An Archive within an Archive or, Archive as Repertoire

Diana Taylor defines the archival “as documents, maps, literary texts [...] all those items supposedly resistant to change” (19), and the repertoire as “[enacting] embodied memory [...] all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge” (19-20). The archive is marked by human intervention; the decisions about what is preserved circumscribe the finder’s agency and their means “to find out” (20). In turn, the “being there” of repertoire animates and amplifies this archival non-neutrality. But, some performance artifacts seem to resist this compartmentalization, functioning as a singularity of archive and repertoire and in doing so, cease to be “well-behaved.” This essay will examine the “unruliness” of Baccio Cecchi’s Descrizione dell’ apparato e de gli’intermedi fatti per la storia dell’ Esaltazione della Croce (1592) as it oscillates between archive and repertoire. Ostensibly a description of a temporary theatre and the intermedi performed between the acts of Giovanmaria Cecchi’s L’esaltazione della Croce during the 1589 wedding of Ferdinand de’ Medici and Christine of Lorraine, the descrizione expresses what is meant to be evoked by that space, and what knowledge—religious, political, and symbolic—is transmitted in the course of the performance. As a record of Baccio Cecchi’s presence and experience, and in its reliance on a specific place and moment of the performance, this essay willdemostrate how the document functions as both archive and repertoire. The tension between the necessary witnessing of the repertoire and the optional engagement of the archive constitutes the disruptive centre of Baccio’s descrizione .