Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Series Editors
Laura Cull Maoilearca
University of Surrey
Guildford, United Kingdom
Alice Lagaay
Bauhaus-Universitt Weimar
Weimar, Germany
Will Daddario
Independent Scholar
Asheville, North Carolina, USA
Performance Philosophy is an emerging interdisciplinary eld of thought,
creative practice and scholarship. The newly founded Performance
Philosophy book series comprises monographs and essay collections
addressing the relationship between performance and philosophy within
a broad range of philosophical traditions and performance practices,
including drama, theatre, performance arts, dance, art and music. It also
includes studies of the performative aspects of life and, indeed, philosophy
itself. As such, the series addresses the philosophy of performance as well as
performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance.
http://www.performancephilosophy.org/books/
Baroque, Venice,
Theatre, Philosophy
Will Daddario
Independent Scholar
Asheville, North Carolina, USA
Performance Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-319-49522-4 ISBN 978-3-319-49523-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49523-1
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the encouraging feedback during the initial drafting stages of the disserta-
tion chapters. Margaret Werry, thank you for your incredible tenacity,
your scholarly assiduity, your reminders about the necessity of sound and
creative research methodologies, and, most importantly, your warm
friendship in the last several years. Laura Cull Maoilearca, our partner-
ships since 2010 have helped me to understand the importance of perfor-
mance philosophy in todays academic landscape and in life in general.
Indeed, what does it mean to think? Your work ethic and leadership are
admirable and I look forward to many more years of working together so
that we can come up with answers to that question. Freddie Rokem and
Alice Lagaay, thank you for your guidance on the book proposal and your
keen understanding of the shape of the discipline as it continues to
unfold. Freddie, in particular, thank you sincerely for having faith in my
work and for your kindness and friendship. Matthew Goulish and Lin
Hixson, your creativity emanates from Chicago and provides a beacon that
I can see wherever I am. Thanks for your work and the inspiring new
directions in which you are taking it. And nally, Michal Kobialka, you
have advised me on this project since its inception and are very much part
of its nal fabric. Countless bottles of wine and champagne have fueled the
late-night discussions about the life of the mind and the necessity of
pushing the boundaries of thought. I look forward to many more of
those conversations and to continuing our work together.
I offer the ultimate acknowledgement, for which no words seem ade-
quate, to my wife, Joanne Zerdy, and our two sons, Finlay Emilio and
Phalen Sage. The light and the dark sides of life have enwrapped the four
of us, and from within the folds, together, we manage to produce new
forms of beauty and nd new expressions of strength. I love you all.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
6 The Enscenement of Self and the Jesuit Teatro del Mondo 159
Bibliography 247
Index 257
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book begins neither by carving out a niche within baroque studies,
nor by presenting a manageable scope of study, but, instead, by reveling in
the excesses of baroque thinking that have illuminated the pages of so
many notable works. Sprouting from a footnote in the chapter The
Inversion of What Can Be Thought of The Writing of History, one
nds (if one looks for it) an enigmatic denition of the baroque cultivated
by the Jesuit psychoanalyst and historiographer Michel de Certeau: [The
Baroque:] a spectacle of metamorphoses which ceaselessly hide what they
show (de Certeau 145 n33). Within some pages devoted to seventeenth-
century Christian mysticism, this denition limns the paradoxical nature of
the baroque as an expression which hides what it shows and calls to mind
the painful act of staring at the Sun. There, where the Sun shines brightest,
a dark spot appears as if to cover ones eyes from the power of the light.
Even upon looking away, the dark spot lingers, both as a hole burned into
our vision and as a negative of the cosmic shine.
Staring at the work of Cervantes, literary scholar and proponent of the
neobaroque William Egginton sees a similar spectacle and asserts that,
The Baroque is theatre, and the theatre is baroque (Egginton 39).
Overcoming the tautology of that statement, he continues, in a thought
reminiscent of de Certeau, by explaining the purpose of such theatre,
which unfolds not organically but rather through a concerted strategy.
The major strategy of the Baroque [ . . . ] assumes the existence of a veil of
appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a space opening just
reveal its secrets in one nal expression. Baroque, then, conditions the
possibility of such an expression and becomes something like the arena
that plays home to a cavalcade of grotesque nality.
Borgess insights have appealed to the scholars of neobaroque arti-
facts and phenomena who have located just such a space in the New
World. Cinema, new media, and literary scholar Angela Ndalianis clari-
es the ndings of Italian semiologist Omar Calabrese, in particular, by
stating that, Baroque and Latin American neobaroque forms unfurl
into a play of borders, where the the border articulates and renders
gradual relations between the interior and the exterior, between aper-
ture and closure (cit. Ndalianis 19).2 Neobaroque advocate Monika
Kaup cites novelist Alejo Carpentiers assertion that the neobaroque
entails, a transformative force of life that recurs through history as
the Manichean counterpart of the ordering force of reason (cit.
Kaup, Becoming 129).3 By recognizing the productive potential of
borderlands and a Manichean, dual subjectivity, indigenous artists cut
through the historical thicket planted by European colonization and move
toward a clearing. As poet Jos Lezama Lima infers, such an American
perspective allows one to occupy the pivotal point such that one experi-
ences both the convergences of knowledge and its dispersions, the bursting
of the image onto the landscape of the unknown (cit. Egginton 74).4
Mexicos great novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes has understood both
the promise of such unknown landscapes as well as the anxieties they
provoke: The Baroque, Alejo Carpentier at one time was telling me, is
the language of peoples, who, ignoring truth, seek after it eagerly. Gngora,
like Picasso, Buuel, Carpentier, or Faulkner, did not know: he encountered
(cit. Egginton 73; emphasis in original).5 Equipped with this alethurgic
language, what does the speaker encounter?6 Again, as inferred by Lacan,
the speaker will encounter the limit of self. As the prolic Latin American
scholar Mabel Moraa tells it, [The Baroque] is the expression of the limit:
an expressivity situated at the abyss of representability [ . . . ] it constitutes, at
the same time, a process that transforms the negativity of what is missing (the
lack, the desire, the abnormality) its original impulse, [into] the locus of the
initial suppression/repression that can be hyperbolically lled with meaning
and saturated with signs (260; emphasis in original). That which lies
beyond the veil, as Egginton has suggested, that unseen and unknown
force, takes place in the realm of the rational and sensible as the stage upon
which all expression will play out. Perhaps this situation explains the aesthetic
4 1 INTRODUCTION
Fortunately, as the baroque scholars above have noted, the study of this
topic (i.e. topos, place) does not benet from acts of making sense;
rather, students of the baroque make their way through the labyrinths
by allowing their ndings not to add up, by resisting the urge to recreate a
whole, and by giving up the effort of inscribing a well-groomed and
traceable area for the benet of future explorers. Mess, fragments, shifting
ground, scribbled ndings: these are the markers of encounters with
baroque acts. With this in mind, the following pages offer an excited
survey and set of provisional charts of this shifting ground by metastasizing
baroque signs instead of limiting them and by developing a baroque mode
of thinking commensurate with the objects of study that the thinking
would like to assess.
PERFORMANCE OF THOUGHT
I want to return again to the metastasization of denitions and meanings
that frequently surges forth in studies of the baroque in order to offer a
more specic set of claims about the performance of thought (what some
might call methodology) that I enact in this books pages. My intention
here is twofold. First, I desire to foreground the maneuvers I make as I
consciously and with great care arrange historical fragments into a specic
shape. By exposing my work as a historiographer, I intend to draw atten-
tion to the act of creation in which all historians (regardless of any stated
or implied objectivity) engage. Second, I want to forward this act of
creation as necessary for the art of historiography. If, as de Certeau has
convincingly suggested, the act of writing history (an act that produces
history) always fails to achieve the status of either pure truth or utter
falsity, then the historiographer perpetually nds himself in the gap, the
very gap that he would vainly seek to erase by endeavoring to write history
and, by doing so, bridge the past and the present. This gap (or, rather, this
gesture of coming nearer [that] reduces but never eliminates distance)
begs for art and playfulness instead of science and surety (de Certeau 230).
In his Barocco: storia di un concetto (Baroque: History of a
Concept), Otto Kurz opens the door to artistic historiography by asses-
sing the baroque through an etymological excavation of the word itself
and discovering not a permanent historical phenomenon but a shifting,
unstable, and quasi-mythical concept housing numerous stories and pos-
sibilities. Baroque appears to him like the irregular pearls preferred by
10 1 INTRODUCTION
the separate sciences accept their ndings, at least their nal and deepest
ndings, as indestructible and static, whereas philosophy perceives the rst
nding which it lights upon as a sign that needs unriddling. Plainly put: the
idea of science (Wissenschaft) is research; that of philosophy is interpretation.
(126)
riddle of the past by revealing how that-which-is can only become visible
through that-which-is-but-only-for-a-moment. As such, philosophy per-
sistently and with the claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without
ever possessing a sure key to interpretation; nothing more is given to it
than eeting, disappearing traces within the riddle gures of that which
exists and their astonishing entwinings (ibid). In other words, embracing
philosophical interpretation means renouncing axiomatic methods that
would try to guide the historiographer through diverse terrains always
with the same map, and choosing, instead, to work out from within the
unique labyrinth of each historical fragment. There is no proof of the
baroque to nd in the theatre practices of sixteenth-century Venice but it
is possible to discover what (else) baroque might be/mean/do by think-
ing creatively about those practices.
To embrace Adornos method of philosophical interpretation while
studying the past, however, one needs to abandon a relatively familiar
denition of the archive. Indeed, a second derivation from deductive
historical research occurs here, in the consideration of the archive as an
arrangement of historical images. It makes little sense to talk about con-
tent when speaking of arrangement, since an arrangement has no content
as such. Rather, arrangements require an attention to form and technique,
to how one assembles and re-assembles various materials. Whereas positi-
vist historians and historiographers would like to nd within archives facts
and objects that give way to the unimpeachable truths of a historical
situation, Adorno and Benjamin collect diverse materials to assemble a
unique archive for each inquiry and to produce an understanding of the
past attuned to the dialectical process active within each object. Historical
images are never givens. Rather, they must be produced by human beings
and are legitimated in the last analysis alone by the fact that reality
crystalizes about them in striking conclusiveness (131).
Fine-tuned ears will perk up here. If historiographers adopt the process
of philosophical interpretation posited by Adorno, are they (we, I) not
embarking on a project of producing history? Does this word produc-
tion not sound uncomfortably similar to invention? Is Adornos mate-
rialist production of historical, unintentional reality through the
juxtaposition of analytically isolated elements no more than fantastical
invention? Yes and no. The term invention played its part in the history
of the dialectical arts, particularly in Rudolph Agricolas De inventione
dialectica (Of dialectical invention 1479, published 1515), where the
word encompassed the all-important act of, rst, nding and ordering
PERFORMANCE OF THOUGHT 13
the right arguments needed for proving a statement and then, second,
discovering truth itself. A wealth of invention, however, was, for Agricola,
a troubling sign, something given to ungoverned and almost mad intel-
ligences (Spranzi 87). Re-functioning this specic understanding of the
term, then, one might say that while Adornos philosophical interpretation
does not amount to making stuff up, it does require the ability to skirt the
madness alluded to in Agricolas term wealth of invention, so as to
prepare a truly artful inquiry. In this sense, invention requires a disci-
plined art to guide it such that the invention gathers itself at some point
and commences judgment (i.e. the act of argumentation) to glimpse and,
perhaps, moves beyond the limits of knowledge.
Adorno himself acknowledged the history of the ars inveniendi (the art
of invention) into which he was stepping:
literature and drama take cues from the baroque thought underpinning
these gardens, what I call garden thinking. I turn rst to Francesco
Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii and then to Torquato Tassos
lAminta, the most exemplary model of the pastoral theatre genre.
Colonnas work persists in the present as an unwieldy and overgrown
work of imagination. Endeavoring to write the dream world of his prota-
gonist Poliphilo, Colonna sews a wild terrain of his own making with
nymphs, ornate temples, maps and diagrams, and erotic longing. In many
ways, the works formal excesses upstage the books content. Moving from
these excesses to the rigorous discipline of Tassos writing, I examine a
play renowned (during its time as well as in the present) for its mastery of
the pastoral mode. Educated by the Jesuits before turning to a life as poet
and playwright, Tasso created a theatrical landscape bursting at the seams
with allegorical messages, each one offering clues about how to discipline
the forces of love and attain happiness in life. Together, the two works
present an opportunity to view the play between discipline and excess
rumbling beneath the surface of many baroque artifacts.
In Chapter 3, Ruzzantes Pastoral, I scrutinize Ruzzantes negation
of Tassos worldview by historicizing his rst theatre work, Pastoral
(1521). Serving as an introduction to the historical gure of Ruzzante
and the world of early sixteenth-century Padua, this chapter presents a
detournement of the traditional pastoral mode in which Platonic philoso-
phical principles ensure a life of happiness. Exposing the inescapable
miscommunication of a world in which each word and idea functions as
an allegory for something else, Ruzzante offers a materialist critique of
pastoral poetry. Next, in Chapter 4, Jesuit Pastoral Theatre: The Case of
Father Pietro Leon da Valcamonica, I offer a third and nal understand-
ing of the baroque pastoral through an analysis of the pastoral power of
the Jesuit Order. While scholarship on pastoral power has not yet met up
with scholarship on pastoral theatre, I contend that, by making visible the
dramaturgy of a condemned priests public execution in Piazza San
Marco, it is possible to understand how Jesuit pastoral power exposes
another facet of pastoral performance, one based on subservience to
shepherds but in an altogether different sense than the same subservience
hinted at by Tasso. The shepherd under discussion here comes into view as
the shepherd-priest, a role played exquisitely by the Jesuits in Venice
during the sixteenth century.
At the end of Part I, I will have articulated baroque pastoral as the ever-
shifting ground of sixteenth-century aesthetic and intellectual production
16 1 INTRODUCTION
aesthetics in the present. With this aim, I concur with Eggintons char-
acterization of the baroque as the aesthetic counterpart to a problem of
thought that is coterminous with that time in the West we have learned to
call modernity, stretching from the sixteenth century to the present
(Egginton 1). By shifting attention away from the well-traversed literature
of the Spanish Golden Age and decolonizing tactics of so-called Latin
America, however, I hope to encourage others to seek out abstruse and
seemingly banal historical objectiles and to revisit and read anew the
theatrical and performance histories whose origins have been obscured
by genre-dening acts such as, in this case, the commedia dellarte.
Furthermore, by siding explicitly with the eld of performance philoso-
phy, I would like to encourage more historical studies into the mutually
constituting forces of philosophy and performance so as to discover modes
of thinking that have slipped into obscurity but, due to their disciplined
excesses, may provide guides for contemporary praxis.
NOTES
1. See Jorge Luis Borges, Historia Universal de la Infamia (Madrid: Alianza,
1954) n.p.
2. See Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles
Lambert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 4748.
3. See Alejo Carprentier, The Baroque and the Marvelous Real (originally
published 1975), trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora,
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds, Lois Parkinson
Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995)
89108; Eugenio dOrs, Lo barroco, eds. Angel dOrs and Alicia Garca
Navarro de dOrs (Madrid: Tecnos, 2002 (originally published 1935)).
4. See Jos Lezama Lima, La curiosidad barroca, La expresin americana,
ed. Irlemar Chiampi (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1993)
79106.
5. See Carlos Fuentes, El barroquismo de William Faulkner, Revista de la
Universidad de Mxico 24.1 (1969): 3.
6. Michel Foucault discusses alethurgy in the rst hour of his lecture at
the College de France from 1984: Etymologically, alethurgy would be
the production of truth, the act by which truth is manifested. This
lecture has been published in The Courage of Truth (The Government of
Self and Others II). Lectures at the Collge de France, 19831984, trans.
Graham Burchell, ed. Frdric Gros (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011).
18 1 INTRODUCTION
Baroque Pastoral
NOTE
1. The translation comes from Sheeler (2007).
CHAPTER 2
GARDENS
The rst three chapters of this book survey and cultivate the ground for
my historiographical engagement with the baroque, Venice, the selected
theatre practices unfolding in and around the Veneto during the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, and the philosophical praxes abounding
there. I call this ground baroque pastoral. Neither xed in place nor
outtted to a single form of logic or rationality, this ground acts as the
foundation for numerous literary and theatrical works circulating through
the Veneto at that time. While investigations of baroque art and pastoral
theatre and poetry rarely cross paths, I suspect this missed encounter may
have more to do with accepted academic disciplinary boundaries than
anything else. In this chapter, artfully forgetting those boundaries, I
stage a meeting between the baroque and the pastoral in order to forward
the claim that baroque thinking and the artifacts and spaces produced by
that thinking resonate profoundly with the pastoralia surrounding and
supporting them.
Gardens express the resonance between baroque and pastoral, and both
their form and content can help to uncover the genius loci of the ground
on which this books study stands. Of the two strata (baroque and pas-
toral), the baroque has received more attention in writings on and think-
ing about gardens. Writing of the seventeenth-century German Jesuit
Athanasius Kircher, Peter Davidson states that gardens, along with the
library and the palace, existed as one of the crucial sites of the elite
Lelio Guidiccioni (132). With little effort, one can picture Guidiccioni
writing his poetry from the safe space of Scipiones sumptuous gardens,
renowned for their design and allegorical content. Gardens, such as those
at Villa Mondragone and their poetic-literary counterparts, provided a way
for individuals to bring the chaotic and frightening natural world under
human control and to gain access to the divine messages that many
believed God had written into the landscapes of the world (Cassen,
Rural Space). In this respect, the garden was a crucial pastoral site, a
merger of the sacred, the divine, the rural, and the urban. Early
Humanist writers such as Petrarch (13041374) and Boccaccio (1313
1375) relied on these pastoral spaces, at once sacred and profane, as scenic
backgrounds that could enhance the primary actions of their stories
characters. Renaissance writers such as Pietro Bembo (14701547) and
Torquato Tasso (15441595) drew heavily from their literary style and
also from their visions of the pastoral.
Mindful of these specic historic conditions and transformations, I
use the term baroque pastoral to connote rstly a meeting place of
imagination and natural environment, arranged and undertaken for the
purpose of perfecting ones material and spiritual existence; and, sec-
ondly, a particular labor of distilling the core of natures beauty while
simultaneously attempting to discard natures outer, chaotic exterior.
From here, the chapter observes the baroque pastoral in action through
what I call (paraphrasing Michael Marder) garden thinking. This think-
ing takes place in two physical environments: the garden of Valsanzibio
in the Euganei Hills of Padua and the Sacred Wood of Bomarzo outside
of Rome. After that, I follow the transplantation of garden thinking
into literature and theatre by analyzing two archetypal works of pastor-
alia: Francesco Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (c.1499) and
Torquato Tassos LAminta (c.1580). These transplants illustrate a
tension between art and nature, a tension that, I argue, gives form to
many baroque expressions. More specically, I am interested in the
attempts through garden art and its dramatic-literary offshoots to dis-
cipline natures chaotic fecundity, an effort that requires a type of
artistic excess. Indeed, disciplined excess underpins much of the baro-
que explorations in this book, but in a double sense. On the one hand,
the discipline of art tames the excesses of nature (both Earths nature
and human nature); on the other hand, the taming takes the form of
wild, exuberant, and lofty expressions that seem to defy the concept of
discipline altogether.
24 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
GARDEN THINKING
Before delving into the materiality of specic gardens in this chapter, and
before tarrying with Ruzzante and the Jesuits in Chapters 3 and 4, I want
to introduce the garden as an epistemic epicenter around which a spatial
dialectic assembles itself. In this sense, dialectic names the non-identity
of opposite entities (that is, the extent to which two opposite forces,
essences, materials, or concepts fuse disjunctively by merit of their precise
differences from one another) as well as the art of inventing or arranging
understandings of truth. Regarding the fusion of opposites, Enzo Cocco
offers the following example: In order to explore the form of the garden,
it is necessary to undertake a double journey (inside and outside) and to
examine the dialectic tension developing at its boundaries. The ideal
conguration of the enclosure must take into account what is contrary
to it (53). Not only do the meanings of gardens bloom through the labor
of dialectical thinking; the garden also exists as dialectical space, as
thought-made-spatial, insofar as its entire existence hinges on the differ-
entiation and epistemic exclusivity between inside and outside, between
the manicured landscape within the wall, hedge, or fence and the natural,
unkempt terrain beyond. On some level, conscious or otherwise, dialectic
garden space requests that its inhabitants contemplate not only how the
exterior terrain conditions the possibility of the garden but also the extent
to which the groomed, allegorical, constructed interior of the garden
conditions nature itself. The relation between inside and outside, between
nature and art in gardens, led Jacopo Bonfadio (in 1541) and later
Bartolomeo Taegio (in 1559) to develop the term third nature to
describe the event in which nature becomes the creator of art and shares
the essence of art. Together they produce something that is neither one
nor the other, and is created equally by each (Lazzaro 9).
Regarding the art of invention and arrangement embedded in dialect
garden thinking and garden space, I turn to Marta Spranzi whose research
reveals how, coeval and coincident with the explosion of baroque garden
creations (including the 1545 establishment of the rst botanical garden
by decree of the Venetian government), Italian philosophers (such as
Rudolph Agricola, Agostino Nifo, and Carlo Sigonio) turned to what
she calls the art of dialectic (Spranzi 2). For Spranzi, the term dialectic
evolves directly from Aristotles Topoi and refers both to nding and
ordering arguments in order to prove a given statement and (in a stronger
sense) to nding out the truth itself (9). This brief quotation contains
GARDEN THINKING 25
terms brimming with meaning. Finding out the truth, for example,
hints at the unclosed form of the dialectic. Though dialecticians seek to
persuade others of truths in which they themselves fervently believe, the
way to truth always shifts and turns, thus requiring artists of the dialectic
to destabilize their thoughts and reestablish them through careful con-
sideration of the matters at hand, to search and re-search for truth.
Likewise, the phrase ordering arguments requires close attention. To
argue, one must rst assemble the materials of the argument. I think of
this assembly as a type of gardening. With great care, the artist cultivates
ideas from seed, arranges them in rows so that neighboring ideas can
inform one another, and eventually presents the assortment of individual
ideas as a whole. As Davidson mentioned, Jesuits like Kircher and Hawkins
thought in a similar way. From Aristotles Topoi (a place where different
items can be arranged in an order that will aid in their subsequent recol-
lection [Spranzi 30]) to gardeners topiary (ornamental gardening) the
art of dialectic entails a keen sense of arrangement and a willingness to
perpetually re-arrange ones thoughts.
To access the baroque pastoral and engage in the dialectical art of
garden thinking, one must escape, or at least try to escape, the seductive
abstraction of metaphor and, instead, dive into the materiality of the
encounter with the gardens springing up in and around Venice during
the fteenth and sixteenth centuries. A garden may refer to something
else (something sexual, for example, as with Ruzzante) but it never
merely stands in for this other entity, relationship, or concept. Rather,
from the fertile tilth of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century garden
springs an understanding of the world as a whole and as a non-abstract
location in which we live. Michael Marder stresses this notion in the
section of The Philosophers Plant devoted to Leibnizs famous descrip-
tion (now synonymous with baroque thinking) of the interfolded archi-
tecture of the world: every bit of matter [contains] a garden full of
plants or a pond full of sh (Monadology, Proposition 65). As Marder
writes, Every portion of matter is, in accordance with this image, a
garden within a garden within a gardenand so on to innity (120).
If we believe Marders compelling version of events, then Leibnizs
concepts (as well as Aristotles fascination with wheat, Augustines
appraisal of pears, and Avicennas consideration of celery) do not live in
a world of vague abstraction but emerge from the roots, fruits, owers,
plants, and pests of gardens. More than that, they emerge from and
remain tethered to this ground. To overlook the ground and the tether
26 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
their material wealth. Below them, peasants, the base of aristocratic wealth,
sit near the bottom and console themselves in their plight with a barrel of
wine. Visitors to the garden could situate themselves within this hierarchy
and then follow the Path of Salvation through the gardens artistic offerings
and arrive at the Villa of Cardinal Barbarigo himself, which, ensconced
within the elaborate allegorical fabric superimposed on the gardens exterior
appearance, presented the pinnacle of humankinds achievement. Inscribed
on the steps stretching out before the villa, one could read the nal lines of a
sonnet (author unknown) declaring that, having escaped the Hell of Venice
located a few miles east, here in the garden one has found Paradise: Ivi
lInferno e qui il Paradiso.
Of the many features within this garden, two environments in particular
showcase the baroque pastoral at work. The rst is Il Labirinto di Bossi
Secolari (The Labyrinth of the Sacred Wood) erected with the help of
6,000 buxus sempervirens plants. Neither a clear example of the unicursal
or multicursal labyrinth, this feature leads individuals to a central tower
from which he or she (though, at the time, more frequently the former)
can spy the one true path that leads away from confusion into the light and
towards the truth of Revelation. As Angela Ndalianis explains, [T]he
multicursal (or multidirectional) model suggests a series of choices
between paths. Unlike the unicursal model, it does not consist of a single
prolonged path [ . . . ]. Rather than the paths guiding wanderers to the
labyrinths center or exit, in the multicursal labyrinth, the wanderer must
make choices when confronted with multiple possibilities (8283).
Though Valsanzibios labyrinth leads to a central tower, its multiple
entry-points present visitors with a challenge. Choose the wrong path
and you will either end at one of six dead ends, each one a manifestation
of a deadly sin (greed, lust or lewdness, avarice, sloth or indolence, anger,
envy), or else you will end up looping around the perimeter of the
labyrinth indenitely and fall prey to the 7th and most insidious capital
sins, the haughtiness or arrogance [sic] (Ardemani). Only the most
virtuous will reach the tower in the center, survey the remainder of the
True path, and then proceed to the Hermits Grotto to meditate on what
you have just achieved and discovered in the mazes saunter (Ardemani).
The second baroque pastoral garden environment presents the juxtaposi-
tion of immanence and transcendence, thereby offering an opportunity for
individuals to acknowledge the faults of the esh and the promises of the
spiritual life. The frailties and nitude of the body appear in the form of
LIsola dei Conigli (Rabbits Island). In the center of this island, spectators
BOMARZO: FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE 29
rest their eyes upon a birdcage containing doves: the spirit, trapped by the
body, remains sutured to the earth. Surrounding the birdcage, a miniature
glen unfurls atop a rabbit warren populated by those most effective procrea-
tors: without a rational soul to see beyond the desires of the esh, the mind
will only concern itself with the bodys immediate needs. As if viewing this
scene from its nearby vantage point, the Statua del Tempo (Statue of Time)
looks over the rabbits while also yielding to garden visitors a glimpse of
Cronos stopped momentarily on his journey through time and space. With a
dodecahedron weighing on his shoulders (12 sides, one for each month; a
symbol of times heft) the god of Time may soon y off and beckon the spirit
of the garden visitor to follow. Unburdened by the body, the human spirit
can then transcend the physical limits of space and time.
Both of these environments articulate the garden thinking of the baroque
pastoral. As complex parts that express the totality of an ever-more-complex
whole, they call to mind not only the discourse of Henry Hawkins but also
the gardens within gardens invoked by Leibniz as they simultaneously work
upon the imaginations of visitors to Valsanzibio in an effort to raise the
intellect and spirit to a loftier position. At the same time, these thought-
provoking qualities of the environments allegorical supertext emerge from
earthen materials. Boxwood shrubs, marble, stone, grass, mud, iron, water,
and rabbits: these materials, which will surely reappear in front of the eyes of
the gardens visitors as they return to Venice through the Venetian country-
side, remind all that divine inspiration unfolds from an attention to the here
and now. Material and allegory are not separate from one another. Bound by
some powerful afnity realized through the architects art, these two ele-
ments fuse together into a third nature. More specically, this third nature
relies upon both the topological arrangement of elements within the garden
and the interior/exterior relation that distinguishes the there of the country-
side from the here of the gardenIvi lInferno e qui il Paradiso.
Simultaneously a play between opposing forces (inside/outside) and a
material argument arranged through the garden elements, Valsanzibio
expresses dialectical garden thinking at work in the Veneto of the seven-
teenth century.
In the sacred wood, nature is unavoidable. The rock used to create the
sculpture never hides within the form of the sculpture itself; it is as if the
artists hired to undertake the carvings (probably Giacomo Barozzi da
Vignola and Francesco Moschino [Sheeler 26]) decided to feature the
natural materials instead of their craftsmanship. And yet, nowhere does
Nature, understood as a divine creation, announce itself. The inscription
invites (almost taunts) visitors to interpret the hermetic wisdom of the
parks arrangement and materials, and by doing this it foregrounds the
intellect of Vicino Orsini. Likewise, it compels the intellect to distinguish
between trickery and art. If, in Valsanzibio, Art entails a human action ever
subservient to the works of God, in Bomarzo it does much more. If the
garden exists as a trick, then its success will be to lure the interpreter into a
meaningless quest for knowledge, hinting at something like a sardonic
nihilism behind the statuarys scary faces. If it exists as artistic expression
that constitutes a mode of thinking, however, then art becomes a provo-
cateur. The gardens art persists in time and overwrites the bucolic setting
of the garden in order to rene the self-knowledge of the individual and
lead visitors, by extension, to a more fullling life. Baroque pastoral, and
its manifestation through garden thinking, makes room for both inter-
pretations: the hierarchical Nature/Art relationship of Berninis imagina-
tion and the assertive and mischievous intellectuality of Vicinos lifelong
labor. As ground to multiple and at times antagonistic meanings, the
baroque pastoral presides beneath a play of forces both seen and unseen,
intelligible and mysterious. Garden thinking foregrounds this play of
FROM PASTORAL GARDENS TO PASTORAL LITERATURE 33
forces and reminds us in the present to attend to its material reality while
simultaneously mapping its historically specic allegorical overtones.
force eld, which in turn spatializes the work, gives it gravity, and opens it
up for critical scrutiny.
Before examining these texts in some detail, I want to offer a brief
overview of the pastoral literary genre. Charles Fantazzi locates the begin-
ning of the pastoral literary lineage in Virgils creation of Arcadia in his
Eclogues, c.41 BCE (81). William D. Paden discusses how this Virgilian
form morphed into the medieval poetic genre known as the pastourelle.
Regardless of its taxonomic particularities (whether classical, augmented,
objective, rustic, or pastoureau) the pastourelle rehearses an encounter
between a young man and a female (most often a shepherdess) during
which the male attempts, with various degrees of success, to seduce the
woman. The French pastourelle ourished during the thirteenth century.
In the fourteenth and fteenth centuries the French term pastourelle
often became synonymous with Modem English pastoral, and was
applied to diverse compositions (Paden xi).
On the Italian peninsula, Matteo Maria Boiardos Amorum libri tres
(Boiardo c.14341494; Three Books on Love, 14721476) carried
on the pastoral tradition, as did the works of Pietro Jacopo De Jennaro
(c.14361509) and Leon Battista Alberti (14041472). Of the Italian
Renaissance scholars, poets, and artists who mined the archive for
traces of the classical tradition, Jacopo Sannazaro (14581530) per-
haps best exemplied Virgils tradition with LArcadia (originally pub-
lished c.1504), the very work that prompted Sansovino to think of
Vicino Orsinis sacro bosco. Following Sannazaro, Pietro Bembo
attempted to purify the form by grafting Sannazaros themes and
scenarios together with the fourteenth-century Tuscan language of
the great poet Petrarch.
Against this puried strain, the Congrega dei Rozzi (Sienas foremost
cultural institution) created the theatrical and dramatic-literary genre that
has become known as the grotesque pastoral in which the usual crowd
of shepherds and nymphs appear but the philosophical ideals of love and
friendship collapse under the weight of material needs (Boillet). In the
Veneto, as in Florence, where the grotesque pastoral passed through and
garnered reasonable attention, il genere, grazie alla forte inuenza della
cultura cortigiana quattrocentesca [ . . . ] si assimila con relativa delt al
classicismo umanistico e conserva deboli tracce folkloriche solo in esempi
dialettali e periferici (86, the genre [of the pastoral . . . ], thanks to
the strong inuence of fteenth-century court culture [ . . . ] assimilates
with relative delity to the Humanistic classicism and retains faint folkloric
COLONNA: PASTORAL IN EXCESS 35
traces only in the dialects and peripheral elements). Of the many kinds of
pastoral literature, the cleaner version (both in terms of linguistic purity
and moral content) of the pastoral rings in our ears today; that is, when
one hears the term pastoral, it is to the puried strain exemplied by
Bembo, Sannazaro, and, as we will see, Tasso, that the term most com-
monly refers.
