The Fair at Impruneta (1620): Art, History and Details

The Fair at Impruneta (1620) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jacques Callot (French, 1592–1635).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The annual fair held in Impruneta, a commune in Florence, Italy, was an opportunity for rural and urban communities to comingle and partake in commerce, socializing, and festivity. Jacques Callot filled the panorama with 1,138 people, 45 horses, 67 donkeys, and 137 dogs. Prominent in the left foreground is a vendor of tableware patronized by a mix of social classes, selling footed tazzas (shallow cups mounted on stems) and goblets. Pick-pocketing, fighting, snake-charming, and the punishment of a criminal by torture also occur. Callot dedicated this print to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, for whom the fair signified a healthy Florentine economy.

Object facts

• Title: The Fair at Impruneta
• Date: 1620
• Creator attribution: Jacques Callot (French, 1592–1635)
• Culture: France
• Type: Print
• Technique: etching on two sheets of paper joined
• Dimensions: Sheet: 43.2 x 67.6 cm (17 x 26 5/8 in.)
• Collection: PR - Etching
• Department: Prints
• Accession number: 1962.20

A detail from the museum

Callot's innovative formulas and techniques for etching included a process of stepped acid baths to achieve greater tonal variation from foreground to background.

Collection credit

L. E. Holden Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• McTighe, Sheila. Representing from Life in Seventeenth-Century Italy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.