Mezzetin

A player from the Italian comedy sits alone in a garden in striped pink-and-white satin, strumming a guitar and lifting his face in song toward a lover who never appears; behind him a stone statue turns its back, deaf to his longing. Watteau makes Mezzetin a figure of exquisite, comic melancholy, the music pouring out into indifference. Now in the Metropolitan Museum, it distills his whole sensibility - theatrical costume, wistful desire, and the quiet ache beneath the Rococo's elegant surfaces, a serenade addressed to empty air.