an integral part of its structure. Only did it become an action or sojourn that was continual, during the eighteenth

222 Bakhtin, 9. 223 Ágnes Horváth, “Pulcinella, or the Metaphysics of the Nulla: In between Politics and Theatre,” History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2010), 63. 224 Carnivalesque is always related to time, either to the recurrence of an event, or to the natural cosmic cycle of change, renewal, death, and revival. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. See: Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, 1984, 6. 45

century whence carnival and villeggiatura were equally frivolous and extended, seeping into everyday life, from which these pleasures became almost inseparable. Bertelli aptly describes Venice during the eighteenth century as a “Carnevale permanente” (permanent carnival), and the same can be said for the country retreat, which was extended during the period, as we will later discuss.225 Bertelli’s suggestion of non-return speaks too to Tiepolo’s portrayal of the comic in The Swing, given there is a line of Pulcinelli waiting for their turn on the swing. They appear to have arrived in infinite number, and so we cannot be sure that the action will cease.226

This moment of greater intensity of Venetian life during carnival, which was traditionally sequestered to an established period of time, seems that it spilled into other aspects of life during the eighteenth century.227 It seems, then, as has been suggested by James H. Johnson, that carnival became merely symbolic, or escapist, having no real function for the benefit of society as a whole, but for the sheer enjoyment of the season. For the Abbott Giuseppe Gennari writing in the eighteenth century, there existed no real distinction between carnival and lent. Writing on his observations of Venetians who “si Carla e si ride come se non fosse Quaresima” (chat and laugh like it were not Lent), carnival had altogether lost its potency.228 A certain Gradenigo emphasizes the proliferation of spontaneous parties, organized for the most pretentious reasons, such as the recovered health of Senator Greggorio Barbarigo of St. Francesco, for which poems were also printed. 229 As per the writings of others, the new carnival season represented a letting-go in the face of a profound crisis that was to strike, which was by this time seen as imminent. The last Doge of

Venice (from 1789 to 1797), Lodovico Manin (1725-1802) recounts in his Memoires that from the moment he was elected, he understood that the government in Venice would not last long.230

225 Bertelli, 43 226 This is a symbolism rarely seen in other early modern portrayals of nobles swinging. 227 Bertelli, 43. 228 Gennari, Lettere cit., lettera a Girolamo Zanetti, 24 marzo 1753 cc. 84, rv. 229 Gradenigo, Notatori cit., V, 6 marzo 1759. 230 Citato in A. Scarfatti, Memoire del dogado di Lodovico Manin, Venice 1886, 4. 46

Indeed, while government action in political and social life should have appeared he argues, Venice showed an impotence to operate.231 Venice was also represented as an anti-utopia during this time, as read in the allegorical tale of a “Noble Venetian,” who was likely one of the following authors:

Edmund Stacey, Jonathan Swift, or Edward Ward. In his account of Venice which he sees as “so entirely governed by Humor and Passion,” the author writes the following:

For my own part I shan’t pretend to give you either our history or character, when you come to the Metropolis, whither I hear you are bound, you’ll soon find that the World has not been mistaken to us, and that we have been guilty of so many ridiculous and unaccountable Actions that no Nation under Heaven can equal our Folly, and that we are in reality an Island of Fools.232

These numerous visions led to authored and popular ‘fantasies’ that were intrinsically tied to carnival celebrations and to the interaction of the physical city with the imagination.233 There was a false harmony in Venice during the eighteenth century, when carnival was spread out over many months of the year. Festivities never seemed to end and Pulcinella appeared in the streets hawking wares, performing, and causing mischief at all times. Earlier artists targeted the much tooted harmony of social classes. Indeed, carnival was a time when “aristocrats mix together; all are equal, rendered so by costumes and masks, as if at a perpetual Carnival.234 Though, it was also a time when the deception was beginning to be uncovered and criticized; Venetians were beginning to recognize its distortions, questioning whether the renewal of Venice was at all possible, or whether it is all a façade. The Swing maintains many of these crucial aspects in that Tiepolo attempts to bring Pulcinella inside, akin to some nobles during this time who had tried to entertain indoors with commedia troupes, all of which failed to be a success due to the drama’s inherent gutter talk, somehow less

231 As he walked around Piazza San Marco, the philosopher Andrea Conti was further struck by a crowd of masks that were unable to elaborate non-elementary thoughts, causing the traveler to deem the city as superficial. See: A. Conti, lettres a madame dDe Caylus, ms., B.M.V., mss. Franc., appendice 58 (12102), c. 86, lettera del 14 febbraio 1728. 232 Noble Venetian, A New Voyage, 3. 233 Sophia Psarra, The Venice Variations: tracing the architectural imagination. London: UCL Press, 2018, 139. 234 Lynne Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon: Commedia dell’Arte and the Visual Arts. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1998, 137. 47

offensive in market squares, but wildly out of place in civilized interiors.235 Similarly, Venetian playwright Carlo Goldoni envisioned the theatre as a school of virtue, one that comic figures would inevitably disrupt.236 Tiepolo manages to pull it off by elevating the comic to the ceiling, which is both ironic and absurd.237

It is natural to say that Pulcinella is carnivalesque, but it is perhaps more compelling to define him as pastoralesque. Dissimilar from the generative carnival, and from the Renaissance idea of natura naturans, the summer holiday during Tiepolo’s time had an inevitable end – the sun set, the soil was toiled, the crops ceased, and the summers were always bound to conclude. More than this, nature, as a backdrop to the holiday, cannot be stopped or altered by us, whereas carnival is an inherently human activity directly affected by social participation. We learn further that carnival was extended during the eighteenth century. During this time, Pulcinella became a symbol of societal decay; he was not an active participant in magical Arcadias, but was affected by nature’s powers unwittingly, standing as a representative of its rejuvenating properties for all humanity, although he himself was not renewed by its powers. Thus, Pulcinella expresses equally the negative associations tied, in specific, to villeggiatura.

