Will Daddario - Baroque, Venice, Theatre

Performance Philosophy
Series Editors
Laura Cull Maoilearca
University of Surrey
Guildford, United Kingdom
Alice Lagaay
Bauhaus-Universitt Weimar
Weimar, Germany
Will Daddario
Independent Scholar
Asheville, North Carolina, USA
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Will Daddario
Baroque, Venice,
Theatre, Philosophy
Will Daddario
Independent Scholar
Asheville, North Carolina, USA
Performance Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-319-49522-4 ISBN 978-3-319-49523-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49523-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938277
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I dedicate this book to Joanne, Finlay, Phalen, and the gardens we
cultivate together.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to the Ofce of International Programs at the University of

Minnesota, which funded my early research in Venice on this topic during
my last two years as a graduate student. Likewise, the Graduate Research
Partnership Program provided funding that helped me to track down
secondary sources and to carve out time for in-depth analyses of those
sources. In Venice, I would like to thank the archivists at LArchivio di
Stato di Venezia, La Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, and La Biblioteca del
Museo Civico Correr for facilitating many truly baroque encounters with
the past. Without the advice of John Martin and Dennis Romano solicited
over email in the spring of 2009, I probably would not have been able to
return to the collections in Venice after suffering humiliating defeats
during my rst forays there.
Thanks are also due to the Jesuit and Jesuit-inspired pedagogues who
shaped my early education, including Mike Foy and Susan Renaud at
Assumption School in Seattle, Paul Peterhans and Father Dave Thomas
S.J., at Seattle Preparatory School, and Father Robert J. Spitzer S.J. at
Seattle University. Without them, I would not have learned the spirit of
critical inquiry that drives much of the historical analysis in these pages.
In addition to the source materials and educational background needed
to write this book, I have drawn upon the strength and wisdom of many
friends and advisers. Without the following people, my work would not be
as strong. Bruce Burningham, I greatly appreciate your insights on neo-
baroque studies, without which I would not have discovered the work of
Angela Ndalianis, and your suggestion to look more closely at the aes-
thetics and philosophy of the Middle Ages. Richard Leppert, thank you for
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
the encouraging feedback during the initial drafting stages of the disserta-
tion chapters. Margaret Werry, thank you for your incredible tenacity,
your scholarly assiduity, your reminders about the necessity of sound and
creative research methodologies, and, most importantly, your warm
friendship in the last several years. Laura Cull Maoilearca, our partner-
ships since 2010 have helped me to understand the importance of perfor-
mance philosophy in todays academic landscape and in life in general.
Indeed, what does it mean to think? Your work ethic and leadership are
admirable and I look forward to many more years of working together so
that we can come up with answers to that question. Freddie Rokem and
Alice Lagaay, thank you for your guidance on the book proposal and your
keen understanding of the shape of the discipline as it continues to
unfold. Freddie, in particular, thank you sincerely for having faith in my
work and for your kindness and friendship. Matthew Goulish and Lin
Hixson, your creativity emanates from Chicago and provides a beacon that
I can see wherever I am. Thanks for your work and the inspiring new
directions in which you are taking it. And nally, Michal Kobialka, you
have advised me on this project since its inception and are very much part
of its nal fabric. Countless bottles of wine and champagne have fueled the
late-night discussions about the life of the mind and the necessity of
pushing the boundaries of thought. I look forward to many more of
those conversations and to continuing our work together.
I offer the ultimate acknowledgement, for which no words seem ade-
quate, to my wife, Joanne Zerdy, and our two sons, Finlay Emilio and
Phalen Sage. The light and the dark sides of life have enwrapped the four
of us, and from within the folds, together, we manage to produce new
forms of beauty and nd new expressions of strength. I love you all.
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
Part I Baroque Pastoral
2 Garden Thinking and Baroque Pastoral 21
3 Pastoral Askew and Aslant: Ruzzantes

Historico-Theatrical Consciousness 51
4 Jesuit Pastoral Theatre: The Case of Father Pietro

Leon da Valcamonica 79
Part II Discipline and Excess
5 Ruzzante Takes Place 111
6 The Enscenement of Self and the Jesuit Teatro del Mondo 159
7 Baroque Diarchic Self 203
Bibliography 247
Index 257
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book begins neither by carving out a niche within baroque studies,
nor by presenting a manageable scope of study, but, instead, by reveling in
the excesses of baroque thinking that have illuminated the pages of so
many notable works. Sprouting from a footnote in the chapter The
Inversion of What Can Be Thought of The Writing of History, one
nds (if one looks for it) an enigmatic denition of the baroque cultivated
by the Jesuit psychoanalyst and historiographer Michel de Certeau: [The
Baroque:] a spectacle of metamorphoses which ceaselessly hide what they
show (de Certeau 145 n33). Within some pages devoted to seventeenth-
century Christian mysticism, this denition limns the paradoxical nature of
the baroque as an expression which hides what it shows and calls to mind
the painful act of staring at the Sun. There, where the Sun shines brightest,
a dark spot appears as if to cover ones eyes from the power of the light.
Even upon looking away, the dark spot lingers, both as a hole burned into
our vision and as a negative of the cosmic shine.
Staring at the work of Cervantes, literary scholar and proponent of the
neobaroque William Egginton sees a similar spectacle and asserts that,
The Baroque is theatre, and the theatre is baroque (Egginton 39).
Overcoming the tautology of that statement, he continues, in a thought
reminiscent of de Certeau, by explaining the purpose of such theatre,
which unfolds not organically but rather through a concerted strategy.
The major strategy of the Baroque [ . . . ] assumes the existence of a veil of
appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a space opening just
The Author(s) 2017 1

W. Daddario, Baroque, Venice, Theatre, Philosophy,
Performance Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49523-1_1
2 1 INTRODUCTION
beyond those appearances where truth resides (3). So many of the

spectators viewing these performances, up to and including the performers
themselves, know that they are watching a performance, but this knowl-
edge only deepens the conviction that, the artice in fact refers to some
truth just beyond the cameras glare (4). Ultimately, then, both neobar-
oque lm and baroque theatre, a theatre much wider in scope than that
which appears on a proscenium stage or in the pages of a novella, under-
mines our ability to make this distinction [between appearance and sub-
stance] in the rst place. Not, however, in order to lead us further astray
from reality itself, but rather to make us aware, to remind us that we are
always, at any level, involved with mediation (6).
Posing anti-philosopher Jacques Lacan, speaking of religion and the
mediating role of the biblical Gospels in the play between fantasy and the
Real, calls the baroque the regulation of the soul by a corporeal viewing
(XX 105), where scopie corporelle is at once a viewing of the body (Buci-
Glucksmann) but also an embodied viewing, a sinking into the materiality of
perception (cit. Egginton Truth 74). Bruce Finks translation of the same
passage from Lacans lectures adds another play on language to the analysts
enigmatic pronouncement: The baroque is the regulating of the soul by
corporal radioscopy (Lacan 116). The mediation at stake here transpires on
multiple levels. First, on the level of media: sound waves (radio) become
visual (scopie). The synaesthetic effect denoted by the word radioscopy
mimics the attempted fusion of body and soul in the art of the Counter-
Reformation, which Lacan, incidentally, had visited on this day (May 8,
1973) in a museum prior to beginning his lecture. Second, on the level of
discipline: baroque art bleeds beyond the limits of its own form and thus
exceeds its own structures, but it does this in order to regulate the soul of all
who come in contact with these excesses. Baroque regulation mediates the
excesses of spirit and body while renouncing the strictures of its own form.
Such a denition summons the essays and poetry of Jorge Luis Borges
who, aware of his own literary excesses, says, I would say that the
Baroque is that style that deliberately exhausts (or wants to exhaust) its
possibilities and that verges on its own caricature. [ . . . ] I would say that
the Baroque is the nal stage of all art when this art exhibits and dilap-
idates its means (cit. Egginton Truth, 75).1 Here, Borges raises baroque
to a space of reckoning (the nal stage) and identies the corrosive
effect of occupying such a space. Note that art itself, in Borgess formula-
tion, is not baroque; rather, art may enter the space of baroque in order to
INTRODUCTION 3
reveal its secrets in one nal expression. Baroque, then, conditions the
possibility of such an expression and becomes something like the arena
that plays home to a cavalcade of grotesque nality.
Borgess insights have appealed to the scholars of neobaroque arti-
facts and phenomena who have located just such a space in the New
World. Cinema, new media, and literary scholar Angela Ndalianis clari-
es the ndings of Italian semiologist Omar Calabrese, in particular, by
stating that, Baroque and Latin American neobaroque forms unfurl
into a play of borders, where the the border articulates and renders
gradual relations between the interior and the exterior, between aper-
ture and closure (cit. Ndalianis 19).2 Neobaroque advocate Monika
Kaup cites novelist Alejo Carpentiers assertion that the neobaroque
entails, a transformative force of life that recurs through history as
the Manichean counterpart of the ordering force of reason (cit.
Kaup, Becoming 129).3 By recognizing the productive potential of
borderlands and a Manichean, dual subjectivity, indigenous artists cut
through the historical thicket planted by European colonization and move
toward a clearing. As poet Jos Lezama Lima infers, such an American
perspective allows one to occupy the pivotal point such that one experi-
ences both the convergences of knowledge and its dispersions, the bursting
of the image onto the landscape of the unknown (cit. Egginton 74).4
Mexicos great novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes has understood both
the promise of such unknown landscapes as well as the anxieties they
provoke: The Baroque, Alejo Carpentier at one time was telling me, is
the language of peoples, who, ignoring truth, seek after it eagerly. Gngora,
like Picasso, Buuel, Carpentier, or Faulkner, did not know: he encountered
(cit. Egginton 73; emphasis in original).5 Equipped with this alethurgic
language, what does the speaker encounter?6 Again, as inferred by Lacan,
the speaker will encounter the limit of self. As the prolic Latin American
scholar Mabel Moraa tells it, [The Baroque] is the expression of the limit:
an expressivity situated at the abyss of representability [ . . . ] it constitutes, at
the same time, a process that transforms the negativity of what is missing (the
lack, the desire, the abnormality) its original impulse, [into] the locus of the
initial suppression/repression that can be hyperbolically lled with meaning
and saturated with signs (260; emphasis in original). That which lies
beyond the veil, as Egginton has suggested, that unseen and unknown
force, takes place in the realm of the rational and sensible as the stage upon
which all expression will play out. Perhaps this situation explains the aesthetic
4 1 INTRODUCTION
of baroque and New World, or neo-, Baroque cathedral architecture, which

assaults the viewer with mute claims to the power of Gods presence but-
tressed by evidence offered in the form of the intricate carvings, fearful
symmetry, and chiaroscuro frosting faade after faade.
The list of what the baroque is, what it does, what it produces, and what
it claims as truth can go on and on. It will, in fact, go on as this book
unfolds. Already, though, one gets a sense of the labyrinthine form of
baroque thinking, a thinking that comes into being through an encounter
with a specic object or artifact (the writing of mystics, a religious icon, a
painting, a lm, poetry, prose, an open space housing a performance) and
that labors to index that encounter. To enter the baroque, one must
prepare to enter such a labyrinth. To enter baroque theatre, with its
spectacle of metamorphoses and conjuring of essence through appear-
ance, and to make that entrance with the help of writings on baroque
theatre, one must acquiesce to enter that particular labyrinth with a map
that is itself a labyrinth of signs that needs unriddling. To enter baroque
theatre in sixteenth-century Venice, as this book intends to do, one must
with aplomb welcome the seasickness of historical uncertainty and equip
oneself with a disciplined rigor, while also keeping in mind the excesses
that abound within such rigor. Again, Borges:
In the Empire in question, the Cartographers Art reached such a degree of

Perfection that the map of a single province took up an entire City, and the
map of the Empire covered an entire Province. After a while these Outsized
Maps were no longer sufcient, and the Schools of Cartography created a
Map of the Empire that was the size of the Empire, matching it point by
point. Later Generations, which were less Devoted to the Study of
Cartography, found this Map Irrelevant, and with more than a little
Irreverence left it exposed to the Inclemencies of the Sun and Winter. In
the Western desert there are scattered Ruins of the Map, inhabited by
Animals and Beggars. No other relics of the Geographic Discipline can be
found anywhere else in the Land. (Borges 139)
The labor of the historiographer (allegorized as the Cartographers Art)

encounters problems straight away: are we grappling with the objects and
places themselves, or have we instead picked up the narratives and maps of
those objects and places left behind by others who came before us? This
question pertains equally to the work of writing history and the work of
encountering baroque theatre history.
CONSTELLATORY THINKING: BAROQUE, VENICE, THEATRE, PHILOSOPHY 5
Fortunately, as the baroque scholars above have noted, the study of this
topic (i.e. topos, place) does not benet from acts of making sense;
rather, students of the baroque make their way through the labyrinths
by allowing their ndings not to add up, by resisting the urge to recreate a
whole, and by giving up the effort of inscribing a well-groomed and
traceable area for the benet of future explorers. Mess, fragments, shifting
ground, scribbled ndings: these are the markers of encounters with
baroque acts. With this in mind, the following pages offer an excited
survey and set of provisional charts of this shifting ground by metastasizing
baroque signs instead of limiting them and by developing a baroque mode
of thinking commensurate with the objects of study that the thinking
would like to assess.
CONSTELLATORY THINKING: BAROQUE, VENICE, THEATRE,

PHILOSOPHY
In the essay Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian, Walter Benjamin
declares that any contemplation of history that has the right to call itself
dialectical proceeds from a state of unrest and uncertainty. This state of
unrest, he writes, refers to the demand on the researcher to abandon the
tranquil contemplative attitude toward the object in order to become
conscious of the critical constellation in which precisely this fragment of
the past nds itself in precisely this present (227). Dialectical thinking,
adamantly opposed to the pseudo-scientic procedures of positivist his-
toricism, forces the researcher to surrender claims of certainty to the
caprice of the objects under consideration, and to forsake the desire to
know what (ostensibly) really happened in favor of illuminating the pre-
sent stakes of critical thinking; and to do this by, all the while, attending to
the fraught relationships between historical objects and historical inquiry.
Baroque, Venice, Theatre, Philosophy assembles various theatre and per-
formance practices from sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Venice in
order to rethink the baroque as a gathering of social practices aimed at
cultivating modes of subjectivity, understood here as subject positions that
coincide with recognizable identity categories (e.g. Protestant, Christian,
converted, Venetian, Paduan, etc.). Culminating in a proposal for recog-
nizing these social practices as cultivators of a diarchic self, a self driven by
(at least) two opposed rulers and founded on a complex internal differ-
ence, my research forges numerous links between theatre-making and
6 1 INTRODUCTION
philosophical inquiry, and presents these links as an historical form of

performance philosophy. Distinct from the phrases Baroque Venetian
Theatre or Baroque Philosophy, which send our focus to theatrical
practices modied by a baroque sensibility and Venetian historiography,
on the one hand, and philosophies devised during a specic historical
period, on the other, the constellation Baroque, Venice, Theatre,
Philosophy presents a riddle for contemplation. Moving between the
dramaturgy of Jesuit spiritual exercises, the political theatre-making of
Angelo Beolco (aka Ruzzante), and the civic governance of the Venetian
Republic at a time of great tumult and collapse, this study rethinks the
baroque as neither a time period nor an artistic style but as a collection of
bodily practices developed from clashes between governmental disciplines
and artistic excesses. As such it imagines Venice as a stage upon which
unfolded performances of the theatre of the world, a conception nurtured
and cultivated by the narratives of the Republic itself. My work also re-
situates theatre outside of its commonplace denition as a permanent
structure or a scripted ctional performance occurring inside that struc-
ture, choosing instead to theorize theatre as an act of taking place, an act
that pregures all dramatic repertoires and grounds theatre as a political
art form. Finally, philosophy appears not as an institutionalized discourse
of knowledge-production that explains the presuppositions subtending
specic artistic offerings but as a concerted and systematic mode of
doing life and of maneuvering through various socially constructed obsta-
cle courses with the aim of thinking and experiencing the world anew.
What Benjamin identied as a tranquil contemplative attitude has
stabilized baroque theatre into an historical period and set of aesthetic
principles. This mindset (or scholarly praxis), while birthing numerous
instructive studies on architecture, music, and theatre machinery, has
frozen the chaos of baroque contestations into intelligible, static images.7
Against this attitude, Baroque, Venice, Theatre, Philosophy stages an histor-
ico-philosophical analysis in order to offer an interpretation of historically
specic performance practices that established theatres of the world
through which individuals thought about themselves and the socio-poli-
tical environments in which they lived and, given the legacies left by both
the Jesuits and Ruzzante, continue to live now. By unearthing a tension
produced by clashes between spiritual and civic modes of governance, on
the one hand, and modes of artistic excess, on the other hand, in Venice
during the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, the book argues that
the nascent Jesuit Order, the Venetian government, artistic patrons such
CONSTELLATORY THINKING: BAROQUE, VENICE, THEATRE, PHILOSOPHY 7
as Alvise Cornaro, and the performer known as Ruzzante harnessed thea-

trical expression to coerce allegiance for and/or act out against dominant
ideologies establishing themselves at the time.
Whether one talks about the ideal citizen of a Republican government,
the spiritual purity of an ideal Christian, the intellectual acumen of wealthy
property owners, or the virtuosity of public and private theatrical perfor-
mers, all conversations lead back to the ideology of the self (i.e. a thinking
agent capable of affecting the world) and the proper performance of the
subject. The theatrical expressions of the cast of characters gathered
together in this study and the ideologies those characters supported
and/or sought to disarm all informed a subjectivity bound inextricably
to various notions of performance and to philosophies of il teatro del
mondo. Not, then, a noun modied by intriguing adjectives (Baroque
Venetian Theatre, Baroque Philosophy) but a list of worlds coinciding at
a particular time and a particular place; Baroque, Venice, Theatre,
Philosophy maps the political and aesthetic networks of early modern
Venice in order to contribute to discussions of the baroque concerned
with subjectivity formation and the battle for individuals allegiances
waged through highly theatrical means and involving the highest of stakes.
Commencing from a reconsideration of Benjamins and Theodor W.
Adornos philosophical practice of negative dialectics and its relation to
the elds of theatre history and performance philosophy, this books image
of the baroque coalesces through an inductive research methodology that
stitches together play texts, architectural plans, spiritual concerns of the
self articulated by Jesuit priests, Venetian historiography, Scholastic and
other Medieval philosophical proposals, and archival documents mined
from LArchivio di Stato Venezia (the Venetian Archive of State), La
Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (the Marciana National Library), and La
Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr (the Library of the Correr Civic
Museum). Once assembled like so many tiles within a mosaic, each frag-
ment displays a glimpse of the baroque embedded within everyday actions,
such as attending theatre events, practicing confession, and administering
to the general upkeep of civic life in and around Venice. As such, the
historico-philosophical procedure adopted for this project aims to harmo-
nize with the irreducibly complex qualities of the baroque as well as those
of theatrical performance in early modern Venice.
At its heart, the content of this book oscillates around two seemingly
opposed entities: the Jesuits and Ruzzante. Founded in Venice and con-
ceived as the militant arm of the Catholic Church under the guidance of
8 1 INTRODUCTION
Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits, or Society of Jesus, instituted a daily practice

of discipline, cultivated through a spiritual cleansing ritual known as the
spiritual exercises. Its aim: to teach the manner of acting in accordance
with the Church so as to open oneself to Gods truth and love. By
distinction, Ruzzante, frequently appraised by theatre and cultural histor-
ians as the most important performer of his time, made his living through a
profusion of licentious and politically contentious plays, some offered in
ve acts, others performed as monologues or stripped-down dialogues
inside private homes and on vast mainland estates.8 At rst, Ruzzante
seems to embody precisely the excess resisted and rejected by Jesuit
disciplinary practices; however, once recognized as theatrical modes of
expression unfolding in the same space (Venice and its surrounding terri-
tories), at the same time (the rst half of the sixteenth century), and
consisting of an uncannily similar repertoire of gestures (each cultivated
from explicitly theatrical vocabularies and philosophies), the techniques
of self practiced by Loyolas followers and Ruzzante yoke the two histor-
ical gures into what Adorno called a non-identical pair. Each member of
the pair, rather than relying primarily on or inclining ultimately toward
either discipline or excess as its fundamental disposition, derives its
momentum from a dialectical interplay between both discipline and excess.
To understand the historically specic nature of both the early Jesuit order
in Venice and Ruzzante, I pair these unlikely entities together and develop
the surprising relations revealed through such a pairing.
Traditionally given over to empirical historicism, theatre-specic stu-
dies of the baroque tend either to pursue architectural history or the
evolution of stage machinery. This book, however, develops a theory of
the baroque as a collection of social practices that reveals theatre as an act
of taking place instead of as a permanent building in which specic
performances occur. Meanwhile, the rich eld of Venetian historiography
has provided numerous insights into the stimulating world of Europes
most prolic republic, and yet those studies tend to treat theatre and
performance as anthropological case studies or examples of Venetian
governmental eccentricity.9 In contributing to these elds of scholarship,
my book builds on the momentum of the new terrain of Performance
Philosophy. Scholars in this evolving terrain understand theatre and per-
formance as ways of being and becoming that, once understood as philo-
sophical practices, help us in the present to rethink the nature of the self
and the mutually constitutive relation of art and thinking. All thinking
coursing through and visible in this book owes a great debt to the works of
PERFORMANCE OF THOUGHT 9
Venetian historiographers (from Gaetano Cozzi, Frederic C. Lane, and

Felix Gilbert to John Jeffries Martin, Dennis Romano, and Elisabeth
Crouzet-Pavan) but the thought performed here also aims at dismantling
any articial boundaries that would attempt to keep theatre and perfor-
mance in a subservient position as something to be used to explain a
philosophical concept or as an example of a specic ideology. Theatre
and performance, here, think. These artistic practices produce knowledge
and offer critiques just as much as they represent extant knowledge and
embodied critical inquiries. Moreover, the work of this book aims at
exposing theatre, Venetian state-building, spiritual exercises, political
reformation, pastoral poetic language, and philosophical frameworks
inherited from antiquity as mutually constitutive entities that form a
constellation of thought still visible and legible today.
PERFORMANCE OF THOUGHT
I want to return again to the metastasization of denitions and meanings
that frequently surges forth in studies of the baroque in order to offer a
more specic set of claims about the performance of thought (what some
might call methodology) that I enact in this books pages. My intention
here is twofold. First, I desire to foreground the maneuvers I make as I
consciously and with great care arrange historical fragments into a specic
shape. By exposing my work as a historiographer, I intend to draw atten-
tion to the act of creation in which all historians (regardless of any stated
or implied objectivity) engage. Second, I want to forward this act of
creation as necessary for the art of historiography. If, as de Certeau has
convincingly suggested, the act of writing history (an act that produces
history) always fails to achieve the status of either pure truth or utter
falsity, then the historiographer perpetually nds himself in the gap, the
very gap that he would vainly seek to erase by endeavoring to write history
and, by doing so, bridge the past and the present. This gap (or, rather, this
gesture of coming nearer [that] reduces but never eliminates distance)
begs for art and playfulness instead of science and surety (de Certeau 230).
In his Barocco: storia di un concetto (Baroque: History of a
Concept), Otto Kurz opens the door to artistic historiography by asses-
sing the baroque through an etymological excavation of the word itself
and discovering not a permanent historical phenomenon but a shifting,
unstable, and quasi-mythical concept housing numerous stories and pos-
sibilities. Baroque appears to him like the irregular pearls preferred by
10 1 INTRODUCTION
sixteenth-century jewelers for their grotesque appearance, and that so

delighted the wealthy citizens of Italy and Portugal (16). In seven-
teenth-century texts, such as letters penned by the Italian librarian
Antonio Magliabecchi, Kurz discovers the term barocco as a synonym for
fraudulent usury or cheat (ibid.). He also nds reference to a barocco
that signies the practice of absurd and convoluted reasoning such as that
found in Medieval (Aristotelian) logical exercises (17). Kurz contends that
despite all those references, baroque, as we understand it today, may
come from the name of the painter Federigo Barocci (aka Federico Fiori,
15281612), a source that may explain its appearance in the Dizionario
delle Belle Arti (1797) of Francesco Milizia, who denes the term and
gives a list of other baroque artists: it is the superlative of the bizarre, the
excess of the ridiculous. Borromini gave [such] delusions, but [also]
Guarini, Pozzi, [and] Marchione in the Sacristy of [Saint] Peter are
baroque (22). Baroque, though, also seems to denote a particular
style devised by Jesuits, whose use of theatricality in their conversion
tactics was well known to the sixteenth and seventeenth-century world
(29). By the end of Kurzs essay, any certainty about a stable baroque
identity has faded away beneath a mess of historical traces and genealogies.
The mess constitutes a fantastical arrangement that shifts the baroque
from a concrete historical period or a neatly dened architectural or more
broadly artistic style into a historical riddle. I suggest that we tread care-
fully as we decide how to phrase the riddle. Let us not ask what a baroque
theatre practice looks like, but, rather: What theatre practices reveal
dented, grotesque forms, like that of the baroque pearl? What theatre
historical texts contain characters or historical gures speaking through a
convoluted or abstruse, irregular logic? Where might we nd a theatrical
version of the trompe loeil common in painting? To fantasize baroque
(more on this verb in a moment) means to follow the direction in which
these questions point, and to imagine or visualize a theatre practice whose
specicity comes into view by asking all of these questions.
For me, a philosophical practice well suited to the metastasizing
excesses of baroque fantasy comes from the exceedingly disciplined work
of Adorno, whose lifelong preoccupation with aesthetics and the writing
of history contained within artworks provokes a number of timely con-
siderations. In 1931, Adorno gave a lecture to the philosophy faculty of
the University of Frankfurt titled, The Actuality of Philosophy.
Actuality, in this sense, does not concern a xed identity for philosophy;
rather, it asks whether, after the failure of the last great efforts, there
exists an adequacy between the philosophic questions and the possibility

of their being answered at all (124). The answer is that, yes, one can
answer those questions, but the method of actualizing philosophys poten-
tial lies in the encounter between objective material and subjective
thought (the true locus of philosophy) which unfolds by eschewing all
recourse to science (e.g., Kant, Bergson), on the one hand, and all
totalizing philosophies of being (e.g. Heidegger) on the other. In this
lecture in particular, Adorno characterizes science as that mode of thinking
to which philosophy cannot acquiesce. The difference between these two
modes of thinking emerges in the way that:
the separate sciences accept their ndings, at least their nal and deepest
ndings, as indestructible and static, whereas philosophy perceives the rst
nding which it lights upon as a sign that needs unriddling. Plainly put: the
idea of science (Wissenschaft) is research; that of philosophy is interpretation.
(126)
In addition to differentiating between science and philosophy, this claim

reveals the rst step toward moving away from rigidly empirical studies of
the past. A critical, creative historiography, one that does not prioritize the
discovery of what really happened, requires philosophical interpretation as
opposed to the idea of research, research understood in an extremely
specic sense, one which assumes the reduction of the question to
given and known elements where nothing would seem necessary except
the answer (ibid).
Philosophical interpretation assumes as its object neither manifest
intentions nor reality concealed within objects, but, rather, that which
Adorno names unintentional reality. Existing in counterpoint to the
facts tracked down by the deductive historian, unintentional reality
appears within artifacts that, as if by accident, have been smuggled into
the present moment in forms as diverse as obscure monologues, puns,
architectural drawings, and gardens. Unintentional reality presents itself as
historical images that, when arranged into critical constellations and
approached through a (negative) dialectical materialist mode of thought,
illuminate the unintentional truths of objective reality, thereby making
visible the riddle of the past. Unintentional reality is not the answer to the
riddle of the past; that is, it does not reveal the Real, but, rather, it is a
shock of light that illuminates the riddle momentarily. The eeting and
ephemeral existence of the lighting negates the permanent, enduring
12 1 INTRODUCTION
riddle of the past by revealing how that-which-is can only become visible
through that-which-is-but-only-for-a-moment. As such, philosophy per-
sistently and with the claim of truth, must proceed interpretively without
ever possessing a sure key to interpretation; nothing more is given to it
than eeting, disappearing traces within the riddle gures of that which
exists and their astonishing entwinings (ibid). In other words, embracing
philosophical interpretation means renouncing axiomatic methods that
would try to guide the historiographer through diverse terrains always
with the same map, and choosing, instead, to work out from within the
unique labyrinth of each historical fragment. There is no proof of the
baroque to nd in the theatre practices of sixteenth-century Venice but it
is possible to discover what (else) baroque might be/mean/do by think-
ing creatively about those practices.
To embrace Adornos method of philosophical interpretation while
studying the past, however, one needs to abandon a relatively familiar
denition of the archive. Indeed, a second derivation from deductive
historical research occurs here, in the consideration of the archive as an
arrangement of historical images. It makes little sense to talk about con-
tent when speaking of arrangement, since an arrangement has no content
as such. Rather, arrangements require an attention to form and technique,
to how one assembles and re-assembles various materials. Whereas positi-
vist historians and historiographers would like to nd within archives facts
and objects that give way to the unimpeachable truths of a historical
situation, Adorno and Benjamin collect diverse materials to assemble a
unique archive for each inquiry and to produce an understanding of the
past attuned to the dialectical process active within each object. Historical
images are never givens. Rather, they must be produced by human beings
and are legitimated in the last analysis alone by the fact that reality
crystalizes about them in striking conclusiveness (131).
Fine-tuned ears will perk up here. If historiographers adopt the process
of philosophical interpretation posited by Adorno, are they (we, I) not
embarking on a project of producing history? Does this word produc-
tion not sound uncomfortably similar to invention? Is Adornos mate-
rialist production of historical, unintentional reality through the
juxtaposition of analytically isolated elements no more than fantastical
invention? Yes and no. The term invention played its part in the history
of the dialectical arts, particularly in Rudolph Agricolas De inventione
dialectica (Of dialectical invention 1479, published 1515), where the
word encompassed the all-important act of, rst, nding and ordering
the right arguments needed for proving a statement and then, second,
discovering truth itself. A wealth of invention, however, was, for Agricola,
a troubling sign, something given to ungoverned and almost mad intel-
ligences (Spranzi 87). Re-functioning this specic understanding of the
term, then, one might say that while Adornos philosophical interpretation
does not amount to making stuff up, it does require the ability to skirt the
madness alluded to in Agricolas term wealth of invention, so as to
prepare a truly artful inquiry. In this sense, invention requires a disci-
plined art to guide it such that the invention gathers itself at some point
and commences judgment (i.e. the act of argumentation) to glimpse and,
perhaps, moves beyond the limits of knowledge.
Adorno himself acknowledged the history of the ars inveniendi (the art
of invention) into which he was stepping:
If the idea of philosophic interpretation which I tried to develop for you is

valid, then it can be expressed as the demand to answer the questions of a
pre-given reality each time, through a fantasy which rearranges the elements
of the question without going beyond the circumference of the elements,
the exactitude of which has its control in the disappearance of the question.
(Adorno Actuality, 131)
Here, Adorno shifts from invention to fantasy and transitions from

the formal Aristotelian dialectic tradition leading back through the likes of
Agricola into his own negative dialectical procedure. This shift marks the
third and nal Adornian historiographical derivation away from positivist
empiricism for which I would like to advocate. In the place of a scientic,
research-driven quest for the answer to the question of what really
happened, I propose, following Adorno, an understanding of historio-
graphical practice as disciplined fantasy. The fantastical dimension lives
within the act of invention inherent in the process of arranging historical
images into critical constellations. In this act of fantasy, one needs disci-
pline to discern the circumference of the elements one has collected.
The historiographer cannot choose to say just anything about the material
under consideration. To the contrary, he or she must listen to the proposal
made by the historical material itself and, in that way, give over the power
of subjective reasoning to the irrationality of the object. Adornos term for
this act of listening, which according to Birgit Hofstaetter equates directly
(in Negative Dialectics) with the act of philosophy, is Verhaltensweise
(comportment). That word contains within it another word, Weise,
14 1 INTRODUCTION
meaning melody or tune. To listen to the proposal made by historical

material in a disciplined way would be to tune oneself to the object under
consideration and, simultaneously, to attend to ones own comportment
toward that object so as to maintain critical self-reexivity (Hofstaetter
161). To write history through disciplined fantasy would be to play the
past quasi una fantasia and to discover a baroque historiography.
In this book I try my hand at this disciplined fantasy. Despite this
lengthy excursus through Adornos ideas, I do not seek to apply a rigidly
Adornian or Benjaminian mode of thought at each turn of the analysis. In
fact, I stray often from the strictly Adornian and Benjaminian path to seek
help from other thinkers whose methods and ndings reveal the uninten-
tional reality of the materials I have collected here. Gilles Deleuze, for
example, famous for, among other things, his inquiry into Leibniz and the
baroque, provides help understanding how to think of baroque perfor-
mances and practices as dynamic objects, or, as he calls them, objectiles.
Michel Foucaults schematic blueprints of pastoral power and theories of
subversions to instrumental governmentalities also guide me through
several chapters. Indeed, many secondary sources treating multiple, some-
times far-ung, subjects of knowledge (from Renaissance curricula on
medicine to peasant revolts to garden architecture) make an entrance in
this study as I attempt to scrutinize the worlds embedded in the primary
sources I have culled from various sites. Ultimately, all theorizing required
to see the contours of the baroque practices alive in sixteenth-century
Venice shows itself as a concerted foray into the art of historiography, an
art made thinkable by the creative work of all the thinkers cited thus far.
SHAPE OF THE STUDY

The body of this book contains two parts. In Part I, I excavate the ground
on which the subsequent chapters stand, a ground to which I refer as
baroque pastoral. Chapter 2 tends to this ground by discussing the
intertwining, but frequently overlooked, pasts of baroque thinking and
pastoral literature. I offer two critical models to demonstrate this entwine-
ment. Sprouting from Leibnizs baroque fantasy of the world as a densely
packed enfoldment of gardens within gardens, I offer a reading of
Valsanzibio, the allegorical botanical masterpiece designed by Luigi
Bernini in the hills of Padua, and Bomarzo, a phantasmagorical garden
of delights planned by Vicino Orsini outside of Rome. After visiting those
gardens, I propose that worldviews found in archetypal works of pastoral
SHAPE OF THE STUDY 15
literature and drama take cues from the baroque thought underpinning
these gardens, what I call garden thinking. I turn rst to Francesco
Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii and then to Torquato Tassos
lAminta, the most exemplary model of the pastoral theatre genre.
Colonnas work persists in the present as an unwieldy and overgrown
work of imagination. Endeavoring to write the dream world of his prota-
gonist Poliphilo, Colonna sews a wild terrain of his own making with
nymphs, ornate temples, maps and diagrams, and erotic longing. In many
ways, the works formal excesses upstage the books content. Moving from
these excesses to the rigorous discipline of Tassos writing, I examine a
play renowned (during its time as well as in the present) for its mastery of
the pastoral mode. Educated by the Jesuits before turning to a life as poet
and playwright, Tasso created a theatrical landscape bursting at the seams
with allegorical messages, each one offering clues about how to discipline
the forces of love and attain happiness in life. Together, the two works
present an opportunity to view the play between discipline and excess
rumbling beneath the surface of many baroque artifacts.
In Chapter 3, Ruzzantes Pastoral, I scrutinize Ruzzantes negation
of Tassos worldview by historicizing his rst theatre work, Pastoral
(1521). Serving as an introduction to the historical gure of Ruzzante
and the world of early sixteenth-century Padua, this chapter presents a
detournement of the traditional pastoral mode in which Platonic philoso-
phical principles ensure a life of happiness. Exposing the inescapable
miscommunication of a world in which each word and idea functions as
an allegory for something else, Ruzzante offers a materialist critique of
pastoral poetry. Next, in Chapter 4, Jesuit Pastoral Theatre: The Case of
Father Pietro Leon da Valcamonica, I offer a third and nal understand-
ing of the baroque pastoral through an analysis of the pastoral power of
the Jesuit Order. While scholarship on pastoral power has not yet met up
with scholarship on pastoral theatre, I contend that, by making visible the
dramaturgy of a condemned priests public execution in Piazza San
Marco, it is possible to understand how Jesuit pastoral power exposes
another facet of pastoral performance, one based on subservience to
shepherds but in an altogether different sense than the same subservience
hinted at by Tasso. The shepherd under discussion here comes into view as
the shepherd-priest, a role played exquisitely by the Jesuits in Venice
during the sixteenth century.
At the end of Part I, I will have articulated baroque pastoral as the ever-
shifting ground of sixteenth-century aesthetic and intellectual production
16 1 INTRODUCTION
in Venice, a ground constituted by theatre and performance practices and

resulting in a deft but unnished merger of nature and culture. Against the
background of that baroque terrain, Ruzzante and the Jesuit order pop
into stark relief as the poles of a dialectical pairing that derives its dyna-
mism from the competing principles and practices of discipline and excess.
Part II adds nuance to this understanding. Chapter 5, Ruzzante Takes
Place, presents a method of philosophical engagement directly opposed
to that of the Jesuits, one that aims not for spiritual harmony but rather for
physical satiety and an attunement with nature. Reading across Ruzzantes
performance pieces most resistant to genre classication, I cast him as a
kind of gardener capable of rooting himself where he does not belong so
as to open lines of sight into the difcult world of the rural peasantry for
the people who have the means, at least potentially, to improve the lives of
the poor. By focusing on his dialogues and not his ve-act plays, I also
demonstrate how his creative blurring of the line between onstage and
offstage amounted to a political agenda.
Chapter 6, The Enscenement of Self and the Jesuit Teatro del Mondo,
builds on the theory of psychagogical (pace Foucault) dramaturgy devel-
oped in Chapter 4s analysis of the public execution. I develop the idea of a
Jesuit theatre of the world through careful consideration of the work of
Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli S.J. Read beside Ottonellis treatise on
theatre, oating theatres on the canals of Venice, and plans for a utopian
theatre space proposed by Ruzzantes patron Alvise Cornaro, the spiritual
exercises conceived by Ignatius Loyola then reveal themselves as a peculiar
form of actor training and portray the Jesuits not as anti-theatricalists
(a term so often afxed to them) but as cunning dramaturgs of the
performance of everyday life. Finally, in Chapter 7, Baroque Diarchic
Self, I think through the dialectical pair of the Jesuit order and Ruzzante
in order to develop an understanding of the baroque as an internal tension
produced by discipline and excess and articulated through everyday per-
formances of the self. This chapter circles back on and ties together the
threads spun out in the previous chapters while also communicating
directly with the claims of neobaroque scholars about the subversive
world-making potential of a baroque subjectivity.
Conceived as a baroque book (i.e. a book whose structure, form, and
content overwhelm the senses through a barrage of details and intricate
conceptual creations), the arguments contained in these pages will provide
not a re-periodization of the baroque but a re-conceptualization of the
ways in which baroque thinking continues to shape worldviews and
NOTES 17
aesthetics in the present. With this aim, I concur with Eggintons char-
acterization of the baroque as the aesthetic counterpart to a problem of
thought that is coterminous with that time in the West we have learned to
call modernity, stretching from the sixteenth century to the present
(Egginton 1). By shifting attention away from the well-traversed literature
of the Spanish Golden Age and decolonizing tactics of so-called Latin
America, however, I hope to encourage others to seek out abstruse and
seemingly banal historical objectiles and to revisit and read anew the
theatrical and performance histories whose origins have been obscured
by genre-dening acts such as, in this case, the commedia dellarte.
Furthermore, by siding explicitly with the eld of performance philoso-
phy, I would like to encourage more historical studies into the mutually
constituting forces of philosophy and performance so as to discover modes
of thinking that have slipped into obscurity but, due to their disciplined
excesses, may provide guides for contemporary praxis.
NOTES
1. See Jorge Luis Borges, Historia Universal de la Infamia (Madrid: Alianza,
1954) n.p.
2. See Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times, trans. Charles
Lambert (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) 4748.
3. See Alejo Carprentier, The Baroque and the Marvelous Real (originally
published 1975), trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora,
Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, eds, Lois Parkinson
Zamora and Wendy Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995)
89108; Eugenio dOrs, Lo barroco, eds. Angel dOrs and Alicia Garca
Navarro de dOrs (Madrid: Tecnos, 2002 (originally published 1935)).
4. See Jos Lezama Lima, La curiosidad barroca, La expresin americana,
ed. Irlemar Chiampi (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1993)
79106.
5. See Carlos Fuentes, El barroquismo de William Faulkner, Revista de la
Universidad de Mxico 24.1 (1969): 3.
6. Michel Foucault discusses alethurgy in the rst hour of his lecture at
the College de France from 1984: Etymologically, alethurgy would be
the production of truth, the act by which truth is manifested. This
lecture has been published in The Courage of Truth (The Government of
Self and Others II). Lectures at the Collge de France, 19831984, trans.
Graham Burchell, ed. Frdric Gros (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2011).
18 1 INTRODUCTION
7. See, for example, Margarete Baur-Heinhold, Baroque Theatre (London:

Thames and Hudson, 1967); Per. Bjurstrm, Giacomo Torelli and
Baroque Stage Design (Stockholm: University of Uppsala, 1961); Philip
Freund, Laughter and Grandeur: Theatre in the Age of Baroque (London:
Peter Owen Publishers, 2006); Dunbar H. Ogden, The Italian Baroque
Stage: Documents by Giulio Troili, Andrea Pozzo, Ferdinando Galli-Bibiena,
Baldassare Orsini (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
8. See, as representative examples of this scholarship, Mario Baratto Lesordio
di Ruzante, Tre studi sul teatro (Venezia: Neri Pozza, 1968); Emilio
Lovarini, Studi sul Ruzzante e la letteratura pavana, ed. G. Folena
(Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1965); Giorgio Padoan, Angelo Beolco da
Ruzante a Perduoimo, Momenti del Renascimento veneto (Padova:
Antentore, 1978), 9698.
9. See, for example, William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Republican
Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968); Gaetano Cozzi, Appunti sul teatro e i
teatri a Venezia agli inizi del Seicento, Bollettino dellIstituto di Storia della
Societ e dello Stato Veneziano vol.1 (1959): 187193; Pompeo Molmenti,
Venice, its Individual Growth from the Earliest Beginnings to the Fall of the
Republic, trans. Horation F. Brown (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1906
1908).
PART I
Baroque Pastoral
TU CHENTRI QUA PON MENTE PARTE A PARTE

E DIMMI POI SE TANTE MERAVIGLIE
SIEN FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE
(You Who Enter Here Put Your Mind to it Part
By Part And Tell Me Then if so Many Wonders
Were Made as Trickery or as Art)
Engraving from the sacro bosco of Bomarzo1
NOTE
1. The translation comes from Sheeler (2007).
CHAPTER 2
Garden Thinking and Baroque Pastoral
GARDENS
The rst three chapters of this book survey and cultivate the ground for
my historiographical engagement with the baroque, Venice, the selected
theatre practices unfolding in and around the Veneto during the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, and the philosophical praxes abounding
there. I call this ground baroque pastoral. Neither xed in place nor
outtted to a single form of logic or rationality, this ground acts as the
foundation for numerous literary and theatrical works circulating through
the Veneto at that time. While investigations of baroque art and pastoral
theatre and poetry rarely cross paths, I suspect this missed encounter may
have more to do with accepted academic disciplinary boundaries than
anything else. In this chapter, artfully forgetting those boundaries, I
stage a meeting between the baroque and the pastoral in order to forward
the claim that baroque thinking and the artifacts and spaces produced by
that thinking resonate profoundly with the pastoralia surrounding and
supporting them.
Gardens express the resonance between baroque and pastoral, and both
their form and content can help to uncover the genius loci of the ground
on which this books study stands. Of the two strata (baroque and pas-
toral), the baroque has received more attention in writings on and think-
ing about gardens. Writing of the seventeenth-century German Jesuit
Athanasius Kircher, Peter Davidson states that gardens, along with the
library and the palace, existed as one of the crucial sites of the elite

22 2 GARDEN THINKING AND BAROQUE PASTORAL
baroque imagination (88). Jesuits like Kircher and Henry Hawkins,

English author of the Partheneia Sacra: Or the Mysterious and Delicious
Garden of the Sacred Parthenes (1633), frequently set scenes within gar-
dens because of a perceived symmetry between the material richness and
allegorical heft of actual gardens and the expansive capacities of the human
mind. At the very end of his Parthenia Sacra, tells Davidson, Hawkins
sets the devout soul [of his reader] free to ramble at its own speed in the
interior garden, constructed under his direction, as if it were a place now
susceptible of innite deepening, innite recessions of new meaning, a
place capable of containing everything which the devout mind can feel
(89). The baroque dimension of gardens, visible in these references as a
teeming uctuation of ideas, words, images, meanings, and materials,
provides additional insight into Otto Kurzs declaration (cited in the
Introduction) that of its many meanings, the baroque may most stridently
come to light as a Jesuit style.
Though much of this present book seeks to understand the contours of
that style, it also acknowledges that a similar botanical baroque uctuation
appealed to civic institutions. Perhaps with the educational garden of the
University of Padua in mind, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi explains that for
such institutions a garden represented in the Baroque period a teatro del
mondo, a veritable microcosm, whose ambitious scope was to reect the
macrocosm in all of its richness and variety (129). Protectors and bene-
factors of such institutional spaces perceived such gardens as a public
good because of their ability to teach their visitors about the mysteries of
the material world. Whether such pedagogy aided spiritual aims, as in the
case of the Jesuits, or humanist aims, as in the case of the University of
Padua, the garden has become a site synonymous with baroque cultural
processes and events.
Gardens also crop up, however, within studies of the pastoral, which, in
addition to its evocation of a specic literary heritage (which I discuss in
more length in what follows), equated to both rural space and its cultiva-
tion. Half man-made, half natural, the rural had in Europe, leading up
to the so-called early modern period, referred to a physical terrain beyond
the city gates as well as to a place generated by the imagination, a place
onto which elite urban dwellers projected their fears and fantasies. Tracy
L. Ehrlich writes about this in Pastoral Landscapes and Social Politics in
Baroque Rome where she cites the merger of arable land on Cardinal
Scipione Borgheses Villa Mondragone and the imaginative idyllic scenery
created through the poetry about that land by Borgheses contemporary
GARDENS 23
Lelio Guidiccioni (132). With little effort, one can picture Guidiccioni
writing his poetry from the safe space of Scipiones sumptuous gardens,
renowned for their design and allegorical content. Gardens, such as those
at Villa Mondragone and their poetic-literary counterparts, provided a way
for individuals to bring the chaotic and frightening natural world under
human control and to gain access to the divine messages that many
believed God had written into the landscapes of the world (Cassen,
Rural Space). In this respect, the garden was a crucial pastoral site, a
merger of the sacred, the divine, the rural, and the urban. Early
Humanist writers such as Petrarch (13041374) and Boccaccio (1313
1375) relied on these pastoral spaces, at once sacred and profane, as scenic
backgrounds that could enhance the primary actions of their stories
characters. Renaissance writers such as Pietro Bembo (14701547) and
Torquato Tasso (15441595) drew heavily from their literary style and
also from their visions of the pastoral.
Mindful of these specic historic conditions and transformations, I
use the term baroque pastoral to connote rstly a meeting place of
imagination and natural environment, arranged and undertaken for the
purpose of perfecting ones material and spiritual existence; and, sec-
ondly, a particular labor of distilling the core of natures beauty while
simultaneously attempting to discard natures outer, chaotic exterior.
From here, the chapter observes the baroque pastoral in action through
what I call (paraphrasing Michael Marder) garden thinking. This think-
ing takes place in two physical environments: the garden of Valsanzibio
in the Euganei Hills of Padua and the Sacred Wood of Bomarzo outside
of Rome. After that, I follow the transplantation of garden thinking
into literature and theatre by analyzing two archetypal works of pastor-
alia: Francesco Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (c.1499) and
Torquato Tassos LAminta (c.1580). These transplants illustrate a
tension between art and nature, a tension that, I argue, gives form to
many baroque expressions. More specically, I am interested in the
attempts through garden art and its dramatic-literary offshoots to dis-
cipline natures chaotic fecundity, an effort that requires a type of
artistic excess. Indeed, disciplined excess underpins much of the baro-
que explorations in this book, but in a double sense. On the one hand,
the discipline of art tames the excesses of nature (both Earths nature
and human nature); on the other hand, the taming takes the form of
wild, exuberant, and lofty expressions that seem to defy the concept of
discipline altogether.
GARDEN THINKING
Before delving into the materiality of specic gardens in this chapter, and
before tarrying with Ruzzante and the Jesuits in Chapters 3 and 4, I want
to introduce the garden as an epistemic epicenter around which a spatial
dialectic assembles itself. In this sense, dialectic names the non-identity
of opposite entities (that is, the extent to which two opposite forces,
essences, materials, or concepts fuse disjunctively by merit of their precise
differences from one another) as well as the art of inventing or arranging
understandings of truth. Regarding the fusion of opposites, Enzo Cocco
offers the following example: In order to explore the form of the garden,
it is necessary to undertake a double journey (inside and outside) and to
examine the dialectic tension developing at its boundaries. The ideal
conguration of the enclosure must take into account what is contrary
to it (53). Not only do the meanings of gardens bloom through the labor
of dialectical thinking; the garden also exists as dialectical space, as
thought-made-spatial, insofar as its entire existence hinges on the differ-
entiation and epistemic exclusivity between inside and outside, between
the manicured landscape within the wall, hedge, or fence and the natural,
unkempt terrain beyond. On some level, conscious or otherwise, dialectic
garden space requests that its inhabitants contemplate not only how the
exterior terrain conditions the possibility of the garden but also the extent
to which the groomed, allegorical, constructed interior of the garden
conditions nature itself. The relation between inside and outside, between
nature and art in gardens, led Jacopo Bonfadio (in 1541) and later
Bartolomeo Taegio (in 1559) to develop the term third nature to
describe the event in which nature becomes the creator of art and shares
the essence of art. Together they produce something that is neither one
nor the other, and is created equally by each (Lazzaro 9).
Regarding the art of invention and arrangement embedded in dialect
garden thinking and garden space, I turn to Marta Spranzi whose research
reveals how, coeval and coincident with the explosion of baroque garden
creations (including the 1545 establishment of the rst botanical garden
by decree of the Venetian government), Italian philosophers (such as
Rudolph Agricola, Agostino Nifo, and Carlo Sigonio) turned to what
she calls the art of dialectic (Spranzi 2). For Spranzi, the term dialectic
evolves directly from Aristotles Topoi and refers both to nding and
ordering arguments in order to prove a given statement and (in a stronger
sense) to nding out the truth itself (9). This brief quotation contains
GARDEN THINKING 25
terms brimming with meaning. Finding out the truth, for example,
hints at the unclosed form of the dialectic. Though dialecticians seek to
persuade others of truths in which they themselves fervently believe, the
way to truth always shifts and turns, thus requiring artists of the dialectic
to destabilize their thoughts and reestablish them through careful con-
sideration of the matters at hand, to search and re-search for truth.
Likewise, the phrase ordering arguments requires close attention. To
argue, one must rst assemble the materials of the argument. I think of
this assembly as a type of gardening. With great care, the artist cultivates
ideas from seed, arranges them in rows so that neighboring ideas can
inform one another, and eventually presents the assortment of individual
ideas as a whole. As Davidson mentioned, Jesuits like Kircher and Hawkins
thought in a similar way. From Aristotles Topoi (a place where different
items can be arranged in an order that will aid in their subsequent recol-
lection [Spranzi 30]) to gardeners topiary (ornamental gardening) the
art of dialectic entails a keen sense of arrangement and a willingness to
perpetually re-arrange ones thoughts.
To access the baroque pastoral and engage in the dialectical art of
garden thinking, one must escape, or at least try to escape, the seductive
abstraction of metaphor and, instead, dive into the materiality of the
encounter with the gardens springing up in and around Venice during
the fteenth and sixteenth centuries. A garden may refer to something
else (something sexual, for example, as with Ruzzante) but it never
merely stands in for this other entity, relationship, or concept. Rather,
from the fertile tilth of the sixteenth and seventeenth-century garden
springs an understanding of the world as a whole and as a non-abstract
location in which we live. Michael Marder stresses this notion in the
section of The Philosophers Plant devoted to Leibnizs famous descrip-
tion (now synonymous with baroque thinking) of the interfolded archi-
tecture of the world: every bit of matter [contains] a garden full of
plants or a pond full of sh (Monadology, Proposition 65). As Marder
writes, Every portion of matter is, in accordance with this image, a
garden within a garden within a gardenand so on to innity (120).
If we believe Marders compelling version of events, then Leibnizs
concepts (as well as Aristotles fascination with wheat, Augustines
appraisal of pears, and Avicennas consideration of celery) do not live in
a world of vague abstraction but emerge from the roots, fruits, owers,
plants, and pests of gardens. More than that, they emerge from and
remain tethered to this ground. To overlook the ground and the tether
is to misunderstand the realm of abstraction that hovers over the philo-

sophies of these thinkers. To be precise, Marder cites the gardens of
Herrenhausen in the Electoral Palace of Princess Sophie in Hanover
where Carl August von Alvensleben set out to locate two leaves that
were exactly alike. This episode does not merely act as a performed
inquiry into Leibnizs principle of the identity of indiscernibles; it also
hints at how the principle arose in the rst place and how it continued to
shape individuals interactions with the world in which they live.
Likewise, one might imagine that the topology abounding with gar-
den[s] full of plants and ponds full of shes climbed into Leibnizs
mind through careful perusal of specic gardens such as those of
Herrenhausen. Building from Marders thoughts, baroque pastoral
names an actual ground, one cultivated with dirt, plants, trees, poetry,
literature, theatrical fare, spectacle, and philosophy, but not necessarily
given over, despite the ingredients in that list entwined in the craft of
ction, to absolute abstraction. When poets do lose their way, when their
ideas fail to reach back down into the ground, anxieties abound, such as
in the case of Tasso whose allegorical craftsmanship reveals a feverish
desire to tame natures bounty with art.
In the next chapter, baroque pastoral ground nurtures Angelo Beolcos
rst play, appropriately named Pastoral. In Chapter 4, the same ground
gives rise to the Jesuit brand of pastoral power developed to guide the
souls of lost sheep who have strayed from the fold of the Church. Here, in
the next section, I nd baroque pastoral within two gardens that express
the complexity of worlds-within-worlds envisioned by Leibniz and the
dialectical qualities of garden thinking: Valsanzibio and Bomarzo. Not
only do these gardens individually integrate a multiplicity of phenom-
ena to create a ux of things in perpetual becoming (hallmarks of
baroque gardens), they also speak to each other and welcome their visitors
into the baroque pastoral limen at which art and nature comingle (Turner
224).
VALSANZIBIO: IVI LINFERNO E QUI IL PARADISO

Having established that the imaginary garden is baroque both in the way in
which it is apprehended and in its collection of the fashionable bulbous
plants and orists owers, Hawkins progresses to his discourse, and here
he allegorizes these elements in a manner which is poised between tradi-
tion and innovation. [ . . . ] As the Discourse continues, it becomes clear
VALSANZIBIO: IVI LINFERNO E QUI IL PARADISO 27
that we are indeed contemplating a baroque garden on a vast scale, perhaps

not unlike the semi-sacred Paradise garden of Valsanzibio in the Veneto.
(Davidson 90)
In this quotation, Peter Davidson creates a connection between Jesuit

baroque imaginations and the actual gardens of Valsanzibio, helping, in
the process, to conjure a specic site of baroque pastoral in action.
Following through on a vow made by his father to God in 1631,
Cardinal (and, eventually, Saint) Gregorio Barbarigo created a garden
to be a monumental symbolic road trip to perfection; a journey that
brings man from the false to the truth, from ignorance to Revelation
(Ardemani, n.p.). Having made this vow in request for protection from
the ravishes of the black plague that swept through Venice that same year,
Zuane Francesco, Gregorios father, had intended to commemorate and
glorify the might of God. The garden, then, inscribed into its terrain a
common but important argument. First, the argument insisted that God
indeed participated in the lives of human beings. Second, it claried that
humans had to discern and then follow a specic path in order to escape
ignorance and rise to the knowledge of Gods presence. By walking il
Percorso di Salvicazione (The Path of Salvation) through the garden, and
attending to the allegorical meaning embedded within each piece of
statuary and declared through the statues inscriptions, visitors would
experience this argument on a sensorial level and depart from the garden
with new knowledge that they should incorporate into their everyday lives
for the improvement of their spiritual well-being.
Designed by Luigi Bernini, brother to the famous artist Gian Lorenzo
Bernini, the seven-hectare garden (roughly 753,000 square feet) materia-
lized in the Euganei Hills of Padua and took the name Valsanzibio (the
Venetian pronunciation of the valley of Saint Eusebio). Upon arrival at
the garden by gondola, Venetians were greeted by Dianas Doorway,
itself a conglomeration of sculptures (sculptures within sculptures within
sculptures) laden with signicance. Essentially a hierarchy of spiritual and
secular identities, the doorway presents Diana on top, a familiar nod to the
classical Roman pantheon then so much in vogue with scholars and artists.
Below Diana and second in the hierarchy, Bernini inserted a bearded gure
(known in architectural-decorative language as a mascaron), probably a
symbol of the Barbarigo male ancestry. Next, he offered another reference
to mythology in the statues of Ateone and Endimione that represented the
Venetian nobility who, like the mythic gures, were never satised with
their material wealth. Below them, peasants, the base of aristocratic wealth,
sit near the bottom and console themselves in their plight with a barrel of
wine. Visitors to the garden could situate themselves within this hierarchy
and then follow the Path of Salvation through the gardens artistic offerings
and arrive at the Villa of Cardinal Barbarigo himself, which, ensconced
within the elaborate allegorical fabric superimposed on the gardens exterior
appearance, presented the pinnacle of humankinds achievement. Inscribed
on the steps stretching out before the villa, one could read the nal lines of a
sonnet (author unknown) declaring that, having escaped the Hell of Venice
located a few miles east, here in the garden one has found Paradise: Ivi
lInferno e qui il Paradiso.
Of the many features within this garden, two environments in particular
showcase the baroque pastoral at work. The rst is Il Labirinto di Bossi
Secolari (The Labyrinth of the Sacred Wood) erected with the help of
6,000 buxus sempervirens plants. Neither a clear example of the unicursal
or multicursal labyrinth, this feature leads individuals to a central tower
from which he or she (though, at the time, more frequently the former)
can spy the one true path that leads away from confusion into the light and
towards the truth of Revelation. As Angela Ndalianis explains, [T]he
multicursal (or multidirectional) model suggests a series of choices
between paths. Unlike the unicursal model, it does not consist of a single
prolonged path [ . . . ]. Rather than the paths guiding wanderers to the
labyrinths center or exit, in the multicursal labyrinth, the wanderer must
make choices when confronted with multiple possibilities (8283).
Though Valsanzibios labyrinth leads to a central tower, its multiple
entry-points present visitors with a challenge. Choose the wrong path
and you will either end at one of six dead ends, each one a manifestation
of a deadly sin (greed, lust or lewdness, avarice, sloth or indolence, anger,
envy), or else you will end up looping around the perimeter of the
labyrinth indenitely and fall prey to the 7th and most insidious capital
sins, the haughtiness or arrogance [sic] (Ardemani). Only the most
virtuous will reach the tower in the center, survey the remainder of the
True path, and then proceed to the Hermits Grotto to meditate on what
you have just achieved and discovered in the mazes saunter (Ardemani).
The second baroque pastoral garden environment presents the juxtaposi-
tion of immanence and transcendence, thereby offering an opportunity for
individuals to acknowledge the faults of the esh and the promises of the
spiritual life. The frailties and nitude of the body appear in the form of
LIsola dei Conigli (Rabbits Island). In the center of this island, spectators
BOMARZO: FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE 29
rest their eyes upon a birdcage containing doves: the spirit, trapped by the
body, remains sutured to the earth. Surrounding the birdcage, a miniature
glen unfurls atop a rabbit warren populated by those most effective procrea-
tors: without a rational soul to see beyond the desires of the esh, the mind
will only concern itself with the bodys immediate needs. As if viewing this
scene from its nearby vantage point, the Statua del Tempo (Statue of Time)
looks over the rabbits while also yielding to garden visitors a glimpse of
Cronos stopped momentarily on his journey through time and space. With a
dodecahedron weighing on his shoulders (12 sides, one for each month; a
symbol of times heft) the god of Time may soon y off and beckon the spirit
of the garden visitor to follow. Unburdened by the body, the human spirit
can then transcend the physical limits of space and time.
Both of these environments articulate the garden thinking of the baroque
pastoral. As complex parts that express the totality of an ever-more-complex
whole, they call to mind not only the discourse of Henry Hawkins but also
the gardens within gardens invoked by Leibniz as they simultaneously work
upon the imaginations of visitors to Valsanzibio in an effort to raise the
intellect and spirit to a loftier position. At the same time, these thought-
provoking qualities of the environments allegorical supertext emerge from
earthen materials. Boxwood shrubs, marble, stone, grass, mud, iron, water,
and rabbits: these materials, which will surely reappear in front of the eyes of
the gardens visitors as they return to Venice through the Venetian country-
side, remind all that divine inspiration unfolds from an attention to the here
and now. Material and allegory are not separate from one another. Bound by
some powerful afnity realized through the architects art, these two ele-
ments fuse together into a third nature. More specically, this third nature
relies upon both the topological arrangement of elements within the garden
and the interior/exterior relation that distinguishes the there of the country-
side from the here of the gardenIvi lInferno e qui il Paradiso.
Simultaneously a play between opposing forces (inside/outside) and a
material argument arranged through the garden elements, Valsanzibio
expresses dialectical garden thinking at work in the Veneto of the seven-
teenth century.
BOMARZO: FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE

Covered over almost completely, as if reclaimed by rst nature, the
garden of Bomarzo remained largely forgotten from the late sixteenth
century until the mid-twentieth century when art critic Mario Praz and
surrealist artist Salvador Dal created a video about its sculptural

contents in 1949 (Dal). May Woods refers to Bomarzo as more of
an experience than a garden, but, then again, baroque gardens elicit
the haptic and optic experience of the worlds complexity and, for that
reason, such a distinction between experiences and gardens requires
rethinking (Woods 32). In tune with the words of the locations
creator, Bomarzo presents a sacro bosco, a sacred wood. Cultivated
between 1552 and 1583, Bomarzo came into existence at the behest
of Pier Francesco Orisni, known by his contemporaries as Vicino.
Jessie Sheeler describes this evocative place as a meandering, even
deliberately labyrinthine journey, following paths which lead from the
valley bottom up through the series of terraces. To make this sacred
wood, Vicino had cut into the hillside, passing vistas of trees and
rocks with buildings and striking sculptures, many carved from the
large boulders that litter the site (Sheeler 8). She interprets the word
sacro to mean both holy and magical. His shaping of it is a
product of his desire to describe from a reective viewpoint the
conicting desires, motivations and events that had shaped his life.
Of course, sexual pleasure took a prominent place in his thoughts, and
he was unashamedly quite frivolous in this aspect of his gardens
purpose (31). Adding up these descriptions and historical fragments,
then, it is possible to produce an initial glimpse of Bomarzo as a
surreal landscape, a serpentine pathway through a rugged terrain
populated by sculptural works that intone a masculine sexuality.
Whereas the masculinity of Valsanzibio inhered in the patriarchal
family order at once praising God and itself through the gardens
creation and yet remained somewhat inconspicuous beneath the clas-
sical heritage expressed in its statuary, the masculinity of Bomarzo
announced itself more boldly and paraded itself overtly in what
Sheeler refers to as its frivolous aspects.
The masculinity of the art comes across in the enormous size of many
pieces: here a giant tortoise balancing an obelisk on its back, there a wide-
mouthed gorgon with predatory teeth. While certainly the extension of an
idiosyncratic mind not bound entirely to the norms of his day, Bomarzo
also transmits its messages via a familiar classical and Renaissance fre-
quency. The sacred wood, after all, calls to mind the locus of Dantes
entrance into LInferno. Inscriptions on the sculptures offer wisdom from
ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Likely due to the academic
sophistication of the inscriptions, Francesco Sansovino dedicated his
BOMARZO: FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE 31
edition of Jacopo Sannazaros pastoral romance Arcadia (1578) to

Vicino, and Sheeler notes a distinctly Sannazarian feeling to much of the
imagery in the sacro bosco (11). Avoiding a full embrace of the anachro-
nistic term surrealist, I am tempted to call Bomarzo a grotesque pastoral
vision. In antithesis to the sharp lines and clearly demarcated allegorical
journey of Valsanzibio, the bulbous and oversized gurines, their esoteric
signicances and menacing faces, conjure the underside of the baroque
pastoral. That is, where artistic expression strives in Valsanzibio to convey
the divine perfection of nature (both human and earthly) to the soul of the
gardens visitor, art in Bomarzo denotes at once a sleight of hand and a
profane human signature. Seemingly unconcerned with the divine and its
role in daily affairs, the work of Bomarzo emulates baroque labyrinths,
afrms the role of multiplicity and uctuating meaning in the world, and
draws attention to the pastoral rural terrain on which it stands, a milieu
that provokes the garden visitor to survey his own imagination and explore
the possibilities of human intellect. Inscriptions such as Nosce te Ipsum/
Vince te ipsum/Vive tibi Ipsi/Sic/Eris/Felix (know yourself/conquer
yourself/live for yourself/thus/you will be/blessed) and Ede Bibe Lude
Post Mortem Nulla Voluptas (eat drink play after death there is no
pleasure) reveal the inuence of the classical inheritance on baroque
pastoralia, particularly its insistence on self-knowledge and ethics (here,
framed explicitly through the works of Epicurus). Like Valsanzibio, the
sacred wood does not simply provoke thought; it exists in the world as a
tangible mode of thinking.
The garden thinking of Valsanzibio and Bomarzo fuse disjunctively
into a dialectical relationship. Together, the light and dark sides of bar-
oque pastoral throw each other into relief in a kind of philosophical
chiaroscuro. Comparing two inscriptions from the two gardens demon-
strates this effect. The rst comes from the sonnet inscribed on the steps
approaching Cardinal Barbarigos palazzo in Valsanzibio:
Curioso viator che in questa parte

Giungi e credi mirar vaghezze rare
Quanto di bel, quanto di buon qui appare
Tutto deesi a Natura e nulla ad Arte
(Curious traveler that in this location
Arrives and thinks of admiring rare things
Whatever beauty, whatever good you will see here
It is thanks to the work of nature and not thanks to the hand of man)
Here, Nature and Art retain a hierarchical relationship. Synonymous with

the handiwork of God, Nature presides over the garden as sole inspiration
for the artistic works and as primary referent for all allegorical messages. By
contrast, Art connotes the capabilities of man and tacitly implies a humble
deference paid by the artist to his inspiration and his Inspirator.
The second inscription is from Bomarzo, and the same one that acts as
epigraph to Part I of this book:
TU CHENTRI QUA PON MENTE PARTE A PARTE

