Title: Performance and Spectacle in Early Modern Europe
Edited by: Margaret Shewring and Leila Zammar
Year: 2020
Pages: 237
Editor: UniversItalia
ISSN: 2421-2679
Editorial
Il sesto numero della rivista “Arti dello Spettacolo / Performing Arts”, intitolato Festa e Spettacolo agli albori dell’Europa Moderna, raccoglie una serie di articoli incentrati sul tema della festa e degli spettacoli organizzati presso corti, grandi dimore e città agli albori dell’Europa moderna.
La danza, la musica, l’arredamento, i tornei, la progettazione e l’organizzazione di spazi per spettacoli, nonché l’importanza di questi eventi nella vita culturale, politica ed economica dei paesi, delle corti e delle città coinvolti, sono stati esplorati dagli autori dei contributi pubblicati.
A tutti loro e, in modo particolare alle curatrici, vanno i miei più sinceri ringraziamenti per aver affrontato e risolto brillantemente tutte le difficoltà, causate dalle attuali tragiche circostanze. La pandemia ha reso molto difficile l’accesso ad archivi e biblioteche per la ricerca di documenti e immagini; così come veramente complesso è stato mantenere il costante coordinamento e il quotidiano confronto da parte delle curatrici tra loro stesse, gli autori e i revisori.
Il sesto numero della rivista, frutto di un così grande impegno, è il sentito omaggio al Professor Ronnie Mulryne e ne riflette i suoi vasti interessi di ricerca.
Ho avuto l’onore di incontrare il Prof. Mulryne in occasione di un convegno, organizzato dalla SEFR presso l’Università di Cambridge nel 2018. Mi ha colpito la sua profonda umanità, la vivacità intellettuale e la gentilezza. Quando gli ho donato le pubblicazioni della rivista, si è subito interessato e con entusiasmo ha voluto presentarla ai partecipanti. Sono rimasta sorpresa e sinceramente colpita dal suo interesse. Da qui è nata l’idea di preparare un numero sul tema delle feste dell’Europa moderna. Quando con sorpresa e profonda tristezza ho appreso la notizia della sua scomparsa, ho proposto subito a Margaret Shewring di dedicare al Prof. Mulryne il presente numero.
Quest’omaggio a un uomo dalla grande umanità e a uno studioso di alto profilo è stato possibile, soprattutto, grazie alla entusiasta e immediata adesione di tanti suoi colleghi, collaboratori e amici che ringrazio di cuore.
This sixth issue of the journal “Arti dello Spettacolo / Performing Arts”, entitled Performance and Spectacle in Early Modern Europe, collects a series of articles focused on the various forms of festivals organized in courts, large residences, and cities in early Modern Europe.
Dance, music, decor, tournaments, design, and organization of spaces for performances, as well as the importance of these events in the cultural, political, and economic life of the countries, courts and cities involved, have been explored by the authors of the articles published in this issue.
I would like to sincerely thank all of them, particularly the editors, for having faced and brilliantly solved all the difficulties caused by the current tragic circumstances. The pandemic has made it very difficult to access archives and libraries to search for documents and images; just as it was truly complex to maintain the constant coordination and daily confrontation between the editors themselves, the authors and the reviewers.
The sixth issue of the journal, fruit of such a great commitment, is a heartfelt tribute to Professor Ronnie Mulryne and reflects his vast research interests.
I had the honour to meet Prof. Mulryne at a conference organized by the SEFR at the University of Cambridge in 2018. I was struck by his deep humanity, intellectual vivacity and kindness. When I gave him the previous issues of the journal, he immediately became interested and enthusiastically wanted to show them to the participants. I was surprised and genuinely impressed by his interest. Hence the idea of preparing an issue on the theme of festivals in modern Europe. When, with great surprise and deep sadness, I received the news of his passing, I immediately proposed to Margaret Shewring to dedicate the present issue to Prof. Mulryne.
This tribute to a man of great humanity and a high-profile scholar was possible, above all, thanks to the enthusiastic and immediate support of many of his colleagues, collaborators, and friends who I sincerely thank.
