Fashionable sports' kit for female athletes,
4th century AD.
Detail of mosaic in a private room of
Villa Romana del Casale, Siciliy
where it is always warm enough to wear bikinis.
4th century AD.
Detail of mosaic in a private room of
Villa Romana del Casale, Siciliy
where it is always warm enough to wear bikinis.
Awe and Wonder during Austerity for £27 million
We know sporting spectacles have always been political, even before the first chariot race in the Colosseum. They have never promoted peace - ancient Greek city-states suspended civil wars to send athletic teams to compete at sacred sites, and then resumed killing each other as soon as the games were over - but they have been invaluable public pacifiers and propaganda tools for governments....
Totalitarian, sometimes tottering, states have always used huge outdoor displays of entertainment to define national identity, impress rival nations, and distract attention from privation and oppression. We know that the Olympic Games' are an opportunity for the democratic British government to do some domestic crisis management with a smokescreen for releasing ugly economic facts and a lot of flag-wrapped, medal-awarded incentives to higher personal enterprise. (It could learn also a simple popularity test from the Romans by providing free tickets and free food - to the unemployed or homeless for instance, or to nurses and emergency staff - instead of exclusive prices and empty seats.)
Extravagant ephemera, 1637 : Florentine mock battle with athletic feats
and flying monsters
and flying monsters
Della Bella, Stefano (1610-1664): Stage designs for 'Le Nozze degli Dei' Scene V, 1637, etching,
The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
The opening ceremony was the first essential part of an international rebranding programme, that could make all of GB look like a winner for the first time since 1945. Many of us, not converted to the expense and inconvenience of hosting the Games, sceptical about the sustainability of medal tables, and preferring small-scale entertainment to multimedia circus, were just hoping this extended commercial for GB in decline would come off without security breaches, transport chaos or artistic disasters embarrassing the director, technicians and thousands of committed performers. A single torch that does not light can ruin a person's life.
Last night, Danny Boyle and his design team, avoiding just another giant techno variety show with laser beams, revived the Renaissance tradition of pageantry and allegorical mummery transfigured by illusionist effects, produced by state of the art machinery. They used lighting and pyrotechnology to tell a story, not just dazzle, that combined with live performance and film to create a swirling modern fantasy round the central conceit of the industrial forging of the olympic rings (an artistic triumph to metamorphose such a banal logo into memorably fiery imagery) and the quest to light the magic cauldron.
They produced a show that was endlessly inventive, often messy and repetitive but only sometimes ridiculous and musically monotonous, that kept its socialist integrity by paying tribute to national treasures without descending to reverence or nostalgia, that was neither pompous nor iconoclastic, and, miraculously for its scale, occasionally genuinely funny. They ignited public enthusiasm with a new national myth that fulfilled its domestic and foreign policy functions.
Four centuries ago, there were a couple of English monarchs who played parts in court masques; using the Queen and her show-stealing corgis to play themselves in a mock James Bond moviette was a courtly masterstroke unsurpassed since Sir Walter Ralegh laid down his cloak to keep the first queen Elizabeth's feet dry......
THEATRES OF POWER
The starting point of the exhibition Stages and Scenes: Creating Architectural Illusion at the Courtauld Gallery in 2008 was the model of a stage set of the interior of an opulent palace, the sort that Sleeping Beauty would fall asleep in....
Giuseppi Valeriani: Set of
designs for a stage set, 17th Century.
The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
the size of toy theatre you wanted to play with when you were a child,
arranged in layers of painted flats to create the illusion of depth and
space.
It
was designed in the early eighteenth century as a seven piece set by
the Italian Russian artist Giuseppe Valeriani with pen and brown ink,
watercolour and judicious use of gold leaf on paper. It is enchanting.
Pretty
and delicate as it looked, this model was the first piece chosen by the
eight students on the Curating the Art Museum MA programme for a small
exhibition, and inspired their theme of architectural illusion, in the
scenery of opera and play houses and the huge outdoor entertainments
produced by the powerful states of Baroque Europe to propulgate and
consolidate their power, until the revolutions and Napoleonic conquests
of the late 18th century swept away the old structure of patronage.
A
modest exhibition of only 29 items, few of great artistic merit but all
illustrating the thesis that "Through skilled rendering of architecture
and perspective, the smallest stage can be converted into the most
expansive of settings". By making the connection between artistic
experiments with perspective and the political propaganda of absolutism, Stages and Scenes opened out into a reflection of the illusions at the heart of state power.
