I Medici e i Bourbon tra balletti, veglie e mascherate: migrazioni dello spettacolo di corte e riflessioni su un modello economico e culturale (1596-1608)

The theatrical and musical historiography tends to contrast the courtly spectacular offerings in Florence and Paris: on the one hand, the favored theatrical genre would have been melodrama and on the other the ballet de cour. The article aims to scale down this dichotomous view, emphasizing instead affinities, highlighting the linguistic and structural uniformity of the spectacles of the Medici and the Bourbons and its derivation from the same productive, economic and cultural model. The investigation focuses in particular on two performances, hitherto little known due to lack of documentation, such as Ottavio Rinuccini’s La mascherata di Stelle (1596), which saw Maria de’ Medici dance as the main star, and La notte d’Amore (1608), which contributed to the evolution of ‘ballroom dance’ into ‘theatrical ballet’, combining courtly choreographic practices with the new melodramatic style, and inaugurating the alternation in the use of stage and auditorium space, which became a hallmark of French, and eventually European, courtly spectacle, leading to the ultimate overlap of reality and theatrical illusion.