E DIMMI POI SE TANTE MERAVIGLIE
SIEN FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE
(YOU WHO ENTER HERE PUT YOUR MIND TO IT PART BY PART
AND TELL ME THEN IF SO MANY WONDERS
WERE MADE AS TRICKERY OR AS ART)
In the sacred wood, nature is unavoidable. The rock used to create the
sculpture never hides within the form of the sculpture itself; it is as if the
artists hired to undertake the carvings (probably Giacomo Barozzi da
Vignola and Francesco Moschino [Sheeler 26]) decided to feature the
natural materials instead of their craftsmanship. And yet, nowhere does
Nature, understood as a divine creation, announce itself. The inscription
invites (almost taunts) visitors to interpret the hermetic wisdom of the
parks arrangement and materials, and by doing this it foregrounds the
intellect of Vicino Orsini. Likewise, it compels the intellect to distinguish
between trickery and art. If, in Valsanzibio, Art entails a human action ever
subservient to the works of God, in Bomarzo it does much more. If the
garden exists as a trick, then its success will be to lure the interpreter into a
meaningless quest for knowledge, hinting at something like a sardonic
nihilism behind the statuarys scary faces. If it exists as artistic expression
that constitutes a mode of thinking, however, then art becomes a provo-
cateur. The gardens art persists in time and overwrites the bucolic setting
of the garden in order to rene the self-knowledge of the individual and
lead visitors, by extension, to a more fullling life. Baroque pastoral, and
its manifestation through garden thinking, makes room for both inter-
pretations: the hierarchical Nature/Art relationship of Berninis imagina-
tion and the assertive and mischievous intellectuality of Vicinos lifelong
labor. As ground to multiple and at times antagonistic meanings, the
baroque pastoral presides beneath a play of forces both seen and unseen,
intelligible and mysterious. Garden thinking foregrounds this play of
FROM PASTORAL GARDENS TO PASTORAL LITERATURE 33
forces and reminds us in the present to attend to its material reality while
simultaneously mapping its historically specic allegorical overtones.
FROM PASTORAL GARDENS TO PASTORAL LITERATURE

Pastoral literature in the late fteenth and early sixteenth centuries fre-
quently created imaginative vistas for its readers, environments that helped
them to look outward (guratively speaking) into rural landscapes in order
to nd inner truths. The literary environments of these works housed
archetypal characters, usually shepherds, nymphs, and other creatures bor-
rowed from the pantheons of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology. I
want to analyze two of these works that transplant the baroque garden
into literature in order to excavate another dimension of the baroque
pastoral. These two works, Francesco Colonnas Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili and Torquato Tassos LAminta, emerge within a force
eld produced through their own (allegorical) excesses and (poetic)
disciplines, and together the two texts bookend the span from
Ruzzantes birth to the posthumous publication of his plays, a span of
time that also includes Ignatius Loyolas establishment of the Jesuits
during his temporary position in Venice (1537) and the spread of the
Jesuit order throughout Europe.
I draw the term force eld (Kraftfeld) from Theodor W. Adorno, who
invokes it to help us understand the tension produced through the musical
works paradoxical existence as a static (score) and dynamic (performed)
work of art (Paddison 191192). All artworks carry a tension within them
by merit of their relation to the society from which they spring. As nished
(i.e. completed) objects, artworks stand apart from society, and through
this autonomous position they create other worlds; in the case of
Colonnas and Tassos work, the worlds act as homes to the erotic journey
of young Poliphilo and the Platonic-inspired love of Aminta. Despite the
expansiveness of these worlds, however, the artworks can never fully shake
off their debt to the historical situation that birthed them, and therefore
each work remains bound to the actual limits of that situation. The quests
of Poliphilo and Aminta only exist as Arcadian dreams, idealistic fantasies
of worlds governed by the poetics of ctional world-makers. Both
Hypnerotomachia and LAminta maintain explicit awareness of this ten-
sion, the former through its status as a dream narrative and the latter
through its blatant use of Platonic themes. The strength of the tension in
the works (at once autonomous/ideal and bound/unreal) produces the
force eld, which in turn spatializes the work, gives it gravity, and opens it
up for critical scrutiny.
Before examining these texts in some detail, I want to offer a brief
overview of the pastoral literary genre. Charles Fantazzi locates the begin-
ning of the pastoral literary lineage in Virgils creation of Arcadia in his
Eclogues, c.41 BCE (81). William D. Paden discusses how this Virgilian
form morphed into the medieval poetic genre known as the pastourelle.
Regardless of its taxonomic particularities (whether classical, augmented,
objective, rustic, or pastoureau) the pastourelle rehearses an encounter
between a young man and a female (most often a shepherdess) during
which the male attempts, with various degrees of success, to seduce the
woman. The French pastourelle ourished during the thirteenth century.
In the fourteenth and fteenth centuries the French term pastourelle
often became synonymous with Modem English pastoral, and was
applied to diverse compositions (Paden xi).
On the Italian peninsula, Matteo Maria Boiardos Amorum libri tres
(Boiardo c.14341494; Three Books on Love, 14721476) carried
on the pastoral tradition, as did the works of Pietro Jacopo De Jennaro
(c.14361509) and Leon Battista Alberti (14041472). Of the Italian
Renaissance scholars, poets, and artists who mined the archive for
traces of the classical tradition, Jacopo Sannazaro (14581530) per-
haps best exemplied Virgils tradition with LArcadia (originally pub-
lished c.1504), the very work that prompted Sansovino to think of
Vicino Orsinis sacro bosco. Following Sannazaro, Pietro Bembo
attempted to purify the form by grafting Sannazaros themes and
scenarios together with the fourteenth-century Tuscan language of
the great poet Petrarch.
Against this puried strain, the Congrega dei Rozzi (Sienas foremost
cultural institution) created the theatrical and dramatic-literary genre that
has become known as the grotesque pastoral in which the usual crowd
of shepherds and nymphs appear but the philosophical ideals of love and
friendship collapse under the weight of material needs (Boillet). In the
Veneto, as in Florence, where the grotesque pastoral passed through and
garnered reasonable attention, il genere, grazie alla forte inuenza della
cultura cortigiana quattrocentesca [ . . . ] si assimila con relativa delt al
classicismo umanistico e conserva deboli tracce folkloriche solo in esempi
dialettali e periferici (86, the genre [of the pastoral . . . ], thanks to
the strong inuence of fteenth-century court culture [ . . . ] assimilates
with relative delity to the Humanistic classicism and retains faint folkloric
COLONNA: PASTORAL IN EXCESS 35
traces only in the dialects and peripheral elements). Of the many kinds of
pastoral literature, the cleaner version (both in terms of linguistic purity
and moral content) of the pastoral rings in our ears today; that is, when
one hears the term pastoral, it is to the puried strain exemplied by
Bembo, Sannazaro, and, as we will see, Tasso, that the term most com-
monly refers.
COLONNA: PASTORAL IN EXCESS

As translator and musicologist Joscelyn Godwin explains:
The title of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is compounded from the three

Greek words hypnos (sleep), eros (love) and mache (strife). The sleep of
Poliphilo, the narrator and protagonist, is the occasion for the erotic
dream that comprises the entire novel. The strife or battle of the title
refers not to any outward violence, but to the turmoil of Poliphilos own
emotions and to his desperate efforts to gain the love of Polia. He is
eventually victorious in thisbut only in his dream. (Colonna vii)
The date of the books creation and the identity of the true author have not
been easy to determine. While the books imprint reads, Most accurately
done at Venice, in the month of December, 1499, at the house of Aldus
Manutius, the date of May 1, 1467 appears at the end of the story. Godwin
and others insist that parts of the book referencing historical events could not
have been created prior to 1489, thereby hinting at the books gradual
evolution from incipient idea to nal form (xiii). Who actually wrote it?
Some say Alberti, others say Lorenzo di Medici, and an acrostic poem
formed by the rst letter of each chapter (POLIAM FRATER
FRANCISCVS COLVMNA PERAMAVIT) suggests Francesco Colonna
(xiv). The existence of two different Francesco Colonnas (one a priest of the
Dominican order, the other a member of the noble Colonna family) makes
matters more confusing, though scholarly consensus bestows the former
with the honor of writing this wild, overgrown book.
A patchwork of Latin, Greek, faux Egyptian hieroglyphs, Italian, and
Italian-Latin hybrid languages, Colonnas story makes numerous references
to classical texts, draws its momentum from endlessly circuitous sentences,
and contains diagrams of the dreamscapes visited by the young Poliphilo.
Leonardo Crassos dedication to the Duke of Urbino, contained in
Godwins 1999 English translation, offers the Duke a taste of what will
unfold in the books many pages: he who approaches it with less learning
should not despair. It is the case here that although these things are difcult
by their nature, they are expounded with a certain grace, like a garden sown
with every kind of ower (2). An excerpt, in which the narrator describes
the ctional land of Cytherea, one of the storys settings, offers a glimpse of
this pastoral garden:
It was so benign and pleasing to the senses, so delectable and beautiful with
unusual ornamental trees, that the eye had never seen anything so excellent
and voluptuous. The most eloquent tongue would feel guilty of poverty and
parsimony in describing it: any comparison with things already seen would
be false and inappropriate, for it surpassed imagination. This heavenly and
delicious place, all planted and decorated, combined a vegetable-garden, a
herbarium, a fertile orchard, a convenient plantation, a pleasant arboretum
and a delightful shrubbery. There was no place for mountains or deserts; all
unevenness had been eliminated, so that it was plane and level up to the
circular steps of the wonderful theatre [ . . . ]. It was a garden yielding
incomparable pleasure, extremely fertile, decked with owers, free from
obstacles and traps, and ornamented with playing fountains and cool rivu-
lets. (292)
Cytherea appears as a garden within a garden insofar as Poliphilo reaches it

only by traveling over numerous other lands, each one described with equal
boisterousness. As one might suspect to nd in a dream, the traveler does not
cross through these lands so much as penetrate each territorys center. Upon
nding the center, another land springs up. In what seems to be an attempt
to help orientate the reader, Colonna offers maps and diagrams of the many
lands, though, as interpreters have discovered, the scales of the maps bear no
trace of mathematical accuracy (314). Neither the maps nor the narrative is
in any way to scale.
At the center of this paradise, to which Poliphilo arrives after having
enticed his Polia to join him, the two lovers locate a theatre:
The amphitheatre was of a structure not to be believed, because its elegant

base, its string-courses, its ring of symmetrical columns with their beams,
zophori and cornices were all cast exclusively from bronze, re-gilded with
bright gold. All the rest was of diaphanous alabaster of lustrous sheen,
including the columns in antis with their arches. Marcus Scaurus [163
BCE89 BCE, Roman Consul, in charge of the public games (ludi)],
when he was aedile, built nothing like it. (348)
COLONNA: PASTORAL IN EXCESS 37
By this point in the story, the paradisiacal island begins to resemble the
island of Venice. Matteo and Virgilio Vercelloni see this resemblance as
more than a coincidence since only one year after the publication of
Colonnas work (if the date on the imprint bears scrutiny) Jacopo de
Barbari published his birds-eye view of Venice. This map was the culmi-
nation of more than three years of detailed surveys of every part of the city.
In the foreground of this huge print we see the island of Giudecca with its
wonderful gardens: they closely resemble the ones shown in the woodcuts
in Francesco Colonnas book, thus conrming that its illustrations were
inspired by reality (Vercelloni 4243). In addition to this similarity, the
central location of the theatre in Cytherea calls to mind the Piazza San
Marco at the heart of Venice, which too opened out onto the Basin of St
Mark like a natural amphitheatre and even housed lavish performances
from civic parades and religious festivals to, as I discuss in Chapter 4,
public executions.
At the center of the theatre (yes, another center), Poliphilo, with the
help of Cupid and the nymph Synesia, begins a ritual that would lead to
sexual intercourse with his beloved, were it not for the destruction of
paradise that occurs. Nevertheless, the abundance of detail burns the
imagined scene of sexual activity into the readers mind. Citing a huge,
immensely voluptuous, recumbent female gure reclining on a ledge half-
way up the slope of the garden at Bomarzo, Sheeler suggests that Vicino
certainly had the same scene burned into his mind. The raised pose of her
upper body and languorous tilt of her head, writes Sheeler, indicate that
she [the female of the statue] is not dead but sleeping, in the manner of
many a stone nymph in many a classical or Renaissance garden. [ . . . ] In
Colonnas Hypnerotomachia there is a woodcut of a sleeping nymph in a
roughly similar pose to the one at Bomarzo (Sheeler 60). Colonnas epic
clearly took from many sources and inspired just as many.
I am not moving through Colonnas story with any specic aim.
Rather, I am wandering through it as one might wander through
Vicinos garden. Ultimately, the linearity of the story seems less important
than the worlds within worlds that open up through Colonnas ornate and
excessive descriptions. Likewise, I do not mention the ummoxing facti-
city of the works author and creation date for the reason of empirical
diligence. Whoever created it, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili exists. It exists as
a literary environment that guides the reader deeper and deeper into a
labyrinthine world, one from which it becomes quite difcult to extricate
oneself. In this way, and in the other ways cited by Vercelloni, Sheeler, and
Godwin, the world of the Hypernotomachia unfolds as a baroque pastoral

garden. Orsinis inscription cited as the epigraph to Part I of this book may
apply equally well to the at times mind-numbing prolixity of the work as it
does to the esotericism of Bomarzo. Readers do not so much survey the
storys events as they walk through the garden laid out by Colonna and try
to discern the allegorical content grafted onto the images and characters.
It would take nearly 100 years for a poet to live up to the complexity of
Colonnas work without needing the academic onslaught of references,
syllogisms, and allusions to justify the intellectual acumen of the nished
poem. Arguably, one nds that distilled version in Tassos Aminta. Unlike
with Tassos work, however, the baroque pastoral landscape of the
Hypnerotomachia starts to effervesce into an ethereal, dreamlike material.
Not quite guilty of absolute abstraction, Colonnas work remains bound
to the artistic and social worlds from which it sprung, but bound with only
the most tenuous of tethers. Another name for the weave tightening and
tying each tether to both ground and work is allegory, and the different
allegorical weaves found in Colonna and Tasso require comparing each
poets work to a different garden.
TASSO: PASTORAL DISCIPLINE

If Hypnerotomachia transplants the garden thinking of Bomarzo into
literary form, then LAminta germinates from Valsanzibio. Where the
former artfully transfers the bizarre excesses of Orsinis sacred wood into
literary prose, the latter transposes the disciplined architectonics of
Berninis horticultural landscape into a script for dramatic enactment.
More importantly, however, the allegorical ambiguity of Orsinis garden
imagery and Colonnas erotic odyssey resolves into unmistakable clarity in
Tassos play. Tasso manufactures this resolution through a rigorous dis-
ciplining of allegory in order to prevent the coercive effects of visual
pleasure and intellectual interpretation from assaulting his plays virtue.
Tasso received his early education from Jesuits in Naples where the
Compagnia di Ges, at the Collegio Massimo, had recently strengthened
their commitment to endowing their Order with skills in rhetoric and
other humanities disciplines (Lewis S.J.). As Davidsons scholarship illus-
trates, the Jesuits sought to help their students, both lay and clerical, to
survey, explore, and cultivate the inner garden of the imagination. To
ensure that these gardens would not run amok with weeds or erode into
elds of delight given over to mere fancy, Jesuit educators equipped their
TASSO: PASTORAL DISCIPLINE 39
students with the keys to interpreting all that they would nd when
roaming their interior landscapes. Citing Le peinture spirituelle (1611)
by Louis Richeme S.J., for example, Davidson observes that, nothing,
no single object observed in the garden, is allowed to pass without being at
once supplied with a spiritual reading, an interpretation concerned with
the virtuosity and mercy of the Creator as well as with the perceptions and
spiritual growth of the observer (Davidson 91). For poets, this encour-
agement to unleash the powers of imagination, while also always ensuring
that those powers align with the will of the Creator and not some inner
evil, may have provoked anxiety. At least, such anxiety seems to have
plagued Tasso, who battled with melancholy and madness his entire life.
Writing from the hospital of SantAnna where he was conned because of
madness, Tasso afrmed that:
Human beings are easily led astray, for Ci, che soggetto a passione,
corruttibile [that which is subject to the passions is corruptible . . . ]. God
realizes that, in humans, he must battle the appetito del senso [sense
appetite] and so he assigns a guide to the volont [will] and to be fair,
another to guide the parte sensuale [sensual part]. (cit Cozzarelli 174
175)
For Tasso, the poet had to listen to these guides and fulll his role as the
grand articer, the profane counterpart to the Great Articer of heavens
and earth. Julia Cozzarelli explains this further when she observes, Poetry
harnesses and guides the ight of the imagination, and saves us from the
dangers of an unbridled fantasy that transgresses all boundaries. Tassos
extensive writings on the rules of poetry, and their underlying sense of
divine inspiration now seen as laborious human ingenuity, illustrate his
effort to control the uncontrollable (181). Between the time he left
Naples (and his Jesuit teachers) and his connement in SantAnna, Tasso
studied law and philosophy at the Univerist di Padua where he encoun-
tered the work of Plato and the famous Platonic interpreters of the day. As
such, Tassos Jesuit-inspired theology melded with Neo-Platonic under-
standings of the souls immortality, Marsillio Ficinos work on artistic
ingegno (genius, intellect) and furore (passion), and Aristotelian poetics
to create a polyvalent personal belief system. Ultimately, For Tasso, the
key to the escape from the labyrinth of the self lies in the creations of the
imagination, in the form of a work of art. Poetic creation connects the
poet to God (180), and it was this connection that brought him much
fame.
Of his many works, LAminta demonstrates Tassos most mature
poetry and demonstrates the artists ability to discipline his poetic art.
Specically, Tasso charts a path through the fraught relationship between
love and reason, much as il Percorso di Salvicazione guides the visitor to
Valsanzibio through the microcosmic labyrinth of lifes journey. I do not
wish to tout Tassos poetic mastery of love and reason or valorize
LAminta as a hallmark of literature; instead, I wish to follow the path
through the dramatic-literary garden prepared by Tasso so as to illustrate
the loftiness of the pastoral genre and mastery of pastoral allegory that
Ruzzante would critique and so vociferously ght against. Before arriving
at Ruzzantes theatrical critique, however, it seems appropriate to tarry
with this masterwork of the genre and map out its terrain.
The Venetian bookseller Aldo Manuzio published Tassos play some
time around 1581, though the famous Compagnia dei Gelosi may have
performed the play as early as 1573 (Tasso). Through its familiar pastoral
storyline of a humans quest for a nymphs love, LAminta weaves
together an instructive allegory about the extents to which one must go
in order to discipline the passions of love. Briey, the story unfolds as
follows. Aminta, a shepherd, loves Silvia, a nymph. The recognizable
pastoral characters and plot build around these two gures. Seemingly
more in love with her own beauty than with Aminta, or indeed anybody
else, Silvia rebukes Aminta at every turn. Such unrequited passion leads to
a plan for Aminta to spy on Silvia as she bathes, with the added advice from
his faithful companion Tirsi that, if the nymph does not oblige Amintas
desires, the young shepherd should take her by force. The shepherds
moral sensibility prevails and he commits no such act, but this does not
save Silvia, who has a run-in with a satyr for whom lust trumps moral
virtue. Expecting to see a bathing nymph at Dianas spring, Aminta
instead nds Silvia naked, bound to a tree by her own hair, about to be
raped by the Satyr. Overcoming his usual timidity, Aminta charges the
Satyr and, with the help of Tirsi, chases him off. But the event has
frightened and embarrassed Silvia who, once free, chastises her savior
and ees into the forest.
Without Silvia, Aminta sees his life as worthless. Tasso ratchets up this
despair by prolonging Amintas misery and crafting a near-death encoun-
ter between the nymph and a wild wolf. Aminta, believing Silvia to have
succumbed to the wolves, asks for her veil with which he plans to hang
himself. Nerina, Silvias friend, does not honor Amintas request, so,
instead, the protagonist throws himself off a high cliff. Dafne, another of
Silvias friends, carries word of this tragic event to Silvia who, it turns out,
had narrowly escaped the wolves and ed into the forest to nd sanctuary.
Dafnes report of Amintas suicide disturbs Silvias peace in the forest and
instigates a remarkable occurrence. The proud and misguided Silvia, never
before capable of feeling love for another, begins to cry. She reads her own
tears as pity but the other characters read them as love awakening in her
heart. Silvia eventually realizes this to be true and, now convinced that she
does love Aminta with all her heart, decides to kill herself as a gesture of
solidarity. The awakening of love only becomes possible once Silvia reg-
isters that Amintas death stemmed from his devout love for her.
This momentum turns back on itself when, against all odds, Aminta is
found alive. A thicket made from tufts of plants and thorns broke his fall as
he plummeted to earth. In a true leap of faith, Aminta had thrown himself
resolutely into deaths arms, but, by taking this last step, found inside
deaths embrace the love he had long been searching for. It is through this
enactment of death that Silvia awakens to her love for Aminta, that Aminta
and Silvia come together, and that Aminta, the personication of the play
as a whole, nds true love. All the loose ends come together in this
unifying leap off the precipice.
Tasso manages to master loves excesses in LAminta by subordinating
them to the philosophical guidelines of self-knowledge and sacrice. This
interpretation runs counter to the more conventional readings of
LAminta, but analysis and attention to Tassos use of allegory bear it
out. The typical reading of the story nds a pair of champions in Charles
Jernigan and Irene Marchegiani Jones: The story is not about them
[Silvia and Aminta]; it is about love, the transforming power of love
[ . . . ] In a world where ambivalence reigns, where nothing is xed, and
mutability is the rule, love offers us an anchor (xxv). I argue, however,
that the play is not about love per se, nor does it champion mutability.
Rather, the play showcases a poets ability to master the forces of love and
nature through his art, to freeze the mutability of nature much like the
sculptors froze Time into a statue within the garden of Valsanzibio. Since
love, in the pastoral worldview, exists as something like the underside of
nature, a force at once commensurate with, equal to, and yet distinct from
nature, the poets art intervenes where human ignorance has attempted to
block out love and thus works as a corrective on behalf of the natural
world. At the same time, Tassos pastoral poetry recognizes a devious
aberration alive within love. This aberration corrupts individuals by sedu-

cing them into narcissistic self-love, which, if unchecked, can enslave men
and women to the impulses of eros much like Nemesis enslaved Narcissus
to his own reection within the glassy countenance of a ponds surface.
Allegory guides the reader through this complicated terrain of nature,
love, and narcissism. In his essay Spenser, Tasso, and the Ethics of
Allegory, Andrew Wadoski hints at the pedagogical purpose of allegory
in Tassos work and the way it instructs men in virtue or knowledge or
both (368). Wadoski cites Melinda Gough in his discussion of Tassos
epic Gerusalemma Liberata in order to argue that, in that heroic poem,
Tasso does not want to destroy beauty and pleasure; his interest lies in its
preservation through proper reorientation (371). Similarly, in LAminta,
Tasso seeks to properly orientate love within the souls of individuals, to
interfere with the narcissistic feedback loop of self-love and thereby help to
guide his readers and spectators into natures divinity. Despite the pagan
source material so prevalent in the text, Tassos early Jesuit education
shines through in this attention to redemptive love.
To spy Tassos gesture of orientation (i.e. the path he lays down for his
reader/spectator to follow through the baroque poetic assemblage of
classical references and allegory), it helps to realize that in LAminta,
and in the pastoral genre from Tasso forward, art tends to love and nature,
which, again, mutually constitute one another. Art tends (or, in the mode
of garden thinking, we might say that it prunes) love and nature. In
exchange for this service that it renders, art would like to achieve recogni-
tion as something that need not be made; rather, true poetry (in this case)
reveals itself in nature as a kind of signature imprinted on the natural
landscape. Tasso reminds his readers and the spectators of his play, some-
times covertly and sometimes overtly, that they can gain access to the
mysteries of nature and love when they engage with his poetry. For this
reason, Tasso makes himself and his work visible within the world of
LAminta where he offers the character of Tirsi who, as Jernigan and
Jones mention in the introduction to their translation of the play, stands
out as a thinly veiled aesthetic persona of the poet (Tasso xiv).
Tasso plants hints about his poetrys power to guide its readers/spec-
tators. In Act I, Scene 1, Dafne tries to convince Silvia that interfering with
loves powers will cause great problems for her. Now dont you know/
what Tirsi wrote about when full of love/he wandered like a madman
through the woods? she asks. He wrote it on a thousand trees, that
verse/and tree would grow as one; and I thus read:
You mirrors of the heart, unfaithful eyes,

how well I recognize in you deceit:
and yet for what, if Love allows no ight? (27, 1.1.225230)
Through these words, Tasso makes Dafne summon Tirsi (Tassos poetic
surrogate) to serve as a reminder of the architectonic order of the pastoral
universe. In this world, love infects its prey like an organic toxin, a kind of
psilocybin that gives way to wide-eyed wandering through the woods. In
front of wide-eyes, madness and mystical insight comingle. Tirsi wrote of
his visions upon the trees themselves, thus fusing the natural and artistic
worlds, organic matter and linguistic artice. Indeed, early on in the play,
Tassos rhetoric fuses with nature and his own poetic verse grows within
the very bers of the forest. As the trees grow, so do the words. Nature and
Poetic Art intertwine with one another. Tirsis message convinces Dafne
that love, once infused within ones soul, allows no escape. Dafne sees
such a state of affairs in Amintas eyes when he gazes at Silvia, and she even
believes she sees something similar in Silvia, despite the latters attempts to
hide her feelings. Silvia, however, does not give in to either Dafnes
persuasion or Tirsis insights at this point, and instead persists in her
shunning of Aminta the shepherd.
In addition to the references to his own poetic work, Tasso inserts other
allegorical stitches into the fabric of his play intended to help his reader/
spectator interpret the relationship between love and nature so as to
discipline his/her feelings of passion. Earlier in the same scene, Dafne
says to Silvia, And dont/you see how all the earth/is now infused with
love? (19 1.1.133). Dafne offers this comment to Silvia in order to help
her realize that by shunning love she shuns nature, too, and that, in turn,
Silvia irts with becoming unnatural. In such an environment, the poets
argument, wrought through the plays poetic form as well as its action,
amounts to a godlike power of correction, a steel rod that will straighten
the unnatural curvature of Silvias soul. Tasso will gure out a way to
straighten Silvia and bring her back in accord with the world around her.
An absurd dimension of love reveals itself here since Silvia, as a nymph of
the forest, is nature. For her to deny love she would have to deny herself.
Her name, for example, bears the stamp of the wild world: Silva, via selva,
wild, and/or Silvus, wood. All characters in the forest bare a striking
resemblance to their surroundings, as though they, like plants, sprouted
from the soil. Bees even mistake faces for owers, fooled by the similitude
perhaps (37, 1.2.111). With great skill, Tasso creates a poetic universe
that contains in its very literary fabric hints with which his readers can
unlock the secrets of love and the natural world beyond the connes of the
page and the theatre in which the play unfolds.1 To do so, one need only
follow the path laid out by the poet. Following Tassos path ostensibly
leads to the Good Life.
I say one need follow Tassos path because dangers lurk in the
shadows of the pastoral world. Love may correct the unnatural curvatures
of the soul, but it also has the power to distort and corrupt the self. In the
world of the play, Silvia may not, as nature, be able to escape from nature,
but she can fall prey to the seductive aberration of loves powers and come
to know herself wrongly, to live a life of ignorance. The evils of self-love
and narcissism act as the antithesis to the liberating power of love within
Tassos allegorical framework. Tasso dedicates the majority of the play to
showing how Silvia had succumbed to that trap. Dafne identies Silvias
dilemma rst: I understand your bashful girlishness:/what you are, so
was I; like you I led my careless life (13 1.1.4750). Unfamiliar with the
care of the self (the Platonic/Socratic epimileia heautou that accompanies
the more familiar gnothi seauton [know thyself]) Silvia became careless and
began to esteem the less important experiences of life, such as hunting
and, more notably, preserving her chastity out of allegiance to the goddess
Diana. Next, in terms of affection for others, Silvia admits openly that she
only cared for Aminta when his aims in life merged with her own: I hate
his love/who hates my chastity, and I loved him/when he desired the
things that I desired (19 1.1.110111). From this youthful petulance,
Silvia ages into a vainglorious nymph who prefers her own appearance to
any human form. Later, In Act II, Scene Two, Dafne tells Tirsi about her
suspicions that Silvia indeed knows infatuation but only insofar as she loves
herself:
I saw her there,

nearby the city walls in those great elds
where midst the pools there lies a little isle;
she pendant stood above the limpid lakes
smooth calm and seemed to take delight in her
reection [ . . . ].
While she, adorning, gazed adoringly,
she raised her eyes by chance and was aware
that I had seen her there, and all ashamed,
she quickly stood and let the owers fall [ . . . ]
she saw herself in disarray and smiled,

for she was beautiful though disarrayed.
I noticed and was quiet. (6769 2.2.3555)
Tasso slowly reveals Silvia as a negative model, as proof of what happens

to those who turn away from the world and pour love only into
themselves.
Finally, to drive the point home about the dangers of narcissism and the
need to chart a middle way through the thickets of love, Tasso even dares
to compare Silvia with the creature that would rape her, the Satyr. Already
marked as aberrant by his status as half man and half beast, Tasso aggra-
vates the Satyrs decit of charm by revealing him to possess a similar
narcissism. Pondering why Silvia does not return his amorous glances
(Now why, unjust,/do you abhor and scorn my gift? [61 2.1.34]) the
Satyr appraises his own form: I am/not one to scorn, although I saw
myself/reected in the liquid sea, when winds/were quiet the other day
and made no waves./This face of mine is ruddy-hued withal,/my
shoulders great and large, my sturdy arms/robust and muscular [ . . . ]
(61 2.1.3540). The same narcissism that engenders violence in the Satyr
will prove damaging to Aminta and the nymph herself if Silvia does not
leave behind her self-love for the knowledge that true loves brings, a
knowledge that will guide the individual through loves excesses. The
masculinity and misogyny of Tassos verses shine brightest here, giving
credence to the claims of Jane Tylus and Maria Galli Stampino that the
great Isabella Andreini devised her own La Mirtilla as a feminist response
to LAminta (Stampino 3, 7). During the long stretch of time that her
company, I Gelosi, performed the play, however, Andreini seems to have
swallowed the bitter pill and brought Tassos message to the masses, a
move that made her fame grow.
At the end of the play, Tasso differentiates Silvia from the Satyr by
allowing her to realize her faults and abscond into the truth of the
virtuous, Platonic/Socratic self-knowledge. Having heard the news of
Amintas leap off the cliff, Silvia admits, I lived for cruelty,/for self til
now; for what is left, I wish/to live for him alone,/and if I cannot live/
with him, Ill live nearby/his cold, unhappy corpse (159 4.2.180).
Fortunately for her, Aminta skirted death and will soon awaken in her
arms. Amintas imperviousness comes in part from his seless loving of
Silvia, his willingness to pursue her, to protect her from danger, and his
acknowledgement that to love Silvia is to learn about himself. Despite
Tirsis early attempts to transfer Amintas affections to another, the young

shepherd persisted, Alas! How can I nd/another if I cannot nd
myself? (31 1.2.22). Tasso ensures that Amintas journey reads as the
path to true self-discovery. In corralling the various strands of loves
excesses, natures signposts, and the merits of self-knowledge into one
poetic conclusion, Tasso utilizes the shepherd character of Elpino to
expose a series of crucial reversals. By loving another purely, Aminta
came to learn about his own inner courage. Conversely, by loving
Aminta, Silvia shook off the damaging yoke of narcissism. The poet even
rearranges the cardinal directions of the plays world such that up becomes
down, down becomes up, and death reveals its non-identical relationship
with love and nature: See here, Aminta, hurled down to the ground,/
who gains the heights, the summit of content [ . . . ] still his fall was
fortunate, and from/the efgy of death, so full of grief,/hes found both
life and joy (165 5.1.10; 167 5.1.39).
With allegorical markers, indeed an entire allegorical garden crafted
from poetic language and form, Tasso directs his audiences through the
plays action and reveals the only way to live, the way ordained by nature
and love. Though no explicit garden imagery appears in this pastoral work,
LAminta harmonizes with the orderly allegorical layout of Valsanzibio,
particularly in the way that Tassos art passes itself off as an extension of
the natural world. Recall the sonnet that appears at the conclusion of il
Percorso di Salvicazione, notifying travellers in the garden that they have
successfully navigated lifes twists and turns to reach spiritual
enlightenment:
Curioso viator che in questa parte

Giungi e credi mirar vaghezze rare
Quanto di bel, quanto di buon qui appare
Tutto deesi a Natura e nulla ad Arte
(Curious traveler that in this location
Arrives and thinks of admiring rare things
Whatever beautiful, whatever good you will see here
It is thanks to the work of nature and not thanks to the hand of man)
(Ardemani)
Unlike Bomarzo, where art (either as trickery or as ingenuity [or both])

proclaims its presence loudly, Valsanzibio subordinates art to nature. At
rst, this maneuver rings false. Dianas Gate, the boxwood maze, the
BAROQUE PASTORAL: GROUND AS INFINITE WORK IN PROCESS 47
rabbits island: all of these constructions bare the ngerprints of Bernini.

Within the pastoral world, however, art that springs from the signatures
imprinted on the natural world merits the status of nature itself. Since all
the stops on the path of salvation drive visitors to the magnetic pull of
natures (i.e. Gods) true course, the architecture (at least, in the archi-
tects own mind) becomes one with nature. As such, it is thanks to the
work of nature and not to the hand of man that Valsanzibios beauty
manifests itself. Likewise, Tassos allegorical and rectilinear play merits the
status of natural (again, in the poets own mind) since it helps all to
distinguish between the right and wrong kind of love as well as the right
and wrong kind of knowledge of oneself. The characters function more
like the stops along Valsanzibios Percorso di Salvicazione than as discrete,
dynamic human beings. This realization may help to explain why Tasso
tells more than he shows. The characters dictate to the audience, just as
the entryway into Valsanzibio dictates the story of the garden through its
nested statuary and the sonnet points to the owner of the garden as the
pinnacle of human achievement. Similarly, just as the Paduan garden levels
an argument about the ethical life, so too does LAmintas action and
poetic language offer a strong claim. As Marta Spranzi has suggested,
Tassos dialogues function as the literary representation of a dialectical
disputation in the sense of Aristotles Topics (Spranzi 60). As such,
LAminta appears as a work of poetic topiary and a dramatic-literary
manifestation of garden thinking, the sole aim of which is to discipline
the unnatural impulses alive in the soul of man.
BAROQUE PASTORAL: GROUND AS INFINITE WORK IN PROCESS

The vertiginous geography of references within pastoral literature and
baroque gardens makes it difcult to know where to start when trying to
appraise and analyze them. In general, two possibilities present them-
selves. Empiricists taking a structural approach might read the pastoral as
a system that delights audiences (and scholars) by offering an enigma that
can be decoded or deciphered. If the interpreter understands the code,
then he or she not only grasps the meaning of the artwork but also proves
his or her knowledge of the artworks epistemological offerings. While this
approach offers the possibility of understanding historical artifacts con-
tents and meanings, it does not rise to the level of imaginative excess that
shines through so clearly in baroque artifacts. To entertain the excess of
baroque works, one can pair the structural, empiricist approach with a
treatment of the artifacts as unstable matrices of accumulating meaning, or

what Angela Ndalianis calls a poetics of serial thought:
According to a structural order, signs and messages belong to a shared or

preestablished code that can be decoded. In serial thought, however,
messages disturb prior codes by replacing them with their own distinctive
variations. [ . . . ] Serial thought is intent on producing new signs. That
which is important in the message or sign is not information but its aesthetic
equivalent: its poetic meaning (Eco 1989, 59). Serial thought is con-
cerned with form itself, with what Deleuze has called the innite work in
process (1993, 34). (71)2
The effort of tracking meaning through the passages of Colonnas pastoral

wonderland emulates the strife faced by Poliphilo as he struggles to unite
with Polia. As such, the mathematical soundness of the diagrams proposed
by Colonna and the referents hiding beneath the torrent of his citations
matter less than the form of the book itself, its meandering, oneiric state of
perpetual unfolding. In a similar vein, Tasso may reference Orlando
Furioso in LAminta and show signs of his familiarity with the pastoral
genre, but his play intends to produce new signs that indicate the path to
self-knowledge and true love through a poetic sensibility that splices
Platonic philosophy, Renaissance humanism, and Christian ethics into a
practice of waynding. By thinking serially and by allowing the baroque
pastoral to come into focus as a uctuating ground, the fecundity of which
nurtures the innite work in process, interpreters will stumble upon a
more playful yet still rigorous interpretation of these texts as well as the
(textual, theatrical, botanical, spiritual, and quotidian) performances tak-
ing place in and around Venice during the sixteenth century.
Probing more deeply into the Deleuzian quotation harnessed by
Ndalianis, I suggest that a specic trio of ludic dialectical relationships
motivates the process or the processual movement of these performances.
First, I discern the tension of the interior and exterior that Cocco recog-
nizes at the heart of every garden. When the botanical art of making
gardens relocates to the epistemological art of garden thinking, the ten-
sion between interior and exterior migrates from the locus of the gardens
emplacement to the boundaries of the thinking subject. A privileged
(spiritual) interior safe from the hazards of the (civic, social) exterior has
no place within the baroque. Interior and exterior communicate, contest
and inform one another so as to require a practice of self-pruning that itself
BAROQUE PASTORAL: GROUND AS INFINITE WORK IN PROCESS 49
relies upon an incessant practice of discipline. Jesuit thinkers such as

Kircher and Hawkins, and Jesuit-trained artists such as Tasso, demonstrate
this discipline in their works.
Second, each disciplined gesture nds its counterpart in an excessive
gesture. I have attempted to reveal this situation by juxtaposing
Bomarzos libidinal and citational excesses and Valsanzibios well-
groomed and rectilinear Path of Salvation, which at rst seem at odds
with one another but, through analysis, begin to appear as two sides of the
baroque pastoral coin. The excesses of Bomarzo only come into being
through a lifetime of concerted and disciplined garden thinking, which, in
turn, injects a multiplicity of meaning into each textual and sculptural
element within the sacred wood. The disciplined architecture of
Valsanzibio requires a sprawling landscape teeming with sculptural signs
and didactic inscriptions, thus proving that its disciplined art only comes
into being through an awareness of natures fecundity and diversity.
Where discipline shows itself, excess likewise asserts its presence. A similar
schema appears when pairing Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and LAminta,
for the excesses of the former seem to lock with the discipline of the latter
to create a pastoral literary force eld, and yet the discipline of Tassos play
comes about by giving oneself over to the all-encompassing tumult of
loves re, and even the circuitous sentences of Colonnas magnus opus
bear the hallmark of an assiduous effort to craft a dreamscape in literary
form. The poetic meaning of baroque pastoral hinges on this pairing of
excess and discipline.
Third, the poetic meaning within the baroque pastoral, indeed a poetics
of meaning, bursts forth from a dance between art and nature. What appears
today as the high art of Tassos poetry also resembles a particularly compel-
ling choreography. Where the poetry seems to be showing itself most
ostentatiously (in its fancy phraseology and ornate imagery) it actually
upstages itself purposely in order to show off the beauty of nature. The
garden art of Valsanzibio enacts a similar movement, as its sonnet clearly
states. Inversely, where nature makes its presence felt most overtly in
LAminta (for example, in the way it cushions the fall of Aminta and
protects him from dying) the poets signature shines through, since nature
as such exists nowhere in the poem. Every line, every image springs from the
poetic world as conceived by Tasso. In the next chapter, by distinction,
Ruzzantes Pastoral will display an unease with such moves because the
nature foregrounded by the high art of the pastoral poets has little to do
with nature as understood and experienced by the lower classes. What
appears to the members of the upper classes such as those at the dEste court
where LAminta debuted as a poetic gem given form by nature itself appears
to Ruzzante as a kitschy substitute for nature that has the power to obscure
the earths bounty in the same breath as it offers it praise. Indeed, anticipat-
ing Ruzzantes response, I stress that whereas the baroque glimpsed in
Leibnizs connection to the gardens of Herrenhausen showed thought
that emerged from and remained tethered to the dirt, the baroque of
Tasso and Colonna oated up higher off the ground, as it were, and
threatened to lose touch with the terrestrial world altogether. This, at
least, is a claim reasonably argued by the classes of people whose daily lives
were governed by both the caprice of nature and the desires of government
ofcials.
Together, the ludic dialectical relationships motivating the materials col-
lected in this chapter animate the innite work in process of the baroque
pastoral. The nal lesson from the material gathered here leads from this
more familiar dimension of the dialectics collision of opposites to the less
familiar work of arrangement foregrounded in Spranzis The Art of Dialectic.
For the baroque pastoral unfolds through expressions of serial thought and as
such culminates not in closed, nished, or fully autonomous artifacts unteth-
ered to the world from which they sprang but, rather, in open-ended poetical
meaning that requires aesthetic critique to unpack. Such a critique must train
itself on the arrangement of citations and the path offered through the works
terrain by the form of the work itself. This path belies a concerted pedago-
gical, and as I demonstrate in the case of the Jesuits a psychagogical, effort to
hew a specic life performance from the reader and/or spectator who walks
it. To uncover the path and the pedagogical or psychagogical effort under-
girding it, I deploy the techniques of garden and spatial thinking that the
gardens and literary works in this chapter have revealed.
NOTES
1. According to Jernigan and Jones, the theatre in which the play rst took
place was likely an outdoor one: Most modern critics feel that Aminta was
written in Spring 1573 and rst performed on July 31 by the Gelosi
company on the island of Belvedere del Po, near Ferrara; the dEste summer
palace was situated there (Tasso xvii).
2. Ndalianiss reference is to Umberto Eco, The Open Work, trans. Anna
Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 1993.
CHAPTER 3
Pastoral Askew and Aslant: Ruzzantes

Historico-Theatrical Consciousness
RUZZANTE TAKES THE STAGE

If we think of Venice as a massive epicenter of comedic theatre in the early
sixteenth century, then we can also acknowledge that few playwrights
humors have sent as many tremors from Venice into the present moment
as that of the Padua-born Angelo Beolco, aka il Ruzzante. A discovery of
12 forgotten Plautine comedies in the early fteenth century launched
Venetian artists and scholars into a feverish study of ancient drama and
may account for the sway that Venice held over the creation and publica-
tion of stage comedies (Radcliff-Umstead 34). Likewise, the tradition of
commedia dellarte improvisation spanning from the late sixteenth to the
late eighteenth centuries made Venice famous for its theatrical offerings,
particularly during the annual event of Carnevale. Able to expand on the
inherited classical dramatic framework and to infuse polished, nished play
texts with vitality, Beolco stands out from the comedians who came before
and after him. Familiar with the treasure trove of Plautus and Terence, the
works of Niccol Machiavelli, the erudite humanistic creations of Siennas
literary circle, and the pastoral literature epitomized by Jacopo Sannazaro
and Pietro Bembo, Beolco made a name for himself by crafting complex
pastiches of all the in-vogue dramatic fare while simultaneously represent-
ing (in both the political and aesthetic senses of that term) the rural
peasantry of his native Padua.1 His savvy, often bold commentary on
contemporary politics, irreverent humor, ability to texturize the familiar
stock characters of classical drama, and commitment to the militancy of

52 3 PASTORAL ASKEW AND ASLANT: RUZZANTES HISTORICO-THEATRICAL . . .
humor explain how Beolco went on to inuence commedia dellarte

performers from Andrea Calmo to Carlo Goldoni as well as the Nobel
Laureate Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame.2 For the purposes of this
chapter, however, I want to look beyond Beolcos identity as a playwright
and begin to understand him as a quasi-clandestine philosopher of aes-
thetics engaged purposefully in critiquing the world in which he lived.
Doing this will, in turn, illustrate Beolcos baroque detournement of the
pastoral.
Building on the work of the previous chapter, I illustrate Ruzzantes
awareness of the ways in which the VenicePadua relationship of the early
sixteenth century corresponded to the aesthetic and literary might of the
pastoral genre; indeed, how the latter contributed to the infrastructure of
class identity that would, in turn, contribute to the continuing domination
of the rural peasantry by the oligarchic Venetian upper classes at a time
when Venices land-holdings became more and more vital to the health of
the Republic. Additionally, folded into the multiverse of Pastoral (a multi-
lingual, self-aware theatrical space housing competing worldviews) I see a
philosophical outlook that anticipates and modies, avant la lettre, the
Leibnizian cosmogony of compossibles that will eventually become a
hallmark of baroque thinking. Beolcos Pastoral, treated in this way, trans-
forms into a baroque pastoral. In this form, acerbic humor and savvy
literary references collaborate to expose not only a imsy class identity
posited on elevated language and privileged educational background but
also a world-changing devaluation of nature. Whereas the pastoral works
of Tasso and the gardens of Valsanzibio praised a natural world that
beneted all those whose intellect could help to master its secrets,
Beolcos baroque pastoral recognized in this same nature a force that
would destroy the peasants and all those who actually made their living
from the land. This was the case because the nature Beolco saw in the
pastoral was not nature at all but, rather, a man-made cultural mechanism
intended to advance the livelihoods of the urban upper classes at the
expense of the rural lower classes.
Of course, as with all historiographical operations, attempting to unfold
the text, reanimate its historical situation, translate its vernacular, and espy
this baroque pastoral requires acknowledging and moving through the
turbulence that spans the present moment and 1521, the year of Pastorals
debut. Scholars know that nine years passed between the death of Beolco
in 1542 and the publication of the rst editions of his collected works, and
that, therefore, the ngerprints of his rst editor Stefano di Alessi and
RUZZANTE TAKES THE STAGE 53
patron Alvise Cornaro surely stain the manuscript of Pastoral that lives in
the Venetian Marciana library today (Rhodes 1). Likewise, despite the
assiduous efforts of Ruzzante scholars, from Ludovico Zorzi and Emilio
Lovarini to Nancy Derso and Linda L. Carroll, the glue binding
Ruzzantes many jokes to the specic social events of his time has by
now rubbed off, leaving an unbound compilation of humorous signiers
without decisive antecedents. Add to this mixture of riddling circum-
stances the particularities of the Paduan dialect and the effort of distin-
guishing signal from noise in the comedic language of Beolcos rst play
becomes all the more difcult. The entrance into Pastoral, then, resembles
the entrance into a ruin of a multicursal labyrinth where the center to
which the paths lead may no longer exist and the paths themselves may
abruptly stop or simply trail off. Like Poliphilus in Colonnas magnum
opus, we can expect a convoluted journey through a terrain that rolls back
on itself even as it stretches out in front of us.
The most well-tended path into Pastoral leads through and displays
what I call Beolcos creative genealogy. His acting troupe, most often
composed of ve men and two women, all amateurs, frequently appeared
at festivities for important Venetian patricians (Radcliff-Umstead 35, 38).
The collective nature of Beolcos theatrical offerings suggests that he
relied upon and seems to have enjoyed creating his work with others. As
an individual gure, though, the particular character of Ruzzante created
by Beolco belongs to a lineage dating back at least to the thirteenth
century and the gure of Matazone da Caligano, who stands in as the
creator of the genre known as satira del villano. Nicolino Applausos
research on Matazone (literally, the motley fool) reveals the lofty (or
lowly, depending on ones perspective) origin of villano characters:
Matazones comedic country yokel and all who followed descend from
the fart of a donkey (Applauso 607608). As Charles E. Fantazzi and
others have discovered, Ruzzante acknowledges his atulent ancestors in
plays such as the Anconitana where he says that his name derived from
ruzzare, a word that means to romp around and alludes somewhat
ambiguously to the sexual relations between peasants and their animals
(Fantazzi 83). The word villano itself does not connote a villain; rather,
it names the base, uneducated, and rude (rozzo) behavior grafted onto
farmers and other rural folk by poets and playwrights of the medieval era.
Thus, apparently aware of the image into which he stepped, Beolco
created Ruzzante, a loud, troublesome peasant unburdened by the stigma
of bestiality, to take up and challenge stereotypes of the satira del villano
that Matazone had created. Beolco, as Ruzzante, took the stage for the
rst time in Pastoral.
SITUATING THE PASTORAL

From the rst play to the last, the ambivalent gesture of acquiescing in the
derogatory image of rural peasants while simultaneously disenchanting or
challenging the audience who would happily consume such images per-
vades Beolcos/Ruzzantes work. Applauso distinguishes between a nega-
tiva and a positiva tradition of the satira del villano for precisely this
reason: some depictions of the countryside in fteenth and sixteenth-
century comedic theatre and pastoral literature serve the purpose of extol-
ling the civility and education of the aristocracy, while others, Fo-like, try
to punch that same aristocracy in the face (Applauso 607). Matazone
walked the line between the two genres, and Ruzzantes work, especially
in the Pastoral, seems to take the same route. Beolcos rst play, after all,
entertained a decidedly erudite audience, likely students at the recently
reconvened University of Padua, which had re-opened its doors in 1517
following a span of years troubled by endless war (Zorzi 1286). On the
side of the negativa, Beolcos/Ruzzantes awareness of his university-
student audience admits to the possibility that Pastoral gives the privileged
audiences what they want, namely an appropriately disparaging portrait of
the Padua peasant, embodied in Ruzzante, who always speaks of food,
does little work, jabbers incessantly, and excoriates all pretenders to the
high-language of pastoral poetry and university jargon. On the side of the
positiva, however, Ruzzantes blatant political manifestos offered in his
later works, especially the Prima and Seconda Oratione, coupled with the
numerous attacks against the pseudo-Epicurean good life espoused by his
noble patron Alvise Cornaro, point to a theatre constructed for the
purpose of advocating on behalf of the lower classes. Even in Pastoral,
Ruzzantes crassness serves a specic purpose. Behind every appearance
lurks a political consequence. In terms of the lifestyle of those residing in
the countryside of Padua, Beolco/Ruzzante frequently spoils the pre-
sumed certainties of the better-off.
As Carroll and many other scholars have noted, the Pastoral deserves
attention for multiple reasons, including: (1) its numerous references to
the existing pastoral genre that prove Beolcos status as (in Danielle
Boillets words) a buon scolaro, a good student of contemporary literary
and theatrical vocabularies and ideologies; (2) the plays deviations from
SITUATING THE PASTORAL 55
the existing norms of that same pastoral tradition and the social commen-
tary arrived at via those deviations; and (3) the texts complex imbrication
of multiple strata of daily life, from the quarrel between speakers of various
dialects vying for dominance in the Veneto to the roles both the upper and
lower classes had to inhabit at this crucial turning point in Venetian history
(Boillet; Carroll Angelo Beolco).
By 1521, the elite of Venice had only recently started to adapt to the
1516 Treaty of Noyon that resulted from the crushing defeat dealt to the
Republic by the League of Cambrai. After a back-and-forth battle with the
League and the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, Venice had succeeded
in re-claiming Padua, but, nonetheless, had to look ahead to a future that
would require a different political and economic strategy than the one that
had secured the small island mastery of the spice routes into Europe.
Beolcos pro-Padua rhetoric, perhaps because of this geopolitical instabil-
ity, enjoyed great success on the mainland Veneto territory, while his
raunchiness also slipped by the censors in Venice proper, at least in the
early part of his career (Carroll 7). At the same time as this political
recalibration, the Veneto continued slogging through an equally impor-
tant cultural war fought beneath the banner of the questione della lingua.
What language best conveyed the brilliance of Italian literary artistry? Each
powerhouse had its spokesperson: Machiavelli voted for the Tuscan of
Florence; Baldesar Castiglione advocated for a composite dialect that
represented the contemporary intermixing of cosmopolitan urban centers
such as Venice; and Pietro Bembo urged a return to the language of
Petrarch and Boccaccio (Radcliff-Umstead 41). The linguistic form and
topical content of Pastoral bears traces of both the post-Cambrai Venetian
political identity and the linguistic feud of Renaissance Italy.
The Company of the Immortals, one of the numerous so-called
Stocking Troupes (Compagnie della Calza) that preceded the commedia
dellarte organizations, sponsored the Pastoral, and Alvise Cornaro likely
housed the performance inside his palazzo. (Cornaros outdoor loggia on
which Ruzzante would later appear would not come into existence until
1524.) The play presents the young Ruzzante as an Arcadian, which
Fantazzi helpfully distinguishes from Ruzzante the Utopian. The
Arcadian, at least, does not pretend that he can make his world happen
for others. His is a personal, narcissistic dream, an escape from the harsh
realities of civilized life. The Utopian, on the other hand, especially in his
modern guise, would force his schemes upon nature and man, and involve
everyone in his new ordering of the world (81). This setting in Arcadia,
moreover, exists in at least two places at once. The setting unfolds within
the world of the play, but it also exists as the backdrop of the audiences
world; that is, the Pastoral depicts and coincides with an encounter
between pastoral wilderness, an urban university campus, and rural farm-
scapes. Beolcos rst play shares a common trait with the rest of his works;
namely, it takes place in multiple settings all at once by merit of the
playwrights ability to suture theatrical reality to the world offstage, the
world into which both performers and audience would have to return
when the show was over. The term world functions here in much the
same way as it does in the work of Alain Badiou, where it denotes a
situation of being and a logic of being there (cit. Shaw 618). The
Padua inhabited by the audience of Pastoral has little in common with the
Padua glimpsed poetically through the setting of Pastoral. Whereas the
students inhabiting the former experience Padua through the situation of
the university, with its semi-autonomy as a home to secular beliefs and
(arguably) blasphemous philosophical stances earned from its reputation
as Europes best school, the rural villano inhabiting the latter Padua nds
himself hemmed in by a lack of food, a class hierarchy that puts doctors
above farmers, and, as later plays will demonstrate, a strict obedience to
Church rules and regulations. Each situation gives birth to a different
logic, and the resulting logics do not usually synch up. This asynchronicity
accounts for much of the humor in the play.
Within the dramatic setting of Pastoral, Beolco creates representatives
for each of these worlds. The nymph Siringa and the shepherds Milesio,
Mopso, Arpino, and Lacerto dwell within a pastoral realm subject to the
logic of pastoral poetry. The medic, master Francesco, and his servant,
Bertuolo, operate in the world of scholastic Padua, one sustained by the
medical arts familiar to the audience of students. Ruzzante and Zilio bring
the third world forward as typical peasants, a world of scarcity masked
behind something like a resigned frivolity. Any neat separation between
these worlds, however, collapses by merit of their sharing the stage space.
The theatre itself (i.e., the room within Cornaros palazzo and wherever
else the play may have popped up), constitutes a fourth world, the auton-
omy of which Beolco handicaps through Ruzzantes direct address to the
audience and his appearance in a prologue that binds the spectators to the
shepherds, doctor, and villani. What Lionel Abel and subsequent com-
mentators will call metatheatre cannot, without great anachronism, afx
itself to this theatre. The presentational form of theatre offered in Pastoral
shaped most theatrical offerings of the time, though (as metatheatrical
language will eventually put it) the character of Ruzzante certainly has
awareness of himself as a character in this play and the work as a whole
seems to acknowledge the uid line between audience and actors, espe-
cially at the end when Ruzzante offers an explicit invitation for everyone to
join together in a dance.
Beolcos play belongs to the archetypes that Angela Ndalianis and
others eventually call upon in their studies of the neobaroque aesthetic
phenomena of the twentieth century. Ndalianis notes specic qualities
shared, for example, by Spanish and Latin American scholars of the
neobaroque: fragmented structure that recalls the form of a labyrinth;
open rather than closed form; a complexity and layering evident, for
example, in the merging of genres and literary forms [ . . . ]; a world in
which dream and reality are indistinguishable; a view of the illusory nature
of the worlda world as theatre; a virtuosity revealed through stylistic
ourish and allusion; and a self-reexivity that requires active audience
engagement (15). Direct and indirect citations to existing pastoral plays
reveal the serial nature of the Pastoral, its awareness of itself as a copy of a
copy of a supposedly original form of pastoral poetry accepted by the
literati of Renaissance Italy. Ruzzantes opening prologue demonstrates
the subservient position of plot and Beolcos preference for a dissonance of
worlds. It also blends dream and waking life straight away since the
impetus for the prologue comes from a dream from which Ruzzante has
supposedly just awoken. With that indistinguishable boundary between
dream and waking realities comes a distrust of nature, and this distrust
(marked by the term snaturale, a neologism of Beolcos creation) will
amount to a critique delivered directly to the audience. Together, all of
these attributes begin to display the baroque quality of Beolcos pastoral
work.
Beolco actually includes two prologues to the play, one in the Paduan
dialect and one in an excessively orid language reminiscent of Bembos
preferred version of Tuscan. Similar to the tradition of Roman comedy, each
prologue gives a summary of the plot. Instead of a young and potent
shepherd, a typical feature in the tradition of Sannazarian pastorals, Beolco
introduces the aged and decrepit Milesio. Onstage, the shepherd encounters
the nymph Siringa. Unlike her literary descendants, however, this Siringa
speaks plainly with her biting, Tuscan tongue and makes quick work of the
shepherds advances by describing him to his face as pien dogni tristicia
(full of every sadness) and appraising him as sei gionto nel senile impacio
(having arrived in senile awkwardness) (Ruzzante Pastoral, 29). Siringa
leaves the stage quickly, never to return, but not before offering a nal
stab: Va cerca, come i vechii pernigoni, como i toi pari, e non mi dar pi
noglia. Che posto fuste in obscure pregioni! (Go off in search of someone
more suited to you, like your old pernicious peers do, and dont annoy me
anymore. What a dark prison Ive been placed in [by having to meet
you]!) (31).
Milesio does not take this well. While decrying the cruelness of
Love, a second shepherd, Mopso, enters and attempts to pacify his
friend by running off to nd Siringa. Left alone, Milesio takes the only
option betting his unfortunate state: he kills himself. Re-entering the
scene, Mopso nds the horrible sight of what he believes to be his
friends forlorn corpse and collapses as a result of it. In a few short
pages, Beolco has ridiculed the typical pastoral co-dependence between
love and death (exemplied in Tassos LAminta) by suggesting that
sometimes love has no remedy. Not even the gesture of self-sacrice
can save an old, impotent shepherd from saucy nymphs and unrequited
love. The growing pile of shepherds bodies on the stage attracts
another when Arpino enters and, after mentioning a dark omen he
has experienced in a recent dream, joins the fray. More capable of
controlling his emotions, Arpino laments only his inability to bury the
two shepherds on account of having nobody to help out. In the blink
of an eye, a fourth shepherd, Lacerto, enters and provides the elbow
grease needed to dispose properly of the bodies.
After some deliberation, Arpino and Lacerto decide to bury the bodies
tra fronde e ori (between fronds and owers) outside of the temple of
Pan, which Beolco has placed on one side of the visible playing area,
presumably as a visual reference to the familiar pastorals of the time.
Through the dithering that results from emotive pastoral monloguing,
Lacerto starts to worry that he has spent too much time away from his
ock and so he runs off before the two men can complete the burial.
Arpino nds himself in his previous position and, thus, Beolco showcases
the inertia caused by pastoral dramatic language. Everything seems to
grind to a halt beneath long laments to the pagan powers of the universe.
Soon, however, the play receives a jolt when Ruzzante stumbles onto the
scene and thus into the proto-melodrama of love suicides. The clash
between the worlds of the pastoral and Ruzzantes Padua leads straight
to farce since neither Arpino nor Ruzzante can understand one another.
Eventually persuaded to help bury the bodies by what he believes to be an
offer of free bread, Ruzzante starts to help Arpino despite his concern that
these shepherds have died from the plague and may be contagious. When
he eventually rolls up his sleeves he quickly discovers that the shepherds
are not actually dead, they have merely fainted.
Since the problem at hand now seems to have a ready-made solution,
Ruzzante and Arpino attempt to enlist the help of a doctor. Master
Francesco arrives onstage after more frantic antics and miscommunication,
thereby introducing another layer of misunderstanding. The doctors
questions, methods, and remedies strike Ruzzante as bizarre, and Beolco
dedicates nearly the entire last half of the play to the skirmishes between
these two characters, spliced together with conversations about excessive
eating delivered by Ruzzante and his compatriot Zilio. Finally, Milesio
and Mopso (the rst two shepherds) appear to show signs of recovery. No
one single cause explains their revival: Pan may have interceded thanks to
Arpinos orations, though master Francescos science may equally have
presented a diagnosis and cure. So as not to anger the supernatural forces
that may or may not be at work, the characters all offer a sacricial lamb to
Pan, thereby bringing the play back around to the pseudo-pastoral key in
which its opening notes resounded.
Almost every scholarly treatment of this play since the late nineteenth
century has pointed to the mixing of worlds presented by its three sets of
characters, and to the amazingly diverse series of references to pastoral
literature that Beolco packaged together for his audiences entertainment.
Nancy Derso, for example, dedicates a signicant portion of her book
Arcadia and the Stage to understanding the world palimpsest (3550).
Antonio Daniele locates specic references in style and content to
Boiardo, de Jennaro, Alberti, and, of course, Sannazaro, whose Poliziano
occupied the upper echelon of pastoral poetry (Daniele 6465). Ludovico
Zorzi adds to this list, observing that the second prologue, the one offered
in the Tuscan dialect, is delivered in the poliphilesco style, con allusione
allHypnerotomachia Poliphili e ai suoi complessi stilemi; that is, the
overly complex style of Colonnas Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii (Ruzante
Teatro, 1285). This dizzying mix of references together with the non-stop
barrage of Ruzzantian swearing and comic asides lead some to call Pastoral
a frottola, or a nonsense rhyme, that would have delighted the erudite
audience of University students (e.g. Daniele 65). Boillet accentuates the
likely demographics of the audience at the debut of the Pastoral and treats
the play as a type of send-up that simultaneously showcases Beolcos
intellect, albeit an intellect gained without the benet of ofcial university
education (Boillet 222). For her, Beolcos rst play comprises a slumped
pastoral, then a seated or bent pastoral, one stretched and nally pulled
down, and ultimately a beaten and knocked down pastoral (poi una
bucolica seduta o piegata, inne una bucolica abbattuta e stesa) (209).
Others still, while acknowledging the contributions to theatre that follow
this rst play, see nothing out of the ordinary in Pastoral and wonder if
pro-Ruzzante historians have too vehemently accentuated any so-called
originally that lies in the work (Pieri 102103). In sum, the reception of
Pastoral oscillates around two main points: its strengths derived from
Beolcos awareness of the literary tradition he sought to lampoon, on
the one hand, and Beolcos ability to superimpose multiple realities on
top of one another to create a palimpsest that reects the complexity of the
time, on the other hand.
PASTORAL AS CRITIQUE WITHIN CRITIQUE WITHIN CRITIQUE

Responding to the stark, radiant contrasts between the worlds that he
superimposes, the deafening volume of brazen speech issuing from the
mouth of Ruzzante, and the way in which Beolco appears to ape and
simultaneously attempt to decapitate the pastoral tradition, I urge readers
to side with those who marvel at Pastorals theatrical heft. Consider, for
example, the very rst moments of play when, for the Proemio alla
Villana (Peasant Prologue), Ruzzante stumbles onstage and says,
Cancaro a i stropiegi! Pota, o and gi osiegi che era ch sta doman? O
pota di San . . . L massa abonora (A cancer on these saplings [i.e., the
weeds he walked through]! Cunt, where are the birds that were here this
morning? O Cunt of Saint . . . Its too early) (Ruzante Teatro, 7). Zorzi
notes that these opening words howl with inappropriateness since attri-
buting feminine body parts to a male saint would have counted as blas-
phemous language. Elizabeth Horodowich adds another perspective to
these opening lines by telling us that, more than any other government
organization at the time, Venice linked the purity of speech with the well-
being of the state and therefore worked tirelessly to police foul language,
in general, and blasphemy, in particular (Horodowich 211). Though the
ofcial branch empowered to control blasphemy (the Esecutori Contro la
Bestemmia) would not exist until 1537, Venetian government ofcials at
the time of Pastorals debut saw a causeeffect relationship between the
uttering of such speech and the onset of plague, famine, and economic loss.
They would therefore have frowned upon such utterances. Due, however,
to the depressed state of Venetian governmental authority after its defeat at
PASTORAL AS CRITIQUE WITHIN CRITIQUE WITHIN CRITIQUE 61
Agnadello in 1509 and the pro-Padua environment in which Pastoral took

place, Ruzzantes cursing may have had an inspiring effect on the residents
of Padua (or the multiple Padua-worlds, as the case may be) on hand for the
performancethe more blasphemous, the better. The outrageousness of
the blasphemy increases throughout the plays duration, thanks in part to
the new combinations that Beolco tries out. If the sound of cunt had
struck a nerve when it emerged as the fourth word of the play, it would have
struck again, and perhaps more acutely, when placed next to the poetic
language of the pastoral shepherd, Arpino. When the shepherd rst meets
Ruzzante, he addresses the villano in the grand style, Ti salvi Iove, dolce
fratel caro. Ti prego alquanto mi vogli aiutare? (God save you, dear sweet
brother. Might I trouble you for some assistance?). Ruzzante responds,
Pota, cha no digo, di San Loro! [ . . . ] A mazavo un osel: quest me lha
lev (I dont believe it, Cunt of Saint Loro [ . . . ] the bird I killed has been
raised from the dead), referring to the task of bird hunting and his hope of
a snack, two things that far outweigh the needs of a shepherd (Ruzante
Teatro, 57).
Each of the numerous blasphemous references functions as a multi-
valent critique of the sacred, both in terms of the sacred realm praised by
the Christian Church (more on which in Chapter 5) and lauded through
pastoral literature. Here, in this particular work, the monotheistic
Christian belief system takes a backseat to the polytheistic worlds of
Ancient Rome and Greece. In fact, Beolco gives almost no explicit atten-
tion to the Christian world. He does, however, place the temple of Pan,
the representative of the classical pantheon, onstage. When Ruzzante
meets this supernatural force, though, it gives way to a more humble
and perhaps more sustaining substance: bread. When Arpino calls upon
Pan to help him resolve the situation with Milesio and Mopso (O sacro
Pan, piet di servi toi!) Ruzzante hears a different kind of pan: Tu me
vu dar del pan? Mo su, anagn (61). If Arpino is going to put food
(bread) on the table, then Ruzzante can put bird hunting aside. Very little
is sacred to Ruzzante. If anything deserves praise, food does, that sub-
stance with which high-minded pastoral characters need not concern
themselves but that real people need in order to survive. Remember that
in this theatrical world, Ruzzante is both character and actual person, a
gure within the play and a gure who mediates between the world(s) of
the play and the world(s) of the audience with his many asides.
Religion has no power in Beolcos pastoral world. Love, likewise,
leads ultimately to depression for the shepherds. Science too provides
few certainties. Commentators rarely delve into the specics of the

doctor character, master Francesco, choosing to label him quickly as a
representative of the quacks and mountebanks who roved the Friuli.
Beolcos script, however, does more than take potshots at quacks; it
levels a nuanced critique of systematized knowledge and provides
insight into the specic historical circumstances that surrounded
Beolco. In his summary of the curricula offered at Padua during the
sixteenth century, Jerome J. Bylebyl tells his readers that the Studio, as
the university was known, existed to train lawyers and doctors and, as
such, that it divided into a university of jurists and a university of artists
(337). The term artists denoted primarily artists of medicine, stu-
dents who learned natural philosophy, surgery, medical astrology, and
the theory and practice of medicine. As the research of Zorzi and
others has pointed out, the students of these classes likely made up
the audience for the production of Pastoral, and clues throughout the
text hint that Ruzzante played directly to this audience by offering
them the character of Francesco.
Attempting to help revive Mopso and Milesio while also entertaining
Ruzzantes request for him to help Ruzzantes ailing father, Francesco asks
his servant Bertuolo to bring him some specic medical books: Bertuol,
port ch el test dAviena, Aristotil . . . (Bertuolo, bring here the text by
Avicenna, Aristotle . . . ) (Ruzante Teatro, 9495). Pupils from the Studio
would have known that the introductory texts during the rst year of
medical study included part of the Canon of Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina
(aka Avicenna), the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, and the Ars Medica of
Galen (Bylebyl 339). The gure of Francesco, then, starts to come into
focus as, perhaps, a rst-year medical student, and the jokes made at
Francescos expense turn directly toward the students in the audience,
allowing them to laugh at themselves and their theories. Or, Ruzzante
might have been mocking a specic person, somebody like Francesco
Frigimelica (14901558), professor of medical practice who endorsed
the humanist medical curriculum at the university even prior to the arrival
of Andreas Vesalius (358). The possibility even exists that Ruzzantes
heckling aimed at somebody closer to home. After all, his father, Gian
Francesco, served as doctor of arts and medicine and long-time rector of
the College of Art at the Studio (Zorzi 12981299). Then again,
Ruzzante may have chosen the name of the hospital of St Francis that
neighbored the university as a kind of coded synecdoche for all Paduan
medics.
Regardless of the specic referent signied through the character of

