Collecting Callot

Callot's theatrical figures from the Balli di Sfessania have resided in a protean afterlife in the commedia dell’arte , not only in its visual tradition, but also as ephemera and collectibles. This chapter explores the relationship between print collecting and the reconstruction of Callot's various figures as exemplars to establish systems and categories of meaning. Using select examples between the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, I demonstrate the shifting value of the print from objects of curiosity, to objects of artistic value, to souvenirs fixing memory. The very act of collecting and fetishizing the historical print transformed an interpretive objectivity of the past. As souvenirs, the figures became fixed into recognizable and romanticized commedia dell’arte types that gave meaning to the past.