235 Johnson, Venice Incognito, 157 236 Johnson, 158. 237 The backdrop of carnival held additional meaning for Venetians, as did the Veneto. As shown by Professor of English literature, Margaret Anne Doody in her book Tropic of Venice, carnival might be compared to a maze, much like the city itself, which was travelled by foot. Both labyrinth and carnival tease the visitor, who cannot be a mere spectator to this world but must, in some way participate, much akin to the pastoral experience. “The labyrinth itself is at once a point of departure and a point of entry” argues Doody, “an interval in time that makes time look like space,” she continues. Indeed, as an interval in time, the duty of the traveler who finds themselves in a maze or labyrinth is indeed to find escape. There is, thus, stress attached to being in the labyrinth itself, whether stumbling about on short hot streets or oozing along mysterious waterways with sudden turns. See: Margaret Doody, Tropic of Venice. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007, 264-278. 48

Part III. Narratives of Villeggiatura iii.ii Goldoni, Gozzi, and l’opera buffa

Visions of the countryside were subsumed under the heading of villeggiatura (holiday time) during the eighteenth century. Akin to the German Sommerfrische, villeggiatura involved a physical departure from the urban sphere to the countryside during carnival, when nobles would frequent their summer villas to enjoy parties, leisure time, and a multitude of other pleasures associated with the retreat. In

Tiepolo’s portrayals, Pulcinella is curiously inserted into this narrative. He appears to have journeyed there, as suggested by Tiepolo’s portrayals in the Sala where Pulcinelli are seen wandering, drinking, and languishing in the space, activities conducive to the seasonal trip, as seen again in Tiepolo’s famous Dance in the Country (c. 1750-60) (fig. 14).238 In this earlier portrayal of the holiday, we see a party unfolding in a walled garden of a Venetian mainland villa, with a mountainous atmospheric landscape glimpsed in the distance.239 Tiepolo captures the specific cultural aesthetic of villeggiatura but also the essence of the commedia dell’arte tradition, especially its un-staged quality and improvised naturalism.240 After seeing a commedia performance at the Teatro San Luca in Venice, Johann

Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) wrote that he “had never seen more natural acting than that of these masked players”; he further reflected that such art could be achieved only by “long practice.”241A similar observation was offered by the eighteenth-century historian of Italian comic

238 Tiepolo’s A Dance in the Country is widely held to be the artist’s greatest pictorial excursion into the world of eighteenth-century Venice. See: Linda Wolk-Simon, “Domenico Tiepolo,” 1996-1997, 30. 239 Surrounded by fashionable ladies, fashionable young men, musicians and masked revelers, a sprightly couple dances. Pulcinella is a mountebank with tall hat, Harlequin climbs a tree, Columbine, the masked female behind the dancers; Coviello, sprouting tall feathers from his cap and wearing a mask with a large hooked nose, playing the bass at the right; Doctor, an academic pendant of Bolognese origin, attired in the black robe of a pedagogue and a large floppy hat. Seated at the right, beside the woman sipping a fashionable cup of steaming chocolate, appears one more member of the troupe – perhaps Pasquariello – wearing a large ruff and close-fitting cap. See: Wolk-Simon, 30; Bentmann and Muller, The Villa as Hegemonic Architecture, 1992, 79; Robert F. Storey, Pierrot: A Critical History of a Mask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014, 30. 240 Commedia dell’arte was not performed via the use of scripts, but in rehearsed and unscripted comic scenarios. 241 Goethe was an admirer of commedia dell’arte and his friend Johann Heinrich Merck (1741-1791) once owned A Dance in the Country. Both of these men were part of the sturm und drang proto-Romantic movement in the eighteenth century, which was a counter-enlightenment movement. 49

theater and director of the Comédie-Italienne in Paris,242 Luigi Riccoboni (1676-1753), who opinioned the following: “The actor who performs impromptu, performs in a more lively and natural manner than he who plays a role which he has learned by heart.”243 That Tiepolo, too, fully appreciated this naturalism and spontaneity is vouched for by the subject of his painting – an improvised performance by masked players, which at first glance appears to be simply a dance in the country. 244

For all its appeal to truth, Italian comedy was detested by a major playwright most prominently active in Venice during the 1750s, Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793).245 Goldoni took it upon himself to restore Venetian theatre by introducing increasingly sober and elevated plots that attempted to enter Venice into the verve of the enlightenment. His scorn of society’s looseness of morale and of the wasteful festive time were made lucid in written librettos and scores for the new l’opera buffa (comic opera), which featured a comic figure or two in accordance with public taste.246 In dispute with Goldoni, a second playwright active during the period, also called Carlo, was an ardent supporter of the old commedia dell’arte, supporting its gradual revival. Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806) wrote fairytales that capture the humour and spirit of traditional commedia dell’arte, and recaptured much of the intended roles of Italian comedy’s stock characters. As one of Tiepolo’s greatest excursions into the world of eighteenth century Venice, A Dance in the Country is thus situated at the threshold