The date of the books creation and the identity of the true author have not
been easy to determine. While the books imprint reads, Most accurately
done at Venice, in the month of December, 1499, at the house of Aldus
Manutius, the date of May 1, 1467 appears at the end of the story. Godwin
and others insist that parts of the book referencing historical events could not
have been created prior to 1489, thereby hinting at the books gradual
evolution from incipient idea to nal form (xiii). Who actually wrote it?
Some say Alberti, others say Lorenzo di Medici, and an acrostic poem
formed by the rst letter of each chapter (POLIAM FRATER
FRANCISCVS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT) suggests Francesco Colonna
(xiv). The existence of two different Francesco Colonnas (one a priest of the
Dominican order, the other a member of the noble Colonna family) makes
matters more confusing, though scholarly consensus bestows the former
with the honor of writing this wild, overgrown book.
A patchwork of Latin, Greek, faux Egyptian hieroglyphs, Italian, and
Italian-Latin hybrid languages, Colonnas story makes numerous references
to classical texts, draws its momentum from endlessly circuitous sentences,
and contains diagrams of the dreamscapes visited by the young Poliphilo.
Leonardo Crassos dedication to the Duke of Urbino, contained in
Godwins 1999 English translation, offers the Duke a taste of what will
36 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
unfold in the books many pages: he who approaches it with less learning
should not despair. It is the case here that although these things are difcult
by their nature, they are expounded with a certain grace, like a garden sown
with every kind of ower (2). An excerpt, in which the narrator describes
the ctional land of Cytherea, one of the storys settings, offers a glimpse of
this pastoral garden:
It was so benign and pleasing to the senses, so delectable and beautiful with
unusual ornamental trees, that the eye had never seen anything so excellent
and voluptuous. The most eloquent tongue would feel guilty of poverty and
parsimony in describing it: any comparison with things already seen would
be false and inappropriate, for it surpassed imagination. This heavenly and
delicious place, all planted and decorated, combined a vegetable-garden, a
herbarium, a fertile orchard, a convenient plantation, a pleasant arboretum
and a delightful shrubbery. There was no place for mountains or deserts; all
unevenness had been eliminated, so that it was plane and level up to the
circular steps of the wonderful theatre [ . . . ]. It was a garden yielding
incomparable pleasure, extremely fertile, decked with owers, free from
obstacles and traps, and ornamented with playing fountains and cool rivu-
lets. (292)
By this point in the story, the paradisiacal island begins to resemble the
island of Venice. Matteo and Virgilio Vercelloni see this resemblance as
more than a coincidence since only one year after the publication of
Colonnas work (if the date on the imprint bears scrutiny) Jacopo de
Barbari published his birds-eye view of Venice. This map was the culmi-
nation of more than three years of detailed surveys of every part of the city.
In the foreground of this huge print we see the island of Giudecca with its
wonderful gardens: they closely resemble the ones shown in the woodcuts
in Francesco Colonnas book, thus conrming that its illustrations were
inspired by reality (Vercelloni 4243). In addition to this similarity, the
central location of the theatre in Cytherea calls to mind the Piazza San
Marco at the heart of Venice, which too opened out onto the Basin of St
Mark like a natural amphitheatre and even housed lavish performances
from civic parades and religious festivals to, as I discuss in Chapter 4,
public executions.
At the center of the theatre (yes, another center), Poliphilo, with the
help of Cupid and the nymph Synesia, begins a ritual that would lead to
sexual intercourse with his beloved, were it not for the destruction of
paradise that occurs. Nevertheless, the abundance of detail burns the
imagined scene of sexual activity into the readers mind. Citing a huge,
immensely voluptuous, recumbent female gure reclining on a ledge half-
way up the slope of the garden at Bomarzo, Sheeler suggests that Vicino
certainly had the same scene burned into his mind. The raised pose of her
upper body and languorous tilt of her head, writes Sheeler, indicate that
she [the female of the statue] is not dead but sleeping, in the manner of
many a stone nymph in many a classical or Renaissance garden. [ . . . ] In
Colonnas Hypnerotomachia there is a woodcut of a sleeping nymph in a
roughly similar pose to the one at Bomarzo (Sheeler 60). Colonnas epic
clearly took from many sources and inspired just as many.
I am not moving through Colonnas story with any specic aim.
Rather, I am wandering through it as one might wander through
Vicinos garden. Ultimately, the linearity of the story seems less important
than the worlds within worlds that open up through Colonnas ornate and
excessive descriptions. Likewise, I do not mention the ummoxing facti-
city of the works author and creation date for the reason of empirical
diligence. Whoever created it, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili exists. It exists as
a literary environment that guides the reader deeper and deeper into a
labyrinthine world, one from which it becomes quite difcult to extricate
oneself. In this way, and in the other ways cited by Vercelloni, Sheeler, and
38 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
students with the keys to interpreting all that they would nd when
roaming their interior landscapes. Citing Le peinture spirituelle (1611)
by Louis Richeme S.J., for example, Davidson observes that, nothing,
no single object observed in the garden, is allowed to pass without being at
once supplied with a spiritual reading, an interpretation concerned with
the virtuosity and mercy of the Creator as well as with the perceptions and
spiritual growth of the observer (Davidson 91). For poets, this encour-
agement to unleash the powers of imagination, while also always ensuring
that those powers align with the will of the Creator and not some inner
evil, may have provoked anxiety. At least, such anxiety seems to have
plagued Tasso, who battled with melancholy and madness his entire life.
Writing from the hospital of SantAnna where he was conned because of
madness, Tasso afrmed that:
Human beings are easily led astray, for Ci, che soggetto a passione,
corruttibile [that which is subject to the passions is corruptible . . . ]. God
realizes that, in humans, he must battle the appetito del senso [sense
appetite] and so he assigns a guide to the volont [will] and to be fair,
another to guide the parte sensuale [sensual part]. (cit Cozzarelli 174
175)
For Tasso, the poet had to listen to these guides and fulll his role as the
grand articer, the profane counterpart to the Great Articer of heavens
and earth. Julia Cozzarelli explains this further when she observes, Poetry
harnesses and guides the ight of the imagination, and saves us from the
dangers of an unbridled fantasy that transgresses all boundaries. Tassos
extensive writings on the rules of poetry, and their underlying sense of
divine inspiration now seen as laborious human ingenuity, illustrate his
effort to control the uncontrollable (181). Between the time he left
Naples (and his Jesuit teachers) and his connement in SantAnna, Tasso
studied law and philosophy at the Univerist di Padua where he encoun-
tered the work of Plato and the famous Platonic interpreters of the day. As
such, Tassos Jesuit-inspired theology melded with Neo-Platonic under-
standings of the souls immortality, Marsillio Ficinos work on artistic
ingegno (genius, intellect) and furore (passion), and Aristotelian poetics
to create a polyvalent personal belief system. Ultimately, For Tasso, the
key to the escape from the labyrinth of the self lies in the creations of the
imagination, in the form of a work of art. Poetic creation connects the
40 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
poet to God (180), and it was this connection that brought him much
fame.
Of his many works, LAminta demonstrates Tassos most mature
poetry and demonstrates the artists ability to discipline his poetic art.
Specically, Tasso charts a path through the fraught relationship between
love and reason, much as il Percorso di Salvicazione guides the visitor to
Valsanzibio through the microcosmic labyrinth of lifes journey. I do not
wish to tout Tassos poetic mastery of love and reason or valorize
LAminta as a hallmark of literature; instead, I wish to follow the path
through the dramatic-literary garden prepared by Tasso so as to illustrate
the loftiness of the pastoral genre and mastery of pastoral allegory that
Ruzzante would critique and so vociferously ght against. Before arriving
at Ruzzantes theatrical critique, however, it seems appropriate to tarry
with this masterwork of the genre and map out its terrain.
The Venetian bookseller Aldo Manuzio published Tassos play some
time around 1581, though the famous Compagnia dei Gelosi may have
performed the play as early as 1573 (Tasso). Through its familiar pastoral
storyline of a humans quest for a nymphs love, LAminta weaves
together an instructive allegory about the extents to which one must go
in order to discipline the passions of love. Briey, the story unfolds as
follows. Aminta, a shepherd, loves Silvia, a nymph. The recognizable
pastoral characters and plot build around these two gures. Seemingly
more in love with her own beauty than with Aminta, or indeed anybody
else, Silvia rebukes Aminta at every turn. Such unrequited passion leads to
a plan for Aminta to spy on Silvia as she bathes, with the added advice from
his faithful companion Tirsi that, if the nymph does not oblige Amintas
desires, the young shepherd should take her by force. The shepherds
moral sensibility prevails and he commits no such act, but this does not
save Silvia, who has a run-in with a satyr for whom lust trumps moral
virtue. Expecting to see a bathing nymph at Dianas spring, Aminta
instead nds Silvia naked, bound to a tree by her own hair, about to be
raped by the Satyr. Overcoming his usual timidity, Aminta charges the
Satyr and, with the help of Tirsi, chases him off. But the event has
frightened and embarrassed Silvia who, once free, chastises her savior
and ees into the forest.
Without Silvia, Aminta sees his life as worthless. Tasso ratchets up this
despair by prolonging Amintas misery and crafting a near-death encoun-
ter between the nymph and a wild wolf. Aminta, believing Silvia to have
succumbed to the wolves, asks for her veil with which he plans to hang
TASSO: PASTORAL DISCIPLINE 41
himself. Nerina, Silvias friend, does not honor Amintas request, so,
instead, the protagonist throws himself off a high cliff. Dafne, another of
Silvias friends, carries word of this tragic event to Silvia who, it turns out,
had narrowly escaped the wolves and ed into the forest to nd sanctuary.
Dafnes report of Amintas suicide disturbs Silvias peace in the forest and
instigates a remarkable occurrence. The proud and misguided Silvia, never
before capable of feeling love for another, begins to cry. She reads her own
tears as pity but the other characters read them as love awakening in her
heart. Silvia eventually realizes this to be true and, now convinced that she
does love Aminta with all her heart, decides to kill herself as a gesture of
solidarity. The awakening of love only becomes possible once Silvia reg-
isters that Amintas death stemmed from his devout love for her.
This momentum turns back on itself when, against all odds, Aminta is
found alive. A thicket made from tufts of plants and thorns broke his fall as
he plummeted to earth. In a true leap of faith, Aminta had thrown himself
resolutely into deaths arms, but, by taking this last step, found inside
deaths embrace the love he had long been searching for. It is through this
enactment of death that Silvia awakens to her love for Aminta, that Aminta
and Silvia come together, and that Aminta, the personication of the play
as a whole, nds true love. All the loose ends come together in this
unifying leap off the precipice.
Tasso manages to master loves excesses in LAminta by subordinating
them to the philosophical guidelines of self-knowledge and sacrice. This
interpretation runs counter to the more conventional readings of
LAminta, but analysis and attention to Tassos use of allegory bear it
out. The typical reading of the story nds a pair of champions in Charles
Jernigan and Irene Marchegiani Jones: The story is not about them
[Silvia and Aminta]; it is about love, the transforming power of love
[ . . . ] In a world where ambivalence reigns, where nothing is xed, and
mutability is the rule, love offers us an anchor (xxv). I argue, however,
that the play is not about love per se, nor does it champion mutability.
Rather, the play showcases a poets ability to master the forces of love and
nature through his art, to freeze the mutability of nature much like the
sculptors froze Time into a statue within the garden of Valsanzibio. Since
love, in the pastoral worldview, exists as something like the underside of
nature, a force at once commensurate with, equal to, and yet distinct from
nature, the poets art intervenes where human ignorance has attempted to
block out love and thus works as a corrective on behalf of the natural
world. At the same time, Tassos pastoral poetry recognizes a devious
42 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
Through these words, Tasso makes Dafne summon Tirsi (Tassos poetic
surrogate) to serve as a reminder of the architectonic order of the pastoral
universe. In this world, love infects its prey like an organic toxin, a kind of
psilocybin that gives way to wide-eyed wandering through the woods. In
front of wide-eyes, madness and mystical insight comingle. Tirsi wrote of
his visions upon the trees themselves, thus fusing the natural and artistic
worlds, organic matter and linguistic artice. Indeed, early on in the play,
Tassos rhetoric fuses with nature and his own poetic verse grows within
the very bers of the forest. As the trees grow, so do the words. Nature and
Poetic Art intertwine with one another. Tirsis message convinces Dafne
that love, once infused within ones soul, allows no escape. Dafne sees
such a state of affairs in Amintas eyes when he gazes at Silvia, and she even
believes she sees something similar in Silvia, despite the latters attempts to
hide her feelings. Silvia, however, does not give in to either Dafnes
persuasion or Tirsis insights at this point, and instead persists in her
shunning of Aminta the shepherd.
In addition to the references to his own poetic work, Tasso inserts other
allegorical stitches into the fabric of his play intended to help his reader/
spectator interpret the relationship between love and nature so as to
discipline his/her feelings of passion. Earlier in the same scene, Dafne
says to Silvia, And dont/you see how all the earth/is now infused with
love? (19 1.1.133). Dafne offers this comment to Silvia in order to help
her realize that by shunning love she shuns nature, too, and that, in turn,
Silvia irts with becoming unnatural. In such an environment, the poets
argument, wrought through the plays poetic form as well as its action,
amounts to a godlike power of correction, a steel rod that will straighten
the unnatural curvature of Silvias soul. Tasso will gure out a way to
straighten Silvia and bring her back in accord with the world around her.
An absurd dimension of love reveals itself here since Silvia, as a nymph of
the forest, is nature. For her to deny love she would have to deny herself.
Her name, for example, bears the stamp of the wild world: Silva, via selva,
wild, and/or Silvus, wood. All characters in the forest bare a striking
resemblance to their surroundings, as though they, like plants, sprouted
from the soil. Bees even mistake faces for owers, fooled by the similitude
perhaps (37, 1.2.111). With great skill, Tasso creates a poetic universe
44 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
that contains in its very literary fabric hints with which his readers can
unlock the secrets of love and the natural world beyond the connes of the
page and the theatre in which the play unfolds.1 To do so, one need only
follow the path laid out by the poet. Following Tassos path ostensibly
leads to the Good Life.
I say one need follow Tassos path because dangers lurk in the
shadows of the pastoral world. Love may correct the unnatural curvatures
of the soul, but it also has the power to distort and corrupt the self. In the
world of the play, Silvia may not, as nature, be able to escape from nature,
but she can fall prey to the seductive aberration of loves powers and come
to know herself wrongly, to live a life of ignorance. The evils of self-love
and narcissism act as the antithesis to the liberating power of love within
Tassos allegorical framework. Tasso dedicates the majority of the play to
showing how Silvia had succumbed to that trap. Dafne identies Silvias
dilemma rst: I understand your bashful girlishness:/what you are, so
was I; like you I led my careless life (13 1.1.4750). Unfamiliar with the
care of the self (the Platonic/Socratic epimileia heautou that accompanies
the more familiar gnothi seauton [know thyself]) Silvia became careless and
began to esteem the less important experiences of life, such as hunting
and, more notably, preserving her chastity out of allegiance to the goddess
Diana. Next, in terms of affection for others, Silvia admits openly that she
only cared for Aminta when his aims in life merged with her own: I hate
his love/who hates my chastity, and I loved him/when he desired the
things that I desired (19 1.1.110111). From this youthful petulance,
Silvia ages into a vainglorious nymph who prefers her own appearance to
any human form. Later, In Act II, Scene Two, Dafne tells Tirsi about her
suspicions that Silvia indeed knows infatuation but only insofar as she loves
herself:
appears to the members of the upper classes such as those at the dEste court
where LAminta debuted as a poetic gem given form by nature itself appears
to Ruzzante as a kitschy substitute for nature that has the power to obscure
the earths bounty in the same breath as it offers it praise. Indeed, anticipat-
ing Ruzzantes response, I stress that whereas the baroque glimpsed in
Leibnizs connection to the gardens of Herrenhausen showed thought
that emerged from and remained tethered to the dirt, the baroque of
Tasso and Colonna oated up higher off the ground, as it were, and
threatened to lose touch with the terrestrial world altogether. This, at
least, is a claim reasonably argued by the classes of people whose daily lives
were governed by both the caprice of nature and the desires of government
ofcials.
Together, the ludic dialectical relationships motivating the materials col-
lected in this chapter animate the innite work in process of the baroque
pastoral. The nal lesson from the material gathered here leads from this
more familiar dimension of the dialectics collision of opposites to the less
familiar work of arrangement foregrounded in Spranzis The Art of Dialectic.
For the baroque pastoral unfolds through expressions of serial thought and as
such culminates not in closed, nished, or fully autonomous artifacts unteth-
ered to the world from which they sprang but, rather, in open-ended poetical
meaning that requires aesthetic critique to unpack. Such a critique must train
itself on the arrangement of citations and the path offered through the works
terrain by the form of the work itself. This path belies a concerted pedago-
gical, and as I demonstrate in the case of the Jesuits a psychagogical, effort to
hew a specic life performance from the reader and/or spectator who walks
it. To uncover the path and the pedagogical or psychagogical effort under-
girding it, I deploy the techniques of garden and spatial thinking that the
gardens and literary works in this chapter have revealed.
NOTES
1. According to Jernigan and Jones, the theatre in which the play rst took
place was likely an outdoor one: Most modern critics feel that Aminta was
written in Spring 1573 and rst performed on July 31 by the Gelosi
company on the island of Belvedere del Po, near Ferrara; the dEste summer
palace was situated there (Tasso xvii).
2. Ndalianiss reference is to Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna
Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 1993.
CHAPTER 3
patron Alvise Cornaro surely stain the manuscript of Pastoral that lives in
the Venetian Marciana library today (Rhodes 1). Likewise, despite the
assiduous efforts of Ruzzante scholars, from Ludovico Zorzi and Emilio
Lovarini to Nancy Derso and Linda L. Carroll, the glue binding
Ruzzantes many jokes to the specic social events of his time has by
now rubbed off, leaving an unbound compilation of humorous signiers
without decisive antecedents. Add to this mixture of riddling circum-
stances the particularities of the Paduan dialect and the effort of distin-
guishing signal from noise in the comedic language of Beolcos rst play
becomes all the more difcult. The entrance into Pastoral, then, resembles
the entrance into a ruin of a multicursal labyrinth where the center to
which the paths lead may no longer exist and the paths themselves may
abruptly stop or simply trail off. Like Poliphilus in Colonnas magnum
opus, we can expect a convoluted journey through a terrain that rolls back
on itself even as it stretches out in front of us.
The most well-tended path into Pastoral leads through and displays
what I call Beolcos creative genealogy. His acting troupe, most often
composed of ve men and two women, all amateurs, frequently appeared
at festivities for important Venetian patricians (Radcliff-Umstead 35, 38).
The collective nature of Beolcos theatrical offerings suggests that he
relied upon and seems to have enjoyed creating his work with others. As
an individual gure, though, the particular character of Ruzzante created
by Beolco belongs to a lineage dating back at least to the thirteenth
century and the gure of Matazone da Caligano, who stands in as the
creator of the genre known as satira del villano. Nicolino Applausos
research on Matazone (literally, the motley fool) reveals the lofty (or
lowly, depending on ones perspective) origin of villano characters:
Matazones comedic country yokel and all who followed descend from
the fart of a donkey (Applauso 607608). As Charles E. Fantazzi and
others have discovered, Ruzzante acknowledges his atulent ancestors in
plays such as the Anconitana where he says that his name derived from
ruzzare, a word that means to romp around and alludes somewhat
ambiguously to the sexual relations between peasants and their animals
(Fantazzi 83). The word villano itself does not connote a villain; rather,
it names the base, uneducated, and rude (rozzo) behavior grafted onto
farmers and other rural folk by poets and playwrights of the medieval era.
Thus, apparently aware of the image into which he stepped, Beolco
created Ruzzante, a loud, troublesome peasant unburdened by the stigma
of bestiality, to take up and challenge stereotypes of the satira del villano
54 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
that Matazone had created. Beolco, as Ruzzante, took the stage for the
rst time in Pastoral.
the existing norms of that same pastoral tradition and the social commen-
tary arrived at via those deviations; and (3) the texts complex imbrication
of multiple strata of daily life, from the quarrel between speakers of various
dialects vying for dominance in the Veneto to the roles both the upper and
lower classes had to inhabit at this crucial turning point in Venetian history
(Boillet; Carroll Angelo Beolco).
By 1521, the elite of Venice had only recently started to adapt to the
1516 Treaty of Noyon that resulted from the crushing defeat dealt to the
Republic by the League of Cambrai. After a back-and-forth battle with the
League and the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, Venice had succeeded
in re-claiming Padua, but, nonetheless, had to look ahead to a future that
would require a different political and economic strategy than the one that
had secured the small island mastery of the spice routes into Europe.
Beolcos pro-Padua rhetoric, perhaps because of this geopolitical instabil-
ity, enjoyed great success on the mainland Veneto territory, while his
raunchiness also slipped by the censors in Venice proper, at least in the
early part of his career (Carroll 7). At the same time as this political
recalibration, the Veneto continued slogging through an equally impor-
tant cultural war fought beneath the banner of the questione della lingua.
What language best conveyed the brilliance of Italian literary artistry? Each
powerhouse had its spokesperson: Machiavelli voted for the Tuscan of
Florence; Baldesar Castiglione advocated for a composite dialect that
represented the contemporary intermixing of cosmopolitan urban centers
such as Venice; and Pietro Bembo urged a return to the language of
Petrarch and Boccaccio (Radcliff-Umstead 41). The linguistic form and
topical content of Pastoral bears traces of both the post-Cambrai Venetian
political identity and the linguistic feud of Renaissance Italy.
The Company of the Immortals, one of the numerous so-called
Stocking Troupes (Compagnie della Calza) that preceded the commedia
dellarte organizations, sponsored the Pastoral, and Alvise Cornaro likely
housed the performance inside his palazzo. (Cornaros outdoor loggia on
which Ruzzante would later appear would not come into existence until
1524.) The play presents the young Ruzzante as an Arcadian, which
Fantazzi helpfully distinguishes from Ruzzante the Utopian. The
Arcadian, at least, does not pretend that he can make his world happen
for others. His is a personal, narcissistic dream, an escape from the harsh
realities of civilized life. The Utopian, on the other hand, especially in his
modern guise, would force his schemes upon nature and man, and involve
everyone in his new ordering of the world (81). This setting in Arcadia,
56 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
moreover, exists in at least two places at once. The setting unfolds within
the world of the play, but it also exists as the backdrop of the audiences
world; that is, the Pastoral depicts and coincides with an encounter
between pastoral wilderness, an urban university campus, and rural farm-
scapes. Beolcos rst play shares a common trait with the rest of his works;
namely, it takes place in multiple settings all at once by merit of the
playwrights ability to suture theatrical reality to the world offstage, the
world into which both performers and audience would have to return
when the show was over. The term world functions here in much the
same way as it does in the work of Alain Badiou, where it denotes a
situation of being and a logic of being there (cit. Shaw 618). The
Padua inhabited by the audience of Pastoral has little in common with the
Padua glimpsed poetically through the setting of Pastoral. Whereas the
students inhabiting the former experience Padua through the situation of
the university, with its semi-autonomy as a home to secular beliefs and
(arguably) blasphemous philosophical stances earned from its reputation
as Europes best school, the rural villano inhabiting the latter Padua nds
himself hemmed in by a lack of food, a class hierarchy that puts doctors
above farmers, and, as later plays will demonstrate, a strict obedience to
Church rules and regulations. Each situation gives birth to a different
logic, and the resulting logics do not usually synch up. This asynchronicity
accounts for much of the humor in the play.
Within the dramatic setting of Pastoral, Beolco creates representatives
for each of these worlds. The nymph Siringa and the shepherds Milesio,
Mopso, Arpino, and Lacerto dwell within a pastoral realm subject to the
logic of pastoral poetry. The medic, master Francesco, and his servant,
Bertuolo, operate in the world of scholastic Padua, one sustained by the
medical arts familiar to the audience of students. Ruzzante and Zilio bring
the third world forward as typical peasants, a world of scarcity masked
behind something like a resigned frivolity. Any neat separation between
these worlds, however, collapses by merit of their sharing the stage space.
The theatre itself (i.e., the room within Cornaros palazzo and wherever
else the play may have popped up), constitutes a fourth world, the auton-
omy of which Beolco handicaps through Ruzzantes direct address to the
audience and his appearance in a prologue that binds the spectators to the
shepherds, doctor, and villani. What Lionel Abel and subsequent com-
mentators will call metatheatre cannot, without great anachronism, afx
itself to this theatre. The presentational form of theatre offered in Pastoral
shaped most theatrical offerings of the time, though (as metatheatrical
SITUATING THE PASTORAL 57
language will eventually put it) the character of Ruzzante certainly has
awareness of himself as a character in this play and the work as a whole
seems to acknowledge the uid line between audience and actors, espe-
cially at the end when Ruzzante offers an explicit invitation for everyone to
join together in a dance.
Beolcos play belongs to the archetypes that Angela Ndalianis and
others eventually call upon in their studies of the neobaroque aesthetic
phenomena of the twentieth century. Ndalianis notes specic qualities
shared, for example, by Spanish and Latin American scholars of the
neobaroque: fragmented structure that recalls the form of a labyrinth;
open rather than closed form; a complexity and layering evident, for
example, in the merging of genres and literary forms [ . . . ]; a world in
which dream and reality are indistinguishable; a view of the illusory nature
of the worlda world as theatre; a virtuosity revealed through stylistic
ourish and allusion; and a self-reexivity that requires active audience
engagement (15). Direct and indirect citations to existing pastoral plays
reveal the serial nature of the Pastoral, its awareness of itself as a copy of a
copy of a supposedly original form of pastoral poetry accepted by the
literati of Renaissance Italy. Ruzzantes opening prologue demonstrates
the subservient position of plot and Beolcos preference for a dissonance of
worlds. It also blends dream and waking life straight away since the
impetus for the prologue comes from a dream from which Ruzzante has
supposedly just awoken. With that indistinguishable boundary between
dream and waking realities comes a distrust of nature, and this distrust
(marked by the term snaturale, a neologism of Beolcos creation) will
amount to a critique delivered directly to the audience. Together, all of
these attributes begin to display the baroque quality of Beolcos pastoral
work.
Beolco actually includes two prologues to the play, one in the Paduan
dialect and one in an excessively orid language reminiscent of Bembos
preferred version of Tuscan. Similar to the tradition of Roman comedy, each
prologue gives a summary of the plot. Instead of a young and potent
shepherd, a typical feature in the tradition of Sannazarian pastorals, Beolco
introduces the aged and decrepit Milesio. Onstage, the shepherd encounters
the nymph Siringa. Unlike her literary descendants, however, this Siringa
speaks plainly with her biting, Tuscan tongue and makes quick work of the
shepherds advances by describing him to his face as pien dogni tristicia
(full of every sadness) and appraising him as sei gionto nel senile impacio
(having arrived in senile awkwardness) (Ruzzante Pastoral, 29). Siringa
58 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
leaves the stage quickly, never to return, but not before offering a nal
stab: Va cerca, come i vechii pernigoni, como i toi pari, e non mi dar pi
noglia. Che posto fuste in obscure pregioni! (Go off in search of someone
more suited to you, like your old pernicious peers do, and dont annoy me
anymore. What a dark prison Ive been placed in [by having to meet
you]!) (31).
Milesio does not take this well. While decrying the cruelness of
Love, a second shepherd, Mopso, enters and attempts to pacify his
friend by running off to nd Siringa. Left alone, Milesio takes the only
option betting his unfortunate state: he kills himself. Re-entering the
scene, Mopso nds the horrible sight of what he believes to be his
friends forlorn corpse and collapses as a result of it. In a few short
pages, Beolco has ridiculed the typical pastoral co-dependence between
love and death (exemplied in Tassos LAminta) by suggesting that
sometimes love has no remedy. Not even the gesture of self-sacrice
can save an old, impotent shepherd from saucy nymphs and unrequited
love. The growing pile of shepherds bodies on the stage attracts
another when Arpino enters and, after mentioning a dark omen he
has experienced in a recent dream, joins the fray. More capable of
controlling his emotions, Arpino laments only his inability to bury the
two shepherds on account of having nobody to help out. In the blink
of an eye, a fourth shepherd, Lacerto, enters and provides the elbow
grease needed to dispose properly of the bodies.
After some deliberation, Arpino and Lacerto decide to bury the bodies
tra fronde e ori (between fronds and owers) outside of the temple of
Pan, which Beolco has placed on one side of the visible playing area,
presumably as a visual reference to the familiar pastorals of the time.
Through the dithering that results from emotive pastoral monloguing,
Lacerto starts to worry that he has spent too much time away from his
ock and so he runs off before the two men can complete the burial.
Arpino nds himself in his previous position and, thus, Beolco showcases
the inertia caused by pastoral dramatic language. Everything seems to
grind to a halt beneath long laments to the pagan powers of the universe.
Soon, however, the play receives a jolt when Ruzzante stumbles onto the
scene and thus into the proto-melodrama of love suicides. The clash
between the worlds of the pastoral and Ruzzantes Padua leads straight
to farce since neither Arpino nor Ruzzante can understand one another.
Eventually persuaded to help bury the bodies by what he believes to be an
offer of free bread, Ruzzante starts to help Arpino despite his concern that
SITUATING THE PASTORAL 59
these shepherds have died from the plague and may be contagious. When
he eventually rolls up his sleeves he quickly discovers that the shepherds
are not actually dead, they have merely fainted.
Since the problem at hand now seems to have a ready-made solution,
Ruzzante and Arpino attempt to enlist the help of a doctor. Master
Francesco arrives onstage after more frantic antics and miscommunication,
thereby introducing another layer of misunderstanding. The doctors
questions, methods, and remedies strike Ruzzante as bizarre, and Beolco
dedicates nearly the entire last half of the play to the skirmishes between
these two characters, spliced together with conversations about excessive
eating delivered by Ruzzante and his compatriot Zilio. Finally, Milesio
and Mopso (the rst two shepherds) appear to show signs of recovery. No
one single cause explains their revival: Pan may have interceded thanks to
Arpinos orations, though master Francescos science may equally have
presented a diagnosis and cure. So as not to anger the supernatural forces
that may or may not be at work, the characters all offer a sacricial lamb to
Pan, thereby bringing the play back around to the pseudo-pastoral key in
which its opening notes resounded.
Almost every scholarly treatment of this play since the late nineteenth
century has pointed to the mixing of worlds presented by its three sets of
characters, and to the amazingly diverse series of references to pastoral
literature that Beolco packaged together for his audiences entertainment.
Nancy Derso, for example, dedicates a signicant portion of her book
Arcadia and the Stage to understanding the world palimpsest (3550).
Antonio Daniele locates specic references in style and content to
Boiardo, de Jennaro, Alberti, and, of course, Sannazaro, whose Poliziano
occupied the upper echelon of pastoral poetry (Daniele 6465). Ludovico
Zorzi adds to this list, observing that the second prologue, the one offered
in the Tuscan dialect, is delivered in the poliphilesco style, con allusione
allHypnerotomachia Poliphili e ai suoi complessi stilemi; that is, the
overly complex style of Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii (Ruzante
Teatro, 1285). This dizzying mix of references together with the non-stop
barrage of Ruzzantian swearing and comic asides lead some to call Pastoral
a frottola, or a nonsense rhyme, that would have delighted the erudite
audience of University students (e.g. Daniele 65). Boillet accentuates the
likely demographics of the audience at the debut of the Pastoral and treats
the play as a type of send-up that simultaneously showcases Beolcos
intellect, albeit an intellect gained without the benet of ofcial university
education (Boillet 222). For her, Beolcos rst play comprises a slumped
60 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
pastoral, then a seated or bent pastoral, one stretched and nally pulled
down, and ultimately a beaten and knocked down pastoral (poi una
bucolica seduta o piegata, inne una bucolica abbattuta e stesa) (209).
