Conjuring the Concept of Rome: Alterity and Synecdoche in Peruzzi's Design for La Calandria
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Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) ISSN 0361-0160 Conjuring the Concept of Rome: Alterity and Synecdoche in Peruzzi’s Design for La Calandria Javier Berzal de Dios The Ohio State University This essay sets forth a nuanced interpretation of Baldassare Peruzzi’s stage design for La Calandria (1514) that addresses the spatial disassociations found in the drawing in relation to active modes of visual engagement. Eschewing traditional and overarching generalizations about scenography in the sixteenth century, like the pictorial manifestation of Aristotle’s theory of unity through single-point perspective, it shows that Peruzzi presents a multifarious and het- erogeneous space, not a defined place in which the action is contained. Using as a fulcrum the flattened, disproportional and paradoxical arrangement of the ruins of Rome, the space in the drawing can be understood to present Rome as a monumental concept. Peruzzi’s drawing thus articulates an interplay of relations that, maximizing the artificial by conjuring an anomalous space, displaces the phenomenological expectations of the viewers in order to create a fantastic albeit impossible space that is, ultimately, truer to Rome than any mimetic instantiation of the city. “…they are both in Rome today, and you will see both of them appear here. Do not imagine, though, that they were suddenly transported here from Rome by necromancy. The city you see here is Rome, which used to be so ample, so spa- cious, so large that, triumphing, it could contain many cities, and towns and rivers. Now it has become so small that, as you can see, it can easily fit into your own town.”1 Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, “La Calandria” Among the few surviving early modern theatrical visual records, Baldassare Peruzzi’s view of Rome for La Calandria (fig. 1) has been singled out as signifying a pivotal moment in the history of art, scenography, and theatrical architecture. 1“…amendua sono oggi in Roma ed amendua or qui comparir li vedrete. Né crediate però che, per negromanzia, sí presto da Roma venghino qui; per ciò che la terra che vedete qui è Roma. La quale giá esser soleva sí ampia, sí spaziosa, sí grande che, trionfando, molte cittá e paesi e fiumi lar- gamente in se stessa riceveva; ed ora è sí piccola diventata che, come vedete, agiatamente cape nella cittá vostra” (author’s translation). Argumento in Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, “La Calandria,” in Commedia del Cinquecento, ed. Ireneo Sanesi (Roma: Laterza, 1912), 9. See also La Calandria, ed. Paolo Fossati (Torino: Guilio Einaudi, 1967), 22. For an English translation of the play see Renais- sance Comedy: The Italian Masters Volume II, ed. Donald Beecher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 21–100. Sections of this paper were presented as “Perspective in the Public Sphere,” Renaissance Society of America Conference (Montreal, 2011) and “At the Mar- gins of Perspective: Italian Scenography and the Problem of Space,” Sixteenth Century Society Conference (Cincinnati, 2012). 25
26 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) Building upon developments present in Pellegrino da Udine’s 1508 design for La Cassaria and Girolamo Genga’s 1513 scenography, also for La Calandria, Peruzzi (1481–1536) is seen as decisively producing a unified stage in which a painted backdrop in perspective was integrated with three-dimensional theatrical set design and with the space of the stage itself.2 As a result, Peruzzi emerges as a figure of transition between early attempts to use pictorial developments, such as linear perspective, and latter instantiations of theatrical art by Sebastiano Serlio and Giorgio Vasari.3 This historical trajectory culminates with the architecture of the Teatro Olimpico and with the set designs of Bernardo Buontalenti.4 Along with the work of those artists, Peruzzi’s scenography is consistently interpreted as emphasizing a sense of visual and spatial unity that, aided by linear perspec- tive, denotes the humanistic absorption of Aristotle.5 Specifically, it is seen as embodying the Greek philosopher’s emphasis on unity of action, which mid- and late sixteenth-century commentators like Ludovico Castelvetro conjoined with the unity of time and the unity of space, crafting the famous doctrine of the Three Unities.6 Rather than further pervasive diachronic contextualizations, 2Thomas A. Pallen, Vasari and Theatre (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Uni- versity Press, 1999), 21–22, 26. Also Allardyce Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre (New York: Harcourt, 1966), 72–73. 3George R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 177. See also Kenneth Macgowan and William Melnitz, The Living Stage (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1955), 79–80; William Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages: Western European Stage Conditions, c. 800–1576 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). For Vasari see Pallen, Vasari and Theatre. See also Alison Fleming, “Presenting the Spectators as the Show: The Piazza degli Uffizi as Theater and Stage,” Sixteenth Century Journal 38 (2006): 701–20; Christopher Cairns, “Theatre as Festival: The Staging of Arentino’s Talanta (1542) and the Influence of Vasari,” in Italian Renaissance Festivals and the European Influence, ed. J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 105–17. 4 Licisco Magagnato, “The Genesis of the Teatro Olimpico,” Journal of the Warburg and Cour- tauld Institutes 14 (1951): 209–20. See also, Andreas Beyer, Andrea Palladio: Triumpharchitektur für eine humanistische Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1987); Giangiorgio Zorzi, “Le prospettive del Teatro Olimpico di Vicenza nei disegni degli ‘Uffizi’ di Firenze e nei documenti dell’Ambrosiana’ di Milano,” Arte Lombarda 10 (1965): 70–97. Thomas Oosting, “The Teatro Olim- pico Design Sources,” Educational Theatre Journal 22, no. 3 (1970): 256– 67. For Buontalenti see James Saslow, The Medici Wedding of 1589 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). 