242 For more on images of commedia dell’arte in France, see: Charles Sterling, “Early Paintings of the Commedia dell’Arte in France,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Summer, 1943): 11-32. 243 Wolk-Simon, 30. 244 Baring the imprint of his father’s trade, it has been suggested that the artist looked to the French courtly tradition of Jean-Antoione Watteau (1684-1721) and Nicolas Lancret (1690-1743) for inspiration when drawing and painting his scenes of everyday life. Watteau’s unique aesthetic of the countryside inspired the formation of the Fête Galante, a unique style of pastoral wherewith disjunctive elements were meshed into an overall concordia discors – cultural dances, games, fictive curtains, architectural settings, luscious silks and textures, and a mingling of comics and men. See: Lawner, Harlequin on the Moon, 137. 245 Goldoni returned to Venice just a year prior to writing L’Arcadia, following nearly five years away, where he spent time mainly in Tuscany. Upon his return, he became immediately embroiled in disputes with various theatrical rivals and critics, and during the next season he agreed to write the staggering number of sixteen new plays to sustain the Medebach Company at the Teatro Sant’ Angelo, and to silence his detractors. See: Heartz, 16. 246 Full-length comic operas were introduced in Venice in 1743, and were as much a success as had been the serious operas of the Neapolitan school, which dominated the largest and most important Venetian theatre, San Giovanni Grisostomo, around 1730. See: Heartz and Rice, From Garrick to Gluck, 2004, 12. 50

between the quiet appreciation of commedia, and its supposed eclipse at mid-century, when comic figures were thought to have started shifting in meaning, from being active performers to mere signifiers of a past dramatic art. The works of both of the Carlos stand to reveal additional clues as to the function of Tiepolo’s enigmatic Pulcinelli.247

Goldoni was especially harsh on traditional comic theatre and its masks, which he saw as props of immodest deceit that tarnished the international repute of Venetian theatre and lowered the dignity of his society. His comedies paint a portrait of the vices that disgraced his times, and of the ignorance and superstitions he hated, which includes the commedia figures he manipulated for the purpose of his “social thesis.”248 His primary social target was the upper echelons of society whose lusting after pleasure and escape tied to carnival and to the annual villeggiatura, which he scorned mercilessly.249 And he proclaims in the preface to his libretti Trilogia della villeggiatura (Holiday

Trilogy) (1761) that villeggiatura had become during his lifetime “a passion, a mania, a disorder.”250

Uttering in rustic seclusion, Goldoni’s love-sick Leonardo proclaims himself a “madman” and a

“fool.”251 “They went to the country all smiles” tattles Leonardo’s servant “and they came back with chips on their shoulders.”252 Here, as in other comedies, Goldoni considers the ways in which the countryside retreat affected his characters.

While villeggiatura constituted a physical retreat from home, it did not necessarily constitute a break from the social networks and concerns of the city.253 Thus, just as sixteenth-century pastoral was a green place of hope, transformation, and learning, the fateful characteristics of eighteenth-

247 The theatrical war between Gozzi and Goldoni has been hailed as “one of the most impressive and far-reaching events in the entire history of Italian theater.” John Louis DiGaetani, Carlo Gozzi: A Life in the 18th Century Venetian Theater, an Afterlife in Opera. Jefferson, NC; London: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2000, 92. 248 Joseph Spencer Kennard, Goldoni and the Venice of his Time. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1920, 9-12. 249 In Goldoni’s day, anybody who was anybody went to the countryside two times a year: the first time for the last two weeks of July, and the second time from the beginning of October until mid-November. See: Goldoni, De Michelis, Five comedies, 2016, 220. 250 Carlo Goldoni, Cesare De Michelis, Michael Hackett, Brittany Asaro, and Gianluca Rizzo (eds.), Five comedies. Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press, 2016, 156. 251 Ibid., 300. 252 Ibid., 307. 253 Tag Gronberg, Vienna: City of Modernity, 1890-1914. Oxford; New York: P. Lang, 2007, 119. 51

century pastoral were tied to the decaying Serenissima, being part delightful, part dangerous. Akin to carnival, villeggiatura was tripled in length during the eighteenth century to embrace spring, summer, and autumn, and had lost much of its powerful rejuvenating qualities as a result. He denounced the excesses of this serious ritual that had become an artificial fashion, akin to carnival, reporting that a one-month stay in the villa cost as much as four months of life in the city.254

The perception of travel in Venice was highlighted during carnival. For the opening of the

Spring season, or the Ascension season, Venetians of any means would have gone to the Teatro

Sant’ Angelo; they would have worn masks and would have arrived there by gondola. More than likely, they were already contemplating the summer holiday along the Brenta,255 for the Sensa or

Ascention fair was held during this time,256 when the people of standing retired to la solita villeggiatura estiva sulla Brenta.257 Tiepolo inserts Pulcinella into this lifestyle, not only in his A Dance in the Country, but also in his Divertimento per li regazzi, which traces the life of Pulcinelli, from the time he was hatched from a turkey’s egg to other episodes from his life growing up along the Brenta.258 The implied irony in Tiepolo’s series is clear considering that Pulcinella is not elite, but this is partly the point, to parody the season and the lives of its wealthy participants, as Gealt and Vetrocq observe.259

The season had a personal meaning for Tiepolo, as for Goldoni, who both delivered commentaries on what they saw, which they turn theatrical, as was the Venetian way. It is clear from both of their