Others still, while acknowledging the contributions to theatre that follow
this rst play, see nothing out of the ordinary in Pastoral and wonder if
pro-Ruzzante historians have too vehemently accentuated any so-called
originally that lies in the work (Pieri 102103). In sum, the reception of
Pastoral oscillates around two main points: its strengths derived from
Beolcos awareness of the literary tradition he sought to lampoon, on
the one hand, and Beolcos ability to superimpose multiple realities on
top of one another to create a palimpsest that reects the complexity of the
time, on the other hand.
gardens because those gardens had been trampled by Venetian and Holy
Roman forces (Ruzante Teatro, 1286). The lack of food brought about by
the devastation of the Paduan land constitutes a primary focus of Beolcos
later works. Though slightly harder to discern in Pastoral, the day-to-day
conditions of famine still show themselves. Ironically, and probably inten-
tionally, Beolco dressed Ruzzante in a fat suit for this production, some-
thing that he would not repeat in future plays. Though the characters
paunch and borderline obsessive-compulsive need to discuss food make
Ruzzante out to be a glutton, these characteristics might point to an
underlying neurotic cause of gluttony. Ruzzante enters, and before too
long he utters a line that he will go on to repeat several times, muor da
fame, Im dying of hunger (61). A few lines later, when he hesitates
before helping Arpino with the bodies of his fellow shepherds, he says,
Ho el mal de la loa (65), an expression that Zorzi reads as a reference to
an anxiety-provoked bulimia common to starving peasants at the time
(1293). In other words, despite his appearance, Ruzzante might actually
be dying of hunger. If not dying, then his anxiety about nding food each
day has led to his gluttonous behavior.
In short, Beolcos play reveals his own awareness that life for most
Paduans in 1521 was not at all good and that, by extension, his life as a
performer would not be all laughs. Going forward, I present Beolco as an
author of critical commentary, a follower in the footsteps of the forgotten
Cynic tradition of (spoudogeloia, pronounced spoo-tho-
yay-ya). From the Greek words serious and laughable, this tradition
has migrated into our contemporary vernacular as satire, specically a
brand of withering humor created by the Cynic philosopher and play-
wright Menippus (third century BCE) intended as a weapon to reveal
hidden truths. The mimicking of Ancient Greek characters and beliefs in
the pastoral tradition makes an appropriate word to
describe the Pastoral, as does the militancy smuggled into the expression
by the Cynics. For Beolco, Ruzzante became the aesthetic persona to
express the seriously funny condition of his world, complete with an
eroding infrastructure and deteriorating living conditions in the Paduan
countryside. This is a state of affairs that demands laughter because, as
Simon Critchley suggests, laughter lets us see the folly of the world in
order to imagine a better world in its place while it simultaneously warns
the powers-that-be that, Una risata vi seppellir (It will be a laugh that
buries you) (Critchley 17; 11). In Chapters 5 and 7, I deal more explicitly
with the phenomenon of Beolcos merger with his aesthetic persona, the
66 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
[I]t is a fact that during Beolcos lifetime the Paduan contadino [peasant]
was conscripted into the Venetian army; he endured the massacre at
Agnadello, and fought in other battles for the Republic. His lands were
wasted, and he suffered seasons of famine. Since Beolcos plays often refer to
specic local events, the rustics theatrical postures always depart [i.e. derive]
from some awareness of the villanos role in history, and Ruzantes snatur-
ale derives from that awareness. (Derso Snaturalit, 144)
RUZZANTES BAROQUE PASTORAL 67
The root of the word shows itself clearly: naturale, natural. Linguistically,
the prosthetic s afxed to the word modies and sometimes negates the
meaning of the root. For example, whereas comparare means to appear,
scomparare means to disappear; fumare means to smoke, and sfumare
means to vanish, to soften, to nuance. For Derso, the s denotes
more than semantic meaning, it shows an awareness of the historical
circumstances experienced by the Paduan lower classes in the early six-
teenth century. Nature (i.e. the bountiful excess of foodstuffs, animals,
and resources such as water that sustain life for peasant farmers) becomes
negated-Nature: the marked and lamented absence of this bountiful excess
caused by wars instigated by the Republic of Saint Mark. Recall here
Zorzis suspicion that Beolcos rst play tacitly afrmed the ourishing
of Paduan literature that served as a type of spiritual sustenance during a
time when invaders crippled Venices cultural inuence on the area. When
nature turns to snature, art will have to sustain the people.
As with most words in Becolos arsenal, the words naturale and sna-
turale have other connotations. Angelo Beolco lived his life as a natural,
or illegitimate, child. The logic woven into this particular adjectival usage,
common at the time of Beolcos birth (Carroll Ruzante, 34), would seem
to suggest that marriage, as a religio-cultural transaction, ends the natural
relation between a man and a woman (i.e. it makes of their conjugal
relations more than the simple animal act of fornication), thus ushering
in a new, sanctioned and legitimized life within society. Beolcos status as a
natural child, however, marked the fact that he owed his life to an
unsanctioned sexual union, and thus that he would always exist in a
somewhat marginalized, or at least peripheral, place within the Beolco
family. To be a natural child meant that one fell from the habitually
accepted, second nature of religio-cultural life to a parallel state of being
that, while called natural, might be more appropriately marked as
snatural, or out of place.
Beolcos snatural status even underwrites his professional career. As
Emilio Menegazzo reports, when his father died, sometime around 1520,
Beolco received a modest amount of money that would have helped him
survive for about two years (Menegazzo 212). Beolcos choice to enter
under Cornaros patronage resulted in part from this nancial stress. This
information helps to point out that while Ruzzante had access to the
learned community at the Studio, and, while he likely never suffered
from abject poverty while his father lived, the comedians status as a
natural child restricted the bounties provided to legitimate children
68 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
and forced him to look for work and nancial guidance from the same
caste of society that most of his plays satirized.
The notion of snaturalit might also lend itself to rethinking the
relation between language and culture during Beolcos time, specically
the language of pastoralia. In Horodowichs discussion of Castigliones Il
cortegiano, specically the section dedicated to the acceptable and unac-
ceptable ways of speaking at court, I nd a compelling link between words,
nature, and ones station in life. When deciding which outdated words to
eliminate from ones vocabulary, she writes, the courtier should remem-
ber that just as the seasons of the year divest the earth of her owers and
fruits, and then clothe her again with others, so time causes those rst
words to fall, and usage brings others to life (36). Members of the upper
classes would recognize a charlatan amongst their ranks by attending to his
speech. A person may unwittingly reveal his links to the middle classes by
using an out-of-date word and, as a result, nd himself uninvited to court.
Castigliones metaphor of seasonal language tends to the ideological belief
of the upper classes: that their language reinforces their (ostensibly) nat-
ural claim to aristocratic privilege. Perhaps Beolcos grandiose language in
the Pastoral shows his awareness of a specic historical reversal: that, for
the wealthy, language had ceased to produce meaning and had become
instead a signature of the wealth bestowed upon the few by an unseen
natural force. If so, then one could utilize the term snaturale to describe
the upside down world that protects the afuent persons natural status
and punishes the poor for being poor.
Neither the word snaturale nor its corresponding image of the
world-upside-down appears explicitly in Beolcos rst play, and yet the
concepts that this word and image express linger everywhere in this so-
called slumped pastoral. Beolco exposes the supposedly simple ways of
the shepherds through his excessively ornate mock-poetic language taken
from the pastoral genre. Through Ruzzantes foul mouth, he shows the
medics natural philosophy to be mere shit. Even love, which fertilizes
the pastoral landscape, nds no purchase in the poetic ground of Beolcos
pastiche. Thus, the play berates not only the high language of upper-class
poets, the jargon of university education, and the notion of love excavated
from the textual ruins of the classical world, but it also denies any legiti-
macy bestowed upon the second-nature that treats such things as natural
entities. Whereas Renaissance gardeners attempted to materialize the
concept of third nature through the immaculate gardens made possible
by mans mastery over nature, Beolco attempted through his play to
RUZZANTES BAROQUE PASTORAL 69
paths that are rejected (80). Splicing her own words with that of
Leibnizs most recognizable French interpreter of the twentieth century,
Gilles Deleuze, she goes on to stipulate that, By positing an innity of
possible worlds, however, Leibniz asserts our world to be the only
existing world because, given that it constitutes Gods nal choice, it is
considered to be the best among all the possible scenarios, the rest of
which are nally rejected (Deleuze 1993, 61) (80).
The mixture of worlds within the Pastoral displays the battle of com-
possibles and incompossibles, though it bears no traces of a God who will
decide which is which. The opening stage description offers a topology of
worlds:
The action of the play takes place on the dividing line between two worlds,
that of pastoral Arcadia and that of the urban Padua represented by the
Universitys chief cultural product (artists/doctors). One does not need to
stretch too far to interpret the former as the representative of poetry and
the latter as representative of scientic rationality. Equally as important as
the setting, however, is that which the audience never sees, namely the
world of Ruzzante, which stands in for Paduan countryside where farmers
live. Following Ancient Greek terminology, this world (the Paduan coun-
tryside) exists as the obscene (literally, ob-scene, or off-stage), the perfect
dwelling for a character as rude (and possibly as truthful) as Ruzzante. Of
course, the obscene also houses the audience, and thus a problem presents
itself. Does the audience reside in the same world as Ruzzante? Hints
offered throughout the plays action suggest that, yes, the world of the
audience and the world of Ruzzante are one and the same. When
Ruzzante summarizes the plot in the opening prologue and tells the
audience that Siringa ees from Milesio, he species that she runs alle
Grance, something like a farm run by monastic personnel that existed
RUZZANTES BAROQUE PASTORAL 71
down the road in Padua not far from the theatre space (Ruzante Teatro,
1284).
The map of superimposed worlds gets even more complicated if we
consider that the Padua of Alvise Cornaro (one the wealthiest inhabitants
of the city) did not correspond directly to the Padua of university students,
much less the Padua of poor Ruzzante because Cornaros wealth set him
apart from the masses. Thus, within Padua one nds separate worlds
delimited by class identities and economic (dis)advantages. Furthermore,
the prologista starts his recounting of the plot by saying that he has
awoken from a dream, thereby implying that the action unfolding on the
stage during the course of the Pastoral happens within dreamspace (and
maybe even remembered dreamspace). If this is true, then readers of this
play stumble into the hall of mirrors created by the dialectical interplay of
dreamspace and waking reality, one of the hallmark antagonisms of the
Spanish Baroque outlined by Jos Antonio Maravall. Without complicat-
ing matters further, and without resolving the problems posed by the
possibility of a dreamspace produced by a theatrical character, I believe
that lurking behind this multiverse of worlds lies a specic understanding
of self. That is, Beolco does not vouch for one worlds claim to reality over
another, neither does he prove that his Padua deserves more attention;
rather, the Pastoral showcases Beolcos anxiety that none of the worlds has
been chosen by God, as Leibniz has put it. This claim, however, cedes too
much ground to Leibnizs worldview, the same worldview that Voltaire
would scandalize in Candide. As such, instead of placing Beolco at the
whim of a God whom he seems not to have believed in, I suggest we
recognize his awareness of a nascent antagonism between the compossible
and the incompossible in a different way. God may not choose Ruzzantes
Padua or the pastorals world of Platonic ideals, but both will continue to
exist nonetheless thanks to Venices need for arable farmland, on the one
hand, and the booming print industry, on the other hand. Ruzzantes
Padua will endure as a marginalized space, one masked by the poetic
version of the countryside penned by pastoral poets. Maybe Leibniz was
wrong and the incompossibles exist, only to struggle for visibility beneath
the veil of appearances created through a barrage of aesthetic production.
Pastoral lays bare this barrage in both its form and content.
In the same light, not only do all the worlds within the Pastoral begin
to take on the status of incompossibility, but Beolco seems also to wonder
if he himself exists. Or, rather, if he surely exists, then he necessarily exists
as multiple people: Beolco is Ruzzante; Ruzzante is one person to Zilio
72 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
the Baroque puts the incorruptible truth of the world that underlies all
ephemeral and deceptive appearances on center stage, making it the ultimate
goal of all inquiry; in the same vein, however, the Baroque makes a theatre
out of truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an
effect of the appearances from which we seek to free it. (2)
How precisely a work does this, and whether it afrms or denies the
authority of the truth lingering behind or beyond the world of appear-
ances, determines whether the artwork aligns itself with either the major or
RUZZANTES BAROQUE PASTORAL 73
the minor baroque. The major strategy of the baroque assumes the
existence of a veil of appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a
space opening just beyond those appearances where truth resides (3). I
explore this major strategy in depth in the next chapter by attending to the
dramaturgy of the Jesuit order in late sixteenth-century Venice. In fact, as
Egginton himself suggests, representatives of the Counter-Reformation
provide some of the clearest expressions of the major baroque strategy
(2627). By distinction, the minor baroque strategy suggests that the
promise of purity behind the veil of appearances is itself already corrupted
by the very distinction that gave birth to it (27). In other words, artworks
that expose the mediation of reality (i.e. the fact that all knowledge of the
truth comes from a consciously produced and sustained discourse or set of
practices of one kind or another) operate in a minor mode. The minor
baroque strategy forces the spectator/auditor/reader/interpreter to ques-
tion the dichotomy between appearance and substance and to discern
whether perhaps the choice between these two entities evolves from a
political plan, a human desire, or a social project instead of Nature or God
Himself.
As the work of this chapter has suggested, the Pastoral deploys this
minor baroque strategy by crippling the legitimacy of poetic pastoral
language, Arcadian love, university erudition, and the anxiety-riddled
underside of rustic gluttony and laziness. Beolcos play does not reveal a
higher truth beyond this language, love, erudition, or underside; rather, it
draws his audiences attention to the coexistence of these things as human
creations that, precisely because of their human origin, hide an afnity to
the corrupt and the nite. By maneuvering between the audience and the
world(s) within the play, the character of Ruzzante makes this hidden
afnity visible from the start and proceeds to guide the audience through
the play, thereby making the theatricality of the Pastoral a part of the play
itself.
I draw Egginton into this discussion not to provide another keyword
with which to unlock the secrets packed within Beolcos text but to show
all that unfolds from the gesture of the minor strategy. For Egginton, this
play of appearance and truth so central to baroque artifacts conditions the
Leibnizian philosophical architecture that Deleuze and others identify as
paradigmatic in its expression of the baroque worldview. The interfolded
nature of appearance and truth crucial to baroque thought (a relation that,
as Egginton and others note, negates the Platonic separation of Idea and
Material) acts as the foundation upon which will stand the architecture of
74 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
the Leibnizian monad, the germ of individuality that, despite its hermetic
enclosure, expresses from itself the totality of the world.
In The Fold, Deleuze thinks through the peculiar expressiveness of the
monad in order, in part, to explain the complex relation between the soul
and the body in Leibnizs philosophy. In Deleuzes own words, Forever
indissociable from the body, [the soul] discovers a vertiginous animality
that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral
humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up (Deleuze
Fold, 11). Transposing this image to the more familiar form of the two-
storey baroque houses that appear everywhere in the Veneto of the six-
teenth century, from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (the interior of
which Tintoretto will eventually tattoo from top to bottom) to the Loggia
at the house of Cornaro on which Beolco/Ruzzante will eventually per-
form once Maria di Falconetto completes it in 1524. These two-storey
structures boasted elaborate faades decorated by the top sculptors of the
day. Relating the faade and two-storey architecture to the Leibnizian
monad, Deleuze writes:
Baroque architecture can be dened by this severing of the facade from the
inside, of the interior from the exterior, and the autonomy of the interior
from the independence of the exterior, but in such conditions that each of
the two terms thrusts the other forward. (28)
the Leibnizian system does not, as Michael Marder writes, bind matter to
the force of dumb and passive resistance, always opposed to the noble
endeavors of form-giving spirit, it certainly emphasizes cultivation and
enlightenment as the hallmarks of a true human intellect, thereby smug-
gling in the historico-philosophical preference of mind over body (Marder
125). That said, and as Deleuzes creative philosophy demonstrates,
Leibnizs monadology permits for great variation in thought and forces
philosophers to unsettle the binary distinctions of inside/outside and
appearance/substance that had underwritten most theories of expression,
reception, aesthetics, and indeed philosophy itself.
Similar to the revision (pre-vision?) of Leibnizs theory of compossi-
bility and incompossibility, Beolcos rst play anticipates, while it simulta-
neously relocates, Leibnizs monad and Deleuzes baroque house. The
two-storey house that functions admirably as a metaphor for the monad in
Deleuzes work does appear in the Pastoral, but it appears with a crucial
renovation. Interestingly, the play presents a kind of two-storey entrance
that receives the audience into its embrace. The Proemio alla Villano
constructs the rst oor (on the bottom), and welcomes audiences and
readers into the worldview of the Paduan peasant. The second prologue
builds the second oor (on the top) and cultivates the same Paduan
worldview into a owery and more poetic expression. Sealed off into an
autonomous enclosure by its hermetic sentence structure and involuting
assonances, the Tuscan prologue acts as the distillate of the potency of the
human intellectat least, it renders visible the extent to which pastoral
poetic sounds attempt to exist as such. In actuality, this particular pastoral
prologue deates such pretensions through over-identifying itself as the
vehicle of spiritual ascendance. Taken together, then, the two prologues
render a leaning two-storey structure, something reminiscent of Deleuzes
philosophical architecture . . . but sillier, less noble, a bit grotesque, and
more disruptive.
A non-metaphorical, architectural analogue of just such a slanted struc-
ture exists a couple of hundred miles south of Cornaros home on the
Italian peninsula in the garden of Bomarzo that I discussed in the previous
chapter. Upon entering that garden, visitors nd a two-storey house
leaning off to one side. One of its two inscriptions explains that Vicino
Orsini had dedicated this particular structure to Cristoforo Madruzzo,
Archbishop of Trent and friend of the eccentric Orsini sibling responsible
for the gardens. The other inscription offers a set of instructions to the
houses visitors: ANIMUS QUIESCENDO FIT PRUDENTIOR ERGO
76 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
NOTES
1. On the relation between Ruzzante and the Sienese pre-Rozzi tradition, see
Marzia Pieri, La Scena Boschereccia nel Rinascimento Italiano (Padova:
Liviana Editrice, 1983), especially Chapter 6: Il Grottesco Pastorale dei
Pre-Rozzi. La Pastoral come opera riassuntiva.
2. See Dario Fo: Stage, Text, Tradition, eds. Joseph Farrell and Antonio
Scuderi (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and
Enrico Pucci, Dario Fo: Ruzante il nostro Shakespeare, Il Mattino di
Padova, 25 Febbraio 2015 <http://mattinopadova.gelocal.it/padova/cro
naca/2015/02/25/news/dario-fo-ruzante-e-il-nostro-shakespeare-1.
10934680>.
CHAPTER 4
[A]nd he turned to the Executioner, and kissed him, and placing his head on
his knee he said to the people he advises us to pray, and to him was given the
Axe 8 times [ . . . his head] wouldnt come off until nally it was cut off with a
knife [ . . . ] and then it was placed outside under the loft[ed area of the
scaffold], where it was burned, and like that it was the end of his life, and as
has been said, his sins were overcome. (Cicogna)1
Once the rector of the Convertite (The House of the Converted, aka Santa
Maria Maddalena) on the Venetian island of Giudecca (or Zuecca in the
Venetian dialect), Valcamonica worked his way to the scaffold by prosti-
tuting and sexually molesting the young women he was assigned to
protect. One of many such houses in sixteenth-century Venice, S. Maria
Maddalena existed to protect women, some just girls, whose nancial
circumstances had driven them to prostitution. Though supposedly
way than did the Jesuit spiritual advisers who were beginning to work their
way into the hearts and minds of those legislators. Taking the archived
remains of the priests nal words as a starting point, then, this chapter will
rst zoom out to offer a wide-angle perspective on the mechanism of
corporal punishment and then zoom in to expose this bloody event not
just as a performance but also as a specic kind of baroque pastoral theatre.
Whereas the previous two chapters mapped the allegorical language
embedded in the baroque pastoral landscapes of Italian gardens and
Colonnas and Tassos texts, on the one hand, and Beolcos askew and
aslant Pastoral, on the other hand, this chapter develops a new picture of
the pastoral shepherds tale and provides a manifestation of what Egginton
calls the major baroque strategy. In the Piazza San Marco on November
10, 1561, the shepherd in this pastoral tale was not a ctional character
but a esh-and-blood leader of the Christian ock. The drama of the Jesuit
pastoral theatre actually revolved around the tale of two shepherds, one
who had led the ock astray through sin and one who would harness the
downfall of such sins to reveal the path toward forgiveness and eternal life.
From the perspective of the Venetian Jesuits, these two identities at times
coexisted within the body of one shepherd, Valcamonica himself, whose
villainous actions, framed through a particular philosophy of love and
forgiveness, transgure him into a martyr. But before schematizing the
mechanics of that drama and explicating the paradoxical role of the
shepherd in this Jesuit pastoral theatre, I would like to approach
Valcamonicas demise from the point of view of the Venetian government.
Such a perspective offers historical contextualization, which doubles as a
survey of the political environment of the Republic in the late sixteenth-
century.
There simply are too many Venices, too many unknown dimensions. Just
when one believes one is beginning to follow the story line, Venice trans-
mogries and, both in spite of and because of the richness of its archives and
artistic treasures, is again a mystery, an enigma, an indecipherable maze of
interweaving stories, false and true.
82 4 JESUIT PASTORAL THEATRE: THE CASE OF FATHER PIETRO LEON . . .
has been perfectly preserved from internal and external danger. To pre-
serve itself, a healthy state had to cultivate and maintain internal tranquility
while also pursuing moderate but aggressive exterior expansion; ideal state
homeostasis derived from this double movement, and, in turn, the sover-
eigns virtuosity propelled this double movement. Such virtuosity arose
from the sovereigns recognition of his subjects as materials and of himself
as articer capable of manipulating those materials like so many actors on a
great stage.
The size of ones territory also conditioned the success of the state.
[A] small dominion, wrote Botero, is one that cannot stand by itself,
but needs the protection and support of others [ . . . ]. A middle-sized
dominion has sufcient strength and authority to stand on its own
[ . . . ]. Those dominions are large which have a distinct superiority over
their neighbors (4). Of these three sizes, Botero thought medium the
best since those states were exposed neither to violence by their weakness
nor to envy by their greatness, and their wealth and power being moder-
ate, passions are less violent, ambition nds less support and license less
provocation (8). The best example of such a state: Venice.
For Botero, the Venetian state maintained the necessary peace and
tranquility required to make it strong. Their rulers exercised those special
arts which won for those rulers the love and admiration of their people.
The Republic of Saint Mark understood the two aspects of royal justice:
justice between the ruler and his subjects and justice between subjects
themselves. Though peace was the goal, Botero believed that both types of
justice frequently relied on violent means capable of countering civic
turbulence. Violence, he wrote, is the work of outlaws, robbers, assas-
sins and murderers, who must be held in check by fear and by severe
legislation; for what is the use of keeping out foreign armies if a worse
danger prevails at home? (1920). Of what did the sovereigns violent
response consist? The answer lay in the coupling of fear and severe
legislation.
Michel Foucault named this coupling the coup dtat (Italian: softo di
stato). In his genealogy of reason of state, Foucault identied the coup
dtat as the masterstroke of government, as that which constituted the
most violent but also the most theatrical gesture of a sovereign ruler
(Foucault, Security 261). When did a ruler perform this masterstroke?
Foucault cited Boteros own thoughts on the matter: A public misfor-
tune is the very best of opportunities for a prince to win the hearts of his
subjects since it is in those moments of misfortune and disarray that the
84 4 JESUIT PASTORAL THEATRE: THE CASE OF FATHER PIETRO LEON . . .
presence of the sovereign can set things straight and re-establish a rightful
order of things. Thus, the turbulence churned up by interior threats of
criminals had always to dissolve beneath the violent and swift response of
the ruler. Such responses took on spectacular forms, such as public execu-
tions and civic performances that demonstrated the legitimacy of the
government.
Boteros depiction of Venice as the model of reason of state was,
however, distorted. Venice did not have a sovereign. The government
had a head gure, the doge, but the administrative and legislative duties
fell to multiple branches, each with its own particular duty. Additionally,
in 1561, the year of Valcamonicas execution and around the time that
Botero would have witnessed Venetian governance in action, the smooth
functioning of the Republics government underwent a dramatic shift.
The Council of Ten, which for so many years held the most power, had
begun to lose its absolute grasp. Whereas that Council once consolidated
many duties within itself, the last decades of the sixteenth century saw the
creation of new councils aimed at taking over matters of blasphemy, civic
peace, and heretical inquisitions, thereby diffusing the Council of Tens
authority (Cozzi, Authority 317318). Therefore, Boteros metapho-
rical pronouncement that [t]he more intricate and complex the mechan-
isms of a watch the more likely that it is to go wrong, which he offered as
a counter-example to the efciency of the Venetian state, seems misplaced.
The Venetian government was an intricate and complex mechanism if ever
there was one. What accounts for Boteros misreading?
Boteros distorted vision may have been produced from the barrage of
theatricality deployed by the Venetian government on a regular basis. As
Edward Muir has suggested, [t]he fundamental problem of the historians
of Venice [ . . . ] has been to separate outward appearance from reality, to
uncover from the veneer of propaganda and mythology the actual social
and political structure of the city (Muir, Civic Ritual 13). This veneer
was generated by numerous annual demonstrations, parades, and galas, all
of which were deployed by the Venetian state to tend to its own complex
clockwork. These civic rituals, including the demonstrations of might
exemplied in the softo di stato, were all a part of the Venetians
perpetual encomium to their city. Botero was not wrong to suggest
that Venice epitomized the coupling of fear and severe legislation, or
that the state knew when to deploy theatrical gestures to stabilize and
sustain its civic life. Rather, he failed to realize that in addition to the softo
di stato, the Venetian Republic was equipped with many theatrical gestures
DELLA RAGION DI STATO: AN ACT OF JUSTICE 85
In the December of 60 some of the converted left the convent [i.e., the
Convertite] and one of them revealed that sometimes she had been touched
and kissed by [a priest named] Giampietro. [Benedetto] Palmio involved
various persons in an inquest: Agostino Barbarigo, Tommaso and
Giustiniano Contarini. (421)4
this connection between Palmio, the head of the Jesuit enclave in Venice,
Barbarigo, and the Contarini brothers, each of whom were members of
the Council. Valcamonicas name appears three times in the pages of those
records. The rst was an introduction of Valcamonica to the court, during
which the ministers of state identied him as chaplain and confessor of
the converted on Giudecca.5 The second time the court decreed that,
this Fr. Zuan Piero is conned for the rest of his life in prison [ . . . ] until
he is [brought] between the two columns in S. Marco [and] beheaded.6
Finally, the day before the execution, the Council declared one last time
that, tomorrow morning this priest Zuanpiero will be beheaded by an
executioner between the two columns of S. Marco and after his death his
body will be burned [ . . . ] and converted into ash (ASV, Consiglio dei X,
lza 14).7 The names of Agostino Barbarigo and Giustiniano Contarini
appear in the margins of those pages as witnesses of the sentencing and
members of the judicial committee.
An understanding of how precisely Palmio could instigate these crim-
inal proceedings and why he would choose to do so begins to form by
reading the benediction he gave at a new house dedicated to the conver-
sion of prostitutes in 1558. This house, known colloquially as the Zitelle
(Spinsters, but also Maidens), was the Santa Maria della Presentazione
(The Presentation of Mary) on the island of Giudecca, directly southwest
of Piazza San Marco in the Basin of St Mark. The Zitelle and the
Convertite were situated in close proximity, and their primary function
was identical. Palmio, renowned for his oratorical ability, announced this
function and its inspiration with the following words:
After the benediction, Palmio thanked a long list of noble men and
women without whose help the Zitelle would not have been built. The
list, a veritable whos who of sixteenth-century Venice, included numerous
doges, members of the Council of Ten, and those mens wives. Among the
names were those of Signori Protettori M[.] Thomaso Contarino [sic]
and il Magnico M. Agostin Barbarigo. The presence of so many
PASTORAL POWER: AN ACT OF SALVATION 89
The Society has the care of those souls for whom either there is nobody to
care or, if somebody ought to care, the care is negligent. This is the reason
for the founding of the Society. This is its dignity in the Church. For
[Father Nadal] the Jesuit task par excellence was to search for the lost
sheepwhether pagan, Muslim, heretic, or Catholic. (73)
Prostitutes and the poor, illiterate youth were targets of Jesuit care, but so
was Valcamonica. Valcamonica was a lost sheep. More than that, he was a
lost shepherd and the Jesuit mission could not be successful if the very
people who were helping to herd the masses were themselves running
amok. For Palmio, the wanton priest who deled the young prostitutes
under his care was an embodiment of the paradox of the shepherd, which
lay at the core of pastoral power.
In the same set of lectures in which he analyzed the mechanisms of
reason of state, Foucault outlined this paradox and presented the scope of
the problem it posed for Christian pastoral power:
On the one hand, the shepherd must keep his eye on all and each, omnes et
singulatim, which will be the great problem [ . . . ] of the techniques of
power in Christian pastoralship. [ . . . ] And then, in an even more intense
manner, the second form taken by the paradox of the shepherd is the
problem of the sacrice of the shepherd for his ock, the sacrice of himself
for the whole of his ock, and the sacrice of the whole of his ock for each
of the sheep. (Foucault, Security 128)
Crucial to the case of the priest from the Convertite, Foucaults delinea-
tion of the paradox marks the rst transition from pastoral power to
pastoral theatre. From Palmios point of view, Valcamonica had failed to
keep his eye on all and each of his sheep, and this required the wayward
shepherd to atone for his faults by sacricing himself for the whole of his
ock.
While it is true that the objects of the Societys governance were souls,
it is important to note that these souls were terrestrial substances. Palmio
PASTORAL POWER: AN ACT OF SALVATION 91
and the Jesuits struggled with the discipleship of souls on earth. This
raised the stakes of their mission since any extraterrestrial life in Heaven
would become possible only if they could establish themselves as the very
road that conveyed souls from this world into the next. This is why the
original Formula of the Society described the nature of the Jesuit
Institute as the pathway to God (Society of Jesus 4). As a result of
this terrestrial dimension to pastoral care, the Jesuits had to develop
methods for dealing with stray sheep beyond private confession and
rhetorical orations during Mass. The execution of Valcamonica would
act as an embodied display of the transition of the soul from earth to
heaven, and the spectacle of it was sure to draw a large audience.
The complex and paradoxical full-distribution of the shepherdsheep
relationship has four principles. The elaboration of each one sheds addi-
tional light on the execution of Valcamonica viewed from the perspective
of pastoral power. Foucault named these four principles as follows. First,
the principle of analytic responsibility. With this, the pastor has to
account not only for each sheep as a numerical quantity, but also for
each of the acts that each sheep commits, everything good and evil
they may have done at any time. The analytic responsibility, then, is
not just a responsibility dened by a numerical and individual distribution,
but also a responsibility dened by a qualitative and factual distribution.
Second, the principle of exhaustive and instantaneous transfer. That is,
on the Day of Judgment, not only does the pastor have to account for
every good and evil act committed by any sheep at any time but also the
pastor will acquire each of those acts as if it was his own. Third, the
principle of sacricial reversal. If a pastor is lost along with his sheep,
then he must also lose himself for his sheep, and in their place. That is to
say, the pastor must be prepared to die [body and soul] to save his sheep.
Fourth, the principle Foucault called alternate correspondence: just as
on one side the pastors merit and salvation are due to the weaknesses of
his sheep, so too the pastors faults and weaknesses contribute to the
edication of his sheep and are part of the movement, the process, of
guiding them towards salvation (Foucault, Security 169173).