5“The unified spatial setting of Early Renaissance painting became an important ingredient in the evolution of the new humanist theater, at once inspiring and satisfying the demand for dramatic unity.” David Rosand, “Theater and Structure in the Art of Paolo Veronese,” The Art Bulletin 55, no. 2 (1973): 217–39, esp. 220. See also Peter Womack, “The Comical Scene: Perspective and Civil- ity on the Renaissance Stage,” Representations 101, no. 1 (2008): 32–56; Lily Campbell’s Scenes and Machines on the English Stage during the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923); Arnaldo Momo, La crisi del modello teatrale del rinascimento (Venice: Marsilio, 1981), 11. 6Lodovico Castelvetro’s interpretation of Aristotle was published under the title Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposita. For an English translation (abridged) see Lodovico Castelvetro, On the Art of Poetry (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1984). For early modern commentaries on Aristotle see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the
Berzal/ Conjuring the Concept of Rome 27 in which textual information is seen as dominating visual practices, this study builds on Jacob Burckhardt’s neglected prioritization of aesthetics over illusion- ism. When Peruzzi’s design is examined as a relatively autonomous work of art, it is possible to analyze the questions that emerge from its articulation of space.7 This is not to say that issues of image-text relation have no place in this study, but that the pictorial will be its focus and raison d’être. In addressing the overlooked anomalous elements that infuse Peruzzi’s drawing for La Calandria, the anoma- lies are not artistic or circumstantial shortcomings, but evidence reinforcing a pragmatic aesthetic interest in the relationship between spectators and stage.8 By confronting the spatial disassociations and the continuous interest in an active mode of visual engagement, Peruzzi’s design—and by extension the world of sixteenth-century Italian theatrical art—is one of heterogeneity, plurality, and experimentation. A design that cannot be reduced to a notion of spatial coher- ence where the stage presented an illusionistic and unified location. In Peruzzi’s case, his drawing articulates the juxtaposition of a legible perspective space and an impossible flattened and condensed Rome that appears unbound from restrictive mathematical, perceptual, and cognitive expectations. Peruzzi pres- ents a marvelous artistic apparition in which the spectators encounter Rome as a monumental, overflowing concept. Congested and teeming with monuments, Peruzzi’s artificial presentation displaces the viewer’s phenomenological expec- tations in order to conjure an overwhelming presence of the city that is truer to Rome than any factual, single view of the city can be. Peruzzi’s drawing, which probably shows a faithful depiction of what ulti- mately appeared on the stage, is housed in the Galleria degli Uffizi, being com- monly regarded as having been made for La Calandria.9 This commedia erudita Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 1:366–563. For Castelvetro’s devi- ation from Aristotle see Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Halliwell writes, “. . . the all too familiar doctrine of the Three Unities . . . a pointed reminder of how little the treatise was actually read, as opposed to being simply appealed to, even in the most self-consciously neo-classical circles,” 287. 7 Burckhardt argues that the aim of scene-designers was in no instance “illusion in our pres- ent sense but an appearance of festive splendor.” Jacob Burckhardt, The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 272. Cf. Peter Womack, “The Comical Scene,” 36. As Damisch has put it, “What we are concerned with here is to see architecture in terms of thought, not theory or practice, but actual thought, raw thought. This is what we can start look- ing at. What short of thought do we see in the architectural work?” “Discussion 2” in Anymore, ed. Cynthia Davidson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 89. 8Scenography is concerned with audience reception and engagement, creating an experience that is sensory, intellectual, rational, and emotional. Joslin McKinney and Philip Butterworth, The Cambridge Introduction to Scenography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4. In this sense, “Theatre takes place whenever there is a meeting point between actors and a potential audi- ence.” Pamela Howard, What Is Scenography? (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 1. 9It was proposed that Uffizi 291A was Vasari’s. However, Klaus Neiiendam has convincingly argued against that attribution. See “‘Il portico’ and ‘la bottega’ on the Early Italian Perspective Stage: A Comparative Study in Theatre Iconography,” in The Renaissance Theatre: Texts, Performance,
28 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) Figure 1. Baldassare Peruzzi, La Calandria (learned comedy) was written by Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, pro- duced by Leo X in honor of Isabella d’Este, and staged by Duke Francesco Maria Rovere.10 Peruzzi’s drawing is the most finalized and complete of a very small Design 2 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 29– 40, esp. 38– 40. Cf. Bernd Evers, ed. Architekturmodelle der Renaissance, Die Harmonie des Bauens von Alberti bis Michelangelo (München: Prestel, 1995), 51. On the question of whether Peruzzi’s design presents what was ultimatedly built, I agree with Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre, 72. 10“In my opinion these [sketches] either date from after 1514 or else cannot be linked to Bibbie- na’s text.” Elena Povoledo, “Origins and Aspects of Italian Scenography,” in Music and Theatre from Poliziano to Monteverdi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 324. For the participation of Duke Francesco Maria Rovere in the staging see Alois Maria Nagler, A Sourcebook in Theatrical History (New York: Dover, 1952), 72. For the learned comedy as a genre see Marvin T. Herrick, Ital- ian Comedy in the Renaissance (Urbana-Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1966), 60–165. See also Richard Andrews, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2. For an overview of Leo X’s interest in performance see Bonnie J. Blackburn, “Music and Festivities at the Court of Leo X,” Early Music History 11 (1992): 1–37.
