No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Early Modern Comedy and the Politics of Religion: Reconsidering Comedy in Rospigliosi's Il Sant'Alessio
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Abstract
Giulio Rospigliosi and Stefano Landi's 1634 revisions of Il Sant'Alessio for the Barberini stage expanded the role of comedy within the opera. These revisions reveal an important juncture in the history of religious comedy and lay the foundation for the development of a comic rubric for the still-developing operatic genre. This article examines the legend of St Alexis and its potential for historic reinterpretation in light of the Barberini family's religious and political goals. Its consideration of the interrelationship of religion and comedy in early modern sacred drama provides the theoretical context for an analysis of scenes in the 1634 version featuring the comic pages Martio and Curtio. Operating as a mitigating force between the extreme ideologies presented by the characters of Sant'Alessio and the Devil, the pages’ comedy promotes a more widespread acceptance of key religious ideals and becomes the driving force behind a significant political statement for post-Tridentine Rome.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © 2018 The Royal Musical Association
References
1 Stefano Landi, Il Sant'Alessio, Les Arts Florissants Orchestra and Choir and La Maîtrise de Caen Children's Choir, directed by William Christie, stage director Benjamin Lazar, recorded live at the Théâtre de Caen, 15 and 18 October 2007, Erato DVD 5189999 (2008).
2 This interpretation of Martio and Curtio lies in direct contrast with the images of young, noble pages that are found in the engravings accompanying the 1634 publication of Landi's score. Stefano Landi, Il Sant'Alessio: Dramma musicale (Rome: Paolo Masotti, 1634); facsimile edn, ed. Arnaldo Morelli (Bologna: Forni Editore, 1970).
3 In keeping with these late eighteenth-century models, contemporary scholarship on early operatic comedy has tended to classify comic archetypes and explore the musical and dramatic mechanisms by which laughter is evoked (such as stuttering, madness, general clowning, references to commedia dell'arte mask types and lazzi). The resulting gap between modern-day scholarship and seventeenth-century practice has been implicitly acknowledged by Ellen Rosand in her discussion of how seventeenth-century audiences considered Iro to be a comic character, despite the fact that he does not fit the established comic type. See her ‘Iro and the Interpretation of Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria’, Journal of Musicology, 7/2 (spring 1989), 141–64, esp. pp. 143–6.
4 Treatises such as Franciscus Robortellus's Explicatio eorum omnium quae ad comoediae artificium pertinent (Florence, 1548), Antonius Riccobonus's Poetica: Eiusdem Riccoboni Paraphrasis in Poeticam Aristotelis; eiusdem Ars comica ex Aristotele (Padua: Maietus, 1587) and Agostino Michele's Discorso di Agostini Michele: In cui contra l'opinione di tutti i più illustri scrittori dell'arte poetica chiaramente si dimostra; come si possono scrivere con molta lode le comedie, e le tragedie in prosa (Venice: G. B. Ciotti, 1592) reveal that knowledge of the classics had, by the end of the sixteenth century, spread throughout the cultural centres of Italy.
5 This seventeenth-century understanding of comedy and the ways in which it was manifested in early mixed-genre operas is the subject of my forthcoming book.
6 A letter of Lelio Guidiccioni, a poet in Pope Urban VIII's literary circle, praising Il Sant'Alessio has sparked some debate about whether or not an earlier, 1629 performance of Il Sant'Alessio occurred in Rome. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 2958, fol. 209. For the discussion of dating, see Elena Tamburini's ‘Per studio documentario delle forme sceniche: I teatri dei Barberini e gli interventi Berniniani’, Tragedia dell'onore nell'Europa barocca, ed. Maria Chiabò and Federico Doglio (Rome: Centro Studi sul Teatro Mediovale e Rinascimentale, 2002), 255–75, and Virginia Christy Lamothe, ‘The Theater of Piety: Sacred Operas for the Barberini Family (Rome, 1632–1643)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2009), 172 n. 6.
7 Corresponding passages can be found in Mark x. 29–30 and Luke xviii. 29–30. Scriptural quotation taken from The Holy Bible, Douay–Rheims Version (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1899), <http://drbo.org> (accessed 29 March 2017).