The
inherently theatrical gestures and imagery
of
Baroque art and architecture were born out of the urgent need of
European countries, splintered by decades of ideological conflict and
political division, to restore order and redefine faith. It was a
personal, secular and religious movement, particularly essential to
governments needing legitimization of despotic centralizationthrough a
coherent public image, and to the Roman Catholic Church seeking to
reignite enthusiasm for the Counter-Reformation.
Outwardly, it continued as the style of visual
communication long after the passionate drama of Rubens and Bernini was
sedated, and the subtler sensuality of Van Dyck turned blowsy, by later
17th century artists, to be superseded in the 18th century by the decorous elegance of
Tiepolo and the light-hearted scepticism of the Rococo, embarrassed by the
religious fervour and overt emotion of the past.
Rubens' oil sketch on panel, Esther before Ahasuerus,
designed in 1620 for the ceiling of the Jesuit Church of Antwerp (the
decoration all destroyed by fire in 1718), one of the few paintings in
the exhibition, unites the themes of architectural illusion and public
show with dramatic figure-painting in glowing, sumptuous colours and
bold composition. Here and in the accompanying scene Solomon Receiving the Queen of Sheba,
featuring a show-stealing parrot, he used the equivalent of a telephoto
lens effect of leading our eyes upward at a vertiginous perspective, to
catch a glimpse of dramatic interaction of characters standing between
palatial columns and staircases under looming arches.
Rubens'
bravura technique is easy to dismiss as vulgar and superficial, his
fleshly obsession verging on the pornographic, distracting attention
from the thoughtfulness of his compositions and the expressiveness of
his figures, their gestures and faces caught in the very moment of
emotion, not in tranquillity before or after, in operatic intensity.
Baroque
imagery, even when superbly executed by artistic geniuses, did not
always succeed as political message in the patron's favour or keep the
King or Queen's head on during a revolution, but it worked as art. Van
Dyck's portraits, etherealising Charles I and his court, are as much of a
theatrical device as Inigo Jones' fantastical masque designs, creating
an ineradicable illusion of aristocratic grace and virtue in parallel
with the historic reality of an unpopular and flawed regime.
Fortunately
for the development of public theatre, the more autocratic and
aggressive a government's policies were in reaction to religious, social
and political tensions, the more theatrically ambitious and
extravagantly fanciful their allegorical entertainments
became, particularly once the musical and dance elements of masques were
formalized into opera and ballet, which demanded bigger, increasingly
elaborate, moveable wing and drop scenery for the temporary court stages, and, eventually, the construction of permanent buildings to store them.
These decorative fantasies derived from late Italian Renaissance Italian artists using perspective for illusory effects in architectural capricci, which were adapted into designs of
receding vistas of idealized buildings and landscapes for the court and
outdoor public entertainments of the City States. The use of newly
invented cloud machines that could carry performers dressed as gods
through the air, of wave, storm and fire machines and of atmospheric
lighting changes added to sophisticated spectaculars that raised
government prestige at home and abroad.
 |
| Intermezzo at the Medici court theatre, engraved by Callot, 1617. Image source: Wikigallery |
Catherine
de Medici introduced these techniques to the French court during the
1560s - 80s to enhance her famous charm offences, the politically
motivated “magnifences” that were an astonishing multi-media experience,
incorporating masque, ballet, song, street theatre, traditional
tournaments and mock battles, and avant-garde adult entertainment, all
to win support and loyalty for the Valois in breaks during the Wars of
Religion.
 |
A scene from Le Ballet Comique de la Reine, Paris 1581.
Engraving. Image source: Wikimedia Commons |
The
infinite metaphorical possibilities of theatre to enhance public
perception of government by beguiling spectators, were fully
assimiliated into political and cultural thought, long before scientific
and artistic innovations made it possible for artists to put their
designs into as many dimensions and different materials as they chose.
The convention of representing royalty in their portraits as theatre,
complete with regal props and a fixed palatial or celestial set, was
already established.
In the famous Ditchley portrait of 1592 (National Portrait Gallery), Elizabeth I is standing on a globe painted with a map of southern England, floating
imperiously through the sky - but, in the style of iconography the
queen preferred, the painting is flat, shadowless, an elaborately
wrought emblem without any depth of field.
 |
| Elizabeth by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, 1592. National Portrait Gallery. Image source: Wikipedia |
Forty
years later, Van Dyck's painting of Charles 1 on horseback (National
Gallery), shows the king riding under a triumphal arch that could be
from a stage set, with painted backdrop beyond, straight towards the
spectator, who has to look up in awe at all the approaching majesty of
man and animal, an image in which the mastery of perspective and
theatricality is designed to create a breathtaking immediacy.
| ||
The
members of the Accademia Olimpica in Vicenza who commissioned Palladio
to design a permanent theatre in 1585, would have approved of the main
stage facade looking like a palace, because the theatre was an idealised
representation of their own power in the real world, which included the
vistas of Scamozzi's wooden set of streets and buildings glimpsed
through the three main arches of the stage in perfect perspective.