Francesco, if indeed one existed, Beolco dressed his medic character with a
substantial amount of features recognizable in the university city of Padua.
Framed within the historical specicity of the character, then, the jokes
aimed at Francesco by Ruzzante lay bare more of their complexity. For
example, Ruzzante decides that he might be able to make use of this
doctor and asks him to diagnose his fathers illness. Francesco explains
that he would rst need a urine sample. The distortion of language caused
by dialects makes Ruzzante think that Francesco is demanding payment
and asking not for lorina (the urine) but for Lorina, Ruzzantes
favorite cow. Persisting through the distortion, Francesco quotes
Avicenna (poorly, using either very poor or fake Latin) explaining what
the urine sample reveals: orina est obstendens causam, dependens dal cor o
dal gt o dal polm o dal bat . . . (Ruzante Teatro, 101), and Ruzzante
responds . . . che te caghi; that is, Francesco is full of shit, a fact obvious
to all who recognized his fake Latin.
How is this complex as opposed to simple, base humor? Framed
through the curricular weaving of medicine, philosophy, and spirituality
practiced at the Studio, Ruzzantes cavalcade of curse words raises the
expletives to a higher intellectual level. Of course, audiences of the play
then and now can laugh at the move Beolco makes from urine to shit in
one short line. Beyond that, though, how much did Ruzzante know and
understand of the Studios course of study, especially given his fathers
prominent position? As Horodowich discovered in her archival digging,
the anatomist Berengario Carpi declared in his 1522 work Isagogae that
the tongue, like the penis [ . . . ] has more and larger pulsating and quiet
veins than any other member equal to its size (cit. Horodowich 170).
Indeed, in Renaissance medicine, the voice and the secretion of sperm
share a connection because they represent the only two modalities
through which the spirit leaves the body in an observable way
(Couliano, cit. Horodwich 171). If Beolco knew the composition of his
primary audience, and if the intelligence of the audience members allowed
for an interpretation of Francesco as more than simply a roaming quack,
then does the blasphemous language of Pastoral amount to something
more than insult? Do the curses, almost all of which come from the mouth
of Ruzzante, add up to an expression of spiritual essence, an exterioriza-
tion of the Paduan peasants inner self? As the concluding section below
explains, answering yes to that question might be too cavalier, and yet
Beolcos text, even its basest jokes, clearly carry an awareness of the
cultural environment around him and forward a subtle argument about

the ridiculous state in which Padua nds itself. For all of its bounties, had
Padua become most renowned for the ability of its students to read urine?
If so, Beolco seems to have understood this as an unsavory achievement.
The unattering depiction of Francesco, and possibly the entire medical
profession, is one of several critiques leveled by Pastoral in quick succession.
Beolco also skewers the pastoral literary genre so beloved by the humanists
of his day. He picks apart not only the style of language but also the reliance
on an outdated and misunderstood pantheon of gods. Christianity fairs no
better in the comedy, though, evidenced by the constant stream of blas-
phemy. Both pastoral and Christian love play no active role in the text, a fact
that Beolco makes clear in the character of Siringa, who mocks Milesio
nearly to death and departs early on. Humanist science fares no better, as
the exchanges with Francesco illustrate. Beolco even mocks the Paduan
yokels whom he goes on to defend in many of his future works. The
constant miscommunication between Ruzzante and all the other characters
shows that Paduan country-dwellers will likely not switch from farming to
university education any time soon. In the Proemio alla Villana, the prolo-
gue offered in the Paduan dialect, Ruzzante constantly forgets what he is
talking about, thus hinting at the inability of the peasants to remember their
own trains of thought. Ultimately, however, Pastoral is not an example of
the negativa style of writing that Applauso mentions. It is not anti-villanesco
writing, despite the surface appearance of the rude Ruzzante. Rather, the
plays treatment of the peasantry, and indeed all of its critical energy
combined, emerges from Beolcos astute awareness of his historical situa-
tion. If the play exists as a critique wrapped in a palatable package, then
perhaps its primary critique takes aim at the deteriorating status of the once
great Paduan countryside.
Zorzis notes to his translation of the plays manuscript help esh out
this idea. Commenting on the Proemio in Prosa in Lingua Toscana that
mimics the dizzying sentence structure of Colonnas Hypnerotomachia
Polyphili, he suggests that, between the lines (leggendo pi attentamente
tra le righe), Beolco is referencing the quasi clandestine literary culture
that grew up in Padua while the Venetian republic was defending itself
during the Cambrai Wars. Zorzi argues that this literary culture was,
bench nutrita dellhumus di quel medesimo giardino, che gli agricoltori
nei calamitosi tempi decorsi non hanno potuto coltivare, that the literary
output of Paduan-born writers acted as compost in the spiritual garden of
the Paduan people who could no longer grow any food in their actual
gardens because those gardens had been trampled by Venetian and Holy
Roman forces (Ruzante Teatro, 1286). The lack of food brought about by
the devastation of the Paduan land constitutes a primary focus of Beolcos
later works. Though slightly harder to discern in Pastoral, the day-to-day
conditions of famine still show themselves. Ironically, and probably inten-
tionally, Beolco dressed Ruzzante in a fat suit for this production, some-
thing that he would not repeat in future plays. Though the characters
paunch and borderline obsessive-compulsive need to discuss food make
Ruzzante out to be a glutton, these characteristics might point to an
underlying neurotic cause of gluttony. Ruzzante enters, and before too
long he utters a line that he will go on to repeat several times, muor da
fame, Im dying of hunger (61). A few lines later, when he hesitates
before helping Arpino with the bodies of his fellow shepherds, he says,
Ho el mal de la loa (65), an expression that Zorzi reads as a reference to
an anxiety-provoked bulimia common to starving peasants at the time
(1293). In other words, despite his appearance, Ruzzante might actually
be dying of hunger. If not dying, then his anxiety about nding food each
day has led to his gluttonous behavior.
In short, Beolcos play reveals his own awareness that life for most
Paduans in 1521 was not at all good and that, by extension, his life as a
performer would not be all laughs. Going forward, I present Beolco as an
author of critical commentary, a follower in the footsteps of the forgotten
Cynic tradition of (spoudogeloia, pronounced spoo-tho-
yay-ya). From the Greek words serious and laughable, this tradition
has migrated into our contemporary vernacular as satire, specically a
brand of withering humor created by the Cynic philosopher and play-
wright Menippus (third century BCE) intended as a weapon to reveal
hidden truths. The mimicking of Ancient Greek characters and beliefs in
the pastoral tradition makes an appropriate word to
describe the Pastoral, as does the militancy smuggled into the expression
by the Cynics. For Beolco, Ruzzante became the aesthetic persona to
express the seriously funny condition of his world, complete with an
eroding infrastructure and deteriorating living conditions in the Paduan
countryside. This is a state of affairs that demands laughter because, as
Simon Critchley suggests, laughter lets us see the folly of the world in
order to imagine a better world in its place while it simultaneously warns
the powers-that-be that, Una risata vi seppellir (It will be a laugh that
buries you) (Critchley 17; 11). In Chapters 5 and 7, I deal more explicitly
with the phenomenon of Beolcos merger with his aesthetic persona, the
moment when he becomes Ruzzante. At the moment, however, sufce it

to say that the comedy of Pastoral brings laughter to bear on serious
matters plaguing the world(s) of Padua.
RUZZANTES BAROQUE PASTORAL

For the actual villano, the ideals of the pastoral genre project a ridiculous
mode of living life (exemplied by the shepherds) and a sappily effulgent
mode of speech (exemplied by the high language of pastoral poetry).
Whereas love, friendship, and piety pervade the pastoral landscape as
though they were natural entities, Ruzzante, as spokesperson for the
villani, shows these as thoroughly human and largely unattainable con-
structs. Whereas Boillet looks to the Pastoral and sees the presence of the
peasant act[ing] like a distorting mirror between the bucolic world and the
spectators, I would like to forward an understanding of the play, and
particularly of Ruzzante, not as a mirror but as a tool for re-scaling the
perspective of reality that had been presented to the upper and upper-
middle classes in the Veneto for centuries through the pastoral genre
(Boillet 199). Beolco does not distort the pastoral tradition so much as
he helps to transpose the already distorted view of nature created by
pastoral works back into a realistic scale. Once deated and emptied of
its hot air, the image of life presented by pastorals sags, becoming a
shriveled and thoroughly unappealing portrait of life on the ground.
Beolcos rst play utilizes critique to instigate this deation, and, in turn,
forwards an altogether different view of both art and nature.
Key to this new interpretation is an understanding of the term snatur-
ale, which appears time and again in Beolcos works. Snaturale provides a
point of entry back into the realm of the baroque explored in the previous
chapter and demonstrates Ruzzantes presage of some Leibnizian philo-
sophical principles. Nancy Derso leads the way into the intricacies of this
particular neologism:
[I]t is a fact that during Beolcos lifetime the Paduan contadino [peasant]
was conscripted into the Venetian army; he endured the massacre at
Agnadello, and fought in other battles for the Republic. His lands were
wasted, and he suffered seasons of famine. Since Beolcos plays often refer to
specic local events, the rustics theatrical postures always depart [i.e. derive]
from some awareness of the villanos role in history, and Ruzantes snatur-
ale derives from that awareness. (Derso Snaturalit, 144)
RUZZANTES BAROQUE PASTORAL 67
The root of the word shows itself clearly: naturale, natural. Linguistically,
the prosthetic s afxed to the word modies and sometimes negates the
meaning of the root. For example, whereas comparare means to appear,
scomparare means to disappear; fumare means to smoke, and sfumare
means to vanish, to soften, to nuance. For Derso, the s denotes
more than semantic meaning, it shows an awareness of the historical
circumstances experienced by the Paduan lower classes in the early six-
teenth century. Nature (i.e. the bountiful excess of foodstuffs, animals,
and resources such as water that sustain life for peasant farmers) becomes
negated-Nature: the marked and lamented absence of this bountiful excess
caused by wars instigated by the Republic of Saint Mark. Recall here
Zorzis suspicion that Beolcos rst play tacitly afrmed the ourishing
of Paduan literature that served as a type of spiritual sustenance during a
time when invaders crippled Venices cultural inuence on the area. When
nature turns to snature, art will have to sustain the people.
As with most words in Becolos arsenal, the words naturale and sna-
turale have other connotations. Angelo Beolco lived his life as a natural,
or illegitimate, child. The logic woven into this particular adjectival usage,
common at the time of Beolcos birth (Carroll Ruzante, 34), would seem
to suggest that marriage, as a religio-cultural transaction, ends the natural
relation between a man and a woman (i.e. it makes of their conjugal
relations more than the simple animal act of fornication), thus ushering
in a new, sanctioned and legitimized life within society. Beolcos status as a
natural child, however, marked the fact that he owed his life to an
unsanctioned sexual union, and thus that he would always exist in a
somewhat marginalized, or at least peripheral, place within the Beolco
family. To be a natural child meant that one fell from the habitually
accepted, second nature of religio-cultural life to a parallel state of being
that, while called natural, might be more appropriately marked as
snatural, or out of place.
Beolcos snatural status even underwrites his professional career. As
Emilio Menegazzo reports, when his father died, sometime around 1520,
Beolco received a modest amount of money that would have helped him
survive for about two years (Menegazzo 212). Beolcos choice to enter
under Cornaros patronage resulted in part from this nancial stress. This
information helps to point out that while Ruzzante had access to the
learned community at the Studio, and, while he likely never suffered
from abject poverty while his father lived, the comedians status as a
natural child restricted the bounties provided to legitimate children
and forced him to look for work and nancial guidance from the same
caste of society that most of his plays satirized.
The notion of snaturalit might also lend itself to rethinking the
relation between language and culture during Beolcos time, specically
the language of pastoralia. In Horodowichs discussion of Castigliones Il
cortegiano, specically the section dedicated to the acceptable and unac-
ceptable ways of speaking at court, I nd a compelling link between words,
nature, and ones station in life. When deciding which outdated words to
eliminate from ones vocabulary, she writes, the courtier should remem-
ber that just as the seasons of the year divest the earth of her owers and
fruits, and then clothe her again with others, so time causes those rst
words to fall, and usage brings others to life (36). Members of the upper
classes would recognize a charlatan amongst their ranks by attending to his
speech. A person may unwittingly reveal his links to the middle classes by
using an out-of-date word and, as a result, nd himself uninvited to court.
Castigliones metaphor of seasonal language tends to the ideological belief
of the upper classes: that their language reinforces their (ostensibly) nat-
ural claim to aristocratic privilege. Perhaps Beolcos grandiose language in
the Pastoral shows his awareness of a specic historical reversal: that, for
the wealthy, language had ceased to produce meaning and had become
instead a signature of the wealth bestowed upon the few by an unseen
natural force. If so, then one could utilize the term snaturale to describe
the upside down world that protects the afuent persons natural status
and punishes the poor for being poor.
Neither the word snaturale nor its corresponding image of the
world-upside-down appears explicitly in Beolcos rst play, and yet the
concepts that this word and image express linger everywhere in this so-
called slumped pastoral. Beolco exposes the supposedly simple ways of
the shepherds through his excessively ornate mock-poetic language taken
from the pastoral genre. Through Ruzzantes foul mouth, he shows the
medics natural philosophy to be mere shit. Even love, which fertilizes
the pastoral landscape, nds no purchase in the poetic ground of Beolcos
pastiche. Thus, the play berates not only the high language of upper-class
poets, the jargon of university education, and the notion of love excavated
from the textual ruins of the classical world, but it also denies any legiti-
macy bestowed upon the second-nature that treats such things as natural
entities. Whereas Renaissance gardeners attempted to materialize the
concept of third nature through the immaculate gardens made possible
by mans mastery over nature, Beolco attempted through his play to
expose such mastery as snatural, out of place, and, ultimately, harmful to

the Paduan peasantry (Dixon Hunt 155). As a word connoting the
bizarre, asymmetrical relation between nature and culture, between that
which is, that which is made to be, and that which is made but is also made
to appear as unmade (i.e., natural, given), I contend that snaturale also
serves to name baroque nature. Despite Beolcos protests, the unnatural
view of the world offered by pastoral poetry would not simply cede to the
perspective of the lower classes, and thus he would have to live in a world
within a world, specically a world (Padua) that would be negated by a
poetic creation (the pastoral countryside) posing as a natural environment.
This realization brings us back around to the multiple worlds co-exist-
ing within the Pastoral and rhymes philosophically with the Leibnizian
gardens within gardens topological assessment of baroque nature.
Building on the insights of the previous chapter, I propose that Pastoral
shows Beolcos awareness of his status as the incompossible dweller resid-
ing within the incompossible world of his ideal Padua. This language
comes directly from Leibnizs Monadology. Numerous commentators
have traced the concepts of compossibility and incompossibilty from
Leibnizs time to the present, particularly as they appear in neobaroque
aesthetics (Egginton, Theatre of Truth; Ndalianis, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics).
I would like to make a similar move but, instead of jumping from the
eighteenth century forward to the time of cinema and multimedia art, I
want to dig into the historical ground and think of Beolcos rst play as a
foreshock of Leibnizs realizations.
Leibnizs gardens within gardens present a problem for the philoso-
pher: if all pieces of matter express a point of view onto the world, how
precisely do we come to inhabit our own point of view instead of any
other? And, if multiple worlds are possible, then why does this world exist
and not another? Leibnizs writings intervene into the inherited wisdom
that humans occupy a more rational position on the great chain of being
than plants and animals, and answers these questions by claiming, instead,
that this world exists because God has chosen it to exist and, therefore,
that it is the best of all possible worlds. This world and all of its lived
realities he names compossibles, while all of the rejected worlds of inferior
quality he names incompossibles. Does there exist a world in which Caesar
does not cross the Rubicon? Yes, but its status has been demoted to that of
an incompossible world because God has willed it to be so. As Ndalianis
explains, Gods selected path (the compossibles) constitutes the existing
world as it nally comes into being. The incompossibles are all those other
paths that are rejected (80). Splicing her own words with that of
Leibnizs most recognizable French interpreter of the twentieth century,
Gilles Deleuze, she goes on to stipulate that, By positing an innity of
possible worlds, however, Leibniz asserts our world to be the only
existing world because, given that it constitutes Gods nal choice, it is
considered to be the best among all the possible scenarios, the rest of
which are nally rejected (Deleuze 1993, 61) (80).
The mixture of worlds within the Pastoral displays the battle of com-
possibles and incompossibles, though it bears no traces of a God who will
decide which is which. The opening stage description offers a topology of
worlds:
Un paesaggio silvestre con un prato in mezzo dove principia e si svolge lazione

central; da un lato, separato, il tempio del Dio Pan, con laltare, una fonte e
un sepolcro antico; dallaltro, un viottolo conduce alla casa del medico, della
quale tra gli alberi potr scorgersi la porta. (Ruzante Teatro, 5)
(A woodland with a meadow in the middle where the central action
starts and unfolds; to one side, separated, the temple of the god Pan,
with the altar, a font and an ancient sepulcher; to the other side, a path
leading to the house of the doctor, of which, between the trees, one can
glimpse the door.)
The action of the play takes place on the dividing line between two worlds,
that of pastoral Arcadia and that of the urban Padua represented by the
Universitys chief cultural product (artists/doctors). One does not need to
stretch too far to interpret the former as the representative of poetry and
the latter as representative of scientic rationality. Equally as important as
the setting, however, is that which the audience never sees, namely the
world of Ruzzante, which stands in for Paduan countryside where farmers
live. Following Ancient Greek terminology, this world (the Paduan coun-
tryside) exists as the obscene (literally, ob-scene, or off-stage), the perfect
dwelling for a character as rude (and possibly as truthful) as Ruzzante. Of
course, the obscene also houses the audience, and thus a problem presents
itself. Does the audience reside in the same world as Ruzzante? Hints
offered throughout the plays action suggest that, yes, the world of the
audience and the world of Ruzzante are one and the same. When
Ruzzante summarizes the plot in the opening prologue and tells the
audience that Siringa ees from Milesio, he species that she runs alle
Grance, something like a farm run by monastic personnel that existed
down the road in Padua not far from the theatre space (Ruzante Teatro,
1284).
The map of superimposed worlds gets even more complicated if we
consider that the Padua of Alvise Cornaro (one the wealthiest inhabitants
of the city) did not correspond directly to the Padua of university students,
much less the Padua of poor Ruzzante because Cornaros wealth set him
apart from the masses. Thus, within Padua one nds separate worlds
delimited by class identities and economic (dis)advantages. Furthermore,
the prologista starts his recounting of the plot by saying that he has
awoken from a dream, thereby implying that the action unfolding on the
stage during the course of the Pastoral happens within dreamspace (and
maybe even remembered dreamspace). If this is true, then readers of this
play stumble into the hall of mirrors created by the dialectical interplay of
dreamspace and waking reality, one of the hallmark antagonisms of the
Spanish Baroque outlined by Jos Antonio Maravall. Without complicat-
ing matters further, and without resolving the problems posed by the
possibility of a dreamspace produced by a theatrical character, I believe
that lurking behind this multiverse of worlds lies a specic understanding
of self. That is, Beolco does not vouch for one worlds claim to reality over
another, neither does he prove that his Padua deserves more attention;
rather, the Pastoral showcases Beolcos anxiety that none of the worlds has
been chosen by God, as Leibniz has put it. This claim, however, cedes too
much ground to Leibnizs worldview, the same worldview that Voltaire
would scandalize in Candide. As such, instead of placing Beolco at the
whim of a God whom he seems not to have believed in, I suggest we
recognize his awareness of a nascent antagonism between the compossible
and the incompossible in a different way. God may not choose Ruzzantes
Padua or the pastorals world of Platonic ideals, but both will continue to
exist nonetheless thanks to Venices need for arable farmland, on the one
hand, and the booming print industry, on the other hand. Ruzzantes
Padua will endure as a marginalized space, one masked by the poetic
version of the countryside penned by pastoral poets. Maybe Leibniz was
wrong and the incompossibles exist, only to struggle for visibility beneath
the veil of appearances created through a barrage of aesthetic production.
Pastoral lays bare this barrage in both its form and content.
In the same light, not only do all the worlds within the Pastoral begin
to take on the status of incompossibility, but Beolco seems also to wonder
if he himself exists. Or, rather, if he surely exists, then he necessarily exists
as multiple people: Beolco is Ruzzante; Ruzzante is one person to Zilio
and another person to Francesco; Ruzzante is one person to Francesco

and another person to Arpino. This multiplicity of self may lead to vertigo,
but it does not necessarily deserve the word crisis, which contemporary
discourse likes to afx to all challenging situations. Horodowich accesses
the discourses on self and identity in Renaissance Venice and notes that
during Beolcos time:
self was neither an essentialist self with an independent, ontological status

nor a self that was an entirely unfree, historicized construct or empty site
onto which large political and historical forces were inscribed. Rather, it was
a mixture, with the tongue representing the mediating device that nego-
tiated the multifaceted and complicated relationship between ones interior
world and ones exterior persona. In effect, the tongue represented the site
where the self was performed. (Horodwich 55)
Such a claim seems particularly well suited to Beolco, who created a

character for himself to become. That is, wherever Ruzzantes tongue
set to lashing his opponents, there stands Beolco, always struggling to
carve out a place for himself somewhere between the rural Arcadian Padua
of his imagination and the well-heeled circle of Cornaro that kept him
nancially aoat.
Though Beolco did not actively attempt to persuade his audiences with
the Pastoral to endorse one Paduan world-identity over another, he did
manage to oat a sustained critique on the surface of his plays jokes about
the medical profession alongside explicit jabs at the pastoral genre. As
critique, the Pastoral could belong to what William Egginton calls the
minor strategy of baroque art and artifacts. For Egginton, one can deter-
mine a baroque artwork by the degree to which it tangles with the inter-
play between truth and appearance:
the Baroque puts the incorruptible truth of the world that underlies all
ephemeral and deceptive appearances on center stage, making it the ultimate
goal of all inquiry; in the same vein, however, the Baroque makes a theatre
out of truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an
effect of the appearances from which we seek to free it. (2)
How precisely a work does this, and whether it afrms or denies the
authority of the truth lingering behind or beyond the world of appear-
ances, determines whether the artwork aligns itself with either the major or
the minor baroque. The major strategy of the baroque assumes the
existence of a veil of appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a
space opening just beyond those appearances where truth resides (3). I
explore this major strategy in depth in the next chapter by attending to the
dramaturgy of the Jesuit order in late sixteenth-century Venice. In fact, as
Egginton himself suggests, representatives of the Counter-Reformation
provide some of the clearest expressions of the major baroque strategy
(2627). By distinction, the minor baroque strategy suggests that the
promise of purity behind the veil of appearances is itself already corrupted
by the very distinction that gave birth to it (27). In other words, artworks
that expose the mediation of reality (i.e. the fact that all knowledge of the
truth comes from a consciously produced and sustained discourse or set of
practices of one kind or another) operate in a minor mode. The minor
baroque strategy forces the spectator/auditor/reader/interpreter to ques-
tion the dichotomy between appearance and substance and to discern
whether perhaps the choice between these two entities evolves from a
political plan, a human desire, or a social project instead of Nature or God
Himself.
As the work of this chapter has suggested, the Pastoral deploys this
minor baroque strategy by crippling the legitimacy of poetic pastoral
language, Arcadian love, university erudition, and the anxiety-riddled
underside of rustic gluttony and laziness. Beolcos play does not reveal a
higher truth beyond this language, love, erudition, or underside; rather, it
draws his audiences attention to the coexistence of these things as human
creations that, precisely because of their human origin, hide an afnity to
the corrupt and the nite. By maneuvering between the audience and the
world(s) within the play, the character of Ruzzante makes this hidden
afnity visible from the start and proceeds to guide the audience through
the play, thereby making the theatricality of the Pastoral a part of the play
itself.
I draw Egginton into this discussion not to provide another keyword
with which to unlock the secrets packed within Beolcos text but to show
all that unfolds from the gesture of the minor strategy. For Egginton, this
play of appearance and truth so central to baroque artifacts conditions the
Leibnizian philosophical architecture that Deleuze and others identify as
paradigmatic in its expression of the baroque worldview. The interfolded
nature of appearance and truth crucial to baroque thought (a relation that,
as Egginton and others note, negates the Platonic separation of Idea and
Material) acts as the foundation upon which will stand the architecture of
the Leibnizian monad, the germ of individuality that, despite its hermetic
enclosure, expresses from itself the totality of the world.
In The Fold, Deleuze thinks through the peculiar expressiveness of the
monad in order, in part, to explain the complex relation between the soul
and the body in Leibnizs philosophy. In Deleuzes own words, Forever
indissociable from the body, [the soul] discovers a vertiginous animality
that gets it tangled in the pleats of matter, but also an organic or cerebral
humanity (the degree of development) that allows it to rise up (Deleuze
Fold, 11). Transposing this image to the more familiar form of the two-
storey baroque houses that appear everywhere in the Veneto of the six-
teenth century, from the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (the interior of
which Tintoretto will eventually tattoo from top to bottom) to the Loggia
at the house of Cornaro on which Beolco/Ruzzante will eventually per-
form once Maria di Falconetto completes it in 1524. These two-storey
structures boasted elaborate faades decorated by the top sculptors of the
day. Relating the faade and two-storey architecture to the Leibnizian
monad, Deleuze writes:
Baroque architecture can be dened by this severing of the facade from the
inside, of the interior from the exterior, and the autonomy of the interior
from the independence of the exterior, but in such conditions that each of
the two terms thrusts the other forward. (28)
Then, writing on the interiors relation to the exterior, he adds:
The lower level is assigned to the facade, which is elongated by being

punctured and bent back according to the folds determined by a heavy
matter, forming an innite room for reception or receptivity. The upper
level is closed, as a pure inside without an outside, a weightless, closed
interior, its walls hung with spontaneous folds that are now only those of
a soul or mind. (29)
In this architectural rendering, the upstairs belongs to the monad itself

and the downstairs to the modes through which the monad communicates
with the rest of the world. Despite the fact that this Deleuzo-Leibnizian
programming allows for constant exchange and circulation between the
upstairs and the downstairs, indeed distinguishes itself from its Platonic
forbears through this system of folding and circulation, the hierarchy of
soul and body remains somewhat intact. The soul dwells upstairs. While
the Leibnizian system does not, as Michael Marder writes, bind matter to
the force of dumb and passive resistance, always opposed to the noble
endeavors of form-giving spirit, it certainly emphasizes cultivation and
enlightenment as the hallmarks of a true human intellect, thereby smug-
gling in the historico-philosophical preference of mind over body (Marder
125). That said, and as Deleuzes creative philosophy demonstrates,
Leibnizs monadology permits for great variation in thought and forces
philosophers to unsettle the binary distinctions of inside/outside and
appearance/substance that had underwritten most theories of expression,
reception, aesthetics, and indeed philosophy itself.
Similar to the revision (pre-vision?) of Leibnizs theory of compossi-
bility and incompossibility, Beolcos rst play anticipates, while it simulta-
neously relocates, Leibnizs monad and Deleuzes baroque house. The
two-storey house that functions admirably as a metaphor for the monad in
Deleuzes work does appear in the Pastoral, but it appears with a crucial
renovation. Interestingly, the play presents a kind of two-storey entrance
that receives the audience into its embrace. The Proemio alla Villano
constructs the rst oor (on the bottom), and welcomes audiences and
readers into the worldview of the Paduan peasant. The second prologue
builds the second oor (on the top) and cultivates the same Paduan
worldview into a owery and more poetic expression. Sealed off into an
autonomous enclosure by its hermetic sentence structure and involuting
assonances, the Tuscan prologue acts as the distillate of the potency of the
human intellectat least, it renders visible the extent to which pastoral
poetic sounds attempt to exist as such. In actuality, this particular pastoral
prologue deates such pretensions through over-identifying itself as the
vehicle of spiritual ascendance. Taken together, then, the two prologues
render a leaning two-storey structure, something reminiscent of Deleuzes
philosophical architecture . . . but sillier, less noble, a bit grotesque, and
more disruptive.
A non-metaphorical, architectural analogue of just such a slanted struc-
ture exists a couple of hundred miles south of Cornaros home on the
Italian peninsula in the garden of Bomarzo that I discussed in the previous
chapter. Upon entering that garden, visitors nd a two-storey house
leaning off to one side. One of its two inscriptions explains that Vicino
Orsini had dedicated this particular structure to Cristoforo Madruzzo,
Archbishop of Trent and friend of the eccentric Orsini sibling responsible
for the gardens. The other inscription offers a set of instructions to the
houses visitors: ANIMUS QUIESCENDO FIT PRUDENTIOR ERGO
(The mind/soul becoming quiet becomes wiser thereby). Perhaps

intended as something like a key signature to the rest of the gardens,
this statement follows visitors into the house where they can then ascend
to the top oor and gaze out onto an outdoor theatre. Jessie Sheeler likens
the structure as a whole to an emblem of a slanted house found in coats-
of-arms that signies a familys ability to endure hardships over time,
though the meaning behind the actual structure (if a meaning exists at
all) eludes art and architectural historians. Paired with the theatre, how-
ever, and situated at the entrance to the bizarre garden grounds, the house
creates a sense of instability and calls to mind Eggintons minor baroque
strategy insofar as it seems to suggest that no single meaning lies behind
the gardens offerings. Instead, wanderers through Bomarzo will come
face to face with a playful mediation between ideas and matter, as if to
remind each person that the most artistic allegorical offerings may in fact
present nothing other than an attempt to amuse oneself and to laugh at
the works of man, works that play out on a grand theatre stage.
Pastorals two prologues present a similar consideration. Once beyond
the gates of the prologues and into the center of the play itself, Beolcos
visitors get a glimpse not of Padua as it really is but of Padua mediated by
Beolcos theatricality. In this world, love and death deserve no more
attention than a shit joke and a urine sample. Audiences will have to
look for spiritual meaning in a new place, perhaps a more grounded and
earthy place than pastoral poetry has heretofore suggested. What of the
corresponding vision of the soul that accompanies this slanted house?
Surprisingly, Pastorals vision of the soul takes on a Deleuzian character-
istic: a vertiginous animality folded into an organic, cerebral humanity.
From Milesios old body rebuked by Siringa to Ruzzantes distended
abdomen, the bodily dimension of each character hints at the essence of
the play of the whole, or, rather its internal dynamism. Never still, the
theatrical work of art resists essentialism and offers only a glimpse of
becoming, which, in the case of the Pastoral, is a deciduous unfolding, a
movement toward bareness. As if to suggest that Paduas residents have
entered the winter of its territorys lifespan, Beolcos excessive pastoral
language and non-stop farcical action actually betray a withering and a
falling away since, as I mentioned earlier, Padua faces a daunting state of
affairs now that it nds itself back under the thumb of the Venetian
patricians. Contra Leibniz, then, the cultivation of the material life force
made possible by the intellect manifests itself through Beolcos baroque
pastoral as a seriously funny elegy to the twilight of Paduas bounty.
NOTES 77
NOTES
1. On the relation between Ruzzante and the Sienese pre-Rozzi tradition, see
Marzia Pieri, La Scena Boschereccia nel Rinascimento Italiano (Padova:
Liviana Editrice, 1983), especially Chapter 6: Il Grottesco Pastorale dei
Pre-Rozzi. La Pastoral come opera riassuntiva.
2. See Dario Fo: Stage, Text, Tradition, eds. Joseph Farrell and Antonio
Scuderi (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) and
Enrico Pucci, Dario Fo: Ruzante il nostro Shakespeare, Il Mattino di
Padova, 25 Febbraio 2015 <http://mattinopadova.gelocal.it/padova/cro
naca/2015/02/25/news/dario-fo-ruzante-e-il-nostro-shakespeare-1.
10934680>.
CHAPTER 4
Jesuit Pastoral Theatre: The Case of Father

Pietro Leon da Valcamonica
Seeping into the bers of what appear to be three sheets of school

instructional paper, and tucked away at the very end of the Z section
of an alphabetized catalogue of churches in Venice, one nds ink that
preserves the nal words of a priest condemned to public execution in
Piazza San Marco on 10 November 1561. There, in the Cicogna Codex of
the Biblioteca di Museo Civico Correr, a blotchy and at times indecipher-
able text relays the intriguing monologue of Father Pietro Leon da
Valcamonica to posterity, a monologue that culminates with a third-
person description of the priests gruesome exit:
[A]nd he turned to the Executioner, and kissed him, and placing his head on
his knee he said to the people he advises us to pray, and to him was given the
Axe 8 times [ . . . his head] wouldnt come off until nally it was cut off with a
knife [ . . . ] and then it was placed outside under the loft[ed area of the
scaffold], where it was burned, and like that it was the end of his life, and as
has been said, his sins were overcome. (Cicogna)1
Once the rector of the Convertite (The House of the Converted, aka Santa
Maria Maddalena) on the Venetian island of Giudecca (or Zuecca in the
Venetian dialect), Valcamonica worked his way to the scaffold by prosti-
tuting and sexually molesting the young women he was assigned to
protect. One of many such houses in sixteenth-century Venice, S. Maria
Maddalena existed to protect women, some just girls, whose nancial
circumstances had driven them to prostitution. Though supposedly

80 4 JESUIT PASTORAL THEATRE: THE CASE OF FATHER PIETRO LEON . . .
converted from their unholy profession by the shepherds at the head of

such houses, the charges of Valcamonica had been violently led astray.
Some sources suggest that the priest went as far as to drown the children
born from his sexual assaults (Ruggiero 53).2 The Consiglio dei Dieci
(Council of Ten), Venices most powerful branch of government at the
time, found him guilty of these crimes and sent Valcamonica to the
scaffold erected between the two now iconic columns outside the
Palazzo Ducale (The Doges Palace) where the priest gave up his soul in
what would have been an uncommonly violent execution event for the
Republic known throughout Europe as the Serenissima (the Most
Serene).
This historical, embodied event that researchers now access through a
quasi-illegible, textual artifact slowly comes into focus once the document
from the Cicogna Codex enters into conversation with an assemblage of
other historical sources and phenomena, including Giovanni Boteros
theories on il ragion di stato (the Reason of State), Michel Foucaults
historiography of pastoral power, the Bologna Comforters Manual that
instructed lay ministers on how to guide condemned criminals through
their nal moments on earth, and, perhaps most importantly, the presence
in Venice of the newly nominated Society of Jesus. Situated in a public
square that resonated with the sounds of civic and religious theatrical
events throughout the calendar year, which itself sat within the heart of
a city known for its nearly incessant private performance events and much
chronicled Carnevale entertainments, Valcamonicas execution, inter-
preted through historico-philosophical analysis, reveals a large-scale social
performance staged with incredibly high stakes. What begins as a textual
index of a historical event becomes a script, which, analyzed in tandem
with the bodies speaking and directing its language, projects a faint image
of this performance upon which contemporary audiences can reect.
In other words, though the word execution conveys the gist of the
beheading to contemporary readers, this chapter proposes that a more
nuanced understanding of the event, as well as of the conditions that made
the event possible, comes into view by reading Valcamonicas execution as
an elaborate performance staged for specic political and spiritual pur-
poses. The route leading to the historical perspective from which one can
glimpse this performance begins with a consideration of the e/affects that
such an execution might have produced. The e/affects change when one
considers the event from different points of view. For example, Venetian
legislators understood Valcamonicas burnt corpse in an entirely different
DELLA RAGION DI STATO: AN ACT OF JUSTICE 81
way than did the Jesuit spiritual advisers who were beginning to work their
way into the hearts and minds of those legislators. Taking the archived
remains of the priests nal words as a starting point, then, this chapter will
rst zoom out to offer a wide-angle perspective on the mechanism of
corporal punishment and then zoom in to expose this bloody event not
just as a performance but also as a specic kind of baroque pastoral theatre.
Whereas the previous two chapters mapped the allegorical language
embedded in the baroque pastoral landscapes of Italian gardens and
Colonnas and Tassos texts, on the one hand, and Beolcos askew and
aslant Pastoral, on the other hand, this chapter develops a new picture of
the pastoral shepherds tale and provides a manifestation of what Egginton
calls the major baroque strategy. In the Piazza San Marco on November
10, 1561, the shepherd in this pastoral tale was not a ctional character
but a esh-and-blood leader of the Christian ock. The drama of the Jesuit
pastoral theatre actually revolved around the tale of two shepherds, one
who had led the ock astray through sin and one who would harness the
downfall of such sins to reveal the path toward forgiveness and eternal life.
From the perspective of the Venetian Jesuits, these two identities at times
coexisted within the body of one shepherd, Valcamonica himself, whose
villainous actions, framed through a particular philosophy of love and
forgiveness, transgure him into a martyr. But before schematizing the
mechanics of that drama and explicating the paradoxical role of the
shepherd in this Jesuit pastoral theatre, I would like to approach
Valcamonicas demise from the point of view of the Venetian government.
Such a perspective offers historical contextualization, which doubles as a
survey of the political environment of the Republic in the late sixteenth-
century.
DELLA RAGION DI STATO: AN ACT OF JUSTICE

As John Martin and Dennis Romano acknowledge in their introduction to
Venice Reconsidered:
There simply are too many Venices, too many unknown dimensions. Just
when one believes one is beginning to follow the story line, Venice trans-
mogries and, both in spite of and because of the richness of its archives and
artistic treasures, is again a mystery, an enigma, an indecipherable maze of
interweaving stories, false and true.
In this light, Valcamonicas execution presents a riddle wrapped in an

enigma. Within the inner riddle, given the dominant powers operating
in Venice at the time, the execution itself compels at least two readings:
one aligned with the governmental authorities of state and one with the
spiritual authority of the Church. Neither one perspective nor the other
provides all the answers; rather, the enigma of the execution reveals itself
within the parallax view opened from straddling both perspectives simul-
taneously. That gymnastic feat presents the possibility that the interweav-
ing stories of Venice, stories which the Venetians told to themselves in
order to maintain faith in their political autonomy that came under
pressure during the sixteenth century, played out upon the bodies of its
own citizens. Reading the body of Valcamonica within the network of
state power helps to gain access to the narratives and metanarratives
structuring these stories.
Around the core riddle of Valcamonica, however, stretches another
enigma, that posed by Venice itself. As Martin and Romano point out,
Venetian historiography reveals narratives that somehow exist as both true
and false. The perception of Venetian government at any one given time,
for example, does not necessarily reveal an accurate picture. Misreadings
stem from the possibility that the city streets and the dramaturgies of the
performances transpiring within them both encode multiple layers of
meaning into all the events that unfold there, thereby compelling con-
temporary spectators to wonder how, in this particular case, the space of
the city prepares the scene of the execution. To begin working through
the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of Valcamonicas execution caused by the
multiple perspectives carved out by Venices numerous narratives, I turn
to Giovanni Botero. A former Jesuit whose political theorizations provide
a map of state governmental mechanisms in early modern Europe, Botero
presents a compelling grid of specication through which to view both
Valcamonicas death and the machinery that conveyed him to the scaffold.
In 1598, a Venetian press published Boteros Della ragion di stato (On
the Reason of State). In that document, the last edition which the author
himself revised, the former Jesuit opened with the following denition:
State is a stable rule over a people and Reason of State is the knowledge
of the means by which such a dominion may be founded, preserved, and
extended [ . . . ]. [I]t is concerned most nearly with preservation, and more
nearly with extensions than with foundations (3). Somewhat enigmati-
cally, then, the text functioned as a guide to the practice of extending a
states domination but also as a portrait of the ideal state, a territory that
has been perfectly preserved from internal and external danger. To pre-
serve itself, a healthy state had to cultivate and maintain internal tranquility
while also pursuing moderate but aggressive exterior expansion; ideal state
homeostasis derived from this double movement, and, in turn, the sover-
eigns virtuosity propelled this double movement. Such virtuosity arose
from the sovereigns recognition of his subjects as materials and of himself
as articer capable of manipulating those materials like so many actors on a
great stage.
The size of ones territory also conditioned the success of the state.
[A] small dominion, wrote Botero, is one that cannot stand by itself,
but needs the protection and support of others [ . . . ]. A middle-sized
dominion has sufcient strength and authority to stand on its own
[ . . . ]. Those dominions are large which have a distinct superiority over
their neighbors (4). Of these three sizes, Botero thought medium the
best since those states were exposed neither to violence by their weakness
nor to envy by their greatness, and their wealth and power being moder-
ate, passions are less violent, ambition nds less support and license less
provocation (8). The best example of such a state: Venice.
For Botero, the Venetian state maintained the necessary peace and
tranquility required to make it strong. Their rulers exercised those special
arts which won for those rulers the love and admiration of their people.
The Republic of Saint Mark understood the two aspects of royal justice:
justice between the ruler and his subjects and justice between subjects
themselves. Though peace was the goal, Botero believed that both types of
justice frequently relied on violent means capable of countering civic
turbulence. Violence, he wrote, is the work of outlaws, robbers, assas-
sins and murderers, who must be held in check by fear and by severe
legislation; for what is the use of keeping out foreign armies if a worse
danger prevails at home? (1920). Of what did the sovereigns violent
response consist? The answer lay in the coupling of fear and severe
legislation.
Michel Foucault named this coupling the coup dtat (Italian: softo di
stato). In his genealogy of reason of state, Foucault identied the coup
dtat as the masterstroke of government, as that which constituted the
most violent but also the most theatrical gesture of a sovereign ruler
(Foucault, Security 261). When did a ruler perform this masterstroke?
Foucault cited Boteros own thoughts on the matter: A public misfor-
tune is the very best of opportunities for a prince to win the hearts of his
subjects since it is in those moments of misfortune and disarray that the
presence of the sovereign can set things straight and re-establish a rightful
order of things. Thus, the turbulence churned up by interior threats of
criminals had always to dissolve beneath the violent and swift response of
the ruler. Such responses took on spectacular forms, such as public execu-
tions and civic performances that demonstrated the legitimacy of the
government.
Boteros depiction of Venice as the model of reason of state was,
however, distorted. Venice did not have a sovereign. The government
had a head gure, the doge, but the administrative and legislative duties
fell to multiple branches, each with its own particular duty. Additionally,
in 1561, the year of Valcamonicas execution and around the time that
Botero would have witnessed Venetian governance in action, the smooth
functioning of the Republics government underwent a dramatic shift.
The Council of Ten, which for so many years held the most power, had
begun to lose its absolute grasp. Whereas that Council once consolidated
many duties within itself, the last decades of the sixteenth century saw the
creation of new councils aimed at taking over matters of blasphemy, civic
peace, and heretical inquisitions, thereby diffusing the Council of Tens
authority (Cozzi, Authority 317318). Therefore, Boteros metapho-
rical pronouncement that [t]he more intricate and complex the mechan-
isms of a watch the more likely that it is to go wrong, which he offered as
a counter-example to the efciency of the Venetian state, seems misplaced.
The Venetian government was an intricate and complex mechanism if ever
there was one. What accounts for Boteros misreading?
Boteros distorted vision may have been produced from the barrage of
theatricality deployed by the Venetian government on a regular basis. As
Edward Muir has suggested, [t]he fundamental problem of the historians
of Venice [ . . . ] has been to separate outward appearance from reality, to
uncover from the veneer of propaganda and mythology the actual social
and political structure of the city (Muir, Civic Ritual 13). This veneer
was generated by numerous annual demonstrations, parades, and galas, all
of which were deployed by the Venetian state to tend to its own complex
clockwork. These civic rituals, including the demonstrations of might
exemplied in the softo di stato, were all a part of the Venetians
perpetual encomium to their city. Botero was not wrong to suggest
that Venice epitomized the coupling of fear and severe legislation, or
that the state knew when to deploy theatrical gestures to stabilize and
sustain its civic life. Rather, he failed to realize that in addition to the softo
di stato, the Venetian Republic was equipped with many theatrical gestures
that were aimed at producing a complex unity out of Venices numerous

governmental limbs.
As one example of these civic performances, the annual marriage to the
sea (La Sensa) acted to support the unied Venetian identity as master of
the waves (Muir, Civic Ritual 119135). As Muir has pointed out, La
Sensa provided an opportunity for the state to order the temporal and
spatial dimensions of the Republic within a civic grid. The annual marriage
fell on the feast day of the Ascension, and the civic ceremony was therefore
a strategic act of overwriting the Churchs authority. The event followed a
well-worn groove in the citys geography that led from the Palazzo Ducale
to the Basin of St Mark where the doge boarded the giant Bucintoro, a
boat plated with gold. The boat, powered by numerous rowers stowed
below the decks, took the doge to the sea of Venice where he threw a
wedding ring overboard and discharged gallons of holy water into the surf.
With the symbolic marriage and consummation thus complete, Venice
demonstrated its authority over the sea in a highly masculine manner. This
ceremony grew in importance after 1509 when, because of Venices defeat
under the League of Cambrai and the increased dominance of Portugal
over the spice trade, the Republic required a renewed sense of condence
in order to maintain its political drive and autonomy. La Sensa, along with
the other civic festivals, helped Venice annually to strengthen its faith in
itself through theatrical means.
From the perspective of reason of state, the execution of
Valcamonica appears in a similar light. The execution, embedded
within a highly theatrical landscape and functioning as part of a larger
and more sustained effort to keep Venice intact as a political entity,
demonstrated the governments ability to re-establish inner tranquility
in the wake of unspeakable horrors and obvious failures within the halls
of its civic institutions. In Boteros terms, the gruesome nature of the
priests crimes constituted a great public misfortune. When the very
person designated to shepherd the souls of impoverished girls propa-
gated the sinfulness against which those girls struggled, inner civic
tranquility came under threat. What other state-funded facilities hid
such men from view? Since reason of state suggested that public
misfortune is the very best of opportunities for a prince to win the
hearts of his subjects, Valcamonicas transgressions demanded a swift
and lethal response. Instead of banning the priest from the Republic for
life or just dropping him in the sea in the middle of the night, the state
displayed its ability to suppress such threats.
Viewed as such, Valcamonicas execution bore a resemblance to the

surgeries performed within the anatomy theatres of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Instead of medical professionals removing organs in front of
medical students, however, it was the state that sutured the wounds
opened by the priests ignominious activities at the Convertite.
Anatomy theatres had a theatrical architecture consisting of steeply
raked seats that encircled the stage upon which the body of the patient
opened up to the audiences inquisitive gaze. The Piazza San Marco
had a similarly theatrical architecture that positioned spectators around
the scaffold that was raised between the two columns. On this stood
the body of the priest, which, through the act of beheading and the
subsequent incineration of the corpse, was reduced to the primary
object in a civic anatomy lesson.
The most explicitly theatrical components of the Piazza San Marco
were the windows on the second storey of the newly constructed library.
Those windows became private viewing posts from which the Republics
noblemen and governors could watch the state operate. As such, these
windows functioned like the box seats from which the richest patrons
watched theatrical production unfolding upon the stages of the rst
permanent theatres in Venice, built around 1580. In the piazza, the pink
brickwork of the faade of the Palazzo Ducale replaced the need for any
painted backdrop.3 Between the two pillars, outside the legislative center
of the city, Valcamonica lost his head in Venices most cherished sceno-
graphic locale.
Looking at the execution from the perspective of ragion di stato, the
multiple blows of the axe to Valcamonicas neck were folded within the
one masterstroke of government that utilized the opportunity of a public
misfortune to reveal its own power and capability of securing the Republic
from any interior threat. As Botero conceded, the act of securing the
interior was essential for the preservation of the state, and the virtuosity
of the Venetian government lay in its ability to deploy such a highly visible
gesture of authority. The executioners axe, the gazes of the nobles in their
box seats looking down, and those of the masses gathered on ground level
looking up to the scaffold all vivisected Valcamonicas body, thereby
turning him into the object of state power as well as an instrument of
the state. This act, like the multitude of annual performances organized by
the doge and other administrators of the Republic, doubled as a macabre
civic festival executing the act of justice necessary for the smooth running
of the Serenissima.
PASTORAL POWER: AN ACT OF SALVATION 87
PASTORAL POWER: AN ACT OF SALVATION

Shifting perspective from the scene of Valcamonicas death prepared by
Venices government to that same scene prepared by the Church requires
a subtle icker of the eyes. Boteros reputation as a political thinker, after
all, follows from his reputation as a Jesuit, a member of the militant order
of the Church known alternately as The Society of Jesus and the Soldiers
of Christ. Similarly, the political autonomy of the Republic of Saint Mark,
seemingly fashioned through a critical distance artfully maintained
between the oating island and the Holy See in Rome, must not distract
from the active role spiritual governance played in shaping the daily
actions of the Venetian state, or at least the actions of the state legislators.
To re-envision Valcamonicas execution, thereby gaining access to another
interpretation of the event and grappling more fully with the enigma of
Venetian history evoked by Martin and Romano, one must look through
Boteros Della ragion di stato and the Venetian coup dtat behind
Valcamonicas beheading into the less visible gestures of Venices spiritual
advisors. The route to this new perspective follows a chain of archival
evidence that positions the Jesuits as dramaturgs of the execution, those
who were not only aware of both the sacred and profane dimensions of
such a public display of mortality but also capable of directing the gazes of
all present in Piazza San Marco, that epicenter of Venetian theatrical
activity. Once occupying this new perspective, the interpretation of
Valcamonicas death as an act of justice begins to allow for an interpreta-
tion of the same event as an act of salvation orchestrated through an
elaborate form of pastoral theatre.
The evidence linking the Jesuits explicitly to the Council of Ten, S.
Maria Maddelena, and the demise of Valcamonica, begins with Jesuit
historian Mario Scaduto S.J. and his study on Giacomo Lainez, the
General of the Jesuit Order in 1561:
In the December of 60 some of the converted left the convent [i.e., the
Convertite] and one of them revealed that sometimes she had been touched
and kissed by [a priest named] Giampietro. [Benedetto] Palmio involved
various persons in an inquest: Agostino Barbarigo, Tommaso and
Giustiniano Contarini. (421)4
Scadutos information leads to the criminal sentencing records of the

Council of Ten, 15611564, where there exists additional support for
this connection between Palmio, the head of the Jesuit enclave in Venice,
Barbarigo, and the Contarini brothers, each of whom were members of
the Council. Valcamonicas name appears three times in the pages of those
records. The rst was an introduction of Valcamonica to the court, during
which the ministers of state identied him as chaplain and confessor of
the converted on Giudecca.5 The second time the court decreed that,
this Fr. Zuan Piero is conned for the rest of his life in prison [ . . . ] until
he is [brought] between the two columns in S. Marco [and] beheaded.6
Finally, the day before the execution, the Council declared one last time
that, tomorrow morning this priest Zuanpiero will be beheaded by an
executioner between the two columns of S. Marco and after his death his
body will be burned [ . . . ] and converted into ash (ASV, Consiglio dei X,
lza 14).7 The names of Agostino Barbarigo and Giustiniano Contarini
appear in the margins of those pages as witnesses of the sentencing and
members of the judicial committee.
An understanding of how precisely Palmio could instigate these crim-
inal proceedings and why he would choose to do so begins to form by
reading the benediction he gave at a new house dedicated to the conver-
sion of prostitutes in 1558. This house, known colloquially as the Zitelle
(Spinsters, but also Maidens), was the Santa Maria della Presentazione
(The Presentation of Mary) on the island of Giudecca, directly southwest
of Piazza San Marco in the Basin of St Mark. The Zitelle and the
Convertite were situated in close proximity, and their primary function
was identical. Palmio, renowned for his oratorical ability, announced this
function and its inspiration with the following words:
God, our Master, stamped in my soul an ardent desire to procure and to

found in this Illustrious City of Venice the House of the Maidens (Citelle) in
order to liberate from the danger of eternal damnation Virgins who, though
very beautiful and full of grace [ . . . ] were too swiftly following the way into
the profound abyss of that abominable life that is so contrary to good health.
(Constitutioni et regole 1)
After the benediction, Palmio thanked a long list of noble men and
women without whose help the Zitelle would not have been built. The
list, a veritable whos who of sixteenth-century Venice, included numerous
doges, members of the Council of Ten, and those mens wives. Among the
names were those of Signori Protettori M[.] Thomaso Contarino [sic]
and il Magnico M. Agostin Barbarigo. The presence of so many
important gures from the Venetian government attests to the social

mobility of the Venetian Jesuits and provides a link between Palmio and
the governmental system.
The connection between the Jesuits and the upper echelons of the
Venetian government started to form 20 years earlier when Ignatius
Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, and his earliest followers began
their service of caring for the souls of the dying in Venetian hospitals.
Brian Pullans study of the Venetian poor has revealed that the Jesuit
desire to care for the sick coincided with a crucial 20-year period in
which Venetian philanthropy boomed and provided a great inux of
money for charitable works. Loyola and the others not only gained visibi-
lity from their presence in the hospitals but also made connections with
the benefactors whose money helped build Venices largest charitable
institutions (Pullan 372).
By the time of Palmios arrival, then, there was a strong connection
between the Jesuit Order and the wealthy upper-class men and women
dedicated to using their wealth for charitable means. Over the course
of that 20-year period, though, the Jesuit involvement in such cha-
rities had evolved from hands-on care of the sick to a properly admin-
istrative function. The Jesuits began to use their connections to
acquire property and to open houses in which they could guide lost
souls. Several of these houses focused their services on young female
prostitutes.
The Societys predilection for building homes for troubled youth was
not arbitrary. The Jesuit mission worked primarily to shepherd lost souls
back into the Catholic ock. By Pope Paul IIIs decree in the Regimini
militantis Ecclesiae (On the government of the Church militant), dated
September 27, 1540, the Society of Jesus became an ofcial Order of
the Church. These soldiers of God were to strive especially for the
progress of souls in Christian life and doctrine and for the propagation of
the faith by the ministry of the word, by spiritual exercises and works of
charity, and specically by the education of children and unlettered per-
sons in Christianity (Society of Jesus 34). Houses like the Zitelle were
centers of operation in the Jesuit mission of pastoral care. The Convertite,
while not expressly under Jesuit command, acted as a node within the
network of charitable institutions and housed numerous souls belonging
to uneducated and illiterate children. The Societys interest in salvaging
the poorest members of Venetian society, its specic interest in the moral
challenge presented by prostitution, and Palmios connections with
numerous nanciers and high-ranking government ofcials all help explain

how Palmio could have gained access to Valcamonicas case.
As for why Palmio would concern himself with Valcamonicas crimes, I
turn to a passage from The First Jesuits, by John OMalley S.J., in which
the author cites Father Jernimo Nadals journals:
The Society has the care of those souls for whom either there is nobody to
care or, if somebody ought to care, the care is negligent. This is the reason
for the founding of the Society. This is its dignity in the Church. For
[Father Nadal] the Jesuit task par excellence was to search for the lost
sheepwhether pagan, Muslim, heretic, or Catholic. (73)
Prostitutes and the poor, illiterate youth were targets of Jesuit care, but so
was Valcamonica. Valcamonica was a lost sheep. More than that, he was a
lost shepherd and the Jesuit mission could not be successful if the very
people who were helping to herd the masses were themselves running
amok. For Palmio, the wanton priest who deled the young prostitutes
under his care was an embodiment of the paradox of the shepherd, which
lay at the core of pastoral power.
In the same set of lectures in which he analyzed the mechanisms of
reason of state, Foucault outlined this paradox and presented the scope of
the problem it posed for Christian pastoral power:
On the one hand, the shepherd must keep his eye on all and each, omnes et
singulatim, which will be the great problem [ . . . ] of the techniques of
power in Christian pastoralship. [ . . . ] And then, in an even more intense
manner, the second form taken by the paradox of the shepherd is the
problem of the sacrice of the shepherd for his ock, the sacrice of himself
for the whole of his ock, and the sacrice of the whole of his ock for each
of the sheep. (Foucault, Security 128)
Crucial to the case of the priest from the Convertite, Foucaults delinea-
tion of the paradox marks the rst transition from pastoral power to
pastoral theatre. From Palmios point of view, Valcamonica had failed to
keep his eye on all and each of his sheep, and this required the wayward
shepherd to atone for his faults by sacricing himself for the whole of his
ock.
While it is true that the objects of the Societys governance were souls,
it is important to note that these souls were terrestrial substances. Palmio
and the Jesuits struggled with the discipleship of souls on earth. This
raised the stakes of their mission since any extraterrestrial life in Heaven
would become possible only if they could establish themselves as the very
road that conveyed souls from this world into the next. This is why the
original Formula of the Society described the nature of the Jesuit
Institute as the pathway to God (Society of Jesus 4). As a result of
this terrestrial dimension to pastoral care, the Jesuits had to develop
methods for dealing with stray sheep beyond private confession and
rhetorical orations during Mass. The execution of Valcamonica would
act as an embodied display of the transition of the soul from earth to
heaven, and the spectacle of it was sure to draw a large audience.
The complex and paradoxical full-distribution of the shepherdsheep
relationship has four principles. The elaboration of each one sheds addi-
tional light on the execution of Valcamonica viewed from the perspective
of pastoral power. Foucault named these four principles as follows. First,
the principle of analytic responsibility. With this, the pastor has to
account not only for each sheep as a numerical quantity, but also for
each of the acts that each sheep commits, everything good and evil
they may have done at any time. The analytic responsibility, then, is
not just a responsibility dened by a numerical and individual distribution,
but also a responsibility dened by a qualitative and factual distribution.
Second, the principle of exhaustive and instantaneous transfer. That is,
on the Day of Judgment, not only does the pastor have to account for
every good and evil act committed by any sheep at any time but also the
pastor will acquire each of those acts as if it was his own. Third, the
principle of sacricial reversal. If a pastor is lost along with his sheep,
then he must also lose himself for his sheep, and in their place. That is to
say, the pastor must be prepared to die [body and soul] to save his sheep.
Fourth, the principle Foucault called alternate correspondence: just as
on one side the pastors merit and salvation are due to the weaknesses of
his sheep, so too the pastors faults and weaknesses contribute to the
edication of his sheep and are part of the movement, the process, of
guiding them towards salvation (Foucault, Security 169173).
As the head of the Jesuits in Venice, Palmio was a shepherd of shep-
herds as well as a shepherd involved in the herding of stray sheep. The
execution of Valcamonica presented Palmio with an opportunity to display
to all present, in a highly theatrical way, the extent of the discipline
instilled in the Society of Jesus. He would display this discipline by sacri-
cing one of the Churchs own shepherds on the principles of pastoral
power that underpinned the entire Jesuit mission. Since the Jesuits sought
to guide souls specically through the establishment of houses like the
Zitelle, it is reasonable to suggest that the smooth functioning of all such
houses, including the Convertite, was desirable to the Society. As the
instigator of the project to construct a home for girls lost in the profound
abyss of that abominable life that is so contrary to good health, as
illustrated by his benediction of the Zitelle, Palmio was qualitatively
responsible for the horrendous acts of Valcamonica (analytic responsibil-
ity). As such, Palmio had to take those sins as his own before the eyes of his
God (exhaustive and instantaneous transfer).
A certain arrangement of textual artifacts, then, presents the possibility
that Palmio found an instrumental use for Valcamonicas crimes. After he
confessed to his crimes in front of the Council of Ten, the scene was set for
Valcamonica to become the embodiment of the sacricial reversal. The
climax of that scene would unfold in Piazza San Marco in order to
contribute to the edication of the souls in attendance (alternate corre-
spondence). To guide Venetians to salvation, Palmio could display
Valcamonica in the act of sacricing himself for his sheep. Everyone
present in the Piazza that day, from Palmios point of view, would bear
witness to the commitment of the pastoral shepherd who accepted death
and self-sacrice when the occasion called for it.
Like a congregation assembled for Mass, the audience at the execution
would become a focus of Jesuit guidance. This guidance was primarily a
mode of governance capable of conducting wandering souls back into the
ock. To be more specic, Jesuit guidance and its function on the day of
the execution was psychagogical. Pace Foucault, the term psychagogy
refers to the transmission of a truth whose function is not to endow any
subject whomsoever with abilities, etcetera, but whose function is to
modify the mode of being of the subject. That is, if pedagogy seeks to
endow any subject whatever with aptitudes, capabilities, knowledges, and
so on, that he did not possess before and that he should possess at the end
of the pedagogical relationship, the psychagogical dimension of
Valcamonicas execution aimed at modifying the spatial location of the
stray souls from outside the fold back inside the fold (Foucault,
Hermeneutics 407). The execution of Valcamonica from the perspective
of pastoral power became an opportunity to exploit the paradox of the
shepherd, the goal of which was to present the priest as a psychagogical
object capable of enfolding the spectators within the embrace of the
Church.
This perspective helps to explain an aspect of the execution that did not
make sense within the logic of reason of state. While it is true that the state
had, at times, to display authority with the softo di stato, it is not clear
why, in the case of Valcamonica, that blow had to result in death. In the
folio of records where Valcamonica appeared three times before the
Council of Ten, there were numerous other names of criminals who
received sentences. One priest was banned for life from the lands of the
Republic for committing unspecied crimes within a monastery. Another
man was conducted between the two columns in Piazza San Marco, but
only his right hand was cut off.
In addition to these records, the scholar Gaetano Cozzi has discovered
that criminals indicted with crimes of blasphemy sometimes suffered the
amputation of their tongue or they were conducted onto a scaffold
between the two columns wearing an ignominious miter on their
head and bearing signs around their necks informing the public of the
crime that had led to such a punishment. In severe cases where criminals
lost their tongue, an eye, a hand, or received beatings from the public
gathered as spectators, those criminals would have to bear the expense of
any medicine used to treat their injuries (Cozzi, Religione 27). All of
these punishments were gruesome and extreme, all of them deployed
theatrical means of punishing the criminals, but none of them was as
gruesome or extreme as the punishment of Valcamonica that consisted
of a brutal, botched beheading and the burning of his dismembered
corpse. To stage the paradox of the pastoral shepherd in its most profound
dimension, however, Valcamonica had necessarily to sacrice his life spec-
tacularly. No other punishment was possible. Beneath the gazes of the
nobles seated in their boxes and up above the Venetians crowded into the
Piazza, Valcamonica ended his life as a shepherd willing to endure igno-
miny and sacrice himself on behalf of his ock, or at least to be sacriced
by the shepherd of shepherds.
Finally, the lens of pastoral power reveals a crucial difference between
the goal of Jesuit care and that of the reason of state. With the latter, the
softo di stato functions as a tool for preserving the inner tranquility of the
state understood as a geographical entity. It was a governmental instru-
ment, but the type of government it revealed was one concerned with
preserving political cohesion. Pastoral power revealed a more expansive
semantic domain of governance. It understood to govern to refer to
movement in space, material subsistence [ . . . ] the control one may
exercise over oneself and others, over someones body, soul, and
behavior. As Foucault has suggested, this wide array of meanings revealed

that, for pastoral power, one never governs a state, a territory, or a
political structure. Those whom one governs are people, individuals, or
groups (Foucault, Security 122).
Valcamonicas exchange with the audience gathered to watch him die
presented the specic type of intercourse that was crucial to the Jesuits and
to the mission of pastoral care more generally; namely, an interpersonal
process of exchange that constructed an economy of merit and fault
between the shepherd and the sheep. God may decide in the end the
value of those merits and faults, but as the militant arm of the Church in
the sixteenth century, the Jesuits inserted themselves as Gods chosen
interlocutors in charge of facilitating the subjectivation of all souls.
Viewed through the lens of pastoral power, the execution makes visible
that economy of merit and fault as well as the Jesuit mode of governance
in all its semantic permutations.
FROM PASTORAL POWER TO PASTORAL THEATRE

