Commedia dell'arte masks: Harlequin, Pulcinella and their ancestors
From the Padua contract of 1545 to the Gelosi company: the history of the Italian masks and the folkloric, infernal roots of Harlequin and Pulcinella.
On 25 February 1545 in Padua a group of actors led by a certain Ser Maffio signed a contract before a notary, pledging to perform together for a year and share the profits. It is the oldest known document of a professional company of Italian actors and is regarded as the birth certificate of the commedia dell'arte, the theatre of masks and improvisation that for two centuries would tour the courts and squares of Europe.
A theatre of professionals
The term commedia dell'arte became established later, in the eighteenth century; at the time people spoke of improvised comedy or comedy of the zanni. The actors did not perform a written script but followed a scenario, an outline of the plot hung backstage, and filled the scenes with jokes and lazzi, well-tried comic routines. Among the most famous companies were the Gelosi, in which the actress and poet Isabella Andreini shone; she died in Lyon in 1604.
The characters were fixed and recognisable. Pantalone, the old Venetian merchant; the Doctor, a Bolognese pedant; the Captain, boastful and cowardly; the lovers, unmasked; and the servants, the zanni, among them Brighella and Harlequin. Each actor often played the same type for his whole life, refining its gestures, dialect and repertoire. The Italian companies were warmly received in Paris, Madrid and Vienna, and in Paris a permanent Comédie-Italienne came into being.
Harlequin and the wild hunt
Harlequin's name has a surprising history. As early as the twelfth century the Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis described the familia Herlechini, a nocturnal troop of the dead on the march, linked to the European tradition of the wild hunt. In medieval French Hellequin or Herlequin denoted a demon or the leader of this procession of souls, and the name also appears in plays and popular festivals.
The Mantuan actor Tristano Martinelli, active in Paris in the 1580s, is traditionally considered the first to have given a zanni the name Arlecchino. The nimble, hungry servant kept something of his infernal ancestry: the black mask, the elusive nature, the ability to pass from one world to another with a leap. Dante, in Canto XXI of the Inferno, had already given the name Alichino to one of the Malebranche devils.
Pulcinella and the mask as threshold
Pulcinella, the Neapolitan mask made famous in the seventeenth century by the actor Silvio Fiorillo, dresses in white and wears a black half-mask with a hooked nose. In the popular culture of Campania he has often been associated with the world of the dead and with the carnival figures that represent them, although these symbolic interpretations should be regarded as scholars' hypotheses rather than historical certainties.
The theatrical mask, after all, has ancient origins, from Greek theatre to seasonal rites, and preserves the idea of a face that belongs not to the actor but to a type, a spirit, a force. In the eighteenth century Carlo Goldoni reformed Italian comedy, replacing improvisation with written texts and reducing the use of masks. Yet their symbolic power survived in carnival, in puppet theatre and in the imagination of painters such as Watteau and Tiepolo.