Berzal/ Conjuring the Concept of Rome 29 number of surviving examples of Peruzzi’s theatrical works.11 Despite their lim- ited number, the historical significance of these drawings is by no means small. Peruzzi’s scenographic designs signal a crucial step in the developments origi- nated by artists like Genga, who had designed the stage for the inaugural 1513 production of La Calandria in the city of Urbino under the direction of Baldesar Castiglione, and whose stage design also included a view of a city in perspec- tive.12 Additionally, Peruzzi’s designs may have been part of a compilation of drawings of Rome that were intended to illustrate a never-published commentary on Vitruvius. These drawings certainly fertilized the scenographic tradition: it has been frequently argued that Serlio may have retained them after Peruzzi’s death, later using them as models for his influential tragic and comic scenes.13 Within the larger sixteenth-century cultural context, the scenographic works of Serlio and Peruzzi have been seen as directly informing highly regarded works of art, and thus form part of the early modern interest in theatricality.14 Vasari expresses an unequivocal admiration for Peruzzi’s theatrical skill, highlighting that his designs were a turning point in Italian scenography.15 In 11Paola Poggi, “Architectonica perspectiva: La prospettiva solida de Le Bacchidi e la voluta ionica di Baldassarre Peruzzi,” in Baldassarre Peruzzi 1481–1536, ed. Christoph L. Frommel et al. (Venice: Marsilio, 2005), 443–55. See also Thomas Ault, “Peruzzi and the Perspective Stage,” Theatre Design & Technology 43 (2007): 33–50. 12For Genga’s design see Pallen, Vasari and Theatre, 20–23 and 93–99. See also Antonio Pinelli and Orietta Rossi, Genga Architetto (Rome: Bulzoni, 1971), 107–17; Jack D’Amico, “Drama and the Court in ‘La Calandria,’” Theatre Journal 43 (1991): 93–106; Donald Beecher, “Introduction to The Calandria,” in Renaissance Comedy, 23; Franco Ruffini, Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento: La “Calandria” alla corte di Urbino (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986); Giovanni Attolini, Teatro e spattacolo nel Rinascimento (Bari: Editori Laterza, 1988), 113. For Castiglione’s interest in performance see Wayne Rebhorn, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978). 13Povoledo, “Origins and Aspects of Italian Scenography,” 324–26. See also Pallen, Vasari on Theatre, 26; David Brubaker, Court and Commedia: The Italian Renaissance Stage (New York: Rich- ard Rosen Press, 1975), 41. Neiiendam traces Serlio’s influences to Bramante. See “‘Il portico’ and ‘la bottega’ on the early Italian perspective stage,” 29– 40. 14 E.g. Kurt Badt, “Raphael’s ‘Incendio del Borgo,’” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Insti- tutes 22, no. 1/2 (1959): 35–59; Rosand, “Theater and Structure in the Art of Paolo Veronese”; Eunice Howe, “Architecture in Vasari’s ‘Massacre of the Huguenots,’” Journal of the Warburg and Cour- tauld Institutes 39 (1976): 258– 61; Cecil Gould, “Sebastiano Serlio and Venetian Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 25, no. 1/2 (1962): 56– 64; George L. Gorse, “A Classical Stage for the Old Nobility: The Strada Nuova and Sixteenth-Century Genoa,” The Art Bulletin 79 (1997): 301–27; Alison Fleming, “Presenting the Spectators as the Show,” in Theatricality in Early Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Caroline van Eck and Stijn Bussels (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Eugene J. Johnson, “Jacopo Sansovino, Giacomo Torelli, and the Theatricality of the Piazzetta in Venice,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 59 (2000): 436–53. 15“Baldassarre fece al tempo di Leone X due scene che furono maravigliose, et apersono la via a coloro che ne hanno poi fatto a’ tempi nostri,” Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori: Nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, ed. Rosanne Bettarini and Paolo Barocchi (Florence: Accademia del Crusca, 1994), 4:323. Kernodle adds, “Vasari gives credit for the develop- ment of perspective scenery to Baldassare Peruzzi…. Vasari’s enthusiasm attests the tremendous
30 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) his Lives, Vasari explicitly refers to two plays for which Peruzzi produced the stage designs. One of them is La Calandria, which was probably performed in the late months of 1514 and perhaps repeated in January 1515.16 The other play is not named, and its identity has become the subject of scholarly speculation.17 Impor- tantly, Vasari praises both the text of La Calandria for its use of the vernacular and Peruzzi’s stages for having laid the foundations for contemporary sets. The latter is something especially remarkable, in the Tuscan writer’s opinion, given that comedies, and consequently scenery for comedies, had fallen into disuse, replaced by festivals and mystery plays. Such triumphal rhetoric regarding scenography has traditionally been taken up in order to see Peruzzi as heralding a new age of scenographic unity and illu- sionism.18 The drawing has been characterized as a tour de force in which the advances of Renaissance painting are finally used in theatrical performances.19 Leaving behind medieval practices, where geographically disparate locations were simultaneously visible on stage, Peruzzi’s groundbreaking stage is under- stood to reify the values of Renaissance set design.20 Thus, his scenographic work is seen as manifesting the importance of verisimilitude, the scientific use of linear perspective, and the pervasive interest in revitalizing Vitruvius’ theatrical architecture.21 excitement which artists and laymen alike felt over this new courtly toy—perspective scenery—and the new effects of illusion.” From Art to Theatre, 177. 16See Ricci, “The Art of Scenography,” The Art Bulletin 10, no. 3 (1928): 231–57. See also Neiien- dam, “‘Il portico’ and ‘la bottega’ on the early Italian perspective stage,” 40. Burckhardt argues the play was produced by Leo X in 1515 for the promotion of his brother, Giuliano de’ Medici, to General of the Church. See The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance (London: Secker and Warburg, 1985), 271. Pallen and Lotz agree that the play was produced by Leo X, but argue that the reason was to cel- ebrate the conferral of Roman citizenship to both his grandson Lorenzo and to his brother Giuliano. Lotz also writes that Peruzzi took a leading part in the construction of “the wooden ‘theatre’ on the Capitol in Rome which Leo X erected in 1513 on the occasion of the admission of his nephews Giuliano and Lorenzo de’ Medici to the Roman patriciate.” Wolfgang Lotz, Architecture in Italy 1500–1600 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 46. Pallen posits that the theatre was built by Rosselli. See Vasari on Theatre, 36. 17See Pallen, Vasari on Theatre, 24. See also Povoledo, “Origins and Aspects of Italian Scenog- raphy,” 324; Attolini, Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento, 114–5. 18Richard Andrews, “The Renaissance stage,” in A History of Italian Theatre, ed. Joseph Farrell and Paolo Puppa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 31–38. 19“It is surprising that apparently no perspective scenery was built until the first decade of the sixteenth century.” Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 176. 20Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre, 73. See also Tydeman, The Theatre in the Middle Ages, 238; Pallen, Vasari and Theatre, 26; Alessandro Biagi, “La prospettiva, la scenografia, lo spettacolo,” in Baldassarre Peruzzi, Architetto: 20 luglio–20 agosto Ancaiano-Sovicille, commemorazione V cen- tenario della nascita (Siena: Periccioli, 1981), 30. 21Richard Andrews argues that the Renaissance stage depicted an autonomous fictional terri- tory that mirrored the world inhabited by the audience and “was both ‘rational’ and ‘verisimilar.’” See “The Renaissance stage,” 35. See also Bodo Richter, “Recent Studies in Renaissance Scenography,” Renaissance News 19, no. 4 (1966): 344–58, especially 347; Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 23. For Vitruvius’s
