3 - Singing Effigies

Summary

Chapter 3 turns to the medieval Venetian ritual of the Festa delle Marie, a multiday celebration that began on the eve of the Feast of Saint Mark’s Translation (31 January) and ended on the Feast of the Purification (2 February). The feast centered around twelve wooden effigies of the Virgin Mary, each sumptuously dressed, adorned with gemstones and pearls, and crowned with a golden headpiece. From around 1267 until 1379, when the feast was abolished, the state threw all its financial backing behind a new facet of the celebration: a procession made on 31 January to the church of Santa Maria Formosa, where a sung Annunciation exchange, unique within the medieval dramatic corpus, was performed. This chapter provides the first in-depth musical study of this unique Annunciation drama and its sung ceremonial context. Using previously lost sources, I reconstruct the dialogue’s melodies, all based on the antiphonal repertory of San Marco, and show how this preexisting repertory was refashioned into a version of the Annunciation story that helped aligned the Festa delle Marie celebration with the interests of the state and its empire. Central to this chapter is a concern with the ways song worked in tandem with the plastic arts (effigies, thrones, costumes) to create the ceremony’s special representational effects.