Eloquent Action: the Body and Meaning in Early Commedia Dell'arte

ion should not surprise us: to the contrary, as Castagno points out, portraiture as well as religious and allegorical painting during the period reflected the “hegemony of typification over individuation” (Early Commedia dell’Arte, 165); and Katritzky reminds us that “a sixteenth-century artist is rarely or never concerned with presenting an accurate ‘snapshot’ of a particular performance” (“Recueil Fossard 1928–88,” 108). As Castagno has observed, the great majority of formal research on these images has tended to focus not only on “classification rather than context” but on documentary rather than interpretive questions (Early Commedia dell’Arte,