As the head of the Jesuits in Venice, Palmio was a shepherd of shep-
herds as well as a shepherd involved in the herding of stray sheep. The
execution of Valcamonica presented Palmio with an opportunity to display
to all present, in a highly theatrical way, the extent of the discipline
instilled in the Society of Jesus. He would display this discipline by sacri-
cing one of the Churchs own shepherds on the principles of pastoral
92 4 JESUIT PASTORAL THEATRE: THE CASE OF FATHER PIETRO LEON . . .
power that underpinned the entire Jesuit mission. Since the Jesuits sought
to guide souls specically through the establishment of houses like the
Zitelle, it is reasonable to suggest that the smooth functioning of all such
houses, including the Convertite, was desirable to the Society. As the
instigator of the project to construct a home for girls lost in the profound
abyss of that abominable life that is so contrary to good health, as
illustrated by his benediction of the Zitelle, Palmio was qualitatively
responsible for the horrendous acts of Valcamonica (analytic responsibil-
ity). As such, Palmio had to take those sins as his own before the eyes of his
God (exhaustive and instantaneous transfer).
A certain arrangement of textual artifacts, then, presents the possibility
that Palmio found an instrumental use for Valcamonicas crimes. After he
confessed to his crimes in front of the Council of Ten, the scene was set for
Valcamonica to become the embodiment of the sacricial reversal. The
climax of that scene would unfold in Piazza San Marco in order to
contribute to the edication of the souls in attendance (alternate corre-
spondence). To guide Venetians to salvation, Palmio could display
Valcamonica in the act of sacricing himself for his sheep. Everyone
present in the Piazza that day, from Palmios point of view, would bear
witness to the commitment of the pastoral shepherd who accepted death
and self-sacrice when the occasion called for it.
Like a congregation assembled for Mass, the audience at the execution
would become a focus of Jesuit guidance. This guidance was primarily a
mode of governance capable of conducting wandering souls back into the
ock. To be more specic, Jesuit guidance and its function on the day of
the execution was psychagogical. Pace Foucault, the term psychagogy
refers to the transmission of a truth whose function is not to endow any
subject whomsoever with abilities, etcetera, but whose function is to
modify the mode of being of the subject. That is, if pedagogy seeks to
endow any subject whatever with aptitudes, capabilities, knowledges, and
so on, that he did not possess before and that he should possess at the end
of the pedagogical relationship, the psychagogical dimension of
Valcamonicas execution aimed at modifying the spatial location of the
stray souls from outside the fold back inside the fold (Foucault,
Hermeneutics 407). The execution of Valcamonica from the perspective
of pastoral power became an opportunity to exploit the paradox of the
shepherd, the goal of which was to present the priest as a psychagogical
object capable of enfolding the spectators within the embrace of the
Church.
PASTORAL POWER: AN ACT OF SALVATION 93
This perspective helps to explain an aspect of the execution that did not
make sense within the logic of reason of state. While it is true that the state
had, at times, to display authority with the softo di stato, it is not clear
why, in the case of Valcamonica, that blow had to result in death. In the
folio of records where Valcamonica appeared three times before the
Council of Ten, there were numerous other names of criminals who
received sentences. One priest was banned for life from the lands of the
Republic for committing unspecied crimes within a monastery. Another
man was conducted between the two columns in Piazza San Marco, but
only his right hand was cut off.
In addition to these records, the scholar Gaetano Cozzi has discovered
that criminals indicted with crimes of blasphemy sometimes suffered the
amputation of their tongue or they were conducted onto a scaffold
between the two columns wearing an ignominious miter on their
head and bearing signs around their necks informing the public of the
crime that had led to such a punishment. In severe cases where criminals
lost their tongue, an eye, a hand, or received beatings from the public
gathered as spectators, those criminals would have to bear the expense of
any medicine used to treat their injuries (Cozzi, Religione 27). All of
these punishments were gruesome and extreme, all of them deployed
theatrical means of punishing the criminals, but none of them was as
gruesome or extreme as the punishment of Valcamonica that consisted
of a brutal, botched beheading and the burning of his dismembered
corpse. To stage the paradox of the pastoral shepherd in its most profound
dimension, however, Valcamonica had necessarily to sacrice his life spec-
tacularly. No other punishment was possible. Beneath the gazes of the
nobles seated in their boxes and up above the Venetians crowded into the
Piazza, Valcamonica ended his life as a shepherd willing to endure igno-
miny and sacrice himself on behalf of his ock, or at least to be sacriced
by the shepherd of shepherds.
Finally, the lens of pastoral power reveals a crucial difference between
the goal of Jesuit care and that of the reason of state. With the latter, the
softo di stato functions as a tool for preserving the inner tranquility of the
state understood as a geographical entity. It was a governmental instru-
ment, but the type of government it revealed was one concerned with
preserving political cohesion. Pastoral power revealed a more expansive
semantic domain of governance. It understood to govern to refer to
movement in space, material subsistence [ . . . ] the control one may
exercise over oneself and others, over someones body, soul, and
94 4 JESUIT PASTORAL THEATRE: THE CASE OF FATHER PIETRO LEON . . .
life, and in the resignation to death, and I stop hoping [insofar as] I now am
certain, and in this way I confess most honestly in order to rediscover the
true body and blood of Jesus Christ, so that this morning I make way for
salvation of my soul, and so I confess the truth, in order to partake in the
innity of Your Mercy, and in death I voluntarily bear my sins, forgive my
grave errors, and reveal Paradise to me. (Cicogna)
The notion of love within the Jesuit catechism consists of a split similar
to the Love operating in Tassos play. With the former, love is a state one
can obtain by moving from desolation to consolation; with the latter, Love
is the obverse of Death and can only be reached through an experience
with death. Jesuit love nds its best articulation in Ignatius Loyolas
Spiritual Exercises.8 In that work, Loyola denes consolation as an interior
movement aroused in the soul that appears only once the soul is inamed
with the love of God. He adds:
It is likewise consolation when one sheds tears that move to the love of God,
whether it be because of sorrow for sins, or because of the sufferings of
Christ our Lord, or for any other reason that is immediately directed to the
praise and service of God. Finally, I call consolation every increase of faith,
hope, and love, and all interior joy that invites and attracts to what is
heavenly and to the salvation of ones soul by lling it with peace and
quiet in Christ our Lord. (de Loyola 142)
With this insight, desolation becomes a necessary tool for nding ones
way into the fold. It is akin to the Lowest Pitch in the LAminta that
portends exactly the reverse, the highest high. Desolation should raise
ones awareness of the fact that one requires a guide, and that guide is the
shepherd.
FROM PASTORAL POWER TO PASTORAL THEATRE 97
love of God. The communicating doorway that linked the two worlds was
the shepherd, Valcamonica, who, like Elpino, was positioned as the guide
to the spiritual dimension of the terrestrial realm. Unlike Elpino, however,
who merely possessed the knowledge of Deaths relation to Love,
Valcamonica had to demonstrate his knowledge in order to call forth the
spectators to repeat the action, to repent for their sins, and to step onto
the pathway connecting this world to the next.
The dramaturgy at work, then, was one of carving out a viewpoint from
which the spectators could begin to see the path to God. The Bolognese
Manual provides an asymmetrical model for understanding the situation
and I turn to it once again in order to understand this particular idea. In
Book 2, Chapter 27, The manner you must have when he who has to die
kneels down, the anonymous author paints a picture of the comforter
upon the scaffold: When you are at the block and he who has to die
kneels down to put his head on it, you kneel down as well, using your right
knee and keeping the tavoletta in such a way that he always has his eye on
it, that is, so he always sees it (274). And then again, a few lines later:
make sure that you never move the tavoletta under his face until the
mallet is close to the chopping block. And make sure that you pull the
tablet away at the same time as the blow, so that he who has to die does
not notice (275). There, on the scaffold, the comforter holds a painted
scene of Christ upon the cross directly in front of the gaze of the con-
demned. Indeed, this picture, the tavoletta, a kind of inspirational image
into which the man about to die can transport himself as he prepares to
transform from sinner to martyr, provides not just an on-the-ground
perspective of execution scenes from the fteenth and sixteenth centuries
but also a rmer understanding of the Jesuit dramaturgical act.
Kathleen Falvey explains that, For the one being comforted, the
tavoletta became at once an object of intense devotional concentration
and a kind of ritually reecting mirror in which he was urged to see himself
strengthened, consoled, and ultimately transformed (Falvey 19). The
visual eld of the tavoletta constituted a parallel plain of existence that
accompanied the earthly realm but remained distinct from it, acting as a
promise to the man about to die that his nal destination will bring him
peace. Situating these scenes of death within their historical moment,
Falvey also demonstrates that the scene of death itself functioned as an
extension to or perhaps an analogue of the popular passion plays of late
fteenth-century towns such as Bologna and Ferrara. In this scene, how-
ever, the condemned played the role of Christ and the comforter, again
acting as medium, worked to guarantee the authenticity of the con-
demned mans performance through his many acts of support, such as
holding the tavoletta before the mans face.10
In Piazza San Marco, however, the Jesuits were not on hand to position
the tavoletta in front of Valcamonica. Instead, they transformed
Valcamonica into a tavoletta and placed the scene of his sacrice in front
of the eyes of the spectators who had come to watch him die. From the
102 4 JESUIT PASTORAL THEATRE: THE CASE OF FATHER PIETRO LEON . . .
[a]ny person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.
Within this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane
world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great
importance. But it will be unmistakably apparent [ . . . ] that all of the things
which are used to signify derive, from their very fact of pointing to some-
thing else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable
with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane, and which can,
indeed, sanctify them. Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane
world is both elevated and devalued. (175)
First of all, this denition allows for the possibility that Valcamonicas
death can mean absolutely anything else, that is, it could indeed be the
act that reveals the path to consolation. Second, in that scenario,
Valcamonica stands in for the intricacies of the life-practice required to
transition from desolation to consolation. As allegorical object,
Valcamonica becomes the crystallized distillation of the process of
JESUIT BAROQUE ALLEGORICAL DRAMATURGY 103
The mythic instant, Nu, is that innite instant during which Christ died on
the cross. In the execution, the Nu became the Jetzt of Valcamonicas
sacrice. Valcamonica transformed from an isolated symbol of the shep-
herd into an allegory of all of Gods shepherds who had ever made a
signicant sacrice. He transformed from a static object into an event.
From the Deleuzian perspective, Valcamonicas status as allegorical object
broke free of its temporal (and symbolic) mold to become a temporal
modulation that implie[d] as much the beginnings of a continuous varia-
tion of matter as a continuous development of form (Deleuze, The Fold
19).
This temporal modulation was a dramatic metamorphosis, the function
of which was to create a unifying point of view for all the spectators in the
piazza to inhabit. A point of view in this instance, to quote Deleuze, is
not what varies with the subject [ . . . ] it is, to the contrary, the condition
in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or:
something = x (anamorphosis) (20). For the Jesuits, all Venetians gath-
ered to watch the execution were eventual subjects within the Kingdom
of God. The metamorphosis unfolding in front of those spectators eyes
was the transition of Valcamonica-as-criminal into the shepherd as envi-
sioned within the schema of pastoral power and staged within the frame-
work of this particular (and peculiar) form of pastoral theatre. Once
THE CASE OF VALCAMONICA 105
converted, the shepherd became the threshold linking the domains of the
profane and the sacred.
Within the composition of the allegory as a whole, Valcamonica was the
x that marked the spot of Gods presence on earth, as in Deleuzes
baroque formula something = x (anamorphosis). This formula inserts an
important distinction in the perception of the event from the ground level
in the piazza. Though the spectators were numerous, the allegorical frame
of the event did not allow each spectator to perceive Valcamonica from his
or her own perspective. The metamorphosis of Valcamonica [was] not a
variation of the truth according to the subject, but the condition in which
the truth of a variation appear[ed] to the subject (20). In other words,
through the act of execution/sacrice, Valcamonicas death opened a
space for each spectator to occupy. Whoever occupied that space would
enter the fold of the Church, gain visibility within Gods line of sight and
have access to the sacred.
Thus, the execution does not rely on symbolic representation to per-
suade the multitude to return to the ock. Rather, the execution for-
warded the living image of Valcamonica (Christ-like, but revised by the
Jesuits who were the interpretive artists) as a portal or threshold through
which the multitude must pass if they desired to move from the profane to
the sacred. The fundamental difference between a symbolic and an alle-
gorical dramaturgy is the movement inherent in the object around and
through which the allegory is constructed. The symbol points to move-
ment whereas the allegory is movement itself crystallized into a dialectical
image. In terms of this execution, the movement appears on two levels. It
appears on a formal level in the body of Valcamonica who, upon the
scaffold, becomes penitent and transforms his subjectivity from that of a
sinner to that of a puried member of Gods ock. On the level of truth-
content, the spectators perceiving this transformation of Valcamonicas
subjectivity perceive a path that, should they follow it, will lead to their
own conversion. After Valcamonicas body is converted to ash, the space
left behind, the x, awaits the next individual to inhabit it.
NOTES
1. Cicogna Codex 3239, Biblioteca di Museo Civico Correr [The Library of the
Correr Civic Museum], Venezia, n.p. Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna (1789
1868) was a bibliophile and scholar whose extensive collection of docu-
ments now belongs to the Library of the Correr Civic Museum. As recently
as the 1990s, scholars have cited this document as Cicogna 2082, but the
newer numbering system identies it as 3239.
2. See also Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosit veneziana. Venezia: Scarabellin, 1933.
3. For the link between the window seats of the library and the box seats of
the Tron and Michiel theatres in Venice, see Eugene J. Johnson, The
Short, Lascivious Lives of Two Venetian Theatres, 15801585,
Renaissance Quarterly vol. 55, no. 3 (Autumn, 2002): 946. [T]he
utterly new boxes of the Michiel and Tron theatres, he writes, provided
elevated, separated spaces for the patricians to watch performances and in
turn to be watched. Both built on an old Venetian tradition of using
windows as private viewing platforms for the public spectacles. For more
on the theatricality of Piazza San Marco, see Egle Renata Trincanato,
Rappresentativit e funzionalit di Piazza San Marco Piazza San
Marco: larchitettura, la storia, le funzioni, a cura di Giuseppe Samon
(Umberto Franzoni, Padova [Padua] 1970) 87.
NOTES 107
NOTE
1. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay.
CHAPTER 5
The moving image formed from these brief entries brings several
specic characteristics of Beolcos Venetian performances as Ruzzante to
the fore. First, from his earliest appearance in Venice, Ruzzante was
performing in front of wealthy and powerful members of the Republics
elite governing class. The places for those performances were the homes
(Ca or casa/e) of very powerful people. Trevisan, Pisaro, and Contarini da
Londra held ambassadorships to England and France, and rotated
through the highest ranks of the Venetian government. The Palazzo
Ducale was the seat of government wherein dwelt the doge, the highest-
ranking ofcer of the Venetian Republic. Second, these performances were
always a la villana, or done in the style of rural Padua. Ruzzante and
Menato spoke their own dialect, which would have instantly marked them
as outsiders to their Venetian audiences. This would not have been the
case with all the members of the Zardineri (Farmers) or the Ortolani
since, as with all the Compagnie della Calza, many men in those compa-
nies would have been sons of wealthy Venetian patricians. Interestingly,
while the right to perform inside the homes of notable Venetian governors
and ambassadors went to the sons of nobles who headed the various acting
troupes, Ruzzante managed to nagle his way into the homes, perhaps
because of his recognizable talent. Third, Beolco began his Venetian
acting career as a Gardener (Ortolani) and a Farmer (Zardinieri), and
the companies that bore those names had woven into the troupes iden-
tities a lewd aura that preceded them. This aura emanated from the banner
that the troupe carried with them as they marched through Venice during
Carnevale. Fourth, because the Paduan dialect and rustic themes, espe-
cially when paired with the licentious Gardeners and Farmers, frequently
entailed the raunchiest of dialogue, there was always a chance that the
comedies would receive a negative response, as was the case for the
performance at the Ducal Palace on 5 May 1523. The reason for the
afrmative accolades garnered by the other performances in Sanutos
diary may have stemmed from the fact that those comedies appeared
during Carnevale (when tolerances for obscenity were higher) while the
performance at the Ducal Palace did not. Thus, it appears that Beolco
performed as Ruzzante during the high season of Venetian festivity but
also during the off-season, and that he did not bother to change the tone
of his performances outside of Carnevale.
From these briefest of diary entries, one learns that Ruzzante had
multiple identities as a theatrical character in sixteenth-century Venice.
He was sometimes a gardener, sometimes a farmer, and always a Paduan
120 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
All were dressed in clothes of crimson velvet like that of the doge and of
brightly colored silk, and hats on their heads some of which were satin and
others were velvet; masks with noses. And each had two servants in front of
them with a torch in each hand, dressed as rustics. There was one of them
with a gold vest, and they all had great charisma [virt]: rst came the
clowns, Zuan Polo and others; of note: Ruzante the Paduan; others dressed
like villagers jumped and danced around quite well; and six dressed like rural
children that sang horrendously, and each of them had some sort of rustic
object in hand, like hoes, shovels, etc., stakes, spades, rakes etc., of note:
horns, pipes, and off-key trumpets. These people made the rounds, through
the Piazza, and then at night with lit torches they went through the grounds
and at one in the night they came to the Palace of the Doge, into the court,
to show off their virtues. Then they went into the Procuratia of Sir Marco da
Molin, the Procurator, who had a party, then in diverse locations, at the end
came a dinner and then great drunkenness. (Sanuto, vol. 35 393)5
Sanutos image portrays a raucous parade that begins outside in the urban
landscape, weaves its way through Venice, and culminates in a formal
presentation within the Palazzo Ducale. Just as vibrant as the images of
the clothes worn by the company members were the sounds emitted from
musical instruments and atonal cantors. Both the visual and aural reso-
nances of the event captured in Sanutos diary offer a hint of the theatrical
fare brought by the yearly festival season.6
This parade, however, no matter how raucous it might have been, had
little power to agitate the status quo, caught as it was in the tightly woven
net of Venetian governance. The Consiglio di Dieci (Council of Ten),
Venices most inuential governing body, strictly controlled the time of
Carnevale that heralded such parades as that of Ruzzante and his fellow
Gardeners. The performances that unfolded in Venice during the months
leading up to Lent were ofcially sanctioned entertainments, some of
ACT I, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE VENICE BUT FAILS 121
which were meant for the public and others of which were intended for
private audiences only. For the public, Carnevale promised violent spec-
tacles such as cow and bear baiting, while, for the upper classes, it offered
private theatrical performances that unfolded in the homes and palaces of
the wealthy.
The parade itself, as a mode of conveyance and mode of performance,
was not an unusual sight by any means. Edward Muirs work on civic
festivity has made it clear that the procession was a typical occurrence
that, more often than not, had entirely to do with re-asserting the power
of the extensive government hierarchy (Muir, Civic Ritual Chapters 6
and 7). Sanutos description of the parade above dates its occurrence as
February 4. Two days prior to that, for the feast of Santa Maria Formosa,
the doge and the 11 principal bodies of government would have paraded
over the same ground covered by the Ortolani. That feast and parade in
honor of Santa Maria Formosa happened yearly, dating from 1273 CE,
and would have packed a spectacular punch as hundreds of immaculately
dressed men walked single-le through the city streets. There were many
parades like that one throughout the year. Ruzzante and his friends may
have attracted attention to themselves, but they were not engaged in any
sort of unusual activity. Overall, the temporal and spatial grid placed over
the entirety of Venices territory on the day of the parade indexed by
Sanuto was constructed and maintained by the legislators and the doge.
Nowhere would that have been more distinct visually and aurally than in
the Piazza San Marco where Ruzzantes parade culminated before enter-
ing the Palazzo Ducale for the lavish dinner.
The texture of this temporal and spatial grid becomes palpable with the
help of Eleanor Selfridge-Fields description of the sight and sound pro-
duced by the Orologio (clock tower) in the Piazza (epicenter of Venetian
festivity) and the meaning produced by its massive size and perpetual
sounding-off:
who was the chief patron saint of the Republic). The doge was depicted with
his symbol of powera ag, a ball, a cross. In the realm of religious
authority, which was depicted on the third tier, the Three Magi, led by a
herald angel, passed before Our Lady who held the infant Jesus in her lap,
while four angels guarded her from above. Celestial domination was sig-
nied on the bottom tier, which contained the clock-face itself. (Selfridge-
Field 57)
As the parade of Ruzzante, Zuan Polo, and the others villani neared its
nal destination, there is little likelihood that it represented an eruption of
disorder or the establishment of an upside down hierarchy of power, even
amidst the festive period of Carnevale. The top position of the two slaves
on the upper tier of the Orologio signied nothing other than domination
of Christian Venice over all heathens, up there for all to see, as was the case
with the parading Ortolani whose display of farming equipment served
only to mark members in the group as belonging to the laboring, rural
classes. Ruzzante, despite his charisma, was just another rustic. Not even
the dissonance of the troupes singing and screaming would have been
that powerful, since the bells all over Venice bathed the entire island in a
sonic soup from morning to night:
The cacophony of civic bells, parish bells, and monastic bells has to have left
few moments of the day completely silent. Bells not only rang out the time
but also conveyed alerts about res, earthquakes, and the deaths of impor-
tant personages. On paramount feasts they rang for hours on end as a sort of
override to the customary signals for work and recess. (64)
Pipes, whistles, and off-key trumpets, like those blown by the Ortolani,
would have become one more layer of sound, a layer that many people
may have ignored as, instead, they stayed attuned to the bells in their
home parishes that notied them of the events of the day.
From this middle-range historical perspective, then, the Ortolani and
other Calza troupes around the city appear as parts within the larger civic
machinery of Venice, acting as entertainment for the richest members of
the society. This scale, however, this mid-range view of the historical
scene, is not the only perspective from which to view either the parade
or Ruzzantes performances. By zooming in further and looking down to
more minute levels of detail, an act of micro-territorialization emerges
from this seemingly well-policed scene. This perspective becomes available
ACT I, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE VENICE BUT FAILS 123
by panning from the Piazza San Marco, where the shadow of the Orologio
overpowers the antics of the parading performers, into the room where
Beolco, as Ruzzante, separated himself from the pack and performed his
monologue known as Lettera giocosa.
The name does not do it justice and may have been afxed to the work
after Beolcos death, perhaps by Stefano di Alessi or even Alvise Cornaro,
his patron, who collected and edited Ruzzantes works into a compilation.
Still, as Zorzi has pointed out, this letter contains more than it appears
to at rst glance. More than a letter in the normal sense, it was a
humorous diversion, composed on the model of a sprolico, namely a
theatrical monologue (Ruzante, Teatro 1595).7 This monologue pro-
vides one of the clearest examples of Ruzzante-as-scenogardener, and it
functions in the present analysis as the portal through which the act of
taking place becomes visible. Taking place is the primary component of
Ruzzantes theatre practice, and from this particular scenario there erupts
a proliferation of gardens within gardens: spaces concealed within other
spaces, each of which is more private and privileged than the space that
envelops it.
With the Lettera giocosa, Ruzzante attempted to insinuate himself into
an extremely secure location, that of the bed belonging to a daughter of an
important man in Venetian politics, Francesco Don. The identity of the
monologues addressee was ambiguous, but the Lettera giocosa concluded
with what Zorzi called an irreverent salute to Don who would himself
become doge in 1545 (1248).8 While the addressee remained subtly
unidentiable, the content of the monologue was explicit. Draped in
double-entendre, Ruzzante introduced himself as a Paduan who proudly
spoke his native tongue because the Florentine language was for preten-
tious sorts. When he reached the business at hand, he singled out a young
woman in the audience and referenced a recent conversation between her
and himself: And so as not to ramble on too much, I want to come
immediately to the matter of your possession, that thing you said you
wanted to give me the other day, when I was there with you, in your
house, in your room . . . (1248).9 This thing was disguised rhetorically
as a plot of land or a garden, but certainly referred implicitly to the
womans virginity. To play up the double meaning, Ruzzante forwarded
his credentials as a gardener:
Im sure that youll be content, because I am well provided with tools for
cleaning. Im good at stabbing, and for digging ditches I have a good
124 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
shovel, very rm in the handle, that, the more I use it, the more rm it gets
and capable of driving into the owerbed, with no pulling out or any
hesitation. So I am sure that, if I use it for a harvest, it will make the most
for you and pull a better harvest and a more pleasing one, from which you
will no longer need other workers at hand. (12481249)10
In terms of the text, the allusions are not difcult to grasp. If the text was
all that existed of this performance, then the complexity of Ruzzantes
spatial operation would remain invisible, but by infusing the words with
the image of the Ortolani parading through the Piazza San Marco pro-
vided by Sanutos descriptions and a knowledge of the interior of the
Palazzo Ducale a more nuanced understanding of the performance begins
to surface.
Pulling out, then, and turning back to the parade as it ambled toward
the Palazzo Ducale, I want to add a feature of the Ortolanis clothing that
Sanuto neglected to mention in his diary entry. Each of the Calza troupes
wore badges embroidered to the back of their cloaks and cloth hoods, or
else on their sleeves, to distinguish themselves from one another. These
badges bore simple images, sometimes designed by noted artists of the
day, as in the case with the Ortolani whose insignia consisted of three
pictorial components: a circle of pearls resembling a sun with its rays
protruding from the circles circumference; a fence, enclosed by the sun,
made from osiers; and, above the fence but still enclosed by the sun, a
scroll in the process of unfurling. In Pompeo Molmentis early twentieth-
century study of the life and works of Vittorio Carpaccio, the author
located this same insignia on the sleeves of numerous characters in the
Venetian painters oeuvre and identied it as belonging to the theatrical
Ortolani troupe by comparing it to two other insignias (Molmenti and
Ludwig 9395). A brief comparison of all three insignia helps here to
connect the symbol of the Ortolani with Ruzzantes mission of inltrating
the most intimate spaces of the Venetian government, of, as it were,
planting himself in a garden where he didnt belong.
Molmenti placed the pearly symbol of the Ortolani next to two similar
insignia: a depiction of St Catherine of Siena in the Garden and the Coat
of Arms of the Counts of Orti of Verona. The rst insignia, depicting St
Catherine, offers an illuminated letter G, such as those drawn by cloistered
monks of the Middle Ages, framing the saint with her arms held up, as if in
ecstasy, being penetrated by rays of light emanating from a vision of Christ
on the cross. These rays pierce her hands, ribs, and feet, and thus
ACT I, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE VENICE BUT FAILS 125
correspond to the wounds of the stigmata, which the saint endured as part
of her ascetic and holy lifestyle. Of interest here is not the reference to
stigmata but the location of the scene itself, for, in this scene, St
Catherines visionary event transpires in a garden. The setting becomes
clear once the eye notices the presence of a low fence made from twigs that
encircle both Catherine and a bed of blooming owers.
In the next insignia, that of the coat of arms belonging to the Counts of
Orti, the fence appears once again, this time encircling one tall and sturdy
tree. Orti, the Italian word for garden(s), links the Veronese Counts to
their heritage as landed noblemen. When looking at all three images side
by side (the Ortolani insignia of pearls, the depiction of Catherine of Siena
in the garden, and coat of arms) the single shared image is that of the fence
made from osiers (or twigs taken from willow trees), young twigs exible
enough to be molded into architectonic structures. The fence establishes
the necessary boundary between the ourishing plant life of a man-made
garden and the ora of ungroomed nature, and thus signies metonymi-
cally the presence of a garden (Ortolani), the site-specic garden stage
upon which mystical events played out (Catherine of Sienna), and a history
of horticultural occupations (Counts of Orti). Molmentis juxtaposition of
the three images by Carpaccio reveals an allegory of the garden as a sight
for mystical, noble, and ignoble deeds alike.
But where precisely was the garden of the Ortolani and Ruzzante and
what sorts of deeds occurred within it? First, that garden appeared on the
backs and sleeves of the parading troupe. Second, and more importantly,
the garden was the site to which the Ortolani paraded, their destination.
The call of this garden enticed them to their performance venue. As Zorzi
has suggested, [t]he agricultural symbols of the Compagnie della Calza
referred generally to the hortus conclusus of rened delights and virtue,
into which they intended to withdraw and with which they would distin-
guish themselves from the profane crowd (Ruzante, Teatro 1591).11 This
hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, was the kernel of Ruzzantes
double entendre.
Historically, as I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the hidden
garden existed both as an actual site and a holy metaphor. It referred to the
enclosed gardens within monasteries from which monks would harvest
their fruits and vegetables for their brethren, but it also referred to the
Virgin Mary and the mystical birth that brought Jesus into the world. A
third, this time secular, valence of this trope unfolds from the miraculous
ability of all women to give birth, and nds a textual precedent in Song of
126 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
were arrested, held captive, and would have been present in the jails
adjoining the Palazzo Ducale until their deaths. To some extent, then,
Angelo Beolcos entry into Venice was a risky venture. Even after several
years of employment with the Ortolani, each house Beolco entered under
the auspices of Ruzzante the performer would have introduced him to
more and more wealthy patricians and a number of private homes, the
interiors of which few members of the Paduan middle and lower classes
would ever have seen, much less family members of spies identied as
traitors against Venetian sovereignty.
Zooming in again to the performance of the Lettera giocosa with these
insights framing the scene, a vision of Ruzzantes tactical spatial operations
begins to form. These operations all happened under the guise of
Ruzzante-as-gardener, and the proliferation of gardens outlined above
creates a topographical map of the scene. First garden: the embroidered
insignia on the clothes of the Ortolani that would have distinguished them
from the other stocking troupes parading around Venice at the time.
Second garden: the hortus conclusus of the virgin Venetian women, one
of whom Ruzzante addressed specically in his performance. Third gar-
den: the secluded interior, or giardino segreto, represented by the inner
sanctum of the Palazzo Ducale.
I recognize the performance space created through Ruzzantes mono-
logue as the fourth garden. Ruzzantes act of taking place; that is, his
theatre practice consisted in a transplanting of Paduan identity into a
strictly Venetian space. One dimension of the transplant appeared in the
vulgar joke made by Ruzzante in which he vowed to tend to the Venetian
virgins garden. In a sense, were Ruzzante capable of sowing his oats into
the noble family lineage of any of the Venetians present, the performer
would succeed in rooting himself in the Palazzo Ducale permanently,
since he would acquire the right to access the palace on a normal basis as
a member of the invited audience instead of as an occasional visitor work-
ing as a carnivalesque entertainer. But this transplanting, rooting, and
taking place required more than rude quips. The transplant relied upon
a sonorous territorialization that unfolded through the sonic transmission
of Ruzzantes Paduan dialect into the ears of his Venetian audience.
Elizabeth Horodowichs research supports this claim when she posits a
symbolic, speculative relationship between the tongue and the penis,
alive in the minds of sixteenth-century Venetian audiences that under-
writes the Republican belief that, political legitimacy was based upon
familial legitimacy and a disciplined sexuality was intrinsic to the
128 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
Because I have never liked the way the show-offs in this world talk, I dont
want to be like those assholes, those people who show how smart they are
and that theyve been to school, like when writing a letter to someone or
whatever, they talk like they do in Florence, or else in Spanish, like the
Napolese, or Hungarian like the soldiers, like they do in the army. (Ruzante,
Teatro 1246)14
In this prologue, Ruzzante set himself apart from his audience and carved
out a separate space from which to address them. Diplomatically, perhaps,
he did not single out the Venetian dialect, but the barb would still have
been sharp. At that time, Venetians in the government were instructed to
speak to each other in the Venetian dialect, but they kept most of their
ofcial records in Latin or Florentine Italian, a fact that reminded Venetian
governors of their many binds to the Papacy and the linguistic tradition of
Florentine scholarship and undermined all claims to the purity of the
Venetian dialect.15 Additionally, the references to the Spanish-speaking
people of Naples and the Hungarian soldiers would have drawn attention
to the threat of the Spanish forces in the South of Italy and the presence of
invading forces in the Veneto since 1509. All of the foreign powers
referenced obliquely in these opening lines aligned themselves with the
League of Cambrai and thus linked by association with Venices eroding
political autonomy. All in all, then, the note sounded by this opening blast
would have been off-key to the ears of the audience.
