Ballets and Masques of the Nations: Translating and Staging the Four Corners of the World

This essay provides an excursus of the research carried on at the William Andrews Memorial Clark Library in 2018-19 within the project “Making Worlds - Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization”. By exploring how lands and peoples outside of Europe were visually portrayed in allegorical performances set in European courtly environments in the 17th century, the project delves into the sub specie spectaculi transposition of cross-cultural contacts and racial conceptions. Both the visual (e.g. preparatory drawings, illustrations in commemorative volumes) and textual aspects of the most paradigmatic examples of these ‘spectacle of strangeness’ - or Ballet des Nations, as the genre is also defined by scholars - are examined. In particular, the ballet Il Tabacco (Turin 1650) offers a fertile critical instance to investigate the integration/translation of motifs enabled by cross-cultural influences as manifested in the costumes, ornaments and actors’ bodily movements; to consider the circulation of main elements across media; to highlight the ideological premises and consequences of these events, occasions that presented a staged translation of political current context of the time.