Theatre and Print Culture in the Manner of Jacques Callot

Examining the influential print series Balli di Sfessania di Jacomo Callot, a suite of 24 prints designed and etched by Jacques Callot in 1621-22, this book highlights the influence of visual culture on commedia dell’arte historiography and its performance traditions since the early seventeenth century.

This book aims to shuffle some long-standing attitudes about the relationship between theatre and print culture. Examining the influential print series Balli di Sfessania di Jacomo Callot, a suite of 24 prints designed and etched by Jacques Callot in 1621–1622, this book highlights the influence of visual culture on commedia dell’arte historiography and its performance traditions since the early seventeenth century. Callot’s ability to captivate viewers through scale, dynamic figures, and innovative spatial schemes has manifested an impassioned gaze by many admirers. Through acts of collecting, adulation, and replication, prints from the Balli di Sfessania have been sourced and re-sourced, excavated and mined, copied and misread, over time as visual records of the past. With a focus on one image group as a case study for the trans-media circulation of images over four hundred years, scholars will find new ways to engage with prints wielding highly impressionable status and reproducibility.