Content area
Full Text
Javier Berzal de Dios’s excellent Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces persuasively rebuts received narratives regarding Italian Renaissance theatre architecture and design, offering a more complex, nuanced picture that includes the heterogeneous, sometimes messy experiences of actual spectators.
The standard view (only slightly exaggerated): Italian Renaissance theatre designers and scenographers, such as Baldassare Peruzzi in his decisive 1514 design for a production of La Calandria, rationalized their designs with the new art of linear perspective, which created the illusion of an ideal representation whose unity aligned with neo-Aristotelian notions of the dramaturgical unities. This single, unified picture was passively received by spectators functioning as a homogenous unit, except insofar as they were aesthetically and politically subordinate to the sovereign, who was positioned at the ideal perspectival point in the audience. This new, Renaissance view of seeing in the theatre decisively broke with medieval habits and shaped a linear progression of these tendencies running the course of the sixteenth century, from Peruzzi to Serlio in the mid-sixteenth century to the Teatro Olimpico and Teatro all’antica at Sabbioneta. The old humanist paradox obtains in this narrative as elsewhere: what seemed new was really a return to classical ideas.
Berzal de Dios’s short but incisive book demolishes these received notions. In his account, theories of spatial unity were not in concert but actually clashed with humanist experimentation, the desire for non-orderly aesthetic effects such as wonder and the heterogeneous experiences of actual spectators conceived more as participants in civic dialogue than as cheerfully...