Yet even in Italy in the Renascence the most popular form of the drama, the improvised play which we call the comedy-of-masks, was performed in a traditional stage-setting representing an open square, whereon only the back-cloth seems to have been the work of the scene-painter, the sides of the stage being occupied by four or more houses, two or three on each side, often consisting of little more than a practicable door with a practicable window over it, not made of canvas, but constructed out of wood by the carpenter, with the solidity demanded by the climbing feats of the athletic comedians and by their acrobatic agility. The traditional set of the comedy-of-masks conformed to that recommended for the comic drama by Serlio, in his treatise on architecture, published in 1545; but it may be noted also that Serlio's suggested set for the tragic drama was not dissimilar even if it were distinctly more dignified.
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The opera seems to have been the direct descendant of the court-ballet, known in England as the mask, as that in its turn was derived from the open-air spectacle of the Italian Renascence, such as survived in Florence in the seventeenth century. In the beginning the court-ballets of France, like the masks of England, were not given in a theater with a stage shut off by a proscenium arch, but in the ball-room or banqueting-hall of a palace. One end of this spacious apartment, often but not always provided with a raised platform, served as the stage whereon one or more places, a mountain, for instance, and a grotto, were represented, at first by the decorated machines of the artistic engineers only, but afterward by the canvas frames of scene-painters. The action of the court-ballets or of the masks was not necessarily confined to this stage, so to call it. The spectators were ranged along the walls and under the galleries (if there were any), leaving the main part of the hall bare; and the performers descended frequently into this area, which was kept free for them, and which was better fitted for their dances and processions and other intricate evolutions than the scant and cluttered stage.
A twentieth-century analog to this sixteenth-century practise can be seen in the spectacle presented in our modern three-ringed circuses—the 'Cleopatra,' for example, which was the opening number on the Barnum and Bailey program not long ago, where the Roman troops and the Egyptian populace came down from the stage and paraded around the arena. Bacon in his essay on 'Masques,' used the word "scenery" as tho he meant only decorated scaffolds, perhaps movable; and his expression of desire for room "to be kept clear" implies the use of the body of the hall for the maneuvers of the performers. Ludovic Celler, in his study of 'Mise en scène au dix-septième siècle' in France, shows that the action of the court-ballet was sometimes intermitted that the spectators could join in the dancing, as at an ordinary ball. In the earlier Italian open-air festivals, and in the earlier French court-ballets there was not even a proscenium sharply separating the stage from the rest of the hall; but in England by the time of Inigo Jones the advantage of a proscenium had been discovered, and we have more than one of the sketches which that skilful designer devised for his masks. But even then this proscenium was not permanent and architecturally conventionalized; it was invented afresh for every successive entertainment, and it was adorned with devices peculiar to that particular mask. Inigo Jones had also advanced to the use of actual scenery, that is to say, of canvas stretched upon frames and then painted. Mr. Hamilton Bell believes it possible that the invention of grooves to sustain wings and flats may be ascribed to Inigo or to his assistant and successor, Webb.
Even in the Italian opera, where all the scenery was due to the brush of the scene-painter, there was for a long while a formal and monotonous regularity. Whether the set was an interior or an exterior, a public place or a hall in a palace, the arrangement was rectangular, with a drop at the back and a series of wings on either side equidistant from one another. This stiff representation of a locality is preserved for us nowadays in the toy-theaters which we buy for our children, altho it is now seen on the actual stage only in certain acts of old-fashioned operas. It lingers also in the variety-shows, where it is the proper setting for many items of their miscellaneous programs.
Altho the Italians had discovered perspective early in the Renascence they utilized it on the stage timidly at first, bestowing this rectangular regularity upon all their sets, both architectural interiors or exteriors and rural scenes, in which rigid wood-wings receded, diminishing in height to a landscape painted on the drop at the back, thus leaving the whole stage free for the actors. Not until the end of the seventeenth century did an Italian scene-painter, Bibiena, venture to abandon the balanced symmetry of the square set, and to slant his perspective so as to present buildings at an acute angle, thereby not only gaining a pleasing variety, but also enlarging immensely the apparent spaciousness of the scene, since he was able to carry the eyes of the spectator into vague distances, and to suggest far more than he was able to display. This advance was accompanied by a more liberal use of stairways and platforms—"practicables" as the stage-phrase is—that is to say, built up by the carpenters so that the actors could go from one level to another. Hitherto flights of steps and balconies had been only painted, not being intended for actual use by the performers.
A similar development took place also in the landscape scenes; the foreground was raised irregularly, so that the persons of the play might climb up. Practicable bridges were swung across torrents, and the earlier formality of pastoral scenes began to disappear. Apparently the scene-painters were influenced at this time by the landscape-painters, more especially by Poussin. The interrelation of painting and scene-painting, each in turn affecting the other, is far closer than most historians of art have perceived. It is not unlikely, for example, that Gainsborough and Constable, who were the fathers of the Barbizon men, had been stimulated by the stage-pictures of De Lutherbourg. David Garrick profited by the innovating art of De Lutherbourg, a pupil of Vanloo, who came to England in 1771. Apparently it was De Lutherbourg who invented "raking-pieces"—as the scene-painters term the low fragments of scenery which mask the inclines of mounds. To him also is credited the first use of transparent scenes to reproduce the effect of moonlight upon water, and to suggest the flames of volcanoes. Thus to him must be ascribed the beginnings of that complicated realism by which our latter-day scene-painters are enabled to create an appropriate atmosphere for poetic episodes.
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