Masquerade
Masques were in the Europe of the Renaissance and especially in the early Italian Renaissance a form of theatrical as well as initially popular entertainment.
history
Longobard tradition
The character mask developed among the Lombards around Venice from a cult of the dead , which used the mask (painted and unpainted) as part of the body bandage with laminated linen fabric for representation play as an image of the dead.
Soon a rather funny folk piece emerged from this, which re-embodied the dead in freely invented or re-enacted situations. The pale cloth face of the dead became a model for the Arlecchino and especially the later white fools. The spirits of the deceased (Lares - Larva) could obviously also be consulted with the Romans as well as in other cultures (for example Mexico) on certain holidays and personal memorial days and were not forgotten.
Roman tradition
In addition to this rather barbaric Lombard tradition, the activities of the Roman Saturnalia also play a role in the early mask games. There, and only on this day, the poor and the slaves were allowed to slip into the role of their masters, finally to eat gourmet food, to be served by the masters and to ape them in a funny game (wrong world) and possibly of course to speak your mind to your heart's content.
Baroque and Rococo
A conglomerate of these customs persisted through the Middle Ages in the masquerade of the folk showmen . The first forms of a funny dance of death as a preliminary form of the Bad Mittendorfer Armenspiel and Salzburger Jedermann date back to this time.
Especially in the late Renaissance, in the baroque and rococo periods , the gentlemen took a liking to this upside-down world again when playing burlesque, the stupid pranks of the masked showmen in the Commedia dell'arte . Courtly mask games, a mixture of costume ball and theater play, as well as the masques are pre-forms of the opera . The simple folk theater wandered with the showmen, reinforced by other "rabble" on the roll from village festival to village festival and earned its income in the taverns and in front of the manor houses rather by begging than by a fixed entry fee (winter customs). The larvae, which were originally made of fabric, have been preserved in amateur play, especially in Bergamo. Leather, like the masks of the Commedia dell'arte, was more likely to be found in the courtly theater south of the Alps. In the Alpine valleys, across the Ladin, to the Inn Valley and Switzerland , roughly hewn wood larvae prevailed. Only a few church painters and restorers from Venice and Northern Italy turned the wood-carved masks into fine-faced and thin-walled Baroque works of art.
Mask run
From the originally cultic fertility runs of the Dionysian mysteries , magnificent parades with magnificently masked and costumed figures and imaginative masquerades developed in Italy . As with the Krampus Run, which developed from the Thracian Mithras cult , the Roman soldiers also ensured that these redemption and fertility cults spread quickly across the entire Alpine region as far as the Danube. It was not until Constantine , who feared the danger of a revolt among the soldiers, stirred up by the military commanders (sometimes also heads of cults) and therefore declared Christianity as a more harmless variant of the state religion , that sanctuaries of both religions were built over with churches and the figures of salvation exchanged (Mithras-Apollo - Sol Invictus - Christ) and the ritual midsummer days with Christian names and birthdays overlaid. The bull god ( Krampus ), the ziegenbeinige Pan , the drunken Dionysus allowed on other days in the Ship of Fools (the Sun Chariot of a world turned upside down) before Lent a little unsettle or should remember long-forgotten cult through the fields running animals, humans and Bring fertility and salvation to nature. The historical mask procession at the Carnival in Venice , which ends on St. Mark's Square , is also famous today . The sacred procession arose from the masked procession and the masque unfolded in France and England .
literature
- Fulvio Roiter: Carnival. Mask games in Venice , Schroll, Vienna 1991, ISBN 3-7031-0669-7
- Felix Poppenberg: Mask trains , Reiss, Berlin 1912
