Like a reporter, Jacques Callot documented his age. During his years in Florence he described the magnificence of Medici feasts, the popular markets, the characters in the Commedia dell'arte, and other street comedians. He also engraved numerous portraits of saints. They are often rather dull, perhaps because he was not particularly interested in religious motifs. Can we ever know whether he really was? How did Callot intend his art to be understood, and how was it received by his contemporaries? Our values are not the same as the seventeenth century's, and our reality is different from his. He shows us poor people and cripples in his pictures. During the course of the centuries they have aroused pity and have been quoted as evidence of human misery. However, it is far from certain that this is the right interpretation of his work. He might have regarded these beggars as a pack of rascals who cheated honest folk. The historical background is important. Callot was a loyal member of the aristocracy. Those who commissioned and bought his work were men of property in a highly-stratified class society. He could not appeal to them for sympathy with outcasts. The Siege of Breda is not a tribute to the victors who commissioned the engravings, but an impartial commentary on everyday life and the horrors of war. But the violence that Callot depicts shocked neither victors nor vanquished. Sadoul claims that the pictures are a protest against war and an example of Callot's moral courage. However, there is no real support for such an interpretation. Callot's most famous suite of war pictures—Les miseres et les malheures de la guerre—is usually taken to be a sharp protest against war. Starting from the order in which the pictures are arranged and by taking into consideration the verses beneath them, Heide Reis has come to an entirely different conclusion. According to her, they should rather be regarded as a series of didactic pictures designed to strengthen military discipline. Which interpretation is the correct one? And is it necessary to know the answer in order to understand Callot's art properly? The factual contemporary message and the artistic one may be two quite different things. The former may have been that law and order must prevail even in wartime. It is a message that can be verified by historical instances. The artistic message, on the other hand, must be stated in other terms, and can only be verified by our own experience. Perhaps it is about man's loneliness, an inescapable torment, and the indifference and cruelty of the anonymous mass of people. That is one interpretation of the feelings Callot's work can arouse. To describe what his series is about, however, is an entirely different matter. Callot's masterpiece in the burlesque and fantastic genre is the later version of The Temptation of St. Anthony. It is, however, hardly necessary to know how his contemporaries regarded the engraving to be captivated by the imagination, humour and dramatic vitality that the picture radiates.
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