Homeric Culture in The History of the Scenography in Seventeenth Century: "Il Greco in Troia" and "La Caduta del Regno dell´Amazzoni"

Abstract

It would be impossible to make a list of events, shows and plays, that throughout the modern era, had an argument the stories told by the Homeric literature. Countless, but they all looked the gift of eloquence that had since I started in antiquity reissued. Barely a century after collecting oral histories that were tacked under the headings of the Iliad and the Odyssey –if one accepts the authorship of that mythical figure who was Homer around the eighth century before Christ– tyrants and oligarchs peered visionary possibilities so that provided the frames in which they were involved gods and heroes. Olympic mythology not only served the purpose of unification of the Panhellenic nations that was Greece, around a common belief world as part of the great sanctuary, but also the vicissitudes of the main characters, as Paris, Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, Penthesilea, Aeneas, Agamemnon, Andromache, Cassandra and Helen, provided a repertoire of role models and a ceremonial protocol extremely useful in society. Piety, loyalty, excellence, beauty, submission, moral virtues that were to “decorate” equally rulers and citizens, guaranteeing a new order in Hellas, and is also the distinctive notes regarding ossified and monolithic hegemonic empires in the area Middle Eastern, Egyptian and Babylonian or Persian respectively. It is proposed to analyze the impact of such matters iconological from the review of two scripts for scenographic two plays of the late Italian Seicento, from two separate specimens found in the National Library of Madrid: Il Greco in Troia and La caduta del regno dell´amazone.