b) A young Man resting on Bales
Red and black chalk
68 x 83 mm; 2 11/16 x 3 ¼ in

c) Front and Back View of a Standing Man (recto), A Horse (verso)
Red and black chalk
83 x 94 mm; 3 ¼ x 3 11/16 in

d) Side and Back View of a Standing Friar (recto), Two Figures (verso)
Red and black chalk
83 x 94 mm; 3 ¼ x 3 11/16 in

e) A Woman resting on a Bundle
Red and black chalk
67 x 47 mm; 2 5/8 x 1 7/8 in

These studies were part of the large corpus of stock figures compiled by Callot in preparation for his most ambitious print, La Foire d’Impruneta, (Fig. 1), dated 1620, which contains more than eleven hundred characters and secured Callot’s reputation as one of the leading print-makers of his generation. At that time he was already closely involved with print-making for the Medici court in Florence, illustrating the elaborate carnival and theatrical entertainments of Cosimo II. The annual fair of St Luke at Impruneta, a few miles south of Florence, provided a new source of subject matter, one that helped Callot emerge from his role as a recorder of theatrical events. He may have been led to the subject by his Florentine contemporaries, Giulio Parigi (1571-1635) and Remigio Cantagallina (1583-1656), the latter having made two large scale drawings of the same scene in 1615. The idea of showing a genre scene in a landscape setting may have ultimately been inspired by the work of northern artists such as the Breughels. Historically, Callot’s Fair at Impruneta can be considered to be one of the finest examples of engraving made in Italy during the seventeenth century.

The technique employed in these drawings, a careful admixture of red and black chalk, is the same as in other studies for the project, to be found mostly in the Uffizi and Albertina, Vienna. Callot frequently depicted the same figure twice from different angles in order to maximise its usefulness as source material. Altogether, there must have been many such sheets, perhaps combined together in an album or folio, allowing the artist to browse through and select the appropriate image for each part of the extremely complicated composition. The use of counterproofing further extended the pool of available figures. In effect, Callot was able to adapt and vary his stock of figures as the work progressed, without the need to make original drawings for all one thousand plus characters in the print. In the case of the present drawings, some can be found to match their counterparts in the engraving exactly; one even contains a figure on the verso, possibly a counterproof, used in a different engraving, L’Eventail, made the year before, 1619. This suggests Callot’s use of these figures could be carried from one project to another.

There are four surviving designs which chart the progress of the whole composition, three of which are in the Uffizi, Florence, and the other in the Albertina, Vienna. They show first, in the Uffizi, a study in black chalk possibly made from life, with the bulk of the church, Santa Maria dell’Impruneta and surrounding buildings already dominating the centre of the scene in the middle distance. In all the subsequent designs, the arrangement of these buildings has been reversed so that they appear topographically correct in the print. The composition is then worked up to various degrees of finish in brown ink until the artist reached the final design for the print. The kind of figure study shown here constitutes just a small part of the immense undertaking required for this work.