Tarantella

Tarantella (1830) captures the famous Southern Italian folk dance that had become a standard subject for Northern European artists visiting Naples and the surrounding region in the early nineteenth century. The dance — traditionally performed to cure the bite of the tarantula spider — was by Blechen's day already a theatrical entertainment staged for visiting Grand Tourists as much as a living folk practice, and artists from Léopold Robert to countless German painters had depicted its vivid spectacle. Blechen observed the dance during his Italian journey and reworked the subject in a studio canvas exhibited at Frankfurt's Städel, which holds the work. His interest is characteristically directed at the light conditions and the figural dynamics of the dance rather than the ethnographic particulars, treating the tarantella as a vehicle for studying how intense sunlight organizes figures in motion.

The composition organizes the dancers and spectators into a tightly compressed group within which individual figures are differentiated through tonal accent and directional movement. The strong Italian sunlight creates sharp shadows that give the figures a sculptural clarity while simultaneously flattening them into pattern. Blechen applies paint with the confident economy of his mature period, using abbreviated brushwork in the peripheral passages to focus attention on the central dance group.