Theater, Spectacle and the City in Italy, 1400-1600

Catalog description

Renaissance Italian playwrights adapted dramatic models from the ancient world for their comedies and tragedies. At the same time, designers and architects created spaces for drama that imitated ancient models but also adopted innovative concepts of pictorial space pioneered by 15th century painters. All the participants were in turn conditioned by the various social and political contexts in which the plays were conceived and produced. How the mutually conditioning factors of the play-text, the stage space, and the larger civic or court context work together will be the focus of the course.