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Fruits of the Cross. Robert L. Kendrick
Читать онлайн.Название Fruits of the Cross
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isbn 9780520969872
Автор произведения Robert L. Kendrick
Издательство Ingram
After an analogously hermetic explanation by Tempo, the Stagioni appear to exemplify temporal change, and to enunciate the central conceit of the text: that the Hypostatic Union was parallel to eternity’s becoming subject to time. Tempo and Eternità then summarize this point, allowing the issue of “limits” to be raised via the introduction of Giorno and Notte, related to the Creation (Gen 1:14, “He divided the day from the night”). The first four characters to appear then retell Christ’s life and Passion in terms of temporal spans (e.g., the forty days in the desert). Here, however, the visual emblem of the sundial becomes important, as Ezechias’s canticle in Isaiah also features a refrain foretelling Good Friday: “de mane usque ad vesperam finies me//You finish me from morning until evening.” In the sepolcro, this is echoed by Tempo and Eternità’s references to Passion events that occurred by both day and night. Lapide’s commentary on Isaiah had taken this verse as only a meditation on the brevity and vanity of human life, without reference to Good Friday. Minato did not miss the occasion to connect temporality to the preceding day’s piece by having L’Estate sing the second stanza of a two-strophe aria, “and His thirst was so terrible, lasting so long that finally on the Cross He showed Himself thirsty” (sitibondo, the key word of La Sete’s conclusion).
In Minato’s careful construction of scenes, Il Giorno then sets up the entrance of the final trio of characters, Le Tre Ore di Tenebre, by lamenting his own abandonment of Christ that allowed darkness to come upon the earth. Their entrance toward the piece’s climax would have presaged the coming sunset on that 16 April, as sunset happened around 6:45 p.m. (in modern terms). The combination of each Hour of Darkness brings the Penitent to a culminating two-stanza aria of penance (“Mio Christo, perdono”), and the concluding coda, on the “reversed” idea of using earthly time to acquire eternal life, also retrogrades the order of appearance of the allegorical characters. Listeners had to make the meditative connection among the stage set (never explicitly invoked in the sepolcro’s text), the poetic conceits, and the musical experience.
These pieces raise the issue of audiences’ reception of allegorical figures, as they arise also in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s autos sacramentales.64 The role of such characters in Italy, coming out of the medieval rappresentatione tradition, is less known, and their specific employment by a dramatist of European renown like Minato will be investigated in chapter 2.65
ELEONORA’S VIEW: LA GARA DELLA MISERICORDIA E GIUSTITIA DI DIO (1661)
The totality of the messages for the 1683 Triduum also suggests that penance and Passion mourning were woven together in close (and not always obvious) ways in any given year. At the very beginning of the genre, the 1661 Thursday piece gives one view of Eleonora Gonzaga’s devotional world.66 She would have learned early how to use spectacle and music in the service of penance. Her mother (also a widow), Maria Gonzaga, had personally supervised the cultural and physical reconstruction of Mantua after the devastation of the 1629–31 War of the Succession, and in the 1640s, the duchess had set up a Sunday Eucharistic celebration in the ducal capital, officiated by the local Jesuits, with candles and the ducal musicians at the church of S. Stefano, entitled the “buonamorte.”67 In the devastated duchy, the young (and half-orphaned) Eleonora would have seen musical enactments of a Christian death. Still, there seems to be no tradition of Tombs, with or without music, in Mantua’s churches.68