254 The wistful idea of Arcadia envisioned by Alberti, Palladio, and others, stands in dramatic opposition to later narratives of the season, marked, in some cases, by nightmarish, starless, and monstrous portraits of untamed rusticity found in Francisco Goya’s (1746-1828) Quinta del Sordo (Villa of the Deaf). Here, secluded in nature, the artist hews paradisiacal aspects of villeggiatura for a darker, antithetical landscape with two camera dipinte of savage cannibalism, witchcraft, ghosts, and peasants fighting as they sink deeper and deeper into the earth. 255 Brenta comes after Momolo sulla Brenta at San Samuele in 1739 and the expanded version Il prodigo, which he wrote a preface in 1750. 256 This was the most solemn of civic festivals, when the doge boarded the Bucintoro to wed the republic to the Adriatic by dropping a ring in the water. 257 Daniel Heartz and John A. Rice, From Garrick to Gluck: Essays on Opera in the Age of Enlightenment. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2004, 21. 258 Henry S. Francis, “Six Drawings from the Life of Pulcinella by the Younger Tiepolo,” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1939), 47. 259 Pulcinella is imagined as a product of villa life. In No. 54 of the series, he and his kin gather faggots in the countryside adjacent, with the Dolomites in the background; and in the last, No. 74, he is seen with 6 other figures watching a rainstorm on a sultry day. Francis, “Six Drawings,” 48. 52

works that the River Brenta was a location noted as being a space for the holiday, and a potentially dangerous place that licensed unfavorable behaviors.

When describing a return from Venice in his Memoires, Goldoni notes that he passed on his way several country houses of the banks of the Brenta, where wealth displayed its finery. “Our ancestors went there only to amass their fortunes,” writes the playwright, “today one goes there to dissipate them,” he continues.260 He goes on to critique the activities people enjoyed in the countryside; they organized grand amusements, dinners, balls, and shows, where the Italian cicisbeism, without embarrassment or restraint, could be seen.261 Goldoni’s grandfather ruined himself with parties in a villa on the River Sile near Treviso, and we know based on Venetian newspapers during carnival season that theatrical performances were played outside the city. To make the holiday of the nobility more pleasant, they would gather at the Dolo piccolo teatro on the

Veneto where there were plays recited and poems by Mr. Francesco Passarini.262 Antonio Longo describes a party at one of the villas on the River Brenta, the “destinato al divertimento” (destination of fun), where masked players and masked villagers enjoyed the season together (see fig. 14).263 The escapism tied to these events was the exact target of Goldoni’s scorn, which sought to eradicate these senseless playtimes for serious ceremony and sensible social gatherings.

It is not sure where The Swing is situated in this dichotomy. Pulcinella is, after all, silent, pristine, and ostensibly renewed, but the action of the swing leads to a different conclusion. In eighteenth-century Europe, swings became one of the established motifs for leisurely life, connected to the un-heroic activity of nothingness.264 Viewed as an exercise in “aimlessness,” “idleness,”

260 Goldoni (ed.), Five Comedies by Carlo Goldoni, 2016, lxvi. 261 Description is elucidated in connection with a play of 1754, la villeggiatura. La cicisbéature is the Italian practice of a man other than her husband attending a married woman in high society; but Goldoni probably meant here a more general relaxing of sexual mores that prevailed during retreats to the Brenta. Heartz, footnote 13, p. 17. 262 “Pallade Veneta” dal 27 settembre al 4 ottobre 1710. 263 A. Longo, Memorie, Veneziana 1820, I, 51. 264 Donald Posner, “The Swinging Women of Watteau and Fragonard,” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 64, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), 76. 53

“inconsistency,” and fickleness,” the swing was suitable to a figure like Pulcinella, who is libertine in his interactions and approach to life.265 Swings and philandering female swingers were established motifs for the pleasures of villa life and villeggiatura in eighteenth-century Europe, after the French rococo lifestyle. As emblems of the annual country holiday, collectively envisioned by the haute bourgeoisie in France as a “rural heaven of the rich” in an original state of innocence, charming swingers had the double significance of marking the inconsistency of life itself via a comparison with fleeting sexual desire.266 In Antoine Watteau’s The Shepherds (c.1717-19), for example, a woman can be seen swinging in the background of a country scene, set in motion by a man at her right (fig. 15).

Watteau’s swing would have been readily understood as a symbol of flirtation and the act of love- making itself.267 The artist teases these implied meanings further by placing the action between a natural peephole of greenery to a moment of intimacy, having an impact on the meaning of the main scene.268 Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s (1732-1806) The Happy Accidents of the Swing (1767) is equally suggestive (fig. 16). Painted for an unnamed courtier who requested he be portrayed looking up at the ravishing legs of his mistress, “and even more, if you wish to enliven your picture,” the Swing relates equally to the transience of time as a journey to the countryside in its concealed symbolism of changes of the heart, and indeed, of partners. Tiepolo’s portrayals of Pulcinella, while not appearing to adhere to this specific view of the swing has its own underlying scorn, which is exemplified in a set of drawings at the Museo Correr (fig. 17-18).

The swing of nobles and the picnic allow us a glimpse into Tiepolo’s interpretation of the holiday. While his works have been seen as the equivalent to Goldonian theatre, they never did seem to share a similar critique – it was almost as though he understood but fought against. Here, though,

265 Posner, “The Swinging Women,” 76. 266 The dream informed Rousseau’s very “civil” social utopia to the same degree that it did Marie Antoinette’s Potemkinist Village in the gardens of Versailles, complete with windmill, duck pond, and dairy. Bentmann and Müller, Villa Hegemonic, 1992, 80. 267 Colin Bailey, Philip Coinsbee, and Thomas W. Gaehtgens, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003, 134. 268 Bailey, The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard, 134. 54

the artist’s mocking portrayals shed a negative light on the nobles, who he portrays as grotesque caricatures with bulbous noses, with full lips and open mouths, and with large pot-bellies for scoffing food and vocalizing their delighting in the raptures of the holiday.