8 Seventeenth-century sources report that Urban described himself as a mediator between the Roman Catholic forces that dominated Europe during his pontificate. ‘Della vita di Papa Urbano VIII, scritta da Andrea Nicoletti, Canonico di San Lorenzo in Damaso’, Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barb. lat. 4730–4737. This view is reiterated in the published materials of the Venetian ambassadors to Urban's court in William Chandler Kirwin, Powers Matchless: The Pontificate of Urban VIII, the Baldachin, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), 36. For the diplomatic context of papal policy during the war, see Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages: Drawn from the Secret Archives of the Vatican and Other Original Sources, ed. Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, trans. Ernest Graf et al., 40 vols. (London: John Hodges; Kegan Paul, 1891–1953), xxviii–xxix (1938).
9 The pope's nuncio to Paris in 1627 ‘was instructed that the primary objective of the pope's religious policy must be “the conservation of the Catholic religion where it is, and its restitution and propagation where it is not”’. Letter from Cardinal Francesco Barberini to Nuncio Bagni in Auguste Leman's Recueil des instructions générales aux nonces ordinaires de France de 1624 à 1634 (Paris: Champion, 1920), 89, quoted in Frederick Hammond, Music and Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Barberini Patronage Under Urban VIII (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 21.
10 In connecting Rome to its pagan past, the Barberini were participating in an activity initiated by Nicholas V (1447–55). Such a link to antiquity was especially important in post-Tridentine Rome, as the duration of the church's establishment provided a sense of legitimacy that cast Catholicism in a positive light when compared with the more recent Protestant faiths.
11 A published poet with skill in Latin and Greek verse, Urban VIII was recognized among his peers as a most virtuous and learned man. The intellectual and social circle that he gathered about him in Rome reflected his diverse interests, bringing together men of the cloth, men of letters, scientists and a variety of musicians and artists.
12 Comic characters were not new in religious drama, but rather had been present as peripheral figures for the added entertainment of audiences for the Italian sacre rappresentazioni, the English mystery, miracle and morality plays, the mystères in France, the autos sacramentales and comedia de santos in Spain and Jesuit drama. See, for example, Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘The Search for a Dramatic Formula for the Auto Sacramental’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 65/6 (December 1950), 1196–1211; William H. McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater: A Posthumous Work, ed. Louis J. Oldani (St Louis, MI: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1983); and Thomas E. Case, ‘Understanding Lope de Vega's “Comedia de santos”’, Hispanófila, 125 (1999), 11–22.
13 Aristotelian eutrapelia was the virtue of pleasantness or playfulness through wit, associated with relaxation and enjoyment. Lying between the extremes of buffoonery and boorishness, eutrapelia required a kind of human temperateness or moderation. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Sarah Broadie and Christopher Rowe (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), IV, 8. Elsewhere, Aristotle associates eutrapelia with the young, who are ‘fond of fun and therefore witty, wit being well-bred insolence’ (Rhetorica, II.12.1389b 10–11). This interpretation of youth and wit is of particular interest for Il Sant'Alessio, as Rospigliosi's young pages embody Aristotle's definitions of youth and wit in their comic verbal exchanges with Sant'Alessio and the Devil. See Aristotle, Rhetorica, II.12.1389a–b, ed. and trans. Richard McKeon, The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), 1404–5.
14 Notably, these attributes are among those offered by Aristotle as he describes youth and youthfulness in Rhetorica. Aristotle further explains that, if youths do wrong to others, it is because they mean to insult them, not to do them actual harm. Such an interpretation applies to Martio and Curtio. Aristotle, Rhetorica, II.12.1389a–b.
15 The prefatory letters contained in the printed 1634 score note that ‘L'opera mi parve in ogni parte perfetta: la struttura, e la Compositione, che Aristotele chiama favola, ben'unita, non episodica, breve, e non vagante: il costume tanto aggiustato, che non vi fù chi non havesse quello, che se gli confaceva: la sentenza proportionata al costume, arguta, grave, inaspettata, secondo il bisogno, e conforme al decoro. L'elocutione di prattica, non affettata, non vile; mà ò grande, ò mezana, ò infima, come la richiedeva il soggetto, ò la persona, che favellava’ (‘The work seemed to me in every part perfect: the structure and the composition, which Aristotle calls fable, well united, not episodic, short and not wandering: the costume so well altered, that there was not one who did not have that which suited him: the sentence appropriate to the costume, witty, serious, unexpected, according to the need, and in keeping with the decorum. The elocution [is] well articulated, not affected, not vile; but either grand or moderate or low, as the subject requires or the person favours’). Translations throughout this article are my own unless otherwise stated. See Landi, Il Sant'Alessio: Dramma musicale, ed. Morelli. Morelli has elsewhere attributed this anonymous letter to the Jesuit Tarquinio Galluzzi: ‘“Alexius Romanorum nobilissimus” dagli altari alle scene: Il Sant'Alessio di Rospigliosi/Landi: Contesto, drammaturgia e recezione di una “historia sacra”’, Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée modernes et contemporaines, 124/2 (2012), <http://mefrim.revues.org/944> (accessed 1 April 2016), ¶ 14.
