Capitani da commedia nell’iconografia teatrale tra Cinque e Settecento

The study analyses the figure of the capitano from Commedia dell’arte in early modern theatrical iconography. Although, as the scholar warns, the iconographic representation of this character is markedly inferior to that of other famous masks, the hundred or so surviving images help delineate the theatrical development of this figure over time. It gradually asserts and ennobles itself as the seventeenth century progresses, only to acquire, in the following century, a grotesque image or, conversely, one banalised through the figure of a bland swordsman. To this end, the autor considers several significant examples: the cycle of paintings executed by Alessandro Scalzi, ‘il Padovano’, and Antonio Ponzano in Trausnitz Castle, datable to 1568; the portrait of the celebrated actor Francesco Andreini – author of Le bravure del Capitano Spavento – which the painter Bernardino Poccetti included in a fresco from the early seventeenth century preserved in the cloister of the convent of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence; Jacques Callot’s etchings of the Balli di Sfessania, published in Nancy in the early 1620s; the twelve German engravings contained in the volume Amor, vehementer quidem flagrans; artificiose tamen celatus, de Pantalonis custodiaque triumphans, printed in 1729; and, in the same year, the seventeen engravings included in the second edition of Luigi Riccoboni’s Histoire du Théâtre Italien.