Goldoni’s well-received L’Arcadia in Brenta (Arcadia on the River Brenta) was performed at the Teatro Sant’ Angelo on May 14 1749 during the Spring Ascention season.269 The comic opera recounts the villeggiatura of seven civili (civilians) and oneste persone (honest persons) in a delightful place or Arcadia on the Brenta, an imagined backdrop that Goldoni clearly knows does not exist.

The first scene is set in the camera terrena of a villa rented by the protagonist Fabrizio, who later turns into Pulcinella, as we will see.270 In the camera terrena, Goldoni’s protagonist Fabrizio, played by

Baglioni, indulges himself in a midday nap in an easy chair, while fully dressed. His friend Foresto, who is also one of Fabrizio’s guests, attempts to awaken him, though Fabrizio cannot wake up, or else does not wish to, so not to hear the bad news that Foresto keeps repeating, “Non v’è più denaro” [There is no more money].271 Foresto then sings his first aria (solo), a conventional da capo while Fabrizio yawns, nods, and falls asleep again.272 Upon his waking up, Fabrizio rejoices that his accounts, being reduced to zero, are beautifully balanced (Ex. 1. Ib), a poignant line that presents his character as dimwitted and delusional.

Following a solo by Fabrizio, the third scene is introduced by way of a change of scenery, rather than dialogue, which was entirely Goldoni’s contribution.273 The scene, in specific, is a garden with grassy benches upon which Rosanna, Laura, Giacinto, and Foresto sit to perform a quartet. In the finale of this scene, the untroubled Fabrizio assumes the role of a commedia dell’arte character, an

269 Selfridge-Field, Song and Season, 519-520. 270Alberti recommends that the houses of the wealthy have separate chambers for summer and for winter. Load bearing and outer ground floor walls tended to have greater thickness thereby helping ground floor chambers to remain cooler during the summer months. See: James R. Lindlow, The Renaissance Palace in Florence, 271 Heartz, From Garrick to Gluck, 21 272 Ibid., 21 273 Goldoni used scenography to establish the emotional tone of the comedy, and only then reinforced it with words and with music. 55

unexpected change. Venetian adventurer Giacomo G. Casanova (1725-1798) remarked that this part of the opera was especially memorable.274 To sell the point that Fabrizio was an impoverished man of great heart but little substance, and that he squandered all of his money for the sake of renting a villa on the Brenta, Goldoni turns him, for a moment, into Pulcinella. By now, the fact that

Pulcinella’s figuration represents all the negative aspects of humanity is clear enough; more than this, he helps to sell the idea that the countryside had itself shifted from an Arcadia to a space that valued witty words, facetious sayings, spirited news, canzonettes, and madrigals. Put another way, Fabrizio reduces Arcadia to a comedy, which is not accepted by the other six members of the group, who all laugh at him mercilessly.275

Advancing his own interpretation of commedia figures in Arcadia was Carlo Gozzi.276 While said to be dead by the eighteenth century, commedia dell’arte found a new popularity thanks to the fiabe (fairytales) of Carlo Gozzi (1720-1806). Gozzi wished to restore commedia scenarios, as opposed to scripted comedies, and so began writing improvised skits; the first of these was entitled

The Love of Three Oranges (1761), which premiered at San Samuele277 in January 1761 and gave commedia a newfound popularity.278

Gozzi’s fairytale The Snake Lady (1762) is especially relevant here.279 Dissimilar from

Goldoni’s portrayals of the comics in the countryside, Gozzi’s works maintain much of the old commedia style whence comics, especially Pulcinella, were truth-tellers, acting as interlocutors between

274 Selfridge-Field, Song and Season, 519-520. 275 Pulcinella loses all his wealth by squandering it and falling victim to thieves in scenarios from Chrysostom dell’arte, as a representation of the treatment of poverty in the important Neapolitan casmarciano scenarios. He also steals money to go gambling. Robert Henke, Poverty and Charity in Early Modern Theater and Performance. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015, 127. 276 It was during the 1760s, when the Tiepolo’s were in Spain, that the fairytales of Carlo Gozzi had their greatest success. See: Shaw, 46. 277 This is where the famous Sacchi company held a lease, a highly successful commedia troupe working in Venice during Gozzi’s time. 278 John Louis DiGaetani, Carlo Gozzi: Translations of the Love of Three Oranges, Turnadot, and The Snake Lady with a Bio- Critical Introduction. New York; Westport, CT; London: Greenwood Press, 1988, 107. 279 The scenario includes the usual destruction of the female lead, and brings up larger issues of family life and of eternal conflicts between husband and wife, and of the family versus society, for example. The scenario includes magical stage effects and includes the comics Pantalone, Brighella, and Truffaldino. 56

the imagined reality on stage and the lived reality of the audience. The scenario begins in a magical

Arcadia where two fairies, Franza and Zemia discuss love and life. Pantalone, the Prince’s former tutor and adviser, and Truffaldoni, the Prince’s hunter, enter this world, alongside Prince Farruscad,

King of Tiflis, where they urge him not to marry the magical creature he discovered there.280 The

