Peering at the Prints

Many of the figures from the Balli di Sfessania have become visual shorthand for the idea of an embodied historic theatrical practice. In encounters with Callot's prints, the artistic imagination has been given the opportunity to play, invent, and be inspired by their capacity to evoke the past in print. Such engagement has reanimated and reimagined them so often that they have become emblems of the commedia dell’arte tradition itself. Here, we see how the quality of sentiment, one could even say “desire,” upon viewing the prints has evoked many states of transformative and emotional wonderment by viewers, what I call an “impassioned gaze.” Surveying nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters with the prints, I explore how the figures from the Balli di Sfessania have inspired many “new” interpretive encounters by visual, theatrical, and literary artists who have been transformed by viewing the prints as a window into an older practice.