Index
This sixth issue of the journal “Arti dello Spettacolo / Performing Arts”, entitled Performance and Spectacle in Early Modern Europe, collects a series of articles focused on the various forms of festivals organized in courts, large residences, and cities in early Modern Europe.
Dance, music, decor, tournaments, design, and organization of spaces for performances, as well as the importance of these events in the cultural, political, and economic life of the countries, courts and cities involved, have been explored by the authors of the articles published in this issue.
I would like to sincerely thank all of them, particularly the editors, for having faced and brilliantly solved all the difficulties caused by the current tragic circumstances. The pandemic has made it very difficult to access archives and libraries to search for documents and images; just as it was truly complex to maintain the constant coordination and daily confrontation between the editors themselves, the authors and the reviewers.
The sixth issue of the journal, fruit of such a great commitment, is a heartfelt tribute to Professor Ronnie Mulryne and reflects his vast research interests.
I had the honour to meet Prof. Mulryne at a conference organized by the SEFR at the University of Cambridge in 2018. I was struck by his deep humanity, intellectual vivacity and kindness. When I gave him the previous issues of the journal, he immediately became interested and enthusiastically wanted to show them to the participants. I was surprised and genuinely impressed by his interest. Hence the idea of preparing an issue on the theme of festivals in modern Europe. When, with great surprise and deep sadness, I received the news of his passing, I immediately proposed to Margaret Shewring to dedicate the present issue to Prof. Mulryne.
This tribute to a man of great humanity and a high-profile scholar was possible, above all, thanks to the enthusiastic and immediate support of many of his colleagues, collaborators, and friends who I sincerely thank.
The evolution of the tournament was a pan-European phenomenon which did not everywhere proceed at the same tempo. There has never been a satisfactory history of the subject because the sources for different periods and places are widely divergent. Yet this diversity makes it possible to base a history on the nature of the evidence itself: literary works for the earliest combats; challenges and responses from the thirteenth century; combat treatises from the fifteenth century; and arms and armour from beginning to end. Narratives become useful in the fifteenth century; and pictorial evidence increases with the passage from manuscript to print, illustrating the growing emphasis on ballet, opera and hybrid spectacle, and the decay of the tournament’s original martial purpose.
Keywords: combat; narratives; treatises; armour; challenges; opera; ballet.
This article pays tribute to J. R. Mulryne’s cross-national and cross-disciplinary scholarship on festival culture in early modern Europe and seeks to identify and explore avenues for future research on festival occasions in which his pioneering scholarship can be implemented and further expanded. Its focus is on comparative approaches to court and civic festivals. By drawing on insights from cultural and postcolonial studies, the article proposes an all-encompassing comparative approach to festival culture in early modern Europe that seeks to acknowledge both the mediated nature and immaterial and intangible aspects of festive occasions, including beliefs, ideas, institutions, languages, practices, structures, diplomatic solutions and strategies, and spectatorial responses.
Keywords: comparative; transnational; cultural exchange; historical methodology; court and civic festival culture.
The experiments in blending poetry, music and dance in the Académie de Poésie et de Musique founded in 1571 have been carefully studied. This article assesses the evidence available for these beliefs, explores how far they were known outside the Academy, and considers the parallels perceived between Greek dancing and sixteenth-century French performances. The principal sources will be examined: the works of Hesiod, Plutarch and – above all – the Dialogues of Lucian of Samosata and the Orations of Libanius. The role of Blaise de Vigenère in the transmission of such ideas through his annotations of the Images of Philostratus and the Décades of Livy will be emphasized, and their influence on the practice of late sixteenth-century dancing.
Keywords: Greek choreography; expressive power of dance; Renaissance dance theory and practice.
The aim of this article is to analyse the cultural phenomenon of Baroque dance that emerges from the Roman theatrical production and from the numerous public or private occasions in which dance is often the protagonist in ‘feste’ or convivial parties as reported in the archival sources of the Colonna family in the second half of the seventeenth century. Careful reading and comparison of all sources, librettos, scores, reports, avvisi and engravings, allow us to know, even if only through an allusion, a phrase, a word, the dramaturgy of ballets as multifaceted social phenomenon. In them, dance plays a role not only as an accessory or purely decorative element, but also as an ideological and political signifier. Dancing represents an ideal world in which the Roman aristocracy reflected itself, offering the viewer messages that are clearly self-celebrating and easily decipherable.
