A Theater of Diplomacy. Ellen R. Welch
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and sciences. They subscribed to what Georgia Cowart dubs the “harmonia mundi” model of understanding music’s effects.28 Influenced by Plato and Pythagorus as filtered through Boethius and Ficino, they believed that sweet melodies allowed audiences to experience a physical manifestation of divine accord. Music, in this view, especially when accompanied by measured verses and the well-ordered visual spectacle of dance, had a therapeutic effect, balancing the humors and replicating celestial harmony within the listener’s mind and body.29 The moral and, by extension, political value of these theories was articulated in the Lettres patentes that justified the founding of the Académie de poésie et de musique: “And as the opinion of several great personages, legislators as well as ancient philosophers, is not to be disdained, let it be known that it is of the utmost importance for the morals of a city’s citizens that the music commonly used in the land be restrained under certain laws, all the more so because the minds of most men are shaped and behave according to how that music is; such that where music is disordered, there morals are also depraved, and where it is well ordered, there are the men well-formed and instructed in morality.”30 The document implies a causal relationship between music and morality. Reforming music will reform men’s souls, which will in turn restore order to the polity.
A closer look at the theory that informed the Academicians’ understanding of music’s powers, however, shows that the relation between music and political order was not one of linear causality but rather one of hierarchal correspondences. If a particular piece of music succeeded in replicating celestial harmonies in a worldly form, it would act as a mediator between the earthly and heavenly realms, bringing listeners’ bodies and minds into concord with the music of the spheres. As Pontus de Tyard wrote in his Solitaire second, it was possible to achieve “the elevation of the soul through music.”31 Music, in other words, had an anagogical function. It lifted listeners up, oriented them toward a spiritual ideal. The poets who studied and collaborated with Baïf understood not only music but all the artistic facets of court entertainment in similarly vertical terms. Their poetry was richly metaphoric. Their themes were usually allegorical. The total spectacle of a court entertainment directed viewers’ minds to higher, more abstract thoughts.
In the case of multimedia entertainments, this vertical orientation functioned in two ways, each with its own diplomatic implications. As sensory and aesthetic experiences, spectacles transported their audiences to a higher state of harmony, peace, and spiritual contemplation. Perhaps, as theorists suggested, they allowed for a momentary experience of utopia in which mortal cares and political divisions could be transcended. Seen in this light, entertainments worked as a kind of diplomatic ritual creating a sacred (if temporary) aesthetic meeting ground where worldly differences could be overcome. As series of texts and icons to be interpreted, on the other hand, the entertainments directed their spectators toward increasingly abstract concepts through an allegorical process. In a diplomatic context, this movement toward abstraction created space for the coexistence of competing interpretations. Allegories only produce stable meanings when the reading community agrees on the interpretative master code that should unlock them. The international audience for a diplomatic entertainment did not necessarily share such a coherent code. Through the separate but complementary dimensions of aesthetic power and invitation to reading, the entertainments may have fostered a superficial unity (of feeling) while in fact promoting diversity (of interpretation) among its various spectators.
Staging Concord
The mise-en-scène of harmonious unity at Bayonne began with the choice of setting. The incontestably Catholic, border city of Bayonne was charged with diplomatic meaning as well as providing a geographically convenient meeting place for a summit whose chief participants were France and Spain.32 Its proximity to the frontier allowed Charles and Catherine to greet the Spanish queen on her own territory, when she arrived by boat sailing down the Bidasoa river that served as the natural dividing line between the two countries. Several observers remarked on Bayonne’s status as an equal meeting ground. Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, third duke of Alba, Philip II’s trusted delegate at the summit, gave a detailed account of the queen’s reception in a letter to the king: “Yesterday her majesty departed at noon, went down to the river, where the king and queen awaited her; they [the queen and her entourage] got into boats … and they crossed from the Spanish side; they alighted on land, where they were received with much love.”33 The English ambassador in Madrid, who likely heard about the meeting from both Spanish and English sources, reported that “the King of France received the Queen in the boat, having one foot in Spain,” a slight exaggeration of conciliatory gestures witnessed by the Duke of Alba.34 A French eyewitness described Elisabeth’s procession into the city, noting that she passed below a painting of herself with a coat of arms “half French, half Spanish,”35 and that her route was lit by flaming torches in a nod to the “Spanish style.”36 The blending of French and Spanish aesthetics announced a program of artistic conciliation that continued throughout the conference.
The transformation of the Franco-Spanish borderland into a utopian space governed by love and friendship rather than politics was a recurring theme of the entertainments. A poem recited as part of the allegorical “assault” on the enchanted castle succinctly illustrates this artistic move:
Between the high ramparts of the Pyrenees’ points
Is enclosed a country of fortunate lands,
Delicious country, where happy sojourn makes
A peaceful people under the reign of Love.37
Although modern readers might dismiss the poem’s facile erasure of political difference as naive or propagandistic, the creators of the entertainment deployed a number of tools and techniques to reinforce its sense of unity and commonality among diverse spectators.
First, the artists relied on a program of imagery and a vocabulary of performance behaviors common to a noble audience in despite of cultural and linguistic differences. Iconography drawn from Classical mythology provided one important, shared lexicon. Several of the ethnicities represented in the masquerade tournament hailed from the Classical Mediterranean world. Charles IX came as a Trojan—a founder of Rome—accompanied by his brother, who was dressed as an Amazon queen.38 On the second day of festivities, Philip II’s chief delegate, the Duke of Alba, inducted Charles into the Order of the Golden Fleece, a chivalric society that took its name from the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, often associated with themes of royal or imperial power. Jupiter, Venus, and Cupid played key roles in the allegorical enchanted castle play, and Neptune sang during the water pageant. French, Spanish, and Italian eyewitnesses could more or less accurately identify these figures on sight and immediately grasp what concepts they were meant to represent. In addition to offering a high degree of legibility, Greek and Roman references allowed viewers to commune with a time and place considered to be the common origin of European cultures according to the prevalent discourse of translatio imperii. As Aby Warburg puts it, the frequent appearance of Classical figures in early modern court festivals “afforded a unique opportunity for members of the public to see the revered figures of antiquity standing before them in flesh and blood.”39 The presence of ancient personages in performance collapsed the temporal distance between spectators and their idealized past, allowing them to dwell within that shared vision of Greco-Roman antiquity.
Theatrical performance always, in some sense, transfers audiences to another time and place. Samuel Weber calls theater a “medium” precisely because it serves as an agent of mediation between the space of the performance and an imagined “elsewhere” that space represents.40 The Bayonne festivals used this capacity of performance to convey participants not only to a shared vision of Classical antiquity but also to another idealized historical landscape: that associated with chivalry. Poetry, set design, and costumes asked spectators to transport themselves to a legendary feudal landscape borrowed from popular romances. Festive rehearsals of chivalric practices such as jousts and tournaments were a regular feature of Renaissance court culture.41 Even in this context, though, the events at Bayonne stood out both for the concentration of chivalric activities and for the sustained use of Arthurian themes.42 This mythical chivalric imagery effectively transformed the ground on which the festivities