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Updated: May 7, 2025
Several of the figures in the Italian comedy had already passed into French popular drama, and in Watteau's time there seems to have been a fluctuating company, according as one actor or actress or another developed a part, and to Pantalone, Arlecchino, Dottore and Columbina were now added Pierrot or Gilles Mezetin, a sort of double of Pierrot, Scaramouche and Scapin.
Of Burchiello we know expressly that he used to heighten the comic effect by mixing Greek and Slavonic words with the Venetian dialect. Gradually all the famous local masks made their appearance, whose remains still delight the Italian populace in our day: Pantalone, the Doctor, Brighella, Pulcinella, Arlecchino, and the rest.
The one, dated 1440, is a Coronation of the Virgin, with many figures, including several boys, and numerous saints seated. In the heads of the saints we may trace the hand of Alamanus, in the Germanic type of countenance which recalls the style of Stephen of Cologne. A repetition of this, if it is not actually the original, is in S. Pantalone at Venice.
This has been preserved in its entirety, together with the author's preface, from which valuable information may be gathered. The work is an attempt to turn into a lyric form the "Commedia dell' Arte," enacted in early times at village fairs in northern Italy. The characters are Arlecchino, Pantalone, Doctor Graziano, Brighella, Isabella, Lelio and others.
According to the plot of the play, Pantalone is an old merchant of Rimini who arrives in Venice with his family. Colombina is his daughter, and was played, of course, by Belviso; Arlecchino and Brighella are his simpleton sons they were the manager and myself. Il Nanno was Punchinello, his Neapolitan servant, Il Dottore his travelling physician.
A bully called Truffaldino poses as a marchese and wins the affections of Colombina; Brighella is entrapped by a Donna Furlana into a promise of marriage; the Dottore finds himself engaged to cure half a dozen of the same sort of ladies of the maladies incident to their career; finally, Pantalone is claimed as their long-lost uncle, who was supposed to have abandoned them in their days of infant orphanage.
The Donne Furlane was the piece, a comedy of art as they call it here or, as we say, a comedy of masks wherein the stock characters of Harlequin, Columbine, Brighella and Pantalone are given a rag of a plot, and are expected to embroider that with follies, drolleries and obscenities according as their humour of the moment may dictate.
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