Teatro francescano. «Fare come» per «farsi come»: il teatro della nudità e la drammatica della conformazione

[Autom. eng. transl.] Between the eleventh and twelfth centuries, affective language had represented man's bond with God, referring to the idea of parental love proper to Bernardine or, more generally, Cistercian spirituality, which meant Christ as husband, son, father and brother. That was a "theater of love" that was condensed above all in two images, that of the sensual and deeply emotional embrace of Bernard to the crucifix and that of his mother's crying at the foot of the cross. Francis went further and became "theater of nudity", focusing on the concrete experience of the imitation of the crucified Jesus understood as the dispossession of majesty and divine glory descending into human life. To allow the passage between Christ and man and thus arouse the stimulus to imitation, it was necessary to elaborate a language through which the mystical vision of previous centuries exceeded the purely ostensive logic and was translated into "real" (and realistic) vision of violence in their actual happening; in the same way, the shared embrace in the affective perspective of relationships turned into a real experience of participation. The Man-Jesus and his story were, therefore, the two elements around which a new meaning of the theater of passion was built, which came to be founded on mercy as incarnate love, continually offered and perpetually received.