Mezzetin

Mezzetin was a stock character from the Italian comedy troupes that played in Paris, usually a wily servant mixed up in other people's love affairs. Antoine Watteau painted him around 1717, a few years before tuberculosis killed him at 36. He drops the scheming and gives us a man alone in a garden, plucking a guitar and singing upward to someone we cannot see, his face caught mid-note between hope and complaint. Watteau built much of his art from these theatrical figures, taking stage costume and gesture and turning them to private, wistful moods. At the far end of the garden stands a marble statue of a woman with her back firmly turned, an old way of saying the beloved is not listening.