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his creation. But an enigma remains. Among the chatting figures surrounding the scene in a semicircle stand two
protagonists. The one, possibly the village headman, although a contadino appears to invite a lady of quality to
dance. She turns her head away as if embarrassed. Her peers look on disapprovingly. Two elegant seated ladies
appear to avert their gaze chatting while, to their left, a standing man holding his gun by the barrel glumly watches
the scene, his right arm akimbo in a classic representation of anger or maybe of jealousy. Reni is painting more
than a simple landscape. One might imagine he was illustrating some well-known story or folklore whose identity
today escapes us, a story that was perhaps also known to the Caracci14.

A fter a hundred and fifty years of mannerly modest‘basse dance’practice in the aristocracy across Europe,
the 16th century witnessed a new fad for scandalous corporal expression which emerged from the rural
classes.This made its way to the very apex of the social scale. Such dances as the‘Scotch Jig’, Saltarello,
Galliard,Tarentella and the infamous La Volta, were all considered to be‘haute danses’, a general term covering
any dance in which the feet were lifted and thus also the skirts; all these dances stem from the same rural root
and modest origins, making them initially country dances, performed by the common people. The Galliard is a
perfect example, coming from the French term gaillarde which is also used to describe a healthy peasant woman.
As always, liberal tendencies were harshly criticised by the more conservative elements of society. In his Anat-
omy of Abuses, Philipp Stubbes wrote in 1583 ‘what clipping, what culling, what kissing and bussing, what

14. Such plots or stories based on Ovid, Ariosto, Tasso and others or the illustrations of Aldus Manutius were the favourite
source material for opera librettists in the latter seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. Beverly Brown has suggested (Ms.
communication) that the scene is simply a representation of a fête champêtre This certainly applies to the Toeput composi-
tion, yet this is to deny that three figures carry guns and others staves as beaters while the male dancing partner, in contrast
to the Marseille Carracci, is not dressed in finery but in clothes comparable with the country musician. He has no leggings,
no frogging or ornament, no waistcoat or jacket, in contrast to the male huntsmen. The Country Dance subject may have been
inspired by a source such as the Pastor fido by Giovan Battista Guarini (1538-1612), which was a pastoral text. The subject of
Amaryllis and Mirtillo was often represented in northern art and may have been the inspiration for the present composition.
In addition Guarini’s final task, after twenty years of service with Alfonso II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara was a public mission to
congratulate Camillo Borghese on his election as pope in 1605.

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