16 St Thomas Aquinas's discussion of eutrapelia resonates with the type of witty wordplay evidenced in Rospigliosi's comic scenes. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2a2ae.72.2, trans. Marcus Lefébure O. P. in Aquinas, Summa theologiae, xxxviii: Injustice (2a2ae.63–79) (New York: Blackfriars in conjunction with McGraw-Hill, 1972). St Augustine similarly explores eutrapelia in his De musica, ii.15.
17 In his Compendio della poesia tragicomica, Giovanni Battista Guarini defines tragicomedy: ‘Se sarà domandato che fine è quello della poesia tragicomica, dirò ch'egli sia d'imitare con apparato scenica un'azione finta e mista di tutte quelle parti tragiche e comiche, che verisimilmente e con decoro possano stare insieme, corrette sotto una sola forma drammatica, per fine di purgar con diletto la mestizia degli ascoltanti’ (‘If asked what is the aim of tragicomic poetry, I will say that it is to imitate with theatrical means a feigned and mixed action of all those tragic and comic parts that with verisimilitude and decorum are able to stay together, corrected under a single dramatic form, in order to purge with delight the sadness of the listeners’). Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica, tratto dei duo verati (Venice: G. B. Ciotti, 1601), 26.
18 The fifth-century Byzantine legend of St Alexis first appeared in the West in a ninth-century Greek canon of works by Josephus the Hymnographer. Upon its arrival in Rome in the tenth century, it was employed by the Benedictines as a means of promoting Christianity and evangelizing territories in eastern Europe. During the Middle Ages, their expanded, ‘Romanized’ form of Alexis's life spread throughout Western Christendom, becoming the basis for sacred plays and epic poems in various vernacular translations. On the amplification and spread of the legend of St Alexis, see Rodolfo Renier, ‘Qualche nota sulla diffusione dell Leggenda di Sant'Alessio in Italia’, Raccolta di studii critici dedicata ad Alessandro d'Ancona festeggiandosi il XL anniversario del suo insegnamento (Florence: Giovanni Barbèra, 1901), 1–12; and Carl J. Odenkirchen, The Life of St Alexius in the Old French Version of the Hildesheim Manuscript (Brookline, MA, and Leyden: Classical Folia Editions, 1978).
19 According to legend, St John Calabite (d. 450 AD) was born to a noble family in Rome. When his parents welcomed a monk from the East into their house as a guest, the young man was so impressed that he was persuaded to adopt the life of a monk and enter the monastery. One day, a heavenly voice adjured the young man to receive his parents’ blessing before his death, so he returned to Rome dressed in a monk's garb and presented himself to his parents, who did not recognize him. He was given a little hut not far from their house, where he led an austere and humble life. Only as death approached did he reveal himself to his father and mother. Jean Marie Meunier, La vie de Saint Alexis: Poème français du XIe siècle: Texte du manuscript de Hildesheim, traduction littérale, étude grammaticale, glossaire (Paris: E. Droz, 1933), 1029. A fifth-century Syrian text composed sometime between AD 450 and 475 similarly recounts the life of a man with a great reputation for piety who until his death lived as a beggar in Edessa and was later recognized as a man of God and venerated as a saint. Johann Peter Kirsch, ‘Alexius’, The Catholic Encyclopedia: An International Work of Reference on the Constitution, Doctrine, Discipline and History of the Catholic Church, ed. Charles George Herbermann et al., 18 vols. (New York: Robert Appleton, 1907–58), i, 307–8.
