Teatro e devozione

[Autom. eng. transl.] In the seventeenth century, Franciscan dramatic devotion keeps at the center the passion of Christ lived both in its sacrificial and sympathetic aspect - and therefore still linked to the mimetic identification of which Francis is and remains the model - and in its salvific and sacramental meaning. There remains the union of the penitential request - which becomes very strong and becomes more exhibited - with an affectivity that aims at empathic sharing. At the same time, devotion to Christ's humanity and to his body, painful and glorious at the same time, present in the Eucharist that offers itself to the eye to be prayed and adored, is reinvented. The rhetorical models of meditation and the preaching of the passion are revised which, while not forgetting the tradition dating back to Bonaventure, give rise to new mechanisms of action and representation. The practice of conformation is renewed which remains linked to the idea of following but is clearly and theatrically acted out, translating into physical and dramatic journeys of penance and salvation. This is the century of a dramatic spirituality that is embodied by making its own the theatrical devices developed by the late Renaissance and Baroque era, to use them both in a catechetical and moralistic-apologetic function, aiming at the inculturation of the people and at conversion and reconciliation; not only, therefore, in an anti-Protestant and anti-heretical key, but also and above all for the renewal of customs and the re-foundation of Christian society. If, starting from the Council of Trent, faith, charity and ethics became primarily personal responsibilities, what Claudio Bernardi has defined as the paradoxical shift from a theater of piety which "aimed at to individual conversion for collective action and for social salvation ", to a theater of glory made up of collective actions but which aims" at individual conversion or personal salvation ". To illustrate this shift, the essay focuses on three examples of the theater of Franciscan devotion from the Baroque period, namely the theater of the Passion, where processions, streets and paths develop alongside the paraliturgical tradition of the deposition, which commemorate the itinerary of pain. of Christ; the Teatro delle Quarantore, an invention that combines Passionist and sacramental devotion; and, finally, the spiritual theater, that is the new dramaturgy, which, having appropriated the contemporary compositional models, deals with scriptural, hagiographic, doctrinal topics and makes a missionary and edifying use of them.