Berzal/ Conjuring the Concept of Rome 31 The scholarly emphasis on Peruzzi’s creation of a verisimilar stage is not ungrounded: a glimpse of Peruzzi’s design shows evidence of a well-constructed perspectival stage, with the receding lines of the floor leading our eyes to a cen- tralized vanishing point in the way famously proposed by Leon Battista Alberti in his treatise On Painting; however, a nuanced analysis of this drawing shows a series of spatial complications. Before we address these complications, it is worth observing the ways in which Peruzzi has created a credible space.22 A quick glance at the design reveals the representation of three types of elements: the blank space that signifies the sky, a series of buildings, and the floor. Upon closer inspection, it is possible to easily subdivide the latter into two distinct sections: the front section, where we encounter the receding lines of the checkerboard pavement, and a back section in which no such squares exist. These two floor areas appear as divided by a double line on the ground, which separates the front and the back. Despite its monochromatic nature and unfinished lines, we understand the drawing as presenting us with a space that we can easily navigate. Though it is assumed that, by the sixteenth century, artists of the caliber of Peruzzi would have had no problem visually articulating a deep three-dimensional space, it is worth considering here how effortlessly the drawing provides us with a tangible space in which we can orient ourselves. That is, it is worth considering how read- ily we accept an encounter with an illusionistic, highly organized space. The putative illusionism of the drawing is critical to any interpretation inas- much as the drawing presents neither a fully architectural nor fully pictorial space: it describes architecture pictorially, yet we know that it is not meant to represent a purely pictorial space, since only parts of it were destined to remain flat. The question is whether the drawing definitively differentiates the elements that are potentially three-dimensional (or at least integrated with the space of the actors) from what was likely to remain flat (e.g. the painted backdrop). It is likely that Peruzzi signified this transition with the very double line on the ground that separates the two spaces—that the checkerboard section of the pavement would indicate the three-dimensional space of the stage, whereas the area beyond it influence see Povoledo, “Origins and Aspects of Italian Scenography,” 324–26. See also Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance: Cultural Realities and Theatrical Innovation (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 134–36; Manfredo Tafuri, “Il luogo teatrale dall’umanesimo a oggio,” in Teatri e scenografie (Milan: Touring Club Italiano, 1976), 28. 22Hubert Damisch interprets the drawing as belonging to the genre of architectural vedute. See The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 203– 6. Damisch’s notion of “view” is linked to Brunelleschi’s experiments, to architectural renderings, and to built architecture. Damisch’s brief mentioning of contradiction and condensation remains linked to built architecture; indeed, despite his awareness of nonfinite, not closed, and nonsystematic systems, Damisch follows Kernodle in this differentiation of medieval and sixteenth-century stages, where the latter “become interested in integrating all the different elements of a single spectacle within a unified framework.” A Theory of /Cloud/ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 155.
32 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) would have remained two-dimensional as a backdrop.23 This hypothesis suggests that Peruzzi would have presented us not with an infinite potentiality, but with a distinct encounter of two different entities: the space that can be experienced and occupied by the living bodies of the actors, and the space that ought to remain pictorial. This idea is buttressed by the drawing itself: Peruzzi’s articulation of the first two houses on both left and right is noticeably more volumetric, homog- enous and proportional than the monuments behind them. The back section does not show an integrated and compelling space, but an ersatz and paradoxical amalgam of buildings and monuments. The perplex- ing situation of the monuments appears, upon initial inspection, less peculiar than perhaps it should. Peruzzi’s artistic qualities here do not merely delineate his mathematic skill, but also importantly his capacity to divert the gaze of the viewer, who intuitively apprehends a successful depiction of depth. However, the contrast between the two spaces is more subversive than it may seem, and it goes beyond Peruzzi’s creation of an imaginary vantage point. In addition to the lack of a factual topographic arrangement, the monuments are flattened, and they appear impossibly stacked and piled up on one another. To these illusionistic irregularities, we need to add problems of scale, as the buildings’ sizes have been modified without reference to a fixed perspective ratio, and thus they lack the appearance of continuous proportionality.24 This is especially noticeable in the depiction of the Coliseum and the Castel Sant’Angelo: both buildings, clearly prominent in the drawing, have been flattened and shrunk. In fact, it is not so much the Coliseum that is perceived, but a carved-out section of the monument that protrudes into the space of the third house, hovering over its roof. Likewise, on the right, the dome of the Pantheon awkwardly appears between the Castel Sant’Angelo and the second house, occupying an impossible space. Peruzzi’s design for La Calandria is, therefore, not a mimetic presentation of a specific location. On the contrary, it brings forth an impossible and imaginary point of view from which a wide array of famous Roman architecture becomes visible: in addition to the above-mentioned monuments, we encounter the Tower of the Milizie, the three columns of the Temple of Castor and Pollux, the obelisk from Piazza del Popolo, Trajan’s Column, the Palazzo Senatorio, the bell tower of San Lorenzo in Miranda, and an arch inspired by that of the Argentari in the Forum Boarium.25 Amalgamated and flattened, the monuments literally exist on the margins of mathematical reason, which in the drawing operates a visual 23Christopher Cairns, “Theatre as Festival,” 108. See also Pallen, Vasari and Theatre, 26; Nicoll, The Development of the Theatre, 73. 24For an analysis of the issue of scale in sixteenth-century art see Creighton Gilbert, “A New sight in 1500: The Colossal,” in Theatrical Spectacle and Spectacular Theatre, ed. Susan Scott, vol. 2 of “All the World’s a Stage…”: Art and Pageantry in the Renaissance and Baroque, ed. Barbara Wisch and Susan Scott Munshower (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1990), 396– 415. 25The Tower of the Milizie was believed to be Torre di Nerone. Neiiendam, “‘Il portico’ and ‘la bottega’ on the early Italian perspective stage,” 40. See also Pallen, Vasari on Theatre, 26.
