An Italian Comedy Scene

An Italian Comedy Scene by Lancret, painted in 1734, depicts performers from the Commedia dell'Arte tradition that remained enormously popular in France throughout the eighteenth century. The stock characters — Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot — provided ready-made theatrical types whose exaggerated personalities and physical comedy offered Rococo painters a repertoire of instantly recognizable human types. Lancret's treatment, like Watteau's, found in the comedic performance a vehicle for meditations on illusion and reality, on the gap between performed and authentic emotion. The theatrical subjects were among his most commercially successful: patrons who did not require the nuanced melancholy of Watteau's treatments responded to Lancret's more directly entertaining versions of the commedia tradition.

The theatrical scene is rendered with vivacity and color, the Commedia characters' distinctive costumes creating decorative patterns within the composition. Lancret's fluid brushwork captures the animated gestures and poses of theatrical performance.