Keywords: Colonna; balletto; dramaturgy; dance master; theatrical engraving.
This paper examines the festival culture of the foreign communities based in early modern Rome in a comparative perspective and discusses how religious ceremonies and profane festivities helped to generate and intensify their collective identities. The analysis of engravings, festival books, libretti and other archive sources will demonstrate how both through performative participation in ritual ceremonies and by means of visual arts and music, individuals and institutions from different local origins asserted themselves as natio – in the pre-modern sense of a community that feels connected through common language, traditions and religious rites – and presented themselves to the Roman and European public as a national community.
Keywords: concepts of national identity in the Early Modern period; festival culture; rites; ephemeral art and architecture; music
This paper aims to analyse Sacrificio, an ironical and misogynistic ritual collectively celebrated in Siena on the day of Epiphany 1532 by the Accademia degli Intronati, as a sort of prologue to the carnival celebrations of that year. Starting from a historical analysis, an attempt is made to frame the event in light of the concept of ‘hybridism’, one of the main traits of sixteenth century Sienese theatre: Sacrificio, in fact, combines different artforms, including poetry, acting, music, and dance. By connecting the bibliography related to the activity of the Intronati with the rest of the ceremony (namely, its dramaturgical residue), this paper investigates the poems contained in the editio princeps of 1537, reproduced in the anastatic edition by Newbigin. An extensive knowledge of Petrarchist style, although overturned in a parodistic way, emerges from madrigals and sonnets.
Keywords: Sienese theatre; Accademia degli Intronati of Siena; music; poetry; ritual.
A magnificent feast known to have been hosted by Cardinal Wolsey becomes in Shakespeare and Fletcher’s King Henry VIII, 1.4, the occasion of Henry’s first encounter with Anne Boleyn. The pair dance together, and the play gives significantly greater attention to dancing than does the chronicle source that is being adapted. When, in the 1790s, Thomas Stothard depicted Henry speaking to Anne at the end of the dance he too, exercising similar creative freedom, introduces a new element. It responds, in part, to Veronese’s Mars and Venus United by Love, and shows in the background the musician Mark Smeton, who will some years later be executed for supposed adultery with Anne, closely observing Anne and Henry from a minstrels’ gallery.
Keywords: Shakespeare; Fletcher; Stothard; Henry VIII; Veronese; Boleyn; Smeton.
This article concerns performances put on at the French Court between 1515 and 1547, excluding royal entries and tournaments, and focusing on two periods, 1515-1520 and 1539-1547. The earlier period saw the construction by Italian artists of special pavilions for banquets and entertainments with the use of machines, as well as mythological and chivalric pageants for carnival. The later saw the introduction of Italian comedy to mark events like baptisms, marriages and carnival, and the introduction of Italian dances, acrobatic displays and masquerades, with the royal family and courtiers vying to dress up in ever more bizarre disguises as trees, chickens and lobsters, or other creations which ambassadors present found impossible to interpret.
Keywords: machines; masquerades; pageant; carnival; Italian comedy; banquets; baptism; weddings; dancing; chivalry; François Ier.
The “grandes salles du bal” erected for Court Festivals in 16th century France had a relatively brief existence. Inherited in many ways from the medieval great halls, they were built from the 1540s onward by the most famous architects (Delorme, Lescot, Primaticcio) in the main residences of the Valois monarchs, or included in Du Cerceau’s grandiose projects for Caterina de’ Medici. Their fashion spread to the residences of the greatest noble families of the time. It continued a little under the Bourbon kings, the last examples being those of Marie de Medici in Luxembourg Palace. Around 1640, they disappeared completely to make way for the Salon à l’italienne. However, they are not without lineage since their shape is undeniably visible in the rectangular theatre hall à la française of the seventeenth century.
Keywords: ballroom; theatre hall; theatre; French court festivals; Du Cerceau; Delorme; Lescot; Primaticcio.
