Theatrum Mundi

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Art Bulletin. IS difficult to find two elements in the Western tradition further apart in function and implication than the Christian idea of heaven and the Roman amphitheater---one a place of spiritual perfection, the other of mass passion and cruelty. It is also difficult to find two that are closer to each other in form. All that distinguishes the interior of amphitheaters--the vastness of their plan, their circularity, their regular layout, the horizontal rows of seats so superimposed as to suggest a hierarchy of rank--recurs in the image that Christianity formed of the habitations of the Blessed. When the circularity of the heavens is fully realized, as it is in Botticini's picture of Paradise (Fig. I), the result is the likeness of an amphitheater, even though its inhabitants sit on thin strips of clouds rather than on marble seats.It was inevitable that a resemblance as close as this should have been observed during the Renaissance and that attempts should have been made to draw its components into a near identity. But how was it to be done? Was one to represent the upper world in the image of its architectural simile? If so, one had to overlook the fact that the theater was a heavy material structure, whereas the heavens were transparent and ethereal. Or was one to start from existing theatrical buildings, investing their auditoria with celestial implications? One had then to be prepared to think of the human spectators in them, with all their frailties, as if they were angels incarnate. Unless the path was prepared by corresponding doctrines about the nature of theatrical audiences, this solution was not feasible. It is not astonishing then that the person who seems to have been the first during the Renaissance to use the theater as an image of heaven should have done so without suggesting either of the two proposed forms of identity. His theater was a symbolic tool, a means of cognition, and as such without living spectators, while it also made no claim of complete identity with the celestial world.Its inventor, the writer Giulio Camillo, needs to be introduced to modern readers, for the prestige which made him one of the best known figures of his day has not lasted into recent times.' Contemporaries praised him as "more divine than human,"' and they were convinced that "his mind had risen to such height as cannot be attained by man's unaided strength." They wondered, how "one author could ever have the fertility of mind required for the work,"' he had set out to do. While such praise cannot satisfy critical demands, it is true that he was a scholar of universal scope, who...

Amfitiyatro, Gösteri ve İktidar Oyunları

“…Sahneye en uzak bulunanlar, devlet için en önemsiz ve en güçsüz vatandaşlar olacaktır. Burada ilâhi bir mahkeme değil, merkezdeki dünyevi bir güce tapınma ritüeli söz konusudur (Bernheimer, 1956;Egginton, 2003, s. 33-67).…”