(b Florence, c1531; d Florence, 6 June 1608). Italian architect, stage designer, engineer and painter. He studied with Vasari and in 1574 succeeded him as director of all the elaborate productions staged at the Florentine court; the theatre that he built in 1586 in a hall in the Uffizi became the centre of all such festivities. For the Medicis he designed palaces, villas (including Pratolino, outside Florence), fortresses, canals and harbour installations in Florence and Tuscany.
Buontalenti had worked for the court before his appointment as director, designing costumes and special machines for transformation scenes in intermedi directed by Vasari in 1565 and Lanci in 1569. He gave the new theatre in the Uffizi an advanced system of revolving periaktoi that were a great improvement on the clumsy machinery of his predecessors, enabling the scenery to be changed virtually as often as wanted. The capabilities of the stage were demonstrated by the productions of the comedies L’amico fido (1586) and La pellegrina (1589), each accompanied by six intermedi and involving respectively six and seven different sets, changed in front of the audience (see Intermedio, figs.2, 3, 4 and 5). The purpose of these court festivities was to glorify the prince by ostentation and splendour, and Buontalenti created a form of production that was equal to the task. Visual splendour based on machinery became obligatory in all later musico-dramatic enterprises in every court in Europe, especially in opera, the new musical genre that evolved in Florence. The earliest opera productions at the Florentine court, for which Buontalenti was still at hand to design the sets (e.g. Caccini’s Il rapimento di Cefalo, 1600), not only took advantage of the mechanics of stage transformation, but also retained the cycle of mythological settings (Helicon, the Underworld, pastoral scenery, the sea, etc.) developed in the intermedi of 1586 and 1589, which were to set their seal on the visual conventions of opera for decades.
DBI (I.M. Botto)
ES (P. Turchetti)
B. de’ Rossi: Descrizione del magnificentiss., apparato e de’ maravigliosi intermedi fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze (Florence, 1585)
B. de’ Rossi: Descrizione dell’apparato, e degl’intermedi, fatti per la commedia rappresentata in Firenze (Florence, 1589)
M. Buonarotti: Descrizione delle felicissime nozze della Cristianissima Maestà di Madama Maria Medici Regina di Francia e di Navarra (Florence, 1600)
A. Warburg: ‘I costumi teatrali per gli intermezzi del 1589’, Atti dell’Accademia del R. Istituto musicale di Firenze, xxxiii (1895), 103–46; repr. in G. Bing, ed.: Aby Warburg: Gesammelte Schriften, i (Leipzig, 1932), 259–300, 394–438
J. Laver: ‘Stage Designs for the Florentine Intermezzi of 1589’, Burlington Magazine, lx (1932), 294–300
J. Jacquot: ‘Les fêtes de Florence (1589): quelques aspects de leur mise en scène’, Theatre Research, iii (1961), 157–76
A.M. Nagler: Theatre Festivals of the Medici, 1939–1637 (New Haven, CT, 1964/R), 58–100
G. Gaeta Bertelà and A. Petrioli Tofani, eds.: Feste e apparati medicei da Cosimo I a Cosimo II (Florence, 1969) [illustrated catalogue]
A. Testaverde Matteini: L’officina delle nuvole: il Teatro Mediceo nel 1589 e gli intermedi del Buontalenti nel memoriale di Girolamo Seriacopi (Milan, 1991)
A. Dugdale: ‘Buontalenti, Bernardo’, The Dictonary of Art, ed. J. Turner (London, 1996)
J.M. Saslow: The Medici Wedding of 1589: Florentine Festival as Theatrum Mundi (New Haven, CT, 1996)
MANFRED BOETZKES