John Champagne Italian Masculinity As Queer Melodrama Caravaggio Puccini Contemporary Cinema

Global Masculinities
Edited by Michael Kimmel and Judith Kegan Gardiner
Michael Kimmel is a professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at

Stony Brook. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including: Men’s
Lives, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men, The Gendered Society,
The Politics of Manhood, and Manhood in America: A Cultural History. He edits Men
and Masculinities, an interdisciplinary scholarly journal, and edited the Encyclopedia
of Men and Masculinities and the Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities. He
consults with corporations, NGOs, and public sector organizations all over the world
on gender equity issues, including work-family balance, reducing workplace discrimi-
nation, and promoting diversity.
Judith Kegan Gardiner is a professor of English and of Gender and Women’s Studies
at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books are Craftsmanship in Context:
The Development of Ben Jonson’s Poetry and Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the Politics of
Empathy. She is the editor of the volumes Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency in
Theory and Practice; Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory; and a co-editor of The
International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. She is also a member of the
editorial board for the interdisciplinary journal Feminist Studies.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism

By Daniel Worden
Men and Masculinities Around the World: Transforming Men’s Practices

Edited by Elisabetta Ruspini, Jeff Hearn, Bob Pease, and Keith Pringle
Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages

to the Present
Edited by Stefan Horlacher
Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern

Masculinity, 1660–1815
By Jason D. Solinger
Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema

By Debbie Ging
The History of Fatherhood in Norway, 1850–2012

By Jørgen Ludvig Lorentzen
Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films

By Kirk Combe and Brenda Boyle
Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema

By Catherine O’Rawe
Alternative Masculinities for a Changing World
Edited by Àngels Carabí and Josep M. Armengol
Masculinities in Black and White: Manliness and Whiteness in (African)
American Literature
By Josep M. Armengol
Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama: Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary
Cinema
By John Champagne
Italian Masculinity as Queer
Melodrama
Caravaggio, Puccini, Contemporary Cinema
John Champagne
ITALIAN MASCULINITY AS QUEER MELODRAMA
Copyright © John Champagne, 2015.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-47480-3
All rights reserved.

First published in 2015 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
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Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
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ISBN 978-1-349-50165-6 ISBN 978-1-137-47004-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137470041
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Champagne, John.
Italian masculinity as queer melodrama : Caravaggio, Puccini,
contemporary cinema / John Champagne.
pages cm.—(Global masculinities)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Masculinity—Italy—History. 2. Homosexuality in art.
3. Homosexuality in music. 4. Homosexuality in motion
pictures. 5. Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 1573–1610—
Inﬂuence. I. Title.
HQ1090.7.I8C43 2015
155.3’320945—dc23 2014033977
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: February 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Previous publications by John Champagne
The Blue Lady’s Hands. Secaucus (1988)
When the Parrot Boy Sings (1990)
The Ethics of Marginality, a New Approach to Gay Studies (1995)
Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (2012)
This page intentionally left blank
C on ten t s
List of Figures ix
Note from the Series Editors xi
Introduction: Italian Masculinity and Melodrama 1

1 Caravaggio and the Melodramatic Sensibility 27
2 Caravaggio’s Melodramatic Male Bodies 55
3 Tosca and Social Melodrama 85
4 Puccini’s Sparrow: Longing and La Rondine 115
5 “Normality . . . What an Ugly Word!” Contemporary
Queer Melodrama 147
6 Özpetek’s Queer Cinema 175
Conclusion 205
Notes 211
Works Cited 231
Index 247
Figur es
1.1 St. Jerome Penitent, 1608 43

2.1 Sebastiano del Piombo 67
2.2 St. John the Baptist, 1604–05 75
2.3 St. John the Baptist 76
2.4 St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c. 1594 79
4.1 Movement and Stasis: The Swallow’s Search 117
4.2 The b1 section of the verse: swelling and diminishing 127
4.3 The aria’s opening bars, section c:
“Between” Magda and Doretta 129
4.4 Aria, C1 to conclusion: denouement, delays,
ruses, resolution 130
No te from the Ser ies Editor s
In Sweden, a “real man” is one who does childcare for his own children,
and liberals and conservatives argue not about whether there should
be government-mandated paternity leave but about the allocation of
time between new mothers and fathers. In China, years of enforcing a
one-child rule have led to a population with a vast demographic imbal-
ance in the number of males over females, with consequences yet to be
determined. In Iran, vasectomy becomes increasingly popular as men
seek to take more responsibility for family planning in an atmosphere
of restrictive gender roles. In the Philippines, government-supported
exports of women as nurses, maids, and nannies to first-world coun-
tries alters the lives of boys and girls growing up both at home and in
the developed countries, and Mexican American men adapt to their
wives’ working by doing increased housework and childcare, while
their ideology of men’s roles changes more slowly. And throughout
the world, warfare continues to be a predominantly male occupation,
devastating vast populations, depriving some boys of a childhood,
and promoting other men to positions of authority.
Global Masculinities is a series devoted to exploring the most
recent, most innovative, and widest ranging scholarship about men
and masculinities from a broad variety of perspectives and meth-
odological approaches. The dramatic success of Gender Studies has
rested on three developments: (1) making women’s lives visible, which
has also come to mean making all genders more visible; (2) insisting
on intersectionality and so complicating the category of gender; and
(3) analyzing the tensions among global and local iterations of gender.
Through textual analyses and humanities-based studies of cultural
representations, as well as cultural studies of attitudes and behaviors,
we have come to see the centrality of gender in the structure of mod-
ern life and life in the past, varying across cultures and within them.
Through interviews, surveys, and demographic analysis, among other
forms of social scientific inquiry, we are now able to quantify some
of the effects of these changing gender structures. Clearly written for
both the expert and more general audience, this series embraces the
xii NOTE FROM THE SERIES EDITORS
advances in scholarship and applies them to men’s lives: gendering

men’s lives, exploring the rich diversity of men’s lives—globally and
locally, textually, and practically—as well as the differences among
men by social class, “race”/ethnicity and nationality, sexuality, ability
status, sexual preference and practices, and age.
M ICHAEL K IMMEL
and
JUDITH K EGAN G ARDINER
Introduction: Italian Masculinity and
Melodrama
Introduction
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s 2012 Cesare deve morire/Caesar Must
Die documents a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar by the
annual theater laboratory of the high-security section of Rome’s
Rebibbia prison. Beginning with a sequence of the production’s final
moments, the film then flashes back to when the actors—men who
are serving sentences for organized crime and murder —audition. For
their auditions, the men must recite their name, place of birth, pater-
nity, and city of residence, but according to two different scenarios.
First, they are to imagine that they are at a border crossing and in the
process of leaving their wives. The director explains, “You would like
to say good-bye to her, to cry with her. But you have to give us your
personal information.”1 He continues: “The second time, the same
situation, but this time, we force you to give us your details. So, the
first time you are crying, the second time you are angry.”
The film then provides a brief montage of the auditions. Each
actor is shot in medium close-up, his two scenarios each filmed as a
single take. In certain cases, the same actor’s two shots are linked by
a jump cut. In others, shots of the first half of one man’s audition are
joined to the second half of another’s. Shots of the men mourning—
weeping openly, cradling their faces in their hands, gesturing toward
their wives—are thus juxtaposed with shots of them shouting, ges-
ticulating, and swearing.
Given that these men are prisoners, the auditions blur the line
between “acting” and “being.” This is an ambiguity that the Taviani
brothers exploit, and we sometimes forget that we are watching real
inmates, not actors playing prisoners who are performing Julius
Caesar. Both the play itself, with its themes of political violence and
treachery, and the directors’ choices—the Tavianis at times avoiding
the enunciative techniques of documentary filmmaking—encourage
2 ITALIAN MASCULINITY AS QUEER MELODRAMA
us to lose ourselves in the two simultaneous dramas. This is particularly

true of the audition sequence, given that the two scenarios—leaving
behind one’s family, being forced to identify oneself to a figure of
power—are experiences the men have lived. The overall effect is to
impress us with the ability of the inmates to summon the required
range of affects, from profound sorrow to barely contained fury, the
jump cuts punctuating this contrast. A non-Italian audience in par-
ticular might be struck by the men’s capacity and willingness to weep
openly.
The word “histrionic”—in Italian, istrionico—comes from the
Latin for actor, “histrio,” itself from the Etruscan, suggesting the-
ater’s deep roots in Italian culture. The stereotype of the Italian
male as effusive and volatile dates at least from the time of Stendhal.
Minus an understanding of a culture of public spectacle whose his-
tory included carnival, religious processions, commedia dell’arte, and
opera, he and his fellow travelers on the Grand Tour resorted to an
essentializing vocabulary to diagnose the Italian character and its
alleged excessive theatricality.
Critics disagree, however, as to whether Stendhal’s portrait is nega-
tive or positive. Arguing the latter, one writer suggests that according
to Stendhal, the Italians
go their own way, pursuing their passions and desires with brio, a
spontaneous childlike intensity. Italians not only have strong feelings
but express them freely. Italy is thus for Stendhal not the home of
Machiavellianism or superficial extroversion, as is often assumed, but
the “native haunt of passion.” (Casillo “Italy” 100; quoting Stendhal 92)
Madame de Staël provides what this same critic has called an “empire”
of stereotypes (Casillo Empire), writing her 1807 novel Corinne, ou
L’Italie just seven years after the man often referred to as the inven-
tor of stage melodrama, French author René Charles Guilbert de
Pixérécourt, achieved his first major successes (Brooks Melodramatic).
According to de Staël, Italian men “readily put their lives at stake for
love and hatred, and dagger blows exchanged in that cause neither
astonish nor intimidate anyone. They do not fear death when natural
passions require them to brave it,” (101) and “‘Italians are indolent
as orientals [sic] in their daily lives, but no men are more persistent or
active once their passions are aroused” (102). One of fiction’s most
internationally famous portrayals of Italian masculinity as histri-
onic, Corinne, then, follows on the heels of the theatrical premiere
of the melodramatic sensibility, employing the tropes of volatility,
INTRODUCTION 3
theatricality, and, as de Staël insinuates via the term “indolence,”

effeminacy.
Enduring a few centuries, these tropes continue to shape inter-
pretations of Italian masculinity: in our own time, non-Italian news-
papers reiterate the link between Italian men and melodrama via the
figure of Silvio Berlusconi, from The [London] Times’ 2003 headline
“Berlusconi Backs Out of Melodrama” (H. Clarke) to The Washington
Post’s 2007 proclamation “Berlusconi spat with wife—melodrama,
Italian style” (Pullella) to the New York Times’ description of the
corrupt and philandering media mogul’s attempt to prevent his
November 2013 expulsion from the Italian senate as “political melo-
drama” (Yardley). Such stereotypes, however, have also been repeated
by Italians themselves: Tosca’s sobbing Mario Cavaradossi; Titta’s his-
trionic father in Fellini’s Amarcord; the leering, grotesque Fascists of
Pasolini’s Salò.2 As the final example suggests, Italians have often ref-
erenced melodramatic masculinity as a form of self-critique. For there
is a tradition of lamenting the national (and implicitly male) character
and its tendency toward melodrama.
Nineteenth-century philosopher and politician Vincenzo Gioberti,
for example, worried that the Neapolitans had too much “imagina-
tion, courage, passionate enthusiasm, mobility, luxuriant thought,
affect, and style” (cited in Patriarca 35). Via her reading of Gioberti’s
colleague Francesco de Sanctis, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg argues
that Italian male scholars have frequently criticized the “insincerity”
of the Italian character, its “lack of interiority” that de Sanctis links to
“a feminized and feminizing sentimentality, to a rhetorical quality of
Italians that severs their relationship to the word and catapults them
into the melodramatic world of music and opera” (Stewart-Steinberg
15). According to Stewart-Steinberg, de Sanctis also cites for appro-
bation “the love of spectacle and entertainment, the dominance of
the Church.”3
Tracking the history of constructions of Italy’s “national charac-
ter,” Silvana Patriarca highlights poet Giosuè Carducci’s disparaging
reference to Italians as “people of cicisbei” (104), the cicisbeo being
“the effeminate and indolent nobleman par excellence” (Patriarca 40).
And, following the 1896 defeat of the Italian army at Adwa, effemi-
nacy becomes “a widespread trope,” marshaled by both rightist edu-
cational reformer and former garibaldino Pasquale Turièllo (105) and
physiologist Angelo Mosso (103). Defensive responses to perceptions
of Italian masculinity as inadequate characterize the Fascist period,
Mussolini himself objecting to the depiction of the Italian army in
the US film A Farewell to Arms (138).
Historian George Mosse notes both that modern European mas-

culinity depended on displays of affect that constituted the antithesis
of the melodramatic and that Italian men were typically exempt from
this requirement. Compare, for example, his claim that “the manly
Englishman or German showed the restraint and self-control so dear
to the middle class” (Nationalism 13) with his acknowledgment that
“Mussolini used body language as a means of communication in
a theatrical manner quite foreign to Adolf Hitler, who would have
thought it unbecoming, if not effeminate” (Image 162). While Italian
fascism’s antibourgeois tendencies privileged embodiments of mas-
culinity that challenged the cliché of the cicisbeo, the excessiveness
of these embodiments, such as the famous nude statues surround-
ing the Foro Mussolini, always threatened to reconfirm what they
set out to deny. For it is one of the many contradictions of Western
masculinity that excessive virility can often appear effeminate and/or
homoerotic.
As the product of a complex series of contradictory historical cir-
cumstances, representations of the Italian male deconstruct binaries
of masculine and feminine, active and passive, and, most recently,
homosexual and heterosexual—given the tendency in the West to
construe, since the nineteenth century, a relationship between gender
and object choice.4 This “queerness” has been deployed for opposing
political ends: both fascism and its critique, for example (Champagne
Aesthetic Modernism). Throughout modern Italian cultural history,
the melodramatic sensibility provides rich opportunities for queering
masculinity and male sexuality.
Queer Italy?
The popular press’s obsession with, on the one hand, Berlusconi’s
fashion choices, facelifts, and liposuction—his own however gauche
attempts at maintaining la bella figura in the face of aging—and,
on the other, his “bunga-bunga” sex parties reminds us that where
masculinity leads, male sexuality follows. The corollary of the Italian
man as prone to passion is the portrayal of Italy as a place of sexual
licentiousness. Three (in)famous examples—Thomas Mann’s Venice,
Wilhelm von Gloeden’s Taormina, and HBO’s portrait of imperial
Rome—all imagine Italy as a land of sexual freedom and excess (HBO
enthusiastically extending this sexual libertinage to women).
Perhaps the most unique characteristic of Italian masculinity is its
polymorphous linkings of sex and gender, the excesses ascribed to
Italian men crisscrossing masculine and feminine, homosexual and
INTRODUCTION 5
heterosexual, allowing for promiscuous pairings: the virile emperor

Hadrian and his lover, the ephebe Antinous, images of whom were
featured in a recent Dolce & Gabbana collection; filmmaker Derek
Jarman’s portrait of Caravaggio’s masculine bisexuality; Freud’s
Leonardo da Vinci as passive, effeminate homosexual; the legend-
ary heterosexual exploits, captured in both film and literature, of the
masculine Casanova; the effete but typically heterosexual cicisbeo; the
star image of Valentino, haunted by “rumors about his private life—
homosexuality, impotence, unconsummated marriages with lesbians”
(Hansen “Pleasure” 19); Marcello Mastroianni, the quintessential
Latin lover, this image oddly conflicting with the actor’s frequent
portrayals of the inetto, the passive and incompetent male (Reich); the
television show Mad Men’s Sal, a closet homosexual whose quirky,
stereotypically effeminate behaviors are attributed to his being
Italian American. Throughout much of his history, the Italian man
has appeared downright “queer”—at least when compared to his
Northern European/US counterpart.
The fact that, as of January of 2014, Italy was one of the only
European countries minus laws against discrimination based on
sexual orientation provides a contemporary context for Italian queer
masculinity (Chu). For if, as Michel Foucault posited, wherever there
is power, there is resistance, the cultural colocation of a machismo
that not so secretly celebrates Berlusconi’s exploits; the lingering grip
of the Vatican; and a tradition of leftist, feminist, and, most recently,
LGBTQ theory and activism creates contemporary conditions of pos-
sibility for a particularly complex reverse-discourse in response to
hegemonic constructions of sexuality and gender. One of the ongo-
ing projects of queer theory is the attempt to specify in all their com-
plexities the various connections and disjunctures between gender
and sexuality that have occurred since the time of classical Greece
(queer theory also recognizing the Eurocentric limitations of some
of its own disciplinary moves). Sigmund Freud’s comments on inver-
sion, for example, are a particularly rich iteration of the multiple and
contradictory ways in which, since the nineteenth century, gender
identification and sexual object choice may or may not follow from
one another (Three Essays). The historiographical paradigm currently
emerging is one that, attentive to the perils of teleology, seeks to
recognize the existence in different temporal moments of competing
models of the relation (or lack thereof) between gender and sexuality
in “the West”—itself understood as an imagined community, given
the extent of historical contact between Mediterranean cultures and
the so-called East.5 Complicating our present attempts to track these
historically competing models are historical accretion (which is not

the same as teleology), the individual historian’s decision to empha-
size either continuity or discontinuity, the disciplinary structures that
overdetermine that choice, the ways in which capitalism makes use of
prior historical forms, and the invention of psychoanalysis and its role
in the production (and interpretation) of contemporary sexual sub-
jects. However anachronistic, my use of the term “queer” to describe
Caravaggio, Puccini, and several contemporary Italian film directors
attempts to foreground these multiple determinants.
However, queer is not a synonym for latent homoeroticism, lan-
guid effeminacy, sexual debauchery, bucolic bisexuality, or unrelent-
ing machismo—all clichés to which Italians have been subject. Rather,
for a variety of historical reasons, Italian masculinities are polyphonic.
However, they have not always been subject to a deconstructive read-
ing, as Fascist appropriations of classical imagery demonstrate; neither
has Berlusconi (though even he, with his homophobic machismo on
the one hand and obsession with his appearance on the other, seems
ripe for a queer analysis).
I have already alluded to some of the historical circumstances, all
of them intertwined, that have contributed to Italian masculinity’s
contradictions. Others would include Platonism’s mandate that the
philosopher pursue the boy but remain chaste; Rome’s enchantment
with all things Greek—as Horace put it, Graecia capta ferum vic-
torem cepit (“captive Greece captured her savage victor”)—and the
competing models of a homoerotic ethics that emerged from the
meeting of Greece and Rome (Cantarella); Roman clientelism and
the masculine bonds on which it depended; rumors that Julius Caesar
had a sexual liaison with Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, prostratae regi
pudicitiae (“prostrating his modesty to the king”; Suetonius, cited
in Osgood 687);6 Hadrian’s deification of Antinous;7 the ambivalent
attitude of Paul of Tarsus toward marriage (1 Corinthians 7:8–10);
the historical memory of the Roman empire and the physical pres-
ence in Italy of its ruins; Augustine of Hippo’s attempt to recon-
cile pagan learning with Christianity; the hundreds of years of papal
rule; the Renaissance’s self-conscious imitating of the Classical world;
twentieth-century neoclassicism, which animated much of Italian
modernism between the wars; the modern revival of Renaissance pag-
eantry and male sartorial display—reenactments of jousts, carnival,
horse races (pali) and flag-tossing (sbandierare); and the tradition of
la bella figura and, more recently, the “made in Italy” brand, which
fostered Italian male modes of dress more “flamboyant” than their
Euro-American counterparts.
INTRODUCTION 7
A final, particularly suggestive and pertinent example: while, in

the late Republican and Imperial eras in particular, the idea of virilità
was what Cantarella called “la massima virtú” of the Roman citizen,
that virilità was “an overall quality, one that involved and included
physical force, military superiority, character and sexuality” (203).8
As a result, even sexual passivity did not automatically bar a Roman
male citizen from hegemonic manhood, as it could be “balanced”
or offset by, for example, military prowess or oratorical skill. In
fact, the opposite: the fact that someone could have as a youth been
sexually passive and yet, later in life, be a great military leader—as
was rumored to be the case with Caesar—meant that “even a pas-
sive homosexual—the popular imaginary seemed to say—could be a
man” (Cantarella 210).9
The myth of the greatness of Italy’s past dominated (and to some
extent still dominates) the artistic and ideological landscape of the
nation, leaving in its wake the historical detritus of ways of imag-
ing sexuality, gender, and the relationship between the two, that
complicate historically subsequent iterations (Champagne “Italian
Masculinity”). Additionally, contemporary understandings of sex/
gender are themselves contradictory, and in their contradictions
inform any contemporary reading of Italian masculinity. Clearly, the
epistemologies of gender and sexuality operating in Roman antiquity
do not operate identically today, for there is a determinate relation-
ship between capitalism and “the reification of desire” that informs
postpsychoanalytic constructions of gender/sexuality (Floyd).10 Yet
because of what Eve Sedgwick has called the “radical and irreducible
incoherence” of these understandings of sex/gender, today, Italian
masculinity often looks queer (Epistemology 85).
Sedgwick is referring here to the contradiction that desire is per-
ceived as a universal attribute and yet one that has proper and improper
objects, depending upon one’s gender (and, in Freud, at least, one’s
“constitution” and its ability to submit to the demands of culture).
The dictate that one’s desire ought to line up, according to one’s gen-
der, with a particular (heterosexual) object choice anticipates that it
may not.11 The persistent presence of a past in which no such assump-
tions operated—where, rather than modern notions of sexual orienta-
tion, appetite and status (in the Greco-Roman world), and then sin
(or lack thereof) determined what one did, under what conditions,
and with whom—has rendered Italy a particularly queer state. The
hotly contested question of when the “modern” model of sexuality
makes its premier in Italy—and the degree to which it coexists with
historically prior models—is still to be explored in more detail.12 Italy
had no Wilde trials; it had, however, a Marinetti critical of them. It

also had sexology journals (Dall’Orto, “Pasquale Penta,” and “Aldo
Mieli”). But so intolerable was the suggestion of homosexuality that
the Fascist era Rocco laws refuse to name it, even to outlaw it.
The degree to which Italian masculinity is queer is of course rela-
tive to other cultures that both construct male and female (and homo-
sexuality and heterosexuality) as binary opposites and posit, however
contradictorily, a link between gender and sexual desire. This queer-
ness is, again, not exclusively a matter of volition; it is overdetermined
by Italy’s history. During the Fascist ventennio, for example, it made
possible on the one hand a hypervirile masculinity and the political
imprisonment of men perceived as effeminate. On the other, in this
same environment, homosexual artists employed tropes from Italy’s
past—Greco-Roman imagery, Christian saints, the figure of la divina
fanciulla/the divine creature—to embody a homoerotic masculinity
both virile and delicate to varied degrees.
Queer Italian Male Melodrama