Renaissance palaces had always been theatres; now theatres were being
built to look like palaces, a fashion which long outlived Baroque good
taste into the beginning of the 20th century.
Arch, Teatro Olimpico by Palladio and Scamozzi.
Photograph Copyright The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London |
Gradually
during the 17th and early 18th centuries the demand for these palaces
spread from the royal and aristocratic elites to the general public in
all the major cities of Europe. The talented Bibieni family, predominant in architectural and set design in Europe
for over a century, became involved in building theatres in towns as
well as creating grand illusions at the courts of their royal patrons.
Architectural
splendour did not always accompany the building of an opera house - an
innate enthusiasm for music and drama was going to fire people on a
smaller budget and in the face of religious opposition. The first
purpose built opera house in Germany was not at a princely court, but was conceived, financed and managed by private citizens in the independent mercantile republic of Hamburg in 1678.
Middle
class and commercial interest in the high arts was able to flourish
even in the ancien regime; opera was only briefly the exclusive art form
of a social elite, starting in the 1590s with a small group of
Florentine humanists dedicated to reviving the classical tradition of
tragic poetry combined with music with poetry. The first public opera
house in Italy, Teatro San Cassiano in Venice,
was opened in 1637. In 1669, Louis XIV, the balletomane sans pareil,
with the advice of his finance minister Colbert, created the Académie
Royale de Musique in order to train dancers - originally only male ones -
and promote professional performances of opera and ballet in Paris and
other French towns.
At
the same time that he promoted theatrical professionalism in the
country at large, King Louis was ordering the expansion of the chateau
of Versailles into the most theatrical of palaces and gardens, where
entertainments featuring courtiers and members of the royal family
continued to be held against the backdrop of L' Escalier des
Ambassadeurs, in other rooms and in temporary structures in the garden's
groves and colonnades, long before and after the building of a
permanent theatre within the palace.
To keep up with this royal impresario, every prince in Europe
had to commission grand architectural and landscape designs, for
performance just as much as appearance, and many inaugurated their own
court ballets. Some of the most visually enchanting of these theatrical
fêtes, which included plays and music by the greatest writers and
composers of the day as part of the entertainment, were staged in the
royal gardens of Europe, masterpieces of outdoor theatre in themselves,
designed and planted as exercises in perspective, in which sculpture and
parterres were arranged in formal patterns like a ballet, where
illusion could be perfected in the eye-deceiving merging of painted
trees with real trees, of statues with human dancers.
 |
| Le Roi-Soleil: Louis XIV dancing in La Ballet de la Nuit, 1653. Image source: Wikipedia |
There were plenty of undignified, sometimes fatal, accidents - but then there are still serious accidents with high-tech machinery in the West End
and on Broadway nowadays, despite modern Health & Safety
regulations. It is impossible that everybody in the audience was
uncritical of the extravagance and pretentiousness of these royal
'spectacles', and there's an irreverant temptation to wonder if
sometimes they were closer to le Cirque du Soleil than the court of le
Roi-Soleil - but in the surviving prints, engravings and painting the
allegorical propaganda of the ancien regime looks charming, disarming
latent disapproval with a vision of a place where ephemeral beauty and
elegance reign for ever.
Two
engravings by Jacques Callot in the Courtauld exhibition gave an idea
of the ambitious scale of the spectacles laid on by the Medici,
including a mock water battle to celebrate the visit of the Prince of
Urbino in 1619, which was watched by 30,000 people. In modern terms,
these huge events were the equivalent of staging the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games,
and the intermezzi are comparable to Madonna's halftime show at the Super Bowl.
Stefano della Bella (1610-1664) Scene Five, "Hell", of a set of stage designs for Le Nozze degli Dei, 1637.
