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Himself is never—until the 1708 La Passione nell’orto and the 1709 Gesù flagellato—a character, for all the Christological content of the pieces.50 The Resurrection is not even mentioned until the 1706 La Morte vinta sul Calvario. All these late libretti, closer to contemporary Passion oratorios than to local tradition, by Bernardoni testify to a changing piety in the new century, less focused on the Tomb as object and the events immediately surrounding the Entombment.51

      THE VISUALIZATION OF MEDITATION

      To the degree that the pieces presented both sound and spectacle, they participated in the century’s ideas of aural and visual theology. One popular Italian model for the internalization of Passion events was Bartolomeo de’ Cambi’s (or da Saluzzo’s) Vita dell’anima desiderosa di cavar frutto grande dalla santissima Passione di Giesù Christo (Venice and Rome, 1614), a mixture of poetic narration of the Passion in ottava rima together with meditations on each of these canti. Two copies survive in Vienna, including the 1614 Roman edition with illustrations for each canto, dedicated to Cardinal (later Duke) Ferdinando Gonzaga of Mantua with a testimonial from the Oratorian Agostino Manni, the latter the librettist for Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di anima, e di corpo. Cambi’s verses describe every action of the Passion in detail, while the prose meditations are spoken in the voice of the devout soul. The entire project was meant to furnish a series of mental images and then appropriate reflections on Christ’s sufferings.52 As is the case for much Seicento devotional literature, the narrative source is sometimes pseudo-Bonaventure’s Meditationes vitae Christi.

      In Canti 28 and 29, Cambi’s account came to the Deposition and to the Tomb, having already introduced Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus together with two laments of Mary and the Magdalen on Calvary in Canto 27 (these roughly correspond to chapters 80 and 81 in the Meditationes: first the Entombment, Lamentation at the Tomb, and the disciples’ return to Jerusalem, followed by the song of the patriarchs during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell).53 After praising the Gospel figures, Cambi’s meditations then turned lithic: “Could I only be entombed with my Jesus in that holy and blessed Sepulcher, never to emerge again during my life. O Tomb, o most sacred Tomb, o holy Ark, you were worthy to receive that most valuable joy within you.” Cambi referred to the Hypostatic Union and then, in a move also found in pseudo-Bonaventure but more recently in Giambattista Marino’s Dicerie sacre, took Paul’s metaphor that “the rock was Christ” as a pivot to consider the Tomb’s clefts as the wound in Christ’s side in which the meditative believer was to dwell. The idea of Mary burying herself both in the Tomb and in the “sepolcro” of the Divine Will came up in the Dominican Ignazio del Nente’s meditations Solitudini di sacri e pietosi affetti (Florence, 1643) at the moment of the imagined final closing of the Tomb. As noted later in this study, it would recur strikingly in the repertory of the later 1690s.

      Following his medieval sources, Cambi’s imaginative path then retraced the steps of Mary, the Magdalen, Martha, John, Joseph, and Nicodemus back into Jerusalem from the Tomb, portraying the Madonna’s grief in vocabulary taken from Lamentations. According to some traditions, John persuaded Mary to return to the Cenacle where the Last Supper had taken place, inside which Cambi had his characters continue to lament. For the 1689 L’Esclamar a gran voce, Burnacini would fashion a set design of the Supper’s space as imagined after the Passion, and this piece opens with Mary’s grief, surrounded by the Magdalen, Veronica, and John. Minato justified this staging with references not to Cambi but to the authority of Nicephorus Kallistos’s Ecclesiastical History (whose unique manuscript was in the imperial collections) and to the so-called Christus patiens, a cento of ancient Greek dramatic verse reworked during late antiquity into a Passion narration and sometimes attributed to Gregory of Nazianzus.

      Cambi’s meditations in Canto 29 concentrated on Mary’s sorrow but also included the Christian soul’s addresses to the Magdalen and the other mourners, as it asked to join in their grief. The engravings that precede each canto in the 1614 Rome edition are also suggestive: that for Canto 28 represented both the Deposition with Mary and the other mourners as well as the Entombment in the background with Joseph and Nicodemus, on two visual planes. The following canto depicted Jerusalem in the background, Calvary in the middle ground, and no fewer than six women plus John returning from the Tomb in the foreground. Thus the very presence of a Tomb “onstage” with differing visual realms set up a series of meditative associations, and it was the task of the set designs to create emblematic meaning to be deduced while the sometimes complex theology of the texts was being sung. In that sense, the demands on sepolcri audiences, even a theologically and musically trained royal such as Leopold, were high.

      As if to echo Cambi’s epistemological divisions, or perhaps to explain them to a new generation for whom they were losing validity, Minato’s preface to one of his last texts, the 1696 La Passione di Christo, oggetto di meraviglia, returned to these categories: “For if marvel abstracts the mind from other objects, the marvels of Christ’s Passion can divert [it] from the errors in my pages…. the contemplation of Christ’s Passion causes pain in memory; illuminates the intellect; purifies the will; creates jubilation in the angels; amazement in humans; and terror in Hell. Thus it is indeed an object of marvel.”

      In this remarkable work, all the characters are allegorical, and three of them derive from Cambi’s explication: Contemplation is flanked by Memory, Intellect, and Will, and the “audience” for the contemplative subject consists of a different trio: the allegorical Angels’ Jubilation, Human Stupor, and Hell’s Terror. Burnacini’s drawing for the upper part of the set—Moses and the Burning Bush—also survives (Vienna, Theatermuseum, Min. 29/29b1; figure 5). Along with the 1691 I Frutti, this is one of Minato’s pieces on the process of meditation, and as such is discussed later. Unfortunately, the scores for both these sepolcri went missing after Draghi’s death on 16 January 1700, or perhaps they were simply considered too anachronistic for a new century’s devotional taste and thus not preserved.

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      THE EMBLEMATICS OF STAGING

      The loss of La Passione’s score is all the more regrettable since Minato asked for three separate orchestras, each on a discrete set level, to play different music in the opening sinfonia simultaneously.54 This is one of the correspondences among poetic conceit, Burnacini’s multiplane designs, and music, and it seems to have been generated by the threefold divisions of subject and audience in the piece; perhaps it was the first “marvel” to be heard musically in the work. Throughout the piece, sinfonias celestial and infernal function as sonic markers of characters on various planes (Heaven, earth, Hell).

      Differentiating Burnacini’s drawings among sepolcri and other projects for operas, Forty Hours’ expositions, and even capricci (fantasies) is not easy. A clear case can be made for eight of the drawings (now in the Österreichisches Theatermuseum; see appendix 3) to represent sepolcri sets. To these should be added Minato’s ekphrastic descriptions at the beginning of some fifteen libretti. Most important for the technical and intellectual complexity of the design are the number of representational planes—one, two, or three—in the conceptions. The former concept is analogous to, but different from, Benjamin’s consideration of “vertical” and “horizontal” planes in tragedy, which in the case of drawings he considered to interfere with the representations of the celestial.

      Burnacini’s surviving wash drawings are sometimes hard to correlate with Minato’s set descriptions, and they seem to date from the later repertory. They were designs, subject to modifications, and not finished constructions. Some of their gestures, as recent research has shown, are taken from emblem books available in the court library, notably Melchior Küsel’s Icones biblicae (Augsburg, 1679), an illustrated Bible synopsis from the primary illustrator of the time and a figure with links to the Habsburgs.55 In addition—and unlike the opera sets—they remained visible throughout the

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