Mezzetin

A comic actor in a striped costume sits alone in a garden, strumming his guitar and singing up toward someone we cannot see. Behind him, a stone Venus turns her back. Watteau's Mezzetin is a love song that nobody answers.

The story behind the painting

Mezzetin, or Mezzetino, was a character of the Italian comedy, based on Harlequin but with his own costume. The actor Angelo Costantini of the Theatre italien de Paris introduced him on 16 October 1683, and his expressive face let him play the role without a mask, a custom every later Mezzetin kept. That novelty attracted Watteau, who put the character in several works. Wikipedia dates this canvas within 1717 to 1720, while Wikidata gives 1717.

What to look for

This is a full length figure, about 55 by 45 cm. Mezzetin sits playing his guitar and singing, his eyes lifted as if toward a balcony outside the picture. Behind him in the garden stands a statue of Venus, facing away from him. Notice how the whole scene is built on that one glance upward and that one turned back: the music goes out, and nothing comes back. The Metropolitan Museum also owns a preparatory drawing of the man's head.

Meaning and intent

The statue turned away suggests that his feelings are not shared by the lady she stands for. The man who posed is not known. Jean de Jullienne, Watteau's friend and patron, sold many Watteau works during his life but kept this one, which has led to the suggestion that Jullienne himself may have played the role. It is a guess, not a fact, and the painting keeps its secret as well as its singer keeps his hope.

Legacy

Jullienne supervised the four volume edition of prints after Watteau, and Benoit Audran the Elder engraved this picture for it. After Jullienne died in 1766, the painting was bought for the new Hermitage of Empress Catherine II in Saint Petersburg. During the Soviet sales of the 1920s and 1930s it went to the businessman Calouste Gulbenkian, then to the Wildenstein firm, and in 1934 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired it. It remains there today.