Perhaps now the theatrical dimension of Valcamonicas nal words will
spring off the page. Uttered upon the scaffold, and emanating from the
body of a man whose violent actions cast him as the protagonist in a
pastoral performance event, the nal words of Valcamonica reveal the
full psychagogical force of Jesuit dramaturgy. After recounting his life
and deeds prior to arriving in Venice, much in the way that one would
look back over his or her life during a general confession with a priest,
Valcamonica brought his audiences attention to the present moment:
I was placed as the governor [rector] at the Monastery of the Convertite,

in which I committed many errors and sins with a great city-wide
scandal, the city in which all of you were born, and it is in this respect,
because we are all subject to this fragility, that it is also the seeing and
knowing that major errors are being committed by others, like those that
I was making [ . . . ] well, it seems to me that my errors are very much
inferior to those [ . . . ] so I confess sincerely that in the three years while
I gave the sainted Eucharist that I administered it unworthily. It pleases
God that the intervention of these wise sirs makes me recognize my great
errors and leads me to this pass [ . . . ] however, my blessed public, I
exhort all of you to make this blessed confession sincerely, and purely so that
we can all reconcile ourselves with our master God, and to make this
confession frequently for the health of our souls; so, I believe in eternal
FROM PASTORAL POWER TO PASTORAL THEATRE 95
life, and in the resignation to death, and I stop hoping [insofar as] I now am
certain, and in this way I confess most honestly in order to rediscover the
true body and blood of Jesus Christ, so that this morning I make way for
salvation of my soul, and so I confess the truth, in order to partake in the
innity of Your Mercy, and in death I voluntarily bear my sins, forgive my
grave errors, and reveal Paradise to me. (Cicogna)
While difcult to navigate, the condemned priests disjunctive syllogism

uttered on the scaffold ultimately resolved into one masterful rhetorical
maneuver.
Valcamonica, after confessing his sins, suggested that the only thing
worse than his actions was the feigned ignorance of those same actions by
others in the community. His suggestion that members of society knew
but remained silent about the sexual misconduct behind the Convertites
walls turned the framework of the confession around to cast the audience
as the very sinners in need of confession, thus positioning Valcamonica in
the role of priest ready to hear and absolve their sins. After that reversal,
Valcamonica embodied the position of sinner and confessor, just as he,
within the complexities of pastoral power, embodied both shepherd and
sacricial lamb. By making confession and guiding his sheep to confession
at the same time, Valcamonica believed he could secure a place in heaven,
that Paradise to which he sought to send his soul.
This performance of pastoral power constitutes a specic type of pas-
toral theatre, one in which a priest must play the role of shepherd. The
allegorical splendor displayed in Tassos LAminta appears in this perfor-
mance, though distorted, within the spectacle of Valcamonicas execution.
The distortion occurs through a shifting in perspective created by the
Jesuit mission of pastoral care. In the pastoral theatre unfolding in
Piazza San Marco on 10 November 1561, Valcamonica plays a character
similar to Elpino, there to alert the gathered audience that only through
death can he (and they) nd the love of God. Unlike Tassos Elpino who,
having read the signs of the world, possesses this knowledge of Deaths
relation to Love, Valcamonica has to enact the leap of faith himself in
order to model the behavior that the audience should follow. He knows
what must be done to save his soul and the souls of his ock and he must
put that knowledge into practice by enacting the sacricial performance.
Through his actions, Valcamonica becomes the link between the realms of
the sacred and the profane. He is the limen, the threshold that leads from
the nite to the innite.
The notion of love within the Jesuit catechism consists of a split similar
to the Love operating in Tassos play. With the former, love is a state one
can obtain by moving from desolation to consolation; with the latter, Love
is the obverse of Death and can only be reached through an experience
with death. Jesuit love nds its best articulation in Ignatius Loyolas
Spiritual Exercises.8 In that work, Loyola denes consolation as an interior
movement aroused in the soul that appears only once the soul is inamed
with the love of God. He adds:
It is likewise consolation when one sheds tears that move to the love of God,
whether it be because of sorrow for sins, or because of the sufferings of
Christ our Lord, or for any other reason that is immediately directed to the
praise and service of God. Finally, I call consolation every increase of faith,
hope, and love, and all interior joy that invites and attracts to what is
heavenly and to the salvation of ones soul by lling it with peace and
quiet in Christ our Lord. (de Loyola 142)
Loyola denes desolation as a darkness of soul, turmoil of spirit, inclina-

tion to what is low and earthly, restlessness rising from many disturbances
and temptations which lead to want of faith, want of hope, want of love.
The presence of desolation signies that [t]he soul is wholly slothful,
tepid, sad, and separated, as it were, from its Creator and Lord (143).
Consolation is an invitation and attraction into Christ, whereas desola-
tion is a state of separation that leaves the soul outside of Christs love.
Desolation may not appear at rst to t as part of Christs love. Yet, under
the heading of Reasons why we suffer desolation, Loyola explains that
desolation exists because:
God wishes to give us a true knowledge and understanding of ourselves, so

that we may have an intimate perception of the fact that it is not within our
power to acquire and attain great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other
spiritual consolation; but that all this is the gift and grace of God our Lord.
(144)
With this insight, desolation becomes a necessary tool for nding ones
way into the fold. It is akin to the Lowest Pitch in the LAminta that
portends exactly the reverse, the highest high. Desolation should raise
ones awareness of the fact that one requires a guide, and that guide is the
shepherd.
FROM PASTORAL POWER TO PASTORAL THEATRE 97
Once on the scaffold, Valcamonica repents and admits that desolation

has led him astray: I confess sincerely that in the three years while I gave
the sainted Eucharist, that I administered it unworthily. It pleases God
that the intervention of these wise sirs makes me recognize my great errors
and leads me to this pass [ . . . ]. This act of repentance propels the priests
soul out of desolation and toward the consolation of God, which he will
obtain fully once he encounters death. The body of Valcamonica in this
situation becomes the screen on which the spectators in the Piazza can
read their own interior states. Like the landscape in Tassos play,
Valcamonica enters into a hermeneutic relationship with all who view
him. As the priest inferred in his nal speech, everyone present in the
Piazza had sinned in some way. Each person could acknowledge that fact
by seeing Valcamonica as an external expression of his or her own sins, and
then take a cue from Valcamonica as to how he or she might nd absolu-
tion. The priests nal words were intended to help the viewers of the
spectacle to know themselves more fully and to step onto the path to God.
Valcamonica became the locus of convergence in which the sacred met
the profane. His crimes against the young maidens of the Convertite may
have been evil, but through the act of self-sacrice the evil became a
generative space in which the character of the good shepherd could appear
and lead the stray sheep back into the fold. By recognizing the Jesuits as
the dramaturgs or poets who composed this entire scene, the execution
begins to appear as a psychagogical demonstration of how the lowliest of
sinners might pass through the world of the profane into the realm of the
sacred. Valcamonica would make the transition rst by atoning for his sins
and relinquishing his life for the edication of the spectators. After him,
however, each spectator, if he or she had been able to read the priests
body and take the appropriate cues, could take Valcamonicas place. By
doing that, each individual could transition from the torpor of desolation
into the stimulating embrace of Gods consolation.
This entire performance becomes a distorted partner of the type of
pastoral theatre epitomized in LAminta. From the perspective of the
Jesuits, Tassos play would have offered a false representation of the
world, false because of its reliance on pagan deities. As a corrective, the
execution served to assert a monotheistic order in lieu of the pantheon of
gods inherited from classical mythology. To do this, however, the execu-
tion had to draw upon an allegorical dramaturgy very similar to that which
operated in LAminta and through which the nite and profane world of
sin and death became afxed to the sacred world of innite life and the
love of God. The communicating doorway that linked the two worlds was
the shepherd, Valcamonica, who, like Elpino, was positioned as the guide
to the spiritual dimension of the terrestrial realm. Unlike Elpino, however,
who merely possessed the knowledge of Deaths relation to Love,
Valcamonica had to demonstrate his knowledge in order to call forth the
spectators to repeat the action, to repent for their sins, and to step onto
the pathway connecting this world to the next.
JESUIT BAROQUE ALLEGORICAL DRAMATURGY

Under the guidance of Benedetto Palmio, the Jesuits appear as the dra-
maturgs of Valcamonicas execution, where the term dramaturg refers
to an agent capable of organizing an event and guiding all spectators
present toward a specic Truth that the event itself evoked, named, and
legitimized.9 In this context, the Jesuits attempted to congure
Valcamonica within the allegory of Christs sacrice. Though different
from Christ on the individual level, when placed within the allegorical
frame of sin and redemption, Valcamonica transformed from wicked
sinner into a portal of sorts, through which the multitude of sinners in
the audience could nd a path to Heaven. Through the act of execution/
sacrice, Valcamonicas death opened a space for each spectator to occupy.
Whoever occupied that space would enter the fold of the Church, gain
visibility within Gods line of sight and have access to the sacred. While
obviously aligned with the Augustinian tradition that preceded them and
dominated the theological, scholastic, and pedagogical landscapes of
Medieval Europe, as well as the LaSallean tradition that would appear in
the eighteenth century, the Jesuits distinguished themselves from other
Christian orders through their capacity to organize mass spectacles such as
this.
In their role as arrangers, composers, and facilitators of an allegorical
event, the Venetian Jesuits played a role quite similar to that of comfortieri
(comforters) who guided condemned criminals through their nal hours
on earth. As groups of lay ministers comprised of noble men of good
standing in society, these comforters followed a specic script to ensure
that the performance of public execution did not digress into mere enter-
tainment. As Nicholas Terpstra writes:
The comforters were well aware of the theatrical dimension of execu-

tions generally and of their work in particular. But they saw drama in
JESUIT BAROQUE ALLEGORICAL DRAMATURGY 99
two dimensionsboth the drama of the execution as public event, and

also their own work with the prisoners as a scene in the eternal drama
of salvation. [ . . . ] Their counseling aimed to help prisoners imagine
themselves in the role of martyred saints or of biblical characters like
John the Baptist, a dramatic parallel highlighted when passion plays
were staged on the same piazzas used for executions. (Terpstra,
Other Side 56)
In the absence of consistent rst-person accounts of executions such as

that which unfolded in Piazza San Marco on November 10, 1561, the
manuals directing these comforters provide an alternative ground-level
perspective, as it were.
Scholars have renewed attention to these manuals, most recently by
providing a new translation of both books belonging to The Comforters
Manual used by Bolognas comfortieri, known collectively as the
Company of Death. Whereas Book 1, attributed to an Observant
Augustinian, Cristoforo da Bologna, contained the theological grounding
of the comforters charge, Book 2 relays a practical account of the com-
forters mission and, though deriving from an anonymous source, seems
to come from extensive rst-hand experience (Terpstra, Editorial Notes
185186). Though the 62 chapters depict an arduous journey from prison
cell to chopping block, the overall image presented by the books authors
remains optimistic:
Everything rests in the prisoners own decision to accept his execution

calmly. By doing this and by forgiving all those who have a hand in securing
his death (his enemies or victims, the police and guards, the judge, the
executioner) the prisoner can change his very identity. No longer a criminal,
he is transformed into a martyr. And like the Good Thief crucied beside
Jesus on Calvary, he can anticipate that in the instant after the axe falls or the
rope tightens, he will be with Christ in paradise. (186)
The comforter, then, exists as a medium capable of facilitating the

transition from sinner to martyr. Repentance drives the transformation,
and that action must come from the condemned; the comforter, how-
ever, has the difcult task of keeping the condemned focused on the
primary aim of the event. Without an honest confession, the transfor-
mation to martyr will falter and the everlasting life promised by the
scripture will transpire in hell as opposed to the heavenly abode of
Christ himself.
Any attempt to graft Valcamonicas unique position onto the scenarios

outlined in the Bolognese Comforters Manual would fail, since his para-
doxical position as criminal and confessor falls outside the imagined situa-
tions outlined in the manuals two books. At the same time, Valcamonicas
deviations from the Bolognese scenarios do in fact shed light on the
pastoral maneuvering that I have proposed in this chapter so far. In
Chapter 12 of Book 1, for example, Which deals with the ways and the
conditions of confession, the author avers that a complete confession
requires ve steps. First, it must be complete; nothing can be left out.
Second, the condemned must feel ashamed. Third, the confession should
be made with sorrow, contrition, and repentance of all your sins. Fourth,
the penitent must not excuse your sins yourself. Instead you must
denounce them and show them, and not only your sins, but even sinful
circumstance. Fifth, the confession should be yours and not anothers.
That is, you must confess your sins and not someone elses, and this David
teaches us when he says, I readied myself to confess all my sins to God
[cf. Ps. 32:5]. Take note that he did not say the sins of my neighbor, but
rather my sins (Bolognese Comforters 207209). While Valcamonica
seems to follow the second and third prescriptions, he stops short of
confessing the details of all of his sins. Moreover, his grand rhetorical
maneuver of acknowledging and then pardoning the sins of his spectators
and his accusers constitutes a breech of the fourth and fth steps. Either
Valcamonica has failed to come clean, even at his nal moment, or his split
identity as criminal and priest provided him with a kind of dispensation.
Presented to the Venetian crowd as the shepherd willing to sacrice
himself for all and each of his sheep, Valcamonica may have had a different
script to follow then that outlined by the Bolognese Company of Death.
This thought leads to the intriguing possibility that the Venetian
branch of the Company of Jesus understood Valcamonicas execution in
a different way than the Bolognese Company of Death understood their
scaffold scenes. Given the ability of the Jesuits to motivate the Venetian
governors to pass sentence on Valcamonica, their desire to lead all present
in the Piazza onto the Pathway to God, and their belief in the power of
confession, I argue that Jesuit dramaturgy did indeed fulll the role of
comforter. Their primary charge, however, was not Valcamonica himself
but, rather, the hearts and minds of all present in the piazza. The lay
ministers of the Bolognese Company devoted themselves to the easing of
the condemned, but the Jesuits focused instead on the guidance of the
entire ock.
The dramaturgy at work, then, was one of carving out a viewpoint from
which the spectators could begin to see the path to God. The Bolognese
Manual provides an asymmetrical model for understanding the situation
and I turn to it once again in order to understand this particular idea. In
Book 2, Chapter 27, The manner you must have when he who has to die
kneels down, the anonymous author paints a picture of the comforter
upon the scaffold: When you are at the block and he who has to die
kneels down to put his head on it, you kneel down as well, using your right
knee and keeping the tavoletta in such a way that he always has his eye on
it, that is, so he always sees it (274). And then again, a few lines later:
make sure that you never move the tavoletta under his face until the
mallet is close to the chopping block. And make sure that you pull the
tablet away at the same time as the blow, so that he who has to die does
not notice (275). There, on the scaffold, the comforter holds a painted
scene of Christ upon the cross directly in front of the gaze of the con-
demned. Indeed, this picture, the tavoletta, a kind of inspirational image
into which the man about to die can transport himself as he prepares to
transform from sinner to martyr, provides not just an on-the-ground
perspective of execution scenes from the fteenth and sixteenth centuries
but also a rmer understanding of the Jesuit dramaturgical act.
Kathleen Falvey explains that, For the one being comforted, the
tavoletta became at once an object of intense devotional concentration
and a kind of ritually reecting mirror in which he was urged to see himself
strengthened, consoled, and ultimately transformed (Falvey 19). The
visual eld of the tavoletta constituted a parallel plain of existence that
accompanied the earthly realm but remained distinct from it, acting as a
promise to the man about to die that his nal destination will bring him
peace. Situating these scenes of death within their historical moment,
Falvey also demonstrates that the scene of death itself functioned as an
extension to or perhaps an analogue of the popular passion plays of late
fteenth-century towns such as Bologna and Ferrara. In this scene, how-
ever, the condemned played the role of Christ and the comforter, again
acting as medium, worked to guarantee the authenticity of the con-
demned mans performance through his many acts of support, such as
holding the tavoletta before the mans face.10
In Piazza San Marco, however, the Jesuits were not on hand to position
the tavoletta in front of Valcamonica. Instead, they transformed
Valcamonica into a tavoletta and placed the scene of his sacrice in front
of the eyes of the spectators who had come to watch him die. From the
actions taken immediately by Benedetto Palmio after hearing about the

misdeeds in the Convertite to the consecration of other houses like the
Zitelle, from the conversations with Venetian legislators capable of hand-
ing down a death sentence to the moment when Valcamonicas beheaded
corpse was reduced to ash, the Jesuits, as organizers of the event and
arrangers of the look, constructed an elaborate allegorical dramaturgy that
would have lasting impact on the souls of Venetians.
How is the execution infused by an allegorical dramaturgy as opposed
to, say, a symbolic dramaturgy? In Walter Benjamins treatise on the
Trauerspiel (Mourning Play), he describes allegory as the speculative side
of the symbol, adopted so as to provide the dark background against
which the bright world of the symbol might stand out (Benjamin, Tragic
Drama 161). The symbol, he claims, nds its perfect application in the
work and thought of the German Romantics who understand it as a static
construct through which the beautiful is supposed to merge with the
divine in an unbroken whole (160). The baroque allegory, by distinction,
has a truth-content as well as a formal or aesthetic semblance, each of
which has a subtle dialectical complexity that the Romantics evacuated in
order to make room for the image of the Whole.
Benjamins analysis of the truth-content to the baroque allegory paves
the way back to the present discussion of Jesuit dramaturgy. Within the
truth-content:
[a]ny person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.
Within this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane
world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great
importance. But it will be unmistakably apparent [ . . . ] that all of the things
which are used to signify derive, from their very fact of pointing to some-
thing else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable
with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane, and which can,
indeed, sanctify them. Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane
world is both elevated and devalued. (175)
First of all, this denition allows for the possibility that Valcamonicas
death can mean absolutely anything else, that is, it could indeed be the
act that reveals the path to consolation. Second, in that scenario,
Valcamonica stands in for the intricacies of the life-practice required to
transition from desolation to consolation. As allegorical object,
Valcamonica becomes the crystallized distillation of the process of
repentance. By standing in as the exemplary penitent, Valcamonica is no

longer commensurable with profane things; that is, he begins the meta-
morphosis, the transition from earth to heaven. The execution sancties
him, but this act does not erase his bad deeds; rather, it points out the
disparity between sacred and profane. That a priest could become so
desolate reveals that no one is safe from sin, but, by extension, no sin is
so great that a person cannot turn around his or her life. The truth-content
of the allegory encapsulated both the processes required on the part of the
profane and desolate individual to become holy and attain consolation as
well as the promise of redemption and forgiveness offered to those who
successfully make the transition. The dramaturgical structure of the execu-
tion presents Valcamonica, the shepherd, as the embodiment of that truth.
The formal or aesthetic correlate to the dialectic of the allegorical truth-
content is the dialectic of convention and expression. As Benjamin
explains, The allegory of the seventeenth century is not convention of
expression, but expression of convention. At the same time, expression of
authority, which is secret in accordance with the dignity of its origin, but
public in accordance with the extent of its validity (175). Shifting ones
gaze back to Piazza San Marco, the authority of which Benjamin speaks is
that of the Jesuits who stand in for Christ on earth. This is the meaning of
their name, The Society of Jesus. They do not usurp Christs power, but,
like Valcamonica once positioned upon the scaffold, they work to embody
it. They speak on Christs behalf and they carry his cross. This was in fact
the vision that came to Ignatius Loyola when, in 1537, Christ appeared to
him while he was on his way to Rome. Loyolas interpretation of the vision
was that Christ wanted Ignatius to carry the cross for him; that is, to do
Gods service on earth. Thus, the Jesuits were the servants enacting the
wishes of Christ.
Jesuit authority was secret insofar as the Society concealed the true
authority of Christ. Here there is a trace of pantheism and the mythical
allegories of classical Greece. In those myths, no one person could see
Zeuss power in all its glory; that person would be obliterated. Thus, Zeus
appeared in myths in the form of swans, stags, and other gures. This
tradition continued in Judaism when God appeared in objects like the
burning bush, and then Christianity subsumed this very tradition into is
own history. The few people to whom God exposed himself directly, one
of whom was Ignatius Loyola, became a conduit capable of transmitting
Gods messages to others. Via the instructions of Ignatius Loyola, the
Jesuits comported themselves as Christs emissaries on earth. They were
the proprietors of Christs secret dignity, which remained concealed in

heaven. At the same time, however, this secret that the Jesuits kept was
entirely public. It was out there for all to see. It was a secret that was
necessarily visible: this is the formal antinomy of the allegory. Instead of
the Venetian crowd gaining a straight line of sight into Gods grace, they
receive proof of its secret authority in the full visibility of Valcamonica,
rendered through a highly theatrical performance for which Palmio acted
as dramaturg.
Baroque allegory harnesses the kinetic momentum of an events unfold-
ing in time while also crystallizing the entire lineage of, in this case,
sacrices modeled on that of Christs martyrdom into one ashpoint:
The mythical instant [Nu] becomes the now [Jetzt] of contemporary

actuality; the symbolic becomes distorted into the allegorical. The eternal
is separated from the events of the story of salvation, and what is left is a
living image open to all kinds of revision by the interpretative artist.
(183)
The mythic instant, Nu, is that innite instant during which Christ died on
the cross. In the execution, the Nu became the Jetzt of Valcamonicas
sacrice. Valcamonica transformed from an isolated symbol of the shep-
herd into an allegory of all of Gods shepherds who had ever made a
signicant sacrice. He transformed from a static object into an event.
From the Deleuzian perspective, Valcamonicas status as allegorical object
broke free of its temporal (and symbolic) mold to become a temporal
modulation that implie[d] as much the beginnings of a continuous varia-
tion of matter as a continuous development of form (Deleuze, The Fold
19).
This temporal modulation was a dramatic metamorphosis, the function
of which was to create a unifying point of view for all the spectators in the
piazza to inhabit. A point of view in this instance, to quote Deleuze, is
not what varies with the subject [ . . . ] it is, to the contrary, the condition
in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or:
something = x (anamorphosis) (20). For the Jesuits, all Venetians gath-
ered to watch the execution were eventual subjects within the Kingdom
of God. The metamorphosis unfolding in front of those spectators eyes
was the transition of Valcamonica-as-criminal into the shepherd as envi-
sioned within the schema of pastoral power and staged within the frame-
work of this particular (and peculiar) form of pastoral theatre. Once
THE CASE OF VALCAMONICA 105
converted, the shepherd became the threshold linking the domains of the
profane and the sacred.
Within the composition of the allegory as a whole, Valcamonica was the
x that marked the spot of Gods presence on earth, as in Deleuzes
baroque formula something = x (anamorphosis). This formula inserts an
important distinction in the perception of the event from the ground level
in the piazza. Though the spectators were numerous, the allegorical frame
of the event did not allow each spectator to perceive Valcamonica from his
or her own perspective. The metamorphosis of Valcamonica [was] not a
variation of the truth according to the subject, but the condition in which
the truth of a variation appear[ed] to the subject (20). In other words,
through the act of execution/sacrice, Valcamonicas death opened a
space for each spectator to occupy. Whoever occupied that space would
enter the fold of the Church, gain visibility within Gods line of sight and
have access to the sacred.
Thus, the execution does not rely on symbolic representation to per-
suade the multitude to return to the ock. Rather, the execution for-
warded the living image of Valcamonica (Christ-like, but revised by the
Jesuits who were the interpretive artists) as a portal or threshold through
which the multitude must pass if they desired to move from the profane to
the sacred. The fundamental difference between a symbolic and an alle-
gorical dramaturgy is the movement inherent in the object around and
through which the allegory is constructed. The symbol points to move-
ment whereas the allegory is movement itself crystallized into a dialectical
image. In terms of this execution, the movement appears on two levels. It
appears on a formal level in the body of Valcamonica who, upon the
scaffold, becomes penitent and transforms his subjectivity from that of a
sinner to that of a puried member of Gods ock. On the level of truth-
content, the spectators perceiving this transformation of Valcamonicas
subjectivity perceive a path that, should they follow it, will lead to their
own conversion. After Valcamonicas body is converted to ash, the space
left behind, the x, awaits the next individual to inhabit it.
THE CASE OF VALCAMONICA

What Martin and Romano say of Venice, that its identity is multiple, that its
shape transmogries depending on which viewing position one occupies,
also holds true for the story of Valcamonica. Though the materiality of the
event seems to have disintegrated over time, leaving only textual traces
tucked away within old catalogues and indices, a certain arrangement of

those traces reveals at least two perspectives of the execution. From one
angle, Valcamonicas death appears as a masterstroke of government,
deployed so as to maintain inner tranquility within the Republic. From
another angle, the same execution unfolds as an act of salvation, an act
wrapped within an elaborate spectacle organized for the health of Venetian
souls. Though each perspective provides a distinct view of the event, each
one concerns itself with governance, understood as movement in space,
material subsistence [ . . . ] the control one may exercise over oneself and
others, over someones body, soul, and behavior (Foucault, Security 122).
Pastoral power especially sought to move the body, soul, and behavior of its
subjects, and the Jesuit brand of pastoral power, visible through their
involvement in the case of Valcamonica, motivates an active rethinking of
the term pastoral as it appears within the constellation of theatre studies.
Pastoral theatres traditional hallmarks remain intact in this case, but the
terrestrial aims of the Jesuit shepherd move the pastoral genre from its
poetic and literary milieu into the streets where it wages a highly disciplined
and yet excessively spectacular battle for the health of all souls.
NOTES
1. Cicogna Codex 3239, Biblioteca di Museo Civico Correr [The Library of the
Correr Civic Museum], Venezia, n.p. Emmanuele Antonio Cicogna (1789
1868) was a bibliophile and scholar whose extensive collection of docu-
ments now belongs to the Library of the Correr Civic Museum. As recently
as the 1990s, scholars have cited this document as Cicogna 2082, but the
newer numbering system identies it as 3239.
2. See also Giuseppe Tassini, Curiosit veneziana. Venezia: Scarabellin, 1933.
3. For the link between the window seats of the library and the box seats of
the Tron and Michiel theatres in Venice, see Eugene J. Johnson, The
Short, Lascivious Lives of Two Venetian Theatres, 15801585,
Renaissance Quarterly vol. 55, no. 3 (Autumn, 2002): 946. [T]he
utterly new boxes of the Michiel and Tron theatres, he writes, provided
elevated, separated spaces for the patricians to watch performances and in
turn to be watched. Both built on an old Venetian tradition of using
windows as private viewing platforms for the public spectacles. For more
on the theatricality of Piazza San Marco, see Egle Renata Trincanato,
Rappresentativit e funzionalit di Piazza San Marco Piazza San
Marco: larchitettura, la storia, le funzioni, a cura di Giuseppe Samon
(Umberto Franzoni, Padova [Padua] 1970) 87.
NOTES 107
4. Nel dicembre del 60 alcune convertite lasciavano il convento e una di esse

svelava di essere stata qualche volta toccata e baciata da [un certo sacerdote]
Giampietro. Palmio interess varie personalit a uninchiesta: Agostino
Barbarigo, Tommaso e Giustiniano Contarini.
5. Archivio di stato, Venzia, Consiglio dei Dieci, parti criminali, lza 14
(15611564): [ . . . ] capellono et confessor delle convertide dalla Zudeca
ritenuto.
6. Ibid: [ . . . ] questo pad. Zuan Piero da [ . . . ] sia connato per tutto il tempo
della sua vita in la prigion [ . . . ] et gli sia fra le due colone di S. Marco
tagliata la testa si dal muora.
7. Ibid: da matina prossimo sia al sop.to pre [prete] Zuanpiero tagliata la testa
via dal bugio fra le due Colone de S. Marco si del muora et se doppo il corpo
suo sia abrugiato [ . . . ] ed si converti in cenera.
8. The Spiritual Exercises, the document, and the exercises that it dictates to
individuals desiring to strengthen or renew their allegiance to Christ, are
extremely important objects of study in terms of Jesuit history. I look at the
document and the exercises in more detail in Chapter 6.
9. This denition of dramaturgy draws inspiration from Maaike Bleeker, who
writes about the possibility [of thinking] of dramaturgy in terms of the
organization of an event. [ . . . ] These events can be organized in such a way
as to guide or direct the attention of the audience in a very specic direction
and towards a very specic meaning, while at other moments the audience
can be left free to wander around. Admittedly, however, the specic
historical situation in which the Jesuits appear has little to do with the
twenty-rst-century context in which Bleeker is writing. Maaike Bleeker,
Dramaturgy as a Mode of Looking, Women and Performance: A Journal
of Feminist Theory vol. 13 (2003): 165.
10. Falvey 15: During the comforting ritual, the prisoner was urged to con-
form his humiliation and suffering to that of Christ and to comport himself
with love and dignity as Christ himself didto perform, so to speak, in an
all-too-realistic Passion play. See also, Massimo Ferretti, In Your Face:
Paintings for the Condemned in Renaissance Italy, The Art of Executing
Well, ed. Nicholas Terpstra (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press:
2008) 7997.
PART II
Discipline and Excess
CERTAIN GARDENS ARE DESCRIBED

AS RETREATS WHEN THEY ARE REALLY
ATTACKS.1
Ian Hamilton Finlay, Unconnected

Sentences on Gardening
NOTE
1. By courtesy of the Estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay.
CHAPTER 5
Ruzzante Takes Place
Sociologist John Laws formulations on the baroque imagination help to

unfold another dimension of Angelo Beolcos theatre practice. His treat-
ment of the Leibnizian garden topology, mentioned in Chapters 2 and 3,
also aids in this books endeavor to cultivate an immanent critique of
Beolcos life-work and performance-work as Ruzzante. Law has suggested
that Leibnizs map, his scheme of gardens within gardens, reveals an
imagination that discovers complexity in detail or (better) in specicity,
rather than in the emergence of higher level order. [ . . . ] It is an imagina-
tion that looks down rather than up (Law 19). In a similar vein,
Deleuzes work on Leibniz has shown how this operation of looking
down helped Leibniz to discover the inner complexity of the soul, the
monad, that metaphysical point of view from which the confusion of the
world became ordered in harmony (Deleuze, The Fold 2325). It is Laws
connection between baroque thinking and looking down that I stress
here in order to interrogate the earth under Beolcos feet. At stake here is
the deployment of a baroque methodology in order to consider Beolcos
theatre practice as a radical scenography and as a rooting (from the Italian
verb radicare) and uprooting that constituted an act of taking place.
As a working actor, Beolco belonged to the Compagnie della Calza
(literally, Companies of the Sock) in Venice, the forerunners to profes-
sional theatre artists.1 Within the worlds of his plays, monologues, dialo-
gues, and skits he appeared as an ofcial spokesperson for the Paduan
lower classes, as a religious reformer, as a soldier conscripted into the

112 5 RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE
Venetian army, and as a swindler.2 Outside of his theatrical portrayals,

Beolco worked additional jobs, such as that of completing land transac-
tions on behalf of his patron, Alvise Cornaro (14841566), and signing
legal paperwork when Cornaro was unavailable (Carroll, Angelo Beolco 16;
Menegazzo and Sambin 229385).3 Each of these jobs could function as
the entry point into the ground from which Beolcos political theatre
practice sprang, but there is one kind of work that overshadows the rest,
one that helps scholars in the present to look down toward the full
complexity of this historical gure. I am thinking of Beolcos labor as a
skillful gardener.
From the early stages of his career in Venice, all the way to his nal
performance in Padua, Ruzzantes theatrical works drew upon the labor of
the (literal, metaphorical, metonymical) gardener and the materiality of
gardens to construct vivid images of lifes hardships. In his very last
monologue, Lettera allAlvarotto (Letter to Alvarotto, 1536), he
recounted an almost mystical visionary experience in which he saw an
earthly paradise inhabited by the gures Goodness, Charity, Peace, and
Friendship. Ruzzante remarked that one kind of Love (i.e. Lust) was
absent. In a garden of earthly delights such as the one in his vision, Love
like that alone would do more damage to lives than seven goats in a
garden (Ruzante, Teatro 1238). Even when the subject matter dealt with
real life and not phantasmatic visions, the garden appeared in his works as a
perfected state of being toward which to strive. In the Seconda Oratione
(Second Oration, 1528), for example, after recounting hardships wrought
by unjust religious laws, Ruzzante ended his address by commenting that
this world has become like an untended garden. Look around and see if
you see any lovers. I can tell you that hunger has fucked love up the ass.
Nobody dares to love anymore, since no one can handle the cost (1210).
In another instance, and speaking in a more nuanced tone, Ruzzante
offered this thought in a short Eclogue: Because Im telling you, this
world is like a vine, and what is natural is the stake: while the stake stands,
the vine gives fruit; when the stake doesnt hold, the vine falls on its ass on
the ground (Ruzante, La Moschetta 17).
What kind of gardener was he exactly, and what is the benet of
mapping his garden references and botanical labor? How precisely does
Beolcos profession as gardener shed light on his theatre practice? And was
he really a gardener (hands in dirt, growing plants and vegetables and so
on), or was he more of an aesthetic gardener, a scenic gardener, or one
who tended to metaphorical gardens? To answer these questions, I draw in
RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE 113
this chapter on the materiality of gardens and the philosophical practice of

garden thinking that I began in the preceding section. For example, when
gardens appeared in the emblems and banners worn and carried by the
compagni Ortolani (company of Gardeners) to which he belonged,
Ruzzante and his fellow actors seem to have mined the garden for its
metaphorical meanings in order to attract attention to the bawdy humor
preferred by their troupe. Garden, in this sense, acquired an almost
pornographic sense of fecundity. At other times, however, gardens and the
act of gardening functioned metonymically within the world of his plays to
address, albeit obliquely, contested social issues; that is, the world
appeared to Ruzzante as an unweeded garden. In short, Beolco saw his
function as world-gardener. He unweeded, ploughed, and tended to the
actual garden of his native Padua, but he also unweeded (i.e. sought to
change through protest), ploughed (i.e. fornicated and insinuated his
way inside fertile feminine territory), and tended (i.e. kept up the poetic
ideals of his beloved Padua) to the garden (i.e. the world in which
Ruzzante found himself in the rst half of the sixteenth century).
Analyzing Beolcos work as gardener, the multiple valences of his bawdy
aesthetic, and the metonymic deployment of gardens within his perfor-
mances leads not only to a more detailed understanding of the type of
gardener Beolco wanted to be but also helps audiences in the present to
understand the tactical blurring between onstage and offstage realities that
was so integral to Beolcos work as Ruzzante.
To investigate the formal and social qualities of Beolcos scenic garden-
ing through Laws practice of looking down, I take three steps. First, I
locate the gure of Beolco and his aesthetic persona Ruzzante by way of
the very ground on which he stood. Prior to the rst permanent theatre
buildings in and around Venice, Beolcos theatre practice relied on that
ground as the instigator of theatres dual nature. That is, in addition to
existing as a compilation of gestures and words that combined to create a
performance for an audience, theatrical actions rst necessitated the pro-
duction of the very space upon and in which those actions could take
place. He performed in piazze, private homes, loggias, and gardens, but he
also produced unique theatrical spaces to t and respond to those sites.
Early in his career, Beolco performed within private gardens belonging to
wealthy Venetian citizens. Citing the diaries of Marin Sanuto, Antonella
Pietrogrande shows that Beolcos theatre took place in the gardens of
Giudecca around February 7, 1526, and prior to that on February 7 and
13, 1515. These gardens were frequently used as settings for theatrical
performances and were sizable enough to appear on the remarkable map of

Venice created by Jacopo de Barbari in 1500 (Pietrogrande 7172). Matteo
and Virgilio Vercelloni supplement this picture of Beolcos playing space
with the detail that, These gardens were arranged according to principle
the interrelation of their constituent elementson the model of the hortus
conclusus (Vercelloni 4243). Stemming from the medieval monastic hor-
ticultural tradition, a hortus conclusus was marked by enclosure, both sym-
bolic/sacred and actual: the garden itself was walled off from the exterior of
the monastery, then the garden was subdivided into multiple sections and
beds. The hortus conclusus exists as microcosm, a world within the world, a
garden within a garden.4 Beolcos theatrical life as Ruzzante sprouted within
and upon those garden grounds and also within the private rooms of palaces
that doubled, metaphorically, as walled-off secret gardens ensconced within
the residences of the wealthy and the powerful. In this chapter in particular, I
attend to the conuence of garden space and private dwelling operating as
the generative ground for Beolcos Lettera Giocosa (15211522), Prima
Oratione, and Seconda Oratione, as well as to the way Beolcos theatre
practice functioned as a territorial attack, a method of taking place.
In the second step, the analysis of looking down leads me to consider the
connections between Beolcos theatrical practice of taking place and the acts
of territorial domination performed by the Venetian Republic on the cities
in the Veneto, specically Padua. The irreversible damage to Beolcos home
town caused by Venetian rule caused a repetitious refrain that oscillated
throughout his stage performances, and that, in turn, spoke up in defense of
the peasants who made their living from tending to the natural environ-
ment. Finally, in the third step: looking down to the ground beneath
Beolcos feet and the historical conditions subtending his theatre practice
leads me to assert a non-coherent view of Beolcos life as Ruzzante. This
step functions as a type of self-reexive, historiographical awareness
intended to keep Beolco from becoming a useful point of origin through
which all of baroque Venetian theatre becomes intelligible as, for example, a
play between various ows of power and the counter-insurgencies that dam
up those ows. As John Law suggests, the non-coherence of the local and
specic site of analysis made visible by the baroque act of looking down
never becomes completely clear:
The implication is that there is no possibility whatsoever of an emergent

overview, and this is not simply because it is neither possible nor necessary to
RUZZANTE TAKES PLACE 115
make what is known fully explicitthough this is the case. In addition, it is

because there is no nal coherence. There is no system, global order, or
network. These are, at best, partially enacted romantic aspirations. Instead
[with the baroque] there are local complexities and local globalities, and the
relations between them are uncertain. (2324)
Each of Beolcos performances of taking place constituted a local

complexity: a multilayered response to specic socio-political cong-
urations in Padua and Venice. Each also constituted a local globality:
a fragment of a political theatre practice that appeared in other
theatrical forms during the same time. Much will become clear
about Beolcos baroque theatre in this chapter and much will remain
unclear.
From Beolco to Leibniz to Law and back again, one fundamental
principle remains to be articulated: Beolcos performance-cum-gar-
dening practice coincided with the production of alternative view-
points carved out by theatrical language and gestures within
territories owned by wealthy and powerful Venetian nobles, and, in
that light, his acts of taking place contributed to a more expansive
baroque scenography unfolding in the Veneto in the sixteenth cen-
tury. Ultimately, Ruzzantes scenography prepared two scenes. One
was created for the benet of his audiences that worked to make
visible the world of the peasants rendered invisible by those audience
members who had the power but not the inclination to alleviate the
suffering of the lower classes. Palatial estates and tall villa walls
functioned as blinders, in this regard, to block out the struggles of
the everyday. The second scene, by distinction, creates a point of
view that opens in the present. By detaching Beolco from his function
in the discipline of theatre studies as an innovator for the eighteenth-
century commedia dellarte practices of other Venetians such as Carlo
Goldoni or Carlo Gozzi, and, instead, by constructing around his
theatre practice another historical system, one built on the art of
planting gardens and taking place, the historiographic tactic of look-
ing down illuminates a baroque politic lodged within an early six-
teenth-century theatrical practice. Charting Beolcos mobile,
deconstructable, and ultimately impermanent theatrical scenes, tuning
into the faint echoes of his Paduan voice, and rendering the sche-
matics of his atypical scenography will help to ground the journey
through this turbulent historical terrain.
PRELUDE: BAROQUE SCENOGRAPHY AND BEOLCOS

SCENOGARDENING
Theatre scholars trace the boom of Italian baroque scenographic practices
back to the eighteenth century with the appearance of Ferdinando Galli-
Bibienas section on theatrical scenery in Larchitettura civile (Civil
Architecture, Parma, 1711). In this work, Bibiena outlined the building
principles behind the scene teatrali vedute per angolo: scenes viewed at a
forty-ve degree angle rather than the traditional stage picture, con-
ceived as an extension of the axis of the theatre and as running to a central
vanishing point (Ogden 43). Others point to the scenographic practices
to Giacomo Torelli and his development of moving scenery, which
allowed for multiple scenes to appear in one theatrical representation
(Bjurstrm). In both cases, the baroque element of the stage designs
appears within a surface effect produced by scenery attached to a stage
inside a permanent theatre building. Thus, according to these studies, that
which makes scenography baroque is a visual quality linked to traits
identied in other artistic disciplines. Bibienas 45-degree angle within
the scena per angolo calls to mind the introduction of oblique perspective
in Tintorettos paintings. The movement of Torellis scenery evokes the
movement within Michelangelos sculptures.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, I believe this disciplinary overlap confuses
matters more than it helps, since the specicity of each artistic medium
treated in these studies blurs into one set of formalistic traits, a move
which, moreover, allows the temporal reach of the baroque to bracket a
long duration from the early seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth
century. Moving away from traditional studies of baroque scenography, I
argue that Beolco/Ruzzantes theatrical practice of taking place (of plant-
ing gardens within private territory, of holding audiences hostage instead
of merely entertaining them) gures prominently within the social terrain
of baroque scenography and aesthetics. Reading the warps and wefts of
this social terrain requires a shift in the historical gaze away from theatrical
representations conducted in permanent theatre buildings post-1580 and
toward the performances within temporary sites, erected for certain times
of the year in the sixteenth century (if not before), for which there tends to
be less historical documentation. The current discussion of baroque sce-
nography, then, attempts to identify a link between theatrical performance
and the production of space. I am not concerned with the visual tricks of
two-dimensional perspective or specialized machinery that scenic
PRELUDE: BAROQUE SCENOGRAPHY AND BEOLCOS SCENOGARDENING 117
technicians used to create the appearance of depth on stage; rather, I want

to known how Beolcos theatre practice created points of view, windows
that opened onto states of affairs that his upper-class audiences most
frequently wanted nothing to do with. I would like to say that Beolcos
theatre practice brought the outside inside, but what precisely does that
mean? Was he capable of bringing the world of the Paduan peasant into
the urban space of Venice and into the privileged space of the palazzo or
villa, a space reserved for the upper classes? The answer is both yes and no.
To answer these questions in more detail and to rene the sense of
baroque scenography I am proposing here, I return now to Beolcos career
as a gardener in the compagni Ortolani.
Ruzzantes scenogardening took place in Venice where he performed
with the Compagnie della Calza. In that locale, the content of his plays,
skits, and monologues tended toward the lewd and lascivious. For exam-
ple, the scatological commentary running through Dialogo facetissimo
(Witty dialogue, 1529) may attract a Bakhtinian theoretical framework of
the bodys lower stratum and the upending of order into disorder during
Venetian Carnevale. Id like to suggest, however, that this framework
obscures the specicity of the scene Beolco set with his graphic depictions.
When Beolcos character Menego proposed an end to his hunger by
plugging-up his anus in order to keep the food from exiting his body,
for example, a standard read of grotesque carnival themes misses the
everyday, real-life scenario that Menego presented to his audiences.
Carnival came and went, but Menegos hunger was permanent. Beolco
did not simply wish to highlight the act of shitting in order to laugh at
something traditionally kept from view; rather, he showcased the extreme
discomfort of peasants and the extreme measures they considered for
soothing the pains of permanent starvation. Beolco offered this depiction
for the (dis)pleasure of Venetians who treated the mainland territories
such as Padua (Beolcos home) as a vacation destination. That Venetian
audiences read Beolcos performances as something more unpleasant to
swallow than the usual fare of grotesque farces appears in the fact that
Beolco eventually left Venice under a cloud of controversy never to per-
form there again. I contextualize this controversy below, while here I want
to emphasize that the lewd, lascivious, and scatological in Beolcos theatre
practice requires an historically specic treatment that will force us to put
aside the Bakhtinian mode of thinking that has been useful for so many
scholars, especially when analyzing Beolcos plays that took place outside
of Carnevale.
After he was ousted from Venice, Beolcos scenogardening took place

in Padua. There, his performances took on an entirely different character.
In his native countryside, the radical nature of the scenogardening took
root. That is, Beolcos radicality entailed an actual rooting. He inltrated
certain private homes in order to reclaim the land on which they stood,
and he did so in the name of Padua, a territory dominated by the Venetian
Republic. More than just homes, the sites of Beolcos interventions were
conglomerations of multiple interior spaces, each kept separate from the
other, and each one distinguished from the exterior wilderness by a large
wall. The privacy of those homes developed from the detachment between
an inner sanctum and the outer world, but Beolcos radical scenography
sought to re-suture the inside to the outside in order to reveal the hard-
ships of the rural Paduans.
ACT I, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE VENICE BUT FAILS

Glimpses of Beolcos Venetian exploits as the character Ruzzante appear
in the diary entries of Marin Sanuto, a member of the Venetian upper
classes whose personal records of daily life have greatly aided Venetian
historians in creating a picture of all that went on there. In compiling
Beolcos play texts, Ludovico Zorzi has gathered several of these diary
entries, which, like snapshots from a camera, conspire together to form
the following montage. The character Ruzzante appeared in Sanutos
diary for the rst time on 16 February 1520, when he performed with
the compagni Zardinieri (company of Farmers/Gardeners) before a
crowd gathered in the home of Domenico Trevisan. Sanuto recalled
that before dinner he saw a comedy by Paduans in the style of the
peasants, one [actor] had the last name Ruzante and one Menato and it
was done well (Ruzante 1590; Sanuto, vol. 28 264). In January 1521,
Ruzzante and Menato appeared again at a sumptuous feast sponsored
by the [company of] Gardeners in Ca Pesaro (Ruzante 1590; Sanuto,
vol. 29 536537). The same pair of Paduans appeared once more in Ca
Contarini da Londra where they performed a comedy in the rustic
style with the compagni Zardinieri (Sanuto, Diarii vol. 33 9). But on
May 5, 1523, at a solemn feast offered by the compagni Ortolani in
the Ducal Palace for the wedding of doge Antonio Grimanis nephew,
Sanuto recorded that Ruzzante performed a comedy molto discoreta;
that is to say, an unacceptable comedy for such a high-prole crowd
(Ruzante 15901591; Sanuto, vol. 34 124).
ACT I, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE VENICE BUT FAILS 119
The moving image formed from these brief entries brings several
specic characteristics of Beolcos Venetian performances as Ruzzante to
the fore. First, from his earliest appearance in Venice, Ruzzante was
performing in front of wealthy and powerful members of the Republics
elite governing class. The places for those performances were the homes
(Ca or casa/e) of very powerful people. Trevisan, Pisaro, and Contarini da
Londra held ambassadorships to England and France, and rotated
through the highest ranks of the Venetian government. The Palazzo
Ducale was the seat of government wherein dwelt the doge, the highest-
ranking ofcer of the Venetian Republic. Second, these performances were
always a la villana, or done in the style of rural Padua. Ruzzante and
Menato spoke their own dialect, which would have instantly marked them
as outsiders to their Venetian audiences. This would not have been the
case with all the members of the Zardineri (Farmers) or the Ortolani
since, as with all the Compagnie della Calza, many men in those compa-
nies would have been sons of wealthy Venetian patricians. Interestingly,
while the right to perform inside the homes of notable Venetian governors
and ambassadors went to the sons of nobles who headed the various acting
troupes, Ruzzante managed to nagle his way into the homes, perhaps
because of his recognizable talent. Third, Beolco began his Venetian
acting career as a Gardener (Ortolani) and a Farmer (Zardinieri), and
the companies that bore those names had woven into the troupes iden-
tities a lewd aura that preceded them. This aura emanated from the banner
that the troupe carried with them as they marched through Venice during
Carnevale. Fourth, because the Paduan dialect and rustic themes, espe-
cially when paired with the licentious Gardeners and Farmers, frequently
entailed the raunchiest of dialogue, there was always a chance that the
comedies would receive a negative response, as was the case for the
performance at the Ducal Palace on 5 May 1523. The reason for the
afrmative accolades garnered by the other performances in Sanutos
diary may have stemmed from the fact that those comedies appeared
during Carnevale (when tolerances for obscenity were higher) while the
performance at the Ducal Palace did not. Thus, it appears that Beolco
performed as Ruzzante during the high season of Venetian festivity but
also during the off-season, and that he did not bother to change the tone
of his performances outside of Carnevale.
From these briefest of diary entries, one learns that Ruzzante had
multiple identities as a theatrical character in sixteenth-century Venice.
He was sometimes a gardener, sometimes a farmer, and always a Paduan
peasantat least in the eyes of Sanuto, whose status in Venetian society

mirrored that of Ruzzantes other high-prole audience members. Some
of Sanutos diary entries offer a quite vivid image of Ruzzante and his
cohorts during the season of Carnevale when theatrical performances
abounded within the homes of senior ofcials, ambassadors, and other
people of high status. For example, this passage from February 4, 1524
helps one to zoom in and look down to the interiors of the homes and
palaces where his theatre took place and to understand more clearly what
the scene entailed:
All were dressed in clothes of crimson velvet like that of the doge and of
brightly colored silk, and hats on their heads some of which were satin and
others were velvet; masks with noses. And each had two servants in front of
them with a torch in each hand, dressed as rustics. There was one of them
with a gold vest, and they all had great charisma [virt]: rst came the
clowns, Zuan Polo and others; of note: Ruzante the Paduan; others dressed
like villagers jumped and danced around quite well; and six dressed like rural
children that sang horrendously, and each of them had some sort of rustic
object in hand, like hoes, shovels, etc., stakes, spades, rakes etc., of note:
horns, pipes, and off-key trumpets. These people made the rounds, through
the Piazza, and then at night with lit torches they went through the grounds
and at one in the night they came to the Palace of the Doge, into the court,
to show off their virtues. Then they went into the Procuratia of Sir Marco da
Molin, the Procurator, who had a party, then in diverse locations, at the end
came a dinner and then great drunkenness. (Sanuto, vol. 35 393)5
Sanutos image portrays a raucous parade that begins outside in the urban
landscape, weaves its way through Venice, and culminates in a formal
presentation within the Palazzo Ducale. Just as vibrant as the images of
the clothes worn by the company members were the sounds emitted from
musical instruments and atonal cantors. Both the visual and aural reso-
nances of the event captured in Sanutos diary offer a hint of the theatrical
fare brought by the yearly festival season.6
This parade, however, no matter how raucous it might have been, had
little power to agitate the status quo, caught as it was in the tightly woven
net of Venetian governance. The Consiglio di Dieci (Council of Ten),
Venices most inuential governing body, strictly controlled the time of
Carnevale that heralded such parades as that of Ruzzante and his fellow
Gardeners. The performances that unfolded in Venice during the months
leading up to Lent were ofcially sanctioned entertainments, some of
which were meant for the public and others of which were intended for
private audiences only. For the public, Carnevale promised violent spec-
tacles such as cow and bear baiting, while, for the upper classes, it offered
private theatrical performances that unfolded in the homes and palaces of
the wealthy.
The parade itself, as a mode of conveyance and mode of performance,
was not an unusual sight by any means. Edward Muirs work on civic
festivity has made it clear that the procession was a typical occurrence
that, more often than not, had entirely to do with re-asserting the power
of the extensive government hierarchy (Muir, Civic Ritual Chapters 6
and 7). Sanutos description of the parade above dates its occurrence as
February 4. Two days prior to that, for the feast of Santa Maria Formosa,
the doge and the 11 principal bodies of government would have paraded
over the same ground covered by the Ortolani. That feast and parade in
honor of Santa Maria Formosa happened yearly, dating from 1273 CE,
and would have packed a spectacular punch as hundreds of immaculately
dressed men walked single-le through the city streets. There were many
parades like that one throughout the year. Ruzzante and his friends may
have attracted attention to themselves, but they were not engaged in any
sort of unusual activity. Overall, the temporal and spatial grid placed over
the entirety of Venices territory on the day of the parade indexed by
Sanuto was constructed and maintained by the legislators and the doge.
Nowhere would that have been more distinct visually and aurally than in
the Piazza San Marco where Ruzzantes parade culminated before enter-
ing the Palazzo Ducale for the lavish dinner.
The texture of this temporal and spatial grid becomes palpable with the
help of Eleanor Selfridge-Fields description of the sight and sound pro-
duced by the Orologio (clock tower) in the Piazza (epicenter of Venetian
festivity) and the meaning produced by its massive size and perpetual
sounding-off:
The Orologio tower was architecturally organized in four tiers.

Metaphorically, it was designed to be read from top to bottom. The upper-
most tier represented the dominion of the Venetian Republic in the
Christian view of the world. The two Moors or Saracens on top
represented slaves captured in the Holy Land during a religious crusade.
Since heathens were condemned to do manual labor, they were apt subjects
to strike the hours. The tier below represented the temporal authority of the
doge, who knelt before the Winged Lion (a symbol of the Evangelist Mark,
who was the chief patron saint of the Republic). The doge was depicted with
his symbol of powera ag, a ball, a cross. In the realm of religious
authority, which was depicted on the third tier, the Three Magi, led by a
herald angel, passed before Our Lady who held the infant Jesus in her lap,
while four angels guarded her from above. Celestial domination was sig-
nied on the bottom tier, which contained the clock-face itself. (Selfridge-
Field 57)
As the parade of Ruzzante, Zuan Polo, and the others villani neared its
nal destination, there is little likelihood that it represented an eruption of
disorder or the establishment of an upside down hierarchy of power, even
amidst the festive period of Carnevale. The top position of the two slaves
on the upper tier of the Orologio signied nothing other than domination
of Christian Venice over all heathens, up there for all to see, as was the case
with the parading Ortolani whose display of farming equipment served
only to mark members in the group as belonging to the laboring, rural
classes. Ruzzante, despite his charisma, was just another rustic. Not even
the dissonance of the troupes singing and screaming would have been
that powerful, since the bells all over Venice bathed the entire island in a
sonic soup from morning to night:
The cacophony of civic bells, parish bells, and monastic bells has to have left
few moments of the day completely silent. Bells not only rang out the time
but also conveyed alerts about res, earthquakes, and the deaths of impor-
tant personages. On paramount feasts they rang for hours on end as a sort of
override to the customary signals for work and recess. (64)
Pipes, whistles, and off-key trumpets, like those blown by the Ortolani,
would have become one more layer of sound, a layer that many people
may have ignored as, instead, they stayed attuned to the bells in their
home parishes that notied them of the events of the day.
From this middle-range historical perspective, then, the Ortolani and
other Calza troupes around the city appear as parts within the larger civic
machinery of Venice, acting as entertainment for the richest members of
the society. This scale, however, this mid-range view of the historical
scene, is not the only perspective from which to view either the parade
or Ruzzantes performances. By zooming in further and looking down to
more minute levels of detail, an act of micro-territorialization emerges
from this seemingly well-policed scene. This perspective becomes available
by panning from the Piazza San Marco, where the shadow of the Orologio
overpowers the antics of the parading performers, into the room where
Beolco, as Ruzzante, separated himself from the pack and performed his
monologue known as Lettera giocosa.
The name does not do it justice and may have been afxed to the work
after Beolcos death, perhaps by Stefano di Alessi or even Alvise Cornaro,
his patron, who collected and edited Ruzzantes works into a compilation.
Still, as Zorzi has pointed out, this letter contains more than it appears
to at rst glance. More than a letter in the normal sense, it was a
humorous diversion, composed on the model of a sprolico, namely a
theatrical monologue (Ruzante, Teatro 1595).7 This monologue pro-
vides one of the clearest examples of Ruzzante-as-scenogardener, and it
functions in the present analysis as the portal through which the act of
taking place becomes visible. Taking place is the primary component of
Ruzzantes theatre practice, and from this particular scenario there erupts
a proliferation of gardens within gardens: spaces concealed within other
spaces, each of which is more private and privileged than the space that
envelops it.
With the Lettera giocosa, Ruzzante attempted to insinuate himself into
an extremely secure location, that of the bed belonging to a daughter of an
important man in Venetian politics, Francesco Don. The identity of the
monologues addressee was ambiguous, but the Lettera giocosa concluded
with what Zorzi called an irreverent salute to Don who would himself
become doge in 1545 (1248).8 While the addressee remained subtly
unidentiable, the content of the monologue was explicit. Draped in
double-entendre, Ruzzante introduced himself as a Paduan who proudly
spoke his native tongue because the Florentine language was for preten-
tious sorts. When he reached the business at hand, he singled out a young
woman in the audience and referenced a recent conversation between her
and himself: And so as not to ramble on too much, I want to come
immediately to the matter of your possession, that thing you said you
wanted to give me the other day, when I was there with you, in your
house, in your room . . . (1248).9 This thing was disguised rhetorically
as a plot of land or a garden, but certainly referred implicitly to the
womans virginity. To play up the double meaning, Ruzzante forwarded
his credentials as a gardener:
Im sure that youll be content, because I am well provided with tools for
cleaning. Im good at stabbing, and for digging ditches I have a good
shovel, very rm in the handle, that, the more I use it, the more rm it gets
and capable of driving into the owerbed, with no pulling out or any
hesitation. So I am sure that, if I use it for a harvest, it will make the most
for you and pull a better harvest and a more pleasing one, from which you
will no longer need other workers at hand. (12481249)10
In terms of the text, the allusions are not difcult to grasp. If the text was
all that existed of this performance, then the complexity of Ruzzantes
spatial operation would remain invisible, but by infusing the words with
the image of the Ortolani parading through the Piazza San Marco pro-
vided by Sanutos descriptions and a knowledge of the interior of the
Palazzo Ducale a more nuanced understanding of the performance begins
to surface.
Pulling out, then, and turning back to the parade as it ambled toward
the Palazzo Ducale, I want to add a feature of the Ortolanis clothing that
Sanuto neglected to mention in his diary entry. Each of the Calza troupes
wore badges embroidered to the back of their cloaks and cloth hoods, or
else on their sleeves, to distinguish themselves from one another. These
badges bore simple images, sometimes designed by noted artists of the
day, as in the case with the Ortolani whose insignia consisted of three
pictorial components: a circle of pearls resembling a sun with its rays
protruding from the circles circumference; a fence, enclosed by the sun,
made from osiers; and, above the fence but still enclosed by the sun, a
scroll in the process of unfurling. In Pompeo Molmentis early twentieth-
century study of the life and works of Vittorio Carpaccio, the author
located this same insignia on the sleeves of numerous characters in the
Venetian painters oeuvre and identied it as belonging to the theatrical
Ortolani troupe by comparing it to two other insignias (Molmenti and
Ludwig 9395). A brief comparison of all three insignia helps here to
connect the symbol of the Ortolani with Ruzzantes mission of inltrating
the most intimate spaces of the Venetian government, of, as it were,
planting himself in a garden where he didnt belong.
Molmenti placed the pearly symbol of the Ortolani next to two similar
insignia: a depiction of St Catherine of Siena in the Garden and the Coat
of Arms of the Counts of Orti of Verona. The rst insignia, depicting St
Catherine, offers an illuminated letter G, such as those drawn by cloistered
monks of the Middle Ages, framing the saint with her arms held up, as if in
ecstasy, being penetrated by rays of light emanating from a vision of Christ
on the cross. These rays pierce her hands, ribs, and feet, and thus
correspond to the wounds of the stigmata, which the saint endured as part
of her ascetic and holy lifestyle. Of interest here is not the reference to
stigmata but the location of the scene itself, for, in this scene, St
Catherines visionary event transpires in a garden. The setting becomes
clear once the eye notices the presence of a low fence made from twigs that
encircle both Catherine and a bed of blooming owers.
In the next insignia, that of the coat of arms belonging to the Counts of
Orti, the fence appears once again, this time encircling one tall and sturdy
tree. Orti, the Italian word for garden(s), links the Veronese Counts to
their heritage as landed noblemen. When looking at all three images side
by side (the Ortolani insignia of pearls, the depiction of Catherine of Siena
in the garden, and coat of arms) the single shared image is that of the fence
made from osiers (or twigs taken from willow trees), young twigs exible
enough to be molded into architectonic structures. The fence establishes
the necessary boundary between the ourishing plant life of a man-made
garden and the ora of ungroomed nature, and thus signies metonymi-
cally the presence of a garden (Ortolani), the site-specic garden stage
upon which mystical events played out (Catherine of Sienna), and a history
of horticultural occupations (Counts of Orti). Molmentis juxtaposition of
the three images by Carpaccio reveals an allegory of the garden as a sight
for mystical, noble, and ignoble deeds alike.
But where precisely was the garden of the Ortolani and Ruzzante and
what sorts of deeds occurred within it? First, that garden appeared on the
backs and sleeves of the parading troupe. Second, and more importantly,
the garden was the site to which the Ortolani paraded, their destination.
The call of this garden enticed them to their performance venue. As Zorzi
has suggested, [t]he agricultural symbols of the Compagnie della Calza
referred generally to the hortus conclusus of rened delights and virtue,
into which they intended to withdraw and with which they would distin-
guish themselves from the profane crowd (Ruzante, Teatro 1591).11 This
hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, was the kernel of Ruzzantes
double entendre.
Historically, as I mentioned at the start of this chapter, the hidden
garden existed both as an actual site and a holy metaphor. It referred to the
enclosed gardens within monasteries from which monks would harvest
their fruits and vegetables for their brethren, but it also referred to the
Virgin Mary and the mystical birth that brought Jesus into the world. A
third, this time secular, valence of this trope unfolds from the miraculous
ability of all women to give birth, and nds a textual precedent in Song of
Solomon, verse 12: A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse: a spring

shut up, a fountain sealed (Aben and de Wit 42). For Ruzzante and the
rest of the Ortolani, however, this sanctity was ripe for satirical re-inven-
tion. The religious hortus conclusus worthy of veneration became, in the
hands of Ruzzante, the virginity of all young women, such as she whom
Ruzzante addressed in his Lettera giocosa. The fertility of that garden,
transformed into the image of the owerbed that Ruzzantes shovel
could ably penetrate.12 Even before any words rang out in the Lettera
giocosa, the full weight of Ruzzantes irreverence emanated from the
insignia of the garden embroidered onto his clothing and that of his
company members.
Importantly, however, Ruzzantes garden entailed more than lascivious
and sophomoric jokes about virginity. In addition to the visual moniker of
the insignia and its not-so-subtle reference to the fertility of virgin women,
there was yet another garden packed within the Ruzzantes performance as
a member of the Ortolani. The key characteristic of that garden was its
privacy, which it could promise by merit of its seclusion from the populace
behind numerous walled enclosures. These secluded gardens belonged to
the wealthiest of people and establishments. The closer to the garden one
could get, the higher status one had. Ruzzante identied that secluded
place of great privacy as not only the virginity of Dons daughter, but also
the room in which he delivered the Lettera giocosa. To understand this
more fully, I want to zoom out once again and readjust the historical
frame.
When Angelo Beolco entered Venice and began his career as Ruzzante
with the Compagnie della Calza, at which point he was between the ages of
24 and 26, the city would have represented at least two things to him. First,
it was a place in which he could make money, which he needed since he was
an illegitimate child with a meager allowance from his family. Second,
Venice was enemy territory. Padua, Beolcos birthplace, had by 1524
undergone numerous violent acts of colonization. In that year, Padua was
a Venetian territory, but only 15 years previously it had been won by the
League of Cambrai after the coalition of forces (France, the Holy Roman
Empire, Mantua, Ferrara, the Papacy, and Spain) handed Venice its most
crushing defeat ever in the Battle of Agnadello, in 1509.13 After the wars of
Cambrai, Padua belonged to Emperor Maximilian I. That situation suited
many in Padua just ne, including the Beolco family who, upon Venices re-
conquest of Padua six weeks later, sacriced Giovanni Jacopo and
Melchiorre Beolco to the Emperors cause (Carroll 5). The young men
were arrested, held captive, and would have been present in the jails
adjoining the Palazzo Ducale until their deaths. To some extent, then,
Angelo Beolcos entry into Venice was a risky venture. Even after several
years of employment with the Ortolani, each house Beolco entered under
the auspices of Ruzzante the performer would have introduced him to
more and more wealthy patricians and a number of private homes, the
interiors of which few members of the Paduan middle and lower classes
would ever have seen, much less family members of spies identied as
traitors against Venetian sovereignty.
Zooming in again to the performance of the Lettera giocosa with these
insights framing the scene, a vision of Ruzzantes tactical spatial operations
begins to form. These operations all happened under the guise of
Ruzzante-as-gardener, and the proliferation of gardens outlined above
creates a topographical map of the scene. First garden: the embroidered
insignia on the clothes of the Ortolani that would have distinguished them
from the other stocking troupes parading around Venice at the time.
Second garden: the hortus conclusus of the virgin Venetian women, one
of whom Ruzzante addressed specically in his performance. Third gar-
den: the secluded interior, or giardino segreto, represented by the inner
sanctum of the Palazzo Ducale.
I recognize the performance space created through Ruzzantes mono-
logue as the fourth garden. Ruzzantes act of taking place; that is, his
theatre practice consisted in a transplanting of Paduan identity into a
strictly Venetian space. One dimension of the transplant appeared in the
vulgar joke made by Ruzzante in which he vowed to tend to the Venetian
virgins garden. In a sense, were Ruzzante capable of sowing his oats into
the noble family lineage of any of the Venetians present, the performer
would succeed in rooting himself in the Palazzo Ducale permanently,
since he would acquire the right to access the palace on a normal basis as
a member of the invited audience instead of as an occasional visitor work-
ing as a carnivalesque entertainer. But this transplanting, rooting, and
taking place required more than rude quips. The transplant relied upon
a sonorous territorialization that unfolded through the sonic transmission
of Ruzzantes Paduan dialect into the ears of his Venetian audience.
Elizabeth Horodowichs research supports this claim when she posits a
symbolic, speculative relationship between the tongue and the penis,
alive in the minds of sixteenth-century Venetian audiences that under-
writes the Republican belief that, political legitimacy was based upon
familial legitimacy and a disciplined sexuality was intrinsic to the
maintenance of the family, community, and republican order

(Horodowich 100). Ruzzantes comedic performance troubled any
such legitimacy with his claims of sexual relations between himself
and Dons daughter.
Shifting from visions of Ruzzantes performance to the sonority of
Ruzzantes tongue, I tune now into a faint historical echo of Ruzzantes
quasi-militant Paduan dialect. Even in the briefest reference from Sanutos
diary (of note: Ruzzante the Paduan) it is possible to ascertain the most
powerful tool in Ruzzantes arsenal: his voice. Listen, for example, to the
introduction Ruzzante offered in his brief performance of the Lettera
giocosa:
Because I have never liked the way the show-offs in this world talk, I dont
want to be like those assholes, those people who show how smart they are
and that theyve been to school, like when writing a letter to someone or
whatever, they talk like they do in Florence, or else in Spanish, like the
Napolese, or Hungarian like the soldiers, like they do in the army. (Ruzante,
Teatro 1246)14
In this prologue, Ruzzante set himself apart from his audience and carved
out a separate space from which to address them. Diplomatically, perhaps,
he did not single out the Venetian dialect, but the barb would still have
been sharp. At that time, Venetians in the government were instructed to
speak to each other in the Venetian dialect, but they kept most of their
ofcial records in Latin or Florentine Italian, a fact that reminded Venetian
governors of their many binds to the Papacy and the linguistic tradition of
Florentine scholarship and undermined all claims to the purity of the
Venetian dialect.15 Additionally, the references to the Spanish-speaking
people of Naples and the Hungarian soldiers would have drawn attention
to the threat of the Spanish forces in the South of Italy and the presence of
invading forces in the Veneto since 1509. All of the foreign powers
referenced obliquely in these opening lines aligned themselves with the
League of Cambrai and thus linked by association with Venices eroding
political autonomy. All in all, then, the note sounded by this opening blast
would have been off-key to the ears of the audience.
In the performance, Ruzzante followed his insult of all non-Paduan
languages with his own attempt at the Florentine dialect, which he garbled
badly before breaking into another defense of the Paduan tongue: I
wanted, and it always pleases me, to talk in Paduan, like one does in the
Pavan, of course, because it is the most alive and frank talk that Italy knows
of, this (1246).16 That Paduan was a frank language, nobody in the room
could deny. Ruzzante followed this promise of direct, honest, and frank
speech with his promise to tend to the garden of the anonymous woman
in the audience. By the time he enacted the irreverent salute to Francesco
Don mentioned by Zorzi, Ruzzantes nal words may have even sounded
a little threatening: Well, I thank you all, and I bow to all of you and to
Mister Francesco Don, you hear me (1248).17
At this point, while discussing the form, content, and sonority of
Ruzzantes aggressive speech, it makes sense to consider once again the
obscenities wrapped within Ruzzantes Paduan dialect. As Horodowich
has stated, no other early modern state took as many precautions to
regulate public speech as did Venice, which, with the creation of the
Esecutori Contro la Bestemmia in 1537, dedicated an entire branch of
government to the problem of blasphemy and obscenity (Horodowich 3,
5). Simply put, Blasphemy was a crime that disrupted civic tranquility
(76). Her work in Language and Statecraft in Early Modern Venice
unearths the pains to which the Republic went to distinguish between
blasphemy committed intelligently and consciously as opposed to words
spoken irrationally and shows how the seriousness of the offense
depended on the quality and intelligence of the person involved (68
69). That is, if Ruzzante knew what he was doing, his barbed and barbar-
ous words would have acquired more illicitness. Furthermore, to protect
the Venetian identity during a massive inux of immigrants coinciding
with the Republics defeat at Agnadello, the Esecutori dened blasphemy
as aggressive language up the social scale, including God and his more
immediate representatives, the Venetian nobility (85). That is, one could
blaspheme without cursing God. What is more, this denition of blas-
phemy suggests that non-Venetian speakers may have been regarded as
blasphemous simply by addressing their superiors in their own particular
languages or dialects.
Mixing the aural dimension of obscenity and the visual realm of the
city outside the Palazzo Ducale, Horodowich also describes the count-
less number of posters plastered on Venetian walls notifying visitors
and locals alike that the Republic would not tolerate obscenities,
whether directed toward God or toward the government. We can
picture how the entire urban fabric of Venice slowly became densely
inscribed with visual reminders about spoken decorum, she says, as
one by one, public sites prohibited blasphemy as a potentially
dangerous verbal manifestation of popular life. In this way, social

discipline was not only legislated against but visualized in a systematic
fashion (6667). In 1595, decades after Ruzzantes death, the actor
Giuseppe Beltrame was actually kicked out of Venice for failing to heed
these warnings (106). Perhaps, then, when pondering precisely how
difcult Ruzzantes jokes would have been for Venetians to stomach
and exactly how much danger Ruzzante embraced with his frank talk, I
can convincingly identify Ruzzante as an early explorer of the limits
separating propriety and illegality. Building on Horodowich, I claim
that not only would audiences have recognized the comedian as non-
Venetian and therefore inferior as soon as he opened his mouth, but
they would have also been keenly aware of the moral line Ruzzante
trampled all over with his monologue of double entendres and curse
words. As such, the risk Ruzzante took through his frank speech must
have been quite high. Fortunately for Ruzzante, performing as he was
before the establishment of the Esecutori, there was not yet a codied
law for him to break. Still, it is possible to imagine how the very sound
of Ruzzantes voice constituted an attack against Venetian identity,
how the content of his speech fantasized a scene of unwanted misce-
genation, and how his obscenities underscored that fantasy with a
timbre of threatening immorality and illegality.
In summation, and returning to the ambivalent performance of garden-
ing, I claim that Lettera giocosa preserves an early attempt by Ruzzante to
root himself in a place where nobody wanted him. His position as a
gardener among the Ortolani gained him access to the private chambers
of the Palazzo Ducale where, by way of verbal suggestion, he was able to
insinuate himself into the sheets of one of the women who were present,
perhaps Francesco Dons daughter. Outside the palace in the Piazza San
Marco, the historical dominance of the Republic overshadowed the square
in the form of architectonic symbolism and the atonality of the citys bells
diffused the cackles of Ruzzantes troupe that Sanuto captured in his diary.
Inside the palace, however, the physical presence and sonority of
Ruzzantes Paduan dialect fought aggressively against Venetian claims to
superiority as it affronted the crowd of Venetian upper-class men and
women who had gathered ostensibly for light, comedic entertainment.
Within the private room inside the Ducal Palace, which sat within the
grand Piazza San Marco that was itself surrounded by the main island of
Venice, Ruzzante attempted to take back some territory in the name of
Padua.
ACT II, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE BACK PADUA 131
In that particular performance within Palazzo Ducale, however,

