Detail, Isabella Andreini and The Commedia dell’Arte Company (oil on panel), by the French School, 16th century. ©Comedie Francaise, Paris, France/Archives Charmet/The Bridgeman Art Library.
A Renaissance superstar
by Laura Granfortuna
Cultural performance brings a forgotten actress back into focus.
Isabella Andreini was a Renaissance superstar.
She was a Commedia dell’Arte actress, poet, and dramatist who toured through Europe with her troupe during the late sixteenth century, gaining great popularity and admiration from peers and nobles alike. Despite her fame and her talents, scholars overlooked Andreini until the early 1990s.
It was then that Anne MacNeil began to unearth Andreini’s story. MacNeil says that although Andreini was the best at what she did, there are lots of other notable women from this time who have never been studied. That’s mainly because information about them is so hard to find, she says.
“If your focus as a music historian is on either manuscript or printed compositions, you’re not going to find very many women,” MacNeil says. “End of story.”
That’s partly because during the Renaissance, individuals, unlike institutions such as the church, rarely saved their personal documents. Women were treated as a part of their husbands’ households, making them even harder to track down. So MacNeil was forced to take a closer look at performance — she used that as the doorway to her research rather than relying so heavily on written works. This was an unusual approach at the time, but for MacNeil, a work of art such as music or poetry is not truly art until it is taken off the page and performed.
All people, she says, are drawn to cultural performances such as plays, dances, concerts, or even songs on the radio. We use them to commemorate events in our society, whether it’s the election of a president or a high school basketball game.
“We all perform culture all the time,” MacNeil says. “And figuring out what draws every human on the planet to performing their culture — that motivates me, that’s my driving force.”
MacNeil uses Andreini, a skilled performer both on and off the stage, as a kind of case study for examining cultural performance. Andreini had a quick wit and the ability to improvise, which helped her to succeed in any situation, MacNeil says, theatrical or social. She also wrote poetry in the male voice, enabling her to compete artistically with men. All of this contributed to her renown and helped her climb the social ranks.
“Andreini was extremely adept at self-fashioning, building a persona, and she used writing poetry in the masculine voice as part of that,” MacNeil says. “She knew that there was a difference, as there is for all of us, between the very depth of our inner being and what’s presented to the outside world, and everybody tends to modify that persona a little bit depending on context.”
MacNeil focuses primarily on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian women in the performing arts, and although she was virtually alone in this field when she began, others have since caught up with her.
Unsolved mysteries
MacNeil’s research has also led her to a couple unsolved Renaissance mysteries. Through her studies of the Andreini family, MacNeil ran across a strange practice of Renaissance elites — hiring performers to put on classical laments or tragedies at their weddings. No one really had an explanation for this, so MacNeil decided to investigate more deeply, trying to pin down the context of the tradition by looking at its performance.
She found that strong parallels existed, and still exist to some extent, between marriage and death ceremonies. During the Renaissance, both events involved rituals of bathing, hair-cutting, and enshrouding (or veiling). “Marriage was a passage from one kind of life to another, from one context to another, just like moving from the context of living and mortality to whatever is on the other side,” MacNeil says. She also discovered that the ritual performance of classical tragedies actually reinforced social structures. Young boys were required to memorize and recite classical laments in school because it taught them about social decorum — the appropriate way to act in different situations. For adults these rituals were also an expression of social boundaries and a reinforcement of social norms.
Another puzzle MacNeil tackled is a famous book of madrigals — secular songs written for two or more voice parts without accompaniment — by Claudio Monteverdi. The songs are written in two different clef systems for reasons no scholar could discern.
“The fact that no one’s been able to answer this question for decades indicates to me that the premises that we started with were wrong,” she says. “Somehow, getting wrapped up in the notation — even though notation is the question — was not allowing us to see the answer.”
When empirical comparisons of the clefs and characters revealed nothing, MacNeil tried reading the songs out loud. She then realized that one set of madrigals concerned lovers who were speaking to one another, while in the other the speaker was alone, unheard by the object of his desire.
“The solution came for me as I approached the text and the music and the book as a whole, as a performer,” she says. “Performance is everything.”
Laura Granfortuna is a senior majoring in journalism
and international studies at Carolina.
Anne MacNeil is an associate professor of music in the College of Arts and Sciences.