There also survives evidence for her own piety, notably an incomplete manuscript, gathering daily prayers plus orations and occasional Offices for important sanctoral celebrations throughout the year (the fascicles containing feasts from January to May, and hence potentially Holy Week, are sadly missing).69 This Prattica di divotioni bears a manuscript colophon indicating its destination for the Varese printing house in Rome in 1659, the main publisher of both devotional and historical works by the Jesuits around midcentury. Although nominally written “di mano propria,” the neat hand looks nothing at all like Eleonora’s large script in her letters from the 1650s back home to Mantua. For whatever reason, it was evidently not printed until well after her death, as Prattica di divotioni quotidiane (Vienna and Trent, 1706), since there is no record of a Roman edition.70 The volume, both the print and manuscript versions, includes daily prayers of adoration, texts for each individual day of the week, invocations of Christ’s Five Wounds, addresses to Christ Crucified, “Ave Marias” based on the virtues of St. Joseph, Carlo Borromeo’s “Protesta a ben morire” (like her childhood experiences), and then texts for important (to Eleonora) feast days, including St. Anne, another model for widowed mothers of female children. The Five Wounds devotion would appear in the 1677 Le Cinque piaghe for her chapel, repeated in 1681. Eleonora’s sense of female piety was evident in the two different Viennese oratorios (possibly 1668, and 1683)—evidently the first in the Italian repertory on the topic—on the life of her patroness St. Helena, and her Prattica had also noted the presence of an “Eleonora” among the eleven thousand virgins martyred with St. Ursula.71
The extremely sensual devotion in the empress’s text for the feast of Mary’s birth (8 September) might have represented an obstacle to its actual publication around 1660; this outburst of corporeality on Baby Mary was a highly charged version of devotion to the Immaculate Conception. The opening of the whole book gives a sense of Eleonora’s own formulations, indebted not least to the tradition of Christian optimism: “All-powerful God, fountain of all good, Heaven has been enriched by Your Divine Majesty with so much beauty that it is hard to tell Your glory, for which purpose as many tongues would need to come forth as stars appear to us at night.” This text, along with the sepolcri, probably comes close to the empress’s own unmediated devotion.72
Devotional prints written by others and dedicated to her include Lenten manuals and reflections on other important saints. The Discalced Carmelite Emanuele di Gesù Maria inscribed his Fiori di Carmelo sparsi nelle festività de’ santi (Vienna, 1666) to the dowager empress, including sermons for Bl. Luigi Gonzaga (her relative) and St. Joseph given that same autumn at court. If these items show off the festive side of her devotion, penance and mortality are more evident in the work of the Modenese Jesuit preacher Giovanni Battista Manni (1606–82), who spent enough time in Vienna to write the rules of the Order of the Starry Cross that she had founded in 1662, and who dedicated the first part of his Lenten sermons to her in 1681. Manni also published a biography of the empress’s mother, Maria, and an emblem book on death, his Varii e veri ritratti della morte (Milan, 1671).
Yet Eleonora had even more direct models for how to mourn at Tombs. In his massive 1,031-page compendium of virtuous Christian widows, La reggia delle vedove sacre, dedicated to the empress in 1663 (and reprinted in 1682), the Paduan Dominican Girolamo Ercolani (c. 1620–68) recalled the piety of an earlier female Gonzaga who had gone to Austria, married a Habsburg, and then was left widowed at age twenty-eight, Anna Caterina (1566–1621). In her time as ruler in Innsbruck, Anna had had a new church of the Sepulcher built with seven chapels (the now-secularized Siebenkapellenkirche). During her widowhood spent as a Servite tertiary in the monastery that she had founded in 1614, according to Ercolani Anna had participated in the nuns’ reenactments of the Via Crucis, their forming a “living Cross,” and seeming “like so many Magdalens in their watch day and night, destroyed by sorrow, at the Tomb of God deceased.” Ercolani’s dedication of this tome forms part of Eleonora’s efforts to create a circle of virtuous and religious women in the world, something like a revival of the medieval bizzoche (roughly “secular tertiaries”) tradition, organized around both the “Starry Cross” and her all-female “Slaves of Virtue.”
For all her piety, the empress was also active in court politics.73 Clearly she played vital roles in the transition from her husband to her stepson, and even after the arrival of Margherita Teresa in 1666, largely taking the side of the Spanish party at court.74 She weighed in strongly on Leopold’s choices for his second and third wives in 1673 and 1676. Her