Prince does not listen to his advisors and soon enough, the creature becomes Queen. The comics remain skeptical of her throughout the play. In one instance, Pantalone bursts out the following on the King’s romance: “What love, what passion?” The comic continues to notice the King’s “bleary, sunken, bloodshot eyes” versus the eyes of love, being as “bright as the brightest stars.”281 In his ability to see the Queen for who she really is, Pantalone demonstrates a type of knowledge that was more conducive to his traditional role on the commedia stage, where, outside of the powers of nature, he was usually in-tune with the dealings of the human world.282 This knowledge can be tied to his status as a fool, as Michael Foucault observes. Indeed, while the man of reason and wisdom perceives only fragmentary and all the more unnerving images of life, the Fool, argues Foucault

“bears it intact as an unbroken sphere: the crystal ball which for all others is empty is in his eyes filled with the destiny of an invisible knowledge.”283 Intelligence is also noted in the act of escape:

“But from this it follows that townspeople are not as intelligent as birds, because they could leave the city if they wished to, but do not, whereas the poor birds would gladly escape from their cages if they could, to enjoy that precious liberty so extolled by countless famous writers of antiquity observes Giovanni Avogadro (1735-1815).284 But, of course, Pulcinella is not portrayed as a thinking figure in Tiepolo’s portrayals, or in the writings of Goldoni. This is especially true when the comic is set in the countryside, where he is compared to a hairy satyr.

280 DiGaetani, Carlo Gozzi, 114. 281 Ibid., 114. 282 We are reminded again of Shakespeare’s Feste. 283 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books, 1965, 22. 284 Gio. Batt Avogadro in Ackerman, The Villa, 130. 57

iii.ii Satyr

Leading out of the Sala dei Pulcinelli, past Il Mondo Nuovo and the Sala dei falchetto is the themed Sala dei

Satiri, a sun-drenched room containing Tiepolo’s faux marble fresco Satyr on a Swing (c. 1759) (see fig. 11).285 As indicated by the title of the work, the wall fresco is occupied by a half-wild, hirsute satyr who swings centre-stage amidst a gathering of centaurs, fauns, woodland creatures, and other playmates pulled from storybooks. In typical Tiepolesque fashion, the group appears as if picked from diverse worlds to share in an amusement prepared by the artist.286 Within the crowd, a supple faun is draped centre-right of foreground. She frames the scene with her sinuous curves and directs our gaze via her absorption in the activity. Her body lies facing us, as an invitation to play. She is not a disregarding figure like Giorgione’s muses then, whose presence makes our entering his Arcadia questionable; it is as though we must first pass some sort of test in order to enter, to decipher the poem, and only then might we enjoy its fruits.287 By contrast, Tiepolo’s mythic and sexualized faun tempts us to enter her world of pleasure that does not belong to our own and is more akin to an

Eden gone awry, occupied by an enthused Adam.288 Our position is unclear, though it is suggested that we are to see ourselves in the human figures populating the scene. A woman to the right of foreground shields her eyes with her right hand so as not to catch a glimpse of an unhappy accident, or perhaps so not to be hit by the hoofs of the oncoming creature.

It is through the curious juxtaposition of low and high figures in this scene that Tiepolo brings into focus the ambiguity of nature while demonstrating the effects of time on the gradual

285 J. Byam Shaw observes that the Sala dei Satiri was painted in 1759, upon Tiepolo’s return to the villa from a commission in Udine. See: J. Byam Shaw, “The Remaining Frescoes in the Villa Tiepolo at Zianigo,” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 101, No. 680 (Nov., 1959), 391. 286 What influenced Tiepolo most intimately, according to Gealt and Knox, were his father’s more secret, free, and unpredictable works: the etchings – capprici and scherzi di fantasia – that Giambattista in the early forties. These assemblies of strange figures – orientals, gypsies, peasants, soldiers, adolescents, mostly portrayed gazing at something unusual and which, free of any thematic reference, have meaning and significance in themselves, are the source of Domenico’s interest in the representation of bizarre crowds, ready to gather excitedly around anything that attracts their attention, whether a preacher or a charlatan. See: Gealt and Knox, 19. 287 An almost identical scene is found in Tiepolo’s divertimento, where Pulcinella occupies the swing. 288 I am referring here to the Bacchus-looking youth to the right of the swing. He stands adjacent to a prop on the ground that resembles an apple, though it is possibly a beaker. 58

decline of the country retreat, from a state of innocence to something more vicious, as seen via the image of the satyr. Still, the satyr always poses a conundrum. He is almost always set in lush bowers with handsome accompaniments like cornucopia baskets, beautiful muses, and a train of classical comrades, but despite these sensual delights, he is usually always deemed a contaminant. In commedia dell’arte, the satyr was more typically a malignant figure, who represented an evil of some kind via his grotesque figuration289 and gross behaviors.290 The satyr could also be a symbol of poesia as he evokes the simplicity of ancient life and society inspired by bucolic literature and poetry and replicated in elusive portrayals where the creature is set against rolling hills and is placed in proximity to gentle animals.291 His ambiguity is shared by Pulcinella, who has the potential to scoff gnocchi, frolic, and behave badly in one moment, and to replicate the complacency of the nobility in another.

Pulcinella flies high in a reasonably pristine portrayal and we do not think that he contaminates the space as he and his comrades are the only peoples that populate Tiepolo’s sky; though, when he is with other humans, as in Pulcinella in Love, they appear to enjoy his company (see fig. 4). Seen in juxtaposition with the satyr, though, perhaps Tiepolo’s Pulcinelli have more sinister intentions. It is possible that they intend to draw the young woman into temptation, perhaps with the objective of stealing her innocence and possibly her virginity, as suggested by the barking dog as a symbol of fidelity.