20 The version of the story recounted above is derived from Joannes Pinius, ‘De Sancto Alexio confessore’, Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur vel a catholicis scriptoribus celebrantur, ed. Johannes Bolland et al., 67 vols. (Antwerp, etc., 1643–), xxxi (July, part 4) (Antwerp, 1725), 262–70, and can be found in Wendelin Foerster and Eduard Koschwitz, Altfranzösisches Übungsbuch: Zum Gebrauch bei Vorlesungen und Seminarübungen, 6th edn (Leipzig: Reisland, 1921), 300–8. Foerster and Koschwitz's text is translated into English by Carl J. Odenkirchen and printed alongside the Latin original in The Life of Saint Alexius in the Old French Version, 34–51.
21 Osborne Bennett Hardison, Jr, draws interesting parallels between Christian dramas and Greek tragedy that are of relevance both to the vita of St Alexis and to the version of the saint's life told in Il Sant'Alessio. See his ‘A Note on the Continuity of Ritual Form in European Drama’, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1965), 284–92.
22 Karl D. Uitti has noted that, like other saints’ ‘legends’, that of St Alexis ‘may be best understood as a mythic construct involving “accurate” or “inaccurate” historical data […] made conformable to the mythic paradigm of Christian saintliness as well as to the interpretative understanding of the communities for which the myths were “adapted.” […] Fidelity to the literal tradition exists in tension with the desire to interpret and amplify that tradition.’ See Uitti, ‘The Old French “Vie de Saint Alexis”: Paradigm, Legend, Meaning’, Romance Philology, 20/3 (February 1967), 263–95 (p. 270).
23 Alexis's seventeenth-century designation as the ‘Confessor of Roman Patricians’ is somewhat suspect in that the hardships that he endured were of his own making. His renunciation of worldly goods, however, places him within the realm of the hermit, a distinctive figure within the ecclesiastical hierarchy whose withdrawal from the world and chosen life of solitude was viewed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a means of achieving the highest virtue afforded to man. For more on Catholic confessors and hermits, see Robert R. Morrison, Lope de Vega and the Comedia de Santos, Ibérica, 33 (New York: Peter Lang, 2000), 12.
24 The legend of St Alexis, in all of its versions, provides a complete life story; each successive version of the narrative presents the ‘true’ story of St Alexis, existing as a putative correction to the previous imperfections. See Stephen G. Nichols, Jr, ‘The Interaction of Life and Literature in the Peregrinationes ad loca sancta and the chanson de geste’, Speculum, 44 (1969), 51–77.
25 Patrick Geary discusses conscious propaganda within the ‘life of the saints’ genre in his ‘Saints, Scholars, and Society: The Elusive Goal’, Saints: Studies in Hagiography, ed. Sandro Sticca, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 141 (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies SUNY Binghamton, 1996), 1–22.
26 As the secretary of the Congregation of Rites, Rospigliosi would have been well versed in the rich history of the St Alexis legend, authors’ proclivity for adapting the legend over time and the narrative's potential for serving the political and religious needs of the papacy. Moreover, he would have been aware of the current allure that St Alexis held in Rome, where the saint was recommended for special honours throughout the 1630s and early 1640s. See Laurie Nussberger, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 72, 174.
27 The 1631 carnival performances may have been cancelled owing to the northward spread of the plague through Rome. See Giacinto Gigli, Diario di Roma, ed. Manlio Barberito, 2 vols. (Rome: Carlo Colombo, 1994), i: 1608–1644, 205. Margaret Murata suggests that several private entertainments of the nobility were held in 1631 despite the plague and proposes that a performance of Il Sant'Alessio occurred at the Palazzo ai Giubbonari as one such private entertainment. Murata, Operas for the Papal Court: 1631–1668 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1981), 19, 222.
28 As a distinguished man of letters, a doctor of philosophy and a Jesuit-trained cleric who served as a papal legate in Madrid in 1626, Rospigliosi would have been familiar with each of these theatrical traditions.
29 While there is no surviving score or published libretto for the 1632 version of Il Sant'Alessio, there is an extant argomento, as well as two manuscripts containing early versions of the libretto that were copied well after the fact. See Murata, Operas for the Papal Court, 441–2.
