Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick

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СКАЧАТЬ Triduum, Sepulto Domino. Rather than a single play, one might consider Morone’s work as a compendium of possible dramatic scenes. It would continue to be reworked and printed into the Settecento, including in Austrian Naples.⁴² Similar pieces seem to have been done in Sicily as late as the nineteenth century. Along the way, Morone included biblical intermedi, choruses of angels and singing musicians, and in the worst Franciscan tradition, anti-Judaism embodied in the rabbi Misandro.

      This character appears again in Francesco Belli’s Deposition drama of 1633, Essequie del Redentore, a sacra rappresentazione in prose dedicated to none other than G.F. Loredano, the founder of the Accademia degli Incogniti. This prolix piece traces the time from Christ’s death to the burial, including a fugitive devil’s report of the Harrowing of Hell; like Il Mortorio, it features a double lament of the Virgin, Judas’s despair, and the Three Marys with John the Evangelist on Calvary. Its prologue is spoken by the prophet Jeremiah, paraphrasing both his eponymous book and Lamentations with direct reference to the Passion.

      Finally, the Cristo sepolto, ovvero il Sepolcro glorioso (Venice, 1644) of the Camillian Paolino Fiamma is a rappresentazione divotissima that uses the secondary characters of the Passion story (Joseph, Veronica) to tell the background; after four acts of Deposition events, the last one culminates in an actual Entombment by Joseph, Nicodemus, and John, preceded by a single lament of the Virgin, and ending with the evil Jewish character (not Pilate), the Pharisee Iadir, giving the command to post guards at the Sepulcher. In comparison to Morone’s wildly popular piece, it would be easy to dismiss this work, but it does contain the first display of a relic in the context of Italian Passion drama, Veronica’s Veil. It also makes mention of a theological term that would recur constantly in Minato’s texts, the Hypostatic Union of two natures in Christ.⁴³

      Such works come ultimately out of the medieval depositio tradition. In the sacred imaginary of the seventeenth century, the Tomb held symbolic equivalence with Christ’s cradle. Following the interpretation of the standard Catholic exegete of the period Cornelius a Lapide, along with some patristic opinion, the Somascan priest Giovanni Francesco Priuli in 1676 considered that Christ had come into the world not in a manger but in a gouged rock; he then made the parallel clear “[so that] the Savior, being born in order to die, was born in the rock, a symbol of the Tomb.”⁴⁴ That this should have come up in a Marian sermon also shows the centrality of devotion to the Virgin. It ultimately reflects Augustine’s equivalence (Tractate 120 on John 19) of her womb and the Tomb, both virgin repositories for His Body.⁴⁵

      The main difference between other Entombment drama and the Viennese repertory is that, in many sepolcri, Christ is presumed not only dead but buried already and thus inaccessible. In the first pieces of 1660–61, this is implied only by the unstated presence of the constructed Tomb behind the singers, but with Lepori’s Le Lagrime della Vergine, the 1662 Friday piece which begins with the Magdalen (not the Virgin, despite the title) weeping at the rock, it is made explicit. In that sense, the Sepulcher itself becomes a kind of silent character, invoked directly or indirectly. Lepori’s Magdalen enters by reworking the opening of the famed Franciscan preacher Francesco Panigarola’s Sermon 13 on the Passion, a text dedicated to Judas’s despair and the patience of God with sinners, thus neatly encapsulating both Christ buried and the availability of penance: “O rock, or rather o sky, who hides the Sun / Son from me.” Lepori (c. 1620–91) was likely to have used this source, since he himself was a renowned Conventual Franciscan orator; he also provided the libretto for P.A. Ziani’s Vienna oratorio L’Assalone punito.⁴⁶ Still, the passé nature of Panigarola’s sacred aesthetics to Seicento sensibilities might also explain the search for new or different librettists after 1662.⁴⁷

