L'arte del buffone: Maschere e spettacolo tra Italia e Bavaria nel XVI secolo (review)

Even more so than with English and Spanish early modern theater, the study of Italian professional theater in the Renaissance (most commonly referred to as the commedia dell'arte, following an eighteenth-century coinage) has tended to generate linear and evolutionary narratives. If no one agrees any longer with nineteenth-century scholars that the commedia dell'arte derived directly from the late ancient Atellan farce, a more temporally proximate theatrical phenomenon has frequently been proposed in recent years as a generative antecedent: the performances in Venetian piazzas, banquet halls, and state venues of buffoni such as Domenico Taiacalze (d. 1513) and Zuan Polo Liompardi (d. 1541). Like the later Italian professional actors who emerged, tentatively in the 1540s and 1550s and then extensively from 1567 on, these Venetian entertainers practiced verbal improvisation, performed before a wide social range of audience members, provided an extensive variety of entertainment, and presented themselves not as occasional actors but as entertainers with a distinct occupational identity.

Viewed as an antecedent for something else in a larger narrative, the Venetian buffoni lose their distinct texture, and it is the great virtue of this important, rigorous, and beautifully presented book that Taiacalze, Liompardi, and other early sixteenth-century buffoni (including a kind of fool of God performing under the name of Pre' Stefano) are fully restored in their idiosyncratic particularity: not professional (most were artisans of some sort), not generally itinerant (although regularly venturing outside of the Veneto), not representational (as at least the serious parts in the professional comedy were conceived to be), but presentational, performing in a dizzying range of forms: intermezzi, Venetian civic rituals, canterina-style improvisation in ottava rima accompanied by a stringed instrument, acrobatics, dance, sleight-of-hand piazza performances, and a great variety of theatrical impersonations, including the ability to counterfeit an array of voices behind a curtain and thus animate a mini-comedy in the imaginations of their auditors. Vianello convincingly demonstrates that the buffoni's style of ottava rima and virtuosic vocal improvisation was sharply distinct from that practiced by the Italian professional actors, which was based on individual and dialogic repertoires of lazzi woven into the collective, flexible structure of the scenario.

The Venetian buffoni were richly documented, both in Marin Sanudo's diary and in a series of texts that bespeak a different relationship to the press than that practiced by later professional actors. The lamenti, dream visions (sogni), and testamenti published around the performances of the buffoni, often shortly after their deaths, are carefully analyzed, with attention both to the literary histories of the genres and the precise historical circumstances of each composition. Vianello edits all of these texts in a long appendix, which will provide a great boon to scholars for years to come, as will the collection of black-and-white and color plates at the end of the book, including images of the famous Narrentreppe in the Castle of Trausnitz in Landshut, Bavaria.

The commedia dell'arte style entertainments performed in Munich 1568 for festivities celebrating the marriage of William V of Bavaria and Renata of Lorraine, duly recorded in the Dialoghi (1568) of Massimo de Troiano, present an anomaly: is this really commedia dell'arte or is it something else? Vianello convincingly and carefully argues that the extensive presence of Italian actors in Germany from 1549 on, which resulted mainly from the many dynastic ties forged in the sixteenth century between the Habsburg and Gonzaga families, constituted a tradition that was parallel to and independent of the activity of the professional theater. The German and Austrian courts' taste for Italian music, art, and theater resulted in the employment of many artists, such as Orlando di Lasso, and generated the frequent deployment of commedia dell'arte themes and masks in occasional court festivals and carnival...