Berzal/ Conjuring the Concept of Rome 33 rachis: the perspective construction is presented as a central avenue, whereas the monuments appear to the left and the right of the street, yet completely discon- nected from it. It is rather unlikely that Peruzzi failed to see that the space he had created was strange and unrealistic, or that he was technically unable to correct it into a coherent whole. It would be impossible to argue that Peruzzi lacked a sound understanding of the rules of spatial depiction: not only was his knowledge of perspective praised by early authors, but also his architecture and pictorial work, like the Sala delle Prospettive in the Villa Farnesina, speaks to his capacities.26 Peruzzi’s competence forces the audience to view the less coherent aspects of his stage design through a different prism, one in which the artist and architect was not interested in the recreation of an antiquarian (and arguably narcissistic) dream based on spatial surveillance, but a formulation that did not have to follow the dictates of technical norms, in this case spatial and mathematical ones.27 The proposal that Peruzzi was not interested in spatial unity may seem at odds with the pervasive body of scholarship on early modern Italian set design.28 Nevertheless, it is important to have in mind that multiple voices have raised issues regarding the importance of pictorial mathematical unity based on per- spective. In other period contexts, scholars like James Elkins have shown concerns regarding the assumption that perspective was a pictorial means to the creation of a unified picture plane, as it may have been a tool meant to depict individual objects and not space as such.29 Moreover, there is a tradition in the scholarship, exemplified by John White and Michael Baxandall, that argues pragmatic and 26“Il consumatissimo Baldassare Peruzzi Sanese fú ancor lui pittore, & nella prospettiva tanto dotto, che . . . a niuno altro fu secondo.” Sebastiano Serlio, Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva (Ridgewood: The Gregg Press, 1964), Libro primo (Venice: Melchiorre Sessa, 1551), 2:1r. See also Jehane Kuhn, “‘La buona squola di Baldassarre’: Vignola’s Due Regole as a Source for Peruzzi’s Per- spective Techniques,” in Baldassarre Peruzzi 1482–1536, ed. Christoph Frommel et al. (Venezia: Marsilio, 2005), 411– 42; Martin Kemp, The Science of Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 70. 27On the relationship between antiquarianism and narcissism see Julia Kristeva, “Modern Theater Does Not Take (a) Place,” in Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime, ed. Timothy Murray (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 277–81. For Peruzzi’s surveillance and archeologi- cal knowledge see Phillip J. Jacks, “The Simulachrum of Fabio Calvo: A View of Roman Architecture all’antica in 1527,” The Art Bulletin 72, no. 3 (1990): 453–81. See also Ann Huppert, “Baldassarre Peruzzi as Archeologist in Terracina,” 213–23 and, Pierre Gros, “Baldassarre Peruzzi, architetto e archeologo,” in Baldassarre Peruzzi 1482–1536, ed. Christoph Frommel et al. (Venezia: Marsilio, 2005), 443–55; Robert W. Gaston, “Merely Antiquarian: Pirro Ligorio and the Critical Tradition of Antiquarian Scholarship,” in The Italian Renaissance in the Twentieth Century, ed. Allen Griec et al. (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2002), 355–73. Manfredo Tafuri writes that Peruzzi’s relationship with the antique had an “achitectural understanding liberated from the servitude of norms.” See Inter- preting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 129. 28E.g., “The purpose of perspective scenery—to create the illusion of an actual place—required the complete unity of the stage setting.” Kernodle, From Art to Theatre, 174. 29James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994). See also Elkins, “Renaissance Perspectives,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53, no. 2 (1992): 209–30.
34 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) artistic realities took precedence over mathematical demonstrations.30 Indeed, even arithmetic historians have argued that early modern mathematics need not be seen as articulating principles detached from experiences, as fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mathematics were reflections of everyday life still dependent on the abacists’ tradition of reasoning by example.31 Hence, it seems rather prob- able that mathematic correctness was not the priority of Renaissance artists, but rather that linear perspective was one of many tools, all of which were at the service of the artistic process. Therefore, potential understandings of theatri- cal productions in which the intrinsic virtues of correct spatial constructions are seen as conjuring a unified visual field, need to be contextualized within art historiographic developments and the realities of the period itself. In cases of accomplished artists like Peruzzi, the rationality of the artists’ choices demands receptivity to the positive potential aspects of seemingly incoherent spaces, as such spaces can elicit active cognitive engagement.32 Importantly, the fragmentation of pictorial space need not be seen as incom- patible with the humanists’ interest in Aristotle’s dramatic unity, which stipu- lated a main action without subplots.33 After all, the scene, as the semantic center of a play, can operate as a conceptual unity through the embodied engagement of viewers and actors in the visually designed space of the stage.34 Unity, in this sense, would not be a static, monolithic apparatus, but a malleable set of rela- tions that is articulated by the engagement between each viewer, the space of that viewer, the performers, and the space of the performance. Besides, it is worth considering the extent to which Aristotle’s Poetics would have been interpreted in 1514 as stipulating a unity of space, as the application of the doctrine of the Three Unities would only become pervasive in the second half of the sixteenth century, having its notorious early exponent in Castelvetro’s famous 1570 exegesis in Poe- tica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposita. Although it is possible that Peruzzi either directly or indirectly knew Aristotle’s treatise through Giorgio Valla’s 1498 Latin translation, the 1508 Venetian printing of the Greek original, or even from one of the many copies of the texts that existed in the fifteenth century, the Poetics 30Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth- Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1988), 127–28. See also John White, Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 194–201. 31Luis Radford, “On the Epistemological Limits of Language: Mathematical Knowledge and Social Practice during the Renaissance,” Educational Studies in Mathematics 52, no. 2 (2003): 123– 50, esp. 135. 32“Multiple viewpoints greatly increase the organizational range and effectiveness of perspec- tive.” White, Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 197. See also Pavel Florensky, “Reverse Perspec- tive,” in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art (London: Reaktion, 2002), 201–72. 33“One” in this sense means “whole” or “complete.” See Rüdiger Bittner, “One Action,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 97–110. 34 Arnold Aronson, “Postmodern Design,” Theatre Journal 43 (Mar. 1991): 1–13. Also, Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance, 141.