This book is an interdisciplinary project on masculinity and melo-
drama in Italian culture, a study that examines how melodrama
becomes a significant mode through which modern Italian masculin-
ity is articulated. It focuses on three distinct media—painting, opera,
and film—its examples drawn from three different periods in Italian
history: the Counter-Reformation, the years spanning Unification to
Fascism, and the last decade or two. Given the uses to which capi-
talism puts gender and sexuality, each of these historical periods
represents different moments in Italian capitalism and reflect (and
rework) its contradictions in different ways. While, in a book of this
breadth, a detailed account of the economic and political conditions
of these three periods is not feasible, I note that, given papal tem-
poral power, the Catholic response to the Reformation of necessity
had political and economic implications; that Puccini lived through a
period of political and economic upheaval (including the Great War
and the birth of Italian fascism) in which often violent attempts were
made—from the colonization of Libya to Fascist strike breaking—
to redress Italy’s “underdevelopment”; that the films of the three
directors I discuss—Gianni Amelio, Aurelio Grimaldi, and Ferzan
Özpetek—overtly explore contemporary issues: immigration and cul-
tural differences within Italy; coping with Italy’s Fascist past; con-
temporary Italian gay subjectivities; changing definitions of Italian
masculinity—and the relationships of all to one another.
INTRODUCTION 9
All of these artists are also noted for having transgressed the
boundaries of Italian sexuality or gender. The question of whether
or not Caravaggio had sexual relationships with men has dominated
much scholarship on the painter, as has whether or not his paint-
ings can appropriately be labeled homoerotic. Additionally, the image
that has grown around the painter is that of the prototypically histri-
onic Italian male, throwing plates of artichokes at innocent waiters,
hurling insults at his fellow painters, making love to both men and
women, carousing, dueling, and running from the law.
Accused of musical effeminacy by his contemporaries—despite
his numerous and public love affairs with women, even after his
marriage—Puccini identified strongly with his musical heroines and
produced some of opera’s most famous female characters. In pursuit
of queerness, this project employs a phrase like “male melodrama”
somewhat indiscriminately, particularly in the case of Puccini. For
while I discuss his representations of male characters, I am also inter-
ested in his heroines and the way that, however inadvertently, he—
like Pirandello before him—provides us with images of women that
are more contradictory than they first appear.
Özpetek’s sexuality was on the minds of fans of his early film
Hamam, and his movies return repeatedly to the theme of male
homosexuality. While today Özpetek is “out,” he resists having his
work circumscribed by the label gay, and Laura Leonardo has argued
that, while, in Italy, his films are marketed as mainstream, in the
United States, they are promoted to a niche market of gay men. As
for the other directors, Amelio has only recently come out; as of yet,
I have not located any public discussion of Grimaldi’s sexuality, other
than that he has a daughter. My analysis is not biographical, however,
but one that explores the ways in which Italian queerness has left its
traces in the work of these artists and the relationship between these
articulations of a queer masculinity and the aesthetics of the melo-
dramatic sensibility.
A discussion of Italian masculinity and/as melodrama risks a
symptomatic repetition of the cliché of the Italian man as passion-
ate, volatile, even histrionic. And the proposition that Italian art is
queer cannot dissociate itself from the modern gay romance between
non-Italian Euro-Americans and their Italian others, a romance with
racialized overtones that risks reinscribing the idea of Italy as “under-
developed.” But rather than replicate essentializing stereotypes, I
argue that the properties that have historically been coded as funda-
mentally “Italian” testify to the centrality of the melodramatic mode
to post-Reformation forms of representation, and not to any particular
natural essence or dehistoricized national character. The attempt to

historicize an affect necessarily courts stereotypes, but, on the one
hand, my focus will be on artistic representations, whose relation-
ship to the lived is complicated and contested. On the other, the cri-
tique of the stereotype is self-contradictory, for it suggests that there
is some imagery that manages to circumvent codes of representation,
allowing the real to shine forth in all its veracity. Like melodrama, it
proposes that, beneath the image, there resides a “real” or “true” that
is immanent in the everyday surface of reality but not yet actualized,
waiting to be unmasked, once the stereotype is stripped away.
Given that the melodramatic sensibility traverses a variety of dif-
ferent artistic and popular forms, my analysis draws on several disci-
plines, subdisciplines, and even antidisciplines. Gender and sexuality
studies have from their inception been crossdisciplinary, and in a
variety of ways: in terms of their objects of study, their methodol-
ogies, and their determination to understand how gender and sex-
uality are articulated across a variety of discourses and institutions.
They have also foregrounded the way in which disciplines authorize
particular speaking subjects and their discourses over and against
others, and responded to this critique by pushing the limits of tra-
ditional disciplinary authority and attempting to open up academic
discourse to a greater heterogeneity. A project on melodrama and
masculinity requires a uni-(Wallerstein) or transdisciplinary approach
(Shapiro).13
By focusing on painting, music, and contemporary film, this study
hopes to augment the rich and impressive body of existing scholar-
ship on Italian film melodrama in particular, much of which touches
upon masculinity, too (see, for example, Landy, Bayman, Wagstaff,
O’Rawe, and Gordon). It contributes to the growing archive of work
on affect, its history, and historicity, and the role, significance, and
meaning of affect in everyday life. Jonathan Flatley, for example,
argues for an analysis of the ways in which the specific experiences
of modernization “work on and through affect” (3–4). He calls his
project “affective mapping”—the attempt to understand the histo-
ricity of affective experience. Like Marcia Landy and Richard Dyer
before him, Flatley explores the role of affect not simply in marshal-
ing consensus but also opposition. As Landy suggests, “Through its
theatricality and operatic character, melodrama, working in tandem
with folklore, draws attention onto the unsettling presence of affect
that exceeds the unity of consensus” (Landy Folklore 16).
Landy’s work is particularly indebted to Antonio Gramsci and his
account of common sense. When read carefully, this philosophy of
INTRODUCTION 11
non-philosophers can reveal “tensions and ambiguities that are at the

heart of consensus” (Landy Folklore 4). Reading melodramatic texts
closely allows us to look for fissures in dominant ideologies and, in
the process, to reopen to its contradictions and contingencies the his-
torical moment in which such texts initially circulated; it also permits
us to glimpse the traces of these ideologies as they inform our present
moment.
Rosemary Hennessy has instead written of “affect as a vital social
medium” (211). She argues,
Affective potential is included in what Marx means by labor—that is,

the capacity to satisfy and freely develop vital human needs, a capacity
that is always socially exercised . . . affective needs are part of the human
potential for “self-realization” that Marx often refers to when he con-
tends that the development of human needs is historically contingent
on the development of human potential. (215)
The present study highlights some of the vital social needs that par-
ticular melodramatic texts address, in both the moment of their cre-
ation and the present.
Flatley locates in modernist aesthetics “the desire to find a way to
map out and get a grasp on the new affective terrain of modernity”;
that terrain is melancholy (4). Reading Walter Benjamin, he suggests
that “a range of historical processes, such as urbanization, the com-
modity, new forms of technologized war, and factory work required
people to shield themselves from the material world around them,
to stop being emotionally open to that world and the people in it”
(Flatley 69). This shielding or loss of experience results in a collec-
tive and historically specific affect, melancholy. In terms of gender,
the fictive threat to masculinity modernization unleashed (and per-
haps continues to pose, in part the result of capitalism unbounded)
is particularly pertinent to the case of Italy, whose modern history is
marked by doubts about the Italian male’s ability to match the virility
of his European counterparts. Such a loss refers to no real object, no
secure sense of masculinity alleged to have disappeared. This is true,
however, of all lost objects; the fictitious nature of the loss renders it
no less powerful as fantasy.
An account of melancholy as resulting from irreparable, conscious
loss is somewhat at odds with Freud’s understanding of mourn-
ing and its eventual “giving up” of the cathexis to the lost object,
whereby “deference for reality gains the day” (Freud “Mourning”
166). Freud’s account of the difference between mourning and
melancholia, wherein, in the latter, the mourner experiences uncon-

scious loss (166) and displays something “which is lacking in grief—
an extraordinary fall in his self-esteem, an impoverishment of his ego
on a grand scale” (167)—is incomplete. For, in the case of collec-
tive modern devastations like (neo)colonialism, the World Wars, the
Holocaust, the carnage resulting from military occupations and the
so-called War on Terror, or HIV, melancholy seems not a pathology
but rather an appropriate psychical response involving both conscious
and unconscious processes. (On mourning and HIV, see Crimp.)
As Flatley suggests, for Benjamin, “Melancholia is not a problem to
be cured; loss is not something to get over and leave behind” (64).
Or, as Lisa Saltzman, in her writing on art after Auschwitz, puts it,
“Mourning, much like its presumptive other, melancholia, is a con-
tinual process of repetition, of remembering, repeating, and working
through” (91). Saltzman continues, “The possibility of triumphantly
completing the work of mourning . . . is a resolution that perhaps
always remains unattainable, in a state of perpetual deferral” (91).
And for victims of historical trauma, the fall in self-esteem Freud
describes is hardly pathological.
Flatley specifically argues for the importance of “an antidepressive,
political, and politicizing melancholia” (27), one whose purpose is to
historicize affect and allow a collective recognition of and response
to it. He specifically privileges aesthetic experiences that produce in
the spectator a sense of “self-estrangement,” a defamiliarization of
one’s own (melancholic) emotional life that makes possible “a new
kind of recognition, interest, and analysis” (80). Following Adorno,
he suggests that, in its noncoincidence with the historical present,
the artwork provides the conditions of possibility of alternative ways
of seeing (81; see also Shapiro). At the same time, from the point of
view of its reception in particular, the artworks “bring affects into
existence in forms and in relation to objects that otherwise might not
exist” (Flatley 81).
Melodrama performs precisely this function. As a sensibility coter-
minous with the modern, it is a response to this self-shielding. Often
overtly thematizing melancholy, it is perhaps unique in its attention
to both the affective and corporeal dimensions of modern experience.
While it is fundamentally about loss, it also evidences a protest against
present conditions and suggests the potential to use the aesthetic to
rearrange our present affective attachments and produce new rela-
tionships between affect and need.
According to one of its major theorists, “Melodrama becomes
the principal mode for uncovering, demonstrating, and making
INTRODUCTION 13
operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era” (Brooks

Melodramatic 15). As such, it is by definition melancholy. For all
melodrama necessarily acknowledges the loss of certainty guaranteed
by religious faith, the loss that is the precondition of modernity.
Rather than in late nineteenth-century modernism (the period that
Flatley examines), however, Peter Brooks locates this loss of faith in
the wake of the French Revolution. (See also Rahill xiv.) I will argue
instead that the Catholic response to the Reformation anticipates and
prefigures the crisis of religious faith Brooks and others describe. We
can see the signs of this crisis in Caravaggio, who is, according to some
critics, the inventor of modern painting (André Bern-Joffroy, cited in
André). If the Counter-Reformation was “reactionary,” it was in part
a response to the however unintended secularization of society that
Brad S. Gregory has argued was inaugurated by the Reformation.14
But this Catholic response was not “counter” in the sense of sim-
ply trying to dismantle progressive changes and return to the status
quo. It included a variety of strategies, some of them a concession to
Protestant critiques.
Rather than the French Revolution, then, I suggest that the melo-
dramatic sensibility emerges out of the Baroque and its aesthetic,
but for reasons similar to those identified by Brooks. By focusing
on Italy, I also complicate not only when the melodramatic sensi-
bility emerges, but where, and, to some extent, why. At least one
influential critic argues that melodrama exists in specific, “national”
incarnations (Elsaesser 69). Brooks produces his account of the ori-
gins of melodrama via a reading of French and Anglophone texts,
however; this account leaves largely unexplored Italian (and German)
contributions.
An analysis of Italian melodrama necessarily raises the issue of the
secularization of Italy, which might logically be dated to the forma-
tion of the new Italian state, 1861. Yet even nineteenth-century dis-
cussions of the possibilities for Italian Unification included debates
concerning the papacy, one suggestion for achieving a united Italy
being the extension of papal temporal power (rather than Savoy rule)
to the entire peninsula. Given the pope’s open hostility to democratic
Italy, however, dating the beginnings of secularization to 1861 is not
implausible, and it is not a coincidence that Italian Jews played a par-
ticularly active political role in the early days of the nation (though
the large communities in Venice and Rome had to wait for 1866 and
1870, respectively, when the two areas became part of a united Italy).
With their normalization of relations between the Vatican and Italy,
the Lateran Pacts of 1929 marked another important moment in the
secularization of the peninsula. Yet these hardly severed the historical

relationship between the papacy and Italy, as they gave Catholicism
an official hold in the Fascist state. Article one, for example, declared
Roman Catholicism the only State religion; this provision remained
in place until the 1984 Concordat. Article thirty-six guaranteed
religious instruction in public primary and secondary schools. This
remained in place even after 1984, though students nominally had
a choice between instruction in Catholicism and something else. It
wasn’t until 2013 that students were allowed to opt out of the hour
of religious instruction. On some level, then, any attempt to date
secularization can be for heuristic purposes only.15
The Catholic Church’s profound influence on Italian culture—as
one theorist argues, “The church is the sacred space of Italian civic
and cultural life”—requires us to revise Brooks’s definition of melo-
drama and its relationship to the sacred in general and Catholicism
in particular (Berezin 2). And, obviously, historical change does
not occur in one fell swoop. Shapiro paraphrases Fernand Braudel’s
insight that “the history of forms is conjectural rather than linear. As
new forms develop, some of the older ones persist rather than being
wholly surpassed” (107). This is as true of aesthetics as it is of ways
organizing the division of labor or sex.
Furthermore, the scientific revolution was not simply judged anti-
thetical to Catholicism—at least not initially. We might rewrite Brooks,
then, to suggest that melodrama is an extended problematization of
the sacred, a problematization that, in different historical moments,
is connected to religious belief in different ways. Cawelti has similarly
argued that melodrama is characterized by religious concerns all the
way into the twentieth century, at which point the “moral universe” it
portrays is one from which God has been largely banished—though,
once again, Italy complicates even this conclusion. Bayman has instead
suggested that, in Italy, the “economic miracle” caused a waning of
the melodramatic sensibility, an argument that suggests the ways in
which capitalism depends upon secularization to the degree that reli-
gion not interrupt the flow of labor, goods, and capital on which cap-
italism depends (The Operatic). In my final chapter, I briefly suggest
the way capitalism’s increasing commodification of identity requires
a transformation in melodrama, a camp sensibility being a redeploy-
ment of the melodramatic in an age in which the managing of affect
has reached a particularly fevered pitch—the prototypically straight
white male increasingly finding his body the object of his own critical
gaze, for example, and employers seeking to control to an ever greater
degree the emotions of workers in the service industry (Hennessy).
INTRODUCTION 15
To state this in the strongest terms, my initial claim is that

melodrama is invented in Italy, and a great deal of Italian cultural
production is melodramatic. Not “essentially,” but for reasons his-
torically specific to Italy: the presence of the papacy and its defense of
Catholicism (which during the Baroque also brought renewed threats
to Italian Judaism). Because of the papacy, the Reformation and the
Catholic response to it were not only religious but also political and
aesthetic events. Outside of Italy, it is sometimes easy to forget the
hundreds of years of the papacy’s rule. Even today, Catholicism con-
tinues to shape Italian melodrama and its representations of mascu-
linity. As recently as Christmas of 2013, Rai Uno television ran a
melodramatic adaptation of the life of (St.) Filippo Neri, at the finale
of which, following Filippo’s death, a little girl runs smiling through
the streets, and yelling happily, “Filippo is alive in paradise!” (Rai
Uno also regularly invites Catholic religious figures to participate
in its morning news and afternoon talk shows.) At the same time,
amidst the lingering economic crisi and in a postmodern version of
the numerous papal Jubilee years, Roman merchants look to the pope
(and his “gentle” masculinity forged in the image of Francis of Assisi)
to draw additional pilgrims to Italy.
And Italian life has frequently been imagined as theater. Cultural
practices such as la bella figura and the evening walk through the
center of town are instances of public display wherein participants
are both actors and audience, positions made interchangeable by the
fluidity of the street or piazza and the multiple and shifting vantage
points it makes possible. With its focus on the visible, the Baroque
also fosters these multiple gazes—one thinks, for example, of that
most emblematic of Baroque sculptures, Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa,
and its complex experimentations with seeing, being seen, and even
closing one’s eyes.
To revise Brooks, then: in the Italian context, the melodramatic
subject is not the secular humanist, but rather the “lapsed” Catholic,
for example, or the “cultural” Jew—that is, the doubter, who in the
face of uncertainty still occasionally performs certain motions of belief
in the hopes that an immanent truth will reveal itself.
Melodrama and M ELODR ÀMM A

Any study of melodrama in the Italian context must confront the
problem of terminology. Melodràmma in Italian typically refers to
musical drama; it is a synonym for opera lirica. The term was bor-
rowed from Italy by both the French, to designate plays like those
of Pixérécourt (Garreau 124; Brooks Melodramatic 14) and the

Germans, who used it originally to refer to drama accompanied by
music (Dent 222).
Scholars suggest that Rousseau was the first to use “melodrama” to
refer to spoken drama accompanied by music (Brooks Melodramatic
14); some specifically credit him with inventing the genre in 1762
with his Pygmalion (Kirby 324; Warrack). The Italian word for this
genre is melologo. Italianists, however, have also used the term melo-
drama (or melodràmma) to refer not to opera but to drama set to
music (Lunari 478; Oldani and Yanitelli; Rossi; Tomlinson 571), the
genre invented not by Rousseau in the eighteenth century, but by
Italians in the late 1500s. It constituted a kind of proto-opera (Oldani
and Yanitelli 24).16 In fact, the term melodràmma only came to refer
to opera relatively late in Italian theater history—the seventeenth cen-
tury. Prior to this, it referred, in the Camerata Florentine (a sixteenth-
century group of Italian intellectuals and musicians; Palisca) and in
Monteverdi, to “a theatrical form that resulted in a perfect fusion
of poetry and music, according to the notion of ‘recitar cantando’”
(literally, to act singing; Savio “Melodràmma”).17
Referring specifically to Giovanni Battista Guarini (1538–1612),
Joseph Rossi references the “fantastic and spectacular shows of the
Venetian melodrama” of the late Renaissance/early Baroque, here
using the word to designate the pastoral play and its mixture of tragic
and comic elements (60–61; Lunari also cites the pastoral play as an
example of melodràmma; 478).18 Guarini’s 1590 Il pastor fido was
not an opera libretto, but Guarini’s texts were set for madrigal by
Monteverdi and later served as opera libretti for G. F. Handel. As one
critic pertinently asks of the audience who first heard Monteverdi’s
1607 Orfeo, considered to be among the first operas,
What frames of reference might this audience have had for what they
were witnessing? . . . And would they have seen the work primarily as a
new embodiment—this one with continuous music instead of simply
interspersed musical interludes—of that genre called pastoral drama,
of which Tasso’s Aminta and Guarini’s Il pastor fido would have been
most familiar? Or would they have seen it as similar to those myth-
inspired musical spectacles called intermedi that characteristically were
inserted between the acts of spoken plays during the preceding cen-
tury? (Lindenberger 220)19
Complicating the problem is that a genre of opera called melodràmma

pastorale eventually developed, one early example being Antonio
Lotti’s 1709 Ama più chi men si crede (Selfridge-Field 291).
INTRODUCTION 17
Another Italianist credits Gian Rinaldo Carli, and not Rousseau,

with being among the first to use the term melodrama (Cavallini 14):
Above all Carli reclaims the approval of the Renaissance public for
fabulous-mythological plays, the joining together of song and allegory
to the point of being able to be considered little melodramas (“a new
genre of theatrical composition, which included music, and mythology
provided the subject; and what’s more can be called melodrama: of
which . . . the ancient Greeks and Latins had no idea).” (Cited in Cavallini
6n5; the quotation comes from a text of Carli’s delivered in 1744 and
first published in 1746, sixteen years prior to Rousseau’s play)
Additionally, Carli refers to Poliziano’s Orfeo (which was not an opera

as we understand the term) as “a brief plot, but . . . with a variation of
the meter, and of the scenes, that we might call it the first outline of
melodrama” (cited in Cavallini 15n39).
In Venice’s Church of Sant’Alvise, English commentary argues that
painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) borrows from con-
temporary Venetian “melodrama” the costuming of certain figures
in his paintings of scenes of the Passion. Here, the word apparently
refers to what a twentieth-century critic called “melodràmma gio-
coso . . . con musica” (Zardo 51), though, in its own time period, it was
sometimes referred to as “una commedia in musica” (Zardo, quoting
Gasparo Gozzi). Such works included music by Giacomo Rust (whose
La Contadina in corte, also referred to as a “dramma giocoso,” fea-
tured a libretto by Niccolò Tassi) and Nicola Calandra, called Frascia
(whose works include I tre matrimoni). At this particular time in
its history, the lines separating speaking, recitative, and singing were
not as distinct as they are sometimes considered to be today. Even
Mozart wrote speaking roles, as in the case of Pasha Selim of The
Abduction from the Seraglio (while even Romantic operas sometimes
contain spoken phrases). Complicating the problem is the fact that, in
the settecento, the word “operetta” surfaces, but not to refer to a sung
work (Zardo 98).
Even as a term for opera, “melodràmma” can be confusing, as not
all operas are labeled in this way. Tosca, for example, is the only opera of
Puccini’s that he himself called a “melodràmma.” Alfredo Colombani,
critic of Corriere della Sera, refuted this label, saying, in melodrama,
the confines of the music are extremely less restricted to the exigences
of the rapid, pressing, precipitous action; and the perfumed poetry of
the “melos” has more space to disperse its exquisite fragrance. Here
instead [in Tosca] the musical treatment must impose on itself the
maximum sobriety, therefore the libretto does not allow for conven-
tional musical ornamentation except at only a few points. (Cited in
Girardi Puccini la vita 75)
Italy is not usually understood as having contributed to the develop-

ment of melodrama as Anglophone critics use the term except via
opera. But the long love affair between French and Italian theater
(and the influence of one upon the other) is expressed emblematically
in the relationship between Molière and Goldoni, the latter spend-
ing his final days in France. Translations of French comedies were
performed in Italy in the eighteenth century (Zardo). And we know
that, by the early decades of the nineteenth century, the works of
Pixérécourt were being produced in Italy (Rahill 40), as were those
of the German August von Kotzebue.20 As for the British context,
Dent suggests that “in the early nineteenth century the distinction
between opera and melodrama is but a slight one” (225).
The problem of nomenclature is compounded in the nineteenth
century when the term verismo is used to characterize Italian opera
and literature. For while in English, melodrama is typically under-
stood to be in tension with (if not the antithesis of) realism, in Italy,
melodrama is sometimes conceived of as a characteristic of veristic
literature and opera (Corazzol, Ferrone, Dahlhaus). By 1888, for
example, veristo Luigi Capuana titles one of the short stories in his
Le appasionate “Un melodràmma inedito.” Unfortunately, there is
a critical tendency sometimes in Anglophone criticism to use real-
ism and verismo interchangeably. Carl Dahlhaus also notes that “the
excessive melodrama considered a mark of ‘romanticism’ in the age of
Scribe, Dumas, and Hugo was declared to be ‘verismo’ half a century
later” (353). Italian possesses the terms verismo and realismo (just as
Anglophone critics speak of verisimilitude and realism, sometimes
used interchangeably, sometimes not), and, in the twentieth century,
what Anglophone film scholars call melodrama is referred to in Italian
as strappalacrime—literally, tear-wringer.
Melodrama, Class, Power