This article examines the theory and the practice of fireworks in the work of C.-F. Ménestrier. In seventeenth-century Lyons, Ménestrier teamed with the best painters and engravers, namely T. Blanchet and N. Auroux, with whom he created the splendid Réjouissances de la Paix (20 March 1660). This spectacle can be explained through a theoretical piece of writing (Advis nécessaire pour la conduite des feux d’artifice) showing that the element of fire plays a crucial role in public celebrations. Its presence in Christian celebrations is derived from the autodafés. Ménestrier also suggests that fireworks can lead to an inamoramento and can be thus used as an eloquent luminous language able to ignite the spark of love in the hearts of the viewers.
Keywords: early modern fireworks; symbolic meaning of light and fire; visual rhetoric; history of Lyons.
Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena’s Calandria is one of early Italian Renaissance’s most famous comedies. Successfully staged several times during the Sixteenth century, it became the subject of systematic investigation after the rediscovery of the Renaissance comic tradition. Its first representation, which took place in Urbino on 6 February 1513, drew considerable scholarly interest; other studies focused, and partially shed light, on its representations in Rome the following year. Another significant episode in the staging history of the Calandria is its lavish representation in Lyon in 1548, which however remains underexplored. The present essay focuses precisely on this representation, and especially on the interpretation of its intermissions, with the aim to highlight its peculiarities in the dramatic panorama of its time.
Keywords: Renaissance Italian theatre; comedy; Cazzuola Troup; Italian theatre in France; Bibbiena; Peruzzi; scenography.
On 13 January 1490, in the ‘Sala Verde’ of the Ducal Palace, Leonardo da Vinci staged a pagan Paradise, reproducing the motion of the seven planets orbiting round and hosting the seven gods of Olympus, who came to earth to pay homage to the new duchess, Isabella d’Aragona, and celebrate Ludovico’s political power. By restoring the performing event within the historical, political, and cultural context of Ludovico Sforza’s court, this article explores models, networks, and heritage of Leonardo’s ingegno. This study offers a new interpretation of the political significance of the theatrical performance and its impact in the early modern politics and artistic-scientific life, inaugurating a new genre of premodern dramaturgy, which reflects a new idea of theater as a privileged place of Sapienza and memorability.
Keywords: Leonardo da Vinci; ephemeral; politics; theatrical ingegno; theatrum mundi.
This article offers an interpretation of a drawing held in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, showing an incomplete proscenium arch of a stage with the crest of the Barberini family. Since the drawing is by the artist Francesco Romanelli, who was one of the artists chosen by the Barberini to design works of art that could be a good means of conveying their political propaganda, it is likely that this arch had some hidden political meaning. In the payment records of the operas sponsored by the Barberini, Romanelli’s name appears only in the payment records for the opera San Bonifacio staged at Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome for the Carnival season 1638. Therefore, this article aims at revealing the hidden political meaning of this proscenium arch through an original interpretation of the images shown. It also offers a possible reconstruction of the entire arch made according to the analysis of the historical events related to the Barberini family at the time of the performance and the iconography usually chosen by them to convey their political messages.
Keywords: Francesco Romanelli; proscenium arch; scenography; iconography; Barberini family; Francesco Barberini;
San Bonifazio; Carnival 1638.
J. R. Mulryne’s study of the naval battle, or naumachia, staged in the Palazzo Pitti courtyard in Florence for the 1589 wedding of Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine points out the vivid, borderline unpleasant experience that audiences would have felt in such an enclosed space. This study takes inspiration from Mulryne’s work by looking at the pairing of water and fire in 16th century representations and performances of naval battles. An astounding level of manipulation and choreography was needed to bring together these two unpredictable and dangerous elements of nature. Contemporaries were struck by the wondrous but terrifying displays of fire on water, conveying an impression of destructive power, altogether fitting given the terrifying experience of real maritime warfare.
Keywords: Ferdinand I de’ Medici; 1589 wedding; fire; water; naumachia; naval battle.