The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London
| Stefano Della Bella's etchings of stage designs for The Wedding of the Gods in 1637 record the illusionistic splendour of production values on temporary stages at the Medici court, with machinery capable of lowering performers in the role of gods from the sky in front of painted cloud drops. In the fifth scene, flying monsters attack cavaliers from the air, like a scene from a modern sci-fi movie. With all these scenes and effects to get through, it is not surprising that the performance lasted four hours. |
Stages and Scenes exhibited two 16th century Italian books on architecture, a 1536 edition of Vitruvius' De Architettura and Sebastiano Serlio's Tutte l'Opere de Architettura
of 1551. Serlio included set design as an important architectural form,
his enchanted turrets and woods and stately piazzas, all carefully
drawn in perspective, providing a manual for all future illusionistic
set design.
The
origins of modern theatrical spectaculars and of classical ballet may
be traced back to the coincidence of the dire political need of an
effete French royal dynasty threatened with destruction in civil war and
the incumbency of a culturally and politically sophisticated Medici
Queen Mother. Catherine de Medici, building on the traditions of her own
family court in Florence and of Francois I, was an outstanding
impresario, who devised allegorical court entertainments to promote the
policies and prestige of her son' governments. She recruited the best
available talent for her "magnifences", combining music, poetry, dance
and illusionistic scenery. The culmination of her work was the festival
held in 1581 to celebrate a family wedding, which included a ballet,
commissioned and performed by her daughter-in-law, Louise of Lorraine,
who made her entrance in a vast fountain chariot, and dismounted with
her ladies to perform the first formal ballet de cour, the most refined
of the French monarchy's performing arts from which classical ballet
developed.
 |
| The Fountain Chariot designed by Patin that carried Louise of Lorraine, wife of Henri III of France, her ladies and musicians in Le Ballet Comique de la Reine, 1581, one of the joyeuse magnificences devised to celebrate the marriage of the queen's sister to the king's favourite. Image source: Wikipedia |
Late 17th century court ballet inspired by Louis XIV's example
continued to be a ritualized, exquisitely designed declaration of
political agenda and ideology, occasions prickling with controversy,
just as much as the Jacobean court masques and the dumb-show of Hamlet's
play within the play.
Contemporary
princes were expected to use theatrical performance to make a political
point, even if by nature they were not graceful dancers or talented
actors. A serious vocational soldier-statesman like the young William of
Orange, who preferred architecture and gardening to any of the
performing arts, appeared in a ballet at his court in 1668 as a codified
message to the Dutch Republic and the foreign states that he intended
to restore the authority of his family as a major European power, just
as King Louis had done in France.
Like
today's royal family, there were plenty of monarchs by the 18th century
who restricted their performance art to official ceremonial functions,
weddings and funerals, reviewing the troops, but earlier there had been
natural actors and star personalities like Elizabeth I and Louis XIV
(who made his debut as a ballet dancer in 1651 and first appeared as le
Roi Soleil two years later) or queen consorts like Anne of Denmark and
Henrietta Maria, who enjoyed performing in masques. Henry VIII and Charles I were the only reigning monarchs who played parts.
It
didn't even matter if, as in the case of James I, the royal client
lacked star quality, so long as an international art star like Rubens
was available to apotheose the Stuart brand on the ceiling of Indigo
Jones' Banqueting House, a stage set itself, designed as much as a
symbol of monarchical power as a dining and entertainments venue, and
later chosen by the regicides as the fitting location for Charles I's
execution.
Even
governments opposed to public playhouses could not resist using
theatrical forms as part of their own communications strategy. Whenever a
modern government minister tries to run down public investment in drama
and music, never let him forget that Britain's
most successful Parliamentarian, Oliver Cromwell, ordered a masque at
his own quasi-regal court as part of the celebrations of his daughters'
weddings, the text supplied by Andrew Marvell.
In the English royal court, the masque which had reached perfection as an art form under Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, lapsed out of use in the reign of Charles II, the last big-budget production (£5000 - nearly two thirds of a million in today’s terms) being Calisto
in 1675, in which courtiers and young Stuart princesses were joined by
professional actors, singers and dancers at the Hall theatre in
Whitehall, built by Webb for Charles II. Masques was no longer a crucial
element to government propaganda: Calisto
was just a bit of fun, beautifully designed and lit, with an erotic
lesbian theme to keep the blasé Restoration courtiers awake.
In
1688 the monarchy’s prerogatives were effectively shrunk for ever,
Parliament recapturing ground lost since the Restoration. With the
official deposition of the divine right of kings, the transfer of
magical illusionism from royal court to the professional public theatres
and popular entertainment was complete.
The
restrained imagery of the later Stuart monarchy adapted to the
bloodless revolution in political realities. The new regime of William
and Mary did not consider commissioning a grand apotheosis on a ceiling:
Thornhill’s commission to exalt the Protestant Succession in the Hall
of Greenwich Hospital was issued under George I, in justification of his
right to rule.