The ‘natural’ libidinousness of the pastoral satyr closely matches and exaggerates, in dramatic function if not in exact physical appearance, Pulcinella’s mirrored behaviors. To be sure, drinking, defecating, and eating to the point of near death were not actions merely associated with

289 The earliest Greek representations of the satyrs were partly human and partly equine; the anatomy is nearly human, with the tail, ears, and sexual member of a horse or donkey. In Hellenistic and Roman times, the goat-legged satyr, sometimes with pointed ears and horns, became the dominant type, as it remained for Renaissance artists. See: Raymond Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art, 2004, 14. 290 Satyrs are hybrids; their human form is always augmented by a tail and horse’s ears; sometimes they have hooves or a fully hairy body. See: Thomas H. Carpenter and Christopher A. Farone (eds.), Masks of Dionysus, 1993 208. 291 See Titian’s drawings Two Satyrs in a Landscape (c. 1505-10) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and his pen drawing Landscape with a Satyr at The Frick Collection, New York. 59

this particular fool, but the grotesque excesses that his likeness put a face and figure to.292 As with the centaur, the defining feature of these figures – the satyr and the comic293 – is the combination of human and animal anatomy, and therefore natures. As a proto cipher of festive time, the satyr was a key participant in ancient Bacchanalia,294 which provided him a backdrop to let loose his most animalistic qualities, such as ravishing nymphs in their sleep.295 His other pastimes are equally dominated by his animalistic appetite and passion, as, for example, drinking to excess and playing music.296

Conforming to the central idea of his persona, Pulcinella is exposed as sexual and gluttonous in the smaller scenes surrounding The Swing (fig. 7). These four monochrome tondi (painted roundels) offer insights into the comic’s true personality where he is truly himself, with no façade to sustain. In the bottom tondo, our comic is caught for a second time pinching a woman’s breast (fig. 19). The pair languishes under the shade of a toppling tree, which has the double function of a hiding spot behind which to enjoy one another’s company. The realization of these hidden worlds, wherein lies hidden selves, connects Pulcinella to the bodily and to bodily absorptions, akin to the savage, who is pictured in the guise of a noblewoman swinging, though we are not for a second tricked into believing its veracity.

Tiepolo restricts the satyr’s life to the savage world, and his activities to the material bodily realm. There is no sanction for the satyr, who swings, but cannot shift from low to high beneath the veil of a mask. Only in death is the satyr set free, and herein lies the distinction. Pulcinella is as close to the heavens as we have seen him in Tiepolo’s Swing. Tiepolo frees the comic to take pleasure in

292 Horváth, Modernism and Charisma, 77. 293 Both are equal to peasant figures, being only half human. In Venice, the villano held sway on a large portion of vernacular theatre during the sixteenth century. Giuseppe Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy, 2009. 144. 294 Bacchanalia were festivals in celebration of the Greek god of wine, Bacchus. 295 This is an association that survives in our clinical terms for compulsive sexuality, nymphomania and satyriasis. See: Raymond B. Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr: Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art, 2004, 14. 296 Waddington, Aretino’s Satyr, 14. 60

retirement and elevates him to the ceiling,297 a space typically reserved for mythological figures, dignitaries, and heroes who engage in the rich vita contemplativa (contemplative life) identified with the heavens.298 He betides above the earth which suggests that he now belongs to the eschatological order of paradise and hell. Clad in white, and removed from the material world, he appears as it transformed in mind, body, and spirit, to the level of comic hero. Beneath the static centre of the room – a swing in stasis – a world turns. Pulcinella is the overseer of this chaotic realm, occupied by many men made in his image. He takes for a moment the role of creator of all things, and for a second this all seems possible, but it is not a perception that sticks.

We are reminded of Tiepolo’s hints – tondi, a second swing, and scenes of Pulcinelli cavorting heedlessly. They show no epistemological awareness, and do not comment on the place like other occupants of this world might. While, on the comic stage, Pulcinelli was typically the figure to point out the misdeeds and faults of the other characters, he is here little more than a sign of subjection. Tiepolo’s country protagonist is distanced, in this way, from the shepherd, who is the cipher of the countryside, who boasts the kind of ignorance which makes him immune to the hyper- conceptualizations of the official culture, and allows him to see how things are really. He knows the countryside, too, and is aware of the urban elite’s fascination with it.299 In Angelo Becolo’s (c. 1496-

1542) La pastoral (1521), for example, the protagonist Ruzante, who is part of the pastori (shepherds) class, is the only one who can see that Arcadia’s splendid garden is a painted canvas. Further, he chooses to inhibit the typical liminality of the fool so to descend into the world of “obtuse wisdom” in order to transform himself into the consciousness of his patrons, the nobility.300 Pulcinella and the satyr show no such ability, to have a real opinion, or to be manipulated in such a way so as to

297 There was a movement during the eighteenth century toward a “softening of attitude” for northern Italian villa décor, with the more flexible interpretation of subjects and, occasionally, a dash of irony. See: Morassi, “Zianigo di Mirano,” 1971, 5. 298 Julian Kliemann and Michael Rohlmann, Italian Frescoes: High Renaissance and Mannerism, 1510-1600. New York: Abbeville Press, 2014, 414. 299 Gerbino, Music and the Myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy, 2009. 144. 300 Gerbino, 145. 61

understand the perspective and specific way of thinking of their patrons. Just as the image of rustic shepherds embody the mobility of life in their ability to shift according to the needs of society

Tiepolo’s Pulcinella brings into question the very fluidity of social behavior behind the veil of the mask.