Berzal/ Conjuring the Concept of Rome 35 as a whole, beyond specific doctrines, was not generally well known until the middle of the sixteenth century.35 In any case, it seems anachronistic to ascribe to Peruzzi a definite interpretation of Aristotle’s text, specially regarding unity of place. Let us, then, bracket out the notion of spatial unity as either an epistemo- logical social indicator based on perspective or an a priori theatrical dogma, and engage with space, as Leon Battista Alberti proposes in the opening para- graphs of On Painting, from the point of view of the artists, and not that of math- ematicians.36 A mathematical prism, after all, can create a hierarchy that takes aesthetic value away from art in order to provide a rationale based on a math- ematical notion of logic in which optical legibility means logico-mathematical intelligibility.37 Hence, we must accept the possibility that, not only does Peru- zzi’s perspective accept distortions to its geometric order, but that these distor- tions can assist the function of the stage design.38 The present inquiry, therefore, needs to question the pragmatics of the drawing qua scenographic drawing, since set design has its own intrinsic processes, goals, and functions.39 Theatrical spaces are expressive.40 They articulate a visual utterance that addresses the cognitive and sensory capacities of the audience.41 Since the stage opens itself to the spectators, the designer of the stage needs to anticipate the 35Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 349. Also, Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, 292. See also Daniel Javitch, “The Assimilation of Aristotle’s Poetics in Sixteenth- Century Italy,” in The Renaissance, ed. Glyn P. Norton, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 53– 65. 36“Ma in ogni nostro favellare molto priego si consideri me non come matematico ma come pittore scrivere di queste cose.” Leon Battista Alberti, “De pictura,” in Opere volgari, Vol. 3, ed. Cecil Grayson (Bari: G. Laterza e Figli, 1973). 37 Henry Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 298. Cf. William Irvins, On the Rationalization of Sight (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 13. 38For how perspective can exist without creating a unitary space see Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective. The problematic issue of function is worth raising given certain Kantian pervasive prejudices: designers like Serlio are criticized for being pragmatic, though such criticisms fail to understand a most essential aspect of what a theatrical design is. See Kemp, The Science of Art, 66. See also Nicoll, The Development of the Theater, 75; Sabine Frommel, Sebastiano Serlio Architect (Milan: Electra, 2003), 9; John Gassner and Ralph G. Allen, Theatre and Drama in the Making (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1992), 237–38; Rudolph Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Norton, 1962), 18. 39Cf. Damisch’s and Krautheimer’s argument that architecture and scenography are tanta- mount concepts. See: Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, 203; Richard Krautheimer, “The Tragic and Comic Scenes of the Renaissance: The Baltimore and Urbino Panels,” in Studies in Early Chris- tian, Medieval, and Renaissance Art (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 345–59, esp. 346. 40 Olivia Dawson, “Speaking Theatres: The ‘Olimpico’ Theatres of Vicenza and Sabbioneta and Camillo’s Theatre of Memory,” in The Renaissance Theatre: Texts, Performance, Design, ed. Christo- pher Cairns (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1991), 2:85–92. 41Di Maria, The Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance, 129. In this sense, Gay McAuley describes theatrical events as “dynamic process of communication in which the spectators are virtually impli- cated.” Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre (Ann Arbor: The University of Michi- gan Press, 1999), 7.
36 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) engagement of the spectators while conceptualizing the space. Issues of recep- tion emerge in the drafting process, and the audience is, in a sense, present in the concetto, the conceptual and foundational idea of the design. This is not to say that the spectator was not important in visual arts in general in the Renaissance, and especially in the tradition of linear perspective, but that theatrical perfor- mances are even clearer exponents of this interest.42 Hence, if theatrical spaces say something, we need to inquire as to what they communicate—to which per- haps the most uncontestable answer is that the stage communicates a setting, and more concretely, the spatial location in which the fictive action takes place. La Calandria takes place in Rome, and it is logical to assume that Peruzzi’s design presents Rome to the viewers. Yet the drawing presents Rome, and not a view of Rome or a location in Rome. We understand the set design as Rome, but in order to see it as Rome we need to think of Rome in a way that does not correlate to the reality of the city. To think of Rome as a whole, Peruzzi has created a physical impossibility. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud engaged in a mental exer- cise. Freud, addressing the issue of mental preservation, imagines Rome, not as a space of human habitation, but as a psychical entity “in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away.”43 In this imaginary Rome, ancient monuments and later buildings could coexist in one space, and the observer could call up one view or another by shifting his glance or his position. Freud calls this Rome an unimaginable fantasy, and concludes, “If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space.”44 It is unlikely that Freud knew Peruzzi’s design; what is more likely is that Freud and Peruzzi shared a concern regarding the nature of spatiality and the human condition, and that we are here encountering a notion inherent in the consciousness of European culture, namely the synthesis of a diachronic and a synchronic Rome. The product of this synthetic project, Freud notes, would be 42For issues of viewership see John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). The active role of viewership is palpable before the Renaissance in Erasmus Witelo’s 1278 work De Perspectiva. Witelo argues that the viewer engages in dialogue with the object, and that this interaction requires reason, imagination, and knowledge. See Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), 69. Witelo’s treatise on optics informed Renaissance works like Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Commentario terzo. See Graziela F. Vescovini, “Contributo per la storia della fortuna di Alhazen in Italia: II volgarizzamento del MS. Vat. 4595 e il Commentario terzo del Ghiberti,” Rinascimento 5 (1965). See also G. Federici Vescovini, “Il problema delle fonti ottiche medievali del Commentario terzo di Lorenzo Ghiberti,” in Lorenzo Ghiberti nel su tempo (Firenze: Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, 1980), 349–87; Judith Veronica Field, Piero della Francesca: A Mathematician’s Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 131–32; David C. Lind- berg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Klepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 152. 43Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1961), 17. 44Freud, Civilization, 17.