Even
at Versailles, the solemnity and dramatic passion of Baroque was
displaced in the new century, under a young king. The tradition of
fantastical, extravagant allegorical displays died out more slowly, but
presented in the playful, ironic style of Rococo. At the Ball of the Yew
Trees in the Hall of Mirrors in 1745 the only event of historical
significance was the first meeting of Louis XV dressed as a yew tree
with the future Madame la Pompadour dressed as the goddess of chastity.
The
only modern parallel to the scale of the Baroque State's theatre
budget, technical and artistic expertise, and politico-cultural
influence is Hollywood, 106 years old this year, a combination of
idealization, apologia and self-regulated satire that serves as the
USA's permanent public relations company to the rest of the world,. Some
of the pieces in the Courtauld collection prefigure epic film sets -
the out-size arches and vast courtyards of Serafino Brizzi's stage
fortresses could have been used for countless Robin Hoods; the
neo-classical stage interiors of the Teatro Olimpico would serve as the
home of superheroes; the brooding atmosphere of Piranesi is recaptured
in dark gothic fantasies. The dramatic fore-shortening of figures in the
ceiling paintings of baroque artists would have had the same effect on
spectators as watching 3D has on us.
Seventeenth and eighteenth century courts realized that if their in-house entertainments were to reach standards of excellence, they required, in addition to writers, composers, designers and ballet masters, professional dancers and actors to improve the amateur courtiers' performances. There was a symbiosis quickly in place between amateur and professional - actors still relied on the court for patronage and for providing their real-life models for royal and aristocratic parts, while royalty seized on the services of professional actors and actresses to improve public speaking and presentation skills. Queens Mary II and Anne, while young princesses, were given elocution lessons by Mrs Betterton in the early 1670s, and nearly a century later the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa hired French actors to teach her youngest daughter to speak French, as part of her training to be the future queen Marie Antoinette at Versailles.
Seventeenth and eighteenth century courts realized that if their in-house entertainments were to reach standards of excellence, they required, in addition to writers, composers, designers and ballet masters, professional dancers and actors to improve the amateur courtiers' performances. There was a symbiosis quickly in place between amateur and professional - actors still relied on the court for patronage and for providing their real-life models for royal and aristocratic parts, while royalty seized on the services of professional actors and actresses to improve public speaking and presentation skills. Queens Mary II and Anne, while young princesses, were given elocution lessons by Mrs Betterton in the early 1670s, and nearly a century later the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa hired French actors to teach her youngest daughter to speak French, as part of her training to be the future queen Marie Antoinette at Versailles.
One
of Marie Antoinette's greatest personal pleasures was putting on and
starring in fashionable plays in her private theatre at Versailles.
The entertainments were frivolous entertainments, intended to amuse
herself and her friends, not public events reflecting back the
effulgence of dynastic glory, which would have been outdated and
inappropriate. The Baroque era of absolutism was over. Her Petit Théâtre
was a pretty confection in blue and gold, its tiny auditorium decorated
with a painted ceiling and gilded sculpture, an architectural illusion
made of wood and papier-mâché, built in the grounds of le Petit Trianon
which, with its model village and dairy, was the stage-set for the
queen's fantasies turning inward, while the public image and political
power of the monarchy was disintegrating.
Stages and Scenes
included some of Piranesi's etchings of the mid-18th century, which are
sinister in comparison to the playfully exuberant visions of his older
contemporaries, because his realism subverts their fantasy that the
power of grand architecture is always benign. He had been taught theatre
design by Valeriani, and he shares architectural similarities to the
work of his predecessor Alessandro Galli Bibiena, in the drama of arches
and traversing lines, but his buildings belong to a different
imaginative world than the fairytale palaces of the Baroque.
The perspectives of Round Tower are
designed to intimidate, a torture chamber hidden inside the beautifully
proportioned fairytale palaces of the Baroque, the vanished
flower-garlanded places where cherubs eternally play.
 | ||||
| Vincenzo dal Re (d.1762): Interior of an imaginary palace 44.1cm x 33.6cm, pen and ink (brown) & watercolour (grey) & chalk (black) on paper The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London |
© Pippa Rathborne 2012
Adapted from an article published as Exhibition Review | STAGES AND SCENES
on Rogues and Vagabonds Theatre Website, with permission of Sarah
Vernon and with thanks to The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld
Gallery, London for permission to use images from their collection.
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