Serious Play: The Academies of Renaissance Italy

Ready to take your next journey of Discovery? The Renaissance: Journeys of Discovery at BRLSI is a yearlong programme of talks and events exploring the many joys, discoveries and something of the broader cultural legacy of a movement still making waves in the 21^st century.  Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Martin Luther, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Hieronymus Bosch, if you love culture then you’ll love our new talks series!

But what of academies? What were academies for and what was their attraction for members?

The classical ideal of the Academy was self-consciously revived in mid-fifteenth-century Italy and became one of the most characteristic Renaissance institutions. By 1700 over a thousand had been formed across the peninsula and beyond. These consisted mostly of male elites and intellectuals, but also sometimes artisans and women.

Our upcoming talk explores these questions, focusing on the frequent tendency of academies to cultivate theatre and performance. It will explore how academicians used theatre to define themselves socially, culturally and politically around the time that professional theatre (commedia dell’arte) became established from the mid-sixteenth century. Was theatre in the academy just a form of learned fun, or were more serious issues at stake?

Lisa Sampson is Professor at University College London and Co-director of the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges. Her publications include Pastoral Drama in Early Modern Italy (2006), The Italian Academies, 1525-1700 (2016, co-edited), Drama, Poetry and Music in Late-Renaissance Italy: The life and Works of Leonora Bernardi (2023, co-authored) and two prize-winning critical co-editions of plays by the late Renaissance Italian female dramatists Maddalena Campiglia and Barbara Torelli (2004, 2013). She is currently writing a book on Theatre in the Academies of Early Modern Italy.

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Image: Vittore Carpaccio, Arrival of the English Ambassadors (detail), 1495-1500, Venice, Gallerie dell’Accademia