In the performance, Ruzzante followed his insult of all non-Paduan
languages with his own attempt at the Florentine dialect, which he garbled
badly before breaking into another defense of the Paduan tongue: I
wanted, and it always pleases me, to talk in Paduan, like one does in the
ACT I, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE VENICE BUT FAILS 129
Pavan, of course, because it is the most alive and frank talk that Italy knows
of, this (1246).16 That Paduan was a frank language, nobody in the room
could deny. Ruzzante followed this promise of direct, honest, and frank
speech with his promise to tend to the garden of the anonymous woman
in the audience. By the time he enacted the irreverent salute to Francesco
Don mentioned by Zorzi, Ruzzantes nal words may have even sounded
a little threatening: Well, I thank you all, and I bow to all of you and to
Mister Francesco Don, you hear me (1248).17
At this point, while discussing the form, content, and sonority of
Ruzzantes aggressive speech, it makes sense to consider once again the
obscenities wrapped within Ruzzantes Paduan dialect. As Horodowich
has stated, no other early modern state took as many precautions to
regulate public speech as did Venice, which, with the creation of the
Esecutori Contro la Bestemmia in 1537, dedicated an entire branch of
government to the problem of blasphemy and obscenity (Horodowich 3,
5). Simply put, Blasphemy was a crime that disrupted civic tranquility
(76). Her work in Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice
unearths the pains to which the Republic went to distinguish between
blasphemy committed intelligently and consciously as opposed to words
spoken irrationally and shows how the seriousness of the offense
depended on the quality and intelligence of the person involved (68
69). That is, if Ruzzante knew what he was doing, his barbed and barbar-
ous words would have acquired more illicitness. Furthermore, to protect
the Venetian identity during a massive inux of immigrants coinciding
with the Republics defeat at Agnadello, the Esecutori dened blasphemy
as aggressive language up the social scale, including God and his more
immediate representatives, the Venetian nobility (85). That is, one could
blaspheme without cursing God. What is more, this denition of blas-
phemy suggests that non-Venetian speakers may have been regarded as
blasphemous simply by addressing their superiors in their own particular
languages or dialects.
Mixing the aural dimension of obscenity and the visual realm of the
city outside the Palazzo Ducale, Horodowich also describes the count-
less number of posters plastered on Venetian walls notifying visitors
and locals alike that the Republic would not tolerate obscenities,
whether directed toward God or toward the government. We can
picture how the entire urban fabric of Venice slowly became densely
inscribed with visual reminders about spoken decorum, she says, as
one by one, public sites prohibited blasphemy as a potentially
130 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
the wilderness (the barco, or bosco) within the garden boundaries. (Aben and
de Wit 87)
On its 100 hectares of land and bound by a massive wall, the Cornaro
estate boasted a giant castle, a fountain, a park, and a barchessa, or a type of
enclosed barn in which peasants worked. Seeking to master the environ-
ment on which it stood, groundskeepers sculpted the land within the
villas wall into a series of gardens that offered contemplative bucolic
scenes (Mazzotti 74). In her study of the specic location of Ruzzantes
performance, Antonella Pietrogrande provides a glimpse of the interior
where Ruzzante would have taken place: A true and proper courtly
garden, loaded with humanistic themes is the Barco of Caterina
Cornaro, in the countryside of Altivole, at the feet of the Asolani hills;
fallen into complete ruin, today all that remains is half of a porch of a barn
(6869). In the time of Ruzzante, the villa would have shown scars from
res caused by the Emperor Maximillian, whose troops had tried to steal
Padua away from the slowly weakening Venetian Republic (69).
Somewhere within that villa, likely the sala, Ruzzante held court
through his Prima Oratione. Whereas the villas planners and landscapers
suggested, architecturally, a primary route through which guests should
travel in order to acquire multiple advantageous views of the estates
grandeur, Ruzzante attempted to root himself in one place, directly in
front of the Orations addressee, Cardinal Marco Cornaro, the new Bishop
of Padua, thus stabilizing the audience and offering a single viewpoint
from which to look at the world. That viewpoint would reveal exactly what
the wall around the villa blocked from sight: famine, hunger, and poor
living conditions for Ruzzantes Paduan compatriots.
Ruzzantes oration had three parts. In the rst, the Paduan introduced
himself as the spokesperson for the territory and offered the Cardinal a
long list of Paduas many bounties (Ruzante, Teatro 1188).20 His intro-
duction as spokesperson also allowed for a brief celebration of the Paduan
dialect: [W]e did not want to send a priest or a scholar, those people who
speak according to the grammar of the Florentine language, those people,
you know, that they call doctors [ . . . ] And, just to say it, I wouldnt
change my Paduan tongue for 200 Florentine ones (1184).21 As was the
case with the Lettera giocosa, the establishment of the Paduan dialect as
superior also provided an opportunity for Ruzzante to tie himself to the
land of his birth. Whereas in Venice his dialect chafed against the Venetian
and Florentine dialects of his audiences, in Padua Ruzzantes privileging of
ACT II, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE BACK PADUA 135
So they say you are Cardinal, and that as Cardinal you are one of those who
guards the gates to Heaven, but I dont think thats right. I think those
people have never seen it, Heaven, or the gates [ . . . ] Now, Ill tell you:
Cardinal means a great rich man, that in this world can do as he likes, and
when he dies (because we all die), even if you havent been all that good, you
can go straight to Heaven, and if the gate is barred, you unhinge it [la
scardinate], and you enter straight by any means and every hole. (1196)23
governing the bodies and souls of the good people of Padua. In total,
Ruzzante made seven requests, which ranged from changing the regula-
tions prohibiting work on holy feast days and permitting one to eat before
Sunday mass, to demanding that higher powers castrate all philandering
priests and establish the right to take multiple spouses. Ruzzante accom-
panied each request with a brief rationale. For example, when lobbying for
a dispensation from fasting for all peasants, Ruzzante explained that
digesting stone takes too much effort, inferring that peasants have resorted
to eating rocks as a means for staving off hunger.25 In the case of castrating
priests, he spoke sympathetically of the fragility of human esh. Who can
blame them, really, for being incapable of resisting natures urge? But, at
the end of the day, the children that come of these sexual encounters grow
into an untenable economic burden to the cuckolded fathers forced to
care for these bastards.
All told, Ruzzantes Prima Oratione expressed deep concern related to
the plights of the people outside the villa walls to one person who could
feasibly make changes to the laws that led to the hardship. By rooting
himself in front of the Cardinal and taking up several minutes of his time,
rst to berate him and then to demand changes to religious law, Ruzzante
developed a detailed picture of the enforced sobriety inicted upon the
rural Paduans that he had come to represent. Requests Three, Four, and
Six especially made visible the ways in which the protocols of Catholic
religious practice attempted to regulate the bodies of its ock. Request
Three attacked the prohibition against working during feast days. Request
Four challenged the sin of eating before morning mass. In Request Six,
the call for castration, the image of the peasant that came into focus for the
Cardinal portrayed a malnourished laboring body whose economic means
of subsistence, which sometimes suffered from raising the illegitimate
children produced through the fornication of priests, was directly under-
mined by the demands of the Church.
Overall, the Prima Oratione offered a picture of stark contradictions:
the great title of Cardinal presided over the body of a little man; with all
the bounties offered by Paduas rich soil, the peasants cultivating those
bounties found themselves eating stones to ward off starvation; holy feast
days doubled as periods of aggravated hunger for the lowest classes; the
religious pastors responsible for the spiritual guidance of all men and
women produced hungry illegitimate children whom nobody could afford
to feed. A socially conscious chiaroscuro heightened the drama of this
picture painted through Ruzzantes address.
ACT II, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE BACK PADUA 137
Orationi asserted that a material malaise had settled over the pastoral
landscape. Ruzzantes rst scenographic component, then, dismantled
and blocked from the senses the high-minded literary aura haunting the
Villa Barco and replaced Bembos poetry with a crass demand for new
religious laws and a new mode of life for the masses. By calling for reform,
Ruzzante negated Bembos claim in the third dialogue of the Asolani that
good love would reign eternal.
Having dispelled the literary aura, Ruzzante set to some more archi-
tectonic renovations. By painting such abrasive imagery with his words,
Ruzzante chipped away at the wall around the compound that neatly
distinguished the cultivated interior of the villa from the wilds of the
countryside. The resulting holes functioned as windows that served two
purposes. First, they created a view of the hardships experienced by
peasants and, second, they allowed for famine, pestilence, and unhappiness
to enter, albeit briey. Much like tromp loeil paintings, Ruzzantes win-
dows tricked the eye to force a new perspective. Against the wishes of his
audience, who perhaps would have preferred light comedic banter,
Ruzzante discussed openly the social situation of rural Paduans and,
furthermore, demanded that his esteemed spectators look out beyond
the walls of their charming estate into the lives that the wall blocked
out. Here, Ruzzante is playing with Enzo Coccos notion that, In
order to explore the form of the garden, it is necessary to undertake a
double journey (inside and outside) and to examine the dialectic tension
developing at its boundaries. The ideal conguration of the enclosure
must take into account what is contrary to it (Cocco 53). If the two
Cardinals Cornaro and the events organizers wanted to invite Ruzzante
into their garden, then they would have to invite the outside (the lives of
the people Ruzzante represented as a native villano) inside as well.
Several miles away from Caterina Cornaros villa, at the home of
Ruzzantes patron Alvise Cornaro, stood a Loggia and Odeon where
Ruzzante performed for his patron and where audiences gathered to listen
to music. Giovanni Maria Falconetto designed and decorated both struc-
tures in a style similar to the Villa Barco, displaying allegorical and mytho-
logical imagery from Ancient Greece and Rome. Ruzzantes installation of
windows within the Villa Barco worked in a similar way to Falconettos
illustrated windows on the interior of the Odeon, albeit with a different
purpose. Since the acoustic demands of the Odeon required solid walls,
Falconetto painted tromp-loeil scenes of pastoral lakes and quiet country-
side to sooth the eyes of the audiences while the musicians stimulated their
140 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
ears. Ruzzantes windows in the Villa Barco did just the opposite.
Through a verbal tromp-loeil, the crass talk, vulgar jokes, and tales of
despair opened a viewpoint onto the exterior, thus breaking the sanctity of
the manicured interior. If nobody was going to help make the outside
more livable for the peasants who inhabited it, then Ruzzante could at
least make the Villa Barco less hospitable for its honored guests for the
duration of his performance.
Ruzzante accomplished two more architectural renovations with his
scenobotanical act of taking place. Anticipating its invention by two
centuries, Ruzzantes manifestos in the Villa Barco constituted a prototype
of the English ha-ha. As Christopher Thacker explains, So long as gar-
dens were enclosed [ . . . ] a wall, a hedge, a fence was necessary. And so
long as the garden was thus enclosed, its relationship with the surrounding
land, with the landscape and with nature was inevitably limited
(Thacker 182). Much changed in the thinking about the purpose of the
garden between the time of Ruzzante and the time of the eighteenth-
century English garden, no doubt. Whereas baroque gardens worked
within the same episteme that birthed the hortus conclusus, a mode of
(garden) thinking reliant upon the separation of nature and culture for its
profession of mastery over the chaos of the wild, the Enlightenment
thought behind the English garden, albeit for similar reasons of mastery,
preferred to hide the articial separation between interior and exterior. As
Thacker tells it, The ha-ha solves this problem in one easy process:
instead of a raised enclosing barrier, a sunken barrier, shaped like a ditch
or a dry moat, was dug round those parts of the garden which were to be
made into a pretty Landskip. This ditch created the illusion that the
garden and the surrounding countryside were one and undivided.
Horace Walpole explained the name attributed to these ditches. [T]he
common people called them Ha! Has! to express their surprise at nding
a sudden and unperceived check to their walk (cit. 183). Ruzzantes
unfunny comedic practice expressed in the genre-bending works of the
Prima and Seconda Oratione forced a similar effect. Insults and bleak
portraits of the rural peasantry provoked a loud Ha! Ha! as they removed
the obstruction blocking the seemingly safe interior of the Barco from the
exterior world.
This (p)refunctioned ha-ha enabled a cutting humor. Here is the nal
architectural renovation, which consists of some strategic landscaping.
Gardeners and botanists explain that, when direct rooting and transplant-
ing fails to propagate a plant species, asexual propagation provides an
ACT II, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE BACK PADUA 141
alternative route. One such method, cutting, has existed for centuries. A
cutting is a vegetative plant part which is severed from the parent plant in
order to regenerate itself, thereby forming a whole new plant (University
of Arizona). Having failed to root himself and his demands in the heart
and mind of the elder Cardinal Cornaro during his rst visit to the Villa
Barco, Ruzzante attempted precisely this method of propagating his
beliefs. Severing the main message of the Prima Oratione, he spliced the
cutting into the more direct and franker Seconda Oratione. The asexual
method of propagation attempted through this splicing even underscored
the request for the castration of philandering priests made during his rst
visit without the need to repeat the claim twice. Upon Ruzzantes return
to the Barco, he could hammer home the same discontents but do so
through an entirely new script; only this time around, the humor would
also cut more swiftly to the matter at hand and cut more deeply into the
safety zone provided by the villas seemingly autonomous existence within
(yet distinct from) the Paduan countryside.
Turning from this admittedly more esoteric form of scenography and
architectonic renovation to the more common brand, I want also to attend
to the one scenic diagram that remains amongst Ruzzantes archived
playtexts in the Venetian Marciana library. That image, as Ludovico
Zorzi has suggested, depicted the backdrop to Ruzzantes most infamous
play, Beta (c.1524), and showed three houses standing side by side on a
public street to the view of the audience. While Zorzi has recognized the
images importance for dating the innovations within the evolution of
Renaissance Venetian scenic design and for linking those innovations to
their classical and medieval antecedents, the image also constitutes yet
another fragment in the mosaic of Ruzzantes performances I am pasting
together here. The image from Beta, as well as the composite imagery
pieced together from the performance of the Lettera giocosa and the
tromp-loiel of the Prima and Seconda Orationi, presents the private
home as a key element in Ruzzantes scenobotanic acts of taking place.
The private home was the ground oor of Venetian theatre at this
time, literally the ground on which much theatre stood. In her superbly
researched account of private Venetian homes during the sixteenth
century, Patricia Fortini Brown grounds her discoveries at the cross-
roads of public and private expressed through the notion of politia, a
word that helps frame the political nature of Ruzzantes social tromp-
loeil. The term had two distinct, if related, meanings in the sixteenth
century, she explains. One usage derived from the Greek politeia and
142 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
that message. From the archival fragment depicting Betas scenic back-
drop to this redecoration of Caterina Cornaros Barco, I am suggesting
that Ruzzantes ability to insinuate himself into the private domicile in
order to disrupt the politia of the space and re-orientate the res publica of
the Veneto constitutes another scenographic dimension tucked within his
theatre practice.
As a sort of spatio-temporal anomaly popping into and out of the
archive, as for example in Sanutos diary entries, Ruzzantes theatre relied
on artful modes of entrance and exit. In the textual fragments above, he
made his entrance through his prologues and preambles by establishing
himself as a proud Paduan. After he had had his say, he prepared his exit
through irreverent salutes and ambiguous sign-offs, such as that which he
gave to Don in the Venetian ducal palace. His exits, though, always left
the possibility open that he could return. By calling out Don in the
Lettera giocosa, Ruzzante put a proper name in the place of the ambiguous
addressee of his monologue and thus foreshadowed a future in which
Ruzzante would return as Dons son-in-law; that is, married to his
daughter.
In Prima Oratione, the departure was similarly open-ended: Give me
your hand and promise that I will come again to take the edict. God help
you (Ruzante, Teatro 1204).27 Spoken to the Cardinal, the edict
referred to the authorization of the changes in religious law demanded
by Ruzzante. Acting presumptuously, the performer/reformer intended
the edict to pass into motion at some point in the near future, at which
time he could return and see the new law written in its ofcial form. The
God help you, added an ambiguous phrase. Was it a command that God
should help the Cardinal to do what was right and pass Ruzzantes
reforms? Was it a derogatory comment on the fact that the Cardinal,
despite his place in the religious hierarchy, was in need of Gods help?
Whatever the intention, the closing line left the door open for a quick
return in front of the powerful audience member. When he did return,
however, there was no edict to see since no changes in the religious laws
occurred.
In the monologue that made up the Seconda Oratione, Ruzzantes
harsh critique of the new Cardinal and bleak outlook offered of Padua as
an unweeded garden ended with an ironic twist. Instead of storming out
or offering an ambiguous farewell as in the previous Oratione, Ruzzante
ended with something [he] hasnt been able to do in more than a year,
i.e., to sing and dance and party like they do in Heaven (1219).28 Far
INTERLUDE: TAKING PLACE AS TERRITORIALIZATION 145
from a joyous and entertaining display, the singing and dancing that
followed the political act of taking place would have clashed with the
supremely unhappy state of the peasants outside the space of the perfor-
mance. The clash was one more deconstructive gesture capable, perhaps,
of producing a view of the sad exterior, as if through a window, for the
happy and carefree Cardinal to ponder. The singing ended with
Ruzzantes offer to the Cardinal that, should he ever need someone to
do a days work for him, he would be his man, thus leaving room for a
return performance. It is not likely, however, that the Cardinal ever
thought of Ruzzante again.
This unfolding of theatrical performance accentuated by the produc-
tion of entrances and exits into and out of the private homes in which
Ruzzante appeared underscored the profoundly territorial nature of his
theatre practice. For the brief temporal span of his performances, such as
those in Lettera giocosa and Prima and Seconda Oratione, Ruzzante
worked to reclaim territory for his native Padua, which the Republic of
Venice had subsumed into its interior. To take place in such a way,
Ruzzante acted scenographically. That is to say, he produced a scene
within the private homes, but a scene that would effectively act as political
counter-point to the domestic scene of private politia.
the more expansive garden of Natures bounties. Second, for the peasants
who worked the land and built their livelihood on their relationship with
Paduas land, the multiple blockades erected by religious law that exacer-
bated an already intense era of starvation conditioned by inclement
weather and low-yield harvests created another barrier. Eviction from
the heart of Mister Jesus God, as Ruzzante referred to him, if one ate
before mass; sin acquired by working on Sundays; splitting already thin
rations into the most meager of portions in order to feed children born
from predatory priests. These were all signs of the religious authority
gures barring access to the most immediate of resources: the land.
Because the problem was man-made, Ruzzante gured that men could
correct it and so he pitched his plan to Cardinal Marco Cornaro. From this
perspective, the room inside the Villa Barco where Ruzzante planted
himself for the address was the dominant territory, ground zero, insofar
as the dominating gure of the Cardinal occupied it on that special
occasion. Ruzzantes performance, then, embodied the Deleuzo-
Guattarian concept of territorial counter-point.
Deleuze and Guattari have suggested that territorial counter-points
produced melodic landscapes. Such a product is not a melody associated
with a landscape; the melody itself is a sonorous landscape in counterpoint
to the virtual landscape (318). The virtual landscape in this case was the
ideal humanist projection of everyday life constructed by the Villa Barco.
We can therefore unravel another paradox of Ruzzantes theatre: the
scenographic function of his dialect and frank, direct speech. How does
the sonority of his speaking construct a visual eld? How can his singing at
the end of the Seconda Oratione display the unweeded garden that Padua
had become? By proposing a territorial counter-point to the rhythm of life
mandated by religious laws and broken republican governmentality,
Ruzzantes monologues and other modes of address unveiled the land-
scape that the walls around the Villa Barco, or the Palazzo Ducale for that
matter, kept hidden from view.
Ruzzantes acts of taking place amounted to the production of his own
territory within a privileged site and the erection of a counter-politia
intended to overwrite the private desires that trumped the needs of the
many. When he addressed the audience with his Lettera giocosa, the
territory of Ruzzantes theatre constructed a critical distance between
himself and the audience. Critical distance is a relation based on matters
of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos
knocking at the door (320). From Ruzzantes point of view, the forces of
FINALE: THE RADICAL, THE UPROOTED, AND ART THAT BAROQUES 147
chaos damaging his beloved Padua in the 1520s came not from nature but
from the agents of the Venetian Republic and the Catholic Church, whose
various systems of order produced nothing but misery. Muir cites a speech
made by a local Paduan in 1509 that corroborates this claim of mine.
Against the picture of benevolent republicanism painted by the inuential
Venetian Gasparo Contarini, this Paduan claims that, In that city of
Padua, which should be the city of Paduans, no part remains for them
[ . . . ]. Nothing is ours anymore, but everything has been extorted and
torn from our hands by these Venetians (Muir, Republicanism? 148).
As Deleuze and Guattari put it, How very important it is, when chaos
threatens, to draw an inatable, portable territory (Deleuze and Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus 320). Such were those monologues, dialogues,
letters, and poetic calls for reform offered by Ruzzante and other, now
anonymous, Paduan spokespeople. Works such as Lettera giocosa and the
two Orationi were portable territories that Ruzzante could inate by
haranguing audience members in his dialect and then deate and carry
over to the next house where he would perform. Each individual perfor-
mance enacted a specically Paduan refrain.
upside down. Not accidentally, this very image appeared in the Prima
Oratione when Ruzzante told the Cardinal that, even if he had the power to
choose, he would never take the job of Pope since he would not want to be the
master of this whole reversal world (Ruzante, Teatro 1194).29 Ruzzante
painted the same picture again in the Seconda Oratione when he explained
that, no matter what, man, woman, and all the reversal world would
collaborate to ensure that all necessary natural events come to fruition, even
when the event seemed unnatural like the onset of freezing weather in the
middle of August (1208).30 In the prologue to his play LAnconitana
(c.1534), Ruzzante discussed with his audience the importance of loving
one another during times of war because without love no animal in the
whole upside down world would ever be fruitful, and therefore everything
would disappear (Ruzante, LAnconitana 4041).31 And the phrase appeared
in its most insidious invocation coming from the mouth of Bilora, the char-
acter from the dialogue of the same name, whose anger as a cuckold drives him
to murder an upper-class Venetian man onstage. In that performance, perhaps
the only one to display a murder onstage at any time during the sixteenth
century (with the possible exception of Shakespeares Julius Caesar in
1599), the main character worried that his lover and his nemesis had
conspired to turn everything upside down on him and eventually suc-
cumbed to his worry and descended into the mad rage that led to the
murder (Ruzante, Teatro 574). Whenever Beolco rolled out that picture
of the world upside down, the image designated a state of affairs that
caused all certainty to dissolve beneath uncertainty, all permanence to
cede to impermanence, and every rooted belief to fall out of the very
ground in which it was lodged.
According to Jos Antonio Maravall, this image of the upside down world
lay at the heart of the culture of the baroque. He seized on the image because
if one [could] speak of the world upside down it [was] because it [could] be
right-side up (Maravall 152). The view of the world arose with a type of
historical consciousness that Maravall found in seventeenth-century Spain
where the social disturbances certain groups underwent in their position
and function created a feeling of instability, which translated into a view of a
staggering disorder (152). This same worldview accommodates Ruzzantes
afnity with the peasants who had become displaced in the rst few decades of
the 1500s after Venetian merchants shifted their attentions from sea routes to
land holdings and began to acquire land in the Veneto at extremely low cost
because famine and drought had forced the laborers who owned that land to
sell. The peasants who had built their identities on the land itself lost those
150 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
identities when they sold the farms their families had worked for decades.
Ruzzantes peculiar act of taking place that simultaneously enacted a rooting
within the innermost private spaces and registered an uprooting of a rural way
of life would be, in Maravalls terms, a baroque phenomenon.
Baroque it was, but in the case of Ruzzante and the view of the world
his theatre practice makes visible, Maravalls thesis does not go far enough.
For Ruzzante, the upside down world was not simply a reminder that
things had once been right-side up. For him, the new order of things
obliterated any notion of a world right-side up. The images of the reversal
world offered by Ruzzante stemmed from an even more complicated and
topsy-turvy concept of snaturale, discussed in Chapter 3. Invoked to
identify the overtaking of Paduas nature by Venetian culture, snaturale
also marked the rejection from the earth of everything that was meant to
exist there, including Beolco/Ruzzante himself since his theatre practice
had roots in Paduan territory. In Beolcos scenography of the world
turned upside-down, the more permanent and necessary ones link to
the land, the more tenuous and superuous that link became.32
As Maravalls theory suggested, it is possible that the appearance of
the upside down world throughout Ruzzantes works registered a type
of budding historical consciousness in the performer. Following
Theodor W. Adorno, I dene that consciousness as that thinking
which was concentrated in the indispensable reection on what
[was] and what [was] no longer possible, on the clear insight into
techniques and materials and how they t together (Adorno, On
Tradition 81). Those techniques were the specic disciplinary prac-
tices enforced by ecclesiastical law and Venetian Republican overreach
that Ruzzante pointed out and attempted to reform in the Prima
Oratione, and the materials were the lives and bodies of a specic
swath of the population on whose behalf Ruzzante addressed the
Cardinal.
What makes Ruzzantes theatre and even his historical consciousness
baroque is not, however, simply the visual schema one can analyze within
his scenography; rather, the baroque dimension of Ruzzantes perfor-
mances emerges by thinking through his entire theatre practice, his sce-
nobotanical theatre practice, as an historical objectile. To treat Ruzzantes
life and works as a bundled and static object, sutured in place by the
collated and bound texts of all his works, is to stabilize a much more
dynamic historical process. To re-animate his life and works, to excavate
the complex spatial multiplicity of theatres within theatres and gardens
FINALE: THE RADICAL, THE UPROOTED, AND ART THAT BAROQUES 151
The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold
in other words, to a relation of form-matterbut to a temporal modulation
that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a
continuous development of form. [ . . . ] The object here is manneristic, not
essentializing: it becomes an event. (Deleuze, The Fold 19)
To triangulate these moving objects that have become free of their spatial
molds, Deleuze implemented a line of thought that lead him to the
formula something = x (anamorphosis), cited in the previous chapter
(20). Again, through this formulation, any point of view becomes a
place, a position, a site, a linear focus, or a space of unfolding (19). The
baroque point of view is not something that someone possesses but rather
an active milieu at which one arrives. The point of view is not what varies
with the subject, at least in the rst instance; it is, to the contrary, the
condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamor-
phosis) (20).
This metamorphosis shimmers within Ruzzantes scenographic (de)terri-
torialization(s). After Ruzzante marched into the Palazzo Ducale or into the
Villa Barco, he put his root down. Once planted, by way of the Paduan
dialect, Ruzzante delimited a separate space for himself within the private
space of the home in which he performed. This spatial production unfolded a
viewpoint that, frankly, no member of his audience wanted to see or to
occupy for themselves. The viewpoint he produced within those spaces
revealed an entire territory, a melodic landscape that produced a dissonant
counter-point for the benet or discomfort (depending on how one per-
ceives it) of those in attendance, a cutting satire, a Ha-Ha, a redesigned
spalliere a verdure. Through his direct addresses, a line of sight or linear
152 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
focus opened out onto the world beyond the urban space of Venice proper
or the massive wall surrounding, for example, Caterina Cornaros villa. From
Beolcos subject position as Ruzzante and through the viewpoint he opened
through this theatre practice, one sees the ejection of peasants from the land
they worked, the lives of enforced sobriety in which even the permitted times
for eating were prescribed by absent authority gures, in short, an expansive
vista of a world transgured by Church and State powers. In addition to
opening that viewpoint, Ruzzante also attempted to create a new one, one
that depicted a utopian world modeled on the seven points of reform offered
in Prima Oratione. Of course, that utopia never materialized because, from
the subject position of Cardinal Marco Cornaro and those in power, the
transguration of the world proposed by Ruzzante was simply laughable.
For us in the present, however, what precisely do these performances
make visible? By considering the events of Ruzzantes taking place as the
aggregate or collage of his theatrical offerings, I argue that the name for
Ruzzantes brand of theatre deserves not a noun but a verb, and, more than
that, an innitive verb capable of registering the innite potential of his
theatres effect. Perhaps to produce-alternate-viewpoints, or, as I have
been saying in this chapter, to take-place, or even to baroque. With the
latter, I would add that Ruzzante did not make baroque art; rather, the
historical conditions of the art made him and, as such, his art baroque.
NOTES
1. For information on these troupes and Ruzzantes participation in them, see
Ruzante, Teatro 1590. The standard reference for the Compagnie della
Calza is Molmenti, Venice, its individual growth from the earliest beginnings
to the fall of the republic, trans. Horatio F. Brown (Chicago: A. C. McClurg
& Co., 19061908). The Companies of the Sock distinguished them-
selves from each other in a variety of ways, one of which was by wearing
uniquely decorated stockings. They performed during Carnevale, the Italian
festive period preceding lent. Carne-vale, roughly translated meats ok,
was a time for excessive eating and celebration before the austere and
contemplative weeks leading to Easter.
2. Ruzzante appears as a spokesperson in the Prima Oratione (First Oration,
c.1521). To that task he adds the function of religious reformer in the
Seconda Oratione (Second Oration, c.1528). He appeared as a soldier in
the Reduce (Veteran, c.15091517), the full title of which was Parlamento
de Ruzante che iera vegn de campo (Dialogue of Ruzante who just returned
from the eld). The date for this piece is uncertain. For a tracing to 1520, see
NOTES 153
11. Ruzante, Teatro 1591: La simbologia agricola dei soci della Calza si riferiva
genericamente allhortus conclusus delle rafnate delizie e virt, nelle quali
essi intendevano appartarsi per distinguersi dal vulgo profano.
12. We even learn from Zorzi that the company name Ortolani, along with its
appended signicance, may have been Ruzzantes invention. Zorzi alludes
to that idea when he writes that Il sovrasenso analogico con la sfera degli atti
e degli organi sessuali probabilmente unaggiunta del Ruzante, che si
inserisce nel gusto corrente per il senso equivico. (The overriding analogue
between the garden of delights and the sexual organs is probably an addition
of Ruzantes, who ts it into the taste of the times for its equivocal mean-
ing.) Ruzante, Teatro 1591.
13. See Carroll, Angelo Beolco 4. The phrase crushing defeat is Carrolls, but it
is the most accurate description I can think of. The defeat at Agnadello
represented a major turning point in Venices history and revealed the extent
to which all other dominant powers on the Italian Peninsula and in Europe
desired the land occupied by the tiny island Republic, whose size was
inversely proportionate to the sway it held over that part of the world
from roughly 12001500.
14. Paduan: Perch a no vorae m che i solfezaore del mondo aesse che dire, a no
vuogio fare con fa ierti cogmbari, che mostra de saere e de avere stugi, e co i
manda na boletina o na scritura a qualcun, i ghe favela da zenon, i ghe
favela tosco con se fa in Fiorentinara, e da spagnaruolo, a la politana, e a la
slongarina e a la soldarina, con fa i sold. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Perch io
non vorrei mai che i mormoratori di questo mondo avessero di che dire, non
voglio fare come fanno certi cogliomberli, che mostrano di sapere e di aver
studiato, e quando mandano un biglietto o uno scritto a qualcuno, gli parlano
ricercato, gli parlano toscano come si fa in Fiorentineria, oppure spagnuolo, o
alla napoletana, allungherese o alla soldatesca, come fanno i soldati.
15. Selfridge-Field, Song and Season 48: Strict rules governed conduct of all
members of the government. Among the most important were that nobles
were required to converse with their councils in Venetian dialect (records
were maintained in Latin or Italian) and that nobles were not permitted to
correspond with foreign ministers or ambassadors on pain of death.
16. Paduan: Mo a ho vogi, e s mha sempre m pias, favelare a la pavana com
se fa in sul Pavan, na bota, perch l el p sbraoso favelare che zape Talia, elo.
Italian (trans. Zorzi): Ho voluto invece, e mi sempre piaciuto, parlare alla
pavana, come si fa nel Pavano, certo, perch il pi e vivo franco parlare che
sappia lItalia, questo.
17. Paduan: Mo ben, a ve priego, che marebute na , ald, a vu e messiere
Franesco Don. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Bene, vi prego, e intanto faccio
riverenza, sentite, a voi e a messer Francesco Don.