Cutting across distinctions of high and low culture, melodramatic
literature’s emergence is coterminous with capitalism and the efforts
of an emergent bourgeoisie to distinguish itself from other class for-
mations, register its protest against the “despotic” power of both aris-
tocracy and clergy, and in the process, consolidate its own identity.
But what begins as a bourgeois form, both in terms of audience and
INTRODUCTION 19
ideology, soon traverses class lines. The new bourgeois class attempts
to legitimate itself by claiming, in the language of the Enlightenment,
to speak for all—while still maintaining conditions of scarcity for
some. Out of this contradiction, “bourgeois and popular cultural tra-
jectories were brought together by the peculiar social and institutional
circumstances of theatrical entertainment from the mid-eighteenth to
mid-nineteenth century. Under such conditions earlier folk and cur-
rent ‘popular’ traditions overlaid, or coalesced with, ‘establishment’
dramaturgical and fictional structures” (Gledhill 1987; 18)—an
instance of the tendency of capitalism (and a nascent nationalism) to
make use of historically prior forms.
In his prison notebooks, Antonio Gramsci asks, “How to com-
bat the taste of the Italian masses for melodramatic literature, but
especially poetry?” (many Italian operas were also written in verse).
Reading across the philosopher’s works, however, Landy argues that,
like Brooks after him, Gramsci traces melodrama to democratic
France (“Culture and Politics” 178). On the one hand, Gramsci
worries that melodrama may not speak for the needs of the Italian
subaltern classes; he is troubled by the tendency of Italian writers to
resist indigenous forms and embrace European ones instead (Landy
“Culture and Politics” 179). On the other, he recognizes traces of
melodrama of a popular character in, for example, provincial funeral
oratorio.
Carlotta Sorba has charted some of the ways in which Italy was
not immune to a trans-European “democratization” of theater that
occurred in tandem with the rise of Enlightenment thought, whereby
“the idea of educational theater became linked to the theorization of
a theater for all, involving a direct communication with the masses
that no other art seemed able to guarantee” (402). While traditional
Italian theater historiography treats Jacobin-inspired reform as short-
lived (405), Sorba suggests that “its effects were more enduring”
(407). These included, during the Restoration, an increase in the
number of civic or social (as opposed to private, commercial) theaters
(409). While such theaters maintained class divisions by allocating
different seating (or standing) areas to the aristocracy, bourgeoisie,
and working class—and separate entrances to the various areas—
ticket prices were kept low. These theaters “became the principal pub-
lic and civic space and owed their existence to communal subsidies
and to the annual fees paid by the box-holders” (409). This was also
true of nineteenth-century opera (Körner “Music”).
Critics also suggest a historical transformation of melodrama in the
nineteenth century, whereby its specific class appeal was complicated: as
Christine Gledhill contends, “With the passing of hierarchical social

relationships went also the traditional values and ways of life that had
given society its cohesion. Because of its multivalency, this loss was
shared by new entrants to the middle class, the emerging working class,
the rural labourer and by women across classes” (Home 20). Gledhill
continues, “Melodrama’s affective and epistemological structures
were deployed, within the constraints of the dominant socioeconomic
frameworks, to embody the forces and desires set loose by, or resisting,
the drives of capitalism” (Home 21). As other theorists have suggested,
capitalism’s “de-territorialization” and “re-territorialization” of desire
(Deleuze and Guattari) produce contradictions such as, for example,
the “emergence” of modern forms of gay identity in spite of homopho-
bia (D’Emilio) and the entrance of women into spaces from which
they were formerly excluded by sexism—for example, the factory.
In a germinal essay on the specific historical appeal of enter-
tainment, Richard Dyer proposes an overdetermining relationship
between capitalism and what he identifies as the five utopian sensibili-
ties entertainment offers to its spectators. According to Dyer, enter-
tainment as utopia proffers its audience not a model of a utopian world
(à la Thomas More’s Utopia or Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland)
but rather the feelings of utopia. These feelings or sensibilities include
community, abundance, intensity, transparency, and energy.
These sensibilities are genuine human needs. But Dyer understands
such needs not as arising out of some ahistorical human condition but
rather as specific responses to life conditions overdetermined by capi-
talism. Community is thus a response to the fragmentation instituted
by capitalism’s hierarchical, raced, and sexed division of labor; abun-
dance responds to the artificial scarcities that drive profit; transpar-
ency responds to the multiple ways in which capitalism obscures the
relations of production, and so forth.
Entertainment thus provides solutions to problems generated by
capitalism. But these solutions are themselves overdetermined by capi-
talist relations. For example, because capitalism cannot literally afford
to do away with a hierarchal division of labor, in place of community,
capitalism proposes niche identities whereby subjects come to per-
ceive their collective interests as being met by the market (Clarke, E.).
Scarcity is countered with rampant consumerism, and so forth.
Extending Dyer’s analysis, we might suggest that what distinguishes
melodrama from other forms of entertainment is its hyperinvestment
in two of the sensibilities Dyer defines: intensity and transparency. As
a respite from the controlled expression of affect capitalism demands
in everyday life, melodrama as entertainment proposes a world where
INTRODUCTION 21
emotional excess is the norm and “authentic” feelings are legible rather
than veiled. Without attending to this relationship between capitalism
and aesthetic forms, Brooks nonetheless suggests that melodrama
represents a victory over repression. We could conceive this repression

as simultaneously social, psychological, historical, and conventional:
what could not be said on an earlier stage, nor still on a “nobler”
stage, nor within the codes of society. The melodramatic utterance
breaks through everything that constitutes the “reality principle,” all
its censorships, accommodations, tonings-down. Desire cries aloud its
language in identification with full states of being. (Melodramatic 41)
Brooks’s words echo Marcuse’s concept of surplus repression, which,

however flawed, (Hennessy), still opens up the possibilities of a his-
toricization of desire. In the world of melodrama, “Desire triumphs
over the world of substitute-formations and detours [those “solutions”
Dyer suggests entertainment typically provides], it achieves plenitude
of meaning” (Brooks Melodramatic 41). Hence melodrama’s reputa-
tion for being “excessive,” even in terms of other forms of entertain-
ment and the release of affect they make possible.
However, melodrama’s investment in transparency is always coun-
tered by an acknowledgment of the potential failure of the visible to
reveal the truth; it is thus always straining against the limits of the
visible. Its attempts to reveal the authentic are always in tension with
the variety of ways in which capitalism depends upon the veiling of
the empirical. Melodramatic excess is an attempt to get at a truth that
is not easily revealed. Unlike “pure” entertainment as Dyer defines it,
its goal is not simply to produce pleasure but to remind us of the gap
between what is and what could be. While, as Dyer insists, all enter-
tainment of necessity points to that gap, melodrama does so overtly.
As a result, its utopianism can even take the form of the release of
negative emotions and that odd combination of relief and sorrow that
accompanies the shedding of tears.
Melodrama and Allegory

Melodrama strains not only at the visible but also at the limits of
signification itself:
The narratives generate emotional intensity involving not only the fig-
ures within the melodrama but the external audience, and affect is
conveyed primarily through gesture, music, and iconography which
are indicative of the limitations of conventional verbal language to
express the intense psychic and bodily pains or pleasures experienced

by the characters. (Landy Imitations 15)21
As I suggest via a reading of Benjamin, rather than being mimetic,

melodrama is more productively considered as allegory in that it is
not chiefly an imitation of reality but rather the deployment of cer-
tain reality-effects in the effort to signify a “something else” that
cannot be reconciled in the symbol. Rather than advancing from the
particular to the general, allegory progresses from the general to the
particular. Melodramatic texts shift the spectator’s body precisely in
part due to this movement, the generalized representation of affect
standing in for the spectator’s own particular experience.
Affects “are always experienced in relation to an object or objects.
Indeed, affects need objects to come into being” (Flatley 16). Hence
the reflexivity of melodrama, its “objecthood” highlighted at the
expense of an erasure of the traces of its enunciation that typically
characterizes the realist text. It is thus a critical error to fault melo-
drama for its lack of verisimilitude and to read it as a “failed” realism
(or a failed classicism, the other side of realism; while classicism locates
the true in the idealized, realism locates it in the concrete). Caravaggio,
Puccini, and even Özpetek have been accused of producing works that
aspired to realism and yet on some level failed, while Caravaggio and
Puccini were also labeled too consumed with the actual or quotidian.
The films of both Amelio and Grimaldi have been discussed as owing
a debt to Italian neorealism, but what constitutes neorealism and how
we might define its relationship to Hollywood film production is itself
today a highly contentious question (O’Leary and O’Rawe; Rocchio).
All of these artists also have complex relationships to the modern,
but in their work, we find a collocation of masculinity, the modern,
and melodrama. Admittedly, the way each of these artists is “modern”
is different and, in calling them each modern, I am emphasizing their
difference from some of their contemporaries. That Caravaggio’s work
was sometimes judged in his own time as not being in keeping with
dominant expectations concerning painting is obvious, his painting
being contrasted not only with that of the Mannerists but also with
the classicism of Annibale Carracci. The question of Puccini’s rela-
tionship to operatic verismo continues to be debated, as does the level
of modernist reflexivity in the contemporary films I discuss.
Melodrama and Italian Queers

Özpetek additionally faces the assumption that the obligation of the
contemporary gay filmmaker is, first of all, to “be” gay in a way that is
INTRODUCTION 23
immediately recognizable, and, second, to produce “positive,” “real-

istic” images of gay people (and to employ conventions of cinematic
realism, however reworked via the various challenges to Hollywood
realist cinema that occurred in the postwar years, from Italian neore-
alism to the French New Wave to Third Cinema). Further complicat-
ing the picture is the question of Özpetek’s “Italianness,” given that
his cultural identity is sometimes named, even in the popular press, as
“Turkish-Italian-Spanish” or any combination of the three (though,
admittedly, given his name and that his films employ Turkish cultural
forms such as sung music, the “Turkish” usually is prioritized. This
despite the fact that, in most of his films, a majority of the actors hail
from Italy and are often quite famous there, and the language of the
script is primarily Italian).
In the 2013 film issue of The Italianist, Antonio C. Vitti refer-
ences recent Italian films that are transdisciplinary in their overt
focus on Italian politics and socioeconomic issues. Vitti argues that,
in this regard, Amelio’s cinema has been unfairly overlooked. As we
will see, Derek Duncan provides a vocabulary via which to under-
stand Amelio’s films as queer for the very reasons Vitti cites. Grimaldi
made a series of films in the 1990s, including Aclà, that were read by
some critics as queer (even if these critics did not employ the term).
For example, in 1999, William Van Watson argued that
the cinema of Aurelio Grimaldi both destabilizes and reaffirms the

concept of an Italian national cinema. It challenges national identity
by privileging regional specificity and constructing Italian-ness as an
oppositional discourse. This filmography also explodes the machismo-
based construction of masculinity that has served as a model for the
social structure of the country. Sicilian society proffers Grimaldi this
model in extremis, with its misogynist, homophobic, and homoerotic
underpinnings conspicuously exposed.
With its emphasis on the problematizing of national identity and link-

ing this problematization to categories of sex and gender, Van Watson’s
account of Grimaldi’s films interestingly prefigures Duncan’s recent
definition of queer cinema as deconstructing the Italianate.
The fact that Amelio only recently “came out”—and did so as
both “gay” and “omosessuale”—problematizes my calling him queer
only if one accepts the binary logic of homosexual/heterosexual; it
is only if one assumes that Amelio was always already homosexual
that his “coming out” seems not queer but gay. However, keeping
the “queer” free from the specter of the “gay” is logically impossible,
for the former finds its conditions of possibility in the latter, and a
“queerness” that policed its own boundaries for any signs of a residual
homosex would be self-defeating.
Furthermore, in light of the contemporary reification of gay iden-
tity, there is something queer about the lateness with which Amelio
seems to have arrived at his own coming out party—not simply in
terms of the length of his career, but also his age. Given his films,
queer spectators for years have “known” Amelio’s open secret, and, as
the director himself put it, “At my age [to come out] would be a little
late, maybe ridiculous” (quoted in “Gianni Amelio”). These locutions
remind us that to be perceived as sexually active in middle age renders
one both “ridiculous” and queer. Particularly interesting is Amelio’s
remark that his new film Felice chi è diverso tells the story of his own
homosexuality and that of the many “men who were young when
homosexuals didn’t exist, except those living a clandestine, dreaded,
persecuted, mocked life.” Deliberately or otherwise, such a remark
acknowledges the historical contingency of identity categories. 22
In the first chapter, I review debates around Caravaggio’s aesthetic
both to introduce the predominant characteristics of melodrama and
to suggest the ways in which, responding to the Reformation and
the crisis in Catholicism it signaled, as well as to the Copernican and
Galilean Revolutions, the melodramatic sensibility is anticipated by
his paintings. I then move to a discussion of Caravaggio’s representa-
tions of the male body and the ways in which they articulate mascu-
linity via melodrama, particularly in their representations of the body
of Christ.
My discussion of Puccini will look at two particular works, Tosca
and La Rondine, in order to consider how the melodramatic sensibil-
ity might be conveyed via music. Tosca was judged a critical failure
precisely because it was considered “overly” melodramatic, while crit-
ics did not seem to know what to make of La Rondine’s syncretic
generic status. My argument is that both of these operas rework, in
particularly modern ways, the conventions of earlier theatrical melo-
drama. This leads me also to take up the question of Puccini’s mod-
ernism, as well as the means whereby the melodramatic sensibility is
conveyed musically.
The films of Amelio, Grimaldi, and Özpetek invite a discussion
of the importance of melodrama for queers. The release of pent-up
affect, theatricality, a sense of life’s injustice, the struggle to bring
the good to light—all of these suggest why melodrama might have
appealed historically to emergent gay and lesbian subjects of the
West. So what happens to the melodramatic sensibility when histori-
cal understandings of sexual subjectivity shift? While Amelio and
INTRODUCTION 25
Grimaldi combine, sometimes uneasily, the melodramatic sensibility

with a more analytical style of filmmaking, Özpetek’s films provide
compelling instances of what happens to filmic representations of
masculinity when melodrama meets camp.
From its generation to its conclusion, a number of people have
provided invaluable advice on this project. Given its transdisciplinary
scope, I have had to rely on colleagues from a variety of different
disciplines to assist me, and their generosity has reminded me of how
vital it is to develop a community of scholars with whom to share
one’s thoughts. The idea for a book on Italian melodrama and mas-
culinity came to me as a result of discussions with Louis Bayman.
Throughout the process of writing, he has offered generous feedback,
and the debt of gratitude I owe to him as a friend and colleague is
substantial. Via her fabulous cooking and the lively conversation that
occurred over our many meals together, Luciana Bohne once again
provided intellectual and bodily sustenance as I worked through my
ideas. Present and former colleagues at Penn State offered various
kinds of support: Brian Curran, Sharon Dale, and Franchesca Fee
provided valuable advice on the Caravaggio chapters; Janet Neigh and
Mara Taylor read early drafts of the proposal and, at a crucial moment
in the project’s development, helped me to figure out what I was
doing and why it mattered. Will Daddario, Gabrielle Dietrich, Dan
Frankfurter, Matt Levy, Joshua Shaw, Andrew Sydlik, Gary Viebranz,
and Joanne Zerdy each provided invaluable insights.
Reading an earlier draft of this work, Christopher Braider nudged
me to look again at Walter Benjamin on the Baroque. Gaoheng Zhang
generously shared with me his fine work on Amelio. The chapters
on Puccini benefited from lively exchanges with Ben Earle; Deborah
Amberson also generously shared her work on Puccini with me, and
Roger Parker and Axel Körner also steered me in a productive direc-
tion. My brother and colleague, Salvatore Champagne, offered vital
comments on the Puccini chapters and helped me find whenever pos-
sible the correct musical terms to express what I was hearing; in the
chapter on La Rondine, Howard Lubin also offered assistance in this
regard. Any errors, however, are my own.
The Caravaggio chapter greatly benefited from a research grant
from the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities that
allowed me to travel to Malta and Sicily, and Drs. Steve Hicks and
Bob Light of Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, also generously
provided additional funds for research and travel. Several journal edi-
tors offered valuable commentary on earlier versions of sections of the
manuscript, including Nicoletta Marini-Maio of g/s/i/ and Catherine
O’Rawe of The Italianist (whose excellent contribution to this series I

discovered only once my book was already in production). In Perugia,
Dottoressa Angela Margaritelli of the Centro Studi Teatro Stabile
and the staff at the Biblioteca Comunale Augusta proved extremely
patient as they helped me navigate their respective institutions, and
the Caffè di Roma provided a warm place to work—and free Internet
access—when everything else was closed.
While acknowledging the enormous debt that analyses of gen-
der owe to feminism, queer, and women’s studies, I am particularly
excited to be publishing a work on Italy in a series on global mascu-
linities. The editors of the series, Michael Kimmel and Judith Kegan
Gardiner, offered me feedback on the initial proposal that proved
absolutely invaluable in terms of completing the project, and my edi-
tor at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull, and her assistant, Ryan Jenkins, have
been extremely helpful throughout the process of bringing the book
to print. Production Assistant Jeff LaSala was a godsend. An anony-
mous reader’s report provided generous comments and was a model
of scholarly assistance and collegiality.
Finally, I must thank my marito, Richard Krone, who has always
proven extremely patient when it comes to allowing our life to be
interrupted by my passionate attachment to this topic and these par-
ticular works of melodrama. For the past ten years or so, his love,
generosity, forthrightness, and work ethic have taught me much, and
it is to him that I dedicate this book.
CH A P T ER 1
Caravaggio and the Melodramatic

Sensibility
Introduction
There is perhaps no painter who has ignited as much passion as
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610)—both during his
lifetime and beyond. Following years of neglect, Caravaggio was
rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, when both his art and life
seemed ready-made for a flourishing Romantic sensibility (Warwick
“Introduction” 14).1 With the destruction in World War II of a
St. Matthew and the Angel and the 1969 theft of a Palermo Nativity,
rediscovery of “lost” paintings like Dublin’s Taking of Christ, and
controversies over the authenticity of others (the Genoa Ecce Homo,
for example), the past century compounds our own melodramatic
attachments to the painter.
Yet despite this hyperinvestment—David Stone calling him “a cult
figure”—art historians have struggled to name Caravaggio’s aesthetic
(36). As Creighton E. Gilbert argues, “Although there is broad agree-
ment to reject the time-worn tag of simple naturalism . . . modern
writers have not found a replacement easy” (79). He continues, “Yet
one proposal assigns to the artist a synthesis of natural and classi-
cal.”2 Another critic notes Caravaggio’s combining of the naturalistic
and theatrical, his sensibility “halfway between the quotidian and the
symbolic . . . the literal and moral” (Sgarbi 32).3 A third similarly finds
in Caravaggio both “naturalistic modeling” and “the highly theatri-
cal construction of pictorial narratives” (Schütze 26). Michael Fried
reads the artist’s style as a naturalism that paradoxically thematizes
“reflection as such” (Moment 50).
Contrary to Gilbert’s claims, however, many critics continue to
name Caravaggio’s aesthetic as either realist or naturalist.4 A. D. Wright
describes the painter’s work as “a simple exercise in realistic description”
(215).5 Richard E. Spear notes Caravaggio’s “marvellous realism” (22);

John Varriano refers to Caravaggio as a realist (21). Charles Dempsey
outlines a seventeenth-century debate in European painting “not con-
fined to an opposition of idealist to naturalist styles” but rather between
two different “naturalistic” styles, Caravaggio’s, one of them (98).6
Perhaps setting the stage for these interpretations, in 1977, John Rupert
Martin claimed that “Caravaggio’s unwavering dedication to naturalism
was recognized by both artists and critics from the very start” (41).7
Limiting my analysis primarily to the paintings with religious sub-
ject matter—typically Caravaggio’s larger canvases, and those that do
not obey Albertian perspectival conventions—I propose naming the
artist’s sensibility melodramatic.8 Clearly, Caravaggio’s paintings were
not understood in his own day as melodrama; rather, they employed
certain conventions that came to define the sensibility. Given the con-
sensus that the melodramatic sensibility emerges in the wake of the
French Revolution and the growth of a genuinely popular theater, other
critics might find my naming of Caravaggio’s aesthetic anachronistic
(Brooks Melodramatic; Elsaesser; Gledhill Home; Rahill).9 I suggest,
however, certain historical parallels between the Counter-Reformation
and the French Revolution.10 As a riposte to Protestant iconoclasm,
post-Tridentine religious art sought to reassert the role images might
play in Catholic worship; my chief interest is thus in the commissions
available for public contemplation. An analysis of Caravaggio’s paint-
ings also requires a discussion of the Baroque, for, whatever disagree-
ments art historians have concerning his work, the term Baroque is
almost universally applied.11 In the next chapter, I explore Caravaggio’s
melodramatic representations of the male body. Here, I use his paint-
ings to introduce melodrama’s chief characteristics.
Concerning direct evidence of Caravaggio’s influence on literary
melodrama, admittedly, little exists. One critic, however, has suggested
affinities between Victor Hugo, French Romantic painters such as
Delacroix, and the influence of Caravaggio on such painters (Vaughan
333).12 For Romanticism was a reaction against classicism, and, dur-
ing the Romantic period, Caravaggio was understood as anticlassical.
Interestingly, an unsigned 1834 British review of Hugo’s melodrama
Notre Dame specifically compares the novel’s sensibility to the paint-
ings of Caravaggio (and Guercino), arguing that all three were “not
true to nature” and yet capable of producing “violent sympathies and
affections” in the reader (Urban 81; italics in the original).
As for traffic between Italy, France, Germany, and Britain: about a
visit to Rome’s Doria Pamphili palace, German melodramatist August
von Kotzebue mentions “a Neapolitan Lazzarone who sells melons,
CARAVAGGIO AND THE MELODRAMATIC SENSIBILITY 29
by Michelangelo Caravaggio” (Souvenirs 414–415).13 Pixérécourt was

born in Nancy, whose Musée des Beaux-Arts houses a Caravaggio
Annunciation, which the dramatist might have seen (the painting
belonged to the Cathedral from 1742 to the year he left Nancy for
Koblenz, 1793).14 The Death of the Virgin was ultimately bought by
Louis XIV in 1671 and ended up at the Louvre, where Pixérécourt
could conceivably have seen it; the Louvre itself opened as a museum
in 1793.
Melodramatic texts do not simply allegorize strong emotional
states; they generate profound affective responses in their audience
(Landy “Introduction” 15). Caravaggio’s paintings similarly seek to
move their viewers. Many art historians have argued that his works
engage issues of spectatorship in ways that were, in their historical
moment, absolutely unique to Western painting, and it is an under-
statement to say that Caravaggio’s paintings move many spectators
profoundly (and were intended to do so). Caravaggio’s influence
on the history of modern European painting is definitive (Schűtze
26). While never organizing a proper “school” or large workshop,
Caravaggio was (and is) known for the sheer number of public com-
missions in Rome, including those still in situ in churches, as well as
his influence on subsequent painters—a theme explored in a num-
ber of recent exhibitions, including the 2011–2012 Caravaggio and
His Followers in Rome. Despite certain controversies, even in his life
time, many of the paintings were successful; the commission for San
Luigi dei Francesi, for example, met with public acclaim (Puglisi 27).
Following the Jubilee of 1600, Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Pilgrims
was placed in the church of Sant’Agostino, where it was highly pop-
ular (Wright 215).15 The Deposition from the Cross, painted for the
Chiesa Nuova but subsequently moved to the Vatican’s Pinacoteca,
was universally lauded (Langdon 277).
And any investigation of Caravaggio and melodrama would have
to mention the artist’s own life. From the time it was first recorded,
in 1617–21, by Giulio Mancini, then, in 1642, by Caravaggio’s enemy
and rival Giovanni Baglione, and then later, in 1645, by Giovanni
Pietro Bellori, Caravaggio’s biography has been portrayed as a melo-
dramatic narrative, characterized by “a constant struggle for grati-
fication and equally constant blockages to its attainment” (Landy
“Introduction” 14), including street brawls, sex, scenes in restaurants,
wealthy patrons, libel trials, manslaughter, rejected commissions later
bought up by dukes and cardinals, and knighthood and its rescind-
ing, all ending with death in Tuscany.16 It is no wonder his life has
inspired so many books and films.
Louis Bayman has suggested one of the problems of locating in