30 See Jean-Jacques Bouchard's description of the second 1632 performance of Il Sant'Alessio, found in his Un parisien à Rome et à Naples en 1632: D'après un manuscript inédit, ed. Lucien Marchiex (Paris: E. Leroux, 1897), 5–11, quoted in Hammond, Music and Spectacle, 132.
31 The Roman avviso (public communication or notice) of 18 February 1634 described Il Sant'Alessio as ‘cosa bellissima cosi per l'interlocutori che ciascuno fece eccellentemente la parte sua, come per la vaghezza degli habiti, e diversita dell'apparenza delle scene, et intermedij’ (‘a most beautiful thing for the performers, each of whom did his part excellently, as [also] for the beauty of the costumes and the diversity of appearance of the scenes and intermedi’). Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, I-Rvat Ottob. lat. 3339, pt 4: Avvisi di Roma, 18 February 1634, fol. 427.
32 Frederick Hammond interprets the allusions made by the allegory of Rome in the revised prologue as references to papal politics during the Thirty Years War. See Hammond, ‘The Artistic Patronage of the Barberini and the Galileo Affair’, Music and Science in the Age of Galileo, ed. Victor Coelho (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer, 1992), 67–90.
33 The classification storia sacra appears under the last stave of music at the bottom right side of the first two fascicles of the 1634 published score, a fact previously noted in Paolo Fabbri, Il secolo cantante per una storia del libretto d'opera nel Seicento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990), 49–50, and in Morelli, ‘“Alexius Romanorum nobilissimus”’, ¶ 14.
34 Based upon human characteristics that were superficially hidden behind ‘masks’ of regionalized stereotypes culled from all levels of society, commedia dell'arte characters toyed with the weaknesses and foibles of humanity while scrutinizing current events, public personages and social customs, thereby engaging its audiences on both a raw physical and an intellectual level. On the history and tradition of the commedia dell'arte, see Roberto Tessari, La commedia dell'arte nel Seicento: ‘Industria’ e ‘arte giocosa’ della civilità barocca (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1969; repr. 1980), and his Commedia dell'arte: La maschera e l'ombra (Milan: Gruppo Ugo Mursia, 1981). McCabe explains how Jesuit drama often intermingled gymnastics, dances, songs and pure comedy (all elements common to the commedia dell'arte tradition) with the main plot for the sake of fun and relief, but also with didactic intent. McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater, Chapter 3 (‘The Purpose of the Jesuit Theater’, pp. 19–31).
35 The third scene featuring the pages takes place at the end of Act 1 and functions as a pastoral intermedio in which Curtio arranges a peasant dance to divert the saint.
36 The connection of comedy and Catholicism has been explored by religious theorists and theatre historians alike. See, for example, Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); M. Conrad Hyers, The Comic Vision and the Christian Faith: A Celebration of Life and Laughter (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981); Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, Carnival Comedy and Sacred Play: The Renaissance Dramas of Giovan Maria Cecchi (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986); and John Morreall, Comedy, Tragedy, and Religion (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999).
37 Nathan Scott, Jr, elaborates on the nature of the comic man in his ‘The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith’, Holy Laughter: Essays in the Comic Perspective, ed. M. Conrad Hyers (New York: Seabury Press, 1969), 45–74 (pp. 49–50).
38 Such a function of comedy was by no means unique to Rospigliosi. In his writings on comedy and tragedy dating from the fourth century AD, Donatus quoted Cicero's definition of comedy as ‘an imitation of life, mirror of manners, [and] image of truth’. Today, Cicero's definition of comedy survives only in the extant fragment of Donatus's treatise De comoedia et tragoedia. Konrat Ziegler speculates that Cicero may have introduced his definition in a non-extant portion of his De republica. See Marcus Tullius Cicero, De republica, ed. Konrat Ziegler, M. Tulli Ciceronis scripta quae manserunt omnia, 39 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1960), 4.13.
39 Giovanni Battista Doni (1598–1647) was an active participant in the Barberini circle and wrote several treatises addressing music theory and compositional practices in music drama while in the employment of Cardinal Francesco Barberini. Doni's Trattato della musica scenica (1633–5, rev. c.1635–40) includes what may have been his first attempt to clarify the existing terminology pertaining to the stile rappresentativo. Far more successful was the identification in his Annotazioni sopra il compendio de’ generi e de’ modi della musica (Rome: Andrea Fei, 1640) of the ‘narrativo’, ‘recitativo speciale’ and ‘espressivo’ subgenres of the ‘stile detto recitativo’.
