Savoy. On December 5 1663 Willem Schellinks and Jacques Thierry visited Jan Miel in Turin; Schellinks mentions in his Journal (in the Royal Library of Copenhagen) that the "Duke has gifted [Jan Miel] the Knightly Order of St Maurice and Lazarus". Work General Miel's first dated paintings from the 1630s already show the influence of Pieter van Laer and the Bamboccianti in that they depict low-class subjects engaged in their normal business or at play. Popular subjects included morra players, gamblers, village dances, quacks, barbers, cobblers, itinerant musicians and actors, etc. Examples of his early work in this genre include The bowls players (Louvre) and The cobbler (Musée des Beaux-Arts et d'archéologie de Besançon), both produced in 1633. In this period he reworked and copied paintings by van Laer. An example of a work in this so-called 'bambocciate' style is The quack (Hermitage Museum, 1650s). The composition has traditionally been interpreted as depicting an itinerant medicine peddler with his assistants, who is demonstrating to a crowd of boorish onlookers the beneficial effects of his wares. The motif of quacks was a common feature of Flemish and Dutch genre painting from the 16th century onwards. In the 16th-century Jan Sanders van Hemessen's The Surgeon had depicted a quack surgeon pretending to remove with a knife from a patient's open skull the so-called 'stone of madness'. Seventeenth-century genre painting regularly returned to the theme as can be seen in the works of Adriaen Brouwer, Jan Steen and David Teniers the Younger. The main personages in the Hermitage painting are shown dressed as characters of the commedia dell'arte: the quack wears the mask and costume of Il Dottore while the guitar player has the costume of a Zanni (madcap servant). Jan Miel painted other works using characters from the commedia dell'arte such as Carnival in Rome (Prado Museum, 1653) and The Actors' Rehearsal (Zingone collection, Rome). During the 1640s and 1650s Miel began, just like Michelangelo Cerquozzi, to expand the scope of bambocciate paintings by paying less attention to the surrounding landscape and instead stressing the anecdotal aspects of city and country life. These works were repeatedly used as a model by the Bamboccianti in the second half of the century and by the genre painters working in Rome during the early 18th century. Miel made his most original contribution to genre painting through his paintings of carnival scenes. An example is the