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On the Use of Figurative Art as a Source for the Study of Medieval Spectacles
- Comparative Drama
- Western Michigan University
- Volume 25, Number 1, Spring 1991
- pp. 4-16
- 10.1353/cdr.1991.0014
- Article
- Additional Information
On the Use of Figurative Art as a Source for the Study of Medieval Spectacles Paola Ventrone The complex interrelationship between figurative art and dramatic art is one of the major questions of historiographie analysis—not the scenography and the theatrical stagecraft in a narrow context but figurative art not directly connected with theater production. I propose some general methodological considerations in an attempt to trace the motives which lie behind the need to bring together the study of theatrical phenomena and of iconographie evidence. Present historiography emphasizes the notion of theater as "ephemeral." When die theatrical event has passed, the historian is left with little else but fragmentary evidence (text, sketches, musical arrangements, or, nowadays, films or recordings) unable to revive the totality and the emotionality of the event. The farther we delve back into past centuries, the more arduous the task since sources become increasingly rare and fragmentary. Faced with the evanescence of their subject matter, theater scholars have chosen to study specific aspects of theatrical production (the text, the scenery, the theater's site or building, the actor) 1 or to revive or reconstruct a single play (as Elie Konigson in La Représentation d'un Mystère de la Passion à Valenciennes en 1547) .2 In both cases one must refer to figurative art sources, very often indirect ones, believed to reflect the theatrical phenomena in a visual rather than verbal manner. The visual record permits us to capture at a glance the greater part of the elements employed—the scenery, the colors, the lights, the movement of the actors, the choreography—just as a painted image conveys infinite meanings and images which a verbal description cannot entirely evoke. Resorting to figurative art has thus become indispensable to accompany—or to compensate for the lack of—written documents and to enable Paola Ventrone5 us to capture the concrete image of otherwise evanescent events3 and hence has given rise to studies (from Mâle to Kernodle to Francastel)4 setting this historiographie problem within a régime of reciprocal influences (from theater to art and from art to theater) . These seek to evaluate spectacles either as a source of direct inspiration for pictorial or figurative work in general (justifying the application of these works as true evidence of the theatrical event which inspired them) or, conversely, to consider spectacles as a lively rendition of the very elements constituting figurative art. This approach has been especially evident in the study of medieval theater, about which very little direct visual evidence, including written documentation, exists. To give a concrete example, assuming a passage from theater to painting, Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce Church of Florence should reveal conditions for a production of a religious play in the late Middle Ages,5 while on the contrary, if we consider a borrowing from painting to theater, the very same frescoes should have provided companies producing religious spectacles with a visual pattern on which to model their stage.6 This kind of mirror-like evaluation (regardless of the direction taken) does not really enrich our knowledge of either painting or theater. Yet this type of interpretation has stimulated an often superficial application of figurative sources—and inspired an extensive and haphazard introduction of irrelevant images—in various theatrical studies, while, on the other hand, it has created a tendency in art history to consider as "theatrical" certain images which in reality are not connected with theater. Why then is this simplified and inaccurate interpretation of the complex relationship between figurative art and theater, especially in medieval studies, so deeply rooted? First, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the theater of the Middle Ages ranges at least from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. Pioneer scholars of the nineteenth century7 considered this period culturally homogeneous and believed various and most diverse records of religious spectacles from different parts of Europe throughout this entire period to be local manifestations of an abstract idea of a sacred drama fundamentally unconfined to specific time or place. But if such interpretation is still acceptable in regard to the Latin liturgical plays, produced by a homogeneous cultural class of the conventual clergy, it can no longer be...