Ruzzantes attempt to transplant himself into the various gardens of
Venetian society did not take root. In fact, Ruzzantes entire Venetian
career transpired as a series of unsuccessful plantings. From Horodowichs
point of view, By 1526, Ruzantes Venetian performances came to an
end, suggesting that many Venetians had no tolerance for the unruly
language and behavior associated with [his] comedies (208).18 Sanuto,
always present at big events, gives some additional clues about Ruzzantes
departure. During the season of Carnevale of 1526, he documented a
performance at Ca Trevisan on the isle of Giudecca where unfolded an
entire night of performance planned for visiting ambassadors. Ruzzante
and his friend Menato shared the stage that evening. According to Sanuto,
and as retold by Edward Muir, the commotion caused by so many foreign
dignitaries gathered in one place led to a hectic dinner service, and, at one
point, someone let loose a plucked chicken with its crest cut off onto the
dinner table. The bird blatantly alluded to the French King, Francis I,
whose crest bore the symbol of the Cock and who, earlier in that same
year, had been defeated and captured in Pavia. Outraged by the insin-
uation of a weak French monarchy, the French ambassadors erupted
and the dinner dissolved into unmanageable chaos. Muir concludes his
read of the event with the following postscript: Although Ruzantes
involvement was uncertain [ . . . ] Ruzante never performed in Venice
again and he retired to the circle of Alvise Cornaro in Padua (Muir,
Manifestazioni 65).19
ACT II, IN WHICH RUZZANTE TRIES TO TAKE BACK PADUA

Prior to the introduction of permanent theatre buildings into the Veneto,
the art of taking place preceded and indeed made way for each theatrical
performance. That is, in order to perform, Ruzzante and other performers
of his ilk had to carve out a space for themselves. In the Lettera giocosa,
Ruzzante took place in a number of ways, including through the sonorous
territorializing gesture produced through his Paduan dialect. The dialect
had a dual function: it simultaneously constructed Ruzzantes identity as a
member of the rural peasantry, an identity that allowed him to invade the
private space of the palace and insinuate himself into the personal life of his
letters addressee, and deconstructed the privilege that normally accom-
panied the act of belonging in that palace. Instead of governmental
ofcials and members of the most elite patrician families, there stood
Ruzzante whose obscenity-drenched yokel slurs compelled the audiences

attention for the brief duration of his monologue while also making
cutting remarks at the very people who helped him make his living.
Cutting remarks, as I will demonstrate below, were particularly impor-
tant to his brand of humor. Collectively, these constructive and decon-
structive elements embedded within the sound and content of Ruzzantes
monologue mirrored the acts of conquest and revolt occurring on the
mainland outside of Venice proper. As Venice fought to reclaim Padua and
other cities in the Veneto in those years after the Cambrai wars, the
autonomy of the cities was crippled and brought under the control of
the Republic. Ruzzantes presence inside the palace worked, if only tem-
porarily, to reverse that phenomenon. His Paduan dialect and the derision
it piled upon the Venetian audience occupied the space of the perfor-
mance, thus reclaiming a small patch of land in the name of Padua.
Ultimately, though, he could nd no permanent purchase in Venetian soil.
No matter where he performed, Ruzzante always declared his allegiance
to Padua. His native town underwrote his very identity. When he entered
Venice, he brought Padua with him (in his voice, for example). When he
returned to Padua, however, he still needed to bring his own understand-
ing of Padua to the scene. That is to say, and as already discussed in
Chapter 3, the Venetian domination of Padua in the sixteenth century
eroded the image and the essence of Padua that Ruzzante cherished and in
which he believed. Thus, upon returning to his homeland, Ruzzantes acts
of taking place would display that eroding image and essence for the eyes
of the very people whose presence damaged Ruzzantes place of birth,
even and perhaps especially if those people considered themselves Paduan.
Every attempt Beolco, as Ruzzante, made to put his root down, to
lodge himself in place, to plant or to re-sow a notion of Padua as auton-
omous, proud, luscious, and so on, reveals the extent to which Padua was
yoked, spoiled, and tied not to the earth, not to Nature, but to the
Republic. By extension, since Ruzzantes own sense of self grew from his
identication with Padua, Ruzzantes stage presence always also entailed
an undoing, a resignation to the increasing possibility that the Padua he
loved had disappeared for good. This paradox, a stage presence that
testied to the disappearance of native identity, played out most clearly
in his nal piece, the Lettera allAlvarotto, which, appropriately, he never
performed himself. For this performance, Ruzzante sent a letter contain-
ing the text of the play, a text that was in fact the letter itself, to his
compare Alvarotto, who read Ruzzantes words aloud to the gathered
audience in Alvise Cornaros hunting lodge. In that performance,

Ruzzantes present absence mimicked the slow erosion of Padua as
Ruzzante imagined it to be. Padua was there, and it was gone. Ruzzante
was there, by merit of his written work, but his body was absent.
When performing in Padua, Ruzzante made changes to his theatre
practice, or so it seems, in order to salvage what he could of his town.
First, while the political nature of his Venetian performances remained, his
presence in Padua ceased to represent some miscellaneous other belonging
to a world of rustics and became, instead, a spokesperson for a specic way
of life. His Paduan performances frequently presented him as the ofcial
representative of the working classes (farmers, gardeners, and people who
worked directly with the land). Second, the worldview depicted by his
performances no longer traded in illusory scenarios. When Ruzzante
attempted to root himself inside the villas of Padua and in front of high-
ranking religious ofcials, the environments he constructed for them bore
a very close resemblance to the actual world outside of the villas walls. In
the place of jokes about sexual conquests that had no merit in reality, such
as was the case in the Lettera giocosa, Ruzzante wielded humor as a
weapon against the severity of the lives led by those workers he was
there to represent. Whereas in Venice Ruzzantes audiences could quickly
recover from his barbs, knowing that his jokes had no basis in reality and
thus caused no permanent threat, in Padua his audiences could only laugh
uneasily at material that explicitly referenced the states of affairs outside
the villas walls. Such was the case with the Prima Oratione. Looking
down onto the site of this performance reveals a topography that contains
another set of gardens within gardens. The most capacious of these
gardens, Padua itself, housed an area called Asolo, which contained the
Villa Barco of Caterina Cornaro, a private, walled-off space in which
Ruzzante sought to plant himself.
Saskia de Wits description of features common to late Renaissance
villas offers a good starting point for an analysis of this villa in particular:
The spatial composition of the Late Renaissance villas consists usually of a

principal axis slung off which are a number of autonomous interior and
exterior spaces. Placing parts separately so that they cannot be taken in from
one vantage point encourages movement on the part of the observer. As a
result the route takes its place in the plans organization as a structuring
element. The polarities of the hortus conclusus return in an ambiguity active
on various levels. Thus, wilderness and order are made to relate by bringing
the wilderness (the barco, or bosco) within the garden boundaries. (Aben and
de Wit 87)
On its 100 hectares of land and bound by a massive wall, the Cornaro
estate boasted a giant castle, a fountain, a park, and a barchessa, or a type of
enclosed barn in which peasants worked. Seeking to master the environ-
ment on which it stood, groundskeepers sculpted the land within the
villas wall into a series of gardens that offered contemplative bucolic
scenes (Mazzotti 74). In her study of the specic location of Ruzzantes
performance, Antonella Pietrogrande provides a glimpse of the interior
where Ruzzante would have taken place: A true and proper courtly
garden, loaded with humanistic themes is the Barco of Caterina
Cornaro, in the countryside of Altivole, at the feet of the Asolani hills;
fallen into complete ruin, today all that remains is half of a porch of a barn
(6869). In the time of Ruzzante, the villa would have shown scars from
res caused by the Emperor Maximillian, whose troops had tried to steal
Padua away from the slowly weakening Venetian Republic (69).
Somewhere within that villa, likely the sala, Ruzzante held court
through his Prima Oratione. Whereas the villas planners and landscapers
suggested, architecturally, a primary route through which guests should
travel in order to acquire multiple advantageous views of the estates
grandeur, Ruzzante attempted to root himself in one place, directly in
front of the Orations addressee, Cardinal Marco Cornaro, the new Bishop
of Padua, thus stabilizing the audience and offering a single viewpoint
from which to look at the world. That viewpoint would reveal exactly what
the wall around the villa blocked from sight: famine, hunger, and poor
living conditions for Ruzzantes Paduan compatriots.
Ruzzantes oration had three parts. In the rst, the Paduan introduced
himself as the spokesperson for the territory and offered the Cardinal a
long list of Paduas many bounties (Ruzante, Teatro 1188).20 His intro-
duction as spokesperson also allowed for a brief celebration of the Paduan
dialect: [W]e did not want to send a priest or a scholar, those people who
speak according to the grammar of the Florentine language, those people,
you know, that they call doctors [ . . . ] And, just to say it, I wouldnt
change my Paduan tongue for 200 Florentine ones (1184).21 As was the
case with the Lettera giocosa, the establishment of the Paduan dialect as
superior also provided an opportunity for Ruzzante to tie himself to the
land of his birth. Whereas in Venice his dialect chafed against the Venetian
and Florentine dialects of his audiences, in Padua Ruzzantes privileging of
his dialect and the introduction to his performance through a description

of all that made Padua great entailed a larger agenda. Ruzzantes pro-
Padua introduction led to his demands for social and political change, and
even though the tone of the introduction stayed light, even frivolous,
Ruzzante quickly proved that he wanted more than to play nice or crack
wise.
As the second part of the address, this agenda focused all eyes on the
guest of honor, in whom rested the power to make changes to the
disciplinary systems governing the conduct of the working classes. To
shift the tenor of the address, Ruzzante landed a direct and unequivocal
blow: And then I almost shit from laughing, when they said that you are a
great man. But they dont see you. Youre just a small man, right? You are
a great small man, and not a great man (1194).22 Without the pretense of
Carnevale, this brusque crack about the short stature of the most powerful
man in the room conveyed a message meant to sting. Gaining in momen-
tum, Ruzzante continued to belittle the man in purple as well as his
ecclesiastical ofce:
So they say you are Cardinal, and that as Cardinal you are one of those who
guards the gates to Heaven, but I dont think thats right. I think those
people have never seen it, Heaven, or the gates [ . . . ] Now, Ill tell you:
Cardinal means a great rich man, that in this world can do as he likes, and
when he dies (because we all die), even if you havent been all that good, you
can go straight to Heaven, and if the gate is barred, you unhinge it [la
scardinate], and you enter straight by any means and every hole. (1196)23
Ruzzantes addition of the prosthetic s before the word cardinal

enacted a clever pun, similar to the neologism of snaturale discussed in
Chapter 3. By emphasizing the etymological similarities between Cardinal
and scardinate (literally, to unhinge), Ruzzante identied the Paduan
bishop as a duplicitous gatekeeper who would use his status in the Church
hierarchy for his own salvation.24 Neither a charming eclogue nor a poem
intended to entertain the Cardinal and celebrate his rise through the ranks
of the Church, this oration intoned, rather, a profane prayer offered up to
a man whose purple uniform could not hide the fact that his esh and
blood made him capable of overlooking the class distinction between
himself and the man insulting him in public and discussing business.
At least, this must have been Ruzzantes hope since the third part of the
oration forwarded a direct appeal for changes to the laws of the Church
governing the bodies and souls of the good people of Padua. In total,
Ruzzante made seven requests, which ranged from changing the regula-
tions prohibiting work on holy feast days and permitting one to eat before
Sunday mass, to demanding that higher powers castrate all philandering
priests and establish the right to take multiple spouses. Ruzzante accom-
panied each request with a brief rationale. For example, when lobbying for
a dispensation from fasting for all peasants, Ruzzante explained that
digesting stone takes too much effort, inferring that peasants have resorted
to eating rocks as a means for staving off hunger.25 In the case of castrating
priests, he spoke sympathetically of the fragility of human esh. Who can
blame them, really, for being incapable of resisting natures urge? But, at
the end of the day, the children that come of these sexual encounters grow
into an untenable economic burden to the cuckolded fathers forced to
care for these bastards.
All told, Ruzzantes Prima Oratione expressed deep concern related to
the plights of the people outside the villa walls to one person who could
feasibly make changes to the laws that led to the hardship. By rooting
himself in front of the Cardinal and taking up several minutes of his time,
rst to berate him and then to demand changes to religious law, Ruzzante
developed a detailed picture of the enforced sobriety inicted upon the
rural Paduans that he had come to represent. Requests Three, Four, and
Six especially made visible the ways in which the protocols of Catholic
religious practice attempted to regulate the bodies of its ock. Request
Three attacked the prohibition against working during feast days. Request
Four challenged the sin of eating before morning mass. In Request Six,
the call for castration, the image of the peasant that came into focus for the
Cardinal portrayed a malnourished laboring body whose economic means
of subsistence, which sometimes suffered from raising the illegitimate
children produced through the fornication of priests, was directly under-
mined by the demands of the Church.
Overall, the Prima Oratione offered a picture of stark contradictions:
the great title of Cardinal presided over the body of a little man; with all
the bounties offered by Paduas rich soil, the peasants cultivating those
bounties found themselves eating stones to ward off starvation; holy feast
days doubled as periods of aggravated hunger for the lowest classes; the
religious pastors responsible for the spiritual guidance of all men and
women produced hungry illegitimate children whom nobody could afford
to feed. A socially conscious chiaroscuro heightened the drama of this
picture painted through Ruzzantes address.
The abrasiveness of the image, however, produced no effect. No

changes came during the tenure of Cardinal Marco Cornaro. Not to be
ignored, Ruzzante appeared in the same room a few years later in front of
the next Bishop of Padua, Marcos brother Francesco. This time around,
in the Seconda Oratione, Ruzzantes tone darkened and the frequency of
jokes diminished greatly. In the place of laughs appeared more concerns,
not only with the bodies of the people suffering outside in the elds but
also with the affective forces of the universe. The world, for Ruzzante, was
falling apart and the cause for this erosion stemmed directly from the
neglect of even the most basic of personal needs on the part of the
religious authorities.
Ruzzante opened the second oration with a strong statement: For that
which is given by nature, just try to do otherwise; after all, when some-
thing must be, it seems that men and women and all the reversal world [el
roverso mondo] get down and help make it be [ . . . ] that when something
must freeze, itll freeze in August (1208).26 Nature in this sentence
signied the driving force of life. While these introductory words seemed
to vouch for the power of nature to keep the world spinning, the rest of
the oration offered a counter-argument to that opening claim. The proof:
all of lifes fun had disappeared. Paduas bounties had vanished. The
paucity of food had even degraded love and copulation, thus proving
that natures powers had a limit: In conclusion, this world has become
like an untended garden. Look around and see if you see any lovers. I can
tell you that hunger has fucked love up the ass. Nobody dares to love
anymore, since no one can handle the cost.
If the Prima Oratione depicted a scene of violent contradictions, the
Seconda Oratione portended complete existential despair. The frankness of
Ruzzantes speech and the lack of any story, characters, or organizing
ctitious scenario set these two theatre pieces outside of the typical genres
of theatrical performances of the time. If they were not plays, what were
they? By recalling the spatial palimpsest of gardens, I am tempted to call
them scenographic, perhaps even scenobotanical, interventions.
Fundamentally, these political performances took place, but they did so
through aural and scenographic means. Ruzzante inltrated the innermost
rooms of the villa, rooted himself in front of his audience, and composed
scenic portals through which residents of that interior could see beyond
the villas walls. The scenographic dimension of the performances
becomes visible by splicing images produced during the two events within
the landscape of the Villa Barco with the failure of Ruzzantes ability to
root himself permanently in front of two powerful addressees. The result-

ing synesthetic assemblage suggests that taking place initiated much of
Ruzzantes theatre practice, and that, in the case of these specic perfor-
mances, the place he tried to take, or to take back, was the Padua to which
he swore a lifetime allegiance. By the end of 1528, that Padua had become
uninhabitable because of the homesteading of the Venetian patricians
whose villas and palaces transformed the territory into an organ of industry
serving the elite landowners at the expense of those who worked the land.
In other words, Ruzzantes orations wrote scenes of uninhabitable
home. More dimensions of these scenes come into view by looking at
the conditions leading to the construction of the Villa Barco. The villa
acted as a refuge for Caterina Cornaro who, prior to 1489, had reigned as
the Queen of Cyprus. In that year, Venice took control of Cyprus, thus
relieving the Queen of her duties. After her home was created in Asolo, the
space began to double as a fashionable court for artists and members of the
Venetian elite. The villas construction coincided with the rush of building
on the Venetian mainland that produced many similar venues. As such, the
site of Ruzzantes two orations was produced through an act of coloniza-
tion and quickly became a home away from home for the displaced Queen.
To create for her an isolated nest within the Venetian territory, architects
constructed a perimeter wall to divide the exterior wilderness from the
cultivated interior, as was the fashion of the time.
Among the poets making frequent visits to Queen Cornaros court was
Pietro Bembo (self-pronounced Petrarchan protg, advocate for the
poetic purication of the Italian language) who set his pastoral dialogue
Asolani in the villas gardens. In that play, the famed Venetian poet
constructed three dialogues that analyzed the merits and powers of love.
The nal dialogue touted the Platonic love of ideal and eternal beauty over
all other kinds of secular and profane love. The remanence of Bembos
presence on the villas grounds no doubt resonated within Ruzzante,
whose two orations subtly dismantled Bembos idealism. The rst act of
deconstruction appeared in the Prima Oratione when Ruzzante, attempt-
ing to prove the legitimacy of Padua over all other lands, claimed that
Petrarch may have lived in Florence and privileged the Tuscan tongue but,
let us all remember, he had gone to Padua to die. For Ruzzante, this fact
hinted at a subtle Paduan grittiness lodged within Petrarchs poetry to
which he could lay claim. Less subtly, in the closing remarks of the Seconda
Oratione, Ruzzante declared love to have been fucked up the ass by
hunger. Against Asolanis claims for a living Platonic idealism, the
Orationi asserted that a material malaise had settled over the pastoral
landscape. Ruzzantes rst scenographic component, then, dismantled
and blocked from the senses the high-minded literary aura haunting the
Villa Barco and replaced Bembos poetry with a crass demand for new
religious laws and a new mode of life for the masses. By calling for reform,
Ruzzante negated Bembos claim in the third dialogue of the Asolani that
good love would reign eternal.
Having dispelled the literary aura, Ruzzante set to some more archi-
tectonic renovations. By painting such abrasive imagery with his words,
Ruzzante chipped away at the wall around the compound that neatly
distinguished the cultivated interior of the villa from the wilds of the
countryside. The resulting holes functioned as windows that served two
purposes. First, they created a view of the hardships experienced by
peasants and, second, they allowed for famine, pestilence, and unhappiness
to enter, albeit briey. Much like tromp loeil paintings, Ruzzantes win-
dows tricked the eye to force a new perspective. Against the wishes of his
audience, who perhaps would have preferred light comedic banter,
Ruzzante discussed openly the social situation of rural Paduans and,
furthermore, demanded that his esteemed spectators look out beyond
the walls of their charming estate into the lives that the wall blocked
out. Here, Ruzzante is playing with Enzo Coccos notion that, In
order to explore the form of the garden, it is necessary to undertake a
double journey (inside and outside) and to examine the dialectic tension
developing at its boundaries. The ideal conguration of the enclosure
must take into account what is contrary to it (Cocco 53). If the two
Cardinals Cornaro and the events organizers wanted to invite Ruzzante
into their garden, then they would have to invite the outside (the lives of
the people Ruzzante represented as a native villano) inside as well.
Several miles away from Caterina Cornaros villa, at the home of
Ruzzantes patron Alvise Cornaro, stood a Loggia and Odeon where
Ruzzante performed for his patron and where audiences gathered to listen
to music. Giovanni Maria Falconetto designed and decorated both struc-
tures in a style similar to the Villa Barco, displaying allegorical and mytho-
logical imagery from Ancient Greece and Rome. Ruzzantes installation of
windows within the Villa Barco worked in a similar way to Falconettos
illustrated windows on the interior of the Odeon, albeit with a different
purpose. Since the acoustic demands of the Odeon required solid walls,
Falconetto painted tromp-loeil scenes of pastoral lakes and quiet country-
side to sooth the eyes of the audiences while the musicians stimulated their
ears. Ruzzantes windows in the Villa Barco did just the opposite.
Through a verbal tromp-loeil, the crass talk, vulgar jokes, and tales of
despair opened a viewpoint onto the exterior, thus breaking the sanctity of
the manicured interior. If nobody was going to help make the outside
more livable for the peasants who inhabited it, then Ruzzante could at
least make the Villa Barco less hospitable for its honored guests for the
duration of his performance.
Ruzzante accomplished two more architectural renovations with his
scenobotanical act of taking place. Anticipating its invention by two
centuries, Ruzzantes manifestos in the Villa Barco constituted a prototype
of the English ha-ha. As Christopher Thacker explains, So long as gar-
dens were enclosed [ . . . ] a wall, a hedge, a fence was necessary. And so
long as the garden was thus enclosed, its relationship with the surrounding
land, with the landscape and with nature was inevitably limited
(Thacker 182). Much changed in the thinking about the purpose of the
garden between the time of Ruzzante and the time of the eighteenth-
century English garden, no doubt. Whereas baroque gardens worked
within the same episteme that birthed the hortus conclusus, a mode of
(garden) thinking reliant upon the separation of nature and culture for its
profession of mastery over the chaos of the wild, the Enlightenment
thought behind the English garden, albeit for similar reasons of mastery,
preferred to hide the articial separation between interior and exterior. As
Thacker tells it, The ha-ha solves this problem in one easy process:
instead of a raised enclosing barrier, a sunken barrier, shaped like a ditch
or a dry moat, was dug round those parts of the garden which were to be
made into a pretty Landskip. This ditch created the illusion that the
garden and the surrounding countryside were one and undivided.
Horace Walpole explained the name attributed to these ditches. [T]he
common people called them Ha! Has! to express their surprise at nding
a sudden and unperceived check to their walk (cit. 183). Ruzzantes
unfunny comedic practice expressed in the genre-bending works of the
Prima and Seconda Oratione forced a similar effect. Insults and bleak
portraits of the rural peasantry provoked a loud Ha! Ha! as they removed
the obstruction blocking the seemingly safe interior of the Barco from the
exterior world.
This (p)refunctioned ha-ha enabled a cutting humor. Here is the nal
architectural renovation, which consists of some strategic landscaping.
Gardeners and botanists explain that, when direct rooting and transplant-
ing fails to propagate a plant species, asexual propagation provides an
alternative route. One such method, cutting, has existed for centuries. A
cutting is a vegetative plant part which is severed from the parent plant in
order to regenerate itself, thereby forming a whole new plant (University
of Arizona). Having failed to root himself and his demands in the heart
and mind of the elder Cardinal Cornaro during his rst visit to the Villa
Barco, Ruzzante attempted precisely this method of propagating his
beliefs. Severing the main message of the Prima Oratione, he spliced the
cutting into the more direct and franker Seconda Oratione. The asexual
method of propagation attempted through this splicing even underscored
the request for the castration of philandering priests made during his rst
visit without the need to repeat the claim twice. Upon Ruzzantes return
to the Barco, he could hammer home the same discontents but do so
through an entirely new script; only this time around, the humor would
also cut more swiftly to the matter at hand and cut more deeply into the
safety zone provided by the villas seemingly autonomous existence within
(yet distinct from) the Paduan countryside.
Turning from this admittedly more esoteric form of scenography and
architectonic renovation to the more common brand, I want also to attend
to the one scenic diagram that remains amongst Ruzzantes archived
playtexts in the Venetian Marciana library. That image, as Ludovico
Zorzi has suggested, depicted the backdrop to Ruzzantes most infamous
play, Beta (c.1524), and showed three houses standing side by side on a
public street to the view of the audience. While Zorzi has recognized the
images importance for dating the innovations within the evolution of
Renaissance Venetian scenic design and for linking those innovations to
their classical and medieval antecedents, the image also constitutes yet
another fragment in the mosaic of Ruzzantes performances I am pasting
together here. The image from Beta, as well as the composite imagery
pieced together from the performance of the Lettera giocosa and the
tromp-loiel of the Prima and Seconda Orationi, presents the private
home as a key element in Ruzzantes scenobotanic acts of taking place.
The private home was the ground oor of Venetian theatre at this
time, literally the ground on which much theatre stood. In her superbly
researched account of private Venetian homes during the sixteenth
century, Patricia Fortini Brown grounds her discoveries at the cross-
roads of public and private expressed through the notion of politia, a
word that helps frame the political nature of Ruzzantes social tromp-
loeil. The term had two distinct, if related, meanings in the sixteenth
century, she explains. One usage derived from the Greek politeia and
connoted good government, the political life, and civil comportment.

The other came from the Latin politus, meaning renement in fashion,
politeness of behavior, or the display of luxury (Brown 246).
Venetians decoration and ordering of their home-space reveals for
Brown a manifestation of a hybrid politia that managed to fuse both
the Greek and Latin understandings of that term. Turning to the futile
attempt by the Venetian Patriciate to limit excessive displays of wealth
both in public and in the private domain of its citizens homes, Brown
re-enacts the battle waged through numerous sumptuary laws in order
to depict the public control of private politia in a society that privi-
leged civic responsibility over individual or family glory (309). That is,
Venetians of all classes seem to have forged a sense of (at least) semi-
autonomy beyond the grasp of Venetian Republicanism through a
conscious decoration of their homes. The end goal was simple: what-
ever ones class, live like a noble. This aim found support in the
literature of the time, particularly in Alessandro Piccolominis transla-
tion of Xenophons Oeconomicus (1540).
As an elite member of Venetian society sequestered in the Paduan
countryside where she was to live out her days, Caterina Cornaro had
the means to decorate the interior of her villa in order to establish
domestic politia during an otherwise tumultuous time in her life.
Giuseppe Mazzotti has referred to the Villa Barco as a pleasure resort,
a term that applies equally well to other villas dotting the Padua country-
side (Mazzotti 73). At the turn of the sixteenth century, wealthy Venetians
retired to their homes in the country during the hot summer months and
would remain there until the heat dissipated. In Caterina Cornaros case,
the Villa Barco was carved out of the wilderness specically to function as a
home away from home after the termination of her reign over Cyprus.
Only after the battle of Agnadello, when Venice had to turn to agriculture
after losing dominance in the spice trade, did members of the Venetian
classes begin to live permanently on the mainland. Such was also the case
with Ruzzantes patron, Alvise Cornaro. But even in his case, the move to
Padua was a result of political eviction. The complicated and insular
governmental system edged Alvise Cornaro out of the running for political
ofce, so he turned to the mainland to make his living; the Venetian
domination of Cyprus removed Caterina Cornaro from her island sanctu-
ary and deposited her in the hills of Asolo. The interior spaces of these
private homes marked out an area where wealthy, politically attached,
dominant men and women dwelt.
By rooting himself within the Villa Barco, on at least two separate

occasions, Ruzzante committed two explicitly political acts. First, he
spoiled the domestic politia composed by Caterina Cornaro through his
rhetorical tromp loeil. Calling on Browns research once more, I can
provide a nal image for this scenic feat. In his own Dialogo (published
1563), Giovanni Maria Memmo offered Venetian nobility and citizens
advice on how best to achieve domestic politia. One piece of advice,
especially for those living on the island of Venice where space was tight,
suggested that individuals, whenever possible, bring the inspiration of the
garden into the home via a specic type of drapery called spalliere a
verdure, which were woven with a vegetal or milleeur design that
were hung like a wainscoting around the lower part of the walls and
intended to resemble living espaliered plantings (Brown 312). In the likely
event that Caterina Cornaros interior sala followed such advice,
Ruzzantes depiction of the peasantrys hardships would have, in a sense,
covered those spalliere a verdure with his own images woven through
references to starvation and overwork.
Second, Ruzzantes occupation of the Villa Barco amounted to a
critique of the broken concept of res publica that, despite its fractured
state, still pretended to rule post-Agnadello Padua. In Edward Muirs
terms, [the] practical, materialist, localized conception that there are
places open to all and objects of utility available for common use might
be considered the bedrock meaning of res publica, and republicanism in
this sense would simply imply the recognition of public over private
interests (Muir, Republicanism? 142). Ostensibly maintained by the
podest, capitano, and other Venetian-elected ofcials charged with main-
taining order in the terraferma, res publica promised to protect the needs
of the many through recourse to an equitable legal system. By 1528,
however, Ruzzante saw clearly that anybody allied to the Venetian gov-
ernment and upper classes, such as Cardinals Marco and Francesco
Cornaro, had little to no concern for the peasants of Padua. Accosting
these gures within the domestic space of Caterina Cornaros Barco might
have amounted to a one-man revolt, one that historians should join to the
list of the 1509 and 1511 revolts in the Friuli and the 1525 Great
Revolution lead by Michael Gaismair in South Tyrol. (I will pick up this
thread in Chapter 7.) The continual trumping of public interest by private
interest ew in the face of everything republican government stood for,
and Ruzzante, clearly attuned to the dissonance of such a state of affairs,
temporarily interrupted the interior politia of the villa in order to deliver
that message. From the archival fragment depicting Betas scenic back-
drop to this redecoration of Caterina Cornaros Barco, I am suggesting
that Ruzzantes ability to insinuate himself into the private domicile in
order to disrupt the politia of the space and re-orientate the res publica of
the Veneto constitutes another scenographic dimension tucked within his
theatre practice.
As a sort of spatio-temporal anomaly popping into and out of the
archive, as for example in Sanutos diary entries, Ruzzantes theatre relied
on artful modes of entrance and exit. In the textual fragments above, he
made his entrance through his prologues and preambles by establishing
himself as a proud Paduan. After he had had his say, he prepared his exit
through irreverent salutes and ambiguous sign-offs, such as that which he
gave to Don in the Venetian ducal palace. His exits, though, always left
the possibility open that he could return. By calling out Don in the
Lettera giocosa, Ruzzante put a proper name in the place of the ambiguous
addressee of his monologue and thus foreshadowed a future in which
Ruzzante would return as Dons son-in-law; that is, married to his
daughter.
In Prima Oratione, the departure was similarly open-ended: Give me
your hand and promise that I will come again to take the edict. God help
you (Ruzante, Teatro 1204).27 Spoken to the Cardinal, the edict
referred to the authorization of the changes in religious law demanded
by Ruzzante. Acting presumptuously, the performer/reformer intended
the edict to pass into motion at some point in the near future, at which
time he could return and see the new law written in its ofcial form. The
God help you, added an ambiguous phrase. Was it a command that God
should help the Cardinal to do what was right and pass Ruzzantes
reforms? Was it a derogatory comment on the fact that the Cardinal,
despite his place in the religious hierarchy, was in need of Gods help?
Whatever the intention, the closing line left the door open for a quick
return in front of the powerful audience member. When he did return,
however, there was no edict to see since no changes in the religious laws
occurred.
In the monologue that made up the Seconda Oratione, Ruzzantes
harsh critique of the new Cardinal and bleak outlook offered of Padua as
an unweeded garden ended with an ironic twist. Instead of storming out
or offering an ambiguous farewell as in the previous Oratione, Ruzzante
ended with something [he] hasnt been able to do in more than a year,
i.e., to sing and dance and party like they do in Heaven (1219).28 Far
INTERLUDE: TAKING PLACE AS TERRITORIALIZATION 145
from a joyous and entertaining display, the singing and dancing that
followed the political act of taking place would have clashed with the
supremely unhappy state of the peasants outside the space of the perfor-
mance. The clash was one more deconstructive gesture capable, perhaps,
of producing a view of the sad exterior, as if through a window, for the
happy and carefree Cardinal to ponder. The singing ended with
Ruzzantes offer to the Cardinal that, should he ever need someone to
do a days work for him, he would be his man, thus leaving room for a
return performance. It is not likely, however, that the Cardinal ever
thought of Ruzzante again.
This unfolding of theatrical performance accentuated by the produc-
tion of entrances and exits into and out of the private homes in which
Ruzzante appeared underscored the profoundly territorial nature of his
theatre practice. For the brief temporal span of his performances, such as
those in Lettera giocosa and Prima and Seconda Oratione, Ruzzante
worked to reclaim territory for his native Padua, which the Republic of
Venice had subsumed into its interior. To take place in such a way,
Ruzzante acted scenographically. That is to say, he produced a scene
within the private homes, but a scene that would effectively act as political
counter-point to the domestic scene of private politia.
INTERLUDE: TAKING PLACE AS TERRITORIALIZATION

At this point, the thinking on territory-as-production developed by Gilles
Deleuze and Flix Guattari becomes helpful in theorizing Ruzzantes
mode of theatre. I want to consider the manner in which [the expressive
qualities of Ruzzantes theatre] constitute points in the territory that place
the circumstances of the external milieu in counterpoint (Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 317). Taking the Prima Oratione as a
demonstration of this theory in action, the circumstances of the external
milieu appear at rst as the conditions of life produced by unjust religious
laws. The points in the territory align with the windows or viewpoints
opened by Ruzzantes performance, through which the conditions of life
exterior to the privileged space of the villa became visible for and tangible
to the Cardinal(s). The complex of interior spaces produced by the wall
surrounding the Villa at Asolo appeared to Ruzzante as an act of domina-
tion that sublimated nature to the connes of human law. This was the
case on at least two levels. First, as the quotation on the Renaissance villa
above makes explicit, the Villa Barco produced a secluded garden within
the more expansive garden of Natures bounties. Second, for the peasants
who worked the land and built their livelihood on their relationship with
Paduas land, the multiple blockades erected by religious law that exacer-
bated an already intense era of starvation conditioned by inclement
weather and low-yield harvests created another barrier. Eviction from
the heart of Mister Jesus God, as Ruzzante referred to him, if one ate
before mass; sin acquired by working on Sundays; splitting already thin
rations into the most meager of portions in order to feed children born
from predatory priests. These were all signs of the religious authority
gures barring access to the most immediate of resources: the land.
Because the problem was man-made, Ruzzante gured that men could
correct it and so he pitched his plan to Cardinal Marco Cornaro. From this
perspective, the room inside the Villa Barco where Ruzzante planted
himself for the address was the dominant territory, ground zero, insofar
as the dominating gure of the Cardinal occupied it on that special
occasion. Ruzzantes performance, then, embodied the Deleuzo-
Guattarian concept of territorial counter-point.
Deleuze and Guattari have suggested that territorial counter-points
produced melodic landscapes. Such a product is not a melody associated
with a landscape; the melody itself is a sonorous landscape in counterpoint
to the virtual landscape (318). The virtual landscape in this case was the
ideal humanist projection of everyday life constructed by the Villa Barco.
We can therefore unravel another paradox of Ruzzantes theatre: the
scenographic function of his dialect and frank, direct speech. How does
the sonority of his speaking construct a visual eld? How can his singing at
the end of the Seconda Oratione display the unweeded garden that Padua
had become? By proposing a territorial counter-point to the rhythm of life
mandated by religious laws and broken republican governmentality,
Ruzzantes monologues and other modes of address unveiled the land-
scape that the walls around the Villa Barco, or the Palazzo Ducale for that
matter, kept hidden from view.
Ruzzantes acts of taking place amounted to the production of his own
territory within a privileged site and the erection of a counter-politia
intended to overwrite the private desires that trumped the needs of the
many. When he addressed the audience with his Lettera giocosa, the
territory of Ruzzantes theatre constructed a critical distance between
himself and the audience. Critical distance is a relation based on matters
of expression. It is a question of keeping at a distance the forces of chaos
knocking at the door (320). From Ruzzantes point of view, the forces of
FINALE: THE RADICAL, THE UPROOTED, AND ART THAT BAROQUES 147
chaos damaging his beloved Padua in the 1520s came not from nature but
from the agents of the Venetian Republic and the Catholic Church, whose
various systems of order produced nothing but misery. Muir cites a speech
made by a local Paduan in 1509 that corroborates this claim of mine.
Against the picture of benevolent republicanism painted by the inuential
Venetian Gasparo Contarini, this Paduan claims that, In that city of
Padua, which should be the city of Paduans, no part remains for them
[ . . . ]. Nothing is ours anymore, but everything has been extorted and
torn from our hands by these Venetians (Muir, Republicanism? 148).
As Deleuze and Guattari put it, How very important it is, when chaos
threatens, to draw an inatable, portable territory (Deleuze and Guattari,
A Thousand Plateaus 320). Such were those monologues, dialogues,
letters, and poetic calls for reform offered by Ruzzante and other, now
anonymous, Paduan spokespeople. Works such as Lettera giocosa and the
two Orationi were portable territories that Ruzzante could inate by
haranguing audience members in his dialect and then deate and carry
over to the next house where he would perform. Each individual perfor-
mance enacted a specically Paduan refrain.
FINALE: THE RADICAL, THE UPROOTED, AND ART

THAT BAROQUES
Numerous concrete dwellings and concepts of home emerge through an

historico-philosophical study of Ruzzantes theatre practice. Frequently,
Ruzzantes dialogues, and even some of his works that might register as
more traditional plays (with a plot, multiple characters, and so on), fea-
tured a character who had been displaced from his home. In the Moschetta,
Ruzzante fought to win back the heart of his lover whose empty stomach
has led her to other men. Unfortunately, he ends up locked out of his own
house while his lover and one of those other men have sex and mock him.
As a soldier in the Reduce, Ruzzantes conscription into the army destroys
any semblance of a stable life and, even when he nally returns to his
house, the scars of the horrible scenes from the battleeld leave him with a
permanent sense of disorientation. Then there is the one remaining sketch
from Beta that features three houses standing side by side, thus drawing
attention to, among other things, the ways in which local Paduans nego-
tiated the complicated relationship between public and private space,
between quotidian, civic performance and domestic politia.
In addition to these formal attributes that run through Ruzzantes

works and spring to life through an aesthetic and theatrical act of creation,
historical and material places such as the Palazzo Ducale, Ca Trevisan,
and the Villa Barco, accompany each of his performances. The merger of
the aesthetic dimension of the home, which appears repeatedly as an
insecure interiority left open to the exterior not only by windows but by
social crises, and the historical dimension of the private house, which
became the locale for the political act of taking place, produces a tension
between Ruzzantes mobility and his rootedness. Forced into a kind of
perpetual mobility by the demands placed on itinerant acting troupes
during the sixteenth century, Ruzzante also worked to root himself and
thrive wherever he was invited by inating his portable territory. To phrase
this claim as a question: is there anything radical about Ruzzantes theatre
practice? Was this Paduan performer a kind of dissident? Did his theatre
practice have any impact on the numerous social injustices plaguing his
constituents?
The idea of radicality itself presents a problem. In the present day, the
radical is one who ings him or herself to the fringes of the acceptable. The
radical is the avant-garde, the marching frontlines of a politically conscious
art movement. But, as Raymond Williams reminds us, the radical was once
something entirely different. Its earliest usage was linked to its etymolo-
gical grounding: thus, in Italian (via Latin), radicare was (and still is) to
root (Williams 251252). In that framework, dogma can be radical
because it is the set of foundational beliefs that grounds a religious sect
to its Faith, but an innovator or liminoid individual, pace Victor Turner,
carving out new means of expression is something altogether different.
Instead of grounding anything, those innovators clash with dogma and
seek to set a new course through whatever practice in which he or she
engages. I argue that, in a peculiar way, Ruzzante belongs to the oldest
meaning of radical. He roots, thereby setting foundations that will support
a territory in which he can dwell. In the scenographic and scenobotanical
dimensions of his theatre practice, Ruzzante sews (and sows) himself to
the land of his birth, Padua. Thus, whenever and wherever Ruzzante took
place, he rooted himself and inated around himself his portable territory,
thereby reclaiming either land for Padua or a freedom of movement that
belonged to a way of life that Padua had once extolled.
Yet this rooting that made Ruzzante radical, in the sense of radicare,
doubled as a gesture that indexed the uprooting of all that Ruzzante held
sacred. Ruzzantes acts of taking place were conditioned by a world turned
upside down. Not accidentally, this very image appeared in the Prima
Oratione when Ruzzante told the Cardinal that, even if he had the power to
choose, he would never take the job of Pope since he would not want to be the
master of this whole reversal world (Ruzante, Teatro 1194).29 Ruzzante
painted the same picture again in the Seconda Oratione when he explained
that, no matter what, man, woman, and all the reversal world would
collaborate to ensure that all necessary natural events come to fruition, even
when the event seemed unnatural like the onset of freezing weather in the
middle of August (1208).30 In the prologue to his play LAnconitana
(c.1534), Ruzzante discussed with his audience the importance of loving
one another during times of war because without love no animal in the
whole upside down world would ever be fruitful, and therefore everything
would disappear (Ruzante, LAnconitana 4041).31 And the phrase appeared
in its most insidious invocation coming from the mouth of Bilora, the char-
acter from the dialogue of the same name, whose anger as a cuckold drives him
to murder an upper-class Venetian man onstage. In that performance, perhaps
the only one to display a murder onstage at any time during the sixteenth
century (with the possible exception of Shakespeares Julius Caesar in
1599), the main character worried that his lover and his nemesis had
conspired to turn everything upside down on him and eventually suc-
cumbed to his worry and descended into the mad rage that led to the
murder (Ruzante, Teatro 574). Whenever Beolco rolled out that picture
of the world upside down, the image designated a state of affairs that
caused all certainty to dissolve beneath uncertainty, all permanence to
cede to impermanence, and every rooted belief to fall out of the very
ground in which it was lodged.
According to Jos Antonio Maravall, this image of the upside down world
lay at the heart of the culture of the baroque. He seized on the image because
if one [could] speak of the world upside down it [was] because it [could] be
right-side up (Maravall 152). The view of the world arose with a type of
historical consciousness that Maravall found in seventeenth-century Spain
where the social disturbances certain groups underwent in their position
and function created a feeling of instability, which translated into a view of a
staggering disorder (152). This same worldview accommodates Ruzzantes
afnity with the peasants who had become displaced in the rst few decades of
the 1500s after Venetian merchants shifted their attentions from sea routes to
land holdings and began to acquire land in the Veneto at extremely low cost
because famine and drought had forced the laborers who owned that land to
sell. The peasants who had built their identities on the land itself lost those
identities when they sold the farms their families had worked for decades.
Ruzzantes peculiar act of taking place that simultaneously enacted a rooting
within the innermost private spaces and registered an uprooting of a rural way
of life would be, in Maravalls terms, a baroque phenomenon.
Baroque it was, but in the case of Ruzzante and the view of the world
his theatre practice makes visible, Maravalls thesis does not go far enough.
For Ruzzante, the upside down world was not simply a reminder that
things had once been right-side up. For him, the new order of things
obliterated any notion of a world right-side up. The images of the reversal
world offered by Ruzzante stemmed from an even more complicated and
topsy-turvy concept of snaturale, discussed in Chapter 3. Invoked to
identify the overtaking of Paduas nature by Venetian culture, snaturale
also marked the rejection from the earth of everything that was meant to
exist there, including Beolco/Ruzzante himself since his theatre practice
had roots in Paduan territory. In Beolcos scenography of the world
turned upside-down, the more permanent and necessary ones link to
the land, the more tenuous and superuous that link became.32
As Maravalls theory suggested, it is possible that the appearance of
the upside down world throughout Ruzzantes works registered a type
of budding historical consciousness in the performer. Following
Theodor W. Adorno, I dene that consciousness as that thinking
which was concentrated in the indispensable reection on what
[was] and what [was] no longer possible, on the clear insight into
techniques and materials and how they t together (Adorno, On
Tradition 81). Those techniques were the specic disciplinary prac-
tices enforced by ecclesiastical law and Venetian Republican overreach
that Ruzzante pointed out and attempted to reform in the Prima
Oratione, and the materials were the lives and bodies of a specic
swath of the population on whose behalf Ruzzante addressed the
Cardinal.
What makes Ruzzantes theatre and even his historical consciousness
baroque is not, however, simply the visual schema one can analyze within
his scenography; rather, the baroque dimension of Ruzzantes perfor-
mances emerges by thinking through his entire theatre practice, his sce-
nobotanical theatre practice, as an historical objectile. To treat Ruzzantes
life and works as a bundled and static object, sutured in place by the
collated and bound texts of all his works, is to stabilize a much more
dynamic historical process. To re-animate his life and works, to excavate
the complex spatial multiplicity of theatres within theatres and gardens
within gardens embedded there, and to understand Ruzzantes signature

method of acting out by tactically taking place, one must stitch together a
wily assortment of historical sources. By collecting the rst-person
accounts of Carnevale parades, the clothes on the marching performers,
the patches on sleeves, the spatial layouts of palaces and villas, and the
gestures of reform produced by Ruzzantes letters and orations, it is
possible to inject movement back into Ruzzante-as-historical-subject.
That moving subject, who is also the object of analysis here, becomes
the Baroque objectile.
Deleuze theorized the objectile as the density from which erupted the
baroque point of view:
The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold
in other words, to a relation of form-matterbut to a temporal modulation
that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a
continuous development of form. [ . . . ] The object here is manneristic, not
essentializing: it becomes an event. (Deleuze, The Fold 19)
To triangulate these moving objects that have become free of their spatial
molds, Deleuze implemented a line of thought that lead him to the
formula something = x (anamorphosis), cited in the previous chapter
(20). Again, through this formulation, any point of view becomes a
place, a position, a site, a linear focus, or a space of unfolding (19). The
baroque point of view is not something that someone possesses but rather
an active milieu at which one arrives. The point of view is not what varies
with the subject, at least in the rst instance; it is, to the contrary, the
condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamor-
phosis) (20).
This metamorphosis shimmers within Ruzzantes scenographic (de)terri-
torialization(s). After Ruzzante marched into the Palazzo Ducale or into the
Villa Barco, he put his root down. Once planted, by way of the Paduan
dialect, Ruzzante delimited a separate space for himself within the private
space of the home in which he performed. This spatial production unfolded a
viewpoint that, frankly, no member of his audience wanted to see or to
occupy for themselves. The viewpoint he produced within those spaces
revealed an entire territory, a melodic landscape that produced a dissonant
counter-point for the benet or discomfort (depending on how one per-
ceives it) of those in attendance, a cutting satire, a Ha-Ha, a redesigned
spalliere a verdure. Through his direct addresses, a line of sight or linear
focus opened out onto the world beyond the urban space of Venice proper
or the massive wall surrounding, for example, Caterina Cornaros villa. From
Beolcos subject position as Ruzzante and through the viewpoint he opened
through this theatre practice, one sees the ejection of peasants from the land
they worked, the lives of enforced sobriety in which even the permitted times
for eating were prescribed by absent authority gures, in short, an expansive
vista of a world transgured by Church and State powers. In addition to
opening that viewpoint, Ruzzante also attempted to create a new one, one
that depicted a utopian world modeled on the seven points of reform offered
in Prima Oratione. Of course, that utopia never materialized because, from
the subject position of Cardinal Marco Cornaro and those in power, the
transguration of the world proposed by Ruzzante was simply laughable.
For us in the present, however, what precisely do these performances
make visible? By considering the events of Ruzzantes taking place as the
aggregate or collage of his theatrical offerings, I argue that the name for
Ruzzantes brand of theatre deserves not a noun but a verb, and, more than
that, an innitive verb capable of registering the innite potential of his
theatres effect. Perhaps to produce-alternate-viewpoints, or, as I have
been saying in this chapter, to take-place, or even to baroque. With the
latter, I would add that Ruzzante did not make baroque art; rather, the
historical conditions of the art made him and, as such, his art baroque.
NOTES
1. For information on these troupes and Ruzzantes participation in them, see
Ruzante, Teatro 1590. The standard reference for the Compagnie della
Calza is Molmenti, Venice, its individual growth from the earliest beginnings
to the fall of the republic, trans. Horatio F. Brown (Chicago: A. C. McClurg
& Co., 19061908). The Companies of the Sock distinguished them-
selves from each other in a variety of ways, one of which was by wearing
uniquely decorated stockings. They performed during Carnevale, the Italian
festive period preceding lent. Carne-vale, roughly translated meats ok,
was a time for excessive eating and celebration before the austere and
contemplative weeks leading to Easter.
2. Ruzzante appears as a spokesperson in the Prima Oratione (First Oration,
c.1521). To that task he adds the function of religious reformer in the
Seconda Oratione (Second Oration, c.1528). He appeared as a soldier in
the Reduce (Veteran, c.15091517), the full title of which was Parlamento
de Ruzante che iera vegn de campo (Dialogue of Ruzante who just returned
from the eld). The date for this piece is uncertain. For a tracing to 1520, see
NOTES 153
Emilio Lovarini, Studi sul Ruzzante e la letteratura pavana, a cura di G.

Folena (Padova: Editrice Antenore, 1965). For Zorzis different date, see
Ruzante, Teatro 1361. For Carrolls synthesis of Lovarini and Zorzi, plus
others, see Carroll, Angelo 5254. Finally, swindler denotes the general
function Ruzzante plays in Pastorale (Pastoral, c.1517) and Moschetta
(c.1528). In the latter he attempts to steal back his lover who had been
stolen from him by a soldier. On the title, Moschetta, Carroll offers the
following gloss: moschetto is a pejorative term for incorrect Italian of dialect
speakers attempting to use the standard language based on Florentine.
Mosca means y, explaining the prologistas declaration that if he tried to
speak in the Florentine way, he would have ies. The term also recalls the
Italian expression, a stful of ies, that is, the results of a useless action
(Carroll, Angelo Beolco 39). The play also appears with the title Posh Talk in
Three Renaissance Comedies, trans. Christopher Cairns (Lewiston, NY: E.
Mellen, 1991), which seems to reect an appeal to an English-speaking
audience rather than any linguistic tie to the Italian title. For Zorzis notes
on this subject, see Ruzante, Teatro 13891390.
3. Carroll, Angelo Beolco 16; Emilio Menegazzo and Paolo Sambin, Nuove
Esplorazioni Archivistiche per Angelo Beolco e Alvise Cornaro, in Italia
Medioevale e Umanistica, VII (Roma: Antenore, 1964), 229385.
4. Vercellini and Vercelloni 23: The ower beds (roses, violets, lilies, jasmine,
hyacinths, and lilacs) are laid out inside the entrance and, behind them,
there is a lawn with a fountain and pavilions. Other beds with herbs are laid
out alongside a labyrinth and a bathing pavilion. Other sectors include an
orchard, a kitchen garden, a viridarium [a garden of evergreens used for
shade and to attract birds], and a sh pond. In medieval European gardens
such as this one, water lent a note of exotic renement because it was
particularly associated with Islamic gardens.
5. Tutti vestiti con veste di veludo cremexin a meneghe dogal e di altra seda
e color a becheti, e berete in testa chi di raso chi di veludo; il viso con naxi.
Et cadauno havea do servidori avanti con un torzo in man per uno, vestiti
da vilan. Era uno di loro con una vesta doro, et haveano ass virt:
prima buffoni Zuan Polo e altri; item Ruzante padoan; altri vestiti a la
vilanesca che saltavano e ballavano benissimo; et sei vestiti da vilani putati
[giovanotti] che cantavano villote, et caduan havea cose rustical varie in
man, come zape, badili, etc., pale, vanghe, rastelli etc., item trombe, pifari,
pive et trombe squarzade. Et questi dteno una volta [fecero un giro] per
Piaza, poi la sera con li torzi impizadi [accesi] andno per la terra e a
hore una di notte veneno in Palazo di Doxe, in corte, a mostrar le soe
virt. Poi andno in Procuratia da sier Marco da Molin procurator, che
feva un festin, poi in diversi luoghi, a la n veneno a cena a lhostaria de
la Simia.
6. A standard read of carnevalesque disorder, la Bakhtin, might suggest that,

for an allotted amount of weeks, licentious theatricality overthrows the
normalcy and regimented order of the status quo. Through that lens, the
parade deterritorializes the urban space of Venice as it makes its way to the
Palazzo Ducale. The bright crimson outts of many involved in the parade
mimic the ofcial garb of the doge, thus announcing visually to all who
would lay eyes upon them that the fools are now in charge. The collection of
peasant tools (hoes, shovels, stakes, spades, rakes) de-urbanize the city as
those utilitarian hallmarks of the rural provinces invade the stone island, and,
once there, cease to function as farming implements and begin to function
as weapons. Led by aming torches, those weapons and the people that bear
them march toward the doge. The sonorous atonality of the mob scores the
movement through the city and forces dissonance upon a normally well-
tuned, well-policed Venice. This, however, does not seem to apply here, as
my analysis shows.
7. Pi di una lettera in un senso proprio, si tratta di un divertimento umoresco,
composto sul modello di un sprolico, ossia del monologo teatrale.
8. Paduan: Mo ben, a ve priego, che marebute na , ald, a vu e messiere
Franesco Don. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Bene, vi prego, e intanto faccio
riverenza, sentite, a voi e a messer Francesco Don. English (my translation):
Well, I thank you all, and I bow to all of you and to Mister Francesco
Don, you hear me.
9. Paduan: E per no ve sprolicare, a ve vu vegnire in sul fato de la faenda de
la vostra pussion, cha me diessi de dare laltro diazo, quando a iera
chivelundena da vu, quenze con vu, in ca vostra, in la cmbera [ . . . ].
Italian (trans. Zorzi): E per non fare troppi preamboli, voglio venir subito a
parlarvi della faccenda della vostra possessione, che diceste di darmi laltro
giorno, quandero cost da voi, l con voi, a casa vostra, nella vostra camera
[ . . . ].
10. Paduan: A ghhe un bon cortelazo, e da cavare foss a he un bon baile
ben in manego, che, com p a l uvero, dagnora p el sta fremo e
stachente in lo tugo, e m scantina gamba, cha tegno fremamen, sa la
laoro mi narcolto, che a l ve render p e buter megio e p de vuogia,
che labia fato ancora co [o]mo laoraore che ghabia met man. Italian
(trans. Zorzi): Per quanto credo che voi ne resterete contenta, perch io
sono ben fornito di arnesi per mondare. Ho un buon coltellaccio, e per
scavare fossati ho un buon badile, ben saldo nel manico, che, quanto pi lo
adopero, tanto pi sta fermo e insso nel bocciuolo, senza scantinare un
istante. Sicch sono certo che, se la lavoro io per un raccolto, essa vi render
di pi e butter meglio e di miglior voglia, di quanto non abbia ancora
fatto con altro lavorante che vi abbia messo mano.
NOTES 155
11. Ruzante, Teatro 1591: La simbologia agricola dei soci della Calza si riferiva
genericamente allhortus conclusus delle rafnate delizie e virt, nelle quali
essi intendevano appartarsi per distinguersi dal vulgo profano.
12. We even learn from Zorzi that the company name Ortolani, along with its
appended signicance, may have been Ruzzantes invention. Zorzi alludes
to that idea when he writes that Il sovrasenso analogico con la sfera degli atti
e degli organi sessuali probabilmente unaggiunta del Ruzante, che si
inserisce nel gusto corrente per il senso equivico. (The overriding analogue
between the garden of delights and the sexual organs is probably an addition
of Ruzantes, who ts it into the taste of the times for its equivocal mean-
ing.) Ruzante, Teatro 1591.
13. See Carroll, Angelo Beolco 4. The phrase crushing defeat is Carrolls, but it
is the most accurate description I can think of. The defeat at Agnadello
represented a major turning point in Venices history and revealed the extent
to which all other dominant powers on the Italian Peninsula and in Europe
desired the land occupied by the tiny island Republic, whose size was
inversely proportionate to the sway it held over that part of the world
from roughly 12001500.
14. Paduan: Perch a no vorae m che i solfezaore del mondo aesse che dire, a no
vuogio fare con fa ierti cogmbari, che mostra de saere e de avere stugi, e co i
manda na boletina o na scritura a qualcun, i ghe favela da zenon, i ghe
favela tosco con se fa in Fiorentinara, e da spagnaruolo, a la politana, e a la
slongarina e a la soldarina, con fa i sold. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Perch io
non vorrei mai che i mormoratori di questo mondo avessero di che dire, non
voglio fare come fanno certi cogliomberli, che mostrano di sapere e di aver
studiato, e quando mandano un biglietto o uno scritto a qualcuno, gli parlano
ricercato, gli parlano toscano come si fa in Fiorentineria, oppure spagnuolo, o
alla napoletana, allungherese o alla soldatesca, come fanno i soldati.
15. Selfridge-Field, Song and Season 48: Strict rules governed conduct of all
members of the government. Among the most important were that nobles
were required to converse with their councils in Venetian dialect (records
were maintained in Latin or Italian) and that nobles were not permitted to
correspond with foreign ministers or ambassadors on pain of death.
16. Paduan: Mo a ho vogi, e s mha sempre m pias, favelare a la pavana com
se fa in sul Pavan, na bota, perch l el p sbraoso favelare che zape Talia, elo.
Italian (trans. Zorzi): Ho voluto invece, e mi sempre piaciuto, parlare alla
pavana, come si fa nel Pavano, certo, perch il pi e vivo franco parlare che
sappia lItalia, questo.
17. Paduan: Mo ben, a ve priego, che marebute na , ald, a vu e messiere
Franesco Don. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Bene, vi prego, e intanto faccio
riverenza, sentite, a voi e a messer Francesco Don.
18. A bit more on the subject: the vulgar language of Ruzante whose plays
frequently employed words such as cancaro (canker or pox) or pota (twat),
remained incredibly popular: so popular that Galileo Galilei, a long-time
resident in nearby Padua, collected Ruzantes work and read it aloud to his
friends. By the eighteenth-century, Luigi Riccoboni claimed that Ruzante
had introduced to the stage all of the most barbarous languages in Italy.
Despite all the states efforts to control it, foul language remained as popular
as ever (Horodowich 209).
19. Sebbene il coinvolgimento di Ruzante fosse incero [ . . . ]. Qualsiasi ne fosse
stata la ragione, Ruzante non rappresent pi a Venezia e si ritir presso il
circolo raccolto a Padova intorno ad Alvise Cornaro.
20. See also Will Daddario and Joanne Zerdy, When You Are What You Eat:
Ruzzante and Historical Metabolism, Food and Theatre on the World Stage,
eds. Dorothy Chansky and Ann Folino White (New York: Routledge, 2015)
21.
21. Paduan: N gnian guard che am vogi mandare un preve, n uno de quigi
da le enture insofran, che favela per gramego o in avogare orentinesco, de
quigi, siu, che se ciama dotore [ . . . ]. Italian (trans. Zorzi): N dovete far
caso al fatto che non abbiamo voluto mandare un prete o uno di quei tali dalle
cinture color zafferano, che parlano secondo la grammatica o in linguaggio
orentino, di quel tali, sapete, che se chiamano dottori; perch, se essi sono do-
torri, ci sono io che ne ho tre delle torri.
22. Paduan: Mo a me fagi ben po quaso cagare da riso, quando che i dise che a
si grande omo. Mo no ve vegi, morbo i magne? A si vu ben pzolo omo, i no l
sa dire? A si un gran pzolo, e no grandomo. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Poi mi
fan quasi cacare dal ridere, quando dicono che siete un granduomo. Ma non
vi vedono, che il morbo li mangi? Voi siete piuttosto un piccolo uomo, non
sanno dirlo? Siete un gran piccolo, e non un granduomo.
23. Paduan: I sa se lom dire che a si Sgardenale, e che a dir Sgardenale el ven a
dire quigi che ten su leporte del Paraso, che nu a i ciamn cancari. E si gi ha
m vez, igi, Paraso, n le porte, n quigi che i dise cha si vu, che le ten su,
che se ciama cancari, a vorae che l cancaro me magnasse mi; e se mo lha
vez, a vorae che l cancaro i magnasse igi. Deh, Sgardenale, e no el cancaro,
che assegi cav gi uogi [ . . . ]. Mo a ve l dir: tanto ven a dire Sgardenale com
a dire un gran segnore rico, che se d a sto mondo piasere, e com el muore
(perch tuti a morn), se ben vu a no a fato meassa ben, tamentre and de
longo in Paraso, e se la porta pass, a la sgardene, e intr entro per ogne via
e per ogno busco. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Essi sanno solo dire che siete
Cardinale, e che dicendo Cardinale, se dice uno di quelli che tengono su le
porte del Paradiso, che noi chiamiamo cancheri. Vorrei che il canchero man-
giasse me, se quelli lhan mai visto, il Paradiso, o le porte, o quelli che dicono
siete voi [ . . . ]. Ora ve lo dir: Cardinale vuol dire un gran signore ricco, che
NOTES 157
in questo mondo si d piacere, e che quando muore (perch tutti moriamo), se

pure non avete fatto troppo bene, andate diritto in Paradiso, e se la porta
sprangata, voi la scardinate, e entrate dentro per ogni via e per ogni buco.
24. See Scardinre, Dizionario etimologico Online, 9 October 2015 < http://
www.etimo.it/?cmd=id&id=15659&md=c5682c492a42cdbb4f56f57c2d
5330c3 >
25. This was also a clever reversal of the parable in the Bible that tells of the
Devils attempt to break Jesuss fast in the desert by trying to convince Jesus
to turn stones into bread. From Ruzzantes perspective, the Cardinal had
turned bread into stone.
26. Paduan: Quod a natura dato, el se p ass scoezare a fare che l no supia;
perch, con una cossa de essere, el pare che uomeni e femene e tuto el roverso
mondo se ghe a meta e aia a fare che la supie. [ . . . ] che a son vegn a dire, che
com un se de azelare, el se azelerae de aosto. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Ci che
dato dalla natura, si pu ben cercare di fare che non sia; perch, quando una
cosa deve essere, pare che uomini e donne e tutto luniverso mondo si mettano e
aiutino a fare che essa sia. [ . . . ] che quando uno si deve gelare, si gelerebbe
dagosto.
27. Paduan: Dme la man e prometme che unaltra a vigner a tuore el
spatao. Di v ai. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Datemi la mano e promettetemi
che unaltra volta verr a prendere leditto. Dio vi aiuti.
28. Paduan: A vu ben. A vu fare adesso quel che nhe fato z p dun ano:
vuogio cantare una canzon, e fare an mi chial z alegrisia, con se far in
Paraso [ . . . ]. Italian (trans. Zorzi): Voglio fare adesso quel che non ho fatto
gi da pi di un anno: voglio cantare una canzone, e fare anchio allegria
quaggi, come lass in Paradiso [ . . . ].
29. Paduan: E com a foss morto, vu, a sarissi deruin del mondo, e s aess
scap su quela bromba. Che vossu mo p fare da ingiari n de vescov?
Mi, cuss poverom co a son, a no torae de esser norto e esser st papa. Che
papa la merda! Perdonme, amp: a dighe che a no torae da essere
Segnore del roerso mondo. Italian (trans. Zorzi): E quando foste morto,
voi avreste nito di stare al mondo, e ci avreste fatto questo guadagno. Che
vorreste pi faverne di cinghiali o di vescovati? Io stesso, poveruomo come
sono, non accetterei di esser morto e di esser stato papa. Che papa la
merda! Perdonatemi, via, dico che non accetterei di esser Signore dellu-
niverso mondo. (And when you die, you nish up here on earth . . . .
What would you like more, to be a wild boar or a bishop? Me, the poor
man that I am, I would not accept being dead or being Pope. The Pope,
shit! Oh, excuse me, Im just saying that I wouldnt want to be the
Master of this whole reversal world.)
30. For that which is given by nature, just try to do otherwise; after all, when
something must be, it seems that men and women and all the reversal world
get down and help make it be. [ . . . ] that when something must freeze, itll
freeze in August. For Paduan and Italian, see Note 26 above.
31. [ . . . ] e tanto p che se ne foesse Amore; vache, piegore, scrove, cavale, n altra
biestia del roverso mondo farae m furto. ([ . . . ] since if it werent for Love
neither cows, nor sheep, nor sows, nor mares, nor any other creature in the
whole upside down world would ever be fruitful.)
32. For a different take on snaturale linked more to the linguistic dimension of
Ruzzantes theatre, see Nancy Dorothy Derso, Ruzante: The Paradox of
Snaturalit, Yearbook of Italian Studies (1971): 142155.
CHAPTER 6
The Enscenement of Self and the Jesuit

Teatro del Mondo
Whereas Ruzzantes scenobotanical acts of taking place worked to de- and

re-territorialize his Padua home by foiling the assault upon nature and the
peasantry waged by dominant powers in the Veneto during the sixteenth
century, Jesuit psychagogical dramaturgy performed a similar act of taking
place; one, however, that reacted to the immanent threat not of a territor-
ial but of a spiritual and spatial displacement occurring at the same time.
This displacement consisted of a simple but damning movement from
inside to outside of the Churchs fold and resulted from both worldly
enticements, such as those of the theatre, and also alternative spiritual
commandments, such as those voiced by Martin Luther and set into
practice by other Reformers. To counter this displacement, somewhat
counter-intuitively, the Jesuits produced their own highly theatrical
method of conversion, the goal of which was to reposition and enscene
each individual squarely before the eyes of God. Unlike Ruzzantes theatre
practice, which took place in the name of Padua and for the sake of the
multitudes who called Padua home, Jesuit dramaturgical practice worked
primarily at the level of the individual and, in essence, made of that
individual a self-reexive performer within Gods world play so as to
ensure salvation of each and every sheep. The complex mechanisms of
this performance, the context of a theatre of the world that houses it, the
contradictory nature of a theatrical conversion technique produced by (at
rst glance) arch anti-theatricalists, and the effects of such a performance
on the idea of a self form the content of this chapter.

