Confraternities and Carnival: The Context of Lorenzo de' Medici's Rappresentazione di SS. Giovanni e Paolo

Abstract

In late 1490 and early 1491 Lorenzo de' Medici composed a religious play, the Rappresentazione di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, that is chronologically his last major literary work.1 In the body of Lorenzo's writings this play therefore would seem to take on a particular significance since it might be considered Lorenzo's literary testament and might thus also represent his final development as a poet and writer. The drama is a sacra rappresentazione, a stage work of a type that re-enacts saints' lives and martyrdoms and other events from sacred history. The genre found its highest point of development in fifteenth-century Florence, especially through the effort and example of playwrights such as Feo Belcari, Antonia Pulci, and Castellan de' Castellani, all more or less closely linked to the ruling Medici family. Unlike the learned theater of the following century, the sacra rappresentazione was written in octaves, and it ignored the Aristotelian unities of time, space, and action. Further, it freely mixed natural and supernatural characters, comic and tragic elements. Lorenzo's Rappresentazione di SS. Giovanni e Paolo is unusually fractured in its presentation of narrative even when considered among other examples of the genre. The plot is only tangentially concerned with the life and martyrdom of the title characters, John and Paul, the two Roman officers beheaded in 362 by the Emperor Julian the Apostate. The play is indeed a somewhat loose compilation of stories that treat the miraculous healing (through the intercession of St. Agnes) of Costanza, daughter of the Emperor Constantine the Great, her conversion to Christianity, her bethrothal to the Roman general Gallicano