In 1591 Cardinal Giovan Francesco Morosini, made his ceremonial entry into Brescia to take possession of his episcopal seat. Many aspects of his illustrious career as a diplomatic in the service of Venice and the Papacy is reflected in the iconography of the temporary arches erected along a via triumphalis. Their prominent themes of civic devotion and identity culminated in the final ceremonies at the Cathedral where Morosini was received with the performance of a sixteen-voice motet in the Venetian polychoral manner. This drew music into a complex rhetorical vocabulary, dependent upon historical, classical, and religious themes, which at a time of considerable economic instability resonated with the re-assuring assertion of local traditions.
Keywords: Giovan Francesco Morosini; Marco Publio Fontana; entry; via triumphalis; motet; Venice; Papacy;
Constantinople; France.
Louis XIII’s entry into Paris, 1628, shows how the royal entry played paradoxically with the notion of ornament. Far from being an accessory, ornament is used in the entry as a necessary event which ensures the good functioning of the ceremony. Everything can be seen as ornament, from the ephemeral architectural structures which line the processional route to the images and devices emblematizing royal power that decorate them to the affection displayed by the crowds, also an ‘ornament’ – the greatest and most necessary of all. The entry and its record play out a dialectic between the simple and the multiple, in order to translate visually the way in which a discourse, saturated with stylistic figures, offers immediate evidence of the incomparable power and greatness of the monarch who parades before all.
Keywords: royal entry; ornamentation; superfluous vs essential; magnificence; royal power; popular affection; wonder.
From the fifteenth century, Florence inaugurated a festive typology of which there was hardly equivalent in other parts, whose best exponent was Brunelleschi. Since the mid-cinquecento Giorgio Vasari and Bernardo Buontalenti are owed the codification of the figure of the “set designer”, in addition to the speculative vertebration of the “Fiesta”, anchored in the Orphic thinking inherent in the symbolic interpretation of the Good Government ideology, codified iconographically from the Intermezzi. Although it is Giulio Parigi who best exemplifies the total artist, “through absolute control of entertainment or the royal spectacles. Regarding the copies of several fundamental works of the History of the Scenography – in a sequence that combines continuity from Parigi, through his son Alfonso and Ferdinando Tacca, Stefano della Bella, Giacopo Chiavistelli, Antonio Ferri, Filippo Acciaiuoli – preserved among the funds of the National Library of Spain (BNE), the tour through the analysis of the future of Florence of the last Medici is proposed, at the dawn of a new century and its use of theatrical resources.
Keywords: History of the seventeenth-century stage in Florence; royal spectacles; Ferdinando Tacca; Stefano della Bella; Giacopo Chiavistelli; Antonio Ferri; Filippo Acciaiuoli.
This essay proposes a performative reading of the inauguration of the equestrian statue of the Portuguese king D. José I in 1775 as an event, based on the conceptual perspectives of both R. Schechner and E. Fischer-Lichte about culture as performance, specific conditions of mediality and materiality, and also based on the views of J. Rancière about the distribution of the sensible. The set of these celebrations expands socially in the king’s court, in great houses and on the street. They are a frequent example of “bad literature”, because they “vulgarize”, starting from an aristocratic circles, centered on the King and the Court, reaching an emerging popular class that then reorganizing itself sensibly through reading, theater going and the participation in bourgeois salons (“functions”, “assemblies” or “partidas”).
Keywords: Modern Age; cultural performances; spectatorship and participation; literature; science; politics; intelligentsia.
Relatively few animated sculptures used for devotional practices in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have survived to this day. They are remnants of a past in which liturgy and drama conjoined through sacred representations staged envisaging mechanical or manually operated figures, the origins of which date to the thirteenth century if not earlier. Bearing witness to that devotional practice are two early fifteenth-century sculptures of the Crucified Christ once belonging to female oratories of the Third Order Secular in two distinct feuds of fifteenth-century Piedmont, Trinità and Chieri. Through an analysis of the physical and aesthetic characteristics of these processional sculptures, one of which is clearly an animated figure, this paper aims to cast light on the dramatic character of devotional practices envisaging their use amongst laywomen leading a penitential life, thus known as the ‘humiliates’.
Keywords: animated sculpture; Crucified Christ; processional sculpture; Humiliates.