Renaissance Fun

Renaissance Fun

Author: Philip Steadman

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1787359158

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Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.


Scenic Art for the Theatre

Scenic Art for the Theatre

Author: Susan Crabtree

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 466

ISBN-13: 0240804627

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With plenty of hints and tips, 'Scenic Art for the Theatre' is an easily understood textbook for students and professionals alike who want to know more about set design and the history of scenic artistry.


Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance

Scenes and Machines on the English Stage During the Renaissance

Author: Lily B. Campbell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-03-28

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 1107620848

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This 1923 book studies the development of English staging during the Renaissance, and its relationship with the classical revival of stage decoration in Italy. The text attempts to show how from the beginning of the classical revival of drama in Italy, staging was regarded as an accepted part of dramatic production.


Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy

Encyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy

Author: Marco Sgarbi

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-10-27

Total Pages: 3618

ISBN-13: 3319141694

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Gives accurate and reliable summaries of the current state of research. It includes entries on philosophers, problems, terms, historical periods, subjects and the cultural context of Renaissance Philosophy. Furthermore, it covers Latin, Arabic, Jewish, Byzantine and vernacular philosophy, and includes entries on the cross-fertilization of these philosophical traditions. A unique feature of this encyclopedia is that it does not aim to define what Renaissance philosophy is, rather simply to cover the philosophy of the period between 1300 and 1650.


Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces

Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces

Author: Javier Berzal de Dios

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2019-01-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1487503881

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Through an interdisciplinary examination of sixteenth-century theatre, Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces studies the performative aspects of the early modern stage, paying special attention to the overlooked complexities of audience experience. Examining the period's philosophical and aesthetic ideas about space, place, and setting, the book shows how artists consciously moved away from traditional representations of real spaces on stage, instead providing their audiences with more imaginative and collaborative engagements that were untethered by strict definitions of naturalism. In this way, the book breaks with traditional interpretations of early modern staging techniques, arguing that the goal of artists in this period was not to cater to a single privileged viewer through the creation of a naturalistically unified stage but instead to offer up a complex multimedia experience that would captivate a diverse assembly of theatre-goers.


Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories

Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories

Author: Michele Marrapodi

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-01

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1317056582

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Throwing fresh light on a much discussed but still controversial field, this collection of essays places the presence of Italian literary theories against and alongside the background of English dramatic traditions, to assess this influence in the emergence of Elizabethan theatrical convention and the innovative dramatic practices under the early Stuarts. Contributors respond anew to the process of cultural exchange, cultural transaction, and generic intertextuality involved in the debate on dramatic theory and literary kinds in the Renaissance, exploring, with special emphasis on Shakespeare's works, the level of cultural appropriation, contamination, revision, and subversion characterizing early modern English drama. Shakespeare and Renaissance Literary Theories offers a wide range of approaches and critical viewpoints of leading international scholars concerning questions which are still open to debate and which may pave the way to further groundbreaking analyses on Shakespeare's art of dramatic construction and that of his contemporaries.


Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language

Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language

Author: Giulio C. Lepschy

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 9780802037299

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In this collection of six scholarly essays on the Italian language, Giulio Lepschy discusses issues ranging from Italian literary and spoken history to prosody and a play of the Italian Renaissance.


Pietro Aretino: Subverting the System in Renaissance Italy

Pietro Aretino: Subverting the System in Renaissance Italy

Author: Raymond B. Waddington

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-10-28

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1040245765

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The essays gathered together in this volume follow the career of the sixteenth-century courtier-poet Pietro Aretino. Part One introduces the author during the 1520s in Rome with his remarkable first comedy, La Cortigiana. With Aretino’s move to Venice (1527), he found a congenial life-long home in which he could flourish. Yet the transition from courtier poet to poligrafo, vernacular writer for the popular press, was slow and difficult before he adopted a new career model derived from Erasmus; even then, he contemplated abandoning Italy for the Ottoman Empire. Part Two examines his work as a satirist in the mid-thirties with the Ragionamenti, the dialogues that branded him a pornographer when the satiric targets lost their immediacy. He augmented the satiric writings by creating the visual persona of a satirist in various media - woodcut author portraits in books, engravings, and particularly portrait medals. The complementary, verbal-visual relationship is the subject of this pairing. Aretino’s religious writings have not been taken seriously until quite recently. The two essays presented here trace Aretino’s associations with Erasmians, spirituali, heretics, and apostates, arguing that his own convictions were sincere, suggesting that he became a Nicodemite during the gathering Counter-Reformation repression of the 1540s. The concluding essays consider two examples of Aretino’s continuing influence in different media, visual arts and literature: on the brilliant, eccentric artist, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, and on a great English comedy, Ben Jonson’s Volpone.