      The theatrical space of the Sepulcher functioned inside the sacrality of the royal chapels, as it would in any church. The various “pointing out” or imperative “turn to this stone” references to the Tomb in the libretti—a kind of lithic deixis—underscore its silent onstage presence. Although it works as a prop around which the guards sleep in Minato’s Sette consolationi (1670) and in Giberto Ferri’s text for La Pietà contrastata (1674), the Sepulcher otherwise remains untouched, except in two cases. In La Corona di spine (Minato, 1675), a trio of biblical mourners makes preparations to open the stone, until they are stopped by the arrival of the Three Magi. This is another in the librettist’s rewritings of Passion devotion, as there appears to be no source for this in Christian legend. At the beginning of the 1677 Le Cinque piaghe, Joseph and Nicodemus return to the Tomb to uncover and anoint Christ’s Body, re-cover Him with the Shroud, and then expose him again so that four other grievers—the Virgin, the Magdalen, and John plus Peter—can view Him. Their observation of the Five Wounds on His Body then inaugurates the basic conceit and title of the piece. However, this is the last time such an intrusion occurs in the repertory.

      Indeed, a distancing from direct reference to the Tomb later began to characterize Minato’s texts. In 1677, both pieces had a Sepulcher in the set design, in addition to the constructed one in the sanctuary. But there are no references in the two libretti of the following year, nor in the Prague works of 1680, the one new piece for 1682, and the two for 1683. In the 1680 Friday Il Vero sole fermato in croce, Giuseppe d’Arimathea mentions his upcoming—not past—work in the Deposition and burial (“Staccherò l’essangue pondo / Da quel tronco insanguinato//I will remove the bloodless Body from that bloody wood”), and the piece ends with his leaving to perform the Entombment, thus moving the entire piece back to a moment just after Christ’s death and away from the Sepulcher.

      The lack of direct references continued in 1684, in which the Friday piece was imagined on Calvary after the burial, as noted later (see chapter 4). Still, in 1685’s Il Prezzo, the set featured the garden of John 19:41 inside which the biblical tomb was placed, and this served to focus attention on the actual constructed Tomb in the sanctuary. Although again in 1691’s I Frutti dell’albero della Croce (the source for this book’s title), a Tomb was included in Burnacini’s set, the next sung reference to the Sepulcher was not until the next year. Although the libretti continued to be dramas of grief, their psychological trajectory moved toward salvational, epistemological, and allegorical considerations on Christ’s death, as opposed to outpourings of pain at the rock, signaling a new kind of interiority in the repertory. That “Church Ritual” itself would not only sing, but also open the entire piece, bespeaks a remarkable reflexivity in the court’s symbolic world.

      Thus the exegetical ramifications of the Sepulcher also played into the literary process. Lapide took the alternative translation of “rest” in Isaiah’s “Et erit sepulchrum” verse (“requies” in the earlier Vulgate instead of “sepulchrum”) as analogically meaning Christ’s Beatitude. He also noted the universal Catholic habit of honoring the Tomb on Holy Saturday (without mention of music). The 1660 “Sermon 48” of the Neapolitan Theatine Giuseppe Silos concerned the effects of the Sacrament on one of the Seven Works of Mercy, that of burying the dead. Although elsewhere in his lengthy sermon collection he had polemicized against Rupert of Deutz’s popular idea of the daily Eucharist as an ongoing “funeral of Christ,” here Silos turned to the example of the Magdalen having received an early taste of the Sacrament in the same way that she had anticipated anointing His dead Body while He was still alive, all this used as a model for ordinary Christian burial.⁴⁸

      Thus the labor of Christ’s exequies was linked to the Magdalen/penitent’s reception of the Eucharist, also connecting the ritual events of Holy Thursday and Good Friday, as well as to human interment. Lapide’s understanding of Isaiah referred to the glory of the Sepulcher, but also to its two mystical meanings: Christ’s living in the faithful’s souls, and Eucharistic splendor (the “burial” of the Host). The frequent placement of the consecrated wafer (“Il Santissimo”) in sepolcri stage sets reflects this, providing overlap with Forty Hours’ installations outside of Holy Week. The actual configuration of Christ’s Body in the royal chapels was complex: the physical figure inside the Tomb, but also His Real Presence in the Host inside a monstrance on the Reposition СКАЧАТЬ