40 ‘Nell'Espressiva dunque si fa professione di bene esprimere gli affetti; & in qualche parte quegl'accenti naturali del parlare patetico; e questa è quella ch’ hà grandissima forza ne gl'animi humani: a segno che, quando è accompagnata d'una vivace attione, e d'un parlare proportionato al soggetto, maravigliosamente commuove il riso, il pianto, lo sdegno, &c. Qui hanno luogo sopra tutto quelle mutationi di Tuoni, di Genere, e di Ritmo, che sono le maggiori ricchezze, e sfoggi della Musica’ (‘In the “expressive” kind, then, one makes a profession of expressing the affects well; and, in some way also those natural accents of pathetic speeches; and this is what has the greatest power in human souls: to the extent that when it is accompanied by a lively action and by a speech fitting to the subject, it marvellously moves [the listener] to laughter, weeping, anger, etc. Here above all is where those mutations of mode, genera and rhythm that are the greatest riches and displays of music take place’). Doni, Annotazioni sopra il compendio de’ generi e de’ modi della musica, 61–2.
41 ‘L'azzione e la maniera de'recitanti, leggiadra, convenevole, e sì corrispondente alli sensi delle parole, che anche i gesti, e le movenze parevano armoniosi, e consonanti, come le voci’ (‘The action and the manner of reciting, lovely, pleasing, and so corresponding to the sense of the words, that even the gestures, and the movements appear harmonious, and consonant, like the voices’). See Landi, Il Sant'Alessio: Dramma musicale, ed. Morelli.
42 The G (major) opening of ‘Poca voglia di far bene’ segues naturally out of the G (major) closing ritornello to Sant'Alessio's prayer. Standing in marked contrast to the triple metre of the saint's prayer, the ritornello that closes ‘Se l'hore volano’ is in duple metre and contains an unusual half-bar lead-in at its close, pragmatically allowing for the pages’ song.
43 In this manner, their musico-dramatic portrayal is reminiscent of the juvenile characters of Jesuit drama and the zanni figures of the commedia dell'arte tradition.
44 Representations of worldliness were not reserved for Martio and Curtio. Many of the other characters who interact with Sant'Alessio similarly highlight the strengths and weaknesses of humanity and worldly living. Whereas the pages cannot understand Sant'Alessio's message owing to their juvenile focus on sustenance and play rather than spirituality, Sant'Alessio's family members are blinded by worldly pressures of family, dynasty and earthly love that prevent them from recognizing his sanctity.
45 Paolo Fabbri and Robert Kendrick have noted that such variety in execution and rhetorical style, dependent on the character type and class, is a characteristic of sacred operas. See Fabbri, Il secolo cantante, 49–50, and Kendrick, ‘What's So Sacred about “Sacred” Opera? Reflections on the Fate of a (Sub)genre’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, 9/1 (2003), <https://sscm-jscm.org/v9/no1/kendrick.html>.
46 The stage directions printed in the 1634 score for Act 2, scene viii draw a direct comparison between this scene and the earlier one in which Martio mocked Sant'Alessio, thereby making explicit the connection between these two scenes.
47 There are several parallels of plot within these two scenes: the Devil's ‘hermit’ disguise is thought credible by his intended victim, his words are taken in a literal sense and the falsehoods that he tells are believed. The two scenes differ in the fact that Sant'Alessio is saved from his mistake by the appearance of a heavenly Angel (a suitable outcome for such a God-fearing character), whereas Martio is left to defend himself, but to no avail. To explore these points in greater detail, compare the scene between Martio and the Devil with that of Sant'Alessio's temptation in Il Sant'Alessio, Act 2, scene vi.
48 There is something quite comic in the Devil's decision to trade his human disguise for that of a bear. In some respects, the Devil's transformation into a bear at the end of the scene is representative of his association with the darker aspects of humanity – the sins of the flesh that can lead to bestiality and, ultimately, to a rejection of the divine state represented by heaven.
49 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 122–3.
50 Murata, Operas for the Papal Court, 1–2.
51 On the Galileo affair, see Hammond, ‘The Artistic Patronage of the Barberini and the Galileo Affair’.