Caravaggio_ A Life Sacred and Profane - Andrew Graham-Dixon [66]
The ancestry of Caravaggio’s beautiful gypsy can be clearly traced – in accordance with the assumptions behind Ripa’s Iconologia – to the world of comic theatre. The gypsy was a stock figure in the performances of Italian Commedia dell’Arte, the popular acting companies of the sixteenth century – so much so that the name zingaresche, derived from zingara, or ‘gypsy’, was given to a whole range of comic theatrical productions. A series of French prints known as the Recueil Fossard documents the performances of an Italian Commedia dell’Arte troupe given in France in the late sixteenth century. One of those prints, depicting the encounter of the brazen whore ‘Peronne’ with the louche aristocrat ‘Julien le Debauche’, bears a striking resemblance to Caravaggio’s own Gypsy Fortune-Teller.
The connections between Caravaggio’s painting and the theatre do not stop there. One of the more celebrated late sixteenth-century performances of a zingarescha can in fact be traced directly to the milieu of Cardinal del Monte. In 1589, when the cardinal’s Medici patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, married Christine of Lorraine, a theatrical festival was staged to celebrate their union. A play entitled La Pellegrina was performed, together with six extravagant intermedii involving all kinds of elaborate stage machinery and sets representing both a fiery hell and a cloud-capped Mount Olympus. Shortly after this, according to the diary of an eyewitness, the grand duke invited the Comici Gelosi – one of the leading Commedia dell’Arte troupes – to ‘act a comedy of their own choice’. The two leading ladies, Isabella Andreini and Vittoria Piissimi,
nearly came to blows, for Vittoria wanted to act Zingara and the other wished to perform her Pazzia, entitled La Pazzia d’Isabella [The Madness of Isabella] – given that Vittoria’s favourite part is Zingara and Isabel’s La Pazzia. However they finally agreed that the first piece to be acted would be Zingara, and that La Pazzia would be given another time. And so they performed the said Zingara with the same Intermezzi as were prepared for the great play; and indeed whoever has not heard Vittoria perform Zingara has neither seen nor heard something marvellous, and certainly all were very satisfied with the play.51
Cardinal del Monte attended this actual performance, and it is quite conceivable that Caravaggio himself had first-hand experience of the Gelosi on stage. The company, which was the most prestigious in Counter-Reformation Italy, had close links with his home city of Milan, where its first recorded performance took place in 1568, just three years before the painter’s birth. During its forty-year existence it often played there and in the other principal towns of northern Italy: Florence, Ferrara, Genoa, Mantua and Venice.52
It is possible that Caravaggio’s painting was actually inspired by the memory or repute of Vittoria Piissimi’s celebrated performance as the Zingara. In Artemio Giancarli’s comedy, written in 1545, the gypsy plays the role of kidnapper, temptress and wily thief. But those who saw Piissimi in the role remembered her, above all, as the temptress: ‘a beautiful sorceress of love, she entices the hearts of a thousand lovers with her words; a sweet siren, she enchants with smooth incantations the souls of her devout spectators.’53 Caravaggio’s contemporaries praised his own, painted gypsy in strikingly similar language. In Mancini’s eyes, she might have been ‘false’ and ‘sly’, but above all she was beguilingly beautiful – the most ‘graceful and expressive figure’, indeed, that he had ever seen in art. The painter’s friend, the poet Gaspare Murtola, went even further. In Murtola’s madrigal in praise