Sacra Rappresentazione

Sacra Rappresentazione (pl. sacre rappresentazioni), religious play of 15th-century Italy, which, like the Spanish auto sacramental and the English and French mystery play, developed from liturgical drama. It was chiefly the product of Florence, where it was produced not, as in England, by craft guilds or, as in France, by specially organized adult lay bodies, but by groups of young people from religious or educational centres, who enacted scenes from the Bible or Church history either indoors, in a hall, or in the open square or market-place, in a multiple setting. One play consisting of a cycle of episodes from the Old and New Testaments required no fewer than 22 booths or edifizi, indicating different localities; and a play on the life of St Olive, based on a popular legend, took two days to perform. As elsewhere, too many comic interpolations and the gradual introduction of secular and often impious elements led to a decline in the quality of new productions, but the traditions which had governed the development of the liturgical play, particularly its free-flowing style of composition and its mingling of comedy and tragedy, were still strongly felt even by those late 15th-century dramatists whose plays were being written under the influence of the tragedies of Seneca, as can be seen in the Timon (1497) and Sofonisba (1502) of Galleotto del Carretto (?–c.1530) and the Filostrato e Panfile (1499) of Antonio Caminelli (1436–1502), known as ‘Il Pistoia’.