Drawing of two male figures facing one another with crossed swords, one wooden, the other real. The figure on the left is nude aside from the cape he holds in his left hand.
This drawing is a preliminary study (of the foreground figures only) for Callot’s etching Taglia Cantoni and Fracasso, plate 24 in Balli di Sfessania (c. 1621).
This latter etching was later adapted by Carl Friedrich Thiele as plate 6 (chapter 6, opp. p. 221) in the first edition of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Princess Brambilla: A Capriccio after Jacques Callot (1821).
Meyerhold’s Borodinskaia Street Studio collaborator Konstantin Miklashevsky used several of Callot’s Balli studies and etchings in his book La commedia dell’arte to inform and inspire the studio’s commedia experiments.*
See book: p. 60
*Konstantin Miklashevskii, La commedia dell’arte, ili, Teatr ital’ianskikh komediantov XVI, XVII, i XVIII stoletii (Saint Petersburg: Sirius, 1914–17).