Caravaggio’s art the melodramatic sensibility. According to Bayman,
The question of transcendence is the main sticking point theoretically

separating the Baroque from melodrama—that unlike the Baroque,
melodrama does not offer transcendence for its fatally bounded char-
acters. In Brooks’ analysis the “other realms” of the “ineffable” to
which melodrama gestures are immanent to rather than beyond the
world of the action. (Personal correspondence)
He also reminds us, however, that it is virtually impossible to distin-

guish between Brooks’s “ineffable that is an elevated realm within the
everyday and one that is beyond it,” since in either case—melodrama
as defined by Brooks; Caravaggio’s paintings—“those realms are sug-
gested rather than actualised.”17 Additionally, throughout its history,
melodrama has offered some of its characters if not transcendence
then at least alleviation of their suffering—via marriage to the “good
guy,” for example. For given that melodrama is a sensibility, it can
traverse genres.
History as Melodrama
As a historical event, the Counter-Reformation is itself melodramatic.
According to Brooks, melodrama “is centrally about repeated obfus-
cations and refusals of the message and about the need for repeated
clarifications and acknowledgments of the message” (Melodramatic 28).
Writings by figures like Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, on the one hand,
and Andreas Karlstadt, on the other, are evidence of this struggle
toward recognition of the true Christian faith and the proper rela-
tionship between painted images and religious devotion. That this
struggle was conceived of by both sides as Manichean is self-evident.
Critics have noted the way in which melodrama typically voices a pro-
test of the weak against the powerful. As a historical event, the Counter-
Reformation is also melodramatic in that all the various players—laity,
secular rulers, papacy—were able to cast themselves in the role of vic-
tim. Early modern Catholicism was not simply a rearguard riposte to
the Reformation, for example; it was in part a response to protests, dat-
ing from the period of pre-Lutheran reformers, of a beleaguered laity
(Wright 30).18 Several of Boccaccio’s well-known tales, for example,
satirize the hypocrisy of mendicant orders (see, for example, “First Day,
Fourth Story” 45–49 and “Third Day, Tenth Story” 276–81).
Secular rulers saw the Counter-Reformation as an attempt by
the papacy both to stake out whatever remained of papal temporal
power and to protect church wealth. This was the perspective of both
Protestant rulers and their Catholic counterparts. The Council of
Trent was characterized by behind-the-scenes maneuvering of Roman
Emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I, France’s Kings Francis I and
Henry II, and Philip II of Spain, some of whom threatened to hold
their own local reform councils (O’Malley, Trent, What Happened).
Catholic reservations about papal power, which continued into the
eighteenth century, ultimately led to the suppression of the Society
of Jesus by the papacy itself (Wright 25). As Wright argues, in the
wake of the Council, secular rulers, “intent on defending traditional
control over the Church in their territories,” attempted to thwart
the reassertion of episcopal authority (12).19 But this is only half the
story, for, as O’Malley reminds us, the Holy Roman Emperor was
“traditionally recognized as the Protector of the Church” and the
two Emperors who ruled during the various meetings of the Council
had a stake in using Trent to establish “political stability and peace in
the Empire” (Trent, What Happened 13).
As for the papacy, thanks to the efforts of secular rulers to circum-
scribe church power, Rome was also able to cast itself in the role of
victim. The Council was a constant tug of war between, on the one
hand, the various popes who ruled during its eighteen years and, on
the other, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (and, later, Ferdinand)
in particular. The Church did in fact attempt to use Tridentine
reform, however unsuccessfully, as an opportunity to reassert its
prerogatives, as in “the long, post-Conciliar attempts by the papacy
to enforce application of the revised bull, In Coena Domini, which
threatened automatic excommunication against all who obstructed
ecclesiastical rights or jurisdiction in any way” (Wright 25). Catholic
historian Gregory argues that “much of post-Tridentine Catholicism
would for centuries be characterized by an intellectually defensive
style, extremely sensitive to any deviations from orthodoxy and obe-
dience” (46).
Melodrama, the Counter-Reformation, and

the Scientific Revolution
The relationship between the Reformation, the Catholic response, and
the scientific revolution is a complicated one, as the continuing contro-
versy around Robert K. Merton’s Science, Technology and Society in 17th-
Century England, with its positing of a historical correlation between
Protestantism and the rise of modern science, suggests (Cohen).
And just as the precise relationship between Caravaggio’s aesthetic
and Counter-Reformation theology is debated, so is the relationship

between the scientific revolution and the post-Tridentine church.
Published in 1543 and dedicated to Pope Paul III, initially,
Copernicus’s De revolutionibus orbium coelestium caused little con-
troversy (Tarnas 251).20 Copernican ideas may even have influenced
Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement (Shrimplin), commis-
sioned in 1534 but completed under Paul in 1541 (Geczy 118). Given
his theory’s contradicting of certain Scriptural passages, initial oppo-
sition to Copernicus actually came from Protestants (Tarnas 252),
and it was not until 1616—six years after Caravaggio’s death, and
the year of Galileo’s first trial—that the Roman Inquisition placed
Copernicus’s work on the Index of Forbidden Books.
As for Galileo, Caravaggio’s patron Del Monte “personally knew
Galileo and was familiar with all the details of his lenses and with one
of the few telescopes” (Saggio 30). Del Monte and his brother, scien-
tist Guidubaldo, helped Galileo find a position at the University of
Pisa (Valleriani 17), and the Cardinal was also instrumental in secur-
ing Medici patronage for him (Gilbert 124). Sybille Ebert-Schifferer
suggests that Caravaggio’s tenebrism, which starts to become promi-
nent with the Saint Catherine painted while living with Del Monte,
“succeeds in reconciling theology and science, in a genial fusion of
the interests of the two Del Monte brothers” (92) and is specifically
the result of the brothers’ interest in optics (91; on Caravaggio and
Galileo, see also Prodi 3; Mascherpa 21–26; Saggio 28; Varriano
137).21 And more than one critic has suggested a relationship between
Galileo’s telescope and Caravaggio’s empiricism, an empiricism that
conflicts with Renaissance religious paintings’ focus on types and
classical improvements on nature (Spike Caravaggio 123).
Even if Caravaggio’s canvases responded to the scientific revo-
lution, then, in light of Del Monte’s patronage, we cannot assume
that there was something overtly anti-Tridentine in his work.
Additionally, the trials of Galileo occurred after Caravaggio’s death,
in 1616, when the scientist was “warned [by the Roman Inquisition]
that he should abandon his position with regard to Copernicanism”
(Feldhay 15), and 1633, when he was found “vehemently suspect of
heresy” (Shea and Artigas 193) and sentenced to house arrest.
Melodrama, Painting, and the Catholic

Response to the Reformation
As a theorist of aesthetic modernism, Jonathan Flatley locates in
art-making “a response to the losses generated by the experience of
modernity” (9). Melodrama has similarly been defined as a response

to a loss, specifically, the loss of religious faith. It comes into being
“in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have
been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of
truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate,
daily, political concern” (Brooks Melodramatic 15). Such a world is
Manichean (see also Landy 15–16; Cawelti 34). Good and evil are
alive and well, but their signifiers have been obscured by changing
understandings of what constitutes truth, where that truth resides,
and how it might be made legible. A sensibility coterminous with the
modern, melodrama seeks to map, I contend, what Flatley terms “the
new affective terrain of modernity” (4).
In locating the emergence of this new affective terrain in
the Counter-Reformation—increasingly called “early modern”
Catholicism (O’Malley “Trent and All” 5)—I emphasize the Baroque
as signaling a crisis and an aesthetic response to that crisis that antici-
pates the Enlightenment in terms of its problematizing of the status
of the sacred. For Caravaggio’s paintings provide a rich example of
early attempts to cope with the new affective terrain unearthed by
both the Reformation and the scientific revolution. They reveal a par-
ticularly modern “inchoate sense of loss of a previous habitation of or
at-homeness in the world” (Fried Moment 104).
According to Brooks, “The [French] Revolution can be seen as
the convulsive last act in a process of desacralization that was set in
motion at the Renaissance, passed through the momentary compro-
mise of Christian humanism, and gathered momentum during the
Enlightenment” (Melodramatic 15). The Protestant Reformation’s
attack on the authority of the papacy and Catholic monarchies is rel-
evant here, for if the Revolution was the last act, the Reformation and
its aftermath were perhaps the end of Act I. It is hardly novel today to
suggest, as Max Weber did in 1905, that the Reformation represents
a moment in the secularization of European culture, even if some
contemporary historians question the extent of that secularization.
That the Counter-Reformation evinces a crisis in the sacred is obvi-
ous. In response, the Catholic Church called for visible signs of faith,
devotion, and submission to the papacy, the Counter-Reformation
fostering “popular marks of identity, and enmity, as with the Marian
cult” (Wright 31). This crisis of meaning to some degree paralleled
the conditions that would ultimately make melodrama possible. To
use Brooks’s words, the late eighteen century’s “shattering of the
myth of Christendom, the dissolution of an organic and hierarchically
cohesive society” that characterizes the “epistemological moment,”
that melodrama “illustrates and to which it contributes,” is prefig-

ured by the Reformation and its aftermath, including the series of
meetings of the Council of Trent and the Thirty Years’ War (Brooks
Melodramatic 14–15). Because Brooks restricts his account of melo-
drama’s origins to drama and fiction, however, he overlooks how the
art of Caravaggio might also constitute “a response to the loss of
the tragic vision,”—one inaugurated, however, not by the French
Revolution but via the Reformation.
Benjamin’s writings on allegory suggest how the Baroque and
the melodramatic sensibility might share a common genealogy,
for, according to Cowan, for Benjamin, “allegory could not exist if
truth were accessible: as a mode of expression it arises in perpetual
response to the human condition of being exiled from the truth that
it would embrace” (114). The Reformation signaled a failure of con-
sensus concerning the means whereby truth might be made legible.
The Catholic response was to propose a new artistic language—one
that inadvertently questioned the ability of art to make visible that
truth.
The employment of allegory is a defining characteristic of both the
Baroque and melodrama. For both depend upon a substantive notion
of truth. The difference between the two is the question of where
that truth resides, a realm where God is still “present” if obscured
(in the case of the Baroque) or one where He is not (in the case of
melodrama). But in order to signify that truth, both the Baroque and
melodrama rely on allegory: “a mode that conceals its relations to its
true objects, allegory shows a conviction that the truth relies else-
where and is not detachable in relations between sign and signified”
(Cowan 113).
The notion of truth that makes allegory possible is, however, “not
the Aristotelian one of truth as an adequatio in the relation between
sign and signified” (Cowan 113)—the same version of truth that ani-
mates both the reading of Caravaggio as a naturalist and the mimetic
theater melodrama opposes. Certain prescriptions around Baroque
painting would seem to counter this argument, but what made
Caravaggio’s paintings unique—and what led to charges of lack of
decorum—was precisely his resorting to allegory rather than mime-
sis. For in the realm of allegory, a recognizable prostitute can in fact
signify the Virgin Mary.
That the Tridentine Catholic Church could still invest convinc-
ingly in painting as a means of encouraging religious devotion sug-
gests one of the differences between the Counter-Reformation and
the Enlightenment, but in the face of the Protestant critique of
images, a new aesthetic—Caravaggio’s melodrama—was required.

Like all melodramatic texts, Caravaggio’s paintings deploy the the-
atrical to refer to a moral universe beyond the visible. To call this
sensibility either realist (or naturalist), classical, or even a merging of
the two, is erroneous. It is to confuse the way Caravaggio composed
his paintings—painting “from life,” on the one hand, and borrowing
from the art of the past, on the other—with his aesthetic. (On this
colocation, see Christiansen “Caravaggio and ‘L’esempio.’”)
Benjamin in fact emphasizes the Baroque’s rejection of classicism
and what he calls its “tendency to apotheosis of existence in the indi-
vidual who is perfect” (160). Caravaggio’s paintings are in part a
critique of classicism, a critique that then gets misnamed as natural-
ism or realism. That is, the “naturalism” of Caravaggio is in part a
by-product of his critique of classicism. Given Caravaggio’s skill as a
painter of still life (in Italian, natura morta, literally “dead nature”),
Benjamin’s account of classicism seems of particular pertinence: “By
its very essence classicism was not permitted to behold the lack of
freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful,
nature” (176).22
But to call Caravaggio’s aesthetic naturalism or realism is also mis-
leading, for his is an overtly fabricated veracity.23 Caravaggio as melo-
dramatist employs techniques of verisimilitude not in order to convey
the sense of an objective, visible reality but rather to gesture toward
the inexpressible.24 Dempsey notes the paradox that the staginess of
Caravaggio’s paintings contributed, in their historical moment, to
their reality-effect, for they sought to displace the idea that the reality
that art ought to imitate was an idealized one (the aesthetic of clas-
sicism) with a focus on the painter’s “own individual experience of
common reality” (Dempsey 93). Caravaggio’s is thus the empiricism
of the stage director, who juxtaposes elements of the physical world
in such a way as to evoke a truth that cannot be found in nature.25 In
Caravaggio’s paintings we see a problematization of mimesis to which
melodrama (and later, modernism) respond.26
As a result, there is, however, in certain images, a juxtaposition of
the natural and the classical, a juxtaposition that is the opposite of a
synthesis in that it parallels, on a formal level, the Manichean world
of melodrama. As Benjamin writes of the Baroque, “Its apotheo-
sis is a dialectical one. It is accomplished in the movement between
extremes” (160). It is this movement between extremes, an apotheo-
sis rather than a synthesis, that describes the relationship between
what has been called Caravaggio’s classicism and naturalism, as well
as suggests the consonance between the Baroque and melodrama.
Baroque Painting and the Visible

Counter-Reformation painting sought, like Protestantism, to foster a
more intimate relationship between the believer and God but, unlike
Protestantism, simultaneously to maintain the importance of relics
and religious paintings as conduits to the spiritual. Art became a com-
promise through which the penitent might come closer to God with-
out the aid of clergy per se but via religious imagery—that imagery,
however, overseen by the church, less through the few and not heavily
prescriptive dictates of the various Councils at Trent themselves, but
instead via the influence of figures like Caravaggio’s patrons Cardinals
del Monte, Mattei, and Borghese, as well as Charles Borromeo, his
nephew Cardinal Federico, and Bolognese Cardinal Paleotti (Olson
71; on Charles Borromeo’s influence, see also Graham-Dixon).27 The
influence of Tridentine and post-Tridentine theology on Caravaggio’s
aesthetic continues to be debated, but given the rejection of religious
images by some Protestants, art had a necessary role to play in the
Catholic response to the Reformation.28
Out of the contradictions that resulted from the Catholic Church’s
attempt to respond to the challenge of Protestantism without sacrific-
ing its own identity came the many facets of the Baroque, from the
alteration of church space to bring the participants closer to the cel-
ebrant—as in churches like Rome’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane
and Sant’Agnese in Agone, as well as the removing of the rood screen
that separated the laity from the high altar—to the awe-inspiring,
over-the-top marbles and tromp l’oeil frescoes of Il Gesu. While the
former responded to the Lutheran heresies by acknowledging room
for reform within Catholicism, the latter reasserted the magnificence
of the Papacy.29 For, as O’Malley suggests, the goals of Trent were
themselves contradictory, not only in the sense of responding to
Luther’s two different challenges—one around the question of salva-
tion, the other around Papal authority—but also the contradictory
agendas of Emperor and Pope (Trent, What Happened 13).30
Brooks argues that melodrama is concerned with “quantities and
entities that have only an uncertain ontology and, especially, an
uncertain visibility” (Melodramatic 21). As I have suggested, one clear
correlation between melodrama and Baroque art is their mutual pre-
occupation with the visible; the latter’s preoccupation reflected, for
example, in the general post-Tridentine obsession with possession and
demons (Wright 42). While Brooks is writing of the way in which, in
a postsacred world, melodramatists take as their subject “the domain
of spiritual forces and imperatives that is not clearly visible within
reality. . . . and which demands to be uncovered, registered, articu-

lated” (20–21), the Reformation provoked a crisis in religious painting
and its ability to perform its historical function of providing concrete
“exterior visualizations” of sacred narratives (Baxandall 45).
According to Michael Baxandall, Renaissance religious paintings
were meant to assist a pious public’s attempts to visualize, internally,
religious stories. As humanist Coluccio Salutati, in characteristic
Neoplatonist fashion, argued, “One enters into understanding and
knowledge of spiritual things through the medium of sensible things”
(cited in Baxandall 42). But exterior visualizations like painting were
meant to complement and not compete with the viewer’s own inter-
nal visualizations. As Baxandall has it, “The fifteenth-century expe-
rience of a painting was not the painting we see now so much as a
marriage between the painting and the beholder’s previous visualiz-
ing activity on the same matter” (45). He adds, Renaissance religious
painting “provided a base—firmly concrete and very evocative in its
patterns of people—on which the pious beholder could impose his
personal detail, more particular but less structured than what the
painter offered” (47).
The most specific Tridentine recommendations concerning
“the sacred use of images” came from the twenty-fifth session of
the Council, held on December 3–4, 1563 (eight years prior to
Caravaggio’s birth): “Moreover, in the invocation of saints, the ven-
eration of relics, and the sacred use of images, every superstition shall
be removed, all filthy lucre be abolished; finally, all lasciviousness be
avoided; in such ways that figures shall not be painted or adorned
with a beauty exciting to lust” (235–36). The writers also insisted
that painters portray “nothing that is profane, nothing indecorous,
seeing that holiness becometh the house of God” (236). Given these
remarks, Counter-Reformation writers like Paleotti and Federico
Borromeo argued that all paintings “should depict religious subjects
or act as moralizing exempla” (Richards 58; on the historical circum-
stances that resulted in the Council’s statement on sacred images, see
O’Malley “Trent, Sacred”).
But Catholicism’s need to propose a riposte to Luther (and Calvinist
iconoclasm) involved, at least in some quarters, a rejection of the gen-
eralized Renaissance painterly depiction recounted by Baxandall in
favor of Caravaggio’s much more precise visual style. In the face of
Protestant attacks, the believer’s internal visualizations could no lon-
ger be trusted to escape the threat of heresy. Varriano reminds us
of post-Tridentine recommendations to capture expressions of agony
and suffering in particular “in the most realistic manner possible”
(75). Other scholars have suggested that Caravaggio’s paintings have

long been considered prototypical of post-Tridentine religious art,
“the ‘pictorial equivalent’ of the meditative process in which the
religious subject was meant to be imagined as if taking place and
experienced by sensory means” (Cooper 24; Chorpenning 150). And
as will be discussed, one topic on which all of Caravaggio’s critics
agree is that his sacred figures looked like real people—so much so
that, at times, the artist’s models could be recognized (Christiansen
“Caravaggio’s ‘Death’ 298).31 This, too, undermined Renaissance
painting’s focus on types.
The emphasis on visibility in melodrama is evidence of an anxiety—
the anxiety of not being able to discern the truth, and thus the con-
stant need for its visible reiteration. As Brooks has it, “Precisely to
the extent that they [melodramatists] feel themselves dealing in con-
cepts and issues that have no certain status or justification, they have
recourse to the demonstrative, heightened representations of melo-
drama” (Melodramatic 21). A similar anxiety around the visible can be
found in the artwork of the Baroque, including an inadvertent ques-
tioning of the visible and its abilities to reveal the truth. According to
Peter Gillgren and Mårten Snickare, Baroque art elaborates certain
questions: “what are the relations between an outward gesture and
inner conviction, between role-play and identity, between theatrical
performance and real life?” (2). These questions provoked an anxiety
leading to “an awareness of the possible discrepancy between inten-
tion and effect. Something unexpected might always evolve from the
complex interplay between realization and reception” (Gillgren and
Snickare 2). In a similar vein, Wright argues that the visible reasser-
tion, in the face of Protestant attacks, of certain Catholic doctrines
might have inadvertently opened up a space for critique. Intended to
shore up the sacrament of confession, the representation of a penitent
Peter lamenting his denial of Christ, for example, risked suggesting
the human failings of the papacy (207). (Caravaggio painted both a
Betrayal of Christ and a Denial of St. Peter.)
As a melodramatist, Caravaggio rejects the demand, formulated
by Denis Diderot, that painting “somehow establish the metaphysical
illusion that the beholder does not exist, that there is no one standing
before the canvas” (Fried The Moment 44)—the same metaphysical
illusion we associate with nineteenth-century Realist literature and
drama, which themselves influenced “classical” Hollywood cinema.32
In the visual arts, this metaphysical illusion was made possible by
Albertian perspective, which Caravaggio largely rejected. This is what
makes his paintings so modern, even today. As Buci-Glucksmann
writes of the Baroque, its exaggerated forms are an attempt “to trans-
late the irremediable tension between the world and transcendence” (6).33
The Baroque brings to crisis Renaissance optics and its ties to “moral
and religious interpretation” (Buci-Glucksmann 5). As a result of the
contradictions that constituted its historical conditions of possibil-
ity, the Catholic response to the Reformation displaces the centered,
transcendental subject posited by linear perspective and its single
vanishing point, as well as the field of vision engendered by perspec-
tive, with “the baroque eye, [which,] with its attention to multiplicity
and discontinuity, is distinguished precisely by its infinite produc-
tion of images and appearances” (5). It is the product of the moment
when the Counter-Reformation and modern science “strangely
intersect” (Buci-Glucksmann 5). Both the Baroque and melodrama,
then, are characterized by a crisis of vision, one inaugurated by the
colocation of the Counter-Reformation and the Galilean scientific
revolution.
It is in the traces of this earlier historical crisis that we can locate
what will become the melodramatic sensibility. My project is thus
not simply to ask what we can learn about Caravaggio’s paintings
when we call them melodrama but also what might we learn about
melodrama when we locate its genealogy in Caravaggio and Catholic
Italy (rather than, for example, eighteenth-century French, German,
or British drama). Of course, Caravaggio’s historical redefinition of
painting was not immediately felt nor recognized by many of his con-
temporaries. This may account both for their often wildly opposite
responses to some of his works, as well as our own present difficulty
in determining the degree to which the paintings (and Caravaggio
himself) were invested in Counter-Reformation theology.
Clearly, whether or not Caravaggio obeyed the dictates of Trent
depends upon one’s interpretation, with Gilbert arguing that, involv-
ing “anti-Protestant polemics” (150), Caravaggio’s paintings were
neither lusty nor indecorous (176–89); apparently following Bellori
(who Gilbert argues was mistaken), Sgarbi assumes the opposite.34
Even Gilbert concedes, however, that, had the models in Caravaggio’s
paintings been recognized as real persons, this would have undercut
the religious message of the painting and been grounds for calling
them indecorous (176). Thus he concurs with the conclusion that the
Death of the Virgin had been rejected on such grounds, the model
having been recognized as a drowned prostitute.
All of the abovementioned critics argue that we see in Caravaggio’s
oeuvre a painterly attempt to work out the tension between natu-
ralism or realism and religious subject matter. It is this tension that
links the canvases to melodrama, for Brooks suggests that it is an

error to posit melodrama as the absolute antithesis of realism. Rather,
melodrama
always makes an implicit claim that the world of reference—“real

life”—will, if properly considered, live up to the expectations of the
moral imagination: that the ordinary and humble and quotidian will
reveal itself full of excitement, suspense, and peripety, conferred by the
play of cosmic Moral relations and forces. (Melodramatic 54)
While that moral imagination was still populated by the sacred—again,

