Archeologia Dell'unità. Architettura, Pittura E Filosofia Nella Tragedia Italiana Del Cinquecento

Abstract

Archeologia dell’unità offers a new narrative of both the origins and the consequences in the history of ideas of the pseudo-Aristotelian unities of time and place that emerged in sixteenth-century Italy. Weaving together phenomena such as the reception of Vitruvius’s De architectura, the performance of classical plays in Italian courts, the invention of perspective and its impact on stage design, I reconstruct the interactions between artists and humanists and the development of a shared language across aesthetics and poetics. I claim that the complication of the Aristotelian concept of unity of action with the notions of time and place is the symptom of a shift in paradigms—from the inner coherence of the text to the verisimilitude, from the importance of the plot to the appreciation of the mise-en-scène—caused by the interdisciplinary network that the Poetics entered in mid-sixteenth century. Focusing on the innovations of Renaissance scenography, I show in selected tragedies by Giangiorgio Trissino (Sofonisba), Pietro Aretino (Orazia), Luigi Groto (Adriana), and Torquato Tasso (Re Torrismondo) how the dimension of spectacle came to condition the structure of texts. I claim that rethinking the unity of action in light of the unities of place and time bears consequences for the “philosophy” of the action beyond the material conditions of the stage representation, providing a model for texts that are not meant to be staged and an explanation for the shifting of the “poetics of the tragedy” to the “philosophy of the tragic” that would later emerge in German Idealism.