160 6 THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO
To approach, ascertain, and develop that content, I turn rst to the

practice of garden thinking. With Ruzzante, such thinking produced orid
variations of taking place on the material level. With the Jesuits, however,
such a focus on the material earth beneath Venetians feet gives way to
something else entirely. In place of the Ortolani, the Zardinieri, the
spallieri a verdure, and the multiple kinds (sexual and not) of hortus
conclusus, as well as the worldly needs of peasants and other members of
the lower classes, this chapter pursues the Jesuit theatre of the world as a
site of spiritual dehiscence. Jesuits in Venice during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries tended to the dehiscence of their crop and their
fold.
The word dehiscence names an act of splitting, of gaping open. Afxed
to botanical events, dehiscence marks the dispersal of seeds that occurs
when certain plants, having reached maturity, rupture along an inbuilt
seam. The plants structure collapses upon splitting, thus ending that
plants life while simultaneously ensuring the dispersal of seeds and pro-
mising the future of the species. The event of botanical dehiscence, then,
provokes a consideration of a death that coincides with a (re-)birth. The
term itself has migrated into the anatomical, biological, and medical
sciences, where it most commonly denotes the rupture of an incision
post-surgery. That phenomenon loses its purchase in this particular con-
versation because it has no dialectical tension; the burst incision wreaks
havoc but does not lead to any re-birth. But the subset in the medical
terminology of Superior Semicircular Canal Dehiscence, an opening of the
bone above the inner ear canal leading to vertigo and oscillopsia, maintains
the visceral impact of wound dehiscence while also harkening to the
physical disorientation produced within the human body, a disorientation
that, while destabilizing, could potentially lead to a new way of moving
through the world. I conjure this obscure medical nomenclature alongside
the botanical terminology because, together, the dehiscent rupture-cum-
rebirth of plant and inner ear eerily mimics the spiritual de- and re-con-
struction enabled by Jesuit conversion tactics.
By thinking through the dehiscent nature of Jesuit spiritual conver-
sion (that is, the way in which its affective assault on the individual
forces a visceral yawn within the psyche of the subject) I intend to
reveal the interplay of discipline and excess at work within this more
obscure form of Jesuit theatricality while also guiding the larger con-
versation toward a confrontation with baroque performances of self. En
route to that discussion, I introduce a compelling analogue to
THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 161
Ruzzante in the gure of Giovanni Domenico Ottonelli S.J., whose

sauntering throughout the Italian peninsula mimics the pedagogically
focused wanderings of peripatetic philosophers. Whereas Ruzzante
wrote plays, Ottonelli wrote art criticism, and yet within this criticism
hides an intricate performance score and a conceptual entrance into the
world of Jesuit conversion.
Ottonelli was born c.1584 and died in Florence in 1670. Italian scho-
lars and students of Jesuit history paint him in a stark light as an anti-
theatricalist concerned with the morally damning entertainment of thea-
trical performance in the seventeenth century. Joseph Connorss essay,
Chi era Ottonelli? (Who was Ottonelli?) dresses the Jesuit in his usual
garb, so to speak. Ottonelli, he writes, does not appear as a theologian
or as a writer, nor as the mythic Jesuit that the theoreticians of art love to
imagine, but as a man of action, a guerrilla waging war against the theatre,
and especially against the role played by women (29).1 In this light,
Ottonelli resembles Stephen Gosson (15541624) and William Prynne
(16001669), the ercest critics of the English theatre at the time.
Prynne, like Ottonelli, was contrary to all the evils of society: dance,
dice [gambling], comedies, lascivious pictures, licentious behavior, prac-
tical jokes, toasts [with alcohol], long hair, curls, country romances,
effeminate music, and so on, all of which are pagan pass times (30).2
Connors goes as far as to make the equation, Prynne is the English
Ottonelli, and vice versa (30).3
Support for such a claim comes from the anecdotal evidence and
archival scraps scattered throughout Italian literature and Jesuit historical
sources. For example, [w]e spy [Ottonelli] in Catania in 1635, where he
interrupted a comedy representing an obscene act. After he moved on
from there, [w]e nd him then in Palermo together with another Jesuit
(G.B. Carminta) intent on condemning a poor actor to prison for having
staged an obscene gesture (29).4
In addition to Connorss ndings, those of Michael Zampelli S.J. place
Ottonelli in the anti-theatricalist camp and offer additional historical con-
textualization. In his essay, Lascivi Spettacoli: Jesuits and Theatre (from
the Underside), he writes the following:
The years after the Council of Trent saw an increase in written hostilities
towards the Italian theatre. That the theatre had become a professional
enterprise increasingly visible in piazze, stanze [private homes], and other
performance venues remains the most important explanation of this rise in
antitheatrical sentiment. Simply put, after 1563 there is a vibrant profes-

sional theatre of which to be critical. (552)
In particular, Zampelli cites Jesuits like Francisco Arias (15331605) and

Paolo Comitoli (15451626) who criticized this burgeoning theatre pro-
fession as a bastion of moral depravity. They were wary of female bodies
onstage, the expression of lascivious sentiment, and numerous individuals
gathered in one place for reasons other than religious worship or spiritual
reection. For his own part, Ottonelli was not shy about sharing his
thoughts on these problems of public theatrical performance, and in
Della Christiana Moderatione Del Theatro Libro (Of the Christian
Moderation of Theatre), the work on which I will focus in this chapter,
actors received the full thrust of his scorn. Specically, Ottonelli condemns
actors conduct on and off the stage, their tendencies to lead sexually
promiscuous lives, and their habits of stultifying the common people,
thereby keeping them from becoming virtuous imitators of Christ.
Given this focus, Ottonellis work, published in 1652, appears at rst
glance as the epitome of Jesuit anti-theatrical treatises. As the book
unfolds, however, it takes on the character of a theatrical apologia, or a
defense of a very specic type of acting. That is, I believe there is more to
Ottonellis stage fright than meets the eye. Compare, for example, the
following two excerpts. The rst from a section titled, Il comico osceno
merita desser scacciato dalle citt, e dalle Terr (The obscene actor
deserves to be run out of the city, and from the Earth):
Brother, put an end to the obscene actor; because a dialogue as ugly as that
[from him] has no useful end in terms of your health; indeed it is greatly
injurious, to your health and the health of those around you; therefore they
deserve to be driven out from each land, city, province, and kingdom. (116)5
In this passage, Ottonellis tone is strong and clear. From the actors
mouth spews injurious dialogue that threatens the well-being of the pub-
lic. Yet, in a later section titled Con una breve digressione morale
conferma, che la vita humana una comedia (With a brief moral
digression to conrm that human life is a play), the author writes:
Virtuous and erudite actors are teachers of good morals, and from them you
will frequently hear sentences, that can, like joys, become stored in your
treasure chest of wisdom: similarly, in my opinion, there are those for whom
THE ENSCENEMENT OF SELF AND THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 163
human life was decided upon to be something like a scenic Representation,

or a theatrical spectacle, something one might call a play. (353)6
Here, actors teach good morals and dispense wisdom about the great play
of life. Contradictions such as this one (actors spout lth/actors offer
wisdom) run throughout the entire treatise. As the author of such contra-
dictions, Ottonelli manufactures a polemical guidebook for how to act
virtuously while simultaneously modeling that method for his reader; that
is, Ottonelli is the epitome of the virtuous actor insofar as he has trans-
formed amboyant rhetorical schemas and tales of debauchery into a
treasure chest of wisdom.
The acting for which he advocates, however, has little to do with staged
entertainments; rather, the performance Ottonelli calls for is a pure repre-
sentation of God and a manner of acting in accordance with the Jesuit arm
of the Catholic Church. Ottonellis treatise argues for a specic mode of
living life. He seeks to weed out the obscene actors and to cultivate
virtuous ones. With this turn from onstage performance to the perfor-
mance of everyday life, Ottonellis words conjure the familiar baroque
concept of teatro del mondo (theatre of the world). Referencing rst and
foremost a mode of living, this concept structures the individuals perfor-
mance of everyday life, and in Ottonellis hands it equipped individuals
with the skills they needed to succeed in those performances.
The Jesuit teatro del mondo, in turn, merges with the practice of
pastoral care that I articulated in Chapter 4. Within the theatre of the
world, each individual becomes a patient actor: the subject is guided by
the shepherd; the subject is made aware of the path of God; the subject is
transformed into a subject-object, acting within the pasture of the shepherd
but always beheld by an Outside Eye. The actor is not passive in a pejorative
sense, but is, rather, patient in the philosophical sense of a subjectivity
marked by its ability to be affected as well as by its ability to affect. In the
setting of Valcamonicas execution, the priest upon the scaffold, despite his
crimes that brought him to that place, was made to occupy the subject
position of shepherd-guide. The purpose of his performance of reconcilia-
tion was to open a portal to the sacred realm through which each spectator
was to pass if he or she desired salvation. As eventual subjects within the
Kingdom of God, the individuals in the Piazza San Marco likewise became
subjectivated, each was transformed into the subject of God, and each was
made visible as an actor upon the Venetian stage set by Benedetto Palmio and
the Society of Jesus. Ottonellis manuscript illustrates another dimension
of this transformation to patient actor. More importantly, it offers a window

into the subjectivation process that carries the individual into the moment of
spiritual dehiscence and deposits him into the subject position of virtuous
actor, as Ottonelli calls it.
In other words, Della Christiana Moderatione Del Theatro Libro
presents teatro del mondo from the point of view of the Jesuits in
the seventeenth century. Through this perspective, the theatrical
dimensions of the Jesuit program of reform becomes visible as do the
instrumental uses of the Spiritual Exercises.7 Those Exercises, devel-
oped by Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola some time around 1522, func-
tioned as the primary performance score of conversion and dictated a
specic type of ethical engagement with the world. That ethical
engagement was tantamount to a code of conduct, a mode of self-
governance that each Christian had to learn in order to save her soul
and, consequently, to ensure that the successes one had in this world
would continue in the next one (or that ones shortcomings do not
result in eternal damnation). Nobody could enter the Jesuit teatro del
mondo without converting his or herself into a new kind of subject,
one marked by extreme self-discipline. The Spiritual Exercises taught
and enforced that discipline.
Before delving deeply into Ottonellis virtuous acting and Loyolas
Exercises, several questions arise. What are the unique characteristics of
the Jesuit teatro del mondo? What are its spatial parameters? What are
the mechanics of the process of conversion necessary for gaining access
to the Jesuit theatre of the world? How specically do the Spiritual
Exercises gain one entrance to this theatre of which the sole spectator is
God? Building on the analysis of pastoral power in Chapter 4 and this
introduction to spiritual dehiscence, I will elaborate on the interior/
exterior spatial dynamics of pastoral care by examining different models
of teatro del mondo active in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Venice.
CRITICAL MODELS
The rst model took the form of oating theatres called, believe it or not,
teatri del mondo (theatres of the world). The second was a proposed island
that would be constructed to oat within the basin of Saint Mark and
house diverse theatrical spectacles. An analysis of the aesthetic dimension
of both these structures and their allegorical functions within the Venetian
CRITICAL MODELS 165
landscape helps pave the way to a philosophical and aesthetic understand-

ing of the Spiritual Exercises and Ottonellis treatise.
Lina Padoan Urban offers an image of the oating teatri del mondo as
well as the festivals on the water in Venice for which they were
constructed:
For these festivals on the water [ . . . ] the Compagni [della calza] presented
oating machines or theatres, the so-called teatro del mondo, on which they
had dances, serenades, dinner theatre (usually dialogues). Generally, the appa-
ratuses were vast stages or lofts raised off the ground (soleri), that were adjacent
to and attached to the windows of abutting homes (palazzi) that faced the
Grand Canal or else that stood on Giudecca, and were linked in turn to the
opposite bank of the canal with bridges built on [top of] boats or ships giving
the capacity to cross the Grand Canal or the Giudecca Canal, and on these
[actors performed], quite frequently, skits (momarie). (Urban 488)8
These oating theatres tended to have round oor plans (mirroring the
circularity of the world) as well as porches surrounding the playing spaces
and balustrades on the porches to help keep people from falling into the
water. Built by well-known architects of the day, these structures may have
appeared to Venetians as man-made microcosms of the entire world.
These impressive theatres were frequently used to entertain important
visiting heads of state and attracted the most famous performers of the
day, such as Ruzzante, but they were unlike other Venetian theatre spaces
in the sixteenth century in that they were not always deconstructed
immediately following their use. Andrea Palladio built a teatro del
mondo in 1565 for a production of Antigone, possibly translated by
Luigi Alammani, that remained constructed for some time until it even-
tually succumbed to re, like so many other wooden structures in Venice
before it. The semi-permanence of these teatri del mondo made them the
forerunners of the Tron and Michiel theatres built around 1581. It is
notable but perhaps not surprising that in Venice, a oating city, the rst
theatre structures to survive beyond a one-time use were oating
theatres.9
Writing on the aesthetic singularity of these oating theatres, Gino
Damerini described that which set them apart from the grand architecture
in Venice in the sixteenth century. An absolutely outstanding character-
istic of this dynamic architecture, he wrote, [was] the most absolute
indifference to the outside of the theatres. The theatres [were] the salt.
They [did] not need, on their exteriors, either columns, or peristyles or

timpani. For a long time the standard [was] denitely anti-monumental
(227).10 Damerinis emphasis draws attention away from the eye-catching
faades to the captivating power of the oating theatres interiors. The
oating theatres promised ornate and dynamic inner worlds. Whats more,
the spectacles that unfolded within the teatri del mondo were secret.
Nobody knew details of the interiors before entering the building. Once
inside, however, the microcosm unfolded. Paintings of mythological
scenes and allegories from antiquity, created by such notable artists as
Tintoretto and Veronese, covered every inch of the ceilings and walls
(Urban, Feste 494). The world created through the story of Antigone
or whatever play was featured became the only world for the spectators.
Once wrapped inside, even the fantastic monuments and dramatic views of
Venice faded away.
The second manifestation of the concept of the theatre of the world
came from Alvise Cornaro, Ruzzantes patron, one-time performer with
the Compagnie della Calza, and all-around intellectual dilettante.
Currently tucked away within the les of I Savi alle Acque (the Venetian
Ministry of Water), Cornaros document, Lideale dun teatro alluso de
Romani (The ideal theatre in the style of the Romans), details an
elaborate plan for revitalizing the entire city of Venice through the con-
struction of a complex hydraulic system that will easily be able to conduct
pure and fresh water into fountains throughout city.11 Cornaros system,
however, did not limit itself to the movement of water. The goal of his
project was to revitalize the city morally, intellectually, and spiritually. To
accomplish this, his plan presented an idea for a theatre as the capstone of
the project. The theatre would materialize as a oating island in the Basin
of St Mark. In Cornaros words,
The theatre will be made with large stones and it will be open for all
spectacles and festivities. Entrance will be permitted to all, whereas now
that is not the case. If one wants to go see some celebration by the compagni
de calza, or to hear a play, he or she is not permitted if that person is not of a
certain class. This is not in keeping with what is just and honest, it is partisan.
(Mangini 26)12
The project consisted of what Manfredo Tafuri has called a moralizing

scenography, the function of which was to render Venices brilliance in
its full splendor to Venetian citizens and to visiting foreigners. Tafuri has
CRITICAL MODELS 167
suggested that, [t]he theatre isolated in the water seemed an emblem for
the city of Venice itself: theatre and city displayed their perfection, their
uniqueness. [ . . . ] The lagoon was thus transformed into an ideal gar-
den (Tafuri 157).
The traditions on which Cornaros project rested were primarily classi-
cal. The architect sought to tie Venetian political life back to the res
publica dictated by Roman law, something he planned to accomplish
through a diverse program of events inside his island theatre:
And in such a piazza one will be able to have bears ght with dogs, wild
bulls with men, and similar spectacles: but other than that one will see
[reconstructions of] wars like those this city has fought; it will be a
beautiful thing to see and for visiting foreigners to see [ . . . ] but also
in this same piazza we will easily be able to bring in the water and to let
it out again so as to present beautiful naval battles like they did in Rome.
(cit. Mangini 26)13
The bear baiting and bullghting (caccetorri) were signature Venetian

events during the season of Carnevale, but the reconstruction of battles
was explicitly linked to the Ancient Roman Coliseum. As was the case with
its classical counterpart, Venice would be able to display re-created battles
for the pleasure of visiting guests, thereby showcasing the power of
Venices naval eet.
In addition to its function as a theatre, Cornaro intended his structure
to stand out as a symbol of Venices unique position in the world. What
other city oated on water? What other place boasted such scenographic
vistas? Cornaro knew how to butter-up the Council of Ten whose decision
it would be to go ahead with the plan:
This will be a great spectacle and [present] the most beautiful perspective,
the widest reaching and most diverse [spectacle] that anyone has ever seen
or that anyone could ever see anywhere else in the whole world [ . . . ] there
are no other cities like this one, none as virginal [ . . . a spectacle such as this]
would nominate this city as the capital of the world for its beauty and
strength that no other place could match. (27)14
In the end, however, the governors did not vote in favor of Cornaros
plan. The theatres relatively modest price tag (50,000 ducats15) could not
convince the various councils to sanction either the hydraulic or the

theatrical component of Cornaros vision.
One reason for this refusal may have stemmed from the theatres
symbolic and material redundancy. Was there any need to build a theatre
embedded within an island in the middle of the basin when Venice itself
was a theatre oating in the lagoon? The scenographic quality of the
landscape and the number of theatrical events performed annually by the
government, the various scuole (schools),16 the Church, and the
Compagnie della calza made the city a giant theatre, and its mythic
claim to existence built from years of political autonomy already carved
out a spot for Venice in the imaginations of many nations as a symbolic
epicenter of worldly activity.
Regardless of the fact that Cornaros plan was never actualized, the
proposed theatre and its relationship to Venice as a larger oating theatre
presents another instance of the teatro del mondo concept in action in
Venice during the later sixteenth century. Tafuri made this link when he
wrote that the edice [proposed by Cornaro] becomes a fantastic object,
a theatrical apparition that could be appreciated commodamente or easily
from the greater theatre of the Serenissima, that is to say the Piazzetta
[Piazza San Marco] (Tafuri 148). Were it built, anybody standing
between the two columns in Piazza San Marco would see the oating
theatre and have the opportunity to reect on the larger oating theatre
beneath his or her feetVenice itself.
Indeed, the openness of the theatre to anybody and everybody marks
Cornaros plan as explicitly political. One of the most important aspects of
his plan was that there would be a place for everyone in the theatre. In
Tafuris words:
in [the theatre] everyone would have his place and step, as though God had
given it to him and nature required that everyone should enjoy it. The
theatre, a symbolic place that echoes the larger text of the universe, becomes
the gathering place of all social classes and a place of reection and repre-
sentation, above all, of the natural and untouchable hierarchies that govern
the cosmos and the civil order based on those hierarchies. (145)
Lideale del teatro would have facilitated a renovation of communal and

interpersonal infrastructures (Cornaros hierarchies) in addition to
plumbing and other mechanical systems. Again, however, for a number
of reasons (most likely his allegiance to Padua and lack of internal
ACTUALIZING THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO 169
connections within the Republican government) Cornaros ambitious

plan never came to fruition. Mere traces of its planning linger in the
velum pages of the Venetian Archive of State.
ACTUALIZING THE JESUIT TEATRO DEL MONDO

The Jesuit theatre of the world combined elements of both the miniature
oating theatres and Cornaros teatro allantica. From the oating teatri
del mondo, the Jesuits utilized a humble exterior to disguise a spectacular
interior space where the narratives that unfolded produced a world unto
itself. For example, the members of the Society frequently dressed in
laymens clothes in order to slip unnoticed into certain social settings
(OMalley S.J. 3233).17 Once inside, the Jesuits could use their rheto-
rical ability to attract members of high society to their mission, thus
opening up a space of conversion within the inltrated social space. The
Jesuit teatro del mondo was also mobile, capable of moving along with any
individual, just as the oating theatres glided along the surface of the
Grand Canal. Jesuit spiritual guides endowed individuals with a system
of case-based reasoning that the individual carried with him or her
throughout the day. In this way, the Jesuit guides were always present
inside the minds of those they guided.
Additionally, the Jesuits touted a revitalizing effect available to any
person willing to venture into their grand theatre. By following the path
outlined by the Spiritual Exercises, any person, no matter the magnitude
of ones sins committed in life, could potentially gain access to the specta-
cular interiority of the Church and to eternal salvation. The Jesuit theatre
of the world had a place for everyone, as though, to borrow Cornaros
words, God had given it to him and nature required that everyone should
enjoy it. Once inside, however, the exterior from which one came would
no longer exist. Entering the Jesuit theatre of the world required van-
quishing not only a secular life dominated by material possessions and
personal ambition but also the subjectivity that drove one to possess
worldly goods and to privilege, say, career advancement through political
corridors over and above spiritual elevation into the arms of God. Actors
in the Jesuit theatre of the world had to destroy themselves in order to be
reborn within the true theatre of life and to renounce the secular trappings
of the terrestrial world.
Making these claims, however, requires negotiating the scorn for thea-
trical representations made visible by the deeds of the Jesuits in Venice. If
the teatro del mondo constituted the stage on which played out the Jesuit
repertoire of conversion, if theatre had such a strong place within Jesuit
thinking, then how does one account for the Societys active dislike of
staged performances? This dislike registered in the Societys actions imme-
diately upon their arrival in Venice. Jesuits used their positions as spiritual
guides to access the inner sanctum of Venetian governance and to inu-
ence legislation against the recitation of comedies and other theatrical
representations.18 Gaetano Cozzi writes of the time prior to the establish-
ment of permanent theatre buildings when Father Benedetto Palmio was
especially antagonistic to the public performances during Carnevale. In
1559, Palmio succeeded in convincing Venetian governors to quell the
disturbances caused by those events (Cozzi, Venezia barocca 298).19 The
jubilee year of 1575 presented another opportunity to close theatres, since
the moral degradation caused by theatrical performance went contrary to
the spirit of the holy year. Reading between the lines of the Council of
Tens decree of that year, one senses the hand of a Jesuit adviser:
Having to take up with all due reverence and devotion the most holy jubilee,
conceded to this city by the innite mercy of the Lord God by means of the
supreme Pontiff, according to that which was published the rst of the
month, it is convenient to remove all those impediments which can make
the people of this city less devoted.20
Sometimes, however, the Jesuit inuence failed to stie the favorite pas-
time of the Venetians, as was the case in the years 1568 and 1573 when the
Council of Ten permitted theatrical performances.21 But once permanent
theatre buildings were established, the Jesuits seem to have increased their
efforts to safeguard corporeal and spiritual safety.
Eugene J. Johnson has discovered that, under these auspices of concern
for public safety, [c.1581] the Jesuits had convinced the Venetian Senate
to order the destruction of the theatre [in San Cassiano] to avoid the
danger of someones setting re to it during a performance, thereby
sending up in smoke a large part of the Venetian patriciate (938). The
Jesuits may have been concerned about the mortal lives that a re could
claim, but they were likely more concerned about the moral and spiritual
depravities happening within the private boxes of those permanent theatre
buildings. By 1583, according to the ambassador from France, Andr
Hural de Maisse, the Jesuits possessed to such a degree the consciences
of some of the most inuential senators of the Republic that they could
convince them of everything they wanted (cit. Cozzi, Venezia barocca

291). It seems that what they wanted was to censure the ribaldry of
Venetian theatrical representations and to stem the tide of immoral beha-
vior instigated by the onstage performers.
If the Jesuits utilized their connections and their inuence to pro-
hibit theatre events, as these facts seem to show, how can one explain
the Jesuit use of theatrical techniques in their evangelism, or, for that
matter, the claim by Ottonelli that life is a theatrical representation?
Moving beyond the surface appearance of these facts, it becomes clear
that the Jesuit disdain of theatre was not categorical. For example, the
Jesuits used Latin play texts in their schools in order to teach rhetoric.
They also encouraged their students to perform dialogues and mono-
logues at the end of the school year as a way of displaying the knowl-
edge that the student had acquired. For the Jesuits of the sixteenth
and early seventeenth centuries, theatre constituted an intense peda-
gogical power. The question for them became the use to which that
power would be put.
In his foreword to An Introduction to the Jesuit Theatre, Louis J.
Oldani S.J. notes that, [p]rior to the suppression of the Jesuit Order
in 1773, Jesuit school theatre was a key impetus to [ . . . ] student awa-
kening, amounting to an evolution in school education perhaps parallel
to the role of contemplation in Ignatius Loyolas Spiritual Exercises
(vi). While lewd dialogue, base spectacle, and stage action that encour-
aged sin of any kind were strictly forbidden in these schools, didactic and
well-written theatrical texts sat at the core of Jesuit pedagogy. Oldani
and Victor R. Yanitelli explained this in more detail in their essay Jesuit
Theatre in Italy: Its entrances and exits, where they wrote that:
Until 1555[,] Jesuit colleges [ . . . ] regularly employed the dialogue as a

specialized literary composition in which two or more characters reason
about or debate an issue, a presentation sometimes dramatized in the
form of a prologue, several scenes, and an epilogue. After 1555. full-
blown comedies and tragedies were performed as enrichments of the
curriculum [ . . . ]. Tragedies, or ludi solemnes, composed on the classical
model by the professor of rhetoric and performed by upperclassmen,
were staged at the beginning of the academic year or on prize distribu-
tion day at the close of the school year. Ludi priores, shorter plays, were
performed by younger students at Carnival time or on other special
occasions. (18)
Recalling Ottonellis distinctions, then, the obscenity of performers whose

mission was simply to distract audiences from contemplating life was
unsalvageable; theatre capable of stirring the senses and kindling a
renewed attention to ones physical and spiritual comportment, however,
was a tool with many uses.
A range of such uses became visible when, 35 years after the inaugural
stage production in a Jesuit college, the Jesuits published their ofcial plan
for education, the Ratio Studiorum, in which the Society drew the line
between good theatre and bad theatre while also hinting at the benets one
might extract from the former. Specically on the matter of tragedies and
comedies the text stated the following: The subject matter of the tragedies,
which ought to be only in Latin and extremely rare, should be holy and
devotional. And nothing not in Latin and proper should be inserted into the
action, nor should any female character or clothing be introduced (Society
of Jesus 35).22 As such, Terences original works did not appear within a
Jesuit school but some works by Horace and Martial were permitted.
Additional afnities for certain Roman and Greek authors surfaced in
the section titled Rules for the Professor or Rhetoric, where it reads:
The grade [i.e. difculty] of this class cannot easily be dened by certain set
terms, for it aims at an education in perfect eloquence, which includes two most
important subjects, oratory and poetics (out of these two, however, the leading
emphasis should always be given to oratory) and it does not only serve what is
useful but also indulges in what is ornamental. Still, by and large, it can be said
to consist in three things especially: rules for speaking, for style, and for scholarly
learning. Even though the rules can be found and studied in a very wide range
of sources, only Ciceros books on rhetoric and Aristotles, both the Rhetoric, if
it seems good, and the Poetics should be taught in the daily lesson. (155)
This passage highlighted more than just the subject matter and names of
texts within the theatrical dimension of Jesuit pedagogy. The art of
rhetoric clearly had a particular aim. It cultivated an understanding of
ornamental language so as to help a speaker persuade an audience of a
certain truth. This skill had immediate applications in the eld of preach-
ing, and, indeed, Jesuit preachers were known for their persuasive abilities.
Jesuit instructors taught and cultivated these persuasive abilities:
Talent ought to be taken into account, [as well as] who should be granted
two years of theology. For if they are average in humanistic literary studies,
and they are endowed with no other talent, then they will be sent to the
course in case studies as well. But if among these anyone displays real talent
for preaching or administration along with distinguished virtue, then the
provincial along with his consultors [sic] ought to deliberate about whether
that person should be given two years of theology beyond philosophy so
that the Society might be able to make use of his service with greater
condence and to greater effect. (16)23
Jesuit schools opened their doors to rich and poor alike. From this diverse
eld of students, Jesuits harvested the best and the brightest, those who
were most capable of serving the Society as either preachers or adminis-
trators. The rector could funnel the most capable students into a channel
of courses in which they would learn specic rhetorical, theological, and
philosophical skills and, embedded within each of these disciplines, thea-
trical abilities of persuasion played a vital role.
The paradox of theatre within the Jesuit mission, then, once again, was
not a paradox at all. Rather, specic elements of theatre were banished and
others were cultivated. The theatre as such was not the target of Jesuit
scorn. Public theatre was a gathering of bodies in one space. Thus, the
communication of multiple thoughts simultaneously through languages
semantic value (speech), its penchant for double meaning (rhetoric), and
the bodys gestural vocabulary became means of disseminating ideas that
were potentially hazardous to the spiritual health of individuals. But the
Jesuits knew how to turn these disadvantages into opportunities. Within
the framework of Jesuit pastoral care, theatre could become a site in which
the polyvalent communication of theatrical language became an instru-
ment for transmitting the complex teachings of the Catholic faith to the
minds and souls of audiences. Theatre also presented an opportunity to
retrain the body of individual actors and to tune those bodies to the
invisible presence of God in each persons life. In the words of William
H. McCabe S.J., Thus, following arts way, Jesuit plays helped the
audience to grasp abstraction through the senses (McCabe vi). They
did this through school theatre but also in sacred representations within
churches that boasted elaborate stage sets, scenery weighing tons, forests
imitated in perspective, the sea in motion, palaces aame reduced to
smoke and ashes, tableaux and scenae mutae (changing scenery), dream
scenes enhanced with music and dance, machines for deities to descend
from and to disappear into clouds (Oldani and Yanitelli 20). Audience
members present at Jesuit theatre performances were drawn into the
allegory of saints lives, the trials of Jesus Christ, and other didactic
narratives created by Jesuit playwrights for the express purpose of over-
powering the senses.
More importantly, however, the Jesuit theatre extended beyond the
recitation of plays, dialogues, monologues, and elaborate spectacles. Much
scholarship exists on the spectacles that unfolded in churches during
Carnevale to combat the licentious street performances in Venice,
Rome, Naples, and other cities across Italy.24 There is also a long list of
works on the particulars of school drama.25 Yet what of the Jesuit theatre
of everyday life that becomes visible through this frame of the teatro del
mondo? The schematic to the mechanical workings of this practice of
everyday life shows up in Ottonellis Della Christiana Moderatione Del
Teatro, and this is why the document deserves closer scrutiny. There, the
main goal is conversion and exomologesis. Conversion entailed a turning
of ones inner self toward the entryway of the Jesuit theatre of the world,
and exomologesis, what Foucault identied as the dramatic recognition
of ones status as a penitent, entailed a never-ending performance of the
truth acquired through conversion (Foucault, Technologies 41).
Reaching back to the term dehiscence introduced at the beginning of
this chapter, both conversion and the performance of truth required a
painful and laborious tenure of self-study, a tearing at ones seams in order
to free the seeds of life from within.
The spatial dimension of conversion, or turning toward the truth, is
deceivingly simple. The individual is either outside the Church or within
it. If the soul has strayed to the exterior, the soul must be brought back, an
action that requires the guidance of a shepherd toward the salutary process
of spiritual retreat. Within this dichotomy of inside/outside, however,
unfolds a complex repertoire of conversion that doles out theatrical roles
for both the shepherd and the penitent. The shepherd deploys a strategy,
in the strict sense offered by Michel de Certeau: the spiritual guide
postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base
from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats
[ . . . ] can be managed (de Certeau, Practice 36). This autonomous place
is the interior of the Church. In response to this strategy, the individual
responds by embarking on a quest for the self that requires retraining how
one senses the world, how one understands the senses, how one practices
self-discipline, and how one might avoid the numerous obstacles blocking
ones way to the interior of the Church, a quest that, confounding as it
may seem, requires abdicating the self to nd the self.
Ottonelli dramatizes the individuals part within this repertoire in an

extremely potent chapter of his book titled, Si narra la notabile conver-
sione di uno scenico Sacerdote, per mezzo de gli esercitii spirituali di S.
Ignatio Patriarca (The remarkable conversion of a scenic Priest by
means of the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius the Patriarch). For this
scene, Ottonelli casts as protagonist a priest whose love of theatre has
pulled him off of the path toward holy devotion. Historical precedent
surrounds such a scenario, such as the Friulan cathedral deacon who
played a prostitute in a production of Terences Eunuch in 1500.26
Ottonelli introduces his scenic priest negatively, as it were, by telling the
reader what he is not. Namely, he is not a representation of all that is pure.
This scenic priest, as Ottonelli calls him, has fashioned his life incorrectly
by cultivating bad costumi (habits). Consequently, he is no longer a good
shepherd, and thus he endangers the ock that he leads. Quoting Saint
Chrisostomo, Ottonelli reminds the reader that, Si Sacerdotes fuerint in
peccatis, totus populus convertetur ad peccandum (If a priest sins, the
people will be converted into sin) (Ottonelli 268). This invocation casts
the priest in a similar role as that interpreted (i.e. portrayed) by
Valcamonica. Ottonellis scenic priest embodies the paradox of the
shepherd.
Next, Ottonelli qualies the scenic modier of his protagonist by
distinguishing between good and bad theatrical representations. The for-
mer are those that are intended to instruct or to note the indecency of
manners, while the latter merely excite laughter and take to vain pasture
the ears of the Audience (269). The scenic priest not only attends bad
theatre, he also participates in the performances. All of these qualities
prepare the priest as a threshold, a man on the line between acting good
(modeling purity) and acting bad (leading his ock into sin), acting in
accordance with the Church and acting out, as would a petulant child.
Ottonellis narrative introduces him at the turning point where he will
have to make a decision about what type of life to lead, what mode of
representation to model for his ock.
Ultimately, the decision comes to the priest from without:
[T]ouched one day with celestial inspiration, [the priest] withdrew his soul
into spiritual retreat (pieg lanimo ad un poco di ritiramento spirituale) and
he happily began the exercises that Saint Ignatius, illumined by heaven and
helped in particular with the favor of the Great Queen, the Mother of God,
composed in that little book of gold, by the approval in the Bull of the Vicar
of Christ, Paolo III, those exercises that, other than praising God, exhort the
Faithful to devote themselves to practice and instruction, and to prot from
their souls. (269)
This practice of conversion begins with the act of folding in upon oneself.
Ottonelli describes this as a retreat of the soul.27 Folding into spiritual
retreat initiates the practice of the Spiritual Exercises. Once involved in the
Exercises, the priest generated in his soul an implacable hatred against
this old life, with which he severely castigated his past foolishness (269).
That is, the act of folding back upon himself brings the priest into contact
with two selves. One is the priest who had strayed from his path, and the
other is a new, improved subjectivity.
To vanquish the old self and become the new, the priest must manifest
his realization of past foolishness to the public. Thus settled, he put
around his neck a big rope, went into the Church where many people
were gathered, humbly prostrated himself on the ground, and asked for
forgiveness from the People for all of his grave errors and scandalous
excesses (270). Primarily a tool for self-agellation, the rope doubles in
Ottonellis narrative as a noose that the priest has to wear, as if to signify
that his salvation and absolution are not quite complete. Not until making
a public demonstration of the knowledge gained through the enactment
of the Spiritual Exercises does the mechanism of absolution begin to
function.
Reconciliation concludes with a nal performance of guilt. More than a
simple declaration of having once sinned, the priest must regain his proper
position as a shepherd capable of leading the ock:
[W]ith ardent words, and humble prayer he asked of all the City to pardon
his many, grave offenses, made in his sad, impure, and scandalous life. He
completed all of this: he appeared in the pulpit in front of the eyes of the
People, all spectators of the scenic Priest; and he, as in a scene on the stage,
but a very different scene than the previous profane and impure one, began
to make a true character (il personaggio di vero), extraordinarily penitent: he
showed his pallid face; kept his eyes modestly toward the ground; on his
neck hung a horrid noose, and each part of his humble body passed away,
contrite, and greatly despising his old ways. That sight, without thought or
hesitation, immediately drew tears from the eyes of the Spectators: and he
who rst moved the People to laugh now vigorously excited people to tears
and compunction. (271)
Ottonellis writing creates a performative transformation of subjectiv-

ity. The priest takes the pulpit as in a scene on the stage. Once there
he constructs a new character. The emergence of this character of truth
veries his penitence. Sapped of all life, his face appears pale and each
part of his body withers away. Piece by piece, the priest dies and is
reborn. All of this unfolds in front of the congregation, which, affected
by the sight of the transformation, begins to cry with tears of regret,
perhaps for the truth about themselves made visible through this
event.
The scene plays on the tension of seeing and being seen. The priests
performance of guilt requires an audience, and by witnessing the perfor-
mance the audience in fact begins to play a part in the drama as well. The
tears in the eyes of audience members create another plane within
Ottonellis narrative, a plane that reaches beyond the scene of the priests
performance into the space of the reader. Remarking on the degree to
which the body in this Ignatian ritual must remain material, never
abstracted into the realm of the merely conceptual, Roland Barthes iden-
ties tears as the index of this body, a veritable code whose matter is
differentiated into signs according to the time of their appearance and
their intensity (Barthes 62, 7475). That is, on the individual level, tears
become a sacricial offering of ones inner essence. On the collective level,
these tears issuing forth from these bodies gathered together in the perfor-
mance of repentance initiate the penitents into the Ignatian mystical
system that links the company to the theatre of the world unfolding
under the eyes of God. Ottonelli wrote the narrative to evoke such tears
in the eyes of the reader and thus yoke them into the community of
penitents.
The completion of the Spiritual Exercises endows the priest with an
ability to produce a true character, thus transforming him into a virtuoso
Actor, in Ottonellis words. As such an actor, the priest will be able to
represent the true way of God, whereas before he could only enact a
Mimic Representation. For Ottonelli, mimic representation relates to
the bad theatre on the stage, capable only of eliciting laughs without
endowing in the laugher a sense of Truth. The virtuous acting of the
reformed priest does not mirror scenes of nature through which his con-
gregation will learn about truth. His acting is, rather, a virtuosity linked to
a new presence, a subjectivity that models the life of Christ so precisely
that the priests actions become a transparent veil through which his
congregation may see the way to God.
Ottonelli, upon authoring this stirring scene, sheds his antitheatrical

attire and even opens the door to a philosophical contemplation of being,
one bound up entirely with acting. In fact, Ottonellis thinking opens
questions about theatres contribution to the ontological philosophical
arguments developed by Scholastics from the Middle Ages to the
Renaissance. To act virtuously is to be, whereas the profane actor simply
is not offered passage to Gods grace, is not capable of achieving eternal
life, is not to enter the holy theatre of the Church, simply is not in the eyes
of the Church. In this light, I identify Ottonelli not only as a contributor
to the theatrical landscape of the Italian peninsula in the rst half of the
seventeenth century but also as a contributor to the philosophical formu-
lations forwarded rst by Aristotle, then by Aquinas, and then by a number
of gures. In order to pave the way to the philosophical conclusions I draw
at the end of this chapter, I will briey elaborate on the ontological claims
folded into Ottonellis story of the scenic priest.
To understand Ottonellis theatre philosophy, one rst has to under-
stand the tradition into which he stepped, a tradition that traces back to
Ancient Greece through the gure of Thomas Aquinas. Anthony J. Lisska
explains Aquinass ontologically realist philosophy through the language
of Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics:
Aquinas argues that a human person is, by denition, a synthetic necessary

unity grounding a set of potentialities, capacities, or dispositions, which is a
dispositional analysis of a natural kind. A disposition [ . . . ] is a structured
causal set of properties that leads towards the development of the property
in a specic way. In his hylomorphic metaphysics, the substantial form is the
ontological ground for dispositional properties. (Lisska 624)
Whereas Aristotle did not believe in the autonomy of the soul, as noted in
De Anima (It is not unclear that the soul (or certain parts of it, if it
naturally has parts) is not separable from the body), and sought to steer a
course between Platos dualism and strict materialism, Aquinas keeps the
architectural relation between form and matter (soul and body) but
argues, in line with Christian dogma, that the soul may in fact live without
the body. Thus, Aquinass philosophical understanding of the individual
builds upon the core beliefs of ontological foundationalism.28
Given this foundation, the role of telos in Aquinas acquires great
importance. The human being, understood as a synthetic necessary
unity grounding a set of potentialities, capacities, or dispositions, is
obligated (on a material level) to achieve a specic end or telos. Citing the
explanations of Henry Veatch, Lisska explains that, these ends ought to
be obtained because of the very dispositional structure of human nature.
The ends are not arbitrary but are determined by the natural kind of
human nature itself. Obligation is rooted in the ends themselves (628).
Certainly schooled in this philosophical tradition, Ottonelli offers a unique
twist to the typical story by including performance (acting) as a crucial
mediating praxis in mans realization of these ends. For him, mans
dispositional structure as a subject enscened before God obligates the
cultivation of ones identity as virtuous actor. Only when the scenic priest
becomes the virtuous actor does he achieve the end set out for him. If
there is an ontological foundationalism underpinning human nature, this
ontology will require a rational and concerted practice to re correctly,
and Ottonelli published his work in order to endow his readers with the
required rationality.
Aquinass uptake of Aristotelian philosophy sutured his discussion of
telos to the eld of ethics, insofar as mans chief aim was the achievement
of the Good, albeit a Good modied through several centuries of
Christian deliberations over Hellenic philosophy. But, within this philo-
sophical genealogy, and specically its understanding of the role played by
reason in the acquisition of the Good, the individual must rst choose the
path toward the Good. Since Aristotelians distinguished between theore-
tical reason (the knowing aspect of reason) and practical reason (the
choosing), then logically choosing or undertaking [will depend] on
prior knowledge; one can only choose or undertake that which is a good
after knowing that it is a good (629). Whereas for Aquinas the Word of
God functioned as a compass to direct the formation of the individual as
he or she grew into the end fashioned ahead of time by God and provided
the material for this choice, for Ottonelli the Word had to be enacted
and, furthermore, that enactment had to be witnessed and veried by
God.
If for Aquinas bonum est in rebus (good is in things), then for
Ottonelli and the Jesuits this thing is more properly a space. Borrowing
from the Old English denition of thing as meeting, assembly, coun-
cil, the Good thing becomes the space in which one nds the higher
good of virtuous acting, the space of the Jesuit theatre of the world laid
out by God. Not a res publica, as discussed in the previous chapter, but a
res ecclesia, this thing appeared on Earth as a meeting place wherein the
soul will be governed according to the Good. Two more aspects of
Ottonellis philosophical understanding differentiate him from Aquinas.

First, Ottonellis treatise reveals the extent to which the Jesuit doubted the
ability of mankind to choose the Good. Following the metaphor of the
tulip bulb in Aristotelian metaphysics, which dictates that, The structure
of a tulip bulb is organised biologically to produce a tulip ower and not a
geranium, Aquinass philosophical pronouncements proceeded from the
conrmed belief that human nature is the quidditas determined by
materia prima and forma substantialis (636). Ottonellis authorial
labor reveals his unwillingness to cede to this certainty. He clearly
acknowledged the power of theatrical performance and representation
to, in a sense, mutate the genetics of both human nature and spirit and
to lead human beings away from their ordained telos. For him, the human
was not guaranteed to enact the dehiscent stage of maturation. In this
light, Ottonellis concerns help explain why the Jesuits worked so hard to
legislate against theatrical performances in the Republic of Saint Mark and
elsewhere: bad, mimic theatre rewired humans spiritual code and inter-
fered with the cultivation of spiritual rectitude. Second, and related to this
point, Aristotelian ethics suggest that to function well is to develop the
dispositions or capacities according to the nature or structure one has
(636). For Ottonelli, however, functioning well is something that
humans must learn. Furthermore, they must learn it through virtuous
imitation. Calling forth the Jesuit dramaturgy analyzed in Chapter 4, I
suggest that this teaching requires psychagogical intervention instead of
pedagogical intervention and that Ottonelli clearly understood the psy-
chagogical power of the performance of self shaped through the Spiritual
Exercises. The merger of theatre and philosophy may have revealed itself
subtly in Aquinass rhetorical writing, but in the Jesuit literature of the
early modern age it rises to the fore. For Ottonelli and his brothers, the
verb to be existed in tandem with to act (in accordance with Ignatian
principles).
Ultimately, then, Ottonellis treatise outlines a pyschagogical perfor-
mance philosophy predicated on the belief that one must not only live
according to the Word of God but also fashion a daily performance of self
that demonstrates the extent to which the individual has internalized the
knowledge that he or she is performing for Gods eyes and Gods eyes
alone. As such, the felicitousness of Jesuit ethics, grounded in something
like a classically inspired performance ontology, requires the realization
that: (1) I am playing a role within the theatre of the world; and (2) God is
the sole spectator of this performance on the world stage.
In addition to including a latent performance philosophy within its

pages, Ottonellis story about the scenic priest also presents a detailed
schematic of Jesuit theatre and the practice of folding into the interior
(spiritual retreat) that is so crucial to the act of conversion. First, from
Ottonellis perspective, the practice of the Spiritual Exercises is the entry
point into a new life. If the priest in the story becomes the model of
conversion, then what one sees when reading the story is a sinner who
receives inspiration that leads him into spiritual retreat. Once folded
inward, the Exercises begin the process of vanquishing ones former self
in order to produce a new character. Second, this is necessarily an indivi-
dual experience. Each and every person may encounter it, but it will always
be an individual activity. Third, the primary motor of the conversion to a
new self is repentance. To repent, one must become aware of ones sins, or
arrive at a certain point of view that reveals the errors of ones ways.
Fourth, once transformed, the subject acts in a new way. He or she acts
in accordance with the path set out by the Jesuits. The actors manners and
customs (costumi) are changed and the actor becomes virtuous.
All these points describe the embodied repertoire of this specic kind of
Jesuit theatre, but what of its spatial parameters? Jesuit theatre is not only
marked by its specic set of gestures and modes of speech (which, in the
story, become visible once the reformed priest creates his true character); it
is also marked by a particular space in which this mode of acting can unfold.
This space, the thing of the Jesuit teatro del mondo, opens within the
terrestrial world, but, once opened, it presents a different perspective on
ones daily actions. The space itself works upon the individual actor to
cultivate an apperception that assembles the consequences of each deed an
actor performs and transforms the totality of that assemblage into the
identity of the individual. This is the Jesuit concept of casuistry, which
enters into the individuals mind as that individual enters into the theatre
of the world. Casuistry is the Jesuit art of case-based reasoning that aims to
arrest the subject at every crucial junction of his or her life so that the
individual can decide how best to act in accordance with the Church. As
Barthess essay on Loyola suggests, casuistry marks the supremely rational
dimension of the Exercises insofar as it institutes a practice of choosing
instantiated through disciplined repetition: for every choice I face, I must
consider what the results of this choice will be on the day of my death, and
on the day of the Last Judgement (Barthes 60). And yet even the conven-
tional syntax (I choose) receives an adjustment when the subject enters
Jesuit space. Building on Barthess commentary on this issue, I would add
that, within the Jesuit theatre of the world, individuality is replaced with
subjective apperception that cultivates an I through the multiplicity of
cases of conscience, which, because the virtuous acting-in-accordance-with
marks each and every reformed actor in this theatre, transforms the I
immediately into a We. The Society is the epitome of this We. Its plurality
is really a complex unity: a One(ness) within God.29
Once this theatre begins to unfurl it displaces the terrestrial world to a
status of outside. This is the spatial dichotomy of Jesuit conversion within
the framework of pastoral power. From the terrestrial world, the subject
folds into the oneness of God and through the Spiritual Exercises locates
his or her place within the interior of the Church. This activity simulta-
neously delimits the terrestrial world as exterior, as that which exists out-
side the belief system of the Church.
The Jesuit teatro del mondo thus opens, through the development of a
new perspective on the world and ones place in it, a world in which Gods
presence demands a pure and transparent mode of acting that always manifests
Gods presence through deeds and decisions of the individual. This perspec-
tive only becomes possible through spiritual retreat and the enactment of the
Spiritual Exercises through which a new subjectivity is created within the
Church. The resulting locality is a singular interiority, a dense singularity,
one that encloses and produces exteriority yet has no exit and no outside for
the subject. It is not a theatre in the world, like the oating theatres, Cornaros
ideal theatre island, or Venice itself, all of which present spectacles of the baser
sort. Instead, it is a theatre of the world insofar as it replaces the secular world
with a stage upon which each step in accordance with the teachings of the
Church reveals ones identity as a virtuous actor. The Jesuit theatre of the
world is the world from the perspective of the converted or reformed Catholic.
This entire apparatus resembles the organization within medieval monasteries
through which monks learned to become virtuous actors, but there is an
important difference. The Jesuits, through the application of the Spiritual
Exercises, made the monastic institution portable. People no longer had to
go to the monastery. The Jesuits brought the discipline of the monastery to
each and every sheep in the ock.30
CULTIVATING AFFECTIVITY
Ottonellis story was a ction, but the mobile institution of conversion brought
by the Jesuits to Venice in the sixteenth century was not. The real-world
conversion process of the Spiritual Exercises, which played a crucial role but
CULTIVATING AFFECTIVITY 183
only received a brief mention in Ottonellis narrative, emerges in the present

moment from a collage of stitched-together historical records produced by
different Jesuits at different times in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Conversion worked by deconstructing an individuals perception of the self in
the world and then reconstructing that individual via an awakening of his or her
sense organs, thereby creating the possibility for a new life to emerge through a
new sensational grasp of the world and the individuals place within it. As the
primary motor of Jesuit conversion, the Spiritual Exercises instigated an affec-
tive turn within those it sought to convert as it guided individuals to a new
subjective orientation through a sequence of meditations. Meditation had for a
long time played a signicant role in the individuals practice of Christianity.
Augustine in the fth century and Anselm in the eleventh utilized meditation
as a means for bridging the realms of the profane (knowledge of earthly things)
and the sacred (knowledge of God). Meditation was for devout early Christians
a practice used to strengthen faith. Loyola, however, made crucial interven-
tions into this historical lineage of meditation. He removed meditation from
the monastery and brought it to the streets; it became available not just to holy
gures such as St Augustine and St Anselm but also to the common person.31
Ignatius Loyola dened the Spiritual Exercises in the eponymous text,
written between 1522 and 1524:
By the term Spiritual Exercises is meant every method of examination of

conscience, of meditation, of contemplation, of vocal and mental prayer, and
of other spiritual activities that will be mentioned later. For just as taking a walk,
journeying on foot, and running are bodily exercises, so we call Spiritual
Exercises every way of preparing and disposing the soul to rid itself of all
inordinate attachments, and, after their removal, of seeking and nding the will
of God in the disposition of our life for the salvation of our soul. (de Loyola 1)
The Arch-Jesuit modeled the Exercises on his own conversion, which had
led him into his spiritual life and away from his early days as a soldier in
Spains Basque country. After receiving a leg wound in a battle, Loyola
spent a great of deal of time in recovery and read about the lives of the
saints and the life of Jesus Christ. OMalley has described the point of no
return for Loyola, whose battle wounds portended a life within the
Church:
In his imagination [ . . . ] he debated for a long time the alternatives of

continuing according to his former path, even with his limp, or of turning
completely from it to the patterns exemplied especially by Saint Francis of

Assisi and Saint Dominic. He found that when he entertained the rst
alternative he was afterward left dry and agitated in spirit, whereas the
second brought him serenity and comfort. By thus consulting his inner
experience, he gradually came to the conviction that God was speaking to
him through it, and he resolved to begin an entirely new life. This process by
which he arrived at his decision became a distinctive feature of the way he
would continue to govern himself and became a paradigm of what he would
teach to others. (OMalley S.J. 24)
OMalleys passage points to the primary importance of inner motion

within the Spiritual Exercises, derived from Loyolas own interior delib-
erations. The phrase to govern himself also stands out insofar as it points
to the underlying theme of the Exercises, namely, the development of a
strict self-discipline that could conduct the individual to God.
By the time Loyola rened his personal experience into a technique for
others to follow, the Spiritual Exercises had four parts, each occupying
roughly one weeks span:
[T]he rst part, which is devoted to the consideration and contemplation of sin;
the second part, which is taken up with the life of Christ our Lord up to Palm
Sunday inclusive; the third part, which treats of the passions of Christ our Lord;
the fourth part, which deals with the Resurrection and Ascension. (de Loyola 2)
Thus, the exercitant (he or she who enacted the Exercises) occupied his or
herself with a deep contemplation of Christs life. The aim was to learn
how to represent this life as best one could, to consider the decisions Jesus
had to make, and to learn how to make such decisions for oneself. Loyola
and all his followers trained themselves how best to imitate Christ and
then became the guides who led the exercitants through the four-week
program of spiritual renewal.32
To learn how to imitate Christ, the exercitant had to discover a new
rationality by way of an emotional reawakening. It was not enough to
know of Christ or to know the facts of his life. The challenge of Loyolas
program was to become aware of the movements of the soul and the
emotions within the bodys interior. Discerning the movement of the
soul would allow an individual to surmount the obstacles of fallacious
reasoning placed within the individual by evil spirits. OMalley writes that
the text of the Exercises:
manifests that the engaging of powerful emotions like grief, fear, horror,
compunction, compassion, contentment, admiration, gratitude, wonder,
joy, and especially love is the nal and foreseen outcome of its various
meditations and contemplations, especially the more climactic ones. The
individual should feel bestirred by great feelingand at appropriate
moments moved even to tears. (OMalley S.J. 41)
Tears, as mentioned above, were crucial to the process since they became
material signs of the stirring of the soul. Thus, through emotional
response to specic scenes of contemplation, the individual undergoing
the Exercises would begin to awaken a new sense of self and the spiritual
guide could follow the process of awakening by monitoring the external
signs of the exercitants internal movement.
Proof of the emergence of a new sense of self in the many people who
underwent the Exercises comes from the meticulous records kept by Juan
de Polanco S.J., Loyolas secretary and early archivist of the Jesuits worldly
deeds. His Chronicon yields numerous case studies of interest to the current
analysis of the affective force of the Spiritual Exercises. Here is one example,
a record from the opening of a Jesuit school at Tivoli in 1550:
There was a woman of a prestigious family and a religious [monk] of the

Third Order of St. Francis who gave the Society a garden with a cottage
right inside the city. Her name was Lucia Cynthia. A certain nephew of this
Lucia got into a quarrel with other people, and his blood relatives wanted to
get him out of town, so they brought him to Father Miguel and asked him
to try to convert him and keep him at [our] house till the tumult cooled
down. Miguel agreed to this proposal and decided to help him through the
Spiritual Exercises. In a few days he was so changed into another person that
it was regarded as a miracle. (de Polanco 119)
How did the Jesuits perform such miracles? What were the specic steps
that led one to the creation of a new self, such as Father Miguels
exercitant in the passage above?
One procedure at the heart of such miracles was the mental representa-
tion of place that occurred throughout the four weeks of the Exercises.
Loyola mentioned this for the rst time in the rst prelude of the rst exercise:
Attention must be called to the following point. When the contemplation or

meditation is on something visible, for example, when we contemplate Christ
our Lord, the representation will consist in seeing in imagination the material
place where the object is that we wish to contemplate. I said the material place,
for example, the temple, or the mountains where Jesus or His Mother is,
according to the subject matter of the contemplation. (de Loyola 28)
When engaged in the mental representation of place, the exercitant prac-

ticed the skill of moving a thought or image from the interior of ones self
to the exterior. He or she had to learn to make his or her thoughts
materialize in the world. Once out, the thoughts produced a space of
imagination (spatium imaginarium) populated by people and objects
with which the exercitant interacted.33 If a person was the object of the
contemplation, then that person really existed. The colloquy, as Loyola
called the interaction with these material thoughts, [was] made by speak-
ing exactly as one friend speaks to another, or as a servant speaks to a
master, now asking him for favor, now blaming himself for some misdeed,
now making known his affairs to him, and seeking advice in them (28).
These mental representations of place stimulated the eyes, ears, olfac-
tory systems and senses of taste. In the rst prelude of the fth exercise,
one had to see in the imagination the length, breadth, and depth of hell.
From there the spectator zoomed in to nd the vast res, and the souls
enclosed, as it were, in bodies of re. The exercitant had to hear the
wailing, the howling, cries, and blasphemies against Christ our Lord and
against His saints. Then, [w]ith the sense of smell to perceive the
smoke, the sulphur, the lth, and corruption. Finally, the goal was to
taste the bitterness of tears, sadness, and remorse of conscience (32).
Polancos Chronicon tallied the successes of this method of self-awa-
kening. Commenting on the achievements of the Exercises in Valencia in
1555, he wrote:
The Spiritual Exercises were presented to so many people that our college
was never without someone making them, and sometimes three or four
people at the same time. When some people departed, others took their
places. Of this number there were hardly one or two who did not set their
hearts on entering a more perfect state of life. (de Polanco 388)
As early as 1541, he recorded that:
Father [Pierre] Favre was at Worms and from there traveled to Speyer and
nally to Regensburg, accompanying the court of Charles V. He did no
preaching, but accomplished so much by the ministry of the sacraments of
penance and the Eucharist, by holding private conversations, and, most

important of all, by giving the Spiritual Exercises that Germans as well as
Italians and Spaniards, even men outstanding for their authority, dignity,
nobility, and learning, exerted themselves to change their lives. Some among
them helped others through the same Spiritual Exercises. Among the others,
[John] Cochlaeus stood preeminent for his fervor. As he used to say, he
rejoiced that teachers of affectivity had been found. (910)
As teachers of affectivity, the Jesuits gained access to numerous cities

and many individuals. This was the means by which they accomplished
their mission of guiding the ock back into the Church.
It is within these boundaries of affectivity and action that the theatrical
dimension of the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises becomes intelligible. The four-
week program begins with an entrance that the individual exercitant per-
forms by turning in on himself or, rarely, herself, toward a spiritual retreat.
The entrance deposits the subject in an abyss that begins to gain texture
through a gradual refashioning of the senses. Each sense acts like a search-
light with which the exercitant trawls the abyss. The lights detect move-
ments in the dark and, once illuminated, each movement reveals a type of
terrain in which objects, gures, and scenarios dance about. Through the
mental representation of place, those terrains and their inhabitants (the
same terrains and inhabitants that ostensibly populated Christs life) reveal
the dark abyss as a navigable geography where the exercitant can hold
conversations (the colloquy) and meditate on the new space taking shape.
Each dialogue and meditation adds detail to the geography of the exerci-
tants interior, and by exploring that space the individual will eventually
discover a new self, one that has been locked away in the abyss and
deprived of light. This discovery marks the end of the exercises and the
beginning of the next trial during which the exercitant returns in the form
of the new self discovered during internal examination. If the individual
becomes disoriented in the outer world or led astray by the powerful force
of, say, popular theatrical representation, he or she can return to the
interior theatre and reorient himself or herself. The interior space of the
retreat is a stage on which to rehearse exterior action in the theatre of the
world.
What one does not nd when charting the inner abyss is equally as
important as what one nds. That is, the Spiritual Exercises reveal the
superuity of certain objects, gures, and scenarios that unfold in an
individuals daily life. Those objects are superuous if they do not also
appear in the interior. This is the meaning of Ignatius Loyolas statement

that the Spiritual Exercises is a way of preparing and disposing the soul to
rid itself of all inordinate attachments (de Loyola 1). Just as the terrestrial
world becomes displaced as an exterior in relation to the interior of the
Church and the interior of the theatre of the world, the spiritual retreat
instigates a further displacement. When the interior of the soul has been
mapped and the senses trained to all of its movements, that map is super-
imposed on the outer world. If the maps do not match, then the individual
has to trim the excesses from the exterior map in order to make it
harmonize with the inner geography discerned through the Exercises.
The theatre of the world and the theatre within the individual must at
all times bear strict resemblance.
Is this what Ottonelli had in mind when he stated that, life was
decided upon to be something like a scenic Representation, or a theatrical
spectacle, something one might call a play (la vita humana f giudicata
esser tale, che paragonar si poteva ad una scenica Rappresentatione, e
spettacolo theatrale, con appellarla Comedia)? To answer this question, it
is necessary to re-translate Comedia so as to replace the all-encompass-
ing play with the more specic comedy, as in the humorous genre
historians might trace back to the Ancient Greek . In other words,
an unintentional consequence rendered by the perspective of a virtuous
actor within the theatre of the world described above is that life becomes a
comedy. The distinction of genre does not point to a binary opposition of
comedy/tragedy, but rather to a distinction between comedy and shame.
Life is a comedy for those who, like his scenic priest, have confronted the
error of their ways and have created for themselves a new character of
truth. The man or woman who has successfully transformed his or her
subjectivity through the help of the Spiritual Exercises, like all of the
people recorded in Polancos Chronicon, can live a life free of shame
knowing that he or she is acting in accordance with God.
Slavoj iek and his discussion of the comedy of incarnation in The
Parallax View provide further explanation:
Thus comedy is the very opposite of shame: shame endeavors to main-

tain the veil, while comedy relies on the gesture of unveiling. More to
the point, the comic effect proper occurs when, after the act of unveil-
ing, we confront the ridicule of the nullity of the unveiled content: in
contrast to the pathetic scene of encountering, behind the veil, the
terrifying Thing, too traumatic for our gaze, the ultimate comical effect
occurs when, after removing the mask, we confront exactly the same face
as the one on the mask. (iek 109)
ieks denition of comedy relies on a parallax shift in the play between

difference and sameness. The properly comical occurs when, instead of a
hidden terrifying secret, we encounter the same thing behind the veil as in
front of it, this very lack of difference between the two elements confronts
us with the pure difference that separates an element from itself (109).
Returning one last time to the scenic priest, I argue that his production
of a true character (personaggio di vero) is properly comical. The moment of
doubt that arises within Ottonellis scenic priest when he receives illumina-
tion from God and becomes aware that he has strayed from his proper path
can therefore be captioned with the question: How am I not myself? How
has it come to be that I, a priest, have become something other than my
true self? The process of spiritual conquest that the priest undergoes to solve
this riddle reveals the pure difference structuring his own self. After he
retrains his senses through the affective turn of the Exercises and lifts the
veil on himself, he does not nd a different person behind that veil and
within the darkness of the abyss. The priest lifts the veil and nds himself, his
true self, and he begins to embody his own self anew by means of the true
character that appears on the pulpit in front of the congregation. After all,
both before and after the experience of the Spiritual Exercises, Ottonelli
refers to him as the Sacerdote scenico. The realization of the difference
between the scenic priest before the Exercises and the scenic priest after the
Exercises is the revelation of the pure difference within the priest, the fact
that the priest sees himself to be himself and not himself. Ultimately, God
will mark the correct self, as Barthes makes clear: In the Ignatian system,
paradigms are given by the discernment, but only God can mark them: the
generator of meaning, but not its preparer, He is, structurally, the Marker,
he who imparts a difference. That is, the exercitant must not elect one or
the other self but, instead, offer for the divine mark a perfectly equal
alternative. As such, he will proceed through the comedy of life with this
divided self (Barthes 72).
Herein lies the dialectic of discipline and excess within the Jesuit
process of conversion epitomized in the Exercises and demonstrated in
Ottonellis parable. When the individual enacts a spiritual retreat and
begins the process of charting the interior abyss, and when he leaves the
old self for the new, the vanquished self never goes away completely.
Ottonellis priest cannot completely excise his past as a lover of theatrical
representations and an occasional amateur actor. Instead, the priest has to

keep that part of his self on hand as an excess of self that perpetually
reminds the priest of the reason for his renewed self-discipline. When the
priest takes to the pulpit and performs his dramatic transformation of
subjectivity, he lifts off the mask as scenic priest to reveal the face beneath
it as . . . a scenic priest. This true character is that to which the priest
returns, but his virtuous acting will always prove itself by, at each moment
of the day and on the occasion of each case of conscience, never lapsing
into the bad, mimic representation that characterized the priest before his
conversion. Here the nal meaning of scenic priest announces itself.
Once inside the theatre of the world and once acting upon the stage as a
virtuous actor, the priest performs for an audience of One. That audience
member, God himself, views the priest enscened within the world. The
priest sees himself from this perspective as an actor whose role is to walk
well clear of the line between bad (mimetic, charlatan, lascivious) actor
and good (virtuous, true) actor, fully ensconced within the teatro del
mondo, knowing that he acts for the pleasure of his One audience mem-
ber. The discovery of his true character is a discovery of being seen or
discerned by God.
For all those who have strayed, the Spiritual Exercises presents an
opportunity to develop a true character. This character emerges from an
act of unmasking the self to reveal the (true) self, that self that can act in
accordance with God instead of acting out(side) of the Jesuit teatro del
mondo. How am I not myself? In two ways. First, realizing I am not
myself is the pivotal moment that instigates the folding into retreat.
Second, after conversion, I am not myself by choosing to be this true
character, which includes the responsibility of keeping my old self on hand
as the example of how not to act. I vanquish the self in order to cultivate
the self within the theatre of the world: here one senses the logic, or
disjunctive syllogism, supporting Jesuit conversion. The comedy unfolds
within the Jesuit theatre for the benet of its One audience member. The
cast is a complex unity of virtuous actors, culled from the stray sheep that
wandered away from the ock but each on its own accord has refolded into
the interior of the Church.
Ottonellis Della Christiana Moderatione reveals that Jesuit theatre is in
actuality an ethical code of living in accordance with the Church: That
with which God is concerned [ . . . ] is that it is not the character we
represent, but how we represent it and that we represent it well. This is
our obligation (Ottonelli 356). For all the dramatic air in the story
INTERNAL DIFFERENCE AND THE PRACTICE OF NON-IDENTITY 191
about the scenic priest, the true character the priest discovers is less
important than the life he will produce from the moment of his conversion
to the moment of his death. The excesses that Ottonelli mentions in the
subtitle to his book (Per avvisare agni Christiano a moderarsi da gli eccessi
nel recitare [In order to advise each Christian to moderate the excesses of
recitation]) refer to the excesses of the self that become visible through the
enactment of the Spiritual Exercises and that one always keeps on hand as
a reminder of the improper mode of life. It is the job of each Christian to
moderate these excesses of the self. Far from decrying the obscenity of all
theatrical representations, Ottonelli sets guidelines for cultivating a true
representation that will bring the sheep back within the ock (thus reveal-
ing the terrestrial world as literally ob-scene [exterior to the true scene in
the theatre of the world]) each sheep acting in unison and following the
Jesuit exhortation to depart from desolation in order to dwell in the
Consolation of Christs Love.
INTERNAL DIFFERENCE AND THE PRACTICE OF NON-IDENTITY

