Giovanni Domenico Ferretti

Giovanni Domenico Ferretti was the busiest painter in 18th-century Florence, a city whose great age was behind it. The Medici line was dying out — it ended in 1737 — and the money and fame that had once flowed to Florentine artists had long moved elsewhere. He filled churches and palaces with frescoes and altarpieces and taught at the drawing academy, once serving as its director.

For all that solemn work, he is remembered best for something lighter. Ferretti belonged to a Florentine confraternity that had staged theatre for centuries, and out of it came a series of paintings of Harlequin, the quick, hungry servant of the commedia dell'arte. He shows the masked figure in one disguise after another, caught out as a cook, a painter, a bungling suitor.

Look at the costume. Harlequin's coat of colored triangles began as a joke about poverty, a suit patched together from scraps too small to matter, and hardened over time into the neat diamond pattern we still know. Ferretti painted at least two full sets of these scenes, and they are what carried his name past his own century.