The artist ultimately draws attention to the noble obsession with villa life itself, and with society’s willingness to accrue massive debts in order to sustain a public image.301 The activities of these men are altogether vapid and useless, and they engage in movements that are judged too comfortably complacent to fulfill any type of real transformation.

Together, Pulcinella and the satyr represent a gradual decline of the green space. To be sure, a similar scorn exists in the unsightly scene of the satyr swinging as it does in the Sala’s many scenes of Pulcinella. The places that these scenarios unfold in are tempting to us, and we are susceptible of being sucked in through the canvas. Just as the satyr pleases members in his crowd, Pulcinelli is successful in tempting a woman to loosen her morals, an affect we too might experience in the countryside. Tiepolo’s vision of the retreat is no longer that of an Arcadia, but is an inherently more deceptive, and potentially seductive world.

For a moment, we buy into the fantasy that The Swing’s Pulcinella is a new, evolved version of himself. Still, Tiepolo does not allow us to believe his fantasy. Though, despite what The Swing tells us, we know that the comic has little to do with all the artistic and intellectual activities associated with his airy station. The comic undergoes an uncanny restraint, and his elevation to the ceiling is not a natural one. Lacking in the freedoms of his hirsute companion, who represents the comic’s predominant ego, Pulcinella is made deliberately quiet, frozen, and tamed so as to show to us the impact that he undergoes as a naïve visitor to this new, and slightly dangerous, place.

301 Tiepolo is himself a member of the patrician class. 62

CONCLUSION

Pulcinella does not satiate the desire of his time to see real people feeling real things. He is a cipher, a messenger, a reflection, an empty soul disobeying the call to real emotion advanced in Venice by

Goldoni’s sober reforms. Tiepolo plays on the comic’s capacity for nothingness in his anti-occasion, anti-enlightenment portrayals where vapidity prevails. A shuttle is tossed, a used beaker rests, a wanderer goes to nowhere, and a silent swing arrives at nothing. These are signs of stasis, but they are not void of meaning.

The insensibility of Tiepolo’s Pulcinelli is exaggerated by the effects of their natural environment which calls for a real stoppage of thought alongside time. Lighting a fire under the paradox of rationale and subjectivity, Pulcinella is outwardly elevated and refined, but only so to allow the intoxicating sensations of his natural stage to breathe through him and the roof undetected. Tiepolo thus advances intelligent insights via the comic’s silent suffering, an important precursor to later romantic portrayals of figures made mad under starless skies, of great horrors being anticipated in wild lands, and of men reacting to the screams of nature as a symbol of life’s traumas.302 Pulcinella is vulnerable to nature’s powers, being a naïve comic with a fragile status during Tiepolo’s time that links him directly to the city.

Pulcinella’s nothingness does not mean that he no longer represents the colorful, jocular, and musical delights of festive time in Venice, but rather, that its hoped-for return to normalcy is

302 I am referring here to Francisco Goya’s (1746-1828) Black Paintings in his Quinta del Sorto (Villa of the Deaf) (1820- 1823), and also to Edvard Munch’s (1863-1944) lithograph The Scream (1895) which was re-examined by the British Museum in early 2019. As part of the Museum’s forthcoming Exhibition Edvard Munch: Love and Angst from 11 April to 21 July 2019, the inscription towards the bottom of The Scream, which reads “I felt a large scream pass through nature,” they admit changes the meaning of the work. While originally, The Scream was thought to portray a woman screaming, the inscription has led the Museum to believe that the figure, who is perhaps Munch himself, is not screaming at all, but is instead blocking off the screams of nature with his hands. This intriguing interpretation is further strengthened by the original title of the work, The Scream of Nature. Munch’s man, like Pulcinella, is reacting to nature’s external forces, though he demonstrates an awareness of its dangers that the comic does not as a result of his inability to reason. See: Haroon Siddique, “Edvard Munch’s The Scream comes to the British Museum in April,” The Guardian, (Jan. 8, 2019). 63

blocked, frustrated, prevented, and suspended indefinitely through his image. Pulcinella’s retreat is judged too unwitting to fulfill pastoral’s fundamental requisite of renewal. The Swing solidifies an end to this hope in its teaching that everything unfolds in turns and that everyone has their turn.

Pulcinella disrupts the swing as we anticipate that he might well fall off of it, ending his turn, signaling the end.

Removed from his urban world to the countryside, Pulcinella paints a portrait of a city nearing its downfall, akin to Eden approaching the fall. Tiepolo leaves a gap for the viewer to bridge, and to make their own conclusions as to the cause of this massive defeat his city faces. This is not to suggest that Pulcinella is a second Eve, but to leave you with the idea that the prospect of defeat is brought to light via his image.

FIGURES

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Floor-Plan of the Frescoes’ Display at Museo Ca’ Rezzonico

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

Fig. 11

Fig. 12

Note: Other frescoes surrounding The Swing include four tondi (painted roundels) in a monochrome red wash portraying Pulcinella at rest in the countryside, while the four corner scenes in a monochrome orange wash depict scenes of Pulcinella at work in the countryside, pictured above, Pulcinella and his horse, Pulcinella being force-fed gnocchi (potato pasta associated with the peasant classes) at a pier side, and finally, Pulcinella dancing what appears to be la furlana.

Fig. 13

Fig. 14

Fig. 15

Fig. 16

Fig. 17

Fig. 18

Fig. 19

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