AN ALLEGORICAL FABULA FOR THE BENTIVOGLIO-D'EstE MARRIAGE OF 1487

Abstract

Beginning in the mid-fifteenth century, a theory and justification of dance as art, accompanied by transcription of dances, choreographies, and musical notations, was developed in Italy. Steps and dances that belonged to a repertoire drawn in part from the modes of celebration of court and town, which were to some extent open to new experiment and reworking, were written down and codified. Irreplaceable documentary material for the dance historians of this period consists essentially of ten manuscripts and some fragments, arising out of the theoretical and practical activities of the dancingmasters Domenico da Piacenza and Guglielmo Ebreo, and of the humanist Antonio Cornazano.J1 In these texts we find set out the laws governing the art of dance, dances are described, one or more styles defined, the rules regulating the creation of new choreographies established, and in some cases the music is transcribed. These are the texts that register the codifying of the theoretical scheme that specialist criticism nowadays calls the fifteenth-century Italian style of dance. But the theoretical workings of the masters did not always correspond perfectly with what other types of sources tell us of the actual performance of dances and balli on courtly and bourgeois festive occasions. When, for example, one makes a comparative analysis of the information that can be found in heterogeneous chronicles and diaries, numerous documents written by ducal historians, and the official reports of ambassadors or the correspondence of noblewomen and princes, differences emerge between what was set down by the masters in their treatises and what seems to have characterized the dancing that took place at feasts and banquets. It is well known that such dances as moresche