the Counter-Reformation is not the Enlightenment, and the function
of Baroque art was to reanimate the artwork so that it might lead the
spectator to this sacred moral imagination—like melodrama, many of
Caravaggio’s paintings reveal the presence of the sacred in Brooks’s
“ordinary and humble and quotidian.” This was precisely the theme,
for example, of The Supper at Emmaus, a Counter-Reformation sub-
ject that Caravaggio is thought to have painted numerous times, two
of which survive, as well as La Madonna di Loreto. Given the moral
universe of the Catholic response to the Reformation, what was
sometimes dismissed by some of his critics as a lack of decorum was
precisely the attempt to enact in painting at least one of the several
artistic sensibilities of the Baroque.
Caravaggio’s Theater
One way of connecting painting to drama is through the trope of the
tableau. Many melodramas feature, at the end of scenes or acts, “a
resolution of meaning in tableau, where the characters’ attitudes and
gestures, compositionally arranged and frozen for a moment, give,
like an illustrative painting, a visual summary of the emotional situ-
ation” (Brooks Melodramatic 48, italics in the original). Highly the-
atricalized, bodily acts of signification attempt to render visible what
by definition cannot be seen. As Marcia Landy argues, in melodrama,
“affect is conveyed primarily through gesture, music, and iconog-
raphy which are indicative of the limitations of conventional verbal
language to express the intense psychic and bodily pains or plea-
sures experienced by the characters” (“Introduction” 15). Brooks’s
description of tableau suggests a connection between melodrama
and the Baroque, at least as understood by Benjamin, in that what
Brooks is describing as a “visual summary” is an allegory rather than
a symbol.
Certainly most narrative paintings share a tableau-like quality. But

given their emotionally charged subject matter—scenes of martyr-
dom, for example—as well as their employment of characters posed
in dramatic gestures and possessing well-defined facial expressions,
Caravaggio’s paintings are pronounced examples. The paintings of
the Contarelli Chapel, the artist’s first public commission, provide an
important instantiation of what will become melodrama, one critic
suggesting that, in the Martyrdom of Saint Matthew, “the tragic event
is depicted almost as a crime from the daily newspaper in which all
the emotional reactions of the witnesses are emphasized”—a descrip-
tion highlighting the tableau quality of the painting (Lippo).
But what characterizes this work as melodrama is not simply the
pronounced display of a variety of human emotions, expressed in both
the facial features and bodily poses of the figures. The scene refers to
an implied future: not simply the saint’s actual death, but the moment
in which the truth of that death will be revealed—the saint’s heavenly
reward. That future is figured, prototypically, as the martyr’s palm,
just out of reach of the wounded Matthew.
Similarly, the Calling of Saint Matthew portrays the moment
before the saint’s acceptance of his vocation. Rossella Vodret has
suggest that the Judith Beheading Holofernes captures “the most ter-
rible and tragic moment in the decapitation of Holofernes, here sus-
pended between life and death” (102).35 Painted for the oratory of
the St. John’s Co-Cathedral in Malta, Caravaggio’s largest (and only
signed) canvas captures the moment after John the Baptist’s throat
has been cut but before his head has been severed.36 In the Raising
of Lazarus, Lazarus hovers between life and death, Caravaggio cap-
turing the moment in which he begins to rise. On the one hand, we
see the expression of astonishment on the faces of those who disin-
terred him, as if the body has begun to stir. On the other, mimick-
ing the position of both the crucified Christ and the dead comrade
of the Greek sculpture called “Menelaus Supporting the Body of
Patroclus,” an example of which is in the loggia of Florence’s Piazza
della Signoria, Lazarus seems not yet alive. While we cannot see, in
a single image, the narrative resolution we would expect to find in
melodrama, that moment before, however, engages the spectator in a
way that is characteristically melodramatic. (On the tableau vivant in
German Baroque theater, see Benjamin 192–93.)
The testing of faith is a common theme of Baroque art, and
Caravaggio painted both scenes of martyrdom and their immediate
aftermath, including those of St. Matthew, St. John the Baptist,
St. Lucy, St. Ursula, St. Catherine of Alexandria, St. Peter, and
St. Andrew, as well as scenes of Christ’s Passion, including the flagel-

lation, the donning of the crown of thorns, and the laying of Christ
in his tomb. Such scenes are characterized by the Manicheanism
that divides the holy from his or her torturers, melodramatic battles
between good and evil. But melodrama “not only employs virtue
persecuted as a source of its dramaturgy, but also tends to become
the dramaturgy of virtue misprized and eventually recognized. It is
about virtue made visible and acknowledged, the drama of recog-
nition” (Brooks Melodramatic 27). Several of Caravaggio’s canvases
catch the very narrative moment when Christ’s divinity is recognized,
sometimes following a testing of the believer’s faith: the Doubting
Thomas, The Supper at Emmaus, and the Raising of Lazarus are all
what Brooks might term dramas of recognition.
It is a commonplace to conceive of the Baroque in terms of the-
ater (Carandini, Lavin). Warwick, for example, has suggested that
Caravaggio conceived of painting as performance (“Introduction”
19–20). She highlights the tableau-like quality of his compositions,
his use of costume (mixing historical and contemporary clothes) and
his refusal of Albertian perspective to create a kind of “theater in the
round” that collapses the spatial distinctions between spectator and
scene, audience and performer. Varriano relates Caravaggio’s paint-
ings to the theatrical conventions of his time period (39–40). Other
commentators have also explored the ways in which Caravaggio’s com-
positions address the spectator in a way that might be described as the-
atrical. But the specific qualities of this theater are underdescribed.
First, theater is always staged for a viewer.37 As Fried contends,
“Modern commentators have rightly stressed the forcefulness with
which Caravaggio’s paintings at all stages of his career thematize or
otherwise draw attention to their relation to the viewer” (“Thoughts”
21). What is emphasized, then, is the act of seeing, and the demand
on the spectator to take up the position of witness. A performance
requires an audience.
Another way to understand this theatricality is through address:
“the implied intuition of the viewer’s actual physical existence and
psychic availability for potential response” (Fried Moment 109).
Caravaggio’s mode of address—according to Fried, unparalleled at the
time—might seem at first to be antitheatrical in the sense of “break-
ing the fourth wall.” And to some extent, it is, like melodrama, a
challenge to the conventions of realist theater. One of the most inter-
esting examples of an antitheatrical theatricality occurs in the Malta
St. Jerome, the saint’s body rendered and lit in a way that some readers
will argue is realistic, yet the far right of the canvas featuring what
looks literally like a vertical wooden plank of the fourth wall, on which
a crest is painted—as if the remainder of the fourth wall has literally
been dismantled. Yet, Fried argues that this address in Caravaggio
went hand in hand with an “antithetical or polar emphasis” on what
he terms absorption, the figures denying the presence of the spectator
(Moment 108). Most theater is characterized by this duality, for even
realist theater addresses itself to an audience—through conventions
of staging, lighting, the proscenium, etc.
According to Freedberg, “The setting [of the Beheading of St. John
the Baptist] new in its extent for Caravaggio, is like a dimly lit stage”
(72). Several other formal characteristics lend the painting its partic-
ularly theatrical quality. The source of light illuminating the scene
is located in the space in front of and above the painting. This light
seems in fact to be coming from two separate “spot lights,” one slightly
left of center, which illuminates the muscles of the executioner and
spills onto the saint’s left shoulder and upper back, and one further
to the left, which illuminates the lower half of the upper right arm of
Salome as she stoops, holding the tray on which the saint’s head will
be placed. Rather than framing the action so as to reveal a corner of
the dungeon, Caravaggio instead creates a background that resembles
Figure 1.1 St. Jerome Penitent, 1608

St. John Cathedral, La Valletta, Malta
a contemporary painted backdrop. While perspective is used to convey

the depth of an arch and the barred window behind which we see two
observers of the saint’s martyrdom—a kind of painted version of the
sculpted balconies in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa—a horizontal
line marking the place where the wall meets the floor both suggests
the flatness of the background and gives the floor a raked quality—as
if the action is unfolding on a raked stage. The painting of the Burial
of St. Lucy is similar in that depth is suggested on the left side of the
painting via an arch, but, again, rather than being given, for example,
the corner of a room, we are offered a completely frontal view, the
horizontal line where the wall meets the floor disguised by the bodies
in front of it, but creating once more the effect of a foreground that
slopes toward us like a raked stage.38 While the Messina Nativity does
in fact portray a corner of the manger, the color of the painting is so
dark that the meeting of the vertical and horizontal lines is deempha-
sized, and, in this painting, too, the floor—straw and all—appears to
slant like a raked stage.
Freedberg’s locution “it seems to add a wider dimension to the
given reality” (72), used to describe the treatment of space in the
Malta St. John, suggests the difficulty of naming a theatricality that
simultaneously (and paradoxically) conveys “a moment of present
truth” (75). The “staginess” of Caravaggio’s paintings is precisely
what allows them to convey a “now,” Caravaggio bringing into paint-
ing the real time of the theatrical. Like live theater, his paintings cap-
ture the paradox of a temporal representation occurring in real time.
Melodrama and Lighting

One of the most commented-upon aspects of Caravaggio’s work
is its use of light. The first biographer, Giulio Mancini, identified
Caravaggio with a whole “order” of painters who employed “light-
ing from a single lamp that beams down from above without reflec-
tions, as would occur from a single window in a room with the walls
painted black” (108). Although he concedes that the combination of
strong lighting and deep shadows “give powerful relief to painting,”
he calls this effect “unnatural” in terms of how it creates depth. Yet in
his next sentence, he states that Caravaggio’s aesthetic is, in its “mode
of working, very observing of the true.” He then contrasts this mode
with that of “Raphael, Titian, Correggio, and others” who worked
“from imagination.”
In one of the earliest accounts, then, we see this struggle to name
Caravaggio’s aesthetic, and in terms that prefigure a melodramatic
tension between the “unnatural” and the “true,” the latter defined,
via the contrast with Raphael and company, as the quotidian. As in
the case of melodrama, artifice—in this case, not simply the high
contrast lighting, but also what Mancini identifies as a certain stagi-
ness of composition—produces effects that the critic finds difficult to
describe, because melodramatic texts are emotionally powerful and
yet lacking in the decorum (associated with classicism and its ideal-
ization of the quotidian) appropriate to emergent bourgeois sensibili-
ties.39 Though the figures “look forceful, [they] lack movement and
expression, grace” (Mancini 109). That is, they are not classical.
One of the subsequent biographers, Bellori, argues that Caravaggio
was increasingly becoming known for his
considerable use of black to give relief to the forms. And he carried this
manner of working so far that he never brought any of his figures out
into open sunlight, but found a way of setting them in the dusky air
of a closed room, taking light from high up that fell straight down on
the principal part of the body, and leaving the remainder in shadow in
order to gain force through the intensity of light and dark. (181)
Compare Bellori’s account to Louis Bayman’s recent analysis of how

high contrast lighting functions in melodrama:
Darkness has deep symbolism in terms of mood, atmosphere, night,

defeat, solitude, fear and death, but melodramatic lighting also works to
create contrasts upon the human face. Such lighting privileges attention
on intimate and personalised situations, and invites a reading of bodily,
facial expressions of an unspecified but evidenced emotional life.
Stylised, often extra-diegetic and obviously artificial lighting sug-
gests realms that lie beyond the physical reality of the characters.
(“Melodrama as Seriousness” 88)
In both melodrama and Caravaggio’s scenes of martyrdom, dramatic

lighting seeks to render visible an interior state. This accounts for
Caravaggio’s choice to depict the moments before death, when that
inner state is, theoretically, most pronounced and thus legible.
Caravaggio’s use of light seems above all to challenge the com-
promise critics arrive at when they call the painter’s work a fusion
of naturalism and classicism, for the lighting in these paintings is
neither. As the early biographers suggest, Caravaggio had to go to
some lengths to evoke the high contrasts of lighting he then painted
from what he saw. And while his use of color and treatment of human
figures contrasts with Mannerism, nothing in this lighting suggests
classicism. This accounts, in part, for the negative comparisons, in

the artist’s lifetime, between Caravaggio’s work and that of Annibale
Carracci, that difference perhaps no more effectively demonstrated
than in the Cerasi Chapel of Santa Maria del Popolo, where canvases
by both painters reside.
Saggio links Caravaggio’s use of light to his violation of perspec-
tive. Specifically, he argues that Caravaggio worked with a mirror—
which Saggio contrasts with the “window frame” of perspective
(19)—and the critic links this interest in the mirror to the moder-
nity of Caravaggio’s aesthetic: “The mirror implies that painting
speaks about the ‘representation of truth,’ not of reality itself, but
in a self-reflexive vein” (22). Contrasting Caravaggio with Uccello,
Antonello da Messina, and Piero della Francesca, Saggio emphasizes
Merisi’s compressing of space: “The former spatial depth of perspec-
tive framed ‘within’ the picture, is replaced by a new spatiality evoked
‘outside’ of the picture frame into the space of the living” (8). (On
Caravaggio’s rejection of linear perspective, see also Varriano 42; on
Caravaggian spatiality evoked outside the frame, see also Freedberg
72.) Placing Dempsey’s words alongside Saggio’s comments, we notice
an interesting, peculiarly modern conundrum: in order to produce
what Dempsey calls “the reality of individual experience, il vero”—-
what I would instead term the new visibility of truth required by the
Catholic response to the Reformation—Caravaggio must reject the
conventions of Renaissance verisimilitude—linear perspective and
lighting (cited in Fried Moment 245).
Caravaggio’s Curtains and Costumes

Another obvious way in which Caravaggio’s paintings are theatrical is
in their use of drapery. As Brooks suggests, “Melodrama tends toward
total theatre, its signs projected, sequentially or simultaneously, on
several planes” (Melodramatic 46). Theater’s use of the curtain dates
back to Roman times, and in several of Caravaggio’s paintings, we
find the depiction of a curtain—for example, The Death of the Virgin
and the Nancy Annunciation.
Additionally, Caravaggio’s paintings typically feature virtuoso
depictions of drapery. The attempt to create the illusion of folded
garments is as old as painting itself, portrayals of drapery becoming
increasingly ornate since the trecento. Caravaggio takes the depiction
one step further, “theatricalizing” it by making it exceed, through its
volume, the function of clothing, twisting it luxuriously around half-
naked bodies, floating it in the air, evoking meanings immutable yet
absolutely present. This may be one small way in which Caravaggio

was influenced by Mannerism. The teenaged Saint John the Baptists,
the Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and the two wrestling boy angels
of the Seven Works of Mercy are examples in which the excessiveness of
the drapery, as well as its lush colors (often red), far exceed any realist
function. Caravaggio’s particular depiction of drapery seems also to
have been influenced by Venetian Renaissance painting and its long
love affair with sumptuous fabric.
As for costume, Caravaggio sometimes painted canvases featur-
ing personages dressed in then contemporary clothes, and, in others,
“biblical” costumes. Sometimes, a single character wears a combi-
nation of the two; sometimes, depending upon their religious sta-
tus, personages in a canvas are differentiated by costume, as in The
Calling of St. Matthew. This treatment of clothing is not uncommon
in Renaissance depictions of the nativity, the visiting kings or shep-
herds portrayed in contemporary garb. What is somewhat unique in
Caravaggio’s paintings, however, is the portrayal of the adult Jesus
accompanied by someone in contemporary clothes. Neither classical
nor naturalistic but a juxtaposition of the two, this trope coincides
with Tridentine desires to bring the spectator closer to the one true
Catholic Church via art and engages the issue of the humanation
of Christ—a theme I will discuss in the next chapter. It is a trope
that is picked up in Rococo paintings—for example, the scenes of the
Stations of the Cross painted by Tiepolo fils.
Melodrama and Social Protest

Concerning the recognizability of Caravaggio’s models and their rela-
tion to melodrama, many critics have noted in melodrama a protest
of the oppressed:
Melodrama typically expresses a sense of unfairness which is definitive

of the popular experience of lack of power. In this situation, formal
properties further emphasise the negative situation of the characters,
and instead of offering a socially or diegetically realisable alternative,
suggest fulfilment in realms that lie beyond the actual diegetic situa-
tion. These realms are made visible—although not realisable—in ways
which sympathise with, and are ordered according to, the emotional
lives of the outwardly defeated characters. (Bayman “Melodrama as
Seriousness” 88)
Caravaggio’s recognizable models are examples of the working poor,

two of whom are famously portrayed quite graphically in his Madonna
di Loreto. Arguing that the models of these paintings were visibly

recognizable as members of an early modern service class, Warwick
asserts that Caravaggio’s paintings “thus expose an uncomfortable
gap between the cultural aspirations of his patrons projected onto
singers, actors and models, and the social world of the street from
which many of these performers came” (“Allegories” 140; on class
and Caravaggio, see also Olson). Warwick’s conclusions confirm my
thesis that we can locate the genealogical traces of nineteenth-century
melodrama in Caravaggio, for the idea of melodrama as social protest
is one we see in virtually every existing account, and Caravaggio’s
depiction of social conflict ties his paintings both to what Brooks’s
terms “Romantic socialism” (Melodramatic 88) and Romanticism in
painting and literature.
Caravaggio and Gesture

In melodrama, gesture “is postulated as the metaphorical approach
to what cannot be said” (Brooks Melodramatic 11).40 Caravaggio’s
figures have led to extensive attempts by contemporary art historians
to retrace, in an effort to establish the painter’s debt to classicism,
the origin of his figures’ gestures (Gilbert, Varriano). While interest-
ing, such efforts risk understating the degree to which Caravaggio
changed painting.
In his account of melodrama, Brooks argues that gestures should
not be understood as analogical to linguistic signs but rather as tropes,
the argument being that no predetermined code exists to close the
gap between the gesture and its meaning—no dictionary of gestures,
as it were. Brooks argues instead for an understanding of gesture as
metaphor, as gesture seeks to make present “a vaguely defined yet
grandiose emotional or spiritual force” without directly naming it
but rather by pointing toward it (Melodramatic 72). Consequently,
“it is inaccurate to speak of decoding” gesture; “we must rather deci-
pher it [italics in the original].” Brooks’s account of melodrama here
might initially seem to undermine my attempt to link the melodra-
matic sensibility to the Baroque, for the Baroque relies on allegory.
Yet, as Benjamin argues, in allegory,
Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything
else. . . . all of the things which are used to signify derive, from the
very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes
them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which
raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them.
Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both ele-

vated and devalued. (175)
Benjamin’s words provide a suggestive way of reading Caravaggio’s

paintings and a means of understanding how they could be accused
of being both “indecorous” and completely in keeping with post-
Tridentine theology simultaneously. His critics saw only their eleva-
tion of the profane world (via so-called realism or naturalism). What
they failed to recognize was that, in suggesting a “somewhere else”
beyond the immediate physical, these same paintings devalued the
quotidian (in a way similar to the Christian sense of the believer being
“not of this world”).
Portrayals of gesture function within Caravaggio’s narrative paint-
ings to express an inexpressible grief. Melodramatic gestures of grief
appear in The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, The Deposition, The Burial
of St. Lucy (wherein St. Lucy’s mother holds her own face in her
hands), The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (wherein an unidentified
woman also holds her face in her hands), and The Taking of Christ.
Another painting where a figure expresses an extremely theatrical-
ized, nonnaturalistic gesture is the Supper at Emmaus in London. Yet
another, The Madonna of the Rosary, where the kneeling penitents
stretch out their arms in grand gestures of devotion to the rosaries in
St. Dominic’s hands.
Gesture is particularly pertinent to a discussion of the contradic-
tions of the Baroque, its investment in visibility, and its “awareness of
the possible discrepancy between intention and effect” (Gillgren and
Snickare 2). For gesture both asserts the limits of linguistic significa-
tion and strives to compensate for that lack. It is an attempt to recover
what Brooks calls “the mythical primal language” (Melodramatic
66). However, the acknowledgment of the need for recovery is also
the acknowledgment of loss, and so the portrayal of gesture, too, is
necessarily linked in the Baroque to a sense of the world sundered in
two, a world no longer legible in the same way as it was in the previ-
ous dispensation.
Such a reading strategy—reading as deciphering rather than
decoding—might be brought to Caravaggio’s paintings in that, like
gesture, they attempt “to render meanings which are ineffable, but
nonetheless operative within the sphere of human ethical relation-
ships” (Brooks 72). In the face of the sundering of the community
of Catholic, Christian believers, there is no longer a universal doxa to
which religious paintings might appeal. Art is no longer the conveyor
of (religious) messages, but rather of a more elusive, ineffable meaning,
and, as a result, the meaning of painting itself has changed. Neither

classicism nor naturalism understands painting as Caravaggio’s works
do, for both express a faith in the visual that, in their rejection of
perspective, their staginess, excessive drapery and artificial lighting,
Caravaggio’s paintings bring to crisis.
To establish its authority, classicism turns to the surety of Neo-
platonic essences as revealed through the visible in general and ide-
alized beauty in particular. This investment in Platonism explains
why imagination played such an important role in classical painting,
at least as it was defined by Caravaggio’s contemporary critics. In a
simple mirror reversal, naturalism establishes its authority by appeal-
ing to the visible as true, to empiricism. It would not be until the
late nineteenth century that its particular attack on the metaphysical
would be fully realized in positivism. What looks like naturalism in
Caravaggio is rather a use of the visible to gesture toward the inef-
fable. Caravaggio’s recognizable images suggest “an intention and a
direction of meaning” (Brooks Melodramatic 77). But the images
themselves are on some level merely the vehicle to reach beyond the
communicable, to call up “a state of excess” (Brooks Melodramatic
76) in relation to what hitherto painting was capable of expressing.
This state of excess is what renders Caravaggio’s paintings neither
classical nor naturalistic and simultaneously suggests why they might
have been read by some of his contemporaries as indecorous—a read-
ing that in turn makes possible the suggestion that they did not obey
the dictates of Trent.
This is the sense in which Caravaggio’s biography is itself melodra-
matic, for it charts the efforts of the painter to live beyond the social
conventions of his period, so that he might make of his life itself a new
kind of art—one that was incapable of being expressed by the social
mores of his time. Life, for Caravaggio, was gesture. Even at the level
of painting itself, for Caravaggio’s works are unique in that he did not
execute preparatory designs on his canvases but began directly with
the canvas and model.
A discussion of gesture returns us to the influence of the artist’s
work, a few hundred years later, on Romanticism (and its recourse
to melodrama). In Brooks’s words, Romanticism was “one effort to
recover for meaning what appeared to be in danger of being lost to
meaning” (Melodramatic 78). Caravaggio’s contradictory relation-
ship to classicism—his citation of Michelangelo’s ignudi, for example,
which Gilbert argues reflects a kind of paragone with Carracci (spe-
cifically, the frescoes of the Farnese Palace)—prefigures what Brooks
calls Romanticism’s “suspicion” directed toward the neoclassical. To
crib from Brooks: like the Romantics who would draw on him for
inspiration, Caravaggio feared that painting’s “potential for generat-
ing meaning had come to seem too limited. Gesture, a ‘return’ to the
language of presence, became a way to make present and available
new, or revived, indications of meaning, emotional conditions, and
spiritual experience” (Melodramatic 79). This same fear that painting
might have lost, as a result of the Reformation, its potential for invok-
ing, in the term used by the Council of Trent, “holiness,” is reflected
in Tridentine discourse.
Conclusion
The reason, then, that it is so difficult for critics to conclude whether
or not Caravaggio’s paintings reflect Tridentine theological con-
cerns is the problem of correlation verses causation. For Caravaggio’s
aesthetic correlated with the Catholic Church’s belief that the art-
work, and the relationship between the artwork and the spectator,
needed to be refigured in light of the crisis of belief represented
by the Reformation. Reading Borromeo’s negative comparison of
Caravaggio to Raphael, Sgarbi concludes that what the Cardinal dis-
dained in the painter was precisely his “independence from religious
precepts,” and that “this secular, agnostic vision allows Caravaggio
to paint the world without prejudices, and to seek out the truth in
things” (44). If Sgarbi is right, Caravaggio’s painting are startlingly
prescient in their modern, melodramatic insistence that the everyday
surface of reality must be read closely for the ways in which it gestures
toward Brooks’s “moral occult”; because it is veiled, il vero must be
sought out.
By way of conclusion, I offer some very provisional thoughts on the
relationship between Caravaggio’s paintings and the historical devel-
opment of the modern capitalist subject. Commentators have noted
that, “at least since 1950,” Caravaggio’s paintings have been thought
to release profound intensities of feeling (Fried “Notes Toward” 114).
Perhaps they are compensatory for capitalism’s attempts to manage
affect. This returns us to the theme of melodrama as social protest.
Capitalism seeks to manage intensities of feeling by linking them
to the consumption of commodities and outlawing needs when they
threaten to interrupt the flow of goods, labor, and capital. This is
just one way in which Foucault’s analysis of discipline is linked to
developments in capitalism such as the need to manage the workplace
(Discipline). A materialist understanding of melodrama links the
melodramatic sensibility to outlawed needs, those needs that might
interrupt capitalist accumulation and exploitation, were they to be