Berzal/ Conjuring the Concept of Rome 37 absurd.45 Indeed, we may agree: Peruzzi’s design is visually absurd, his juxtapo- sition being created by sacrificing a space as it is experienced. Yet absurd here need not be understood as ridiculous or inane, but in its etymological sense, from the Latin absurdus, meaning “out of tune” since the non-perspectival sections of Peruzzi’s space are dissonant and spatially divergent, in turn calling into ques- tion the harmony of the stage as a whole. Peruzzi’s Rome is not so much a depiction of Rome as a depiction of “a cer- tain idea that comes to mind” about Rome, to extrapolate a phrase by his friend and colleague Raphael.46 This movement away from the tangible Rome into a conceptualization of the city raises the question of Peruzzi’s philosophical ideas, some of which he might have shared with Raphael. Neo-Platonism, which was an interest within Peruzzi’s circle, is here significant as it befits the aesthetics of the drawing better than the chronologically problematic notion of Aristotelian spatial unity. It is worth noting too the transitional status of Aristotle’s authority at the time, which would move, later in the century, from that of a medieval scho- lastic philosopher, whose authority could be questioned, to the mid-sixteenth- century championing of his Poetics.47 Moreover, certain central concerns for Aristotle, like the importance of order and size as essential factors of beauty, are clearly at odds with Peruzzi’s design, hindering the possibility of an Aristotelian interpretation of the drawing.48 Writing on the topic of Peruzzi’s knowledge of Neo-Platonism, Manfredo Tafuri has argued that, though the artist may not have been fully aware of the theoretical implications of the philosophical system, he nevertheless absorbed a profound assumption of this philosophy, namely that “the absolute does not rest within itself but is an active force that proceeds by duplication.”49 Peruzzi’s design may be then interpreted not so much in terms of urban ideality and unity of place, as it has been argued.50 Rather, it would present a visual articulation of the technical and sublime conditions of possibility inher- ent in the act of doubling. The Rome in the design is not a perfect idea of Rome or a dream of Rome “abstracted from the hazards of time.”51 Instead, it articulates time, both in its synchronic aesthetic, and in the presentation of Roman ruins. Rome is thus neither complete nor idealized: it is an aestheticized double visual encounter that operates sensorially with and for the spectators. In this encounter, identity is immediately relinquished, and the act of presentation becomes also an act of vanishing, as Rome is brought forward but instantly subverted. The act of 45Freud, Civilization, 17. 46“Di certa Iddea che mi viene nella mente.” John Sherman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:735, doc. 1522/16. 47 Weinberg, History of Literary Criticism, 350. 48Aristotle, Poetics, trans. George Whalley (Montreal and Kingston: McGill- Queen’s Univer- sity Press, 1997), 79. 49Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance, 129. 50Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1993), 23. See also Attolini, Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento, 115. 51Hubert Damisch, Skyline (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 17.
38 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) presentation is an act of distancing, and the Rome in the design exists in between the real city and the space of the theatrical performance: it brings us beyond the latter, but it never becomes a simulacrum of the former. This, in turn, calls atten- tion to the act of viewing itself, and hinders the adoption of a spatial mode in which the space of the stage exists beyond the space of the spectators, as “depth perception is perception of the perceiver’s relation to the place that she or he is in.”52 This does not mean that a failed illusion actually disrupts the space of the viewers but, rather, that the successful presentation of an ersatz space calls atten- tion to the theatrical nature of the viewer’s place. In this sense, the presentation of Rome calls for an aesthetic mode of engagement in which spatial identity is not indispensable. Hence, in its act of replication, the drawing distorts its mimetic value and stipulates its own artificiality; at the same time, the artifice is encountered as arti- fice, and not as a deceiving device, since it retracts any potential deception. One can imagine how much this subversion would have been palpable in the actual performance through the juxtaposition of three-dimensional elements with the flat painted backdrop—how much the flatness of the painted architecture would have called into question the existence of volumetric elements. Peruzzi’s design presents what is and what cannot be, therefore expressing the necessity of an alternative viewpoint, in this case aesthetic.53 In this presentation, the particular potentially mimetic reality of the different elements and monuments comes to be negated in order to present Rome as a concept, destabilizing the immanent attes- tation of perceptual experiences. In this process, the drawing takes away the pos- sibility of topological orientation: the visual communication of Rome emerges from an active disruption of the audience’s phenomenological experiences of the city. Thus, the emphasis on linearity and perspective as a mode of orientation comes to be juxtaposed to the impossibility of such orientation. Not only is Rome presented as a work of artifice instead of a simulacrum, the possibility of orienta- tion also becomes artificial, as orientation is possible only through the artificial- ity of linear perspective instead of through the basic engagement with a lived city space, in which arrangements, distance, and scale are crucial.54 A modern author has argued that stage setting “tends to define and contex- tualize the dramatic action, reinforcing it visually and conferring upon it specific meaning.”55 Yet it seems that the stage design in Peruzzi’s work does more than contextualize and reinforce. Its visual approach is not one purely in the service of 52David Morris, The Sense of Space (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 28. 53For a philosophical analysis of alterity see Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For alterity in relationship to space see Jacques Der- rida, “Khora,” in On the Name (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 89–130. 54For an early modern analysis of the shortcoming and problems of linear perspective see Leonardo, On Painting, ed. Martin Kemp (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 58– 68. 55Di Maria, Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance, 132.