156 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
18. A bit more on the subject: the vulgar language of Ruzante whose plays
frequently employed words such as cancaro (canker or pox) or pota (twat),
remained incredibly popular: so popular that Galileo Galilei, a long-time
resident in nearby Padua, collected Ruzantes work and read it aloud to his
friends. By the eighteenth-century, Luigi Riccoboni claimed that Ruzante
had introduced to the stage all of the most barbarous languages in Italy.
Despite all the states efforts to control it, foul language remained as popular
as ever (Horodowich 209).
19. Sebbene il coinvolgimento di Ruzante fosse incero [ . . . ]. Qualsiasi ne fosse
stata la ragione, Ruzante non rappresent pi a Venezia e si ritir presso il
circolo raccolto a Padova intorno ad Alvise Cornaro.
20. See also Will Daddario and Joanne Zerdy, When You Are What You Eat:
Ruzzante and Historical Metabolism, Food and Theatre on the World Stage,
eds. Dorothy Chansky and Ann Folino White (New York: Routledge, 2015)
21.
21. Paduan: N gnian guard che am vogi mandare un preve, n uno de quigi
da le enture insofran, che favela per gramego o in avogare orentinesco, de
quigi, siu, che se ciama dotore [ . . . ]. Italian (trans. Zorzi): N dovete far
caso al fatto che non abbiamo voluto mandare un prete o uno di quei tali dalle
cinture color zafferano, che parlano secondo la grammatica o in linguaggio
orentino, di quel tali, sapete, che se chiamano dottori; perch, se essi sono do-
torri, ci sono io che ne ho tre delle torri.
22. Paduan: Mo a me fagi ben po quaso cagare da riso, quando che i dise che a
si grande omo. Mo no ve vegi, morbo i magne? A si vu ben pzolo omo, i no l
sa dire? A si un gran pzolo, e no grandomo. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Poi mi
fan quasi cacare dal ridere, quando dicono che siete un granduomo. Ma non
vi vedono, che il morbo li mangi? Voi siete piuttosto un piccolo uomo, non
sanno dirlo? Siete un gran piccolo, e non un granduomo.
23. Paduan: I sa se lom dire che a si Sgardenale, e che a dir Sgardenale el ven a
dire quigi che ten su leporte del Paraso, che nu a i ciamn cancari. E si gi ha
m vez, igi, Paraso, n le porte, n quigi che i dise cha si vu, che le ten su,
che se ciama cancari, a vorae che l cancaro me magnasse mi; e se mo lha
vez, a vorae che l cancaro i magnasse igi. Deh, Sgardenale, e no el cancaro,
che assegi cav gi uogi [ . . . ]. Mo a ve l dir: tanto ven a dire Sgardenale com
a dire un gran segnore rico, che se d a sto mondo piasere, e com el muore
(perch tuti a morn), se ben vu a no a fato meassa ben, tamentre and de
longo in Paraso, e se la porta pass, a la sgardene, e intr entro per ogne via
e per ogno busco. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Essi sanno solo dire che siete
Cardinale, e che dicendo Cardinale, se dice uno di quelli che tengono su le
porte del Paradiso, che noi chiamiamo cancheri. Vorrei che il canchero man-
giasse me, se quelli lhan mai visto, il Paradiso, o le porte, o quelli che dicono
siete voi [ . . . ]. Ora ve lo dir: Cardinale vuol dire un gran signore ricco, che
NOTES 157
get down and help make it be. [ . . . ] that when something must freeze, itll
freeze in August. For Paduan and Italian, see Note 26 above.
31. [ . . . ] e tanto p che se ne foesse Amore; vache, piegore, scrove, cavale, n altra
biestia del roverso mondo farae m furto. ([ . . . ] since if it werent for Love
neither cows, nor sheep, nor sows, nor mares, nor any other creature in the
whole upside down world would ever be fruitful.)
32. For a different take on snaturale linked more to the linguistic dimension of
Ruzzantes theatre, see Nancy Dorothy Derso, Ruzante: The Paradox of
Snaturalit, Yearbook of Italian Studies (1971): 142155.
CHAPTER 6
The years after the Council of Trent saw an increase in written hostilities
towards the Italian theatre. That the theatre had become a professional
enterprise increasingly visible in piazze, stanze [private homes], and other
performance venues remains the most important explanation of this rise in
162 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
Brother, put an end to the obscene actor; because a dialogue as ugly as that
[from him] has no useful end in terms of your health; indeed it is greatly
injurious, to your health and the health of those around you; therefore they
deserve to be driven out from each land, city, province, and kingdom. (116)5
In this passage, Ottonellis tone is strong and clear. From the actors
mouth spews injurious dialogue that threatens the well-being of the pub-
lic. Yet, in a later section titled Con una breve digressione morale
conferma, che la vita humana una comedia (With a brief moral
digression to conrm that human life is a play), the author writes:
Virtuous and erudite actors are teachers of good morals, and from them you
will frequently hear sentences, that can, like joys, become stored in your
treasure chest of wisdom: similarly, in my opinion, there are those for whom
THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 163
Here, actors teach good morals and dispense wisdom about the great play
of life. Contradictions such as this one (actors spout lth/actors offer
wisdom) run throughout the entire treatise. As the author of such contra-
dictions, Ottonelli manufactures a polemical guidebook for how to act
virtuously while simultaneously modeling that method for his reader; that
is, Ottonelli is the epitome of the virtuous actor insofar as he has trans-
formed amboyant rhetorical schemas and tales of debauchery into a
treasure chest of wisdom.
The acting for which he advocates, however, has little to do with staged
entertainments; rather, the performance Ottonelli calls for is a pure repre-
sentation of God and a manner of acting in accordance with the Jesuit arm
of the Catholic Church. Ottonellis treatise argues for a specic mode of
living life. He seeks to weed out the obscene actors and to cultivate
virtuous ones. With this turn from onstage performance to the perfor-
mance of everyday life, Ottonellis words conjure the familiar baroque
concept of teatro del mondo (theatre of the world). Referencing rst and
foremost a mode of living, this concept structures the individuals perfor-
mance of everyday life, and in Ottonellis hands it equipped individuals
with the skills they needed to succeed in those performances.
The Jesuit teatro del mondo, in turn, merges with the practice of
pastoral care that I articulated in Chapter 4. Within the theatre of the
world, each individual becomes a patient actor: the subject is guided by
the shepherd; the subject is made aware of the path of God; the subject is
transformed into a subject-object, acting within the pasture of the shepherd
but always beheld by an Outside Eye. The actor is not passive in a pejorative
sense, but is, rather, patient in the philosophical sense of a subjectivity
marked by its ability to be affected as well as by its ability to affect. In the
setting of Valcamonicas execution, the priest upon the scaffold, despite his
crimes that brought him to that place, was made to occupy the subject
position of shepherd-guide. The purpose of his performance of reconcilia-
tion was to open a portal to the sacred realm through which each spectator
was to pass if he or she desired salvation. As eventual subjects within the
Kingdom of God, the individuals in the Piazza San Marco likewise became
subjectivated, each was transformed into the subject of God, and each was
made visible as an actor upon the Venetian stage set by Benedetto Palmio and
the Society of Jesus. Ottonellis manuscript illustrates another dimension
164 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
CRITICAL MODELS
The rst model took the form of oating theatres called, believe it or not,
teatri del mondo (theatres of the world). The second was a proposed island
that would be constructed to oat within the basin of Saint Mark and
house diverse theatrical spectacles. An analysis of the aesthetic dimension
of both these structures and their allegorical functions within the Venetian
CRITICAL MODELS 165
For these festivals on the water [ . . . ] the Compagni [della calza] presented
oating machines or theatres, the so-called teatro del mondo, on which they
had dances, serenades, dinner theatre (usually dialogues). Generally, the appa-
ratuses were vast stages or lofts raised off the ground (soleri), that were adjacent
to and attached to the windows of abutting homes (palazzi) that faced the
Grand Canal or else that stood on Giudecca, and were linked in turn to the
opposite bank of the canal with bridges built on [top of] boats or ships giving
the capacity to cross the Grand Canal or the Giudecca Canal, and on these
[actors performed], quite frequently, skits (momarie). (Urban 488)8
These oating theatres tended to have round oor plans (mirroring the
circularity of the world) as well as porches surrounding the playing spaces
and balustrades on the porches to help keep people from falling into the
water. Built by well-known architects of the day, these structures may have
appeared to Venetians as man-made microcosms of the entire world.
These impressive theatres were frequently used to entertain important
visiting heads of state and attracted the most famous performers of the
day, such as Ruzzante, but they were unlike other Venetian theatre spaces
in the sixteenth century in that they were not always deconstructed
immediately following their use. Andrea Palladio built a teatro del
mondo in 1565 for a production of Antigone, possibly translated by
Luigi Alammani, that remained constructed for some time until it even-
tually succumbed to re, like so many other wooden structures in Venice
before it. The semi-permanence of these teatri del mondo made them the
forerunners of the Tron and Michiel theatres built around 1581. It is
notable but perhaps not surprising that in Venice, a oating city, the rst
theatre structures to survive beyond a one-time use were oating
theatres.9
Writing on the aesthetic singularity of these oating theatres, Gino
Damerini described that which set them apart from the grand architecture
in Venice in the sixteenth century. An absolutely outstanding character-
istic of this dynamic architecture, he wrote, [was] the most absolute
indifference to the outside of the theatres. The theatres [were] the salt.
166 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
The theatre will be made with large stones and it will be open for all
spectacles and festivities. Entrance will be permitted to all, whereas now
that is not the case. If one wants to go see some celebration by the compagni
de calza, or to hear a play, he or she is not permitted if that person is not of a
certain class. This is not in keeping with what is just and honest, it is partisan.
(Mangini 26)12
suggested that, [t]he theatre isolated in the water seemed an emblem for
the city of Venice itself: theatre and city displayed their perfection, their
uniqueness. [ . . . ] The lagoon was thus transformed into an ideal gar-
den (Tafuri 157).
The traditions on which Cornaros project rested were primarily classi-
cal. The architect sought to tie Venetian political life back to the res
publica dictated by Roman law, something he planned to accomplish
through a diverse program of events inside his island theatre:
And in such a piazza one will be able to have bears ght with dogs, wild
bulls with men, and similar spectacles: but other than that one will see
[reconstructions of] wars like those this city has fought; it will be a
beautiful thing to see and for visiting foreigners to see [ . . . ] but also
in this same piazza we will easily be able to bring in the water and to let
it out again so as to present beautiful naval battles like they did in Rome.
(cit. Mangini 26)13
This will be a great spectacle and [present] the most beautiful perspective,
the widest reaching and most diverse [spectacle] that anyone has ever seen
or that anyone could ever see anywhere else in the whole world [ . . . ] there
are no other cities like this one, none as virginal [ . . . a spectacle such as this]
would nominate this city as the capital of the world for its beauty and
strength that no other place could match. (27)14
In the end, however, the governors did not vote in favor of Cornaros
plan. The theatres relatively modest price tag (50,000 ducats15) could not
168 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
in [the theatre] everyone would have his place and step, as though God had
given it to him and nature required that everyone should enjoy it. The
theatre, a symbolic place that echoes the larger text of the universe, becomes
the gathering place of all social classes and a place of reection and repre-
sentation, above all, of the natural and untouchable hierarchies that govern
the cosmos and the civil order based on those hierarchies. (145)
the teatro del mondo constituted the stage on which played out the Jesuit
repertoire of conversion, if theatre had such a strong place within Jesuit
thinking, then how does one account for the Societys active dislike of
staged performances? This dislike registered in the Societys actions imme-
diately upon their arrival in Venice. Jesuits used their positions as spiritual
guides to access the inner sanctum of Venetian governance and to inu-
ence legislation against the recitation of comedies and other theatrical
representations.18 Gaetano Cozzi writes of the time prior to the establish-
ment of permanent theatre buildings when Father Benedetto Palmio was
especially antagonistic to the public performances during Carnevale. In
1559, Palmio succeeded in convincing Venetian governors to quell the
disturbances caused by those events (Cozzi, Venezia barocca 298).19 The
jubilee year of 1575 presented another opportunity to close theatres, since
the moral degradation caused by theatrical performance went contrary to
the spirit of the holy year. Reading between the lines of the Council of
Tens decree of that year, one senses the hand of a Jesuit adviser:
Having to take up with all due reverence and devotion the most holy jubilee,
conceded to this city by the innite mercy of the Lord God by means of the
supreme Pontiff, according to that which was published the rst of the
month, it is convenient to remove all those impediments which can make
the people of this city less devoted.20
Sometimes, however, the Jesuit inuence failed to stie the favorite pas-
time of the Venetians, as was the case in the years 1568 and 1573 when the
Council of Ten permitted theatrical performances.21 But once permanent
theatre buildings were established, the Jesuits seem to have increased their
efforts to safeguard corporeal and spiritual safety.
Eugene J. Johnson has discovered that, under these auspices of concern
for public safety, [c.1581] the Jesuits had convinced the Venetian Senate
to order the destruction of the theatre [in San Cassiano] to avoid the
danger of someones setting re to it during a performance, thereby
sending up in smoke a large part of the Venetian patriciate (938). The
Jesuits may have been concerned about the mortal lives that a re could
claim, but they were likely more concerned about the moral and spiritual
depravities happening within the private boxes of those permanent theatre
buildings. By 1583, according to the ambassador from France, Andr
Hural de Maisse, the Jesuits possessed to such a degree the consciences
of some of the most inuential senators of the Republic that they could
ACTUALIZING THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 171
The grade [i.e. difculty] of this class cannot easily be dened by certain set
terms, for it aims at an education in perfect eloquence, which includes two most
important subjects, oratory and poetics (out of these two, however, the leading
emphasis should always be given to oratory) and it does not only serve what is
useful but also indulges in what is ornamental. Still, by and large, it can be said
to consist in three things especially: rules for speaking, for style, and for scholarly
learning. Even though the rules can be found and studied in a very wide range
of sources, only Ciceros books on rhetoric and Aristotles, both the Rhetoric, if
it seems good, and the Poetics should be taught in the daily lesson. (155)
This passage highlighted more than just the subject matter and names of
texts within the theatrical dimension of Jesuit pedagogy. The art of
rhetoric clearly had a particular aim. It cultivated an understanding of
ornamental language so as to help a speaker persuade an audience of a
certain truth. This skill had immediate applications in the eld of preach-
ing, and, indeed, Jesuit preachers were known for their persuasive abilities.
Jesuit instructors taught and cultivated these persuasive abilities:
Talent ought to be taken into account, [as well as] who should be granted
two years of theology. For if they are average in humanistic literary studies,
ACTUALIZING THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 173
and they are endowed with no other talent, then they will be sent to the
course in case studies as well. But if among these anyone displays real talent
for preaching or administration along with distinguished virtue, then the
provincial along with his consultors [sic] ought to deliberate about whether
that person should be given two years of theology beyond philosophy so
that the Society might be able to make use of his service with greater
condence and to greater effect. (16)23
Jesuit schools opened their doors to rich and poor alike. From this diverse
eld of students, Jesuits harvested the best and the brightest, those who
were most capable of serving the Society as either preachers or adminis-
trators. The rector could funnel the most capable students into a channel
of courses in which they would learn specic rhetorical, theological, and
philosophical skills and, embedded within each of these disciplines, thea-
trical abilities of persuasion played a vital role.
The paradox of theatre within the Jesuit mission, then, once again, was
not a paradox at all. Rather, specic elements of theatre were banished and
others were cultivated. The theatre as such was not the target of Jesuit
scorn. Public theatre was a gathering of bodies in one space. Thus, the
communication of multiple thoughts simultaneously through languages
semantic value (speech), its penchant for double meaning (rhetoric), and
the bodys gestural vocabulary became means of disseminating ideas that
were potentially hazardous to the spiritual health of individuals. But the
Jesuits knew how to turn these disadvantages into opportunities. Within
the framework of Jesuit pastoral care, theatre could become a site in which
the polyvalent communication of theatrical language became an instru-
ment for transmitting the complex teachings of the Catholic faith to the
minds and souls of audiences. Theatre also presented an opportunity to
retrain the body of individual actors and to tune those bodies to the
invisible presence of God in each persons life. In the words of William
H. McCabe S.J., Thus, following arts way, Jesuit plays helped the
audience to grasp abstraction through the senses (McCabe vi). They
did this through school theatre but also in sacred representations within
churches that boasted elaborate stage sets, scenery weighing tons, forests
imitated in perspective, the sea in motion, palaces aame reduced to
smoke and ashes, tableaux and scenae mutae (changing scenery), dream
scenes enhanced with music and dance, machines for deities to descend
from and to disappear into clouds (Oldani and Yanitelli 20). Audience
members present at Jesuit theatre performances were drawn into the
174 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
allegory of saints lives, the trials of Jesus Christ, and other didactic
narratives created by Jesuit playwrights for the express purpose of over-
powering the senses.
More importantly, however, the Jesuit theatre extended beyond the
recitation of plays, dialogues, monologues, and elaborate spectacles. Much
scholarship exists on the spectacles that unfolded in churches during
Carnevale to combat the licentious street performances in Venice,
Rome, Naples, and other cities across Italy.24 There is also a long list of
works on the particulars of school drama.25 Yet what of the Jesuit theatre
of everyday life that becomes visible through this frame of the teatro del
mondo? The schematic to the mechanical workings of this practice of
everyday life shows up in Ottonellis Della Christiana Moderatione Del
Teatro, and this is why the document deserves closer scrutiny. There, the
main goal is conversion and exomologesis. Conversion entailed a turning
of ones inner self toward the entryway of the Jesuit theatre of the world,
and exomologesis, what Foucault identied as the dramatic recognition
of ones status as a penitent, entailed a never-ending performance of the
truth acquired through conversion (Foucault, Technologies 41).
Reaching back to the term dehiscence introduced at the beginning of
this chapter, both conversion and the performance of truth required a
painful and laborious tenure of self-study, a tearing at ones seams in order
to free the seeds of life from within.
The spatial dimension of conversion, or turning toward the truth, is
deceivingly simple. The individual is either outside the Church or within
it. If the soul has strayed to the exterior, the soul must be brought back, an
action that requires the guidance of a shepherd toward the salutary process
of spiritual retreat. Within this dichotomy of inside/outside, however,
unfolds a complex repertoire of conversion that doles out theatrical roles
for both the shepherd and the penitent. The shepherd deploys a strategy,
in the strict sense offered by Michel de Certeau: the spiritual guide
postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base
from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats
[ . . . ] can be managed (de Certeau, Practice 36). This autonomous place
is the interior of the Church. In response to this strategy, the individual
responds by embarking on a quest for the self that requires retraining how
one senses the world, how one understands the senses, how one practices
self-discipline, and how one might avoid the numerous obstacles blocking
ones way to the interior of the Church, a quest that, confounding as it
may seem, requires abdicating the self to nd the self.
ACTUALIZING THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 175
[T]ouched one day with celestial inspiration, [the priest] withdrew his soul
into spiritual retreat (pieg lanimo ad un poco di ritiramento spirituale) and
he happily began the exercises that Saint Ignatius, illumined by heaven and
helped in particular with the favor of the Great Queen, the Mother of God,
composed in that little book of gold, by the approval in the Bull of the Vicar
176 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
of Christ, Paolo III, those exercises that, other than praising God, exhort the
Faithful to devote themselves to practice and instruction, and to prot from
their souls. (269)
This practice of conversion begins with the act of folding in upon oneself.
Ottonelli describes this as a retreat of the soul.27 Folding into spiritual
retreat initiates the practice of the Spiritual Exercises. Once involved in the
Exercises, the priest generated in his soul an implacable hatred against
this old life, with which he severely castigated his past foolishness (269).
That is, the act of folding back upon himself brings the priest into contact
with two selves. One is the priest who had strayed from his path, and the
other is a new, improved subjectivity.
To vanquish the old self and become the new, the priest must manifest
his realization of past foolishness to the public. Thus settled, he put
around his neck a big rope, went into the Church where many people
were gathered, humbly prostrated himself on the ground, and asked for
forgiveness from the People for all of his grave errors and scandalous
excesses (270). Primarily a tool for self-agellation, the rope doubles in
Ottonellis narrative as a noose that the priest has to wear, as if to signify
that his salvation and absolution are not quite complete. Not until making
a public demonstration of the knowledge gained through the enactment
of the Spiritual Exercises does the mechanism of absolution begin to
function.
Reconciliation concludes with a nal performance of guilt. More than a
simple declaration of having once sinned, the priest must regain his proper
position as a shepherd capable of leading the ock:
[W]ith ardent words, and humble prayer he asked of all the City to pardon
his many, grave offenses, made in his sad, impure, and scandalous life. He
completed all of this: he appeared in the pulpit in front of the eyes of the
People, all spectators of the scenic Priest; and he, as in a scene on the stage,
but a very different scene than the previous profane and impure one, began
to make a true character (il personaggio di vero), extraordinarily penitent: he
showed his pallid face; kept his eyes modestly toward the ground; on his
neck hung a horrid noose, and each part of his humble body passed away,
contrite, and greatly despising his old ways. That sight, without thought or
hesitation, immediately drew tears from the eyes of the Spectators: and he
who rst moved the People to laugh now vigorously excited people to tears
and compunction. (271)
ACTUALIZING THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 177
Whereas Aristotle did not believe in the autonomy of the soul, as noted in
De Anima (It is not unclear that the soul (or certain parts of it, if it
naturally has parts) is not separable from the body), and sought to steer a
course between Platos dualism and strict materialism, Aquinas keeps the
architectural relation between form and matter (soul and body) but
argues, in line with Christian dogma, that the soul may in fact live without
the body. Thus, Aquinass philosophical understanding of the individual
builds upon the core beliefs of ontological foundationalism.28
Given this foundation, the role of telos in Aquinas acquires great
importance. The human being, understood as a synthetic necessary
unity grounding a set of potentialities, capacities, or dispositions, is
ACTUALIZING THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 179
obligated (on a material level) to achieve a specic end or telos. Citing the
explanations of Henry Veatch, Lisska explains that, these ends ought to
be obtained because of the very dispositional structure of human nature.
The ends are not arbitrary but are determined by the natural kind of
human nature itself. Obligation is rooted in the ends themselves (628).
Certainly schooled in this philosophical tradition, Ottonelli offers a unique
twist to the typical story by including performance (acting) as a crucial
mediating praxis in mans realization of these ends. For him, mans
dispositional structure as a subject enscened before God obligates the
cultivation of ones identity as virtuous actor. Only when the scenic priest
becomes the virtuous actor does he achieve the end set out for him. If
there is an ontological foundationalism underpinning human nature, this
ontology will require a rational and concerted practice to re correctly,
and Ottonelli published his work in order to endow his readers with the
required rationality.
Aquinass uptake of Aristotelian philosophy sutured his discussion of
telos to the eld of ethics, insofar as mans chief aim was the achievement
of the Good, albeit a Good modied through several centuries of
Christian deliberations over Hellenic philosophy. But, within this philo-
sophical genealogy, and specically its understanding of the role played by
reason in the acquisition of the Good, the individual must rst choose the
path toward the Good. Since Aristotelians distinguished between theore-
tical reason (the knowing aspect of reason) and practical reason (the
choosing), then logically choosing or undertaking [will depend] on
prior knowledge; one can only choose or undertake that which is a good
after knowing that it is a good (629). Whereas for Aquinas the Word of
God functioned as a compass to direct the formation of the individual as
he or she grew into the end fashioned ahead of time by God and provided
the material for this choice, for Ottonelli the Word had to be enacted
and, furthermore, that enactment had to be witnessed and veried by
God.
If for Aquinas bonum est in rebus (good is in things), then for
Ottonelli and the Jesuits this thing is more properly a space. Borrowing
from the Old English denition of thing as meeting, assembly, coun-
cil, the Good thing becomes the space in which one nds the higher
good of virtuous acting, the space of the Jesuit theatre of the world laid
out by God. Not a res publica, as discussed in the previous chapter, but a
res ecclesia, this thing appeared on Earth as a meeting place wherein the
soul will be governed according to the Good. Two more aspects of
180 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
that, within the Jesuit theatre of the world, individuality is replaced with
subjective apperception that cultivates an I through the multiplicity of
cases of conscience, which, because the virtuous acting-in-accordance-with
marks each and every reformed actor in this theatre, transforms the I
immediately into a We. The Society is the epitome of this We. Its plurality
is really a complex unity: a One(ness) within God.29
Once this theatre begins to unfurl it displaces the terrestrial world to a
status of outside. This is the spatial dichotomy of Jesuit conversion within
the framework of pastoral power. From the terrestrial world, the subject
folds into the oneness of God and through the Spiritual Exercises locates
his or her place within the interior of the Church. This activity simulta-
neously delimits the terrestrial world as exterior, as that which exists out-
side the belief system of the Church.
The Jesuit teatro del mondo thus opens, through the development of a
new perspective on the world and ones place in it, a world in which Gods
presence demands a pure and transparent mode of acting that always manifests
Gods presence through deeds and decisions of the individual. This perspec-
tive only becomes possible through spiritual retreat and the enactment of the
Spiritual Exercises through which a new subjectivity is created within the
Church. The resulting locality is a singular interiority, a dense singularity,
one that encloses and produces exteriority yet has no exit and no outside for
the subject. It is not a theatre in the world, like the oating theatres, Cornaros
ideal theatre island, or Venice itself, all of which present spectacles of the baser
sort. Instead, it is a theatre of the world insofar as it replaces the secular world
with a stage upon which each step in accordance with the teachings of the
Church reveals ones identity as a virtuous actor. The Jesuit theatre of the
world is the world from the perspective of the converted or reformed Catholic.
This entire apparatus resembles the organization within medieval monasteries
through which monks learned to become virtuous actors, but there is an
important difference. The Jesuits, through the application of the Spiritual
Exercises, made the monastic institution portable. People no longer had to
go to the monastery. The Jesuits brought the discipline of the monastery to
each and every sheep in the ock.30
CULTIVATING AFFECTIVITY
Ottonellis story was a ction, but the mobile institution of conversion brought
by the Jesuits to Venice in the sixteenth century was not. The real-world
conversion process of the Spiritual Exercises, which played a crucial role but
CULTIVATING AFFECTIVITY 183
The Arch-Jesuit modeled the Exercises on his own conversion, which had
led him into his spiritual life and away from his early days as a soldier in
Spains Basque country. After receiving a leg wound in a battle, Loyola
spent a great of deal of time in recovery and read about the lives of the
saints and the life of Jesus Christ. OMalley has described the point of no
return for Loyola, whose battle wounds portended a life within the
Church:
[T]he rst part, which is devoted to the consideration and contemplation of sin;
the second part, which is taken up with the life of Christ our Lord up to Palm
Sunday inclusive; the third part, which treats of the passions of Christ our Lord;
the fourth part, which deals with the Resurrection and Ascension. (de Loyola 2)
Thus, the exercitant (he or she who enacted the Exercises) occupied his or
herself with a deep contemplation of Christs life. The aim was to learn
how to represent this life as best one could, to consider the decisions Jesus
had to make, and to learn how to make such decisions for oneself. Loyola
and all his followers trained themselves how best to imitate Christ and
then became the guides who led the exercitants through the four-week
program of spiritual renewal.32
To learn how to imitate Christ, the exercitant had to discover a new
rationality by way of an emotional reawakening. It was not enough to
know of Christ or to know the facts of his life. The challenge of Loyolas
program was to become aware of the movements of the soul and the
emotions within the bodys interior. Discerning the movement of the
soul would allow an individual to surmount the obstacles of fallacious
reasoning placed within the individual by evil spirits. OMalley writes that
the text of the Exercises:
CULTIVATING AFFECTIVITY 185
manifests that the engaging of powerful emotions like grief, fear, horror,
compunction, compassion, contentment, admiration, gratitude, wonder,
joy, and especially love is the nal and foreseen outcome of its various
meditations and contemplations, especially the more climactic ones. The
individual should feel bestirred by great feelingand at appropriate
moments moved even to tears. (OMalley S.J. 41)
Tears, as mentioned above, were crucial to the process since they became
material signs of the stirring of the soul. Thus, through emotional
response to specic scenes of contemplation, the individual undergoing
the Exercises would begin to awaken a new sense of self and the spiritual
guide could follow the process of awakening by monitoring the external
signs of the exercitants internal movement.
Proof of the emergence of a new sense of self in the many people who
underwent the Exercises comes from the meticulous records kept by Juan
de Polanco S.J., Loyolas secretary and early archivist of the Jesuits worldly
deeds. His Chronicon yields numerous case studies of interest to the current
analysis of the affective force of the Spiritual Exercises. Here is one example,
a record from the opening of a Jesuit school at Tivoli in 1550:
How did the Jesuits perform such miracles? What were the specic steps
that led one to the creation of a new self, such as Father Miguels
exercitant in the passage above?
One procedure at the heart of such miracles was the mental representa-
tion of place that occurred throughout the four weeks of the Exercises.
Loyola mentioned this for the rst time in the rst prelude of the rst exercise:
place where the object is that we wish to contemplate. I said the material place,
for example, the temple, or the mountains where Jesus or His Mother is,
according to the subject matter of the contemplation. (de Loyola 28)
The Spiritual Exercises were presented to so many people that our college
was never without someone making them, and sometimes three or four
people at the same time. When some people departed, others took their
places. Of this number there were hardly one or two who did not set their
hearts on entering a more perfect state of life. (de Polanco 388)
Father [Pierre] Favre was at Worms and from there traveled to Speyer and
nally to Regensburg, accompanying the court of Charles V. He did no
preaching, but accomplished so much by the ministry of the sacraments of
CULTIVATING AFFECTIVITY 187
occurs when, after removing the mask, we confront exactly the same face
as the one on the mask. (iek 109)
about the scenic priest, the true character the priest discovers is less
important than the life he will produce from the moment of his conversion
to the moment of his death. The excesses that Ottonelli mentions in the
subtitle to his book (Per avvisare agni Christiano a moderarsi da gli eccessi
nel recitare [In order to advise each Christian to moderate the excesses of
recitation]) refer to the excesses of the self that become visible through the
enactment of the Spiritual Exercises and that one always keeps on hand as
a reminder of the improper mode of life. It is the job of each Christian to
moderate these excesses of the self. Far from decrying the obscenity of all
theatrical representations, Ottonelli sets guidelines for cultivating a true
representation that will bring the sheep back within the ock (thus reveal-
ing the terrestrial world as literally ob-scene [exterior to the true scene in
the theatre of the world]) each sheep acting in unison and following the
Jesuit exhortation to depart from desolation in order to dwell in the
Consolation of Christs Love.
Nesbitt, ushers the concept of internal difference into his own philosophi-
cal system as an article of faith. He never explains how it works, but
insists that it is there, working as a pure positivity within the foundational
structures of thought, being, and event. Internal difference becomes an
ontological foundation of Being in Deleuzes philosophy, but nowhere
does he excavate that foundation and inspect it.
Ellrich reveals this problem in more detail by magnifying the moments
in Diffrence et Rptition and Nietzsche et la philosophie where Deleuzes
desire to move beyond Hegel allows the negative (the prime mover of
internal difference) to remain in the picture surreptitiously. One of the
goals of Difference and Repetition is to overcome Hegels reliance on
negation and, through this act of overcoming, articulate negationless
difference. As Ellrich says:
The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not
go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to
contradict the traditional norm of adequacy [ . . . ]. It indicates the untruth
of identity [Er ist Index der Unwahrheit von Identitt], the fact that the
concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. (Adorno 5)
This untruth of identity pervading all of the material world, what Adorno
calls non-identity, forces him to confront many of the same philosophical
problems Deleuze confronted, but he chooses to do so by tarrying with
the sedimented history of each concept he treats, which, in turn, pulls the
negative back into the foreground of his inquiry where it reveals itself as
the aporia between matter and thought. As Nesbitt says, Adorno is a
philosopher of the immanence of thought and matter, but not of their
identity (Nesbitt 81). For Adorno, dialectics names not a symmetrical
system of opposition but the ontology of the wrong state of things and
becomes the means of describing the historical becoming of the aporia
that rests at the heart of the thoughtmatter relationship.
