La Marianna de Lodovico Dolce (1565) : la recherche de la parfaite tragédie à l’épreuve de la forzatura maniériste
While often considered a second-rate author by critics, Lodovico Dolce presents a successful, new, and unprecedented tragedy with his Marianna, performed in Venice in 1565. It draws its sources not from ancient tragedies but from the Hebrew texts by Flavius Josephus and resonates with the Venetian m...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Institut du Monde Anglophone
2024-11-01
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| Series: | Etudes Epistémè |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/episteme/17983 |
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| Summary: | While often considered a second-rate author by critics, Lodovico Dolce presents a successful, new, and unprecedented tragedy with his Marianna, performed in Venice in 1565. It draws its sources not from ancient tragedies but from the Hebrew texts by Flavius Josephus and resonates with the Venetian myth of good governance. Herod's madness leading to the condemnation to death of Mariamne and their children makes the tyrant the antithesis of the ideal Prince. Dolce, an erudite playwright, upholds both the rules of ancient tradition and those of 16th-century Italian theatrical practice, as laid out in Renaissance treatises on theatrical art and in the paratexts of contemporary tragedies. Following in the footsteps of Giraldi Cinzio as well as Trissino or Speroni, Dolce strives to find the ideal composition of the perfect tragedy, while remaining sensitive to the poetic innovations and unusual experiments of Italian Mannerism. Thus, through the notions of sprezzatura (inherited from Castiglione), forzatura, and figura serpentinata (with the example of Parmigianino), the implementation of concepts derived from behavioural treatises as well as pictorial works allows Dolce's Marianna to be placed within a context of constantly evolving aesthetic creation, at the very moment when Tridentine thought developed, with Roman Catholic morality imposing its artistic grammar on theatrical practices. |
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| ISSN: | 1634-0450 |