和音

The Italian comedians who invented characters like this lovelorn serenader had been thrown out of Paris. Louis XIV expelled the Comedie-Italienne in 1697, and the troupe would not be allowed back until after his death, which came in 1715, around the time of this picture. So Watteau was painting a kind of theatre Parisians could no longer legally see, keeping its stock figures alive on canvas. Here Mezzetin, the scheming go-between of those comedies, tunes up beneath a window to sing. His guitar is the whole plot, the serenade offered and the answer still unknown. Watteau himself had only a few years left. He was already ill with the disease that killed him at 36.