confronted, head on. In Richard Dyer’s terms, the two “utopian”
sensibilities that melodrama draws most heavily upon are intensity
and transparency, the first linked to the dulling of sensation required
of certain kinds of physical labor or rote activities, the second, to such
mystifying forms as advertising, the international division of labor,
and the general masking of globalized relations of exploitation.
Caravaggio’s paintings coincide historically with developments in
capitalism, emblematized in the debates, detailed if not inaugurated by
Weber, around the Protestant Reformation and capitalism. According
to Fried, Caravaggio’s paintings evoke “a sustained density of being
that is more than simply physical” (“Notes Toward” 115). This discus-
sion then leads Fried to remark of some of Caravaggio and his follow-
ers that, in certain characteristic paintings, “individual male figures
appear possessed by what might be described as an ‘excessive’ mode
of embodied subjectivity, as if their own physicality were not wholly
‘transparent’ to them, something to be taken for granted and in that
sense not registered as such” ( “Notes Toward” 118). Fried then cruises
the bodies of several of these male figures, providing descriptions of
their muscles and tights—without noting either that a) this is a homo-
erotic reading of these figures or b) until fairly recently, it is woman,
and not man, who is stereotypically portrayed in this way. That is,
throughout the history of the West, the mind/body split has been fig-
ured as the division of the sexes. Instead, Fried takes us to Descartes
to suggest that the Meditations were an effort “to counter the radically
embodied vision of human subjectivity that lies very near the heart of
the Caravaggisti’s collective achievement” (“Notes Toward” 123).
In a related vein, Buci-Glucksmann provides an extremely sophis-
ticated account of the anti-Cartesian characteristics of the Baroque’s
relationship to the visual. Reading Leibniz, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan
(among others), she argues that Baroque optics challenge “any meta-
physics of the subject and the cogito as self-presence in re-presentation”
(25). Renaissance perspective attempts to unify the optical elements
in painting—diagonal lines, optical planes, shadows, modeling and
highlights—with respect to a single point of view (Summers). Or,
perhaps more pointedly, Renaissance painting requires “an incarnate
observer” who is able to make sense of the painting’s illusionism via
what Christopher Braider has characterized as “seizure or usurpation”
of space, “a more or less violent making of it one’s own” (“Fountain”
300). This single eye required of perspective functions as “the center
of the visible world. Everything converges on to the eye as the vanish-
ing point of infinity” (Berger 16).
It is not uncommon today to link painterly perspective to the fic-

tion of the autonomous subject, perspective being a technology that
produces a certain kind of subject—one whose being is guaranteed by
its distance from the object (Summers 156). While such an account
of this technology risks forgetting that human beings have agency
and so can to some degree resist the lure of a subjectivity fashioned
in a relation of binary, hierarchical opposition to an other, it is also
important to note the way the single point posited as origin of vision
might place the spectator in the position once occupied by God as He
surveyed His universe (Berger 16).41 Such a subject is coarticulated
with the rise of capitalism; it is one of the conditions of possibility of,
for example, the European conquest of Africa and the Americas.
Displacing the Cartesian subject reproduced by linear perspective,
Baroque optics precisely seek to “de-center” the subject, offering
up a multiplicity of points of view that undermine the certainty of
the subject-object distinction on which Cartesian Being depends.42
Rather than offering the spectator a version of being in which the self-
presence of the subject is guaranteed via its opposition to the object
and the space that distinguishes the two, in the Baroque (and this
is why Caravaggio’s rejection of linear perspective matters), “Being
is plural sight that is subjected to ‘points of view,’ to the realities of
intersections and encountering sights, baroque Being without a God
of sorts to regulate these sights in a preestablished harmony” (Buci-
Glucksmann 26; Summers similarly notes the ways in which Leibniz
problematized the idea of a singular perspective and thus contributed
to the Baroque; see in particular 158–59).
Leibniz’s influence on Baroque optics, however, is only half of the
story. Buci-Glucksmann also identifies what she terms “an entirely
different optics”—an optics of nothingness (30). I propose that this
optics of nothingness is what we see in the “scuro” of Caravaggio’s
chiaroscuro. It is more evidence of why he is not a naturalist, for, “the
resort to nothingness—the art of nothingness—coincides with a cri-
sis of ‘mimetic’ models of knowing” (Buci-Glucksmann 30).43 The
Baroque attempt to make the sacred visible of necessity calls up its
nonpresence, and the more emphatic the attempt, the more absence is
revealed. The lesson of signification is that the subject is only present
in its absence; or, in the case of the Baroque, illusion is predicated upon
disillusion—a Manichean pairing. In an attempt to reassert, in the face
of Protestant heresies, visible signs of faith, the Baroque necessarily
also calls up “an absent or retreating God” (Buci-Glucksmann 29).
The twin poles of many of Caravaggio’s compositions address,
on the one hand, absorption, and, on the other, capture these two
different optics. They are the optics of melodramatic theater: address—

the staged scene presenting itself to numerous eyes occupying a variety
of spaces (one of the differences between the Albertian treatment of
space in painting and the treatment of space in theater); absorption—
the spectator as absent present, the nonbeing that ratifies the pres-
ence of the staged scene, which is not an imitation but a phantasm,
not mimesis but allegory. Both Caravaggio’s paintings and melodrama
need to be understood as allegory—not as, in the first instance, a
synthesis of naturalism and classicism, or, in the second, failed realism
(a common critique of melodrama, as we will see in the initial criti-
cal reception of Puccini’s Tosca).44 The excesses of melodrama—like
Caravaggio’s excesses—threaten any sense of classical unity, the dou-
blings of melodrama always threatening not to unify the “work” but
rather to fragment the “text” into its contingently woven threads.45
Risking teleology, we might say that Descartes thus interrupts the
development of melodrama and its appeal to the subject as body, a
development that returns in the wake of the French revolution and its
notorious “embodiment” in the guillotine.46 (Pertinent in this con-
text are Caravaggio’s numerous “disembodied” heads, some of which
are alleged to be modeled on his own.) This excessive embodiment
of which Fried writes is of course exactly what melodrama figures. It
was and remains an instance of Raymond Williams’s “structures of
feeling”: “not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling
as thoughts; practical consciousness of a present kind in a living and
inter-relating continuity” (cited in Shapiro 108). It is also undoubt-
edly these structures of feeling embodied in Caravaggio’s melodrama
that leads some contemporary “queer” spectators to see Caravaggio’s
male bodies as eroticized. Even in their own historical moment, then,
Caravaggio’s paintings provided certain conditions of possibility for
an emergent “queer,” if not simply homoerotic, sensibility.
CH A P T ER 2
Caravaggio’s Melodramatic
Male Bodies
Introduction
Standing in Rome’s Galleria Borghese between the withered St. Anne
of the Madonna dei Palafrenieri and the languid Boy with a Basket
of Fruit, my colleague Sharon and I annually restage for our stu-
dents the same argument: “Don’t tell me this guy wasn’t gay,” she
insists. “All the men are attractive; all the women look like hags or
virgins.”1 My riposte, equally exasperated, is to remind her of the
difference between homosexual behavior and identity and that the
historical record, fleeting as it is, suggests that Caravaggio had car-
nal relations with both sexes; there is even evidence of a fight over a
woman (Puglisi 29).
Sharon and I agree that Caravaggio’s men are embodied differ-
ently from those of his Baroque rivals and carry an erotic charge. And
I am always mindful of John Berger’s argument that paintings present
us with a “way of seeing” that allows us to discern historical conti-
nuities between the painter’s moment and our own, providing we
are sufficiently skeptical of capitalism’s—and some art criticism’s—
mystification of the past. Why many contemporary spectators “feel”
that Caravaggio’s paintings are homoerotic seems a question worth
pursuing.
In the previous chapter, I attributed the “inchoate sense of loss”
(Fried The Moment 104) conveyed by Caravaggio’s paintings to the
Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution, naming this
sense of loss of habitation melancholia, “an allegory for the experi-
ence of modernity” (Flatley 2). Not surprisingly, in the paintings of
Caravaggio, the figure of Jesus (and, occasionally, John the Baptist)
serves as a sign of this melancholy. Yet Fried also contends that, in
some of Caravaggio’s paintings, “individual male figures appear
possessed by what might be described as an ‘excessive’ mode of

embodied subjectivity” (“Notes” 118). In certain canvases, Jesus will
also represent this embodied subjectivity, but so will St. John, angels,
and even Christ’s torturers. What are we to make of this particu-
lar colocation: melancholy scenes of defeated male bodies in some
canvases, excessively embodied male figures in others, and, in the
most violent scenes of Christ’s Passion, His own body providing
a link between the two? Across Caravaggio’s oeuvre, we also have
another kind of doubling: on the one hand, the defeated bodies of
Christ and the holy martyrs, and on the other, defeated bodies of the
enemy—Goliath, Holofernes, and, of course figured differently, the
fallen St. Paul in the moment of his conversion. What are we to make
of these doublings of male corporeality and this linking of the male
to bodily suffering, loss, and melancholy?
Scenes of the Passion provide a visual analogy of the Manicheanism
of melodrama, good, in the form of Christ, and evil, in the form of his
torturers. But minus the resurrection, the Passion itself is melodrama,
an extended meditation upon “the Word made flesh,” (John 1:14)—
the Christian theme of Christ as both God and the Incarnation—in
which, “subjected to horror, virtue must undergo an experience of
the unbearable” (Brooks Melodramatic 35).2 As Leo Steinberg has
argued, contemporary viewers are likely to be unaware of both the
degree to which Western religious art-making was occupied with the
problem of how to render “God’s assumed human nature,” and that
the pursuit of painterly verisimilitude played a dominant role in this
effort to render God as man (6). The figuring of God’s human form
is a means whereby the Renaissance adapted pagan learning—in this
case, what is broadly termed, in the visual arts, classicism—to the val-
ues of Christianity, for, in Plato, the beautiful human body provides
the path to the divine (Symposium, Phaedrus).
Caravaggio’s melodramatic male bodies continue to produce heated
debates around masculinity, sexuality, and their relationship to one
another (Gilbert, Varriano, Posner “Caravaggio’s Homo-Erotic”). In
the Italian context, they raise the uncomfortable issue of Italy’s queer
patrimony. Perhaps symptomatically, not one of the essays in the cat-
alog for the blockbuster Scuderie del Quirinale show of 2010 takes
up, in any significant way, either the question of Caravaggio’s sexu-
ality or the homoeroticism of his paintings. Rather, the mingling of
the spiritual and the sensual in the painter’s work is noted but then
attributed to Counter-Reformation theology (Squarzina; Pacelli),
the painter’s imputed contact with Michelangelo’s studio (Guarino
124, 128; Pupillo 153), Caravaggio’s innovations in religious imagery
CARAVAGGIO’S MELODRAMATIC MALE BODIES 57
(Guarino), classical precedents (Pacelli), or else the artistic proclivities

of his patrons (Savina)—none, treated queerly.3 Given Caravaggio’s
paintings, these essays necessarily raise questions of the commingling
of body and spirit, but the homoeroticism that such commingling
might result in is ignored—despite the fact that “classical” Platonism
is precisely homoerotic (even if, in Plato, the sexual act is, if possible,
to be avoided).4
Christianity has long attempted to rewrite classical philosophy,
Augustine of Hippo representing the most influential figure in this
regard, followed several hundred years later by Thomas Aquinas.
John O’Malley has argued that the Renaissance witnessed a reread-
ing of Plato by Scholastic theologians influenced by Aquinas, and
that this reading emphasized “the goodness of all that was natu-
ral (i.e., not supernatural), including the human body” (“Trent,
Sacred” 40). (Ficino and Mirandola were both influenced by Aquinas;
Colish.)
Concerning the Counter-Reformation, as O’Malley puts it,
Where there was Catholicism after Trent, there was Scholasticism.

Where there was Scholasticism, especially in its Thomist form, there
was at least a theoretical acceptance of a close and positive body-soul
relationship and a recognition of the integral role that the senses play
in one of the most spiritual noncorporeal realities of which we have
direct experience, abstract thought or concepts. (“Trent, Sacred” 41)5
Steinberg argues that, to Christian Neoplatonists, pagan carnality

was not necessarily “sinful”: he quotes Pierio Valeriano’s (1477–1558)
contention that in antiquity there was nothing “in the human body
which was considered disgraceful [turpis] either by sight or name”
(Valeriano, quoted in Steinberg 21; interpolation in the original).
Whether or not the humanists were correct about antiquity is irrele-
vant; to them—and perhaps this is why the question of whether or not
Mirandola and Ficino recognized and/or endorsed the homoeroti-
cism of Plato is so difficult to answer—they saw the ancients as “inno-
cent, prelapsarian in the sense that they precede Christian shame”
(Steinberg 21).6
The Scuderie’s “queer-free” responses to Caravaggio constitute a
representative reading, for surely the scholars understood themselves
as speaking as Italians to a broad, international audience. But exhibi-
tions, like all forms of cultural production, are sites of ideological
struggle (and this particular show was a state-supported event dur-
ing the most recent Berlusconi years). They do not simply reflect the
interests of a hegemonic ruling bloc but rather participate, and not

always successfully, in the effort to produce consensus. And the same
is true of paintings. As historians like Marcia B. Hall and O’Malley
have emphasized, Counter-Reformation artworks need to be under-
stood as sites of negotiation with, and resistance to, both “official”
church pronouncements and the efforts of theologians like Charles
Borromeo to impose, from above, their understanding of an appro-
priate painterly riposte to Protestantism (Hall 4–6).
One of the most telling instances in which the Scuderie catalog
both reveals and attempts to mask contradictions is Antonio Paolucci’s
account of Caravaggio’s Deposition. In arguing that Caravaggio’s reli-
gious paintings are perfectly consonant with the Catholic response to
the Reformation, Paolucci proposes that, in Caravaggio, “La moral-
ità del Vero visibile svelato dalla luce diventa moderna epifania del
Sacro, essenziale catechesi spoglia di ogni retorica/the morality of the
True visible unveiled in the light becomes a modern epiphany of the
Sacred, essential catechism stripped of any rhetoric” (151).
The sentence itself is melodramatic in its longing for direct, unme-
diated communication unhindered by “rhetoric” and the process of
linguistic signification itself—the same longing that animates melo-
dramatic bodily gestures. But the longing is itself the symptom of
a blockage, revealed in the phrase “the True visible unveiled in the
light.” For if the True visible were what it claims, it would not need
to be unveiled. By suggesting a “False” visible, the sentence replicates
symptomatically the very anxiety around the visible we find in the
Baroque: that appearances can be deceiving and that seeing may not
result in believing—an anxiety that the rest of the sentence actually
compounds. For “unveiled” needs no modifier; to unveil is to expose
to light. Paolucci’s sentence confesses the very sentiments it hopes to
hold at bay: the inability of the visible to reveal adequately the Sacred;
the longing for this visible, unadulterated display; and the religious
doubt that follows from this potential failure to access the true.
Similarly, the insistence that Caravaggio’s paintings contain no trace
whatsoever of this doubt also suggests that they may.
Visual ambiguity is a characteristic of the Baroque, as it is of melo-
drama; an excess of signification striving toward clarity and plenitude
may instead produce confusion, that excess provoking contradictory
significations. It is this ambiguity that provides the conditions of pos-
sibility for the debate as to whether Caravaggio’s canvases express
a “homosexual sensibility” or not, whether they correspond to the
Counter-Reformation religious sensibilities of his patrons or not, and
whether the painter himself had homosex or not. In other words, it is
the question itself that is the point, and not how one answers it. For
the attempt to render visible what cannot be seen will always produce
these ambiguities, especially when the vehicle employed is the human
body and its capacity to suggest both the spiritual and the carnal—a
legacy of Platonism.
Writing specifically about changing representations of the body, in
his account of melodrama and the Revolution, Brooks argues,
The ancien régime body belongs to a traditional system, a product of

both Christian and popular cultures, that is taken for granted. It is
when this traditional system is evacuated of meaning by the Revolution
that a new aesthetics of embodiment becomes necessary. The loss of
a system of assigned meanings is followed by one where meanings
must be achieved, must be the product of an active semiotic process in
which the body is newly emblematised with meaning. (“Melodrama,
Body” 18)
The Catholic response to the Reformation was precisely a call for “a

new aesthetics of embodiment,” one that sought to respond to the
challenge of Protestantism, its debates concerning the incarnation via
the Holy Eucharist, and its iconoclasm. The Baroque brings to crisis
Renaissance optics; that this crisis gets played out on the body is dem-
onstrated, on the one hand, by the debates around whether or not
Caravaggio’s art gave proper expression to Counter-Reformation the-
ology and, on the other, by the spectacular achievements of Bernini
in conveying bodily ecstasy.
All of the debates around Caravaggio and questions of “deco-
rum” are focused on his representation of the body, whether it be
St. Matthew’s crossed legs, or the bloated abdomen of the dead
Virgin, or the dirty feet of religious pilgrims. As for Bernini, it is
now a commonplace of art criticism that the expressions on the faces
of the St. Teresa in Rome’s Cornaro Chapel and the Blessed Ludovica
Albertoni in that same city’s church of San Francesco a Ripa are
examples of a version of Brooks’s “new aesthetics of embodiment,”
one in which the body is so brimming with the presence of God that
it shudders orgasmically. The St. Teresa goes to particular lengths to
emphasize the saint’s body as a spectacle to be read, for, as her body
is “seized by meaning,” (Brooks, “Melodrama, Body” 18), a crowd
of men, the male members of the Cornaro family, look on from the
boxes of a theater.
Caravaggio’s representations of Christ’s body strike us today as
homoerotic because he highlights Jesus’s carnality. This sensuous
highlighting is a characteristic of the religious painting of much of

the Italian Renaissance; due to a number of different factors, includ-
ing Trent’s refusal to impose a single style or institute a single govern-
ing body in charge of regulating religious images, it continued into
the Counter-Reformation (Talvacchia). As a result, it is not exclusively
the representation of an eroticized Jesus that is the issue here—as
it might be argued that many Noli Me Tangere paintings, including
Titian’s c.1540 version at the National Gallery of London, as well as
Bronzino’s 1561 version in the Louvre, portray a sexy Jesus.7 Rather,
it is Caravaggio’s particular way of eroticizing the body of Christ,
which, because it is neither classical, nor Mannerist, nor realist, evokes
melancholy.
The specter of homoeroticism in Caravaggio’s paintings is linked
to what other critics have named his synthesis of naturalism and classi-
cism. While both of these characteristics can be found in Caravaggio’s
works, to see them as “merged” or “reconciled” is precisely to ignore
their melodramatic sensibility. For had the painter’s canvases recon-
ciled these two tendencies, they would have been utterly in keeping
with Renaissance painting and its search for “techniques that fostered
increasing naturalism tempered by idealization of the body, able to
attract the viewer through its beauty and to convince by its tactil-
ity” (Talvacchia 50). Renaissance naturalism served classicism. This is
why Steinberg calls it, particularly in relation to depictions of Christ,
a self-defeating technique (6), for the more convincingly Christ was
depicted in his humanation, the more, in the future, Renaissance pic-
torial symbolism came to be misread as descriptive naturalism (iv).
Had his contemporaries read his paintings as a synthesis of the natu-
ral and classical, the scandal that was Caravaggio would never have
been.
It is the sum total of Caravaggio’s melodramatic techniques that
render his depictions of Christ so visually troubling and erotic. And
the same is true of Caravaggio’s treatment of some of Christ’s “fol-
lowers,” like his cousin St. John, the church doctor St. Jerome, or
even his torturers and betrayers (given that it is these, the most lowly
and sinful, that He came to save). Caravaggio’s paintings did in fact
produce Brooks’s “active semiotic process in which the body is newly
emblematized with meaning,” the Reformation having inaugurated
a demand for an aesthetics of embodiment that seduces the eye of
the doubter and attempts to reassure him/her of the one true faith
(“Melodrama, Body” 18).
Gilbert provides the most vigorous insistence in English that nei-
ther Caravaggio nor his patron del Monte had sex with men, nor that
Caravaggio’s paintings justify what he terms a homosexual reading.

