Scenic Art for the Theatre, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12

The Renaissance Theatre and the Baroque Theatre: 1400 to 1800

The 15th and 16th Centuries: the Renaissance

Drama and performance were among the many classical art forms revived by the powerful humanist ideals of the Renaissance. Secular plays based on classical texts were examined and staged, and later entirely new dramas came into being. Music drama also came into being later in the Renaissance out of another means to animate Classical Greek dramatic arts based on contemporary and Roman descriptions of it. This experimentation eventually evolved into opera.

All of these works of theatrical art included stage decoration as part of performance, and the decoration itself, like the first texts, was based on an interpretation of classical ...