Balli di Sfessania
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Around 1622, Balli di Sfessania, an album of etchings by the French graphic artist Jacques Callot was published. The large series depicts commedia dell'arte figures in a simple, caricature-like style. They were made in his years in Florence.
It was not long after this that he produced his fets of grotefques, the Balli (or dancers), the Gobbi (or hunchbacks), and the Beggars. The firft of thefe fets, called in the title Balli, or Cucurucu* confifts of twenty-four fmall plates, each of them containing two comic characters in grotefque attitudes, with groups of fmalier figures in the diftance. Beneath the two prominent figures are their names, now unintelligible, but at that time no doubt well known on the comic flage at Florence. Thus, in the couple given in our cut No. 165, which is taken from the fourth plate of the feries, the perfonage to the left is named Smaraolo Cornuto, which means fimply Smaraolo the cuckold; and the one on the right is called Ratfa di Boio. In the original the background is occupied by a ftreet, full of fpectators, looking on at a dance of pantaloons, round one who is mounted on ftilts and playing on the tabour. --History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and Art