His heteronormative framework allows him to consider the homo-
eroticism of Caravaggio’s “effeminate” boys, such as the many labeled
“Bacchus,” if only to refute it by suggesting that these boys are het-
erosexual (despite some of the Dionysus iconography to the contrary;
see Champagne “Italian Masculinity”). But this same framework
prevents the critic from discussing at any length the numerous sexy,
virile male torsos in Caravaggio and the way the painter’s character-
istic chiaroscuro reflects off of and caresses their muscles, whether
those muscles be naked (as in the Martyrdom of St. Matthew, the
Flagellation of Christ, and the teenaged St. Johns in Kansas City and
Rome’s Palazzo Corsini) or in tights (as in the Calling of St. Matthew,
the Beheading of St. John, and the Taking of Christ). Gilbert concedes
that it is the “unique sensory realism of Caravaggio’s paint surfaces
and lighting” that have led to the reading of some of Caravaggio’s
male figures as homoerotic (Gilbert 214). As soon as he opens this
door, however, he shuts it again, for his framework does not allow
him to recognize that nearly all of Caravaggio’s male bodies, saints
and sinners, have this quality. Gilbert doesn’t recognize that even
those paintings that have not been assigned what he calls a homo-
sexual intent—as his example, he mentions the rejected St. Matthew
and the Angel—present eroticized male bodies.
In his important study on the sexuality of Christ, Steinberg argues
that the Renaissance
produced a large body of devotional imagery in which the genitalia

of the Christ Child, or of the dead Christ, receive such demonstrative
emphasis that one must recognize an ostentatio genitalium comparable
to the canonic ostentatio vulnerum, the showing forth of the wounds.
In many hundreds of pious, religious works, from before 1400 to past
the mid-16th century, the ostensive unveiling of the Child’s sex, or the
touching, protecting or presentation of it, is the main action. . . . And
the emphasis recurs in images of the dead Christ, or of the mystical
Man of Sorrows. (iv)
Steinberg’s work has inaugurated a greater consideration of the how

and why of the sexualization of Christ’s body in art, not only in the
Renaissance but beyond, one of the differences between the two
being that Catholic responses to the Reformation were occupied with
questions of decorum in a way that the Renaissance artists Steinberg
discusses were not.8
According to Steinberg, typically, in terms of iconography, Christ’s
genitals were only a concern at the time of the Incarnation—that is,
the birth of Christ—and at the Crucifixion and Resurrection. (On

the sexuality of images of the Crucifixion, see Trexler.) As Steinberg
puts it, “Delivered from sin and shame, the freedom of Christ’s sexual
member bespeaks that aboriginal innocence which in Adam was lost”
(23). What is to some degree unique in Caravaggio is his focus on the
carnality of the Passion itself, the way it becomes an extended test of
Christ’s willingness to inhabit the human, and the painter’s deploy-
ment of the aesthetics of melodrama to do so. For Christian believ-
ers, one of the consequences of the mystery of the Trinity is that the
Crucifixion, a melodramatic trial to unveil the truth, could have been
interrupted at any time after the trial had ended.
That is, God could have freed his Son from the obligation to be
sacrificed—just as God spared Isaac—and Jesus could have avoided the
bodily suffering he endured. This is what renders so poignant the scene
in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ struggles with accepting
his humanness in full knowledge of the horrific bodily suffering that
awaits him. The mystery of the Trinity allows Jesus both to acquiesce
to his Father’s demands and also claim those demands as His own.
Additionally, the controversy between transubstantiation and con-
substantiation is precisely one over the status of Christ’s body. The
mystery of the Trinity is the precondition of the former, for it depends
upon the ability of God to once more be “split” via an incarnation—
this time, as bread and wine. While consubstantiation also allows for
such a “split,” in this case, no incarnation occurs; rather, God the
Son is alongside the bread and wine. With its melodramatic trope of
the bleeding host, the miracle of the mass at Bolsena suggests the
degree to which early modern Catholicism felt it needed to respond to
Protestant polemics around the question of the Incarnation.
In Caravaggio’s portrayals, the genitals, nipples, and muscles of
Christ serve to represent the signs of the human form of God. As
both God and man, Jesus must be given these visible signs of human-
ity, as well as certain signifiers of divinity—signaled, in a character-
istically melodramatic fashion, by the painter’s use of light and the
way Christ’s body reflects that light. At the same time, the other
male figures must also be given specifically masculine attributes—in
particular, muscles—and this helps to explain why those bodies are
erotic, too. For at least since Plato, both “heavenly” and “earthly”
love are revealed in the beauty of the body. The eroticized Baroque
body of Jesus, then, participates in the long process in the West of
reconciling Christianity with classical Greece, but in a way unantici-
pated by those critics who deny this body any homoerotic overtones.9
Such a reconciliation is rendered urgent by the Protestant heresies,
which, from a Catholic point of view, threaten to overemphasize the

human familiarity of Christ (emblematized in certain current-day
Protestant sects via references to one’s “personal relationship with
Christ”) and in the process question His divinity. In other words, in
their taking for granted of Christ’s divinity, the Medieval period and
the Renaissance, as Steinberg understands them, are not the Baroque.
Both the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution sowed
seeds of doubt in this regard, and this helps explain Caravaggio’s spe-
cific aesthetic embodiment of Christ and his torturers.
Designated by Christ himself, the champions of His divinity were
and are, according to Catholicism, the apostles and their contem-
porary representatives, the clergy. The continuing resistance of the
Catholic Church to allowing priests to marry is one way in which that
clergy reasserts its proximity to Christ’s divinity and wards off the
danger of the heretical proposition that Jesus was more man than he
was God. The paradox of the Baroque is its urgent need to reconcile
Christ’s divinity with his humanness, but while the latter can be made
visible, the former cannot—at least not after the scientific revolution
and its new optics. Baroque painting finds one of its conditions of
possibility in this conundrum. What makes Caravaggio’s male bod-
ies different from those of his Renaissance predecessors is the recog-
nizability of his models, a quality that both did and did not render
his paintings indecorous, given the urgency with which the Catholic
response to the Reformation sought to reconcile Christ’s humanation
with His divinity and the impossibility of such a project.
Before discussing some of Caravaggio’s specific representations
of male corporeality, I peruse a few Renaissance images that employ
emphatically this trope of the adult Christ as sexualized, begin-
ning with Andrea Mantegna’s c.1490 virtuoso Dead Christ, noted
for its unusualness in Italian painting and called “one of the most
memorable, singular and vivid” of all Quattrocento images (Eisler 9).10
As Steinberg suggests, artists like Mantegna “embraced even his
[Christ’s] sex in their thought,” not for prurient reasons but rather to
fully convey Jesus’s humanation (16). Despite the difference I am pos-
iting between the Renaissance and the Baroque, such images neces-
sarily influenced subsequent modes of representing the Incarnation.
Described by an Internet video as “almost blasphemous,” the
Mantegna painting portrays the draped genitals of Christ, which
occupy the central point in the canvas (Harris). From his genitals, the
eye is then led up to his face. The depiction of Christ’s wounds is also
startling in its verisimilitude. The commentators also remind us that
Mantegna never delivered this painting to its patron—suggesting it
was too scandalous and may have been painted by Mantegna for his
own funerary chapel. The trope of Jesus’s loincloth is one that links
religious painting from its origins to the Renaissance to Caravaggio;
its deployment as a means to draw the eyes toward Christ’s genitals
and thus confirm his humanation has been argued by both Steinberg
and Richard Trexler, the latter in particular suggesting both the
homo- and heteroerotic possibilities inherent in the contemplation of
the penis of our Lord.
Concerning representations of the male body: leaving aside the
long tradition of the depictions of St. Sebastian, whose specific leg-
end also lent itself to spectacular depictions of male masochism, sev-
eral painters from the Renaissance produce what today strike us as
particularly homoerotic images of Christ’s masculine corporeality.11
These images on some level anticipate Caravaggio’s mixing of the car-
nal and the spiritual in that they render the male body the surface on
which, during the Baroque, the spectator’s gaze will be encouraged
to linger in search of signs of “the essential moral universe” whose
visibility has been rendered problematic by the Protestant schism and
scientific revolution (Brooks Melodramatic 15).
For Christ embodies the mystery of a God who so loved the world
that he sent his only Son to redeem it and yet is himself the Son of
Man. Such a paradox is figured in the Passion and its aftermath. This
is one of the ways in which Mantegna’s Dead Christ anticipates the
Baroque (although its formal experimentation with foreshortening is
more in keeping with the “single eye” of Renaissance perspective).
The Catholic response to the Reformation transforms representations
of both Christ’s Passion and the martyrdom of the saints into alle-
gories of what, on the one hand, the true church must endure in the
face of the Protestant heresies and, on the other, the martyr’s death
in foreign lands that may await religious orders like the Jesuits as they
attempt to spread Catholicism beyond Europe.
In the 1480s and ’90s, Luca Signorelli begins to paint male bod-
ies characterized by their pronounced muscularity and their lack of
clothing, sometimes highlighted by a sheer veil or a colored sash—
two noteworthy examples of which are currently in the Toledo, Ohio
Museum of Art. These bodies are distinguished in particular by
their muscular, naked buttocks—a trope never found in paintings
of Jesus, however. Signorelli’s experiments with the muscular male
body find their fullest expression in the frescoes for the Cappella di
San Brizio (1499–1502) for the Duomo of Orvieto, which influenced
Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. Some of the sexiest male figures appear
in the scenes representing the Apocalypse and the resurrection of the
body (in Italian Resurrezione della carne) referred to in, among other
places, the Nicene Creed. It is this resurrected body that will pro-
vide the ultimate reconciliation of human corporeality and the divine.
(The Capella also includes a Pietà featuring a muscled Christ.)
But the focus on the carnality of Christ in scenes of his Passion and
death is complicated by a melodramatic interest in the persecution
and often bodily weakness of the meek (Bayman, personal correspon-
dence). That is, the male corporeality of Christ must to some degree
be contrasted with that of his torturers, for Christ’s body must be
both like and not like that of other men. As a result, in many scenes
of Christ’s Passion, the artist will contrast Christ’s muscularity with
the more excessively muscled bodies of his torturers.
Of particular pertinence is Signorelli’s 1480–83 banner of the
Flagellation of Christ, currently at Milan’s Brera museum and cre-
ated for the Raccomandati of Santa Maria del Mercato in Fabriano,
a version of which is repeated on the 1502 predella of Cortona’s
Lamentation over the Dead Christ. This trope lends itself to distinctly
and disturbingly homoerotic representations of both Christ and his
torturers. The brevity of their loincloths (those of the torturers are
colored and yet sheer enough for us to see their muscled buttocks
beneath them), their buff torsos, the contrast between these torsos
and the clothed soldiers who surround the scene, and the stylized
body poses of the torturers in particular all evoke a sexually charged
drama. Christ’s carnality, however, is distinguished from that of his
torturers in that his skin is more pale and his musculature less exag-
gerated, in part the result of the contrast between his more resigned
body posture and the expending of brute force required of his tor-
mentors. Both sets of bodies are classicized in the sense of being ideal
types, and this in part will distinguish these Renaissance images of
Christ’s humanation from Caravaggio’s depiction of the Incarnation.
The arrangement of the figures is also a classical model, as Christ and
his torturers form an elegant inverted triangle. Given the way that the
mythos of Christ requires his voluntary submission to torture, the
question of whether the depiction is either sadistic or masochistic (in
terms of both the depiction of Christ and the spectator’s gaze) ren-
ders the painting even more disturbing. Christ’s loincloth is looped
in such a way as to draw our eyes to his genitals, the loincloth’s deco-
rated end literally hanging between his legs like a penis.
In the early 1500s, Perugino paints a baptism of Christ, one of the
panels for the Polittico di Sant’Agostino, that is striking in its treatment
of Jesus’s body in terms of both the extent of its muscularity (as com-
pared to other images of Jesus by Perugino) as well as the loincloth
Jesus wears and how it sits on his hips. A near naked Christ being
baptized is not unusual, not only because the circumstances require it
but because the baptism is itself a visual signifier of the Incarnation,
its signification “doubled” via both the voice of God and the dove,
symbol of the Holy Spirit (see Matthew 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke
3:21–23).12 But this loincloth is unique in terms of its color, its brevity,
the way it is tied, and where it is located. Shaped as a band of fabric and
painted a bright blue, the loincloth is looped in a very particular way
that draws the eye to Christ’s genitals. Tied on the right side of the
figure, it also sits lower on Christ’s hips than in many other depictions
and thus exposes more of his naked body—his pubic region in particu-
lar. Perugino draws our eyes to the figure’s genitals and in the process
reminds us of the trope of God made man. This same distinctive loin-
cloth appears in other versions of the baptism by Perugino, such as the
one at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria, as well as in
paintings by his follower Giannicola di Paolo, called Smicca. An earlier
(1493) version also appears on the San Sebastiano of Perugino’s “San
Domenico Altarpiece,” at the Uffizi, the transition from dressing first
the saint and then Jesus himself in this manner perhaps suggesting an
attenuation of the attempt to render God as Man.
While Perugino painted several scenes of the baptism, the body
pose in the Polittico is also unique, for Christ folds his hands across
his chest so that he is touching his own nipples.13 Of particular sig-
nificance to those who read Caravaggio’s paintings as homoerotic,
Siena’s municipal painting gallery houses two particularly illustrative
examples of the highlighting of Christ’s nipples, both by Il Sodoma—
one is a fresco of Christ at the Column, the other, a 1510 Deposition.
The latter is particularly stunning in that the figure lifting Jesus’s
body down from the cross is literally squeezing Christ’s right nipple
between his fingers.14
A fourth painter, the reputedly queer Sebastiano del Piombo,
paints, in the Church of San Pietro in Montorio in Rome (1516–24),
one of the most eroticized and disturbing portraits of Jesus, a scene
of Christ at the column being whipped.15 Vasari credits Michelangelo
with providing the design for the fresco, and there is a red chalk
drawing in the British museum that, according to Liebert, “provides
the overall conception” (64). But he adds, “In the fresco Sebastiano
reversed the figure of Christ and rendered Him more manly than the
rather sweet ‘Saint Sebastian’” by Michelangelo (64). Its trompe l’oeil
treatment of space, however, as well as its elaborate classical setting,
is far more in keeping with the Renaissance than Caravaggio’s flatter
composition. As was the case with the Signorelli depiction, Christ’s
Figure 2.1 Sebastiano del Piombo

Flagellation
S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome, Italy
skin is significantly lighter than that of his torturers, and, while

somewhat buff, his torso is less muscled. This image, too, includes an
unusual loincloth that winds around Christ’s right thigh and empha-
sizes his genitals beneath it.
Del Piombo’s fresco is sometimes cited as the source for Caravaggio’s
painting, now in Naples’s Capodimonte Museum, on the same sub-
ject. In terms of its expression of Baroque melancholy, this is one
of Caravaggio’s greatest works. It brings together many of the char-
acteristics discussed in the previous chapter. Narratively, Caravaggio
presents the moment just before Christ is actually whipped. One of his
captors ties Christ’s arms behind his back, another prepares a bundle
of sticks with which to beat him, and a third grabs Christ’s hair with
his left hand and holds a bundle of switches in his right. Christ’s right
leg is twisted behind the left, and the man tying Christ’s hands places
his left foot on Christ’s calf to give the torturer leverage as he tightens
the ropes behind Christ’s back. The twisting of Christ’s body evokes
an elegant spiral, as well as casts a shadow down his body, along his
left side. His head is tilted to the left and rests on his left shoulder.
Taken together, the figures suggest a theatrical tableau. (This is also
true of the Signorelli and del Piombo versions.) The column extend-
ing above the men and the organization of the arrangement of the
figures on either side of Christ, the two outermost figures leaning in,
gives the composition a triangular shape.
While light and shadow are used to accentuate the muscles of all of
the figures, it is Christ whose body is most brightly illuminated, as if
he is lit by what in the theater is called a tight follow spot that leaves
those around him in shadows. And it is Christ who is, as the narrative
circumstances dictate, the most naked of the three.
While, like trying to explain why a joke is funny, making arguments
about what renders something erotic is difficult, given that muscles
are a visible signifier of masculinity, they carry an erotic charge. The
three figures torturing Christ wear “Biblical” clothing; this cloth-
ing also eroticizes their bodies. The figure holding Christ’s head, for
example, has his shirt down around his right shoulder, exposing his
nipple, and his chest is lit to emphasize its muscularity. There is no
necessary reason for his body to be exposed in this way; according to
those who read Caravaggio as a realist, apparently, we are to assume
that the garment has naturally slipped, a fortuitous coincidence, justi-
fied by the fact that the figure’s right hand is raised. But why is his
nipple in particular exposed? It is these ambiguities that melodrama
solicits, suggesting that some guiding force has arranged “real life” in
such a way as to render up hidden meanings, providing we are patient
and persistent enough to search out the signs.16
The figure tying Christ’s arms wears a caramel-colored cloth tied
around his waist, the folds of the fabric emphasizing his buttocks, as
does the way he is leaning against Christ’s leg. Given both the light
hitting the loincloth and the garment’s folded white fabric belt, it is
this part of his body that first catches the eye. The lighting, color, and
composition of many of Caravaggio’s works emphasize the buttocks
of male figures. Two other examples: the light in the Annunciation
in Nancy is directed right at the angel’s rear-end, the whiteness of his
garment contrasting with the rest of the canvas, which is quite dark,
and the folds of the garment emphasizing the shape of the buttocks.
And as we will see, the Taking of Christ presents a particularly stun-
ning example of a well-defined male rear-end.17
The third figure crouches down and faces away from us, but his
shirt is sleeveless, exposing the muscles of his arm, and the folds in
his loincloth slant toward his genitals. Of course, all of this could be
explained as simply a “realistic” depiction of how the fabric would
“naturally” gather on the bodies of the men, given the way they are
posed, but of course the poses are staged, and the lighting, far from
natural, is used to highlight the folds in the drapery. As for classicism,
the torso of the figure on the left is “dimpled” in such a way as to sug-
gest body fat, and the faces of the torturers—as is typically the case in
Caravaggio’s works—are not idealized types but resemble portraits.
The figure of Christ, however, evokes a classical notion of beauty, not
simply in the musculature but also the elegant pose, which suggests
motion and stasis simultaneously. It is not difficult to see why some
critics might see, in a painting like this, both classicism and natural-
ism. However, Christ’s body is not as muscular as depicted in contem-
poraneous representations by Annibale Carracci—see, for example,
the latter’s Pietà with two angels, c.1601–2.
Because of the pose he is placed in, as well as the way the lighting
hits his body, every muscle of Christ’s is emphasized, from his neck
to his chest to his abdomen to his legs, and his nipples in particular
are rendered in convincing detail—so much so that they look erect.18
The arrangement, lighting, and color of the composition lead our
eyes first to Christ’s abdomen and loincloth—for it is both white and
brightly lit, with highly detailed folds that catch the play of light and
shadows, and is tied in an elegant knot, the loincloth’s end hanging
gracefully at Christ’s side—then up to his chest, then his face, which,
because it is gazing down, leads our eyes back down his body again
to his loincloth. That is, we are encouraged to “cruise” Jesus. Because
it is tied across his torso diagonally, the loincloth leads our eyes to
the figures on either side and in front of him. Zuffi argues that this
loincloth is knotted in a way that directly reflects the loincloth of
the Crucifixion (205). Many of these same features can be found in
Caravaggio’s c.1607 Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen version of this
same subject. In this canvas, Christ’s body is highly eroticized—by
the lighting; the extreme detail in the portrayal of the nipples, chest,
and torso; the deep angle at which the loincloth is tied; its criss-cross-
ing and folds; and the pose of vulnerability. For not only are his hands
tied behind his back, but Christ is somewhat stooped, and his body
again forms an elegant spiral in which his torso is turned in three-

quarter profile toward us while his head is turned further over his
right shoulder. Here again, our eyes are drawn first to Christ’s chest,
the most brightly lit area of the canvas, and then down his body to
his genitals via the curving pose of the figure—inviting us to cruise
the suffering Jesus.
In both versions, the expression on Christ’s face is difficult to read:
resignation? sorrow? or simply repose? Bayman’s notion of a melodra-
matic defeated interiority seems an appropriate one for this expression
(“Melodrama as Seriousness” 88). In its ambiguity, the expression
reminds us of the ways Caravaggio does and does not seem to follow
Counter-Reformation theology, or perhaps the contradictions of this
theology itself, with its desire to bring the penitent closer to Jesus
while maintaining a hierarchical church structure. For the “profane”
insistence that bodily suffering be portrayed accurately contradicts
the rule of decorum—excess as a contravention of decorum is one
of the ways in which melodrama is not classicism—and in a way that
parallels the tension between Jesus as son of man and son of God
simultaneously. In the Naples version in particular, the “naturalism”
of the faces of the torturers contrasts with the expression of repose
on Christ’s face. Another instance in which Jesus’s face contrasts in
particular with the other figures is in Caravaggio’s composition of
a quintessential Counter-Reformation theme, the Doubting Thomas,
for while the faces of the three apostles are lined and perplexed, the
face of Jesus is, again, difficult to read, one critic suggesting patience
and resignation (Zuffi 141).
In the Naples painting, Jesus’s expression contrasts vividly with
that of the torturer who holds his hair, as the latter’s face is lined, his
eyebrows arched, and his mouth open.19 Taken together, then, the
two represent melodrama’s typically Manichean oppositions. We see
in the two faces not a melding or reconciliation of classicism and nat-
uralism but rather their juxtaposition, a juxtaposition that threatens
to reveal the incommensurability of the two. The most virtuoso area
of the canvas, however, is arguably the face of the figure crouched
below. For his head is turned away from us so that we see it in one-
quarter profile, and the heavy shadows render both the face and tou-
sled hair difficult to see with any clarity.20 And yet they are absolutely
convincing in their verisimilitude. Almost not quite “there” yet at the
same time absolutely present, his face is an allegory of the problematic
status of visibility under the pressures of the Reformation.
The eroticism of the image could be explained in a number of ways:
the emphasis on the loincloth again suggesting the transformation of
God into “real” human flesh, the determination of the Baroque to offer
convincing visual representations of bodily suffering, classical prece-
dents—one critic cites the Uffizi Arrotino (Onori 198)—Caravaggio’s
“naturalism” and the skill with which it renders human skin, muscles,
and hair (Christ’s beard in particular) palpable, the Baroque intertwin-
ing of the erotic and the spiritual, the somatic coincidence between
sexual arousal and bodily discomfort. The point, however, is that the
image is erotic, that the eroticism is unsettling, and that this unset-
tling quality suggests to us meanings we are being called upon to
decipher.
By contrast, Guercino’s 1644 depiction of this same subject, while
clearly influenced by Caravaggio, is far less homoerotic. The torturers
look clumsy rather than elegant or sexy, their body poses in particular
lending them an unstable, awkward quality. At the same time, the
painting is less melodramatic than Caravaggio’s. Perhaps following
Piero della Francesca and del Piombo, Guercino “fills in” the back-
ground, in Renaissance fashion, with trompe l’oeil classical architec-
ture and, beyond, elements of a cityscape and cloudy sky, and the
painter employing a brush stroke more in keeping with Titian’s than
Caravaggio’s. (See also Guercino’s 1657 version.)
The contrast between Guercino’s and Caravaggio’s treatment of
these same scenes emphasizes the latter’s eroticization of the body
of the torturer. This eroticization is not simply the narrative result
of portraying the torturer in states of undress, though this certainly
contributes to our contemporary sense of the paintings as homo-
erotic. Caravaggio’s use of light—and his virtuoso use of fabric to
highlight contrasts between light and shadow—also eroticize the tor-
turer’s body. For example, in the Rouen version, one of the torturer’s
muscled arms is emphasized via the lighting in particular, his chest
is half exposed, and his loincloth features a series of folds that draw
our eyes to his genital area, as does the lighting—as in the figure of
Christ, our eyes are led from the brightness of his arms and down
to his crotch, in this case, via the folds in the clothes he wears. In
the Malta Beheading of John the Baptist, our eyes are drawn first to
the brightly lit, muscular back of the torturer. From here, our gaze
is led down his muscular arm to the saint being held to the ground.
With its elaborate folds, the torturer’s silvery loincloth also holds our
gaze. Light similarly emphasizes the muscular thighs of the man in
contemporary clothes who points to the golden tray on which the
Baptist’s head will be placed. Light highlights his upper right thigh,
his yellow tights, his blue cloak, and folded brown shirt. While light
is also used to highlight Salomé’s black dress and the elaborate white
sash tied around her waist, these effects arguably do not eroticize
her body. For the particular areas highlighted by the lighting are not
those we generally associate with female sexuality—her arms. In addi-
tion to the paintings already discussed, the Crucifixion of St. Andrew
similarly eroticizes, through the use of lighting, the muscled back and
legs of the executioner.
This apparently contradictory eroticization of both Christ and his
torturers suggests in fact the proximity of the two. Christ was a man
like other men, and so while this doubled eroticization might lead
at least some modern-day readers to pose a kind of sadomasochis-
tic reading of the paintings, I would suggest that what looks like
an s/m scene is the result of the closeness of Christ to his tortur-
ers, the closeness of ecstasy to abjection, the closeness of pleasure to
pain. Such a discussion necessarily engages how one understands s/m
scenarios themselves, for while Freud posited sadism and masochism
as “complementary” perversions, Deleuze argued that they were in
fact quite different, both in terms of the desires they engaged and
the accompanying aesthetics such erotic scenarios required. Briefly:
Freud believes that, in the s/m scenario, one partner enjoys inflicting
pain while the other enjoys receiving it. In Deleuze’s account, the
specifically masochistic (and melodramatic) patterns of theatricalized
delay and deferral (qualities that a painting of Christ’s Passion evokes)
that constitute the source of masochistic pleasure are actually under
the control of the “bottom,” who has in fact had to solicit and seduce
the top into performing the role of torturer.21 What Deleuze calls the
masochistic aesthetic—in particular, its emphasis on surface—is
replicated in Caravaggio’s treatment of skin, fur, drapery, and even
armor. Brought to these scenes of Jesus’s martyrdom, such a reading
of masochism intersects with Christian beliefs around the necessity
of Christ’s Crucifixion as a means of righting the wrong of original
sin and Jesus’s own acceptance in the Garden of Gethsemane of the
role he must play in soliciting his own death: Christ is a masochist in
that he had to seduce first Judas and then His torturers into perform-
ing their acts of betrayal and violence so that the ancient prophecies
might be fulfilled.
What links Perugino, Signorelli, del Piombo, and Caravaggio is
knowledge of Michelangelo’s painting; each painter also spent part of
his career in Rome. It is a commonplace to connect Caravaggio’s male
bodies to Michelangelo’s ignudi, and Gilbert takes this even further,
positing a kind of triangular paragone between Michelangelo’s ceil-
ing for the Sistine Chapel (1508–12), Carracci’s ceiling for the Palazzo
Farnese, and Caravaggio’s Capitoline Saint John. But it is too simple to
suggest that Michelangelo is responsible for all of these particular depic-

tions, as the influence of Signorelli on Michelangelo is well known.
In these various figurings of Christ, a painterly discussion
around the representation of the male body is occurring, inaugu-
rated by Renaissance humanism and attenuated by the Baroque, with
Mannerist representations of muscled male bodies providing a link
between the two. This painterly discussion also includes Carracci’s
neoclassicism, but it finds its most melancholy expression in the
paintings of Caravaggio, the result of the painter’s fabricating of a
melodramatic sensibility. That the male body becomes the register on
which a sense of loss is recorded seems perfectly in keeping with the
Baroque, given that Jesus was a man. In other words, Jesus’s male-
ness provides one of the conditions of possibility of the correlating of
masculinity, melodrama, and melancholy.
The Taking of Christ

