2012, Papiro, Martina

Festive operas were preserved in the form of libretti with accompaying graphic plates and, in the context of court publicity, made available to the public and to posterity. The illustrations show the stage area with scenery decoration and all the theater machines employed. They oscillate between factual documentation and an idealized portrayal of the performance. In this paper, the conventions of this type of picture are introduced with the help of etchings of the Florentine festive operas on the occasion of the weddings of members of the ruling Medici family. This selective examination of strategies of pictorial composition should show whether and how the courtly music theater as an interaction of the arts was represented in the two-dimensional medium.