In a previous publication, in order to expound on the philosophical
ramications of this historical event, I thought through the phenomenon
of Ottonelli and his scenic priest by turning to Deleuze and Guattari via an
essay by Maaike Bleeker in order to uncover the conditions that make
possible an I that acts as an identity for converted individuals to
occupy.34 In that study, I determined that the Jesuit theatre of the
world functioned as an ecclesia universale (in this sense, a universal
gathering space) that produced Christian subjects as much as it provided
a space for them in which to congregate. Instead of creating a cohesive and
unied subjectivity, the Jesuit theatre of the world produced a split sub-
ject, and it was the split I sought to understand with the help of Bleekers
perspicacity. By drawing her readers toward the zone of interference that
Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the No in What is Philosophy? (a kind of
contact zone in which the practices of philosophical, scientic, and artistic
thinking come up against that which is not philosophy, science, or art),
Bleeker is able to discern the vital role of the negative within all concep-
tual, perceptual, and affective operations. Here, the negative amounts to
that which the mode of thinking is not. Arts negative is that which is non-
Art. Philosophys negative is that which is non-Philosophy. The nuance of
the denition of the negative does not show up here, probably because of
the tendency in Deleuzes work to build concept after concept without
returning to interrogate the foundations upon which the conceptual

machinery stands. This, in fact, becomes a problem, one that I will
explicate below. Leaving that aside for the moment, however, and heading
back to the argument at hand, Bleeker intriguingly denes this that
which they are not as theatricality and thus points to a productive
performance underscoring the encounter between art, philosophy, and
science, and their respective negatives.
In the light of Bleekers argument, Ottonellis parable of the scenic
priest came into focus for me as what I would now call a performance
philosophy of the No functioning at the level of the individual Christian
subject through which all who enter the Jesuit theatre of the world
encounter that which they are not and, in doing so, commence a theatrical
life as a divided subject under the watchful eye of God. To articulate the
historical specicity of the Jesuit situation, I argued further that, whereas
Bleeker (via Deleuze and Guattari) understands the encounter with the
No as a productive engagement with the play of difference on the plane
of immanence, this encounter in the Jesuit theatre of the world crafted a
schism in the subject, one that led not to a complex dualism of self and
other but to an internal divide induced by ones acknowledgement of
ones self as other. The moral exigency of self-renunciation so crucial in
the spiritual exercises insisted that the individual foreclose (instead of
absorb or adsorb) the generative chaos of the world, to mark it as that
which the individual was not, and to recognize the world outside the
Jesuit teatro del mondo as the world against which the subject must dene
his or her self.
I am eager to return to this argument because of its potential entail-
ment for the theory of the baroque I am presenting in this book. If, as it
most certainly did, the Jesuit theatre of the world and its underlying
performance philosophy (schematized by Ottonellis theatrical treatise
and recorded by Polanco) had such a profound global reach, and if the
resulting subjectivity forged from the encounter with Jesuit conversion
practices led to an enduring split in the self, then is it possible to diagnose a
foundational crisis of self supporting Jesuit Christianity, a crisis performed
and maintained by each Jesuit-inspired Christian and required for perpe-
tual residence on the great stage of the world? Was the virtuous actor
truly a collective subject position formed around a Deleuzo-Guattarian
No, albeit sublated and ultimately supplemented with the audibility of
Catholic doctrine? At stake in these questions is the possibility of a
philosophical subjectivity structured by an internal difference and
maintained by explicitly theatrical practices, as well as a critique of Jesuit

ethics waged at the philosophical level.
Years after undertaking this initial analysis and now returning to these
questions, I would like to wrestle with my own internal difference by
arguing against myself and proposing a new understanding of the crisis
of subjectivity glimpsed in the Jesuit conversion practices set forth in
Ottonellis treatise. I recognized this alternative interpretive path while
crafting the original argument, and it is only now that I am prepared to
esh it out in its entirety; namely, that an understanding of the negative
self discovered through and carried around after the completion of the
spiritual exercises requires recourse to Adornos philosophy of non-iden-
tity more so than it does to Deleuze and Guattaris No. Whereas the
latter skirts the dialectical negativity of the self/non-self confrontation so
as to uphold the philosophers delity to afrmation, immanence, and
immanation, the former grounds immanence within a negative dialectical
tension. This tension and aporetic subjectivity that results from it more
properly express the crisis of self instigated by the Jesuit mission, the
dehiscent rupture that only heals through divine intervention. While the
next chapter will unfold the parameters of this aporetic and divided self in
more detail (a self, moreover, that I recognize as baroque), the remainder
of this chapter will follow this alternative path (the one I chose not to take
in the previous publication) and clarify the central importance of non-
identity within the creation of I within Jesuit theatricality.
Mike Nesbitt and Lutz Ellrich have both provided maps for this dis-
cussion. In The Expulsion of the Negative: Deleuze, Adorno, and the
Ethics of Internal Difference, Nesbitt, after surveying Deleuzes treat-
ment of the phrase internal difference throughout the body of his
oeuvre (with particular focus given to Bergson 18591941, La con-
ception de la difference chez Bergson, Nietzsche et la philosophie,
Diffrence et Rptition, and Logique du sens), claims that, despite
Deleuzes frequent use of the term, the philosopher never adequately
explains what it means or pursues the ethical entailments of internal
difference. Nesbitt attributes this fact to Deleuzes allergy (my term) to
Hegel and his desire to move beyond the dialectic which he claims to be
unhelpful in the understanding of being since the Being of Hegelian
logic remains merely thought being (cit. Nezbitt 76). Sensing the rele-
vance of internal difference within his own study of Bergsonian duration
(Duration is [ . . . ] what differs with itself) but unwilling to recognize
any dialectical (Hegelian) friction within duration, Deleuze, according to
Nesbitt, ushers the concept of internal difference into his own philosophi-
cal system as an article of faith. He never explains how it works, but
insists that it is there, working as a pure positivity within the foundational
structures of thought, being, and event. Internal difference becomes an
ontological foundation of Being in Deleuzes philosophy, but nowhere
does he excavate that foundation and inspect it.
Ellrich reveals this problem in more detail by magnifying the moments
in Diffrence et Rptition and Nietzsche et la philosophie where Deleuzes
desire to move beyond Hegel allows the negative (the prime mover of
internal difference) to remain in the picture surreptitiously. One of the
goals of Difference and Repetition is to overcome Hegels reliance on
negation and, through this act of overcoming, articulate negationless
difference. As Ellrich says:
Whereas negation-like difference inscribes all differences into the gure of

opposition so as to determine them further as contradictions and, nally,
through the sublation of the latter, to reconcile all that is different in the
construct of an always already governing and all-determining unity, nega-
tionless difference aims at the diversity of non-representable singularities
that constitute series without center or convergence. (Ellrich 470)
Ellrich situates this maneuver historically in the philosophical environment

of late 1960s Paris where Deleuze and Derrida were working to re-direct
thought away from the priority of identity and toward the originary as
well as originless play of difference (464).
Deleuze sees the illusion of identity thinking sprouting from Hegels
philosophical system, especially in the gure of the negation of the negation
where, in Ellrichs concise summary, the Other, cut yet required in the
process of determination, becomes manifest as a constitutive element of
what is determined through the sublation of this cutting. The Other of the
Something becomes discernible as its Other, as Other within itself (469).
The problem for Deleuze lies in the supposed symmetrical relation between
afrmation and contradiction driving the dialectic of Self and Other. He
addressed this problem in Nietzsche and Philosophy where he wrote,
Negation is opposed to afrmation, but afrmation differs from negation.
We cannot think of afrmation as being opposed to negation: this would be
to place the negative within it (188). By replacing the symmetry of Hegels
dialectic with the Nietzsche-inspired asymmetry (negation opposed to
afrmation, afrmation differs from negation) Deleuze opens the path to

nomadic distribution and leaves Hegel in the dust.
For Ellrich, however, as well as Nesbitt, this is only an attempted
breakaway. [Deleuze] overlooks the fact [ . . . ] that Hegels analysis of
identity as the determination of reection results in an in-itself-absolute
non-identity (an ihr selbst absolute Nicht-Identitat) (LII, 41). Had he
not overlooked this, he could have culled difference-theoretical prots
from Hegels line of argumentation in his representation of the constitu-
tion of identity (Ellrich 467). Recalling the historical situation of philo-
sophy in late 1960s Paris, this overlooking of non-identity resulted from
the exclusion of critical theory (such as that of Heinrich Rickert, Ernst
Cassirer, and Adorno) from the conversation. Thus, even after all the
impressive conceptual work of Difference and Repetition, especially the
introduction of repetition as that which sets difference into a rapport with
itself and thus reveals negation as an illusory image of identity, Deleuze
never manages to free himself from the role of mediation and thus fails to
banish negativity from the scene (485). With the role of medium, or
catalyst, of afrmative self-bonding, negativity abides, uninvited but una-
voidable, in the interior of difference (487).
Nesbitt demonstrates that even in Logique du sens, where Deleuze comes
closest to confronting his Hegelian shadow and where readers encounter
the most tantalizing treatment of internal difference, one senses a missed
opportunity. There, in the articulation of the difference between sens and
non-sens, Deleuze locates not a true/false distinction but an and/and
relation where the compossibility of sens and non-sens denotes a sensuous
logic of internal self-contradiction demonstrable not through classical logic
but through the aesthetico-artistic dramatization of internal difference
(Nesbitt 83). For Nesbitt, the most surprising aspect of Deleuzes discovery
is its proximity to Hegelian thinking achieved through the greatest attempt
to break free of that thinking. In his words, [Deleuzes] philosophy of
internal difference and pure singularity is, in both its substance and logic,
sheer identitarian ideology (93). That is to say, Deleuze works incredibly
hard to escape Hegel, forges a tremendously impressive philosophical
understanding of difference and sense/nonsense, and then comes face to
face with the type of ideology he was trying to avoid. Had Deleuze encoun-
tered Adorno earlier, he might have had a similar response to that of
Foucault, who stated in a 1978 interview that, If I had read their books
[i.e. those of the Frankfurt School philosophers], I need not have said a lot
of things, and could have avoided some mistakes.35
To overcome the gravitational pull of identity thinking and reveal

where Hegels insights actually anticipated many of Deleuzes maneuvers,
Nesbitt continues his search for an understanding of internal difference
that does not function through at as an article of faith referring to the
ontological foundation of Being, but, rather, exists as a practical and
situated modality of understanding the world. Rather than making trans-
cendental claims as to the structure of Being, internal difference can and
should remain a tool used to describe the actual and potential forms of
becoming of specic and limited totalities (Nesbitt 94). To esh this idea
out, Nesbitt turns to Adorno.
Seeking to realize the merit of Hegels philosophical process without
leaning on the inherited certainty of his conclusions, Adorno pursues an
understanding of internal difference throughout Negative Dialektik. At
the very beginning of that work, Adorno sets forth his thesis:
The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not
go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to
contradict the traditional norm of adequacy [ . . . ]. It indicates the untruth
of identity [Er ist Index der Unwahrheit von Identitt], the fact that the
concept does not exhaust the thing conceived. (Adorno 5)
This untruth of identity pervading all of the material world, what Adorno
calls non-identity, forces him to confront many of the same philosophical
problems Deleuze confronted, but he chooses to do so by tarrying with
the sedimented history of each concept he treats, which, in turn, pulls the
negative back into the foreground of his inquiry where it reveals itself as
the aporia between matter and thought. As Nesbitt says, Adorno is a
philosopher of the immanence of thought and matter, but not of their
identity (Nesbitt 81). For Adorno, dialectics names not a symmetrical
system of opposition but the ontology of the wrong state of things and
becomes the means of describing the historical becoming of the aporia
that rests at the heart of the thoughtmatter relationship.
Recall that the exercitant, upon completion of the spiritual exercises,
would commence living this wrong state of things, divided between his
new self and the self which he was no longer. This division never resolved.
Instead, as Barthes argued, it was the burden of the virtuous actor to carry
around the divided self until such time as God marked the correct self.
God actually marked the true self at each moment of the day and thus
required the virtuous actor to present the choice at each moment of the
day for Gods consideration through a virtuous imitation of Christ, guided

by Jesuit spiritual directors. The virtuous actor was the embodiment of
internal difference and his performance upon the theatre of the world its
protracted enactment. Functioning in this way, as a kind of mobile foun-
dation structuring the Jesuit post-conversion subject, internal difference
attained the status of theatrico-philosophical praxis.
While I agree with myself, then, that the Jesuits created their own
theatre through which all individuals would think the world, I no longer
agree that Deleuzes philosophy of the No and the plane of composition
provide the best way of thinking this theatre in the present. The scenic
priest, as the allegorical epitome of all converted subjects, did not manage
to live in harmonious compossibility with his non-self discovered through
the spiritual exercises. Rather, he was forced, through the desire of secur-
ing eternal life, to dwell within the incompossible worlds of his two
identities. For Adorno, an irreconcilable gap laid at the heart of all iden-
tities, indeed of identity itself. Contradictions, he insisted, could be
neither banished by means of thought nor within thought. The story of
the scenic priest, in this regard, reveals the historical migration of philo-
sophical non-identity from the realm of the concept to that of the modern
subject.
The analytical paths mapped through Deleuze by Nesbitt, Ellrich, and,
to some extent, my former self, lead then to a question. Does Ottonellis
theatrical treatise present a performance of the Jesuit-molded subjects
afrmative recognition of the other within himself or, instead, to the
founding of modern non-identity within the individual? While before I
chose the Deleuzian direction with a nod toward Adorno, I now emphasize
the irreconcilable gap instantiated at the heart of the subject, the negative
dialectical movement between self and non-self driven through Jesuit thea-
tricality, and the burden of the incompossible identities foisted upon the
converted individual. I speak of burden because Jesuit conversion, while
eventually becoming the means of salvation for the masses, began as a
mystical experience. For the mystic who seeks to shed himself or herself so
as to gain more direct communication with God, the erasure of self comes as
matter of cause in the process of mystical communication. Likewise, for
religious subjects choosing to learn (on the pedagogical and psychagogical
levels) from this mystic teaching, such as the Jesuits following in the wake of
Loyola, the burden of ascetic self-reckoning may be a welcomed weight.
But for the common individual living in a historical moment when such
asceticism breeds with the explosion of printed material, the insistence of
post-Trent papal authority, and the global spread of the Society of Jesus,
this mystical practice forces a rude awakening. In other words, Ottonellis
scenic priest marks for us in the present the historically relevant moment at
which non-identity spreads through a repeatable performance practice, the
moment when the spiritual maturation of Christian self forces an unsutur-
able wound into the identity of the Christian subject.
NOTES
1. Ottonelli appare non come un teologo o come uno scrittore, non come il mite
gesuita che i teorici dellarte amano immaginare, ma come un uomo
dazione, un guerrigliero in lotta contro il teatro, e specialmente contro il
ruolo che vi ricoprivano le donne. All Italian translations in this chapter are
mine unless cited otherwise.
2. Connors 30: Prynne, come Ottonelli, contrario a tutti i mali della societ:
danze, dadi, commedie, pitture lascive, mode licenziose, trucchi, brindisi,
capelli lunghi, riccioli, parrucche, pastorali amorosi, musiche effeminate,
ecc., tutti sono passatempi pagani.
3. Prynne lOttonelli inglese, e viceversa.
4. Both quotations from Connors 29: Lo sorprendiamo a Catania nel 1635,
mentre fa interrompere una commedia dove si rappresentava un gesto osceno.
Lo troviamo poi a Palermo insieme ad un altro gesuita (G.B. Carminta)
intento a condannare un povero ciarlatano alla galera per avere messo in
scena un gesto osceno.
5. Fratello ponete hormai ne alle comiche oscenit; perche una conversatione cos
brutta non utili punto alla salute vostra; anzi grandemente perniciosa, &
voi, & a prossimi vostri; onde meritate dessere scacciato lungi da ogni
Terra, Citt, Provincia, e Regno.
6. On the word, comedia: the word refers to a stage play. The literal translation
would be comedy, but that word now carries the connotation of humor-
ous. To avoid that connotation, I translate the word as play, the ambi-
guity of which lies at the very heart of Ottonellis treatise. At the same time,
as I discuss later in the chapter, the term comedy does have its proper
place in Ottonellis scheme.
7. In this chapter, I will capitalize the Spiritual Exercises when I speak of those
created by Ignatius Loyola. Spiritual Exercises (in italics) will denote the
book that contains the exercises. All other spellings, most frequently the
lower-case spiritual exercises, refer to the concept of these exercises in
general.
8. Per queste feste sullacqua, oltre che di barche particolarmente ornate, i
Compagni si servivano di macchine o teatri galleggianti, i cosiddetti teatro
NOTES 199
del mondo, sui quali avevano luogo danze, serenate, cenee rappresentazioni
sceniche (generalmente momarie). Inoltre, apparati consueti erano vasti pal-
chi a pi piani (i soleri), che erano addossati e comunicavano attraverso le
nestre con i palazzi prospicienti il Canal Grande o quello della Giudecca,
collegati a loro volta allopposta riva del canale con ponti costruiti su barche o
navi, in considerazione che si dovesse attraversare il Canal Grande o il Canale
della Giudecca, sui quali avevano luogo, assai di frequente, le momarie.
9. For more on the Palladio theatre specically and the semi-permanence of the
teatri del mondo more generally, see Lina Padoan Urban, Teatri e teatri del
mondo nella Venezia del Cinquecento [Theatres and theatres of the
world in sixteenth-century Venice] Arte Veneta vol. XX (1966): 137146.
10. Caratteristica assolutamente eccezionale di questo dinamismo architettonico
la pi assoluta indifferenza per laspetto esterno dei teatri. I teatri sono le
sale. Non gli occorrono, fuori, n colonne, n peristili, n timpani. Per lun-
ghissimo tempo questa norma decisamente antimonumentale.
11. [S]e potr condurvi facilmente una fontana di acqua dolce viva e pura, et in
diversi luoghi di essa [ . . . ]. The document exists in ASV, Savi alle Acque,
Busta 986, lza 4, cc.2325. It is partially reprinted in Nicola Mangini, I
teatri di Venezia (Milano, 1974) 2628 and then printed in its entirety
(with some corrections) in Manfredo Tafuri, Venice and the Renaissance,
trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: The
MIT Press, 1989) 159160.
12. Il modo sar con fare uno theatro di pietra grande e commodo per tutti quelli
a tali spettacoli e feste: e saranno le intrate aperte a tutti, che hora non sono: e
se uno vuole entrare hora a vedere qualche festa de compagni de calza, o per
sentire una comedia non pu entrare se non dello populo frosso: cosa che non
tiene n del giusto n dellhonesto, ma del partigiano.
13. [E]t in tale piazza si potr fare combattere orsi con cani: tori selvaggi con
huomini, e simili spettacoli: ma oltra quelli si veder fare la guerra come hora
si fa, e si usa in questa Citt; che cosa molto bella da vedere e molto
apprettata da signori forestieri [ . . . ] ma oltra in quella medesima piazza si
potr facilissimamente far intrare lacqua e uscire, per poter farvi un bello
navale come faceano Romani.
14. E questo sar un spettacolo et una prospettiva la pi bella, la pi vaga, la pi
varia dogni altra, che mai shabbia veduta n che si possa vedere per lavenire
in tutto l mondo: et ben ragionevole: non sendo stata, n per essere mai altra
Citt nel mondo simile a questa, n vergine come questa che niunaltra in
tutto l mondo che sia vergine: laonde si potr nominare allora per capo del
mondo per le sue belle qualit, e fortezza che mai ne fu una simile.
15. It is difcult to determine the contemporary value of a sixteenth-century
Venetian ducat given the gold scarcity suffered on the Italian peninsula
throughout the 1500s and the ination of the ducats value after numerous
wars with Spain. By weight, the Venetian ducat was.1107 troy ounces,
which, with contemporary gold prices makes 50,000 Venetian ducats
worth $6.6 million.
16. Venetian scuole, or schools, were a combination of charitable institutions
and artists guilds. There were two types: the Scuole Grandi, such as the
Scuola Grande di San Rocco to which Tintoretto belonged, and the Scuole
Minore, such as that of the goldsmiths, the shermen, etc.
17. This was part of the Jesuit strategy from its earliest beginnings. On their
long and precarious journey on foot to Venice [1535], the nine companions
wore the dress of university students and, besides some clothing, carried
with them in their leather rucksacks only their Bibles and personal papers.
The passage describes Ignatius Loyola and his earliest companions arriving
in Venice for the rst time together on their way to Jerusalem.
18. After entering the Republic of Saint Mark in the early part of the
sixteenth century, the Jesuits gradually gained access to the core of the
Venetian state by becoming the confessors and spiritual advisers for
numerous patricians. In his study of the Venetian baroque, Gaetano
Cozzi wrote that, Ignazio di Loyola aveva insegnato ai confratelli con
quale attenzione si dovesse guardare ai membri dei ceti pi alti, chiave per
entrare nel vivo di una societ, come attrarne la ducia, come sucitarne e
rafforzarne la devozione. (Ignatius of Loyola had taught the brothers
what attention they would need to guide the members of the highest
classes, keys for entering into the life of a society, how to gain their
trust, how to arouse and reinforce devotion.) Loyola himself acted as
guide for Matteo Dandolo, the Venetian ambassador to France during
some very important years in the life of the relationship between those
two powers, as well as for Gasparo Contarini, one of the most inuential
doges in Venetian history. Achilles Gagliardi S.J. became the broker of
peace between Henry III and Venice in the rst part of the sixteenth
century. Father Benedetto Palmio initiated the hospital system for the
reform of young prostitutes, which, more than just becoming an impor-
tant charitable institution within the Venetian governmental system,
allowed Palmio to gain access to members of the powerful Council of
Ten and to the wives of those men. See Gaetano Cozzi, Venezia barocca
293295 where he discusses Dandolo and Contarini in some more
detail. For more on the relationship between Contarini and Loyola, see
OMalley, First Jesuits 35.
19. Si citava, a tale proposito, come un grande succeso del padre Palmio lesser
riuscito a far sospendere a Venezia, nel carnevale del 1559, le commedie, et
guastar le scene etiam fatte. (One such example of this was the grand
success of Father Palmio who successfully suspended in Venice, for the
carnival of 1559, the plays, to ruin the scenes this made.)
NOTES 201
20. The decree appears in lArchivio di Stato, Venezia [ASV], Consiglio de Dieci,
Comune, Raspe 32 (15751576), 104r. Cited in Johnson, Short,
Lascivious Lives 941.
21. For 1568, see ASV, Consiglio de Dieci, Comune, Raspe 28 (1567-68),
164v., 19 January 1568. For 1573, see ASV, Consiglio de Dieci, Raspe 31
(15731574), 76v., November 10, 1573. Both appear in Johnson 940
941.
22. Item #87 under Rules for the Rector. The restriction against womens
clothing aims at eliminating any libidinal excesses.
23. This text comes in the section Rules for Provincial.
24. One interesting anthology, in which there is an extensive bibliography, is
Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe, eds., Baroque Art: The Jesuit
Contribution (New York: Fordham University Press, 1972). Another,
which has a wider scope, is OMalley et al., The Jesuits II: cultures, sciences,
and the arts, 15401773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006).
25. See Nigel Grifn, Jesuit School Drama, a checklist of critical literature
(London: Grant & Cutler, ltd., 1976) and Nigel Grifn, Jesuit School
Drama: a checklist of critical literature, Supplement No. 1 (London: Grant
Cutler Ltd., 1986).
26. In 1500 a cathedral deacon played the part of a prostitute in a presentation
of Terences The Eunuch; in 1531 a priest died from wounds received in a
street ght; and in 1565, while leaving a ball, a canon assaulted and
wounded a man in a dispute over who should go through a door rst. In
the same year the luogotenente and his soldiers had to force their way into
the monastery of Saint Peter Martyr to put down an armed rebellion by the
monks against the prior and his partisans in Edward Muir, Mad Blood
Stirring: Vendetta & Factions in Friuli during the Renaissance (Baltimore;
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) 3637.
27. On the origin of retreat and its connection to Loyolas Spiritual Exercises,
see OMalley, First Jesuits 47.
28. That is: 1. The ontological possibility of essence or natural kinds. 2. A
dispositional view of essential properties determining the content of a nat-
ural kind. 3. An adequate epistemological/philosophy of mind apparatus
providing an awareness of essences or natural kinds in the individual. 4. A
theory of practical reason undertaking the ends to be pursued in terms of
human nature.
29. Barthes: As for the Ignatian I, at least in the Exercises, it has no value in
existence, it is not described, predicated, its mention is purely transitive,
imperative (5051).
30. This point also brings the dual nature of the Jesuit Order into view against
the background of the Church. The Church wanted people to go to the
monastery. When the Jesuits made that step unnecessary, there were
members of the Church who started viewing Loyolas descendants as usur-

pers of the Churchs power. The Jesuits were thus radically tied to the
Church under the control of the Pope, and they were a free radical organi-
zation that acquired a semi-autonomous status. I talk about this more in
Chapter 7.
31. For more on meditation in the lives of Augustine and Anselm, see Michal
Kobialka, This is My Body: Representational Practices in the Early Middle
Ages (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003) 116118.
32. OMalley discusses the importance of Thomas a Kempiss The Imitation of
Christ and Erasmuss Handbook of the Christian Soldier to Loyolas self-
fashioning in First Jesuits 2527.
33. For an excellent essay on the spatium imaginarium within Jesuit thinking,
especially as it related to Hobbess philosophy of space and place, see Cees
Leijenhorst, Jesuit Concepts of Spatium Imaginarium and Thomas
Hobbess Doctrine of Space, Early Science and Medicine vol. 1, no. 3,
Jesuits and the Knowledge of Nature (October, 1996): 355380.
34. Will Daddario, Parable to Paradigm to Ideology: Thinking Through (the
Jesuit) Theatre, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 25.1 (Fall
2010): 2940.
35. Interview with Ducio Trombadori, original title: Conversazione con M.
F., Il Contributo, JanMar 1980, 2384; German title: Der Mensch ist ein
Erfahrungstier, Frankfurt 1996, p. 82. Cit. http://foucault.info/pst/az-cf-
77712-973580928, trans. Nico.
CHAPTER 7
Baroque Diarchic Self
The previous ve chapters of this book have dusted off, arranged, and
analyzed distinct baroque social practices: a triptych of pastoralia formed
from: (1) the botanical work of Valsanzibio, Bomarzo, and Tasso, (2) the
weeding of the idealized garden made theatrical in Ruzzantes offerings,
and (3) the Jesuit exercise of pastoral power; Ruzzantes political and
aesthetic act of taking place; and the rooting, harvesting, and pruning of
souls culminating in the dehiscence of a spiritual self enscened on the
Jesuit teatro del mondo. I argue that these theatrical and performance
events happening throughout Venice in the sixteenth and early seven-
teenth centuries worked collectively to create and maintain an internal,
governmental, homeostatic order consonant with individual worldviews
while they simultaneously strained against the Venetian governmental,
spiritual, and philosophical status quo in their attempt to restructure
society. The tale of these baroque social practices, then, spins out from
an internal struggle or tension, one which I believe coheres around a
dialectical entwinement of discipline and excess.
From the perspective of each individual or group enmeshed in and
formed by this struggle, however, the image of discipline and excess
appears somewhat different. Refusing to submit to the whim of Venetian
governors and spiritual pastors who understood their dominance as con-
sonant with the natural state of affairs, thus ensuring that man-made
power dynamics would rule above God-given nature, Ruzzante modied
paradigms of theatrical expression to demand social and governmental

204 7 BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF
change. His biting critiques, while sometimes grotesque, excessive in their

vulgarity, and perhaps responsible for his dismissal from Venetian stages,
never deated his renown, nor did they lead to his complete dismissal from
the theatrical life of the terraferma. Structuring and stabilizing his ights of
artistic excess, one nds a tactical adherence to the acceptable genres of
theatrical expression. For example, though his direct addresses to the two
Cornaro cardinals upbraided the guests of honor and proposed an alter-
native constitution to govern peasant life in Padua, his witty repartee never
tilted entirely to the obscene. Ultimately, I claim that Ruzzantes disci-
plined aesthetic sensibility permitted his most unorthodox outbursts; at
the same time, his outbursts helped to reshape the discipline of theatrical
fare and gave rise eventually to a long line of dissident (or at least dis-
sonant) political performers, from Andrea Calmo to Dario Fo.1
Jesuit spiritual leaders, recognizing the Republics assertion of its nat-
ural rights to govern as a hideous misstep away from the path of spiritual
salvation, sought to redirect the soul of each individual in the Veneto back
toward the spiritual way. Soon after their emergence in Venice, the Order
would spread to the far corners of the globe with the same aim. Following
the guidance of the ascetic worldview modeled and preached by Loyola,
the Society sculpted its conversion tactics not only with the spiritual
exercises but also the theatre, the very artform they seem to have feared
the most. In their hands, the improper, soul-disturbing debauchery of
theatrical fare transformed into a corporeal pedagogical and psychagogical
tool for fashioning spiritual purity, thereby rewiring the excesses of stage
performance into an artistic discipline of conversion.
By magnifying the minutiae of specic performance practices or texts
while also surveying the broader view of the geopolitical formation of
the Republic, this study has revealed how not only discipline and excess
inform each other but also how the act of ordering coupled with its
dialectical twin, the act of disordering, to underwrite each of these
performances and texts. In many ways, order and disorder (as verbs,
not nouns) drive baroque art and daily life. Venice has rightly featured
in studies of the baroque for this reason. Cultivated over centuries and
having reached the zenith of economic and artistic achievement in the
fteenth century, Venices art of statecraft sought perpetually to tame
the disorder that surrounded the island territory, whether that disorder
came in the form of natural disasters or political distress. To tame the
surrounding disorder, however, the Republic turned frequently to ela-
borate spectacles themselves prone to improvisation and revision. To
BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF 205
some extent, the Republic seems to have recognized that order could
be obtained through excessively theatrical means. By the sixteenth
century, after the Battle of Agnadello and during the wars with the
League of Cognac against the Holy Roman Emperor, the Venetian art
of politics needed to look inward and ensure inner stability so as to
thwart the advances of external assailants. Thus, the art of politics
consolidated the multiple diarchic governmental relations with its ter-
raferma holdings, which historians like Edward Muir have recognized
as signs of Venices continued mastery of the order/disorder dialectic.
Muir denes these diarchic arrangements as follows: These semiauto-
nomous groups that composed these asymmetrical diarchies were called
corpi e ceti, literally bodies and classes, comprising territorial organi-
zations such as the parliament of Friuli; cities, towns, and villages
incorporated as communes; and aristocratic jurisdictions (Muir,
Republicanism? 143). As he also points out, Students of the
Venetian state have emphasized how its hodgepodge of institutions,
the prevalence of aristocratic privilege, and widespread cultural differ-
ences created a diarchy in which local oligarchs shared authority with
Venetian ofcials (Muir, Mad Blood 50). This diarchic model has in
fact replaced Jacob Burckhardts notion of the Renaissance State as a
work of art, though, arguably, the art of statehood still nessed the
more delicate diplomatic moments within these diarchic relationships.
Conscious of the historiographical maneuvering required to gain
access to the various tensions (discipline/excess, order/disorder)
churning within these diarchic political landscapes, I am compelled in
this nal chapter to re-think these diarchies through the frame of
Derridas discussion of arkh and the archive. At the semantic level,
diarchy denotes a relatively simple political arrangement through
which two rule systems operate concurrently in places like Padua,
Treviso, Vicenza, and the Friuli so as to offer the occupants of those
towns semi-autonomous governance of their territories while simulta-
neously asserting Venetian supra-dominance. Derridas deconstructive
reading of arkh, however, opens the door to a more nuanced inter-
pretation of diarchic governmentality and helps us in the present
moment to access the bodies and struggles of individuals whose iden-
tities frequently remain occluded by the blinding light of state-spon-
sored histories and the prevalence of archival documents penned by the
governing classes. By accessing these bodies and struggles, I intend to
engage with a diarchic sense of self operating within these individuals.
For Derrida, arkh names an act of taking place. Seeing arkh stitched
into the word archive, he goes on to suggest how all historiographical
activity engaged with archival study necessarily amounts to a performance
that takes place within and among archival traces, and that, furthermore,
these traces themselves, the so-called objective materials, belie both covert
and overt historical practices that relied on two principles: commencement
and commandment. Archival data hint at origins and springings-forth, but
they also reveal the acts of ordering that deemed those data worthy of
safekeeping and ordering in the rst place. Derridas point is that archives
and archival data not only point to there where events commenced but
also, and logically prior to the commencement, there where social order
was exercised and a nomological principle enforced. The founding and
taking place of arkh thus instigate a cleavage in the heart of the archive
(Derrida 13).
A similar cleavage, issuing from ones cultural identity, shows itself
within the Venetian diarchies mentioned by Muir. I have rehearsed one
example of this already by showing how Paduas diarchic arrangement
with Venice leads to its semi-autonomy that must, ultimately, concede
allegiance to the Republic. Thus, Padua is consigned to Venice, gath-
ered together within the geopolity of the Republic of St Mark. My
concern in this nal chapter is to discover whether this same tension
plays out on the level of the individual whose identity construction
abuts a multiplicity of diarchic principles and regimes (Paduan/
Venetian, spirit/esh, law of nature/law of government). Whereas
Muir worked to understand the various bilateral relationships operating
in the Veneto before, during, and after the defeat of Agnadello in order
to extend and solidify Venetian-style res publica, I am uncovering a
diarchic baroque aestheticism coincident and coeval with this repub-
lican governmentality, one that points to the specter of what I call the
baroque diarchic self. Like the other baroque social practices produced
in this book thus far, this baroque self contains within it a dialectical
tension between disciplinary regimes and excessive expressions,
between archic acts of ordering and anarchic acts of disordering. The
purpose of X-raying this tension within the self is not to develop a
baroque ontology but, rather, to suggest a baroque praxis of self, a
manner of gathering oneself from multiple potential selves and carrying
on as this imagined unity. As I will demonstrate, such a praxis leads
simultaneously to the promise of creating a new world within the
existing order and to an irreconcilable schism within ones identity.
BAROQUE DIARCHIC SELF 207
Many neobaroque writers have worked assiduously to esh out this

baroque self, one fraught with tensions that potentially lead the way to
new understandings of identity and praxis. For William Egginton, the
word neobaroque has in fact become the quintessentially American
expression of postcolonial aesthetics (Egginton 72). Paired with its
counterpart, the coloneobaroque, Egginton understands the neobaroque
as a persistent option or possibility or strategy of the aesthetic congura-
tion ushered in by the historical Baroque, a possibility that lives in an
aesthetic understanding of self made possible, and necessary, through
colonialism. Explaining this in more detail, Egginton turns to Jos
Lezama Limas word imago, the image that the colonizers wove together
out of a dissident, disperse, unknown reality, terra incognita, in order to
make the fabric of history (73). But, as he goes on to explain, the imago,
synonymous with the subject known as American in Lezamas work,
occupies in some sense both the place of the perceiver and that of the
imagined object, and thus, the American consciousness is capable of
producing a very different view of the world, replete with its own aesthetic
forms (73). Herein lies the revolutionary power of the imago-self, a
power hewn from a subjects emergence upon a cultural borderline, a
potent place of in-betweenness. For Egginton, the imago occupies the
paradoxical point of baroque architectonics, where the truth is contained
and produced by the illusion that conceals it (75).
This notion of a self-as-pivot articulated by Lezama and Egginton, a
self not denigrated by the lack of singular subject position developed
through colonial exploitation but, instead, thriving thanks to a supple
stance across multiple sign systems, motivates my inquiry into the
diarchic self, though, like the neobaroque writers, I remain hesitant
to perform a fully positive reading of this self as it exposes itself in
sixteenth-century northern Italy. As the previous chapter suggested,
baroque self unfolds from internal difference and entails an aporetic
non-identity. Likewise, the sense of self underpinning Ruzzantes thea-
tre, indeed Ruzzantes own split-identity as Beolco/Ruzzante, and the
Jesuit scenic actors reveal signs of internal revolt, one possibly managed
through deft theatrical externalization or enfoldment but ornery and
divided nonetheless, unresolved, a peptic self. By lingering on the dis-
ease of the self visible within the Venetian diarchies of the early six-
teenth century, I hope to add an historical perspective that may benet
the dialectical thought active in neobaroque studies and further evalu-
ate the internal tensions within the term baroque itself.
BEOLCOS AESTHETIC CONSIGNMENT

After having situated Angelo Beolco in the particular set of historical
conditions shaping the Veneto in the early sixteenth century, the perfor-
mers internal diarchy reveals itself as an uncomfortable struggle between
the reign of violence and the reign of philosophical invention.
Undoubtedly, Beolco contained numerous conicting ideologies, tactical
plans, and afnities, but the conict between violent revolt and philoso-
phical revolt shows itself clearly in the remaining artifacts of his life and
work. Direct and indirect views of the tumultuous social dynamics pre-
senting violence as a viable means of social change for Beolco come from
scholarship on the Friulan carnival massacre of 1511, the military maneu-
vers of Michael Gaismair leading to the Tyrolean peasant revolt of 1525
and his eventual assassination in Padua in 1532, and the series of wars
between Venice and the Holy Roman Emperor occurring during that
same span of time. The impact on Beolco of these three conglomerations
of events shows up in his dialogues, specically the Bilora and the so-called
Reduce, the latter of which offers a glimpse of Ruzzantes own experience
as a soldier on the battleeld. As Linda Carroll has argued, however, an
intellectual and philosophical set of beliefs seems to temper the perfor-
mers violent tendencies. Beolco built his beliefs by reading or coming into
contact with Utopia by Thomas More, In Praise of Folly and the
Enchiridion by Deisderus Erasmus, the lectures of radical philosopher
Pietro Pompanozzi, and the intellectual side of Gaismairs rebellion. I
argue that neither physical violence nor philosophy wins out as the
supreme force capable of rousing Beolco and the peasants he represented
out of the their malaise. Neither violent action nor philosophical contem-
plation ultimately serves to shape exclusively his worldview. Instead, the
diarchic competition between violence and philosophy produced a deep
and unresolved antagonism that itself dened Beolcos work as Ruzzante.
This diarchic competition spawned Ruzzante, the militant performance
philosopher.
I turn rst to Muirs study of the Friulan carnival because, though it
focuses predominantly on the rise of vendetta violence in Udine and the
towns of the Friuli, and therefore may seem to take this study away from
its primary locus, it illustrates the on-the-ground frustrations of the lower
classes as well as the resulting violence of those frustrations and the degree
to which the violence may have provided members of the lower classes
with suggestions for how to consolidate power amongst themselves
BEOLCOS AESTHETIC CONSIGNMENT 209
despite the hierarchical governmentality imposed by the Republic. These

insights can support the empirical studies of Padua such as those found in
Brian Pullans Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice that demonstrate the
results of poverty and famine on the farmers who supplied Venice with
their food, and, in turn, can suggest why Beolco chose to include an
onstage murder in one of his dialogues.
Muir declares that, Venetians treated Friuli, as they did all their
terraferma lands, as a source of revenue and a military buffer zone, an
approach that failed to unify the dominion in a way that would either
bring a true pax Veneta to the countryside or permit Friuli to evolve
autonomously under Venetian patronage (Muir, Mad Blood 51).
Ideologically, the Venetians defended their governmental practice on
the grounds of unanimitas, the convergence of a multitude of wants
and aspirations into a single will (Margaret King, cit. Muir 53), an
ideal that permeated the writings of Venetian humanists, inuencing
how they understood their own politics and depriving all dissenters of
legitimacy (53). Such humanist ideals poured out through the ink of
Pietro Barozzi, Bishop of Padua from 14711507, who wrote expli-
citly against the voices of the poor whose souls he was supposed to
shepherd in On the Extirpation of Factions and Recalling and
Compelling the Citizens to Obedience (1489, cit. Muir 5354). Back
in the Friuli, bishops, Venetian governors, and local magistrates all
touted the same rhetoric.
The gross imbalance between the humanist ideal of unanimitas, on the
one hand, and the benecent practice of such an ideal, on the other hand,
led to a particularly disturbing event during Udines carnival of 1511.
Disguised as an extemporaneous outburst caused by military fatigue and
mob mentality, but more likely an attack instigated through the machina-
tions of local aristocrat Antonio Savorgnan against his closest rivals, riots
erupted on February 27 that would lead to the killing of between 25 and
50 nobles and the destruction of much private property. Muir describes
this event as the most extensive and most damaging popular revolt in
Renaissance Italy and as an event that contemporaries understood both
as a peasant rebellion and as the blood backwash from a tidal wave of
vendetta violence among the nobles who dominated the affairs of the
region (xixxx). News of this event spread quickly to Venice, brought
both by Venetian ofcers posted in Udine and by subsequent publications
such as Gregorio Amaseos History of the Cruel Fat Thursday (1513
1514), which sought to nger Savorgnan for his behind-the-scenes role
in the events. Written in Venetian, as opposed to Tuscan or Latin, this

tract would have circulated through multiple strata of Venetian society
where it served to explain this bloody event, the likes of which had not
been experienced before.
Though no such rebellion ever coalesced in Ruzzantes hometown,
there is plenty of reason to suspect that the Friulan carnival left a mark
on his understanding of the world. For starters, peasants in all of the
Venetian terraferma properties struggled to serve the Republics needs
while maintaining a life worthy of the name for themselves and their
families. Muir, for example, describes how [t]he Venetian State occasion-
ally passed laws protecting peasants from the worst abuses of their cred-
itors, such as the demanding of work animals, tools, hay, or straw as
collateral for loans, but by the late sixteenth century the requirements of
Venice itself became one of the worst causes of rural impoverishment
(43). He also cites the correspondence of Tommaso Morosini who in
1601 described the Friulan peasantry as because of a thousand adverse
conditions in manifest ruin with little hope of improvement (cit. 20).
These words could have reasonably described the situation of the Padua
peasantry who, along with the laborers in the Friuli, fought against
Venetian exploitation throughout the 1500s, watched as drought and
famine gripped its populace, and struggled generally to eke out a modest
living. With these comparisons ready at hand, together with the number of
accounts of the bloody carnival and, indeed, the prevailing belief of the
Udinesi that the function of historians at the time was to attest to and
prepare the way for reparations of the bloodshed, I think it possible to
counter Muirs statement that, Nothing that happened in Friuli in the
winter of 1511 altered the course of affairs in Europe or even in the
republic of Venice (xx).2
At least one aspect of the carnival changed the course of affairs of
theatrical representation in the Veneto and may help to explain an aspect
of Ruzzantes oeuvre that scholars have not been able to reconcile.
Namely, I believe that Savorgnans defense for his own actions during
the carnival riots may have motivated the culminating scene of Bilora in
which the dialogues protagonist stabs a Venetian merchant to death.
Perhaps performed at a state banquet in Venice in 1530, Bilora marks
what Ronnie Ferguson refers to as the darkest moment in Beolcos
repertoire (Ferguson 41). The one-act piece offers the story of Bilora, a
Paduan, whose wife, Dina, has been lured away by a Venetian merchant,
Andronico. After venturing into Venice to win back his wife, Bilora suffers
a series of setbacks and ultimately collapses under the realization that Dina
wants to remain in Venice, partially because of the security and food
Andronico can provide for her. After working himself into a frenzy and
imagining a grizzly scenario in which he butchers Andronico to death,
Bilora actually fullls his warped fantasy by kning Andronico outside the
merchants Venetian home. The play ends with Bilora ambiguously
reecting on his deedmaybe he regrets it, maybe not. As Ferguson
suggests, the play skirts the boundary of comedy and perhaps moves
beyond it by offering an onstage murder, which spoke frankly to an off-
stage urban/rural, Venetian/Paduan conict. Despite the diarchic
arrangement in place, Padua had, in a sense, become the abject object of
the Venetian Republic, a fertile landmass on which to cultivate agricultural
wealth after nearly a half-century of dwindling Venetian dominance on the
seas. Beolcos Paduan characters, like Bilora, frequently personied the
object-ness of Padua on Veneto stages. The nal words in Bilora (What
did I tell you?) voiced by the eponymous protagonist seems to haunt
scholars interpretation of the text (Ruzante, Teatro 578).3 Of all the
angles of this text to peruse, I am drawn to the escalating anger that
courses through the character of Bilora, an anger that bubbles up through
the imagined act of butchery and builds enough momentum to bypass the
characters common sense and rationality. Beolco did not need to invent
such anger. He could draw from recent historical precedent.
In the court cases and evidence-gathering sessions that followed the
cruel Carnival in Udine, Venetian magistrates apparently amassed enough
information to justiably execute two of the participants and to exile
several others. Intriguingly, however, Antonio Savorgnan, the individual
on whom Gregorio Amaseos text placed all blame, did not receive so
much as a ne. Muir reveals he was never even charged with any crimes or
wrongdoing. Archival remnants suggest that Savorgnan was not, even by
his own admission, completely removed from the violence, but, rather,
that his rational self had been completely overcome by mad blood and
could not, therefore, be accused:
For his part, Antonio describes himself as in the grips of a kind of madness
on Gioved Grasso [ . . . ]: I am so angry that I am beside myself and do not
know what I am doing. Impelled by his mad blood, Antonio abdicated all
responsibility as if his anger had blotted out his reasoning faculties, pushed
him beyond the reach of self-restraint, and subjected him to the governance
of pure emotion. His words derived their force from the integrity of burning
anger, as if authenticity of feeling justied even the most outrageous crimes.

(Muir, Mad Blood 201)
From the moment he uttered this defense, mad blood became a legit-
imate excuse for the triumph of irrationality over reason. Instead of
marveling at Beolcos invention of the Bilora murder, or puzzling over
the literary precursors of such a violent stage event, I am compelled to read
Andronicos grizzly death as the victory of Biloras mad blood over his
diplomatic and rational self, and to read Bilora as a type of theatrical
warning shot leveled against Venetian aristocrats numbly accustomed to
taking everything from the members of their mainland territories.
Beolco would have experienced more targeted violence closer to home
in 1532 when the German peasant leader Michael Gaismair was roused by
a traitorous friend and assassinated, thanks to a bribe from the Habsburg
Archduke Ferdinand. Whereas the peasant rebellion surrounding the
Friulan carnival was stamped out quickly and never likely to ascend beyond
the control of calculating nobles such as Savorgnan, the co-ordinated
peasant rebellions against the Habsburgs interests, stretching from 1524
to Gaismairs death, threatened the stability of the entire region of Tyrol,
which itself bordered Venetian landholdings. Beolcos plays show consid-
erable evidence that he was familiar with Gaismairs life and tactics as the
leader of these rebellions, and though archival evidence has not yet
revealed a face-to-face meeting between the two, one might reasonably
suspect that Gaismairs nal years spent in exile in Padua would have
brought him at least close to Beolcos circle of friends and acquaintances.4
The death of Gaismair may also have meant the death of Beolcos more
violent revolutionary impulses, such as those glimpsed in Bilora, but by
lingering briey on Gaismairs history I would like to demonstrate how
the proximity of a successful revolution could have reasonably compelled
Ruzzante to consider taking up the sword instead of the pen.
Walter Klaassen has cited similar conditions for the Tyrolean peasant
revolts as those which exploited and depressed the Friulan and Paduan
peasants, including especially extraordinary rents, taxes, and levies
demanded of the German tenant farmers and the vexed situation of a
diarchic rule where, slowly over time, the Roman law of the Empire
overtook the law of the land that had enabled peasant agency in the
previous decades (Klaassen 56). Spiritual strife too split the devotions
of the Tyrolean peasants, most obviously in the form of a rising
Protestant dissent against the Catholic Church, whose priests had
done little to assuage the anger of the lower classes (1012). Swayed
more by the failings of temporal government than the Protestant
spiritual militants, at least at rst, Gaismair developed from civil servant
to revolutionary as he witnessed the slow erosion of peasant autonomy
from his position as secretary for the vice-regent, Leonhard von Vls
(1217). Klaassens research suggests that Gaismair secretly built coali-
tions with members of the peasantry during the years leading up to
1525, all the while watching some of his friends go on trial for
defending their liberties against the imposing force of the vice-regent
(24). Remaining faithful to the Catholic insistence that faith in God
consisted of exercising justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with
God, Gaismairs secret plans revealed themselves in early May when,
after a quick revolt in Brixen that drove out the episcopal leaders, the
rebels elected Gaismair, then approximately 35 years old, as their
leader. All violence enacted by the rebels over the next year had as its
express purpose the defense of civil liberties that Gaismair and the
peasants of the land enumerated in The Meran Articles. They sought
nothing less than a new constitution that enforced the common
good as the new law of the land (3233).
At rst, Ferdinand I, then Holy Roman Emperor, willingly negotiated
with Gaismair, but this seems to have been a stalling tactic since as soon as
he could raise enough money and military support to suppress Gaismairs
peasant forces he turned on both Gaismair and his followers. Concurrent
with this change of tune, Gaismair caught wind of Ferdinands duplicity
and edged more toward radical militancy. Ferdinand had the upper hand
at rst, able as he was to imprison Gaismair. After approximately two
months in prison, however, Gaismair escaped to Switzerland where he
hid off and on for a year and prepared his now famous Constitution that
called for a complete overthrow of the existing governmental and religious
systems (5861). Needing the support of a larger army and desiring a safe
haven for his family, Gaismair rode to Venice in July 1526 and gave his
services to the Republic, which all too happily supported the man whose
peasant armies could extend the Venetian defensive border and help the
League of Cognac fend off the Holy Roman Emperor. This move unfor-
tunately crippled the militant peasant revolts since Venice cared not at all
for Gaismairs revolution and sought only to protect its own interests
during a time of great instability. Furthermore, by effectively siding with
the Pope, whose armies also fought in the League of Cognac, Gaismair
lost respectability at home, and thus he spent his remaining years
frustrated and toothless in the Paduan countryside with an annual pension

of 300 ducats (69).
While at rst glance the comparison between Gaismair, a political
revolutionary, and Beolco, a theatrical innovator and frank-talker, may
seem faint at best, a more careful appraisal reveals a good number of
similarities. Neither man was a peasants by birth but both of them chose
to side with the peasants after witnessing the injustices done to them.
Once their careers advanced their social positions, both men were elected
as ofcial spokespeople: Gaismair as chair of the revolt and Beolco as
member of the visinanza, a kind of peasant assembly that Carroll likens
to groups in the Tyrol (Carroll, Nontheistic Paradise 884). Gaismair
and Beolco both took advantage of their proximity to centers of intellec-
tual innovation and used their closeness to educate themselves. The links
between Gaismair and Protestant thinkers (from Luther to Zwingli to the
Anabaptists) are clear, but prior to those afliations he seems to have
studied the work of Nicolas de Cusa. Likewise, Ruzzantes access to the
University of Padua put him in touch with cutting-edge philosophical
curricula, including the radical teachings of Pomponazzi that spoke out
against the immortality of the soul, a primary tenet of the Catholic
Church. Perhaps most interesting, both men found themselves pulled in
two directions from the moment they rose to fame. Gaismair spent years as
an ofcial for the state he would eventually accuse of counter-acting the
divine right of God, and Beolco spent his days in the circle of Alvise
Cornaro who, while friendly and gracious in many respects, required the
performer to enact land deals on his behalf, including the purchasing of
farmers land at low prices when the people couldnt pay their rents. A key
difference here is that while Gaismair took up arms and sided with his
moral convictions, Beolco remained trapped between the peasants on
whose behalf he spoke and the wealthy patron who provided him with
the money he needed to live.
In an essay exploring the warp and weft of this in-betweenness experi-
enced by Beolco because of his relation to Cornaro, I focused on what I
called Beolcos negative theatre practice (Daddario, What a Joke).
Never amounting to a complete political praxis that would overturn the
hierarchical relation with Cornaro, this negative theatre practice expressed
itself as a constipated sublation of his own social situation. Images of this
constipation spring from particularly unfunny jokes such as one in which a
character deprived of food during a period of famine contemplates plug-
ging up his anus in order to keep food inside his gut, and one in which
Beolco, as Ruzzante, contemplates eating himself to death in order to

satiate his empty stomach and end his miserable life at the same time.5
Weaving those suggestions into this narrative, I want to add two consid-
erations. First, that, instead of allowing his mad blood to stir him into a
full-on revolt against the upper classes in Padua, Beolcos frustration
ended up feeding on his own aesthetic personae. Beolco wrote characters
who eat themselves to death and demonstrated the violence enacted on
the poor in Padua through grotesque aesthetic expressions so as to force
dis-ease upon the people whose wealth could reasonably help to abate the
suffering. Second, the vicious cycle of internalizing his discontents, exter-
nalizing them as artistic expressions, and then re-eating those discontents
while acting as one of his own aesthetic personae leads to a philosophical
consideration of Beolco as Ruzzante. Is there anything special to note
about an historical person who chose to identify as a ctitious creation of
his own making, or is this merely a kind of self-advertising common
among working actors at the time?
Though it was not uncommon for actors to assume public recognition
as their stage names (as in the case, nearly a century after Beolco/
Ruzzante, for example, of Nicol Barbieri, known as Beltrame), Beolco
was unique insofar as he eventually changed his name legally, thus assum-
ing in life an identity created for the stage (Calendoli 3334). Thinking of
this act not in terms of identity, however, and not in the language of a
mask but, rather, in terms of a spatial consignment, la Derrida, this
maneuver has fascinating implications; namely, that Ruzzante appears less
as a character and more as a specic kind of aesthetic dwelling. Beolco
created Ruzzante to house the life experience he acquired during his rise
to the forefront of theatrical activity in the Veneto. In effect, Ruzzante
became the archive of Beolcos sense experiences, insofar as he acted as a
shelter and dwelling. But recalling Derridas attention to the cleavage
abiding within each act of taking place known as archive, Beolcos
becoming-Ruzzante hints at a critical tension living in the as that unites
the phrase Beolco as Ruzzante. On the one hand, the Ruzzante archive
indexes the historical situation in which Paduan peasants found them-
selves, thereby hinting at the conditions giving birth to Ruzzante,
Beolcos unique brand of theatre, the specicity of his humor, and so
forth. On the other hand, the Ruzzante archive reminds us in the present
of Beolcos failure to overcome or betray his middle-class privilege and the
protection of Cornaro, and, in this respect, the gure Ruzzante will
remain always somewhat unnished. Despite the legal status attesting
otherwise, Beolco never fully became Ruzzante; he would, rather, wrestle

with his own internal difference as both the protected artist of the wealthy
Cornaro and also spokesperson against the social structures perpetuating
the consolidation of wealth in the hands of a few Venetian families. In
other words, the historical event I am calling Beolco as Ruzzante never
ended. It was an ongoing artistic practice instigated by Beolco to consign
within one aesthetic body the tensions and perspectives of those he
represented.
What is housed in Ruzzante? Certainly one can see suppressed anger,
such as in Bilora, but one also sees an index of a philosophical practice
devoted to attaining the good life. Abiding alongside his considerations of
political revolt, the Ruzzante archive houses elective philosophical af-
nities. It is not the case that violence and philosophy oppose one another.
On the contrary, as Gaismairs history reveals, philosophical considerations
about justice, mercy, and truth gave rise to the peasants violent actions
against the Habsburgs interests. Similarly, as explained in Chapter 5,
Ruzzantes Prima and Seconda Oratione show this marriage between
philosophical thinking and social upheaval, between parrhesiastic speech
and the rough jostling of the status quo. Yet, Ruzzantes philosophical
deliberations did not always rely on the language of violence, even when
the setting of his dialogues seems to suggest the impossibility of breaking
free of the violence sweeping northern Italy in the sixteenth century. Once
viewed as distinct from violence, the philosophy housed in Ruzzante
appears as an intellectual craftiness.
I am thinking here of the dialogue titled Parlamento de Ruzante che
iera vegn de campo (Dialogue of Ruzzante, returned from war), known as
the Reduce (Veteran), which Beolco composed between 1509 and 1517.
In it, Beolco (as Ruzzante) and Menato engage in a conversation about
the formers recent stint as a conscripted soldier in the Venetian army.
When Menato sees Ruzzante for the rst time he does not recognize him
on account of the pallid complexion his compare (comrade, best friend)
acquired through his harrowing moments spent on the battleeld.
Ruzzante explains the cause of his appearance with the following line:
Compare, its these metal helmets that make these ugly complexions. They
weigh a ton and they pull down the esh. And then, with only the sea to
drink, the worst food to eat [ . . . ]. If you had only been where I have been!
(Ruzante, Teatro 520)6
The phrase If you had only been where I have been functions as a refrain
throughout the entire dialogue to express the inexpressibly miserable
conditions of life on the front lines. It follows images of lice-infested
bread, the loss of limbs, and soldiers robbing valuable objects from the
dead bodies of fallen comrades.7
The comedic highlight of the dialogue comes when Ruzzante
describes his tactics for avoiding violence and combat on the battleeld.
His uniform in the Venetian army featured a tunic adorned with a red
cross. The enemy, the Spanish-Imperial army, wore tunics bearing
white crosses. In order to survive the violent terrain of close and
incessant combat at the wars front lines, Ruzzante fashioned a two-
sided cross with one side painted red and the other white (la mia crose
giera da un l rossa e da laltro bianca). Able to switch the cross when
the situation required it, Ruzzante could disguise himself as either a
Venetian or a Spanish soldier. Proud of his maneuvering, Ruzzante
titled himself crafty (a son fato scaltro), and when asked by
Menato why he would act in such a cowardly manner he replied,
Perch un solo non p far niente contra tanti (Because one person
can do nothing against many) (526). Faced with a no-win situation,
Ruzzante manipulated his visibility in the enemys eld of sight. By
altering his uniform, he changed the win-lose dynamic of the war into a
sheer game of survival in which all men on the eld became potential
camouage.
Following Michel de Certeaus extrapolation from Carl von
Clausewitzs treatise On War, Ruzzantes antics at the front resemble
the art of pulling tricks, which involves a sense of the opportu-
nities afforded by a particular occasion (de Certeau, Everyday Life
37). Crafty, tricky, opportunistic: these are the main adjectives that
describe Ruzzantes tactics and perhaps even his broader philosophy,
one that acknowledges the primary role of visibility and appearance in
daily encounters. His is a necessary trickery practiced by the weak in a
world where the wars one is obliged to ght have no immediate
benets for the ghter. Eventually, though, Ruzzantes battle wisdom
leads him to abandon his craftiness and simply to run away. He ees
from the soldiers without having won for himself any spoils or having
acquired any rugged scars, a fact that does not impress his friends
upon returning home. Instead of merely a pusillanimous act, how-
ever, I argue that Ruzzantes running away is indicative of his more
general disdain of violent means used to achieve political ends.
Without his craftiness and his running away, there would be no dialo-
gue at all. In this sense, the Reduce is constituted by Ruzzantes craftiness,
not just as a writer or stage actor but also as human being in the world
capable of navigating the exigencies placed upon him by the Venetian
powers. Moreover, it is possible to elevate this craftiness from personal
perspicacity to practical philosophy by uniting this dialogue with Linda
Carrolls assessment of Ruzzantes intellectual heritage. In two essays,8
Carroll elaborates on the inuences that the writings of More and Erasmus
had on the Paduan. She illustrates how the Reduce, for example, greatly
resembles Erasmuss Militia confessio in form and content. By utilizing the
Dutch writers rhetorical strategies, Beolco, as Ruzzante, is able to decry
the follies of war and to mock his own complicit behavior as land transac-
tor for both Church authorities and his patron. This latter reference
appears in a scene from the Reduce in which the performer subtly likens
buying land from poor peasants to the stealing of clothing from dead
soldiers bodies (Early Adaptations 31). Echoing my own ndings,
Carroll goes on to state that, the playwrights own earning of money
from the administration of church properties created a strong conict
between his reformist desires and the need to survive (Nontheistic
Paradise 890). Her point and mine, though, is that Ruzzantes survival
strategy relied not only on his various modes of employment but also on
the philosophical advice he culled from the works of the foremost
European humanists.
Beolco did more than parrot the philosophical phrases and literary
styles of More and Erasmus. As Carrolls ndings show, he clearly adapted
their philosophies to his specic situation, thereby assembling an ethical
guidebook to help him navigate the social terrain in which he found
himself:
From Erasmus, Beolco adopts a satirical attitude that destroys all presuppo-
sitions, thus preparing the way for a new construction. From More, Beolco
draws an Epicureo-Stoic philosophy, though inverting it to serve his own
purposes. That is, while More proposes that what is reasonable gives plea-
sure and that therefore one can change peoples behavior through laws
appealing to reason, Beolco argues that what is pleasurable is reasonable
and that therefore when people are happy they behave well. (882883)
When one tallies up the many references, both clear and oblique, that
Beolco makes to More, Erasmus, and Pomponazzi, the overall tone of his
bricoleur philosophical handbook is easy to read. Beolcos own worldview

put him in direct contact with multiple millenarian social programs active
in the Veneto at that time (883884). To navigate his way to the good life,
it seems that Beolco avoided not only the violent paths but also all spiritual
paths in favor of a more materialist route. Carroll goes so far as to call his
philosophy nontheism, which denotes both the absence of belief and
indifference to Gods existence, [a stance] of more importance to the
Renaissance than overt denial of the deity [i.e. atheism] (895).
Coupling this information with the ideas developed earlier in
Chapters 3 and 4, the philosophy of Beolco, as Ruzzante, reveals specic
tenets. First, the pathway to salvation laid out by spiritual guides led
nowhere. Instead, the truth of the world lies in the power of the natural.
Second, the natural had both a positive and a negative power. While it
created the bounties of the Paduan farmlands, it also took those bounties
away. The ineptitude and malfeasance of Venetian rulers may have exa-
cerbated the famines of Beolcos day, but Nature itself precipitated the
perils. Third, in order to act in accordance with the benecent powers of
Nature, individuals had to observe their surroundings carefully and devise
practical lessons from the world around them. The phrase if you had only
been where I have been emphasizes this belief in observation. By sharing
what he saw on the battleeld with his compare, Ruzzante could help his
friend construct knowledge about how to avoid a similar situation in the
future. Fourth, and here Ruzzante shows his allegiance to Thomas More,
careful observations of Nature leading to the creation of a properly mate-
rialist philosophy would, in turn, lead to the realization of a utopia on
Earth. While Beolco seems likely to have followed suit with Pomponazzis
belief in the nitude of the soul, thus ruling out the promise of life eternal
in the paradise of heaven, he nevertheless grasped at the hope of a natural
utopia like that outlined in Mores work, Gaismairs Constitution, and
other free-spirit manifestos of the time. Carroll goes as far as to suggest
that all of these tenets, which one nds again in the more mature atheism
owering in Europe in the seventeenth century, marks Beolco as a materi-
alist philosopher ahead of his time (895). Other scholars have notes that
Galileo himself, for whom the observation of the senses was key to think-
ing outside the epistemic boundaries of the day, drew from Ruzzantes
dialogues and may even have been among the rst to own a collected
volume of his plays.9
This historical gure of Beolo as Ruzzante ultimately points to an
intriguing conuence of tensions. On the rst level, these tensions show
themselves in the life performance of Beolcos becoming-Ruzzante, which

tells the story of an individual who cultivates a theatrical mode of addres-
sing social injustices so compelling that he himself adopts a theatrical
identity of his own devising. This ight of fancy, however, one that
would seem to detach Beolco from the realities of his day and deposit
him in a ctional universe of comedic plays, culminates in a highly dis-
ciplined life-practice of dramatic writing and social performance, the aim
of which was to show the harsh realities of peasant life to all who were
ignorant of those realities. On a second level, the tensions aired out in the
performance of becoming-Ruzzante themselves house a productive antag-
onism between violent and philosophical revolutionary impulses. Aware of
the leniency shown to the stirring of mad blood and awake to the ground
covered by Gaismairs organized peasant revolts, Beolco could reasonably
have contemplated the potential of armed insurrection against the nobles
and Church ofcials responsible for the sorrows of so many in the Veneto.
Turning away from the road leading to such insurrection, however, the
Paduan playwright seems to have adopted and adapted the philosophical
stances of contemporary humanist thinkers. These philosophies promised
at least the vision of utopia, but demanded a relinquishing of the institu-
tionalized spiritual means for attaining utopian ends. Frustrated by the
hardships of working for utopia, Beolco, as Ruzzante, frequently played
out an aesthetic violence against himself and his fellow dramatic charac-
ters, thereby bringing him face-to-face again with the violence that his
philosophy sought to avoid. Thinking of these various tensions under the
banner of a diarchic self or a self housing competing systems of rule, one
attempting a clear breakaway from administered life and one attempting a
perpetual internal revolt, helps to add detail to the struggle of internal
difference that I understand as crucial to baroque identity formation.
THE JESUIT MASS PRODUCTION OF A MYSTICAL SELF

The Jesuit mission on earth constituted the antithesis of Ruzzantes
materialist utopian vision and, indeed, aimed at guiding the souls of
Protestants, Anabaptists, Jews, and lapsed Christians back onto the spiri-
tual path. The one path that alone promised eternal salvation was that laid
out by Jesus Christ and rescued from obscurity by the visions of Ignatius
Loyola, whose program of spiritual exercises amounted to a dramatic
script for acting in accordance with the Truth of Gods vision for human-
ity. As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, however, the theatricality
THE JESUIT MASS PRODUCTION OF A MYSTICAL SELF 221
of the Jesuit self installed an irresolvable conict within individuals

through its revelation of the internal difference that would always remain,
even after successfully completing Loyolas program. In fact, this remnant
of internal difference ensured ones subservience to God who would act as
judge at all moments of the day to determine whether the converted
individual was acting as his true or his false self. The diarchic dimension
of this disequilibrium between ones self and ones non-self (i.e. the self
that one was but will no longer choose to be) probably does not need to
be spelled out any more clearly. I would like, however, to follow through
on the historical consequences of the successful Jesuit program of spiritual
exercises, which, as the program spread across the globe, effectively mass-
produced a type of subjectivity based on internal conict as well as philo-
sophical internal difference.
The problem of this program of mass production arises when the Jesuits
transferred a method of spiritual self-fashioning developed by a mystic to
the general populace, thereby forcing a mystical subjectivity onto non-
mystics. Parsing Michel De Certeaus line of argumentation on the spatial
dimension of mystic experience in The Mystic Fable helps to illuminate this
historical situation. In that argument, de Certeau historicizes the break-
away of mystic experience within the Church institution by analyzing the
rewired line of communication between the mystic and God that lay at the
core of Loyolas and other mystics spiritual practice. Wanting to become a
subject of God, which meant wanting to adsorb into God, but wary of the
encumbrances of the Church hierarchy, Loyola occupied an identity
marked by a specic understanding of I, one that demarcated a space
of volition instead of signifying an individuality that he alone could possess.
It was to this space that, according to de Certeau, all mystics absconded,
and it was from that space that each mystic instigated an initial volition
(what de Certeau names volo [I want]) that spliced the mystic into God.
This volition marked the beginning of the mystics subsumption into God
and subversion of the institutionally controlled spiritual pathways pos-
sessed and proffered by the Church on Earth. It was this I within the
volo that initiated all mystics into a similar mystic experience.
As de Certeau explains, the mystic I want takes no particular object
and clings to nothing (de Certeau, Mystic Fable 169). By clinging to
nothing, it changes into its oppositenot to want anythingand thus
takes up the entire range, both negative and positive, of wanting.
Without the xity of a permanent or stable object, the I want frees the
will and allows it to [turn] back upon itself and [identify] with its
opposite. Thus, to want all and to want nothing coincide. Once the
will encompasses the positive and negative ranges of wanting, once it is no
longer linked to the want of something in particular, the volo becomes
the act of renunciation of ones will. It is a not wanting, and a giving
up (169). This paradigmatic quality, Roland Barthes writes, is the
famous Ignatian indifference which has so outraged the Jesuits foes: to
will nothing oneself, to be as disposable as a corpse, perinde ac cadaver
(Barthes 73). De Certeaus analysis draws attention to the space of the
volo, the territory of this wanting and not wanting of anything particular,
the milieu of a willingness that is also an act of renouncing the will. The
space of volo enables the paradoxical act of volition that drives mystic
discourse throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and de
Certeau refers to it as a eld of a different kind of knowledge. It is an
ethical postulate of a sort of freedom: I/you can be (re)born (de
Certeau, Mystic Fable 172). Once reborn, the renounced self that dwells
within the I of mystic experience communicates directly with God by
becoming something like an empty vessel lled and eradicated by the
Lord. That dwelling is not a proper place, but rather a no-place that
moves along with the individual mystic. It is the mystics utopia.
Another map of this mystic utopia comes from Anne Carsons poetic
excursus of Marguerite Poretes The Mirror of Simple Souls (1310), which
articulates a metaphysical impoverishment within God conditioned by a
complex form of self-negation. Carson understands this ontological
impoverishment as a striving toward nothingness. To be nothing, to
disappear into God, marks the aim of the mystic who perceives her
nothingness by means of the abundance of divine understanding, which
makes her nothing and places her in nothingness (Carson 164). Porete
herself notes a frustrating paradox in all of this, since her loyalty to God is
actually obstructed by her love of him because this affection, like most
human erotic feeling, is largely self-love: it puts Marguerite in bondage to
Marguerite rather than to God (166). While Porete will struggle in
anguish to achieve the state of an annihilated soul and eventually burn at
the stake for her heretical writings, Simon Weil will persist and develop a
program of decreation, a dislodging of herself from a center where she
cannot stay because staying there blocks God (167). Loyola, too, had his
program for mystical devotion and self-erasure, the program of the
Spiritual Exercises that he initially created for his own private use.
Loyolas path to rebirth within the space of mystical volition appeared
to him after a near fatal wound that he suffered in battle. Deciding against
THE JESUIT MASS PRODUCTION OF A MYSTICAL SELF 223
a return to his life as a vassal and decorated knight, Loyola cultivated his
Exercises and gained entry to the Catholic Church as a peculiar free radical
within that institution. Since, on the one hand, the Church licensed the
existence of the Society of Jesuits, the Society in general and Loyola in
particular was, from a certain angle, contained; the Jesuits were a mobile
front line of the post-Tridentine Church and Loyola reported back to the
Pope. On the other hand, Loyola utilized his mobility to radicalize his
own practice of faith and forge an independent branch of the Church.
Loyola became the general of the order, a position referred to as the
black pope by those who eyed the Jesuits as something of a threat to
Papal rule, and he molded his Society into a semi-autonomous legion of
spiritual soldiers.
Following Loyolas instructions, the Society touted the Exercises as a
regiment of conversion practices capable of, theoretically, reclaiming each
and every lost soul. In practice, however, the Exercises were something
different for the ock than they were for Loyola himself. Whereas the
spiritual retreat designed by Loyola funneled him into the space of the
volo, it poached the souls of stray sheep and led them back to pastures
where they were promised to the Church. In exchange for their allegiance,
the ock was offered a promissory note, redeemable only in the afterlife.
On Earth, however, the average convert, one not seeking spiritual anni-
hilation or allied to a practice of decreation, had to gure out how to build
a sense of self out of a program of self-renunciation.
The historical-philosophical ramications of a mass-produced and alie-
nating subjectivity come into view by seeing Loyolas thinking as a baroque
extension of the Medieval discourse on sameness and identity developed by
Peter Abelard (10791142), Henry of Ghent (c.12171293), and John
Duns Scotus (c.12651308). These three gures set about explaining the
paradox of a single God that was somehow three (Father, Son, Holy Spirit).
Richard Cross works through the philosophical justications of Abelard for
whom two things could be numerically the same and yet differ in property
(like a lump of wax and a waxen image made from that same lump) and
eventually concludes that, for Abelard, there are no forms in God other
than the divine essence; so while there are differences in predication (we
can make claims about the Fatherfor example, that he generates the Son
that are false of the Son), these differences are not grounded in any real
differences of form (Cross 710). For Henry, the problem hinged not on
form but on thinking of the divine essence as quasi-matter, a term
that led him to the realization that the Son is made from the divine
substance (generated), not from nothing (created) (707). Scotuss

work on universals (what he called common natures) developed the
philosophies of Abelard and Henry further by recognizing three kinds
of sameness: identity, sameness without identity, and non-numerical
sameness. By analyzing these kinds of sameness, and by distinguishing
between the internal thisness of an entity (what he calls haecceity) and the
feature of that entity that yokes it to its kind (for example, that which
yokes seated-Socrates to Socrates), he is able to claim that the particular
nature and the substance are really the same, but non-identical (since the
substance includes a thisness not included by the particular nature), and
the particular nature and thisness are together constituents of the com-
plete substance (714). Together, these theological-philosophical justi-
cations perpetuated the belief in the doctrine of the Trinity and,
intriguingly, inspired a long line of heretical materialist philosophers
(Deleuze being one of them).
Loyolas philosophy of self (woven in between the lines of his Spiritual
Exercises) does not contribute to the scholastic proofs of the Trinity.
Instead, it explains what happens when one tries to bring the Trinity
down to earth, as it were. In his explanation of the above philosophies
of the Trinity, Cross says that there is no even moderately close analogy
from the material world to the Trinitarian case (709). I argue, however,
that the split subject that results from Loyolas mass-produced program of
mystic identity formation, a program that hinges on theatrical understand-
ings of imitation and role play, provides just such a case. As such, Loyolas
mystical philosophy of self contains within it the kernel of heretical mate-
rialism that it would be used to ght against. Moreover, with the arrival of
the Jesuits and the global spread of their conversion tactics, the philoso-
phical question of the Medieval period seeking to resolve how one God
can be three transposes to the earthly realm: How can one person be two?
How can one person both be and not be himself?
RUZZANTE: A SECULAR MYSTIC?

