La clausura dell’infinito: lo spettacolo come paradigma nel Seicento italiano

The essay analyzes, through a series of texts not of primary theatrical importance, the theme of the spectacle in seventeenth-century Italy as a paradigm able to show the overall change of the theoretical commitment which, historically, is recognized in it, between symbolic heraldry, allegory of history and mirabilia Dei. The spectacle is a new idea, a real breaking and corrective point hitherto ignored for what appeared, however, as definitively ratified. Thus, orations and academic discourses, panegyrics and Lenten sermons whose metaphorical starting point is the allegory of the spectacle and the tópos of ‘all the world’s a stage’, can be included not only in the pro fide genre but also as, de facto, emblems of a new modality of reading of reality and knowledge of the order of the cosmos. The spectacle is a new agency of the meaning of living and social action, in front of the disintegration of Renaissance man and the looming of History. The paradigm of a radical change which is at the same time a complex of forces which includes the encounter with the violence of the authentic, with the labyrinth of doubt, and with the fragility of life in the powers of the body, the sunspots and the spectacle of the mud, the horror of the void, and of the return.