Recall that the exercitant, upon completion of the spiritual exercises,
would commence living this wrong state of things, divided between his
new self and the self which he was no longer. This division never resolved.
Instead, as Barthes argued, it was the burden of the virtuous actor to carry
around the divided self until such time as God marked the correct self.
God actually marked the true self at each moment of the day and thus
required the virtuous actor to present the choice at each moment of the
INTERNAL DIFFERENCE AND THE PRACTICE OF NON-IDENTITY 197
post-Trent papal authority, and the global spread of the Society of Jesus,
this mystical practice forces a rude awakening. In other words, Ottonellis
scenic priest marks for us in the present the historically relevant moment at
which non-identity spreads through a repeatable performance practice, the
moment when the spiritual maturation of Christian self forces an unsutur-
able wound into the identity of the Christian subject.
NOTES
1. Ottonelli appare non come un teologo o come uno scrittore, non come il mite
gesuita che i teorici dellarte amano immaginare, ma come un uomo
dazione, un guerrigliero in lotta contro il teatro, e specialmente contro il
ruolo che vi ricoprivano le donne. All Italian translations in this chapter are
mine unless cited otherwise.
2. Connors 30: Prynne, come Ottonelli, contrario a tutti i mali della societ:
danze, dadi, commedie, pitture lascive, mode licenziose, trucchi, brindisi,
capelli lunghi, riccioli, parrucche, pastorali amorosi, musiche effeminate,
ecc., tutti sono passatempi pagani.
3. Prynne lOttonelli inglese, e viceversa.
4. Both quotations from Connors 29: Lo sorprendiamo a Catania nel 1635,
mentre fa interrompere una commedia dove si rappresentava un gesto osceno.
Lo troviamo poi a Palermo insieme ad un altro gesuita (G.B. Carminta)
intento a condannare un povero ciarlatano alla galera per avere messo in
scena un gesto osceno.
5. Fratello ponete hormai ne alle comiche oscenit; perche una conversatione cos
brutta non utili punto alla salute vostra; anzi grandemente perniciosa, &
voi, & a prossimi vostri; onde meritate dessere scacciato lungi da ogni
Terra, Citt, Provincia, e Regno.
6. On the word, comedia: the word refers to a stage play. The literal translation
would be comedy, but that word now carries the connotation of humor-
ous. To avoid that connotation, I translate the word as play, the ambi-
guity of which lies at the very heart of Ottonellis treatise. At the same time,
as I discuss later in the chapter, the term comedy does have its proper
place in Ottonellis scheme.
7. In this chapter, I will capitalize the Spiritual Exercises when I speak of those
created by Ignatius Loyola. Spiritual Exercises (in italics) will denote the
book that contains the exercises. All other spellings, most frequently the
lower-case spiritual exercises, refer to the concept of these exercises in
general.
8. Per queste feste sullacqua, oltre che di barche particolarmente ornate, i
Compagni si servivano di macchine o teatri galleggianti, i cosiddetti teatro
NOTES 199
del mondo, sui quali avevano luogo danze, serenate, cenee rappresentazioni
sceniche (generalmente momarie). Inoltre, apparati consueti erano vasti pal-
chi a pi piani (i soleri), che erano addossati e comunicavano attraverso le
nestre con i palazzi prospicienti il Canal Grande o quello della Giudecca,
collegati a loro volta allopposta riva del canale con ponti costruiti su barche o
navi, in considerazione che si dovesse attraversare il Canal Grande o il Canale
della Giudecca, sui quali avevano luogo, assai di frequente, le momarie.
9. For more on the Palladio theatre specically and the semi-permanence of the
teatri del mondo more generally, see Lina Padoan Urban, Teatri e teatri del
mondo nella Venezia del Cinquecento [Theatres and theatres of the
world in sixteenth-century Venice] Arte Veneta vol. XX (1966): 137146.
10. Caratteristica assolutamente eccezionale di questo dinamismo architettonico
la pi assoluta indifferenza per laspetto esterno dei teatri. I teatri sono le
sale. Non gli occorrono, fuori, n colonne, n peristili, n timpani. Per lun-
ghissimo tempo questa norma decisamente antimonumentale.
11. [S]e potr condurvi facilmente una fontana di acqua dolce viva e pura, et in
diversi luoghi di essa [ . . . ]. The document exists in ASV, Savi alle Acque,
Busta 986, lza 4, cc.2325. It is partially reprinted in Nicola Mangini, I
teatri di Venezia (Milano, 1974) 2628 and then printed in its entirety
(with some corrections) in Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance,
trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The
MIT Press, 1989) 159160.
12. Il modo sar con fare uno theatro di pietra grande e commodo per tutti quelli
a tali spettacoli e feste: e saranno le intrate aperte a tutti, che hora non sono: e
se uno vuole entrare hora a vedere qualche festa de compagni de calza, o per
sentire una comedia non pu entrare se non dello populo frosso: cosa che non
tiene n del giusto n dellhonesto, ma del partigiano.
13. [E]t in tale piazza si potr fare combattere orsi con cani: tori selvaggi con
huomini, e simili spettacoli: ma oltra quelli si veder fare la guerra come hora
si fa, e si usa in questa Citt; che cosa molto bella da vedere e molto
apprettata da signori forestieri [ . . . ] ma oltra in quella medesima piazza si
potr facilissimamente far intrare lacqua e uscire, per poter farvi un bello
navale come faceano Romani.
14. E questo sar un spettacolo et una prospettiva la pi bella, la pi vaga, la pi
varia dogni altra, che mai shabbia veduta n che si possa vedere per lavenire
in tutto l mondo: et ben ragionevole: non sendo stata, n per essere mai altra
Citt nel mondo simile a questa, n vergine come questa che niunaltra in
tutto l mondo che sia vergine: laonde si potr nominare allora per capo del
mondo per le sue belle qualit, e fortezza che mai ne fu una simile.
15. It is difcult to determine the contemporary value of a sixteenth-century
Venetian ducat given the gold scarcity suffered on the Italian peninsula
throughout the 1500s and the ination of the ducats value after numerous
200 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
wars with Spain. By weight, the Venetian ducat was.1107 troy ounces,
which, with contemporary gold prices makes 50,000 Venetian ducats
worth $6.6 million.
16. Venetian scuole, or schools, were a combination of charitable institutions
and artists guilds. There were two types: the Scuole Grandi, such as the
Scuola Grande di San Rocco to which Tintoretto belonged, and the Scuole
Minore, such as that of the goldsmiths, the shermen, etc.
17. This was part of the Jesuit strategy from its earliest beginnings. On their
long and precarious journey on foot to Venice [1535], the nine companions
wore the dress of university students and, besides some clothing, carried
with them in their leather rucksacks only their Bibles and personal papers.
The passage describes Ignatius Loyola and his earliest companions arriving
in Venice for the rst time together on their way to Jerusalem.
18. After entering the Republic of Saint Mark in the early part of the
sixteenth century, the Jesuits gradually gained access to the core of the
Venetian state by becoming the confessors and spiritual advisers for
numerous patricians. In his study of the Venetian baroque, Gaetano
Cozzi wrote that, Ignazio di Loyola aveva insegnato ai confratelli con
quale attenzione si dovesse guardare ai membri dei ceti pi alti, chiave per
entrare nel vivo di una societ, come attrarne la ducia, come sucitarne e
rafforzarne la devozione. (Ignatius of Loyola had taught the brothers
what attention they would need to guide the members of the highest
classes, keys for entering into the life of a society, how to gain their
trust, how to arouse and reinforce devotion.) Loyola himself acted as
guide for Matteo Dandolo, the Venetian ambassador to France during
some very important years in the life of the relationship between those
two powers, as well as for Gasparo Contarini, one of the most inuential
doges in Venetian history. Achilles Gagliardi S.J. became the broker of
peace between Henry III and Venice in the rst part of the sixteenth
century. Father Benedetto Palmio initiated the hospital system for the
reform of young prostitutes, which, more than just becoming an impor-
tant charitable institution within the Venetian governmental system,
allowed Palmio to gain access to members of the powerful Council of
Ten and to the wives of those men. See Gaetano Cozzi, Venezia barocca
293295 where he discusses Dandolo and Contarini in some more
detail. For more on the relationship between Contarini and Loyola, see
OMalley, First Jesuits 35.
19. Si citava, a tale proposito, come un grande succeso del padre Palmio lesser
riuscito a far sospendere a Venezia, nel carnevale del 1559, le commedie, et
guastar le scene etiam fatte. (One such example of this was the grand
success of Father Palmio who successfully suspended in Venice, for the
carnival of 1559, the plays, to ruin the scenes this made.)
NOTES 201
20. The decree appears in lArchivio di Stato, Venezia [ASV], Consiglio de Dieci,
Comune, Raspe 32 (15751576), 104r. Cited in Johnson, Short,
Lascivious Lives 941.
21. For 1568, see ASV, Consiglio de Dieci, Comune, Raspe 28 (1567-68),
164v., 19 January 1568. For 1573, see ASV, Consiglio de Dieci, Raspe 31
(15731574), 76v., November 10, 1573. Both appear in Johnson 940
941.
22. Item #87 under Rules for the Rector. The restriction against womens
clothing aims at eliminating any libidinal excesses.
23. This text comes in the section Rules for Provincial.
24. One interesting anthology, in which there is an extensive bibliography, is
Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe, eds., Baroque Art: The Jesuit
Contribution (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972). Another,
which has a wider scope, is OMalley et al., The Jesuits II: cultures, sciences,
and the arts, 15401773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
25. See Nigel Grifn, Jesuit School Drama, a checklist of critical literature
(London: Grant & Cutler, ltd., 1976) and Nigel Grifn, Jesuit School
Drama: a checklist of critical literature, Supplement No. 1 (London: Grant
Cutler Ltd., 1986).
26. In 1500 a cathedral deacon played the part of a prostitute in a presentation
of Terences The Eunuch; in 1531 a priest died from wounds received in a
street ght; and in 1565, while leaving a ball, a canon assaulted and
wounded a man in a dispute over who should go through a door rst. In
the same year the luogotenente and his soldiers had to force their way into
the monastery of Saint Peter Martyr to put down an armed rebellion by the
monks against the prior and his partisans in Edward Muir, Mad Blood
Stirring: Vendetta & Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore;
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 3637.
27. On the origin of retreat and its connection to Loyolas Spiritual Exercises,
see OMalley, First Jesuits 47.
28. That is: 1. The ontological possibility of essence or natural kinds. 2. A
dispositional view of essential properties determining the content of a nat-
ural kind. 3. An adequate epistemological/philosophy of mind apparatus
providing an awareness of essences or natural kinds in the individual. 4. A
theory of practical reason undertaking the ends to be pursued in terms of
human nature.
29. Barthes: As for the Ignatian I, at least in the Exercises, it has no value in
existence, it is not described, predicated, its mention is purely transitive,
imperative (5051).
30. This point also brings the dual nature of the Jesuit Order into view against
the background of the Church. The Church wanted people to go to the
monastery. When the Jesuits made that step unnecessary, there were
202 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
The previous ve chapters of this book have dusted off, arranged, and
analyzed distinct baroque social practices: a triptych of pastoralia formed
from: (1) the botanical work of Valsanzibio, Bomarzo, and Tasso, (2) the
weeding of the idealized garden made theatrical in Ruzzantes offerings,
and (3) the Jesuit exercise of pastoral power; Ruzzantes political and
aesthetic act of taking place; and the rooting, harvesting, and pruning of
souls culminating in the dehiscence of a spiritual self enscened on the
Jesuit teatro del mondo. I argue that these theatrical and performance
events happening throughout Venice in the sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries worked collectively to create and maintain an internal,
governmental, homeostatic order consonant with individual worldviews
while they simultaneously strained against the Venetian governmental,
spiritual, and philosophical status quo in their attempt to restructure
society. The tale of these baroque social practices, then, spins out from
an internal struggle or tension, one which I believe coheres around a
dialectical entwinement of discipline and excess.
From the perspective of each individual or group enmeshed in and
formed by this struggle, however, the image of discipline and excess
appears somewhat different. Refusing to submit to the whim of Venetian
governors and spiritual pastors who understood their dominance as con-
sonant with the natural state of affairs, thus ensuring that man-made
power dynamics would rule above God-given nature, Ruzzante modied
paradigms of theatrical expression to demand social and governmental
some extent, the Republic seems to have recognized that order could
be obtained through excessively theatrical means. By the sixteenth
century, after the Battle of Agnadello and during the wars with the
League of Cognac against the Holy Roman Emperor, the Venetian art
of politics needed to look inward and ensure inner stability so as to
thwart the advances of external assailants. Thus, the art of politics
consolidated the multiple diarchic governmental relations with its ter-
raferma holdings, which historians like Edward Muir have recognized
as signs of Venices continued mastery of the order/disorder dialectic.
Muir denes these diarchic arrangements as follows: These semiauto-
nomous groups that composed these asymmetrical diarchies were called
corpi e ceti, literally bodies and classes, comprising territorial organi-
zations such as the parliament of Friuli; cities, towns, and villages
incorporated as communes; and aristocratic jurisdictions (Muir,
Republicanism? 143). As he also points out, Students of the
Venetian state have emphasized how its hodgepodge of institutions,
the prevalence of aristocratic privilege, and widespread cultural differ-
ences created a diarchy in which local oligarchs shared authority with
Venetian ofcials (Muir, Mad Blood 50). This diarchic model has in
fact replaced Jacob Burckhardts notion of the Renaissance State as a
work of art, though, arguably, the art of statehood still nessed the
more delicate diplomatic moments within these diarchic relationships.
Conscious of the historiographical maneuvering required to gain
access to the various tensions (discipline/excess, order/disorder)
churning within these diarchic political landscapes, I am compelled in
this nal chapter to re-think these diarchies through the frame of
Derridas discussion of arkh and the archive. At the semantic level,
diarchy denotes a relatively simple political arrangement through
which two rule systems operate concurrently in places like Padua,
Treviso, Vicenza, and the Friuli so as to offer the occupants of those
towns semi-autonomous governance of their territories while simulta-
neously asserting Venetian supra-dominance. Derridas deconstructive
reading of arkh, however, opens the door to a more nuanced inter-
pretation of diarchic governmentality and helps us in the present
moment to access the bodies and struggles of individuals whose iden-
tities frequently remain occluded by the blinding light of state-spon-
sored histories and the prevalence of archival documents penned by the
governing classes. By accessing these bodies and struggles, I intend to
engage with a diarchic sense of self operating within these individuals.
206 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
For Derrida, arkh names an act of taking place. Seeing arkh stitched
into the word archive, he goes on to suggest how all historiographical
activity engaged with archival study necessarily amounts to a performance
that takes place within and among archival traces, and that, furthermore,
these traces themselves, the so-called objective materials, belie both covert
and overt historical practices that relied on two principles: commencement
and commandment. Archival data hint at origins and springings-forth, but
they also reveal the acts of ordering that deemed those data worthy of
safekeeping and ordering in the rst place. Derridas point is that archives
and archival data not only point to there where events commenced but
also, and logically prior to the commencement, there where social order
was exercised and a nomological principle enforced. The founding and
taking place of arkh thus instigate a cleavage in the heart of the archive
(Derrida 13).
A similar cleavage, issuing from ones cultural identity, shows itself
within the Venetian diarchies mentioned by Muir. I have rehearsed one
example of this already by showing how Paduas diarchic arrangement
with Venice leads to its semi-autonomy that must, ultimately, concede
allegiance to the Republic. Thus, Padua is consigned to Venice, gath-
ered together within the geopolity of the Republic of St Mark. My
concern in this nal chapter is to discover whether this same tension
plays out on the level of the individual whose identity construction
abuts a multiplicity of diarchic principles and regimes (Paduan/
Venetian, spirit/esh, law of nature/law of government). Whereas
Muir worked to understand the various bilateral relationships operating
in the Veneto before, during, and after the defeat of Agnadello in order
to extend and solidify Venetian-style res publica, I am uncovering a
diarchic baroque aestheticism coincident and coeval with this repub-
lican governmentality, one that points to the specter of what I call the
baroque diarchic self. Like the other baroque social practices produced
in this book thus far, this baroque self contains within it a dialectical
tension between disciplinary regimes and excessive expressions,
between archic acts of ordering and anarchic acts of disordering. The
purpose of X-raying this tension within the self is not to develop a
baroque ontology but, rather, to suggest a baroque praxis of self, a
manner of gathering oneself from multiple potential selves and carrying
on as this imagined unity. As I will demonstrate, such a praxis leads
simultaneously to the promise of creating a new world within the
existing order and to an irreconcilable schism within ones identity.
BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF 207
a series of setbacks and ultimately collapses under the realization that Dina
wants to remain in Venice, partially because of the security and food
Andronico can provide for her. After working himself into a frenzy and
imagining a grizzly scenario in which he butchers Andronico to death,
Bilora actually fullls his warped fantasy by kning Andronico outside the
merchants Venetian home. The play ends with Bilora ambiguously
reecting on his deedmaybe he regrets it, maybe not. As Ferguson
suggests, the play skirts the boundary of comedy and perhaps moves
beyond it by offering an onstage murder, which spoke frankly to an off-
stage urban/rural, Venetian/Paduan conict. Despite the diarchic
arrangement in place, Padua had, in a sense, become the abject object of
the Venetian Republic, a fertile landmass on which to cultivate agricultural
wealth after nearly a half-century of dwindling Venetian dominance on the
seas. Beolcos Paduan characters, like Bilora, frequently personied the
object-ness of Padua on Veneto stages. The nal words in Bilora (What
did I tell you?) voiced by the eponymous protagonist seems to haunt
scholars interpretation of the text (Ruzante, Teatro 578).3 Of all the
angles of this text to peruse, I am drawn to the escalating anger that
courses through the character of Bilora, an anger that bubbles up through
the imagined act of butchery and builds enough momentum to bypass the
characters common sense and rationality. Beolco did not need to invent
such anger. He could draw from recent historical precedent.
In the court cases and evidence-gathering sessions that followed the
cruel Carnival in Udine, Venetian magistrates apparently amassed enough
information to justiably execute two of the participants and to exile
several others. Intriguingly, however, Antonio Savorgnan, the individual
on whom Gregorio Amaseos text placed all blame, did not receive so
much as a ne. Muir reveals he was never even charged with any crimes or
wrongdoing. Archival remnants suggest that Savorgnan was not, even by
his own admission, completely removed from the violence, but, rather,
that his rational self had been completely overcome by mad blood and
could not, therefore, be accused:
For his part, Antonio describes himself as in the grips of a kind of madness
on Gioved Grasso [ . . . ]: I am so angry that I am beside myself and do not
know what I am doing. Impelled by his mad blood, Antonio abdicated all
responsibility as if his anger had blotted out his reasoning faculties, pushed
him beyond the reach of self-restraint, and subjected him to the governance
of pure emotion. His words derived their force from the integrity of burning
212 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
From the moment he uttered this defense, mad blood became a legit-
imate excuse for the triumph of irrationality over reason. Instead of
marveling at Beolcos invention of the Bilora murder, or puzzling over
the literary precursors of such a violent stage event, I am compelled to read
Andronicos grizzly death as the victory of Biloras mad blood over his
diplomatic and rational self, and to read Bilora as a type of theatrical
warning shot leveled against Venetian aristocrats numbly accustomed to
taking everything from the members of their mainland territories.
Beolco would have experienced more targeted violence closer to home
in 1532 when the German peasant leader Michael Gaismair was roused by
a traitorous friend and assassinated, thanks to a bribe from the Habsburg
Archduke Ferdinand. Whereas the peasant rebellion surrounding the
Friulan carnival was stamped out quickly and never likely to ascend beyond
the control of calculating nobles such as Savorgnan, the co-ordinated
peasant rebellions against the Habsburgs interests, stretching from 1524
to Gaismairs death, threatened the stability of the entire region of Tyrol,
which itself bordered Venetian landholdings. Beolcos plays show consid-
erable evidence that he was familiar with Gaismairs life and tactics as the
leader of these rebellions, and though archival evidence has not yet
revealed a face-to-face meeting between the two, one might reasonably
suspect that Gaismairs nal years spent in exile in Padua would have
brought him at least close to Beolcos circle of friends and acquaintances.4
The death of Gaismair may also have meant the death of Beolcos more
violent revolutionary impulses, such as those glimpsed in Bilora, but by
lingering briey on Gaismairs history I would like to demonstrate how
the proximity of a successful revolution could have reasonably compelled
Ruzzante to consider taking up the sword instead of the pen.
Walter Klaassen has cited similar conditions for the Tyrolean peasant
revolts as those which exploited and depressed the Friulan and Paduan
peasants, including especially extraordinary rents, taxes, and levies
demanded of the German tenant farmers and the vexed situation of a
diarchic rule where, slowly over time, the Roman law of the Empire
overtook the law of the land that had enabled peasant agency in the
previous decades (Klaassen 56). Spiritual strife too split the devotions
of the Tyrolean peasants, most obviously in the form of a rising
Protestant dissent against the Catholic Church, whose priests had
BEOLCOS AESTHETIC CONSIGNMENT 213
done little to assuage the anger of the lower classes (1012). Swayed
more by the failings of temporal government than the Protestant
spiritual militants, at least at rst, Gaismair developed from civil servant
to revolutionary as he witnessed the slow erosion of peasant autonomy
from his position as secretary for the vice-regent, Leonhard von Vls
(1217). Klaassens research suggests that Gaismair secretly built coali-
tions with members of the peasantry during the years leading up to
1525, all the while watching some of his friends go on trial for
defending their liberties against the imposing force of the vice-regent
(24). Remaining faithful to the Catholic insistence that faith in God
consisted of exercising justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with
God, Gaismairs secret plans revealed themselves in early May when,
after a quick revolt in Brixen that drove out the episcopal leaders, the
rebels elected Gaismair, then approximately 35 years old, as their
leader. All violence enacted by the rebels over the next year had as its
express purpose the defense of civil liberties that Gaismair and the
peasants of the land enumerated in The Meran Articles. They sought
nothing less than a new constitution that enforced the common
good as the new law of the land (3233).
At rst, Ferdinand I, then Holy Roman Emperor, willingly negotiated
with Gaismair, but this seems to have been a stalling tactic since as soon as
he could raise enough money and military support to suppress Gaismairs
peasant forces he turned on both Gaismair and his followers. Concurrent
with this change of tune, Gaismair caught wind of Ferdinands duplicity
and edged more toward radical militancy. Ferdinand had the upper hand
at rst, able as he was to imprison Gaismair. After approximately two
months in prison, however, Gaismair escaped to Switzerland where he
hid off and on for a year and prepared his now famous Constitution that
called for a complete overthrow of the existing governmental and religious
systems (5861). Needing the support of a larger army and desiring a safe
haven for his family, Gaismair rode to Venice in July 1526 and gave his
services to the Republic, which all too happily supported the man whose
peasant armies could extend the Venetian defensive border and help the
League of Cognac fend off the Holy Roman Emperor. This move unfor-
tunately crippled the militant peasant revolts since Venice cared not at all
for Gaismairs revolution and sought only to protect its own interests
during a time of great instability. Furthermore, by effectively siding with
the Pope, whose armies also fought in the League of Cognac, Gaismair
lost respectability at home, and thus he spent his remaining years
214 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
Compare, its these metal helmets that make these ugly complexions. They
weigh a ton and they pull down the esh. And then, with only the sea to
drink, the worst food to eat [ . . . ]. If you had only been where I have been!
(Ruzante, Teatro 520)6
BEOLCOS AESTHETIC CONSIGNMENT 217
The phrase If you had only been where I have been functions as a refrain
throughout the entire dialogue to express the inexpressibly miserable
conditions of life on the front lines. It follows images of lice-infested
bread, the loss of limbs, and soldiers robbing valuable objects from the
dead bodies of fallen comrades.7
The comedic highlight of the dialogue comes when Ruzzante
describes his tactics for avoiding violence and combat on the battleeld.
His uniform in the Venetian army featured a tunic adorned with a red
cross. The enemy, the Spanish-Imperial army, wore tunics bearing
white crosses. In order to survive the violent terrain of close and
incessant combat at the wars front lines, Ruzzante fashioned a two-
sided cross with one side painted red and the other white (la mia crose
giera da un l rossa e da laltro bianca). Able to switch the cross when
the situation required it, Ruzzante could disguise himself as either a
Venetian or a Spanish soldier. Proud of his maneuvering, Ruzzante
titled himself crafty (a son fato scaltro), and when asked by
Menato why he would act in such a cowardly manner he replied,
Perch un solo non p far niente contra tanti (Because one person
can do nothing against many) (526). Faced with a no-win situation,
Ruzzante manipulated his visibility in the enemys eld of sight. By
altering his uniform, he changed the win-lose dynamic of the war into a
sheer game of survival in which all men on the eld became potential
camouage.
Following Michel de Certeaus extrapolation from Carl von
Clausewitzs treatise On War, Ruzzantes antics at the front resemble
the art of pulling tricks, which involves a sense of the opportu-
nities afforded by a particular occasion (de Certeau, Everyday Life
37). Crafty, tricky, opportunistic: these are the main adjectives that
describe Ruzzantes tactics and perhaps even his broader philosophy,
one that acknowledges the primary role of visibility and appearance in
daily encounters. His is a necessary trickery practiced by the weak in a
world where the wars one is obliged to ght have no immediate
benets for the ghter. Eventually, though, Ruzzantes battle wisdom
leads him to abandon his craftiness and simply to run away. He ees
from the soldiers without having won for himself any spoils or having
acquired any rugged scars, a fact that does not impress his friends
upon returning home. Instead of merely a pusillanimous act, how-
ever, I argue that Ruzzantes running away is indicative of his more
general disdain of violent means used to achieve political ends.
218 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
Without his craftiness and his running away, there would be no dialo-
gue at all. In this sense, the Reduce is constituted by Ruzzantes craftiness,
not just as a writer or stage actor but also as human being in the world
capable of navigating the exigencies placed upon him by the Venetian
powers. Moreover, it is possible to elevate this craftiness from personal
perspicacity to practical philosophy by uniting this dialogue with Linda
Carrolls assessment of Ruzzantes intellectual heritage. In two essays,8
Carroll elaborates on the inuences that the writings of More and Erasmus
had on the Paduan. She illustrates how the Reduce, for example, greatly
resembles Erasmuss Militia confessio in form and content. By utilizing the
Dutch writers rhetorical strategies, Beolco, as Ruzzante, is able to decry
the follies of war and to mock his own complicit behavior as land transac-
tor for both Church authorities and his patron. This latter reference
appears in a scene from the Reduce in which the performer subtly likens
buying land from poor peasants to the stealing of clothing from dead
soldiers bodies (Early Adaptations 31). Echoing my own ndings,
Carroll goes on to state that, the playwrights own earning of money
from the administration of church properties created a strong conict
between his reformist desires and the need to survive (Nontheistic
Paradise 890). Her point and mine, though, is that Ruzzantes survival
strategy relied not only on his various modes of employment but also on
the philosophical advice he culled from the works of the foremost
European humanists.
Beolco did more than parrot the philosophical phrases and literary
styles of More and Erasmus. As Carrolls ndings show, he clearly adapted
their philosophies to his specic situation, thereby assembling an ethical
guidebook to help him navigate the social terrain in which he found
himself:
From Erasmus, Beolco adopts a satirical attitude that destroys all presuppo-
sitions, thus preparing the way for a new construction. From More, Beolco
draws an Epicureo-Stoic philosophy, though inverting it to serve his own
purposes. That is, while More proposes that what is reasonable gives plea-
sure and that therefore one can change peoples behavior through laws
appealing to reason, Beolco argues that what is pleasurable is reasonable
and that therefore when people are happy they behave well. (882883)
When one tallies up the many references, both clear and oblique, that
Beolco makes to More, Erasmus, and Pomponazzi, the overall tone of his
BEOLCOS AESTHETIC CONSIGNMENT 219
opposite. Thus, to want all and to want nothing coincide. Once the
will encompasses the positive and negative ranges of wanting, once it is no
longer linked to the want of something in particular, the volo becomes
the act of renunciation of ones will. It is a not wanting, and a giving
up (169). This paradigmatic quality, Roland Barthes writes, is the
famous Ignatian indifference which has so outraged the Jesuits foes: to
will nothing oneself, to be as disposable as a corpse, perinde ac cadaver
(Barthes 73). De Certeaus analysis draws attention to the space of the
volo, the territory of this wanting and not wanting of anything particular,
the milieu of a willingness that is also an act of renouncing the will. The
space of volo enables the paradoxical act of volition that drives mystic
discourse throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and de
Certeau refers to it as a eld of a different kind of knowledge. It is an
ethical postulate of a sort of freedom: I/you can be (re)born (de
Certeau, Mystic Fable 172). Once reborn, the renounced self that dwells
within the I of mystic experience communicates directly with God by
becoming something like an empty vessel lled and eradicated by the
Lord. That dwelling is not a proper place, but rather a no-place that
moves along with the individual mystic. It is the mystics utopia.
Another map of this mystic utopia comes from Anne Carsons poetic
excursus of Marguerite Poretes The Mirror of Simple Souls (1310), which
articulates a metaphysical impoverishment within God conditioned by a
complex form of self-negation. Carson understands this ontological
impoverishment as a striving toward nothingness. To be nothing, to
disappear into God, marks the aim of the mystic who perceives her
nothingness by means of the abundance of divine understanding, which
makes her nothing and places her in nothingness (Carson 164). Porete
herself notes a frustrating paradox in all of this, since her loyalty to God is
actually obstructed by her love of him because this affection, like most
human erotic feeling, is largely self-love: it puts Marguerite in bondage to
Marguerite rather than to God (166). While Porete will struggle in
anguish to achieve the state of an annihilated soul and eventually burn at
the stake for her heretical writings, Simon Weil will persist and develop a
program of decreation, a dislodging of herself from a center where she
cannot stay because staying there blocks God (167). Loyola, too, had his
program for mystical devotion and self-erasure, the program of the
Spiritual Exercises that he initially created for his own private use.
Loyolas path to rebirth within the space of mystical volition appeared
to him after a near fatal wound that he suffered in battle. Deciding against
THE JESUIT MASS PRODUCTION OF A MYSTICAL SELF 223
a return to his life as a vassal and decorated knight, Loyola cultivated his
Exercises and gained entry to the Catholic Church as a peculiar free radical
within that institution. Since, on the one hand, the Church licensed the
existence of the Society of Jesuits, the Society in general and Loyola in
particular was, from a certain angle, contained; the Jesuits were a mobile
front line of the post-Tridentine Church and Loyola reported back to the
Pope. On the other hand, Loyola utilized his mobility to radicalize his
own practice of faith and forge an independent branch of the Church.
Loyola became the general of the order, a position referred to as the
black pope by those who eyed the Jesuits as something of a threat to
Papal rule, and he molded his Society into a semi-autonomous legion of
spiritual soldiers.
Following Loyolas instructions, the Society touted the Exercises as a
regiment of conversion practices capable of, theoretically, reclaiming each
and every lost soul. In practice, however, the Exercises were something
different for the ock than they were for Loyola himself. Whereas the
spiritual retreat designed by Loyola funneled him into the space of the
volo, it poached the souls of stray sheep and led them back to pastures
where they were promised to the Church. In exchange for their allegiance,
the ock was offered a promissory note, redeemable only in the afterlife.
On Earth, however, the average convert, one not seeking spiritual anni-
hilation or allied to a practice of decreation, had to gure out how to build
a sense of self out of a program of self-renunciation.
The historical-philosophical ramications of a mass-produced and alie-
nating subjectivity come into view by seeing Loyolas thinking as a baroque
extension of the Medieval discourse on sameness and identity developed by
Peter Abelard (10791142), Henry of Ghent (c.12171293), and John
Duns Scotus (c.12651308). These three gures set about explaining the
paradox of a single God that was somehow three (Father, Son, Holy Spirit).
