Volume 45, Number 1, 2024 Staging the Commedia Guest-edited by Francesco Ciabattoni

EN:

This essay examines four verbs from Dante’s Commedia that relate to music. Sections 2 and 3 discuss alleluiando and osannar, respectively. Section 4 considers the verb inneggiar—regarded, until Giorgio Inglese’s 2021 edition, as a corrupt reading of inveggiar—and argues that its similarity to the previously discussed denominal verbs, alleluiare and osannare, further supports inneggiar as the original lectio. Section 5 explores the meaning of alternando, a term with distinct, if not immediately obvious, musical resonance. As an introduction to the subject matter, section 1 provides an overview of the Commedia’s musical lexicon.

EN:

The relations between Dante’s Commedia and theatre are still a rich and, in some aspects, uncharted territory for research. In this essay, I will briefly outline the principal traits of medieval theatre and spectacle and present aspects of the dramaturgic and iconographic background of Dante’s major poem. Specific attention will be given to the analysis of Virgil, St. Bernard, Dante, and other characters of the Commedia as didascali. The role of the didascalus (maestro), sometimes called festaiuolo, in medieval religious theatre served multiple functions related to the theatre shows. I argue that Dante sometimes relies on narrative/dramatic patterns that can be associated with the role of the didascalus in medieval theatre and spectacle.

EN:

With our new sensibility to faces hidden by and emerging from behind masks, as well as to the dangers associated with seeing unmasked faces, this essay gives consideration to these themes in the Divine Comedy in relation to the question of performance. The blessed souls appearing to Dante descend to the physical spheres in a “command performance” with vague outlines of faces ceding to even less discernible brightnesses. The vision of those same souls as faces assembled in the Empyrean, where they in fact reside, is also staged, as they are shown as they will appear only at the end of time. Yet this performance is described as people removing their masks. The final vision of God seems to be a specular glimpse of one’s own face (nostra effige) in the Incarnation. This essay juxtaposes contemporary ideas of performativity developed out of speech act theory with medieval practical theology, such as the performance of the psalms and the liturgy and iconography of the Eucharist, in which performance effects what is often referred to as “real presence”. In particular, the imago pietatis, or Man of Sorrows, unwittingly echoed in the stance of the proud atheist, Farinata, in Hell, connects real presence to knowledge of the present, both of which are invisible to the damned. The episode of Ugolino, meanwhile, connects seeing faces with eating, glossed by the extreme legibility on the faces of the starving on the terrace of gluttons in Purgatory. By the end of the poem, true knowledge is expressed not as propositional dogma or science of facts but as an ineffable participatory experience: seeing a face, feeding at the breast, and performing or enacting a relationship of love.

EN:

This essay reads the performative aspect of the human being as rooted in their physio-psychological structure. More specifically, it enlightens a connection between the inner balance of the individual—which, according to medieval science, depends on the medical notion of complexio—and a correct choice of behavior that leads to performance. Performance enters therefore into the relationship between medicine and ethics, as exemplified in medieval scientific literature as well as in Dante’s writing. This article re-reads performative moments across the Vita nuova and the Commedia (with particular reference to the Purgatorio) and uncovers the scientific roots of performance both at the diegetic level and in terms of authorship.

EN:

Dance is here viewed as a form of prayer. In the medieval controversy over the legitimacy of secular and religious dancing, Dante sides with the sacredness of moving one’s body harmoniously at the rhythm of music. Because in Paradiso prayer is no longer a request or a desire for intimacy with the divine, the heavenly souls manifest their blissful achievement of finally being with God through their glorious bodies and their voices, singing and dancing, as for example in the concentric dance of the wise souls in the Heaven of the Sun (Paradiso X, XI, and XII).

EN:

Numerous episodes in the Commedia present themselves as “scenes,” as interactions between characters that have a highly dramatic quality. These “scenes” would resonate, for medieval audiences, with their personal experiences of live performance events as well as depictions of related scenes in the visual arts that were visible in local churches and baptisteries. This essay takes Dante’s staging of the encounter with Sordello in Purgatorio 6 as a central case study of a scene of celebration with multiple resonances, exploring the ways in which that episode might bring to a reader’s mind visual and textual performances of the Visitation. By contextualizing the scene within relevant medieval modes of performing and viewing affectively powerful scenes, the essay proposes that known scenes of the Visitation might be implicitly employed in Dante’s text to enrich the affective charge of the depiction of the meeting with Sordello.