Of course, Beolco as Ruzzante presents a case in which a person both is
and is not himself, both is himself and more than himself. It is not simply
the case that the mystic schema of identity transfers evenly to Ruzzante
since he was not a mystic and did not partake in the mystic experience.
Furthermore, his theatre practice had nothing to do with the sacred;
rather, it was bound up entirely with the profane. Regardless of this
RUZZANTE: A SECULAR MYSTIC? 225
primary difference, however, I contend that Beolco inverted and aestheti-

cized the architecture of the volo so as to persevere himself and his compari
within a playing space (life, in general) governed by a dominant institution
most notably the Venetian state and the Church. Whereas the mystic
subject unfolded from (and vanished into) a central emplacement, Beolco
planted a multiplicity of temporary stages. Additionally, unlike the mystic
subject, the identity he composed on those temporary stages was not
bound up with an initial volition; instead, it was structured around a
complex, kaleidoscopic mode of vision, what I call the vedo (I see).
Beolcos identity as Ruzzante was stitched together through the sightlines
opened within numerous theatres (literally, seeing places) that he occu-
pied during the performances of his theatrical works. Presented in this
way, the vedo appears as the secular counterpart of the religious space of
the volo.
Outlining the components of the vedo makes explicit the differences
between it and the initial volition of Loyola and other mystics. The vedo
encompasses three modal domains of the verb to see: I see (active); I am
seen (passive); I see myself (reexive). The subject and object of vision
within this space is the I and this subject/object constitutes a dialectical
pair. The vedo consigns (i.e. gathers together) all the stages opened and
occupied by Beolco as Ruzzante over the course of his life, and the various
points of view opened from these numerous staging areas helped him to
accomplish a kind of alienation of the self from the self so as to understand
his place in the world and piece together a map with which to navigate that
world. In Foucauldian terms, the individual performances also facilitated a
hermeneutics of the subject, a process through which Ruzzante co-ordi-
nated himself in the world by performing in different theatrical works,
reected on his performances, altered the quality and content of the
performances with the aid of his reections, and continued this loop
over and over again in an effort to move through the obstacle course of
administered life in the Veneto.
To this positive construction of the vedo, I can add a fourth, negative,
modality, one bound up with blindness. When expressed as Ruzzantes
ailing, struggling, losing, moaning, and doubting, the sight of the vedo
becomes proprioceptive. Here the negative mode presents itself as: I dont
see (I sense). Proprioception is another term for the perspicacity Ruzzante
developed through close combat with his social foes.
Taken in its totality, the vedo breaks with the volo. Whereas Loyola came
to know himself through a process of spiritual exercises that culminated in
a self-renunciation and erasure, Beolco as Ruzzante gained consciousness

of, indeed built, himself by enacting the aesthetic exercise of performing
himself onstage in different environments of his own creation. Both the
ascetic experience of Loyola and the theatrical-aesthetic experience of
Ruzzante produced what de Certeau would eventually call a eld of a
different kind of knowledge, and an ethical postulate of a sort of free-
dom.10 They both entailed the possibility of being reborn insofar as
Loyola was reborn after recovering from his war wounds and Ruzzante
was reborn repeatedly as a different incarnation of the same character in a
series of plays, monologues, dialogues, and dramatic confrontations with
members of the Venetian and Paduan communities. For Ruzzante, how-
ever, the goal was not to establish a more direct link with God; rather, it
was to establish a more direct link with the self and with the material world
in which he found himself.
Again, then, Ruzzanate appears as a kind of archive, one that houses a
multiplicity of stages popping into and out of existence at different times
but always summoned conceptually by a spirit of discontent and dis-ease
with the status quo. The aesthetic practices that unfolded within those
staging areas constructed a different sense of self than that of Loyola, the
end of which was a necessary self-renunciation and a binding to the will of
God. The new direction in which Ruzzantes aesthetic exercises led is
toward an altogether different life, one structured by a clear philosophical
consideration of the good life aimed at freeing the performing subject and
transforming the struggles of everyday life into an artistic praxis. All of this
becomes visible by returning to the world of Ruzzantes performances
made legible by the texts to his plays. In the next several paragraphs, I will
illustrate how Ruzzantes profane aesthetic exercises functioned as a means
of liberating the self from the connes governing his life. I do not claim
that he ever broke free of his time and place; rather, I claim that his
internal diarchic tensions motivated a lifelong practice of dissent now
only visible through the textual traces of his theatre practice.
If it is too bold to discuss Beolcos artful life as Ruzzante in terms of
revolution, then perhaps the language of counter-conduct will prepare a
more rmly grounded historical image. Foucault addressed the issue of
counter-conduct as it related to government rationality and specically the
governmentality of pastoral power at work during the time Ruzzante was
performing by dening the term counter-conduct as a self-fashioned
mode of living constructed by those who sought to escape direction by
others and to dene the way for each individual to conduct himself
(Foucault, Security 195). Foucault outlined ve main forms of counter-

conduct. Framing Ruzzantes work with each of those ve forms not only
brings into focus his relation to the pastoral power coursing through the
Veneto in the sixteenth century, and by extension brings Loyola back into
Ruzzantes orbit; it also leads to a confrontation between Ruzzante and
his patron, Alvise Cornaro, whose nancial support both underwrote
many of Beolcos theatrical compositions and collaborated in the creation
of the internal identity crises mentioned above.
The rst form of counter-conduct, according to Foucault, emerges in
the construction of communities. At the core of close-knit communities in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as enclaves of peasants and
peripheral religious sects, he suggests that there thrived a counter-society
aspect, a carnival aspect, overturning social relations and hierarchies
(211212). Ruzzantes community appeared time and again in his staged
performances where Menego, Duozo, Menato, Beta, Dina, and other
peasants appeared as the protagonists. As I have noted, Ruzzante placed
that grouping of peasants front and center. In those aesthetic worlds
brought to life through his acts of taking place, he developed his commu-
nitys mode of seeing and understanding of the world through the con-
struction of the negative common sense. The overturning of societal
relations existed obliquely in Menegos attempt to plug up the hole
down below, and more vividly in the staged murder of Andronico in
Bilora. With the former, the medical quackery referenced by the alterna-
tive healthcare plan ew in the face of accepted medical beliefs and
routines, of which even Duozo seemed to be aware. In the latter, the
premeditated murder broke with theatrical tradition by portraying violent
death in front of the spectators eyes at the same time as it blatantly
threatened Venetian upper-class merchants for committing a social
wrong that was quite familiar to peasants of the day. Ruzzantes stage
communities offered a glimpse to his audiences of an entirely different
political and social order, one more aligned with Gaismairs utopian
propositions and the corresponding philosophical ideals of More.11
The second form of counter-conduct that Foucault describes brings the
conversation squarely into the milieu of pastoral power. Foucault links up
with de Certeau here in his belief that mysticism was a form of deviance
that sought to undermine or even ignore completely the mandates pressed
down upon individuals by the Churchs authority. The pastorate was the
channel between the faithful and God, as he explains it. In mysticism
there [was] an immediate communication that [could take] the form of
dialogue between God and the soul, of appeal and response, of the
declaration of Gods love of the soul, and of the souls love of God
(Foucault, Security 213). The mystic space of the volo was the arena in
which the dialogue with God took place. Its ipside, that of the vedo,
Ruzzantes domain, forms a sort of secular and profane mystical space
from which the stage performer could view himself and the world from
multiple angles. It is this latter space that resonates with Foucaults pro-
nouncement that, [i]n mysticism the soul sees itself (212). Ruzzante
was not a spiritual mystic, but his tactical space bore more than a passing
similarity to the mystical tactical space insofar as it provided an arena in
which to index various performances of self and even respond to the social
conditions scripting those performances.
Historically speaking, Ruzzante shared an orbit with Loyola, Martin
Luther, and other religious reformers all seeking to re-write both the
biblical rules regulating spiritual self-performance and the social rules
controlling temporal existence. Luther may best exemplify the third
form of counter-conduct, one that Foucault links to a problem of scrip-
ture. Through his studies, Luther determined that the Church had
deviated from the mandates set out in the Gospels, and thus sought
through this reformation to drag the Church back onto the right track.
For his part, Loyola also re-interpreted the scripture and determined that
the Papal See was capable of following the Word of God more closely
through Jesuit advisement. By naming his company the Society of Jesus,
he attempted to discipline the Catholic ock anew under the name of
Christ, even though the other holy orders grumbled about Loyolas
personal claim on the name of Jesus. It is comical, then, that, in a certain
way, the problem of scripture pairs Luther and the Jesuits together as
groups that caused the core institution of the Church considerable stress.
The Jesuits may have sought to suppress the Lutheran Reformation
through their Counter-Reformation, but they were each engaged in
rethinking the code of conduct that the Church needed to follow on earth.
Ruzzante joins this unlikely pair to make an unruly threesome. His own
interpretation of scripture appeared most vividly in the Prima and Seconda
Oratione where he used his private audience with the two Cornaro
Cardinals to demand distinct programs of reform. The request by the
orator in the rst of the two performances for permission to work on
Feast days, to eat whatever and whenever he wished, and to castrate
philandering priests were all issues that Luther took up explicitly in the
Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Respecting the
Reformation of the Christian Estate.12 Where Ruzzante most resembled

Loyola was in his dedication to the impoverished peasants on whose behalf
he spoke. Against the riches of the Church, Ruzzante claimed superiority
for the rural way of life where people took only what they needed. Zorzi
has claimed that in the Seconda Oratione, which only took place because
none of Ruzzantes requests from the Prima Oratione were met, the
Paduan spokespersons voice [rose] with an unusual timbre, and that
what was particularly interesting [was] the prospect of certain evils as
genuine social ills. The solution, according to Ruzante, [was] found in a
return to the genuine spirit of the Gospel (Ruzante, Teatro 1569).13 Like
Loyola and Luther, re-cognizing the poverty preached by the Gospels was
the rst step toward true reform. Even if Ruzzante eventually developed a
non-theistic philosophical outlook, it is still possible to see how each of
these three historical gures set about articulating the problem of scrip-
ture in his own unique way.
Building from the sentiment of those two orations, the fourth form of
counter-conduct enforced a belief that the degradation of Church integ-
rity signaled that the end was nigh. Foucault encapsulated this belief in the
phrase eschatological beliefs. The basic principle at play here is that the
guidance of the Churchs shepherds was unnecessary because Judgment
Day was close at hand. Counter-conduct amounted to abandoning the
lead of the shepherds in favor of more direct supplication to the coming
judge. Ruzzante embodied this belief in his own unique style by electing
himself as the man to do the judging. He had neither the desire nor the
need to wait for God. When he forcefully addressed the two Cardinals, he
was passing judgment on the current states of affairs, and his plan of
reform was the map to a new civilization.
The fth and nal form of counter-conduct is asceticism. Foucault
describes asceticism as a progression according to a scale of increasing
difculty. It is, in the strict sense of the term, an exercise, an exercise going
from the easier to the more difcult, and from the more difcult to what is
even more difcult (Foucault, Security 205). Ruzzantes lifework appears
as this very progression. Each performance took on more and more
difcult social problems. His chosen mode of expression through which
to address the day-to-day was the articulation of excess. His theatre was
always extreme. Cuckoldry, murder, starvation, bestiality, defecation, and
suicide were the situations in which the stage persona of Ruzzante
thought through the difculties of his life and the lives of the peasants,
and yet rigorous self-discipline inhered within those expressions of excess.
This discipline appeared in many places, including the unfunniness of

Ruzzantes jokes, within his acts of self-medicating and self-devouring,
and within his parrhesiastic speech stripped of unneeded niceties. If the
commedia dellarte became known for the construction of situational
comedy, then Ruzzante, a forerunner to that more codied brand of
comedic theatre, must be remembered for his construction of situational
crisis in which the actor tested the limits of the thinkable through experi-
ments of how much one individual could endure. In the Reduce, Ruzzante
reports on the limits of sanity revealed through life as a soldier. In Bilora,
he shows the limits of love and theft. Unlike in commedia, where the
character types were ready-made and the jokes belonged to a set collection
of witticisms, Ruzzantes character was always in formation and his jokes
always responded to the evolving effects of administered life on his self and
the bodies of his compari.
Again, a quotation from Foucault is illuminating: Asceticism is a sort
of exasperated and revered obedience that has become egoistic self-mas-
tery. Lets say that in asceticism there is a specic excess that denies access
to an external power (207208). If Angelo Beolco was the true perso-
nage who endured daily hardship and who watched his friends endure
similar travails, then Ruzzante was that specic excess that denied the
external powers. Through his situations of crisis, Ruzzantes unique solu-
tions to lifes problems replaced the solutions dictated by the Church and
the State, which were usually no solutions at all. Instead of dying of
starvation, Ruzzante would eat himself to death. To ght emaciation
and malnourishment, he made his characters plug-up their asses. These
images of discomfort rhyme with the self-agellating penitents within the
structure of the Spiritual Exercises who sought to retrain their bodies to
live in accordance with God. As a somewhat bizarre parallel to these more
traditional ascetics, however, Ruzzante respected no external authority,
and the end of his ascetic aesthetic exercises was a freeing of the self.
Ruzzante was the means through which Beolco attempted to free himself.
By becoming Ruzzante, Beolco embodied the specic excess that denied
power to external authority.
Of the ve forms of counter-conduct that Foucault theorizes, asceti-
cism is perhaps the most curiously productive in an analysis of Ruzzante
and his theatre practice. So much of his humor might be discarded as
grotesque, scatological, or immature; jokes that go too far, or that feature
needless excesses (i.e. that which is always beyond accepted limits). Yet,
within these excesses there is a disciplined confrontation of the self with
the self, a confrontation that comes across especially where food and
hunger are concerned, since starvation is a point of extreme bodily dis-
ruption. Hunger is the body feeding on itself, and Ruzzantes jokes about
starvation were an ascetic confrontation with the realities of hunger that
unfolded within the aesthetic realm of his constructed environments.
Those environments, in turn, became extensions of the offstage environ-
ment (Daddario and Zerdy). Via Foucault, a life of counter-conduct edges
toward a philosophical life insofar as it is a life obtained thanks to a
tekhne. Counter-conduct spawns a life that refuses to comply with a
regula (a rule); rather, it submits to a forma (a form). It is a style of life,
a sort of form one gives to ones life (Foucault, Hermeneutics 424). In
other words, by perpetually enacting Ruzzante, the historical gure who
began life as Angelo Beolco treated his life as a philosophical art. His art of
living became the antidote to the various government rationalities
attempting to administer life in the Veneto in the sixteenth century.
Ruzzantes nal theatrical offering, Lettera allAlvarotto, showcases
both this philosophical life-as-art and secular antidote to mystical life.
Taking the form of a letter mailed by Ruzzante to his friend Alvarotto,
the playwright wrote the piece in Padua and signed it on the Feast day of
the Epiphany, 1536 (around 6 January). The story that it relayed was in
many ways an epiphany of Ruzzantes own, at which he seems to have
arrived after several years spent in Alvise Cornaros circle. The letter begins
by addressing the circle of his friends who were gathered at Cornaros
hunting lodge and explaining that he was sorry he could not be present
with them but his recent exploits had taken him on a journey. The letter
goes on to share the ndings of this strange and illuminating journey,
which started when he entered one day into a terrible desire to live
forever, or at least to be among the last men standing (Ruzante, Teatro
1226).14 He remembered reading somewhere that extremely long life was
indeed possible (the Bible?) and that there was a woman, a Madonna
Temperanza (Madam Temperance), who could grant immortality. He
set about consulting his books to discover if she or any of her compatriots
were still alive. The answers he found were vague and so he had to set the
books aside and go out looking for the woman himself. The letter relayed
this information in Ruzzantes best Florentine dialect.
After unsuccessfully looking all over the place for this Madonna
Temperanza, Ruzzante was confused and irritated that his books were
not more help to him. Finding himself atop a mountain, relying on his
dogs to nd food and bring it back to him, and tired out by his search,
Ruzzante became sleepy: When I got over my anger, I was atop one of
our mountains in Este, hunting, waiting alone for the hounds to return
from another hill where they were chasing a hare; and they were so far
away that I could no longer hear them.15 In fact, he could no longer hear
anything and the silence that enveloped him led him into a deep sleep:
sleep entered my eyes and, once inside, chained the door, and closed me
out of myself.16 This was incredibly pleasing to him since, as he expressed
it, it was the most smooth and sweet sleep that ever closed the eyes of
man (1228).17
Upon being shut out of himself, Ruzzantes old friend Barba Polo
appeared to him out of nowhere. This was confusing since Polo had
died a while back, and the image in front of him looked so real that he
could not tell if it was a spirit or not. Encountering his friend required
Ruzzante to switch from the Florentine to his native Paduan dialect, and
the conversation that ensued was quite enlightening. Polo told Ruzzante
four things. First, he was completely capable of taking Ruzzante where he
needed to go. Second, he had to act as a guide because books would be no
help to Ruzzante at all in this situation. Third, the books would be no help
in particular because Ruzzante had not remembered the correct name of
the woman he needed to nd. He was in fact looking for Madonna
Allegrezza (Madam Joy), not Madonna Temperanza. Fourth, and most
importantly, Polo told Ruzzante that he had better be sure that he really
wanted to live a long time. Some people are undeserving of such a gift, and
others are not even sure what life is. There are some people, he suggested,
who hardly know that they are alive; you could hardly call what they are
doing living. But, at the other end of the spectrum, if one lives only
one year and knows he is alive, wouldnt that be more of a life, a longer
life, than those who live a thousand years and dont ever know that they
are living? (1230).18
Ruzzante decided that he did know what he was looking for and that he
wanted Polo to show him the way. Complying with his friends request,
Polo led Ruzzante to the house of Madonna Allegrezza. Upon arriving,
Polo described the location and all of its bucolic beauty: lush plants,
running streams, birds singing, lled precisely with the same ora and
fauna that Ruzzante described in his rst play, the Pastoral. Here, how-
ever, the gures occupying the house on the territory were the company
members of Madonna Allegrezza: Aunt Wisdom, Laughter, Party, Dance,
Unison Singing, Peace, Charity, Gloria, Vigil, Silence, and others. They
were all engaged in game play and in protecting the house from
unwelcomed guests such as Love, that little boy with the bow and arrows,
the son of Damnation and Perdition. All of this activity unfolded under
Ruzzantes gaze, but he was careful not to look upon the scene directly
because, as Polo had instructed, looking directly at the gures would make
them disappear. Ruzzante had to save his direct gaze for Madonna
Allegrezza herself since simply looking upon her would lengthen his life.
But as the excitement unfolded and as Polo instructed Ruzzante on
how to obtain long life, another sound of music inltrated the scene. At
this point in the letter, Ruzzante switched back to his Florentine dialect
and told his friends gathered at Cornaros lodge that while Polo was
talking to him:
I thought I heard some music, not from singing or from any instrument, but
some kind of concert or harmony that I wouldnt know how to explain to
you unless you were asleep like I was there [ . . . ] I wanted to x [the image
and the music] so as not to forget it (it delighted me so), but my eyes
seemed impeded by some sort of weight; then, wanting so much to open
them, the sleep went away, and I stayed there with eyes opened for real.
(1242)19
Once awake, Ruzzante reected on his vision (alla mia visione) and
realized that the music he had heard was really the sounds of the dogs
barking. In other words, the reality of the world was lled with the same
sorts of sights and sounds as his dreamscape, so he decided to return to the
real world and leave the paradise behind. With that revelation, the narrator
signed off with the signature, Your brother Ruzzante. Shortly after
writing this letter, Beolco would succumb to disease and die at a relatively
early age.
Instead of interpreting this nal work as either a letter or a monologue,
it is instructive to read the Lettera allAlvarotto as an account of a secular
mystic experience. The Lettera is Ruzzantes most powerful attempt to
blur together the aesthetic realm and the world off the stage. It com-
mences with a vision, or an ecstatic (literally, ex stasis; from Latin,
extasis) experience that puts him in a trance-like state. Once within the
vision, Ruzzante occupies the space of the vedo, the secular counter-
point to the mystical space of the volo inhabited by Ignatius Loyola and
articulated by de Certeau in The Mystic Fable. The four modal domains of
the verb to see all reveal themselves in the letter, and, since the letter is
relaying an episode of Ruzzantes life, it is important to note that the vedo
appears simultaneously in the world beyond the stage. The active mode, I
see, unfolds in the narrative through the overarching framework of the
journey that sends Ruzzante into a vision in order to discover a site of
interest and report it back to his friends at Cornaros hunting lodge.
Ruzzante functions in this mode as a witness to the impermanence and
instability of the terrestrial paradise and also of life in general.
The passive mode, I am seen, shows itself most clearly in the thea-
trical architecture of Madam Joys house where Ruzzante acts as audience
member to the scene that goes on in front of him. Polos warning to him
not to look too closely at the gures in the scene hints at the fact that while
Ruzzante is watching the scene he is also being seen by the other gures.
Polo even warns that this quality of being seen has the potential to destroy
the performance. This state of being seen is doubled in the theatrical
architecture inferred from the performance of the letter. Alvarottos reci-
tation of Ruzzantes letter constructs a scenario in which Cornaros circle
gathers around as the audience to watch Alvarotto relay Ruzzantes story.
By asking Alvarotto to read his letter, he understands that Alvarotto will be
watched closely as he performs the story. Alvarottos recitation will even-
tually end and the surrogate performance will fade back into regular, non-
theatrical interaction just as the performance of the allegorical gures
faded for Ruzzante. As a performance, the function of the letter is to be
seen.
The reexive mode, I see myself, adds a layer of complexity to the
entire performance event and illuminates the philosophical dimension in
which Ruzzante thinks about himself thinking. The letter as a whole is a
commentary on this performance of thought on thought, since it relays
knowledge that Ruzzante acquired once shut out of himself by his
ecstatic vision. The letter entails a seeing-himself-in-the-world, which
Ruzzante accomplishes after reecting on the experience of visiting the
terrestrial paradise. That paradise, he realizes, was nothing more or less
than a reconguration of certain sights and sounds taken from the moun-
taintop. The consequence of the reexive I see myself in Ruzzantes
narrative is that his quest for eternal life becomes less important than the
letter conveying the ndings of that quest to his friends. Ruzzante recog-
nizes his experience as an educational event that taught him about the
world and could also teach his friends about the possibility or impossibility
of such a paradise really existing. Having experienced both onstage per-
formance and the art of directing his own plays, Ruzzante manages to
accomplish both roles at once in this nal piece and captures in the text
and the surrogate performance of it a self-reexive sense of himself as

present performer and absent spectator.
The nal mode, I dont see (I sense), becomes the affective force that
pulls Ruzzante back to himself on the mountaintop in Este and away from
the realm of the vision. He expresses this in the phrase: my eyes seemed
impeded by some sort of weight; then, wanting so much to open them,
the sleep went away, and I stayed there with eyes opened for real.
Wrapped in this phrase is the fact that the vision of terrestrial paradise
could only appear to Ruzzante when his eyes were closed and, bereft of
sight, he could sense a different reality. His eyes were closed for the entire
journey to the house of Madam Joy, and the blindness caused by his closed
eyes was not an impediment because, rst, he had Polo to guide the way,
and, second, he never had the opportunity to look at anything directly.
Ruzzante could not look directly at the scene unfolding in the vision
because if he did it would disappear; instead, he glimpsed partial images
obliquely through Polos description and sensed the emotions of happi-
ness, peace, silences, and so on, that emanated from the earthly utopia.
Additionally, the audience of the piece realizes that he never looked upon
Madam Joy. He saw nothing that could actually extend his life, a fact that
became all too obvious in the months following the Lettera when Beolco
as Ruzzante died.
Given that the letter itself acts as a script for his compare to perform, the
Lettera provided an opportunity for another gure to inhabit the space of
the vedo. That is, Ruzzantes letter allowed Alvarotto to inhabit the subject
position usually occupied by Ruzzante himself. As Zorzi has argued, the
letter to Alvarotto was also a monologue that placed a critique of
Cornaros sober life in the mouth of Ruzzantes friend and colleague. By
reading the critique and performing the monologue at Cornaros hunting
lodge, Alvarotto became Ruzzante for the duration of the performance.
Thus, if one considers Ruzzantes counter-conduct as a means of creating
a presence in the world on his own terms, then the Lettera presents a
doubling of that presence by opening Ruzzantes viewpoint to another
body. Ruzzante was present in the body of his friend who interpreted the
letter and in his present-absence that constituted the conditions of
Alvarottos performance.
Carroll astutely reads the imagery of the Lettera as a move beyond
the limits of Christianity. The letters closing vision, she writes,
laicizes the Mystical Rose formed by the saints in Dantes vision of
heaven by substituting everyday pleasures for divine ones. Beolcos is,
in short, a nontheistic paradise in which the common woman and man

take the place of God (Carroll, Ruzante 104; Nontheistic Paradise
897).20 The letter also levels a strong critique against the ethical system
of Ruzzantes patron that would eventually become codied in the
treatise On the Sober Life, a type of ethical living made possible through
an ascetic renunciation of food. As I have articulated elsewhere, the
ethos of sobriety may have worked well for those who had food from
which to abstain (Daddario and Zerdy; Daddario What a Joke). For
the majority of peasants suffering under the weight of famine and
economic hardship, however, sobriety had been forced upon them
from above, and any person claiming the powers of temperance
was clearly out of touch with the people working the land. As
Ruzzantes patron, Cornaro was the closest external authority with
whom the performer had to negotiate in order to survive the world.
Cornaro gave Ruzzante money, paid his debts, and even smoothed out
conicts in his personal life with the parents of the wife Ruzzante had
been forced to marry for economic reasons. Taking that it into account,
it is important to recognize the way in which Ruzzantes nal theatre
piece ew in the face of his patron and what that gesture may have
meant. More than that, it was Cornaros money that nanced
Ruzzantes quest, which means that Ruzzante used his patrons
resources to develop an argument against the sober life and the ethical
mandate of renunciation woven into Cornaros tract on the subject.
The Lettera is a case of Ruzzante biting the hand that fed him. Against
the temperance praised by Cornaro in the Sober Life, Ruzzante asserted
Joy. Polo reveals to Ruzzante that his books have led him astray. There is
no Madam Temperance capable of extending life. Only Madam Joy can do
that. This distinction leads to another. Polos remark about people who
live a thousand years without knowing that they are alive refers to
Cornaros regiment of abstinence and the pseudo-life to which it leads.
Against temperance and pseudo-life, Polo, speaking Ruzzantes words,
announces that the person infused with Joy need only live one day in order
to truly live. This seems to be the route Ruzzante takes, since by the end of
the letter he appears to give up his search in order to return to his
wandering. The Lettera indicates that Ruzzante had transferred the imper-
manence of the stage to the realm of the everyday simply by discovering
that the everyday was as impermanent as the stage. This insight positions
the Lettera as a counter-argument to the Sober Life and opens up a
perspective into Ruzzantes ethos, one that takes the form not of direct
political address but of dream imagery and the rhetoric of tireless

searching.
The function of this secular-mystical encounter with paradise on Earth in
the Lettera was twofold. First, it recounted a vision in allegorical terms so as
to teach his peers about his outlook on life, indeed about the outlook he had
pieced together throughout his entire life as a performer. Second, the letter
rebutted the Epicurean philosophy of his patron, outlined most succinctly in
the treatise On the Sober Life, which, for Ruzzante, led only to suffering and
not towards any pleasure in life. His nal piece for theatre, then, embodied
that which Foucault has called the critical attitude. In a lecture given to the
French Society of Philosophy in the May of 1978, Foucault forwarded an
argument that this critical attitude corresponded to the art of not being
governed quite so much (Foucault, What is Critique? 45). This art was
the culmination of a certain way of thinking, speaking and acting, a certain
relationship to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, a relation-
ship to society (42). It was an art of voluntary insubordination, that of
reected intractability, which had as its aim the desubjugation of the
subject in the context of what [one] could call, in a word, the politics of
truth (47). According to Foucault, this critical attitude arose in the six-
teenth century alongside the emergence of various systems of governmenta-
lization. I believe Ruzzante offers a crafty mobilization of precisely this
attitude. In many ways, Ruzzante makes Foucaults declarations possible.
The outcome of Beolcos internal tension between armed revolt and
philosophical critique does not ossify into a fruitless frustration with the
way of the world. Instead, borrowing from Foucault, it expressed itself
through secular-mystic, dissident gestures of being governed not quite so
much. That is to say, taken individually, his wild ailing, his perpetual
failing, his repeated attempts to kill himself in bizarre manners, his battle
against starvation, and his clever re-functioning of philosophical argumen-
tation present riddles to contemporary audiences or readers of his works.
Stitched together, however, those oddities begin to transform into a
provocative ascetic aesthetics that Beolco, as Ruzzante, cultivated
throughout his life. Since, as exemplied in the Lettera allAlvaroto,
Ruzzante exited into the real world and continued to apply his critical
attitude to his own life experiences, his signature ascetic aesthetics led him
to a type of self-fashioning that allowed Ruzzante a range of freedom to
discover certain truths for himself. From Foucaults perspective,
Ruzzantes range of freedom helped him not to be governed like that,
by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in
mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by
them (44). The antecedents to those pronouns appear in the agencies of
the Venetian state, the Catholic Church, and his patron.
BECOMING-BAROQUE
Monika Kaup, pursuing Alejo Carpentiers and others answers to ques-
tions about the ideological function of the historical American Baroque
following the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spains and Portugals overseas
colonies in the eighteenth century, forwards a strong argument for under-
standing the New World Baroque in Deleuzoguattarian terms (Kaup).
Building on Carpentiers claims that, all symbiosis, all mestizaje, engen-
ders the Baroque and that, the art known as the American Baroque
embodies the process of emergence, of a new beginning, of the genesis of
new forms of expression and social life, Kaup reads the baroque as a
process of becoming-minor (cit. 109, 111). Where Deleuze and Guattari
see morphogenesis, incorporeal transformation, and minoritarian re-func-
tioning in the literary works of Kafka, Carpentier sees the New World
Baroque as a similar device for the creation of new worlds, new collective
identities, and new forms of expression, and, for Kaup, the overlap
between the French philosophers concepts and Carpentiers writings of
counter-conquest lead to an important pronouncement (cit. 111).
Namely, that there are two baroques: on the one hand, the homogeniz-
ing and hierarchical ofcial European Baroque of Absolutism and Counter
Reformation, and on the other, the decolonizing and racially, culturally
heterogeneous New World Baroque (112). The latter expresses itself as
the perpetual variation of baroque artistic forms and ideological constructs
intended to valorize the uncertainty of identity as a marker of a liberated
people-yet-to-come.
This current discussion of the diarchic selves created and maintained
through the early dissemination of the Spiritual Exercises, on the one
hand, and Ruzzantes philosophically charged, activist theatre-making,
on the other hand, both validates and deviates from Kaups pronounce-
ments. Ruzzantes creation of a new self, for example, one capable of
standing up against the class-based discrimination enforced through
Venetian rule in the early sixteenth century, seems to foreshadow if not
predate precisely the becoming-minor that Kaup sees in the Americas
several centuries later. This variation of self, demonstrated through
Beolcos becoming-Ruzzante, however, appears supercial unless
BECOMING-BAROQUE 239
accompanied by an analysis of the historical conditions of Beolcos strug-

gle and an honest look at his frustrations and failure. In turn, these
frustrations reveal not a fully emancipated self but, to borrow an
Adornian expression, a heteronomous autonomy, a potential break-
through, glimpsed through his theatrical works, yoked nonetheless to a
conuence of social situations that bind Ruzzante to his esh and blood.
The picture of Ruzzante I have developed thus far leads me to posit that
there are not in fact two baroques, either in Ruzzantes time or in the
present; rather, there is one baroque that emerges from an internal tension
between discipline and excess, conservation and revolution, self and other.
At the level of the self, these tensions resolve discordantly into a founda-
tional internal difference that never sides completely with discipline or
excess, conservation or revolution, self or other. I call this a diarchic self, a
self in which (at least) two ordering mechanisms shape and reshape an
individuals sense of identity. Ruzzante strives through artistic excess to
reveal a new world order for peasants and agrarian communities while at
the same time remaining tethered to the body of Beolco, whose hunger
and nancial troubles require him to make theatre for his patron.
Ruzzante both points the way to Beolcos new world and connes him
to the world as it is, a world populated by people who want to laugh at the
hardships of humankind while doing nothing to stop the causes of that
laughter.
Additionally, is it not possible to say that, at least at face value, the
Jesuits sought to decolonize individuals from their misguided appreciation
of secular culture; that they, through their elaborate theatrical processes of
conversion, worked to build a capacious subject position for a people-yet-
to-come, one people made more faithfully in Christs image? While the
Jesuits feature in Kaups and others critiques of colonialism, indeed star as
the leaders of the civilizing impulse of European imperialism, their activ-
ities during their early years in Europe portray them as radical revisionists
to institutionalized Church practices. Their expulsion from nearly every
corner of Europe at some point in their history points to their uneasy t
within the Catholic Church. The Jesuits (at times synonymous with the
baroque, as in both Kaups essay and Otto Kurzs study cited in this books
introduction) demonstrate the extent to which there are not two distinct
baroques, one colonizing and one decolonizing, but one baroque contain-
ing both poles. Moreover, as I argue in this chapter, the Jesuits produced
mechanisms for creating identities that would house within them both of
these poles, one demanding ascetic allegiance to the Word through the
imitation of (Loyolas) Christ, the other demanding a theatrically savvy

facilitation of the coexistence of selves within that performance of
imitation.
Seeking to build on the insights of Kaups term becoming-baroque,
while recognizing the dialectical tensions that bind the historical gures
gathered in this particular study of baroque social practice, I propose not a
nal forward glance to the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari or
Adorno but, rather, a look backward. After all, the baroque, with all its
extremes, does not arise ex nihilo. Throughout the periods that historians
typically recognize as awash with baroque expression, as well as in these
earlier years that I am investigating, baroque asymmetries and grotesque-
ries lived alongside a thriving classical philosophy mediated by Medieval
scholastics and Renaissance literary scholars. While clearly deviant in some
ways from the lineage of Aquinas, Abelard, Henry of Ghent, and Duns
Scotus, Loyola was raised in an intellectual community founded in their
ways of thinking. Tracing the tactics of meditation and self-reection in
the Spiritual Exercises back to their classical roots will, moreover, reveal
explicit links to Stoic philosophy. Ruzzante likewise re-functioned More
and Erasmus while acknowledging the popularity of Epicuruss philosophy
in his patrons circle and following the institutionalized philosophical
curriculum in the nearby University of Padua that derived from allegiance
to Aristotle. Any study of the baroque that does not at least broach the
topic of classical philosophy will fail to acknowledge a thriving force within
both the disciplinary and excessive polarities found there.
Seeking to stay within the orbit of world-making that neobaroque
writers identify as crucial to the baroque, and seeing Foucaults critical
attitude active in the Veneto of the sixteenth-century, I nd myself drawn
to the term , citizen of the world. Ostensibly coined by
the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinope when replying to the question
of his origin, the identity of the cosmopolitan carried a refusal to be allied
to a particular city-state and, by extension, an unwillingness to be gov-
erned by any local political system. The words contained within this
identity ( and ) each play a part in Diogenes neologism.
Cosmos, from the time of Pythagoras, named the great world-order, the
universe. It also carried with it an afrmation that this world-order is
good, that the form of the universe is organized, rational, and for that
reason knowable. Politeia, visited briey in Chapter 5, referred more
generally to the daily life of an individual. In its traditional usage, this daily
life tied the individual to the governing order overseeing the rules and
regulations of that daily life. Stitching these words together into cosmo-
politan allows Diogenes to both preserve their original meanings and also
rewrite the notion of political afliation. Diogenes, whose name meant
birthed of God, chose not to profess any allegiance to human emperors;
rather, he would be known as an individual travelling through the uni-
verse, a universe he sought to re-make through knowledge gained by lived
experience.
While acknowledging the established history of this word and noting
the signicance of a Cynical heritage to both Ruzzantes and the Jesuits
versions of theatrical fare, my conversation of baroque self leads me to
fantasize another denition of : the act of ordering the
border between interior and exterior. This denition suggests that any
citizen of the worlds identity will come about through acknowledging the
border between ones own conduct, driven by ones soul, and the social
order in which the individual participates. A cosmopolitan identity, in this
sense of the word, lays stress neither solely on the internal self nor on the
external social milieu but rather, and perhaps primarily, on the limen
between the two realms. This limen derives from an act of ordering that
comes from both the individual making the identity and the external
environment that will, in a sense, house that individual. With this discus-
sion of internal and external environments dened and discerned by a
liminal passage, the activity of garden thinking shows itself once again
since the construction of the garden was also determined by the construc-
tion of the wall that would separate the interior garden space from the
outside, uncultivated territory. To be a cosmopolitan, one must practice
the same type of self-maintenance as the gardener. Unlike the garden of
the Enlightenment, epitomized by the nal line of Voltaires Candide,
we must cultivate our gardens, this baroque garden self is not merely a
retreat (Voltaire 328). It is, by distinction, and to cite the words of
Scottish garden artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, an attack.21 Baroque gardens,
both botanical and metaphorical, are attacks aimed at redening the
borders between self and world. Through these acts of re-denition, the
interior garden and external wilderness vie to shape each other, thereby
creating worlds within worlds. Baroque cosmopolitanism names this agon
between interior and exterior as well as the competition between worlds.
In the following ways, Ruzzantes self resonates with the identity of the
cosmopolitan. First, while he claimed Padua as his place of birth and
privileged home, he lamented the gradual demise of Padua as he knew it
and even went as far as to suggest that, due to political turmoil and poor
governance, the Padua he loved had vanished. In its absence, a world

upside down asserted its presence, and thus Ruzzante became a citizen of
this reversal-world. By adopting Ruzzante as his ofcial name, Angelo
Beolco strained against the connes of the reality to which he was, by
necessity, bound. Never able to break completely free of that reality,
Beolco lived his life as Ruzzante, which really meant that he dedicated
himself to the process of becoming-Ruzzante through the creation of
theatrical pieces up to the point of his early death. Throughout that
body of work, Beolco as Ruzzante practiced the work of gardener to
constantly measure, dene, and redene the lines that separated his stage
worlds from the world off the stage. By cultivating new methods of
ordering the line between internal aesthetic world and external empirical
world, Beolco as Ruzzante simultaneously forged a self that expressed its
worldview for one last time in Lettera allAlvarotto. Intriguingly, this self
exhibits a capacity to drift between dream life and waking life, thereby
exhibiting another limen that the performer knew how to tend. Taking all
of these qualities together, not only does Beolco-as-Ruzzante reveal his
complicated and perpetually forming sense of self as ; he also
reveals the extent to which he was (cosmopoeticos),
someone whose sense of self was entirely imbricated with his acts of
creating a better world through theatrical expression. Baroque diarchic
self, I argue, emerges as the tension between the cosmopolitan and the
cosmopoetical, between someone always ordering the boundary between
internal drive and external exigencies, on the one hand, and someone
ordering this boundary through acts of poetical expression, on the other
hand.
The conjuncture of politics and poetics may ring false or at least cause
hesitation. Politics and its Marxist entailment, praxis, human work,
frequently parallels poiesis, the work of nature. As parallel unfoldings,
the two terms cannot meaningfully cross. Building on Belgian philosopher
Jacques Taminiauxs ontological consideration of these two terms (praxis
and poiesis) Warwick Mules conjures the Ancient Greek understanding of
poiesis as the shaping force of nature that runs through all things,
including human beings who are both shaped by and employ poiesis in
their way of being (Mules 26, 38). In my invocation and conjoining of
cosmopolitics and cosmopoetics, however, I am referencing neither the
Ancient Greek world, nor the natural force traced through that worlds
philosophy. Rather, I am stressing the latter half of the denition, the
aspect of poiesis that entails a mode of being. Baroque praxical poetics
arise from the historical situation mapped throughout this books chapters
and seems to t Ruzzantes work given that, for him, nature was no longer
distinguishable from snatural forces produced through humans second
nature. To address this loss of nature and to respond to the social world
taking shape in his time, he tended his garden, which, by extension,
attacked the increasingly exclusionary status quo.
The Jesuit diarchic self glimpsed through Ottonellis scenic priest,
Polancos Chronicles, and Loyolas Spiritual Exercises has a similar afnity
to both and , though the specic expression
of this Jesuit afnity leads in a different direction than did Ruzzantes. The
border between interior and exterior ordered and maintained through the
Jesuit self was the limen between the Jesuit teatro del mondo and the
secular world. To maintain this boundary, the converted subject had to
keep his self at bay, which effectively required a life of self-renunciation.
Paradoxically, it was through this self-renunciation on Earth that ever-
lasting life became thinkable. Through spiritual exercises, the converted
subject could artfully navigate between the self-as-imitator-of-Christ and
the not-self. By navigating this internal divide, converted subjects, regard-
less of the political states of affairs in which their worldly bodies partici-
pated, expressed their spiritual devotion to God. Key to this devotion,
however, was a lifetime of dedicated performance scripted by the Jesuit
spiritual advisor who, in turn, took his cues from the manual constructed
by Loyola. By renouncing his previous life as a mercenary soldier, Ignatius
himself declared his Cynical rejection of worldly governance and professed
his cosmopolitan status: he became a citizen of the world made by Christ
the Almighty. Clearly, the mode of life dictated by this choice of identity
required Loyola to make his world anew. By publishing the Spiritual
Exercises as a manual for all to use, he effectively created a program of
world-making to complement the program of spiritual allegiance dictated
through the Jesuit profession of Faith. As I have argued in this chapter,
however, the mass production of one world for the many converts coming
to the Jesuit teatro led to a deeply problematic enforcement of subjectivity
onto individuals who knew nothing of the mystic mode of being.
Taking the Jesuits (issuing forth from the identity of Loyola himself)
and Beolco-as-Ruzzante as a non-identical pair oscillating through the
strata of baroque social practices alive in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the vision of a baroque diarchic self culminates here, in an image
of a discordant and divided internal subjectivity twinned with a repertoire
of artful expressions aimed at re-making the empirical world anew. There
are not two baroques, one colonizing and one counter-colonial. Instead,
there is one baroque containing both impulses, and that fusion of coloniz-
ing/counter-colonial desire infused the theatrical lives of onstage and
offstage performers alike. Given the complexity of this situation, the
noun baroque may even need to give way to the verb baroque, an act
of diarchic self-expression and world-making emanating from these spe-
cic tensions. Beolco-as-Ruzzante baroques. The Jesuit convert baroques.
NOTES
1. A good source for information on Calmo is Le lettere di Messer Andrea
Calmo, ed. Vittorio Rossi (Torino: Ermano Loescher, 1888). On Fo, see
Farrell and Scuderi.
2. Gods judgment alone did not sufce. The survivors of Gioved Grasso
sought to enlist the judgment of history as well. For them the function of
history was to preserve a record of past injustices, creating a peculiar rela-
tionship between violence and memory (Muir, Mad Blood 209).
3. Paduan: Te lhegi dito? Italian (trans. Zorzi): Te lavevo detto? For
commentary, see Ludovico Zorzis notes in Ruzante, Teatro 1379 and
Ferguson 41.
4. See Linda L. Carroll, A Nontheistic Paradise in Renaissance Padua, The
Sixteenth Century Journal 24.4 (Winter, 1993): 890, 895896. I return to
this source later in the chapter.
5. See also Daddario and Zerdy, When You Are What You Eat: Ruzzante and
Historical Metabolism.
6. Paduan: Compare, l i cassiti de ferro che fa ste male iere. Tanto che i pesa,
tanta carne i tira z. e po, el mar bere, el piezo magnare [ . . . ] Safoss st on
son stato io mi! (521). Italian (trans. Zorzi): Compare, sono gli elmetti di
ferro che fanno queste brutte cere. Tanto quanto pesano, tanta carne tirano
gi. E poi, il mar bere, il peggio mangiare [ . . . ] Se voi foste stato dove sono
stato io me!
7. Zorzi notes a possible representation of dialogue in Venice on 16 February
1520 (Ruzante, Teatro 1361), but it is difcult to determine who the
audience for this piece may have been. The rest of Zorzis note, however,
remarks on the difference between the supposed original title of the piece
(Parlamento de Ruzante a Menato e a la sua Gnua) and the title by which
scholars have come to know it. The more common title, according to Zorzi,
reects the possibility that audiences remembered this piece as a dialogue
about a Veteran, and thus the dialogue may have played to people who
fought in the wars.
NOTES 245
8. Nontheistic Paradise and Linda L. Carroll, Ruzantes Early Adaptations

from More and Erasmus, Italica 66.1 (Spring, 1989): 2934.
9. For the Galileo-Ruzzante connection see Carroll, Angelo Beolco 106;
Stillman Drake, Galileos Language: Mathematics and Poetry in a New
Science, Yale French Studies no. 49, Science, Language, and the
Perspective Mind: Studies in Literature and Thought from Campanella to
Bayle (1973): 18; Jean Dietz Moss, Galileos Letter to Christina: Some
Rhetorical Considerations, Renaissance Quarterly 36.4 (Winter, 1983):
560n22; Anne Reynolds, Galileo Galileis Poem Against Wearing the
Toga, Italica 59.4, Renaissance (Winter, 1982): 334.
10. I do not mean to suggest that Loyolas asceticism was devoid of aes-
thetic awareness or that Ruzzantes aestheticism freed itself from the
strictures of a certain asceticism. Barthess writings on Loyola (already
cited) reveal the importance of aesthetics in the Spiritual Exercises.
Likewise, Umberto Ecos discussion of the Medieval aesthetic sensibility
begins with a consideration of the ascetic mystics, remarks on the poetic
early works of Abelard, Aquinas and others, and concludes that Medieval
ascetic writings contain some of the clearest evidence of a medieval
aesthetic understanding. See Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the
Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1986) 417. Later in this chapter, I comment on the asceticism folded
into Ruzzantes theatrical portrayals. As such, ascetics and aesthetics
inform one another.
11. For a slightly different perspective on these same issues, see Linda Carroll,
Carnival Rites as Vehicles of Protest in Renaissance Venice, Sixteenth
Century Journal 16 (1985): 487502.
12. See Martin Luther, Address to the Christian Nobility of the German
Nation Respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate, The Harvard
Classics vol. 36, trans. C.A. Buchheim, ed. W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier
& Son, 1910) 324, especially the section titled, Twenty-Seven Articles
Respecting the Reformation of the Christian Estate, articles fourteen,
eighteen, and nineteen.
13. Zorzis note: Vi si avvere per una pi matura partecipazione alla causa dei
poveri e degli oppressi [ . . . ].Qui la voce del Beolco si leva con un timbro
inconsueto, e inconsueto per i tempi il modo di prospettare certi mali come
autentiche piaghe sociali. La soluzione, secondo Ruzante, pu trovarsi in un
ritorno al genuino spirito del Vangelo [ . . . ].
14. The full line is: Voi dovete sapere che io, vedendo questo mondo essere il pi bel
paese del mondo, entrai un d in una voglia terribile di dovervi restare per
sempre, o almeno di essere degli ultimi che se ne partissero.
15. Quando mi mont questa collera, io ero sopra una delle nostre montagnette
di Este, a caccia, rimasto solo aspettando i bracchi che ritornassero da oltre un
colle, dove avevano cacciato un lepre; ed erano tanto lontani, chio non li
sentivo pi.
16. [I]l sonno li entr negli occhi e, non appena fu dentro, egli mise il catenaccio
alluscio, e chiuse me fuor di me stesso.
17. [F]u il pi soave e grazioso sonno che mai chiudesse occhi duomo.
18. Paduan: Mo se uno vivesse mo nom un ano solo e saesse de esser vivo, no serve
p vita la soa, e p longa, ca de uno che vivesse milagni e no saesse m desser
vivo? (1231). Italian (trans. Zorzi): Ma se uno vivesse sol tanto un anno solo
e sapesse di esser vivo, non sarebbe pi vita la sua, e pi lunga, di quello di uno
che vivesse millanni e non sapesse mai di esser vivo?
19. Mentre esso diceva queste parole, mi parve sentire una musica, non di canti o
di suoni, ma di non so pi che concento [sic] o armonia, che non saprei darla a
intendere se non a chi dormisse come facevo io. E poco dopo (come fa chi sogna)
mi pareva vedere tutta quella gente dellAllegrezza raccolta insieme, e di tutta
farsene po una cosa s bella, che in mille anni non si direbbe con mille lingue.
Io volevo guardarla sso per non perdere di contemplarla (tanto me pigliavano
diletto), ma gli occhi mi parevano impediti da non so che gravezza; onde,
volendo sforzarmi di aprirli, il sonno se ne fuggi, ed io rimasi con gli occhi
aperti per davvero.
20. From Nontheistic Paradise, reecting on Ruzantes move toward non-
theism: He rst tried Evangelical solutions (Prima Oratione, Beta,
Seconda Oratione, Reduce); when those did not produce results, he began
to experiment with Protestant ideas (Moscheta; see 651, par. 19, Tonin to
Ruzante: Hush, you who are against the faith [ . . . ] baptized in a pig
trough!), then pagan ones (Dialogo facetissimo). When again these provide
no relief, Beolco exploded in the Bilora against the name of God. In the
comedies that followed he accepted the expedient of Nicodemism, but in
the nal one, the Lettera allAlvarotto, God disappeared completely.
21. The complete quotation, which is also the epigraph to Part II, is: Certain
gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks. Nature Over
Again After Poussin: Some Discovered Landscapes (Collins Exhibition Hall:
Glasgow, 1980) 2122.
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INDEX
A Barbarigo, Agostino, 8788

Abelard, Peter, 223224, 240 Barbarigo, Gregorio, 2728, 31
Adorno, Theodor W., 7, 8, 1013, 33, Barthes, Roland, 177, 181, 189, 196
150, 193, 195196 Bembo, Pietro, 23, 3435, 51, 55, 57,
The Actuality of Philosophy, 10 138139
Kraftfeld, 33 Benjamin, Walter, 57, 12,
negative dialectics, 7, 13 14, 102, 103
Agnadello, 61, 66, 126, 129, Beolco, Angelo (Works referenced)
142143, 205, 206 Anconitana, 53, 149
Alberti, Leon Battista, 3435, 59 Beta, 141, 144, 147, 227
Amaseo, Gregorio, 209, 211 Bilora, 149, 208, 210212, 216,
Andreini, Isabella, 45 227, 230
Anselm, 183 Dialogo facetissimo, 117
Applauso, Nicolino, 53, 54, 64 Lettera allAlvarotto, 112, 132, 231,
Aquinas, Thomas, 178180, 240 233, 242
Arcadia, 31, 33, 34, 55, 59, 70, 72, 73 Lettera Giocosa, 114, 123, 126128,
Arcadian, see Arcadia 130, 131, 134, 141, 146147
Aristotelian, see Aristotle Moschetta, 147
Aristotle, 24, 25, 47, 62, Prima Oratione, 114, 133134,
172, 178, 240 136138, 141, 144, 145, 149,
Asolani, 139 150, 152, 229
Augustine of Hippo, 25, 183 Reduce, 86, 102, 147, 173, 208,
Avicenna, 25, 62, 63 216, 218, 230
Seconda oratione, 114, 137, 138,
140141, 144146, 149, 216,
B 228229
Badiou, Alain, 56 Bernini, Luigi, 27
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 117 Boccaccio, 23, 55

Performance Philosophy, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-49523-1
258 INDEX
Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 34, 59 167, 168, 204, 214, 215, 216,
Boillet, Danielle, 34, 5455, 59, 66 227, 228, 236
Bomarzo, 14, 23, 26, 2932, 3738, Cosmopolitan, 55, 240, 241, 242, 243
46, 49, 75, 76, 203 The Council of Ten, 84, 87, 88, 92,
Bonfadio, Jacopo, 24 93, 167, 170
Borges, Jorge Luis, 2, 3, 4 Cozzarelli, Julia, 39
Botero, Giovanni, 80, 8287 Cozzi, Gaetano, 9, 84, 93, 170, 171,
Brown, Patricia Fortini, 141 200n18
Bylebyl, Jerome J., 62 Critchley, Simon, 65
Cross, Richard, 223, 224
Cynics, 65
C
Calabrese, Omar, 3
Calmo, Andrea, 52, 204 D
Carpaccio, Vittorio, 124125 Damerini, Gino, 165, 166
Carpentier, Alejo, 3, 238 Daniele, Antonio, 59
Carroll, Linda L., 53, 54, 55, 67, 112, Davidson, Peter, 21, 22, 25,
126, 208, 214, 218, 235236 27, 38, 39
Carson, Anne, 222 De Barbari, Jacopo, 37, 114
Castiglione, Baldesar, 55, 68 De Certeau, Michel, 1, 9, 174, 217,
Casuistry, 181 221, 222, 226, 227, 233
Cocco, Enzo, 24, 48, 139 Dehiscence, 160, 164, 174, 203
Colonna, Francesco, 15, 23, 33, De Jennaro, Pietro Jacopo, 34, 59
3538, 4850, 53, 59, 64, 81 Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 70, 7475,
Comforters Manual, 80, 100 104, 111, 145147, 151,
Commedia dellarte, 17, 51, 52, 55, 191197, 238
115, 230 De Loyola, Ignatius, 188
Compagnie della Calza, 55, 111, 117, spiritual exercises, 6, 8, 9, 16, 89,
119, 125, 126, 166, 168 96, 107n8, 164, 165, 169,
Company of Death, 99100 171, 175, 176, 177, 180, 181,
Compossibility, 69, 71, 75, 195, 197 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188,
Compossibles, see Compossibility 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196,
Congrega dei Rozzi, 34 197, 198n7, 201n27, 204,
Contarini, Gasparo, 147 220, 221, 222, 224, 225, 230,
Contarini, Giustiniano, 87 238, 240, 243, 245n10
Contarini, Tommaso, 8788 De Polanco, Juan, 185
Convertite, 79, 8690, 92, 94, Derrida, Jacques, 194, 205, 206, 215
95, 97, 102 Derso, Nancy, 53, 59, 66, 67,
Cornaro, Alvise, 7, 16, 53, 54, 55, 71, 158n32
72, 74, 112, 123, 131, 133, 134, Di Alessi, Stefano, 52, 123
137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, Di Falconetto, Maria, 74
146, 152, 153n3, 156n19, 166, Di Medici, Lorenzo, 35
INDEX 259
Diogenes of Sinope, 240 Guattari, Flix, 145147, 191193,

Don, Francesco, 123, 129, 130 238, 240
Duns Scotus, John, 223, 240
H
E Ha-ha, 140, 151
Egginton, William, 13, 17, 69, Hawkins, Henry, 22, 25, 26, 29, 49
7273, 76, 81, 207 Henry of Ghent, 223, 240
Ehrlich, Tracy L, 22 Herrenhausen (Gardens of), 26, 50
Ellrich, Lutz, 193195, 197 Hofstaetter, Birgit, 13, 14
Epicurus, 31, 240 Horodowich, Elizabeth, 60, 63, 68,
Erasmus, Desiderus, 202n32, 208, 72, 127131
218, 240, 245n8 Hortus conclusus, 114, 125127, 133,
Enchiridion, 208 140, 160
Militia confessio, 218 Hylomorphism, 178
In Praise of Folly, 208
Esecutori Contro la Bestemmia,
60, 129 I
Incompossibility, 6971, 75, 197
Incompossible, see Incompossibility
F
Falconetto, Giovanni Maria, 74, 139
Falvey, Kathleen, 101, 107n10
J
Fantazzi, Charles, 34, 53, 55
Jernigan, Charles, 41, 42
Ficino, Marsillio, 39
Jones, Irene Marchegiani, 41, 42
Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 241
Fo, Dario, 52, 54, 204
Foucault, Michel, 16, 17n6, 83,
9092, 94, 106, 174, 195, K
226231, 237 Kaup, Monika, 3, 238240
counter conduct, 226231 Kircher, Athanasius, 2122, 25, 49
critical attitude, 237, 240 Klaassen, Walter, 212, 213
Fuentes, Carlos, 3 Kurz, Otto, 9, 10, 22, 239
G L
Gaismair, Michael, 143, 208, 212, Labyrinth, 4, 5, 28, 30, 31, 37, 39, 40,
213, 214 53, 57, 153n4
Galli-Bibiena, Ferdinando, 116 Lacan, Jacques, 2, 3
Gelosi (Compagnia dei), 40, 45, 50n1 Lainez, Giacomo, 87
Godwin, Joscelyn, 35, 38 La Sensa, 85
Goldoni, Carlo, 52, 115 Law, John, 114, 115
260 INDEX
League of Cambrai, 55, 85, 126, 128 Ortolani (Compagnia degli), 113,
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 14, 25, 117, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124,
26, 29, 50, 52, 66, 69, 70, 71, 125, 126, 127, 130, 155n12, 160
7376, 111, 115 Ottonelli, Giovanni Domenico, 16,
Lima, Jos Lezama, 3, 207 161165, 175180, 188191
Lisska, Anthony J., 178, 179
Lovarini, Emilio, 53
Luther, Martin, 159, 214, 228229 P
Paden, William D., 34
Palazzo Ducale, 80, 85, 86, 119, 120,
M 121, 124, 127, 129, 130, 131,
Machiavelli, Niccol, 51, 55 146, 148, 151, 154n6
Maravall, Jos Antonio, 71, 149, 150 Palmio, Benedetto, 88, 89, 90
Marder, Michael, 23, 25, 26, 75 Petrarch, 23, 34, 55, 138
Martin, John, 9, 81, 82, 87, 105 Pietrogrande, Antonella, 113,
Matazone da Caligano, 53 114, 134
Menegazzo, Emilio, 67, 112 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 214, 218, 219
Menippus, 65 Psychagogy, 16, 50, 92, 94, 97, 159,
Molmenti, Pompeo, 124, 125 180, 197, 204
Moraa, Mabel, 3 Pullan, Brian, 89, 209
More, Thomas, 218, 219, 240
Muir, Edward, 84, 85, 121, 131, 143,
147, 205, 206, 209, 210, 211 R
Mules, Warwick, 242 Rame, Franca, 52
Ratio Studiorum, 172
Regimini militantis ecclesiae, 89
N Richeme, Louis, 39
Nadal, Jernimo, 90 Romano, Dennis, 9, 81, 87, 105
Ndalianis, Angela, 3, 28, 48, 57, 69
Neobaroque, 2, 3, 16, 57,
69, 207, 240 S
Nesbitt, Mike, 193197 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 31, 3435, 51, 59
Arcadia, 31
Poliziano, 59
O Sansovino, Francesco, 30, 34
OMalley, John, 90, 169, 183, 184 Santa Maria della Presentazione, 79,
Ontology, 179, 180, 196, 206 88, 121
On Tradition, 150 Sanuto, Marin, 113, 118121, 124,
Orsini, Pier Francesco, 14, 18n7, 128, 130, 131, 144
32, 75 Savorgnan, Antonio, 209212
INDEX 261
Scaduto, Mario, 87 V
Selfridge-Field, Eleanor, 121, 155n15 Valsanzibio, 14, 23, 2632, 38,
Sheeler, Jessie, 3032, 37, 76 40, 41, 46, 47, 49,
Snaturale, 57, 6669, 135, 150 52, 203
Spranzi, Marta, 13, 24, 25, 47, 50 Il Labirinto di Bossi Secolari, 28
Stampino, Maria Galli, 45 Isola dei Conigli, 28
percorso di Salvicazione, 26, 40,
46, 47
T portale di Diana, 27
Taegio, Bartolomeo, 24 statua del Tempo, 29
Tafuri, Manfredo, 166168, 199n11 Veatch, Henry, 179
Tasso, Torquato, 15, 23, 26, 33, Vercelloni, Matteo and Virgilio, 37,
35, 3850, 52, 58, 81, 95, 114
96, 97, 203 Villano, 53, 54,
Aminta, 15, 23, 33, 38, 4050, 58, 56, 61, 66,
95, 96, 97 75, 139
Gerusalemma Liberata, 42 Virgil, 34
Tavoletta, 101 Voltaire, 71, 241
Teatri del mondo, 164166,
169, 199n9
Terpstra, Nicholas, 98, 99 W
Third Nature, 24, 29, 68 Wadoski, Andrew, 42
Tintoretto, 74, 116, 166
Tomasi, Lucia Tongiorgi, 22
Torelli, Giacomo, 116 Z
Treaty of Noyon, 55 Zardinieri (Compagnia di), 118,
Trevisan, Domenico, 118 119
Tromp loeil, 139, 140, 143 iek, Slavoj, 188,
Tylus, Jane, 45 189
Zorzi, Ludovico, 53, 54, 59, 60,
62, 64, 65, 67, 118,
U 123, 125, 129,
University of Padua, 22, 54, 214, 240 141, 153n2, 155n12,
Urban, Lina Padoan, 165 229, 235, 244n7

Will Daddario - Baroque, Venice, Theatre

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Performance Philosophy

Series Advisory Board: Emmanuel Alloa, Assistant Professor in Philosophy,

More information about this series at

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938277

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

Cover image Sylvain Grandadam, Stockbyte/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

I am grateful to the Ofce of International Programs at the University of

Part I Baroque Pastoral

2 Garden Thinking and Baroque Pastoral 21

3 Pastoral Askew and Aslant: Ruzzantes

4 Jesuit Pastoral Theatre: The Case of Father Pietro

Part II Discipline and Excess

5 Ruzzante Takes Place 111

7 Baroque Diarchic Self 203

The Author(s) 2017 1

beyond those appearances where truth resides (3). So many of the

of baroque and New World, or neo-, Baroque cathedral architecture, which

In the Empire in question, the Cartographers Art reached such a degree of

The labor of the historiographer (allegorized as the Cartographers Art)

CONSTELLATORY THINKING: BAROQUE, VENICE, THEATRE,

philosophical inquiry, and presents these links as an historical form of

as Alvise Cornaro, and the performer known as Ruzzante harnessed thea-

Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits, or Society of Jesus, instituted a daily practice

Venetian historiographers (from Gaetano Cozzi, Frederic C. Lane, and

sixteenth-century jewelers for their grotesque appearance, and that so

exists an adequacy between the philosophic questions and the possibility

In addition to differentiating between science and philosophy, this claim

If the idea of philosophic interpretation which I tried to develop for you is

Here, Adorno shifts from invention to fantasy and transitions from

meaning melody or tune. To listen to the proposal made by historical

SHAPE OF THE STUDY

in Venice, a ground constituted by theatre and performance practices and

7. See, for example, Margarete Baur-Heinhold, Baroque Theatre (London:

TU CHENTRI QUA PON MENTE PARTE A PARTE

Garden Thinking and Baroque Pastoral

The Author(s) 2017 21

baroque imagination (88). Jesuits like Kircher and Henry Hawkins,

is to misunderstand the realm of abstraction that hovers over the philo-

VALSANZIBIO: IVI LINFERNO E QUI IL PARADISO

that we are indeed contemplating a baroque garden on a vast scale, perhaps

In this quotation, Peter Davidson creates a connection between Jesuit

BOMARZO: FATTE PER INGANNO O PUR PER ARTE

surrealist artist Salvador Dal created a video about its sculptural

edition of Jacopo Sannazaros pastoral romance Arcadia (1578) to

Curioso viator che in questa parte

Here, Nature and Art retain a hierarchical relationship. Synonymous with

TU CHENTRI QUA PON MENTE PARTE A PARTE

FROM PASTORAL GARDENS TO PASTORAL LITERATURE

COLONNA: PASTORAL IN EXCESS

The title of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is compounded from the three

Cytherea appears as a garden within a garden insofar as Poliphilo reaches it

The amphitheatre was of a structure not to be believed, because its elegant

Godwin, the world of the Hypernotomachia unfolds as a baroque pastoral

TASSO: PASTORAL DISCIPLINE

aberration alive within love. This aberration corrupts individuals by sedu-

You mirrors of the heart, unfaithful eyes,

I saw her there,

she saw herself in disarray and smiled,

Tasso slowly reveals Silvia as a negative model, as proof of what happens

Tirsis early attempts to transfer Amintas affections to another, the young

Curioso viator che in questa parte