Berzal/ Conjuring the Concept of Rome 39 the play, but one that deserves to be understood as autonomous to an important degree, as the set design can do something that the text cannot do. The autonomy and independent function of the set vis-à-vis the text would become later pal- pable in the work of the influential writer and theorist Giovanni Battista Giraldi (1504–73), commonly known by his sobriquet Cinthio. His Discorso intorno al comporre delle comedia e delle tragedie, written in 1543 and published in 1554, sheds some light into the importance of the stage design of his plays, and presents an important analysis of the aims of scenography, as it reflects his own experi- ences as a playwright and a producer.56 Cinthio postulates that the stage fulfills a double function by presenting a definite indication of the place of action and by captivating its audience.57 Though Cinthio’s text is of later date than Peruz- zi’s drawing, it is relevant here because of Cinthio’s capacity to articulate crucial ideas about scenography in the sixteenth century. Before dwelling on the importance of captivating the audience, it is worth addressing Cinthio’s notion regarding the visual presentation of a place of action. Though Peruzzi’s design reveals little interest in the visual presentation of Rome as a virtual geographical or topographical location, it does convey an idea of the city. It is a definite indication, to use Cinthio’s concept; indeed, it is the most defi- nite, since no other place in the world could encompass those monuments pre- sented therein. In other words, Peruzzi’s definite indication of a place, built from an amalgam of famous Roman monuments, does not need to conform to any particularized point of view, as the indication of place it offers is more authori- tative and unmistakable than any actual view of Rome could be. It is perhaps for this reason that Peruzzi’s drawing seems concerned with a notion of monu- mentality that can only be accomplished by distilling the real Rome down to its greatest monuments. Peruzzi’s is a self-expressed monumentality—an artificial hyper-monumentality obtained by the excess of monuments. Peruzzi’s Rome does not describe monuments: it presents monumentality as a surplus; a surplus associated with Rome above all other cities. This artistic device can be understood by considering these early modern Italian theatrical spaces in terms of synecdoche.58 Much like “flesh and blood” stands for “body,” or “lock, stock, and barrel” for “gun,” well-known architectural 56Peter Bondanella, “Giraldi Giraldi Cinthio, Giambattista,” in McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984), 1:314–5. See also Mary Morrison, The Tragedies of G.-B. Giraldi Cinthio (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 12; Peggy Osborn, “G. B. Giraldi Cinthio’s Dramatic Theory and Stage Practice: A Creative Interaction,” in Scenery, Set and Staging in the Italian Renaissance (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1996), 39–58. 57Giraldi Cinthio, “Discorso intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie,” in Scritti critici, ed. Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti (Milan: Marzorati, 1973), 219. See also Osborn, “G. B. Giraldi Cinthio’s Dramatic Theory,” 42– 43; Burckhardt, The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, 271. 58I am here using the word synecdoche due to its being a widespread notion. In more concrete terms, a single thing that is referred to by a conventional phrase that enumerates several of its parts is called merism. Since merism is not a widely known word and it is a type of synecdoche, it seems beneficial to accept the latter even at the cost of sacrificing a more concrete term.
40 Sixteenth Century Journal XLV/1 (2014) elements and monuments of the city are used in Peruzzi’s stage designs to signify the city itself. Compare Peruzzi’s design (fig. 1) with Baldassare Lanci’s (1510–71) set for Giovan Battista Cini’s La Vedova, a play performed in Florence in 1569.59 Lanci’s design (fig. 2), despite presenting what Martin Kemp has called a “drastic realignment of Florentine topography,” seems to produce a naturalistic point of view, something that Peruzzi has avoided.60 Though Lanci’s design would have looked much less naturalistic in the stage, it is clear that his strategy correlates to quantitative methods such as surveying, aiming at a naturalistic presentation of a place. In contrast, Peruzzi’s visual tactics uproot the constructions from their geographical context, altered in size, flattened and repositioned. Indeed, these are not buildings anymore, and this lack of everyday functionality emphasizes their artificiality. Whereas the linear perspective presents a space to live and move in (and we must remember Peruzzi’s scenographic fame is due to its integration of acting and setting in the staged “piazza”), the monumental Rome appears as an image of constriction where there is no chance to move, where there is no breath- ing space.61 It is likely that Vasari learned much from Peruzzi’s strategy as, in a letter to Ottaviano de’ Medici, he describes the scenography that he had conceived for the production of Talanta, a comedy by Pietro Arentino performed in Venice in 1542. This description mentions the presence of the following assortment of buildings on stage: the Pantheon, the Colosseum, the Trajan Column, the Torre della Milizie, the Arch of Septimus Severus, the Templum Pacis, Santa Maria della Pace, Santa Maria Nuova, the Temple of Fortuna, Palazzo Maggiore, the Seven Hills, and the Pasquino.62 To create a mental image of what this stage would have looked like is, no doubt, an arduous task. It is impossible to know what Vasa- ri’s stage looked like, but given the description and Vasari’s praise for Peruzzi’s inventive architectural capacities, the drawing does offer us a visual referent.63 It seems that both Peruzzi and Vasari were interested in bringing forth to the view- ers not a street in Rome, but its cultural density—the overwhelming presence of 59For the historical context of this performance see Francesca Fiorani, The Marvel of Maps (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 136 and 301n62. 60Kemp, The Science of Art, 176. The verisimilude in the point of view has led the design to be described as presenting “una fedele riproduzione della Piazza della Signoria di Firenze.” See Naz- zareno Luigi Todarello, Le arti della scena (Novi Ligure: Latorre, 2006), 353. Cairns argues for a polarized distinction between Lanci’s “picture” and Peruzzi’s “poem.” See “Theatre as Festival,” 110. Carlson has argued that Lanci’s design follows “the Peruzzian-Serlian manner.” See Places of Performance, 24. 61On the issue of room and roominess as vital see John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigree, 1980), 209. See also David Morris, The Sense of Space (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), 1. 62For a comparison between the buildings in Peruzzi and Vasari see Cairns, “Theatre as Fes- tival,” 115–16. 63For another case in which Vasari looked at Peruzzi’s see Howe, “Architecture in Vasari’s ‘Massacre of the Huguenots,’” 261.
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