Richard Cross works through the philosophical justications of Abelard for
whom two things could be numerically the same and yet differ in property
(like a lump of wax and a waxen image made from that same lump) and
eventually concludes that, for Abelard, there are no forms in God other
than the divine essence; so while there are differences in predication (we
can make claims about the Fatherfor example, that he generates the Son
that are false of the Son), these differences are not grounded in any real
differences of form (Cross 710). For Henry, the problem hinged not on
form but on thinking of the divine essence as quasi-matter, a term
that led him to the realization that the Son is made from the divine
224 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
dialogue between God and the soul, of appeal and response, of the
declaration of Gods love of the soul, and of the souls love of God
(Foucault, Security 213). The mystic space of the volo was the arena in
which the dialogue with God took place. Its ipside, that of the vedo,
Ruzzantes domain, forms a sort of secular and profane mystical space
from which the stage performer could view himself and the world from
multiple angles. It is this latter space that resonates with Foucaults pro-
nouncement that, [i]n mysticism the soul sees itself (212). Ruzzante
was not a spiritual mystic, but his tactical space bore more than a passing
similarity to the mystical tactical space insofar as it provided an arena in
which to index various performances of self and even respond to the social
conditions scripting those performances.
Historically speaking, Ruzzante shared an orbit with Loyola, Martin
Luther, and other religious reformers all seeking to re-write both the
biblical rules regulating spiritual self-performance and the social rules
controlling temporal existence. Luther may best exemplify the third
form of counter-conduct, one that Foucault links to a problem of scrip-
ture. Through his studies, Luther determined that the Church had
deviated from the mandates set out in the Gospels, and thus sought
through this reformation to drag the Church back onto the right track.
For his part, Loyola also re-interpreted the scripture and determined that
the Papal See was capable of following the Word of God more closely
through Jesuit advisement. By naming his company the Society of Jesus,
he attempted to discipline the Catholic ock anew under the name of
Christ, even though the other holy orders grumbled about Loyolas
personal claim on the name of Jesus. It is comical, then, that, in a certain
way, the problem of scripture pairs Luther and the Jesuits together as
groups that caused the core institution of the Church considerable stress.
The Jesuits may have sought to suppress the Lutheran Reformation
through their Counter-Reformation, but they were each engaged in
rethinking the code of conduct that the Church needed to follow on earth.
Ruzzante joins this unlikely pair to make an unruly threesome. His own
interpretation of scripture appeared most vividly in the Prima and Seconda
Oratione where he used his private audience with the two Cornaro
Cardinals to demand distinct programs of reform. The request by the
orator in the rst of the two performances for permission to work on
Feast days, to eat whatever and whenever he wished, and to castrate
philandering priests were all issues that Luther took up explicitly in the
Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Respecting the
RUZZANTE: A SECULAR MYSTIC? 229
the self, a confrontation that comes across especially where food and
hunger are concerned, since starvation is a point of extreme bodily dis-
ruption. Hunger is the body feeding on itself, and Ruzzantes jokes about
starvation were an ascetic confrontation with the realities of hunger that
unfolded within the aesthetic realm of his constructed environments.
Those environments, in turn, became extensions of the offstage environ-
ment (Daddario and Zerdy). Via Foucault, a life of counter-conduct edges
toward a philosophical life insofar as it is a life obtained thanks to a
tekhne. Counter-conduct spawns a life that refuses to comply with a
regula (a rule); rather, it submits to a forma (a form). It is a style of life,
a sort of form one gives to ones life (Foucault, Hermeneutics 424). In
other words, by perpetually enacting Ruzzante, the historical gure who
began life as Angelo Beolco treated his life as a philosophical art. His art of
living became the antidote to the various government rationalities
attempting to administer life in the Veneto in the sixteenth century.
Ruzzantes nal theatrical offering, Lettera allAlvarotto, showcases
both this philosophical life-as-art and secular antidote to mystical life.
Taking the form of a letter mailed by Ruzzante to his friend Alvarotto,
the playwright wrote the piece in Padua and signed it on the Feast day of
the Epiphany, 1536 (around 6 January). The story that it relayed was in
many ways an epiphany of Ruzzantes own, at which he seems to have
arrived after several years spent in Alvise Cornaros circle. The letter begins
by addressing the circle of his friends who were gathered at Cornaros
hunting lodge and explaining that he was sorry he could not be present
with them but his recent exploits had taken him on a journey. The letter
goes on to share the ndings of this strange and illuminating journey,
which started when he entered one day into a terrible desire to live
forever, or at least to be among the last men standing (Ruzante, Teatro
1226).14 He remembered reading somewhere that extremely long life was
indeed possible (the Bible?) and that there was a woman, a Madonna
Temperanza (Madam Temperance), who could grant immortality. He
set about consulting his books to discover if she or any of her compatriots
were still alive. The answers he found were vague and so he had to set the
books aside and go out looking for the woman himself. The letter relayed
this information in Ruzzantes best Florentine dialect.
After unsuccessfully looking all over the place for this Madonna
Temperanza, Ruzzante was confused and irritated that his books were
not more help to him. Finding himself atop a mountain, relying on his
dogs to nd food and bring it back to him, and tired out by his search,
232 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
Ruzzante became sleepy: When I got over my anger, I was atop one of
our mountains in Este, hunting, waiting alone for the hounds to return
from another hill where they were chasing a hare; and they were so far
away that I could no longer hear them.15 In fact, he could no longer hear
anything and the silence that enveloped him led him into a deep sleep:
sleep entered my eyes and, once inside, chained the door, and closed me
out of myself.16 This was incredibly pleasing to him since, as he expressed
it, it was the most smooth and sweet sleep that ever closed the eyes of
man (1228).17
Upon being shut out of himself, Ruzzantes old friend Barba Polo
appeared to him out of nowhere. This was confusing since Polo had
died a while back, and the image in front of him looked so real that he
could not tell if it was a spirit or not. Encountering his friend required
Ruzzante to switch from the Florentine to his native Paduan dialect, and
the conversation that ensued was quite enlightening. Polo told Ruzzante
four things. First, he was completely capable of taking Ruzzante where he
needed to go. Second, he had to act as a guide because books would be no
help to Ruzzante at all in this situation. Third, the books would be no help
in particular because Ruzzante had not remembered the correct name of
the woman he needed to nd. He was in fact looking for Madonna
Allegrezza (Madam Joy), not Madonna Temperanza. Fourth, and most
importantly, Polo told Ruzzante that he had better be sure that he really
wanted to live a long time. Some people are undeserving of such a gift, and
others are not even sure what life is. There are some people, he suggested,
who hardly know that they are alive; you could hardly call what they are
doing living. But, at the other end of the spectrum, if one lives only
one year and knows he is alive, wouldnt that be more of a life, a longer
life, than those who live a thousand years and dont ever know that they
are living? (1230).18
Ruzzante decided that he did know what he was looking for and that he
wanted Polo to show him the way. Complying with his friends request,
Polo led Ruzzante to the house of Madonna Allegrezza. Upon arriving,
Polo described the location and all of its bucolic beauty: lush plants,
running streams, birds singing, lled precisely with the same ora and
fauna that Ruzzante described in his rst play, the Pastoral. Here, how-
ever, the gures occupying the house on the territory were the company
members of Madonna Allegrezza: Aunt Wisdom, Laughter, Party, Dance,
Unison Singing, Peace, Charity, Gloria, Vigil, Silence, and others. They
were all engaged in game play and in protecting the house from
RUZZANTE: A SECULAR MYSTIC? 233
unwelcomed guests such as Love, that little boy with the bow and arrows,
the son of Damnation and Perdition. All of this activity unfolded under
Ruzzantes gaze, but he was careful not to look upon the scene directly
because, as Polo had instructed, looking directly at the gures would make
them disappear. Ruzzante had to save his direct gaze for Madonna
Allegrezza herself since simply looking upon her would lengthen his life.
But as the excitement unfolded and as Polo instructed Ruzzante on
how to obtain long life, another sound of music inltrated the scene. At
this point in the letter, Ruzzante switched back to his Florentine dialect
and told his friends gathered at Cornaros lodge that while Polo was
talking to him:
I thought I heard some music, not from singing or from any instrument, but
some kind of concert or harmony that I wouldnt know how to explain to
you unless you were asleep like I was there [ . . . ] I wanted to x [the image
and the music] so as not to forget it (it delighted me so), but my eyes
seemed impeded by some sort of weight; then, wanting so much to open
them, the sleep went away, and I stayed there with eyes opened for real.
(1242)19
Once awake, Ruzzante reected on his vision (alla mia visione) and
realized that the music he had heard was really the sounds of the dogs
barking. In other words, the reality of the world was lled with the same
sorts of sights and sounds as his dreamscape, so he decided to return to the
real world and leave the paradise behind. With that revelation, the narrator
signed off with the signature, Your brother Ruzzante. Shortly after
writing this letter, Beolco would succumb to disease and die at a relatively
early age.
Instead of interpreting this nal work as either a letter or a monologue,
it is instructive to read the Lettera allAlvarotto as an account of a secular
mystic experience. The Lettera is Ruzzantes most powerful attempt to
blur together the aesthetic realm and the world off the stage. It com-
mences with a vision, or an ecstatic (literally, ex stasis; from Latin,
extasis) experience that puts him in a trance-like state. Once within the
vision, Ruzzante occupies the space of the vedo, the secular counter-
point to the mystical space of the volo inhabited by Ignatius Loyola and
articulated by de Certeau in The Mystic Fable. The four modal domains of
the verb to see all reveal themselves in the letter, and, since the letter is
relaying an episode of Ruzzantes life, it is important to note that the vedo
234 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
appears simultaneously in the world beyond the stage. The active mode, I
see, unfolds in the narrative through the overarching framework of the
journey that sends Ruzzante into a vision in order to discover a site of
interest and report it back to his friends at Cornaros hunting lodge.
Ruzzante functions in this mode as a witness to the impermanence and
instability of the terrestrial paradise and also of life in general.
The passive mode, I am seen, shows itself most clearly in the thea-
trical architecture of Madam Joys house where Ruzzante acts as audience
member to the scene that goes on in front of him. Polos warning to him
not to look too closely at the gures in the scene hints at the fact that while
Ruzzante is watching the scene he is also being seen by the other gures.
Polo even warns that this quality of being seen has the potential to destroy
the performance. This state of being seen is doubled in the theatrical
architecture inferred from the performance of the letter. Alvarottos reci-
tation of Ruzzantes letter constructs a scenario in which Cornaros circle
gathers around as the audience to watch Alvarotto relay Ruzzantes story.
By asking Alvarotto to read his letter, he understands that Alvarotto will be
watched closely as he performs the story. Alvarottos recitation will even-
tually end and the surrogate performance will fade back into regular, non-
theatrical interaction just as the performance of the allegorical gures
faded for Ruzzante. As a performance, the function of the letter is to be
seen.
The reexive mode, I see myself, adds a layer of complexity to the
entire performance event and illuminates the philosophical dimension in
which Ruzzante thinks about himself thinking. The letter as a whole is a
commentary on this performance of thought on thought, since it relays
knowledge that Ruzzante acquired once shut out of himself by his
ecstatic vision. The letter entails a seeing-himself-in-the-world, which
Ruzzante accomplishes after reecting on the experience of visiting the
terrestrial paradise. That paradise, he realizes, was nothing more or less
than a reconguration of certain sights and sounds taken from the moun-
taintop. The consequence of the reexive I see myself in Ruzzantes
narrative is that his quest for eternal life becomes less important than the
letter conveying the ndings of that quest to his friends. Ruzzante recog-
nizes his experience as an educational event that taught him about the
world and could also teach his friends about the possibility or impossibility
of such a paradise really existing. Having experienced both onstage per-
formance and the art of directing his own plays, Ruzzante manages to
accomplish both roles at once in this nal piece and captures in the text
RUZZANTE: A SECULAR MYSTIC? 235
mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by
them (44). The antecedents to those pronouns appear in the agencies of
the Venetian state, the Catholic Church, and his patron.
BECOMING-BAROQUE
Monika Kaup, pursuing Alejo Carpentiers and others answers to ques-
tions about the ideological function of the historical American Baroque
following the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spains and Portugals overseas
colonies in the eighteenth century, forwards a strong argument for under-
standing the New World Baroque in Deleuzoguattarian terms (Kaup).
Building on Carpentiers claims that, all symbiosis, all mestizaje, engen-
ders the Baroque and that, the art known as the American Baroque
embodies the process of emergence, of a new beginning, of the genesis of
new forms of expression and social life, Kaup reads the baroque as a
process of becoming-minor (cit. 109, 111). Where Deleuze and Guattari
see morphogenesis, incorporeal transformation, and minoritarian re-func-
tioning in the literary works of Kafka, Carpentier sees the New World
Baroque as a similar device for the creation of new worlds, new collective
identities, and new forms of expression, and, for Kaup, the overlap
between the French philosophers concepts and Carpentiers writings of
counter-conquest lead to an important pronouncement (cit. 111).
Namely, that there are two baroques: on the one hand, the homogeniz-
ing and hierarchical ofcial European Baroque of Absolutism and Counter
Reformation, and on the other, the decolonizing and racially, culturally
heterogeneous New World Baroque (112). The latter expresses itself as
the perpetual variation of baroque artistic forms and ideological constructs
intended to valorize the uncertainty of identity as a marker of a liberated
people-yet-to-come.
This current discussion of the diarchic selves created and maintained
through the early dissemination of the Spiritual Exercises, on the one
hand, and Ruzzantes philosophically charged, activist theatre-making,
on the other hand, both validates and deviates from Kaups pronounce-
ments. Ruzzantes creation of a new self, for example, one capable of
standing up against the class-based discrimination enforced through
Venetian rule in the early sixteenth century, seems to foreshadow if not
predate precisely the becoming-minor that Kaup sees in the Americas
several centuries later. This variation of self, demonstrated through
Beolcos becoming-Ruzzante, however, appears supercial unless
BECOMING-BAROQUE 239
regulations of that daily life. Stitching these words together into cosmo-
politan allows Diogenes to both preserve their original meanings and also
rewrite the notion of political afliation. Diogenes, whose name meant
birthed of God, chose not to profess any allegiance to human emperors;
rather, he would be known as an individual travelling through the uni-
verse, a universe he sought to re-make through knowledge gained by lived
experience.
While acknowledging the established history of this word and noting
the signicance of a Cynical heritage to both Ruzzantes and the Jesuits
versions of theatrical fare, my conversation of baroque self leads me to
fantasize another denition of : the act of ordering the
border between interior and exterior. This denition suggests that any
citizen of the worlds identity will come about through acknowledging the
border between ones own conduct, driven by ones soul, and the social
order in which the individual participates. A cosmopolitan identity, in this
sense of the word, lays stress neither solely on the internal self nor on the
external social milieu but rather, and perhaps primarily, on the limen
between the two realms. This limen derives from an act of ordering that
comes from both the individual making the identity and the external
environment that will, in a sense, house that individual. With this discus-
sion of internal and external environments dened and discerned by a
liminal passage, the activity of garden thinking shows itself once again
since the construction of the garden was also determined by the construc-
tion of the wall that would separate the interior garden space from the
outside, uncultivated territory. To be a cosmopolitan, one must practice
the same type of self-maintenance as the gardener. Unlike the garden of
the Enlightenment, epitomized by the nal line of Voltaires Candide,
we must cultivate our gardens, this baroque garden self is not merely a
retreat (Voltaire 328). It is, by distinction, and to cite the words of
Scottish garden artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, an attack.21 Baroque gardens,
both botanical and metaphorical, are attacks aimed at redening the
borders between self and world. Through these acts of re-denition, the
interior garden and external wilderness vie to shape each other, thereby
creating worlds within worlds. Baroque cosmopolitanism names this agon
between interior and exterior as well as the competition between worlds.
In the following ways, Ruzzantes self resonates with the identity of the
cosmopolitan. First, while he claimed Padua as his place of birth and
privileged home, he lamented the gradual demise of Padua as he knew it
and even went as far as to suggest that, due to political turmoil and poor
242 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
arise from the historical situation mapped throughout this books chapters
and seems to t Ruzzantes work given that, for him, nature was no longer
distinguishable from snatural forces produced through humans second
nature. To address this loss of nature and to respond to the social world
taking shape in his time, he tended his garden, which, by extension,
attacked the increasingly exclusionary status quo.
The Jesuit diarchic self glimpsed through Ottonellis scenic priest,
Polancos Chronicles, and Loyolas Spiritual Exercises has a similar afnity
to both and , though the specic expression
of this Jesuit afnity leads in a different direction than did Ruzzantes. The
border between interior and exterior ordered and maintained through the
Jesuit self was the limen between the Jesuit teatro del mondo and the
secular world. To maintain this boundary, the converted subject had to
keep his self at bay, which effectively required a life of self-renunciation.
Paradoxically, it was through this self-renunciation on Earth that ever-
lasting life became thinkable. Through spiritual exercises, the converted
subject could artfully navigate between the self-as-imitator-of-Christ and
the not-self. By navigating this internal divide, converted subjects, regard-
less of the political states of affairs in which their worldly bodies partici-
pated, expressed their spiritual devotion to God. Key to this devotion,
however, was a lifetime of dedicated performance scripted by the Jesuit
spiritual advisor who, in turn, took his cues from the manual constructed
by Loyola. By renouncing his previous life as a mercenary soldier, Ignatius
himself declared his Cynical rejection of worldly governance and professed
his cosmopolitan status: he became a citizen of the world made by Christ
the Almighty. Clearly, the mode of life dictated by this choice of identity
required Loyola to make his world anew. By publishing the Spiritual
Exercises as a manual for all to use, he effectively created a program of
world-making to complement the program of spiritual allegiance dictated
through the Jesuit profession of Faith. As I have argued in this chapter,
however, the mass production of one world for the many converts coming
to the Jesuit teatro led to a deeply problematic enforcement of subjectivity
onto individuals who knew nothing of the mystic mode of being.
Taking the Jesuits (issuing forth from the identity of Loyola himself)
and Beolco-as-Ruzzante as a non-identical pair oscillating through the
strata of baroque social practices alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the vision of a baroque diarchic self culminates here, in an image
of a discordant and divided internal subjectivity twinned with a repertoire
of artful expressions aimed at re-making the empirical world anew. There
244 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
are not two baroques, one colonizing and one counter-colonial. Instead,
there is one baroque containing both impulses, and that fusion of coloniz-
ing/counter-colonial desire infused the theatrical lives of onstage and
offstage performers alike. Given the complexity of this situation, the
noun baroque may even need to give way to the verb baroque, an act
of diarchic self-expression and world-making emanating from these spe-
cic tensions. Beolco-as-Ruzzante baroques. The Jesuit convert baroques.
NOTES
1. A good source for information on Calmo is Le lettere di Messer Andrea
Calmo, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Torino: Ermano Loescher, 1888). On Fo, see
Farrell and Scuderi.
2. Gods judgment alone did not sufce. The survivors of Gioved Grasso
sought to enlist the judgment of history as well. For them the function of
history was to preserve a record of past injustices, creating a peculiar rela-
tionship between violence and memory (Muir, Mad Blood 209).
3. Paduan: Te lhegi dito? Italian (trans. Zorzi): Te lavevo detto? For
commentary, see Ludovico Zorzis notes in Ruzante, Teatro 1379 and
Ferguson 41.
4. See Linda L. Carroll, A Nontheistic Paradise in Renaissance Padua, The
Sixteenth Century Journal 24.4 (Winter, 1993): 890, 895896. I return to
this source later in the chapter.
5. See also Daddario and Zerdy, When You Are What You Eat: Ruzzante and
Historical Metabolism.
6. Paduan: Compare, l i cassiti de ferro che fa ste male iere. Tanto che i pesa,
tanta carne i tira z. e po, el mar bere, el piezo magnare [ . . . ] Safoss st on
son stato io mi! (521). Italian (trans. Zorzi): Compare, sono gli elmetti di
ferro che fanno queste brutte cere. Tanto quanto pesano, tanta carne tirano
gi. E poi, il mar bere, il peggio mangiare [ . . . ] Se voi foste stato dove sono
stato io me!
7. Zorzi notes a possible representation of dialogue in Venice on 16 February
1520 (Ruzante, Teatro 1361), but it is difcult to determine who the
audience for this piece may have been. The rest of Zorzis note, however,
remarks on the difference between the supposed original title of the piece
(Parlamento de Ruzante a Menato e a la sua Gnua) and the title by which
scholars have come to know it. The more common title, according to Zorzi,
reects the possibility that audiences remembered this piece as a dialogue
about a Veteran, and thus the dialogue may have played to people who
fought in the wars.
NOTES 245
colle, dove avevano cacciato un lepre; ed erano tanto lontani, chio non li
sentivo pi.
16. [I]l sonno li entr negli occhi e, non appena fu dentro, egli mise il catenaccio
alluscio, e chiuse me fuor di me stesso.
17. [F]u il pi soave e grazioso sonno che mai chiudesse occhi duomo.
18. Paduan: Mo se uno vivesse mo nom un ano solo e saesse de esser vivo, no serve
p vita la soa, e p longa, ca de uno che vivesse milagni e no saesse m desser
vivo? (1231). Italian (trans. Zorzi): Ma se uno vivesse sol tanto un anno solo
e sapesse di esser vivo, non sarebbe pi vita la sua, e pi lunga, di quello di uno
che vivesse millanni e non sapesse mai di esser vivo?
19. Mentre esso diceva queste parole, mi parve sentire una musica, non di canti o
di suoni, ma di non so pi che concento [sic] o armonia, che non saprei darla a
intendere se non a chi dormisse come facevo io. E poco dopo (come fa chi sogna)
mi pareva vedere tutta quella gente dellAllegrezza raccolta insieme, e di tutta
farsene po una cosa s bella, che in mille anni non si direbbe con mille lingue.
Io volevo guardarla sso per non perdere di contemplarla (tanto me pigliavano
diletto), ma gli occhi mi parevano impediti da non so che gravezza; onde,
volendo sforzarmi di aprirli, il sonno se ne fuggi, ed io rimasi con gli occhi
aperti per davvero.
20. From Nontheistic Paradise, reecting on Ruzantes move toward non-
theism: He rst tried Evangelical solutions (Prima Oratione, Beta,
Seconda Oratione, Reduce); when those did not produce results, he began
to experiment with Protestant ideas (Moscheta; see 651, par. 19, Tonin to
Ruzante: Hush, you who are against the faith [ . . . ] baptized in a pig
trough!), then pagan ones (Dialogo facetissimo). When again these provide
no relief, Beolco exploded in the Bilora against the name of God. In the
comedies that followed he accepted the expedient of Nicodemism, but in
the nal one, the Lettera allAlvarotto, God disappeared completely.
21. The complete quotation, which is also the epigraph to Part II, is: Certain
gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks. Nature Over
Again After Poussin: Some Discovered Landscapes (Collins Exhibition Hall:
Glasgow, 1980) 2122.
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INDEX
Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 34, 59 167, 168, 204, 214, 215, 216,
Boillet, Danielle, 34, 5455, 59, 66 227, 228, 236
Bomarzo, 14, 23, 26, 2932, 3738, Cosmopolitan, 55, 240, 241, 242, 243
46, 49, 75, 76, 203 The Council of Ten, 84, 87, 88, 92,
Bonfadio, Jacopo, 24 93, 167, 170
Borges, Jorge Luis, 2, 3, 4 Cozzarelli, Julia, 39
Botero, Giovanni, 80, 8287 Cozzi, Gaetano, 9, 84, 93, 170, 171,
Brown, Patricia Fortini, 141 200n18
Bylebyl, Jerome J., 62 Critchley, Simon, 65
Cross, Richard, 223, 224
Cynics, 65
C
Calabrese, Omar, 3
Calmo, Andrea, 52, 204 D
Carpaccio, Vittorio, 124125 Damerini, Gino, 165, 166
Carpentier, Alejo, 3, 238 Daniele, Antonio, 59
Carroll, Linda L., 53, 54, 55, 67, 112, Davidson, Peter, 21, 22, 25,
126, 208, 214, 218, 235236 27, 38, 39
Carson, Anne, 222 De Barbari, Jacopo, 37, 114
Castiglione, Baldesar, 55, 68 De Certeau, Michel, 1, 9, 174, 217,
Casuistry, 181 221, 222, 226, 227, 233
Cocco, Enzo, 24, 48, 139 Dehiscence, 160, 164, 174, 203
Colonna, Francesco, 15, 23, 33, De Jennaro, Pietro Jacopo, 34, 59
3538, 4850, 53, 59, 64, 81 Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 70, 7475,
Comforters Manual, 80, 100 104, 111, 145147, 151,
Commedia dellarte, 17, 51, 52, 55, 191197, 238
115, 230 De Loyola, Ignatius, 188
Compagnie della Calza, 55, 111, 117, spiritual exercises, 6, 8, 9, 16, 89,
119, 125, 126, 166, 168 96, 107n8, 164, 165, 169,
Company of Death, 99100 171, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181,
Compossibility, 69, 71, 75, 195, 197 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188,
Compossibles, see Compossibility 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196,
Congrega dei Rozzi, 34 197, 198n7, 201n27, 204,
Contarini, Gasparo, 147 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 230,
Contarini, Giustiniano, 87 238, 240, 243, 245n10
Contarini, Tommaso, 8788 De Polanco, Juan, 185
Convertite, 79, 8690, 92, 94, Derrida, Jacques, 194, 205, 206, 215
95, 97, 102 Derso, Nancy, 53, 59, 66, 67,
Cornaro, Alvise, 7, 16, 53, 54, 55, 71, 158n32
72, 74, 112, 123, 131, 133, 134, Di Alessi, Stefano, 52, 123
137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, Di Falconetto, Maria, 74
146, 152, 153n3, 156n19, 166, Di Medici, Lorenzo, 35
INDEX 259
H
E Ha-ha, 140, 151
Egginton, William, 13, 17, 69, Hawkins, Henry, 22, 25, 26, 29, 49
7273, 76, 81, 207 Henry of Ghent, 223, 240
Ehrlich, Tracy L, 22 Herrenhausen (Gardens of), 26, 50
Ellrich, Lutz, 193195, 197 Hofstaetter, Birgit, 13, 14
Epicurus, 31, 240 Horodowich, Elizabeth, 60, 63, 68,
Erasmus, Desiderus, 202n32, 208, 72, 127131
218, 240, 245n8 Hortus conclusus, 114, 125127, 133,
Enchiridion, 208 140, 160
Militia confessio, 218 Hylomorphism, 178
In Praise of Folly, 208
Esecutori Contro la Bestemmia,
60, 129 I
Incompossibility, 6971, 75, 197
Incompossible, see Incompossibility
F
Falconetto, Giovanni Maria, 74, 139
Falvey, Kathleen, 101, 107n10
J
Fantazzi, Charles, 34, 53, 55
Jernigan, Charles, 41, 42
Ficino, Marsillio, 39
Jones, Irene Marchegiani, 41, 42
Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 241
Fo, Dario, 52, 54, 204
Foucault, Michel, 16, 17n6, 83,
9092, 94, 106, 174, 195, K
226231, 237 Kaup, Monika, 3, 238240
counter conduct, 226231 Kircher, Athanasius, 2122, 25, 49
critical attitude, 237, 240 Klaassen, Walter, 212, 213
Fuentes, Carlos, 3 Kurz, Otto, 9, 10, 22, 239
G L
Gaismair, Michael, 143, 208, 212, Labyrinth, 4, 5, 28, 30, 31, 37, 39, 40,
213, 214 53, 57, 153n4
Galli-Bibiena, Ferdinando, 116 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 3
Gelosi (Compagnia dei), 40, 45, 50n1 Lainez, Giacomo, 87
Godwin, Joscelyn, 35, 38 La Sensa, 85
Goldoni, Carlo, 52, 115 Law, John, 114, 115
260 INDEX
League of Cambrai, 55, 85, 126, 128 Ortolani (Compagnia degli), 113,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 14, 25, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124,
26, 29, 50, 52, 66, 69, 70, 71, 125, 126, 127, 130, 155n12, 160
7376, 111, 115 Ottonelli, Giovanni Domenico, 16,
Lima, Jos Lezama, 3, 207 161165, 175180, 188191
Lisska, Anthony J., 178, 179
Lovarini, Emilio, 53
Luther, Martin, 159, 214, 228229 P
Paden, William D., 34
Palazzo Ducale, 80, 85, 86, 119, 120,
M 121, 124, 127, 129, 130, 131,
Machiavelli, Niccol, 51, 55 146, 148, 151, 154n6
Maravall, Jos Antonio, 71, 149, 150 Palmio, Benedetto, 88, 89, 90
Marder, Michael, 23, 25, 26, 75 Petrarch, 23, 34, 55, 138
Martin, John, 9, 81, 82, 87, 105 Pietrogrande, Antonella, 113,
Matazone da Caligano, 53 114, 134
Menegazzo, Emilio, 67, 112 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 214, 218, 219
Menippus, 65 Psychagogy, 16, 50, 92, 94, 97, 159,
Molmenti, Pompeo, 124, 125 180, 197, 204
Moraa, Mabel, 3 Pullan, Brian, 89, 209
More, Thomas, 218, 219, 240
Muir, Edward, 84, 85, 121, 131, 143,
147, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211 R
Mules, Warwick, 242 Rame, Franca, 52
Ratio Studiorum, 172
Regimini militantis ecclesiae, 89
N Richeme, Louis, 39
Nadal, Jernimo, 90 Romano, Dennis, 9, 81, 87, 105
Ndalianis, Angela, 3, 28, 48, 57, 69
Neobaroque, 2, 3, 16, 57,
69, 207, 240 S
Nesbitt, Mike, 193197 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 31, 3435, 51, 59
Arcadia, 31
Poliziano, 59
O Sansovino, Francesco, 30, 34
OMalley, John, 90, 169, 183, 184 Santa Maria della Presentazione, 79,
Ontology, 179, 180, 196, 206 88, 121
On Tradition, 150 Sanuto, Marin, 113, 118121, 124,
Orsini, Pier Francesco, 14, 18n7, 128, 130, 131, 144
32, 75 Savorgnan, Antonio, 209212
INDEX 261
Scaduto, Mario, 87 V
Selfridge-Field, Eleanor, 121, 155n15 Valsanzibio, 14, 23, 2632, 38,
Sheeler, Jessie, 3032, 37, 76 40, 41, 46, 47, 49,
Snaturale, 57, 6669, 135, 150 52, 203
Spranzi, Marta, 13, 24, 25, 47, 50 Il Labirinto di Bossi Secolari, 28
Stampino, Maria Galli, 45 Isola dei Conigli, 28
percorso di Salvicazione, 26, 40,
46, 47
T portale di Diana, 27
Taegio, Bartolomeo, 24 statua del Tempo, 29
Tafuri, Manfredo, 166168, 199n11 Veatch, Henry, 179
Tasso, Torquato, 15, 23, 26, 33, Vercelloni, Matteo and Virgilio, 37,
35, 3850, 52, 58, 81, 95, 114
96, 97, 203 Villano, 53, 54,
Aminta, 15, 23, 33, 38, 4050, 58, 56, 61, 66,
95, 96, 97 75, 139
Gerusalemma Liberata, 42 Virgil, 34
Tavoletta, 101 Voltaire, 71, 241
Teatri del mondo, 164166,
169, 199n9
Terpstra, Nicholas, 98, 99 W
Third Nature, 24, 29, 68 Wadoski, Andrew, 42
Tintoretto, 74, 116, 166
Tomasi, Lucia Tongiorgi, 22
Torelli, Giacomo, 116 Z
Treaty of Noyon, 55 Zardinieri (Compagnia di), 118,
Trevisan, Domenico, 118 119
Tromp loeil, 139, 140, 143 iek, Slavoj, 188,
Tylus, Jane, 45 189
Zorzi, Ludovico, 53, 54, 59, 60,
62, 64, 65, 67, 118,
U 123, 125, 129,
University of Padua, 22, 54, 214, 240 141, 153n2, 155n12,
Urban, Lina Padoan, 165 229, 235, 244n7