The scene depicting the capture of Christ in the Garden is one of
Caravaggio’s most melodramatic canvases, from the darkness of the
night illuminated only by the lantern, to the exaggerated gesture of
fear and grief expressed by the fleeing apostle, to the elegant red arc of
the apostle’s cloak hanging in the air as he flees, to the inclusion of the
artist’s self-portrait. The motif of the betrayal is itself melodramatic,
as it is one in which a kiss promises one signified but actually delivers
another. Again, the face of Jesus is “docile and resigned,” according to
one critic the result of “the doctrine of obedience and of the abandon-
ment of the will typical of the Franciscans” (Zuffi 144). The other
faces, however, are characteristically detailed. The figures are crowded
into the frame and thrust into the foreground as if we share their space
and are standing as silent witnesses to this act of betrayal.
In terms of the male bodies, of particular note is the clothing of
the soldier in the immediate foreground, turned so as to give us a
nearly three-quarter view of his rear-end. The contrast between the
red fabric in which his buttocks is clothed and Caravaggio’s detailed,
highly realistic, and virtuoso depiction of the armor and its reflec-
tive surface draws our eyes to the rear-end of the soldier, its round-
ness further emphasized by the strips of gold fabric laid on top of it
like a kind of jockstrap. This overgarment, as well as the folds in the
red fabric, emphasize the muscular shape of his posterior, as does
the way the armor leaves his rear-end exposed, as if he were wearing
modern-day chaps. Yes, it is perfectly plausible to suggest that this is
Caravaggio “showing off,” as the “realism” in terms of the depiction
of the human figures, the various textures of the fabrics and armor
they wear, and the way light and shadow play off their surfaces is,
literally, stunning. But the melodramatic qualities of this painting are
quite evident, and clearly nothing in the choice of the subject matter
requires that the figure’s buttocks be lit and framed as it is. Our eyes
are further drawn to it in a diagonal pattern that connects its red color
to the red worn by Christ and the apostle crying out, particularly
given the contrast between this red and the surface of the armor.
St. John the Baptist

Caravaggio’s portrayal of the adolescent John the Baptist is unique.
The two versions of this iconography, one in Kansas City and the
other in Rome, present us with strikingly beautiful depictions of male
adolescent corporality. Although the models are clearly different, the
faces of both figures suggest an adolescent moodiness, an expression
that is difficult to read. Both are cast in shadows. The expression on
the Kansas City’s Baptist’s face seems more angry, as his mouth is set,
while the Corsini Baptist’s lips are slightly parted. The face of the
Kansas City Baptist expresses a kind of frustration or disappointment
in marked contrast to the way, for example, the face of Jesus is typi-
cally depicted in Caravaggio’s works. But in both cases, the expres-
sion is difficult to read.
Both figures are largely naked, possessing lithe adolescent bodies
whose muscles are highlighted by the lighting, the Kansas City Baptist
with an animal skin draped across his lap and around his right arm,
the Corsini, even more exposed, a white cloth covering his genitals.
The garments of both figures are lined with folds directly over their
genitals, suggesting the way in which the Baptist prefigures Jesus’s
human corporeality. The Corsini’s body is more muscularly defined
but still lithe, and one of his nipples is exposed. Both have tousled,
auburn hair that falls across the forehead, the Corsini’s falling over
his eyes and thus rendering his expression even more ambiguous than
that of his Kansas City counterpart.
Both Baptists are also wrapped, however, in an immense, rich,
red cloak noteworthy for both its sensuality and excessive size. The
cloak is clearly a costume piece and contrasts drastically with the dark
forests against which the two figures are juxtaposed. The contrast
between the color and texture of the figures’ skin and the fabrics
in which they are wrapped is one of the most arresting aspects of
many of Caravaggio’s paintings, and that is certainly the case with
these two images.22 While both figures are seated, the Kansas City
Figure 2.2 St. John the Baptist, 1604–05

Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, USA
portrait is full length, the right foot raised and the left leg back, as if
he has just sat down or is about to get up, and his left arm is crossed
across his chest, as if he is leaning on something beneath his cloak.
But it is also a gesture that suggests he is drawing inside himself.
The Corsini portrait is three quarters in length, and here, too, the
figure is leaning as if he is about to get up, his weight shifted to the
right. Such poses help explain the reading of Caravaggio’s canvases as
offering a “synthesis” of the classical and natural in that the painter
takes classical notions of balance and dynamism but renders them in
an unusual manner. The body pose, however, is melodramatic rather
than naturalistic, signifying in excess of the simple movement of
Figure 2.3 St. John the Baptist

Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica, Rome, Italy
sitting or rising, and the difficulty of determining which, indicative

of this excess of signification.
The effect of both of these portraits is haunting in that we, as
viewers, know the fate that awaits these young men. That the figures
are on the verge of manhood draws us closer to this future than, for
example, depictions of the Baptist as a child. We scan their faces to
look for signs of their knowledge of their fate. This ambiguity is com-
pounded by the subject matter itself, for John is both the harbinger
of Christ and also his cousin/double, the one who recognizes His
Godly status and who will die in part as a result.23
In all of Caravaggio’s paintings, the figures wear costumes, clothes
that have a sensuality beyond their “use” to clothe the human body.
As in melodrama, costume is, in Caravaggio’s paintings, a metaphor
to be deciphered. Like his use of lighting, Caravaggio’s use of cos-
tume is neither “natural” nor “classical.” Not “natural” because, in
their sensuality and the way in which they stand for something other
than “clothes,” they exceed the functional; not “classical” in that,
if we insist on finding an ancient precedent, their detail suggests
something Hellenistic, excessive. There is also something Venetian
in Caravaggio’s treatment, a celebration of the sensual for its own
sake, and a conception of life as theater. The clothing of the three

young soldiers sitting around the table when St. Matthew is called
have been described by one critic as “sgargianti”: gaudy, showy,
flashy (Zuffi 102). The helmet of one of the soldiers who await Judas’s
kiss is trimmed in incised gold. The breastplate of St. Ursula’s assas-
sin is adorned with a lion’s head in gold. Even the gown worn by
St. Catherine is covered in what appears to be a hand-stamped print.
These paintings use clothing in a way similar to the way costumes are
used in Hollywood musicals (Dyer). They carry a utopian potential,
a world that is on the one hand transparent, providing one is suffi-
ciently attentive to its signs, and on the other one where the senses
can be indulged without concern for scarcity.
Caravaggio’s Angels
This use of fabric as costume is perhaps most pronounced in
Caravaggio’s angels. Wrapped in an embrace, two adolescent boy
angels at the top of the Seven Acts of Mercy wrestle or swirl in the
air, which, it is difficult to tell. Owing to the triangular shape of the
composition, the height of the painting, and light bouncing off their
muscles, the boys occupy the area of the canvas to which the eye is
drawn first. We then gaze up to the tip of the triangle, where we see
the Madonna and Child, and then an elegant drape of deep green
leads our eyes down to earth, to see the works being performed. In
the St. Matthew and the Angel in the Contarelli Chapel, the swirling
white drapery creates a spiral with a half-naked, curly-haired young
boy angel at its center. This angel also appears in the martyrdom.
A boy of a similar age was apparently the model for the now lost
Nativity with Saints Lawrence and Francis.
Some of the most visually striking figures in the religious paint-
ings of Caravaggio are his angels. Literally traveling between the
earthly and the spiritual, angels have a particular role to play in many
of Caravaggio’s canvas, and the majority of their bodies are overtly
marked as male, mirroring the divinity of Christ but traversing the
divine and fully human in a way that during his lifetime as a man He
could not. Interesting in this regard is the angel in the first version
of the Conversion of Paul, as the ruddy-faced boyish angel seems lit-
erally to be holding Christ back from returning to earth. One critic
describes the angel in the Contarelli Chapel painting of St. Matthew
writing his Gospel as “the umpteenth version of the boys from the
streets called in to dress up as Bacchini” (Sgarbi 33). Even Gilbert does
not seek to de-queer Caravaggio’s angels, apparently not recognizing
them as hunky, or, despite the visual evidence, assuming that the
angels are genderless.
The Ecstatic Erotic

The homoeroticism of Caravaggio is attenuated by the way his can-
vases are staged for the viewer, crowding the frame with sexy men and
arranging the composition (figures shown from the back, for example)
so that the space portrayed seems to extend from the canvas into the one
occupied by the spectator—a visual analogue of the way some Baroque
churches tried to bring the penitent closer to the altar—as well as by
the painter’s attempt at making the “holy” visually and sensually pres-
ent. The attempt to make visible states of ecstasy brings with it the
erotic, and, contra Gilbert, no “reading into” the canvas is required.
The Caravaggio canvas that perhaps best illustrates this Baroque
theme of spiritual and bodily ecstasy is the painting of a swooning
St. Francis of Assisi being cradled in the arms of an angel. The story
of Francis’s receiving of the stigmata is related by his first biographer,
Thomas of Celano. Francis was the first person to receive the wounds
of Christ. But Celano’s account, which features a six-winged cruci-
fied seraph, bears no relationship to the way the scene is depicted
in Caravaggio. The event is alleged to have occurred in a hermit-
age; there is no mention of a garden setting. Bonaventure’s life of
St. Francis instead has the vision of the six-winged seraph occurring
while the saint was praying “on the side of the mountain” (139).
Given that Caravaggio’s angels are always male, even if pretty, as
well as the Baroque’s own flirting with the proximity of sexual to
spiritual ecstasy, the painting provokes a homoerotic reading. The
angel in question is an ephebe, whose face and softness of flesh con-
trast with the bearded, mustached St. Francis, the two of them resem-
bling the pederastic couple of classical Greece but at the same time
illustrating a Caravaggesque juxtaposition of classicism and natural-
ism. For the face of St. Francis is, even in sleep, lined, and there is
nothing idealized in the treatment of his hair, beard, and mustache.
Another instance of the juxtaposition of the classical and the natu-
ralistic is the organization of the space of the painting, for while the
bodies of St. Francis and his angel form a Renaissance triangle, they
are not centered but positioned to the right, so that we can see into
the depths of the forest where the event is occurring. The perspec-
tive of the painting thus seems deliberately skewed, as the vanish-
ing point, in terms of the forest scene, is to the left of the figures,
who are in the immediate foreground—as if the painter has taken
two different representational systems and placed them side by side.

Our eyes in fact are led to crisscross the painting, moving left, right,
and back again between the “deepest” point of the canvas, the ponds
receding into the woods, and the figures of St. Francis and the angel.
What draws our gaze back to them is of course Caravaggio’s use of
light, the brightest points of the canvas being the angel’s shoulders,
themselves traversed by a shadow.
The wooded setting also lends the angel a pagan godlike qual-
ity and recalls the many mythological accounts of forest adven-
tures between humans and deities or sprites, particularly via the
light reflecting off the surface of the pond; one cannot help being
reminded of Caravaggio’s Narcissus. The shoulder and part of the
chest of the male angel is naked, and he is dressed in an elaborately
pleated and folded outfit tied in a bow on the side. This garment
once again provides the occasion for virtuoso experiments with the
play of light and shadow. Another interesting use of drapery occurs
in the treatment of the folds of the saint’s habit, which lead the eye
to his genitals, suggesting, as the stigmata does, St. Francis as the
double of the crucified Christ. Without noting the drapery, Wallace
also discusses how the painting blurs the identities of Christ and
Figure 2.4 St. Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, c. 1594

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
the saint. He specifically suggests that Caravaggio has conflated the

scene of the stigmata with Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane (12).
Like Christ, then, in Caravaggio’s treatment, Francis is depicted as a
human incarnation of the divine.
In considering the homoerotic possibilities of the painting, many
critics do not discuss the fact that Caravaggio seems to have invented
this pose. St. Francis is, obviously, “passive,” again reversing the
dynamic of the pederastic couple, and he gestures toward the stig-
matic wound, which Trexler reminds us, in his discussion of earlier
depictions of the crucified Christ, had certain feminine connota-
tions—the wound suggesting a vagina. The angel gazes at the face of
St. Francis as if he were regarding a sleeping lover. The scene is melo-
dramatic not only in terms of its lighting and forest setting mirroring
the saint’s emotional state “between” sleeping and waking, darkness
and dawn, but also via the marked gestures of the sleeping St. Francis.
For one hand points toward his wound, while the other arm is out-
stretched in a gesture that is ambiguous and yet suggests a meaning;
perhaps he is praying; perhaps he is reaching out to embrace someone.
Also melodramatic is the way the angel is propping up the swooning
saint, as if St. Francis’s head had been resting in the angel’s lap, the
angel now attempting to rouse the saint, or else as if St. Francis had
suddenly fainted into the arms of the angel, who has just managed to
catch the saint before he fell to the ground. For the angel is poised
between kneeling and standing.
Conclusion
Caravaggio’s painterly interest in the play of light and shadow brings
with it an eroticization of the male body. First, because the two
surfaces that provide Caravaggio with his greatest opportunities to
pursue this painterly project are the naked human body, fabric (or
armor), and the meeting of the two. Second, because many of his
commissions were for religious paintings, female nudity is at a mini-
mum. Third, in the case of his male models, the subject matter of the
paintings often provides “fortuitous” (but, in many cases, nonobliga-
tory) narrative opportunities for the display of naked (or provocatively
clothed) bodies, the musculature of these bodies offering a particu-
larly “lush” surface with which to experiment. The play of light and
shadow eroticizes virtually all of the male bodies in the paintings of
the Contarelli chapel, for example, whether they are naked, dressed
in tights, or somewhere in between, as well as the particular body
parts highlighted—the curve of a buttocks, the chest, the muscled
abdomen, the thighs. The half nakedness of the figures in the mar-
tyrdom and the combination of “Biblical” and then contemporary
clothing creates a scenario, adding a particular erotic charge to these
canvases, as desire is always a scene, a staging.
Finally, the required Catholic riposte to Protestantism was not a
denial of the human qualities of Christ, but in fact, the opposite:
Catholicism needed to provide its own version of a linking of the heav-
enly and the earthly, the sacred and the profane. On the one hand,
while Christ provided the model image for this theme of God made
man, certain of Christ’s followers—St. John, St. Peter, St. Francis,
and St. Jerome in particular—could also function as an instance of
this representation. On the other, the struggle against Protestant her-
esies could also be figured as the struggle between Christ and his
torturers, between angels and demons. What infused this struggle
with melancholy was on the one hand the recognition that, accord-
ing to Catholic theology, Christ’s bodily suffering and martyrdom
was both obligatory and entered into freely (as was the martyrdom
of his followers), and on the other, the melancholy that followed the
recognition that the Christian community was from the point of the
Reformation forward irreducibly divided. Christianity’s “eternal”
Manichean struggle between good and evil was now also a struggle
between the one true Catholic faith and the Protestant heresies. The
body of Christ was broken in two.
The Counter-Reformation was “obsessed” with Christ’s male
human presence, and to deny the eroticism of these images of Christ
is in fact to project backward into history a twentieth-century sensi-
bility. Unless we are to believe that, in the late Renaissance and early
Baroque, the specific signifying devices of masculinity—most per-
tinently, the male body—carried no erotic charge whatsoever, then
at least some spectators, male and female, would have recognized
Caravaggio’s male bodies—muscled and half-clothed, with the cloth-
ing in fact emphasizing both their muscularity and nudity—as sexy.
Additionally, the possibility that the Renaissance was able to produce
a classicism purged of homoeroticism does not seem very likely.
It is also strange that Gilbert, who is so determined to establish
Caravaggio’s Counter-Reformation credentials, would, in his rigorous
attempt to de-queer the painter, ignore the question in Counter-
Reformation texts of the link between sexual ecstasy and spiritual com-
munion with the divine. Without touching upon this issue of sexuality
and mysticism, Sgarbi argues that the late paintings of Caravaggio in
particular “seems to want to express the equivalent of the mystical
experience of Saint John of the Cross” (45; Chorpenning also makes
this connection between Caravaggio’s paintings and the writings of

Counter-Reformation mystics; see 156). These mystical experiences
engage the relationship between the body as register of ecstasy and
the voyeuristic seeking of the visual proof of pleasure:
The artist is by nature a voyeur, and here Caravaggio has created a

voyeuristic situation into which the spectator, as he takes the painter’s
place in front of the completed canvas, must necessarily fall. The mean-
ing of the picture thus depends not only on the presence Caravaggio
has evoked in it, but on the situation he has now made. (Freedberg 54,
cited in Fried 1997: 21n16)
Freedberg’s referencing of the situation reopens the question of allegory

and its relationship to the Baroque—and by extension, melodrama. For
a naïve realist epistemology would suggest that Caravaggio’s bodies
are not tropes but imitations, and that what arouses the contemporary
spectator is the photographic quality of these sexy male bodies, their
realism. But psychoanalysis has alerted us to the fact that it is not the
“denotational” value of the image that we find erotic, but its connota-
tions; that fantasy is not the desire for a particular object but rather
the setting out of lack, the constructing of a scenario or situation; that
sexual representations refer not to a particular object but to any num-
ber of objects, all of them lost and substitutable for one another. That
is, the erotic image does not arouse because it stands in for, via imita-
tion, its counterpart in reality. Rather, it is caught up in a highly coded,
“unnatural” system of signification. The figure of the male body is a
metonymy where the “product” (sexual satisfaction) stands in for the
“process” (desire); it is not a metaphor in the sense that it does not
transfer the body into a new domain—except for willfully heteronor-
mative readers who see the male body as “standing for” something else
completely, something excluding the carnal. The scopophilic pleasure
offered by the Baroque is not equivalent to that proposed by Albertian
perspective. It is instead the “masochistic” pleasure of the divided, split,
splintered subject, the subject who is offered and takes up a variety of
sometimes contradictory positions in relation to the image. Not the
either/or of the Cartesian subject but the both/and of the queer.
Caravaggio also links melodrama and masculinity through the
genre of the self-portrait. The Manichean worldview is conveyed in
these paintings in the form of the split self, as Caravaggio is both
painter (occupying the space evoked in front of the canvas, con-
jured by his compositional techniques) and participant in the acts
of martyrdom (Zuffi 215; Fried “Thoughts” and The Moment 44;

for a comparison of the self-portraits, see Zuffi 218–19). Caravaggio
looks on as St. Matthew is martyred; he holds the lantern so that
we can see Judas kiss Christ. And in the David, the painting’s hero
holds Caravaggio’s head, a trophy (on this self-portrait, see Stone).
Baroque images of Christ’s suffering are also metonymic and,
by extension, allegorical. The image refers to the process of the
Incarnation, death, and resurrection—not to the “person” of Christ,
however “realistic” the image might be. The “realism” of the depic-
tion of the body in fact guarantees its metonymic quality, since it can
only stand for a part of the whole—the “realism” a reminder of its
part-ness, for God cannot be reducible to either a man or the Holy
Spirit. The carnal Jesus deconstructs the binaries God/man—in the
rigorous sense, not a simple inversion, but a reversal and displace-
ment. While the Holy Trinity is a closed circle, each element refers
to the other two and finds its supplement in them. God, Jesus, and
the Holy Spirit are tropes, allegorical figures. The carnality of Jesus
is irreducible. The Passion is an allegory, a figure, not a metaphor/
imitation. As Benjamin suggests,
Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been
untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed [via allegory] . . . it sig-
nificantly gives rise not only to the enigmatic question of the nature
of human existence as such, but also of the biographical historicity of
the individual. This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the
baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world.
(166)24
This passage in Benjamin leads us back to the figure of the queer,

who, in its many incarnations, stands for a stark confrontation with
that enigmatic question of which Benjamin writes. In one, the queer
is a discursive embodiment of the death drive via the trope of “no
future” (Edelman); in another, the queer stands for a communion
with lower orders of being (Warner) and a return, via the sexual,
to that question of “subject-less” states of desire (Hewitt) and the
(im)possibility of the division between the human and its other, an
(im)possibility that the act of sex allegorizes (Bersani, Vogler); in yet
another, the queer is a figure of optimism (Snediker).
The heightened sense of affect we experience in front of Caravaggio’s
paintings, their recourse to certain melodramatic techniques like
chiaroscuro, the emphasis on gesture and the body, the theatricalized
mise en scene evoked through drapery and placement of the figures

in space, and their representation not only of saints but of sinners—
these characteristics transpose themselves from painting to theater
and ultimately, to opera. In the next chapters, an exploration of two
of the operas of Giacomo Puccini will allows us to begin to consider
how and why.
CH A P T ER 3
Tosca and Social Melodrama
Introduction
It is a critical commonplace that Italy’s most sophisticated contribu-
tion to melodrama occurs via opera (Elsaesser 69). First performed
at La Scala, Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1820 Margherita d’Anjou fea-
tured a libretto after a text by Pixérécourt.1 Other playwrights whose
melodramas inspired operas include Anicet-Bourgeois (who provided
librettos for Verdi and Gounod), Adolphe d’Ennery, Benjamin Antier
(Van 91–92), Hugo, and Dumas (Kimbell 461). The multiple regis-
ters through which opera produces meaning suggests it is particularly
suited to the melodramatic sensibility and its efforts to make present
that which is “beyond” words. No wonder it flourished in this most
synthetic of the arts.
Given European cultural history, the migration of the melodramatic
sensibility across national lines is not surprising.2 Via a reading of the
reception of Verdi’s operas, Axel Körner suggests that “Italy articulated
its experience of modernity and nation building through a transnational
exchange of ideas and a generous reception of European culture” (191).3
While mid-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics argued for
a rigorously Italian aesthetic response to modernization, this hyper-
nationalist rhetoric masked several contradictions. Körner highlights
the example of Italian publisher Ricordi: to circumvent the popularity
and influence of Richard Wagner (whose works were published in Italy
by a competing press), the publisher’s Gazzetta Musicale di Milano
frequently invoked italianità ( “Music of the Future” 198). Deborah
Amberson notes the way in which the “Generazione dell’80”—a group
of early twentieth-century composers and critics determined to reinvig-
orate modern Italian musical culture—pursued contradictory goals, for
their program envisioned
first of all, moving beyond what they saw as the provincialism and
commercialism of the verist operatic hegemony, secondly, the recovery
of Italy’s musical past (especially Baroque composers), and, finally, an

opening up to contemporary European music, an opening up that was,
however, frequently ambivalent, occurring as it did during a period of
increasingly bellicose nationalism. (2) 4
While Italian intellectuals and the nascent culture industry lamented

the failure of the new state to produce a unique aesthetic, both the
sensibilities of Italian artists and the taste of their audiences devel-
oped via transnational exchanges. This continued well into the twen-
tieth century: up until 1938, virtually every major Italian modernist
painter, for example, spent significant time in Paris.
Focusing on two particular operas, Tosca (1900) and La Rondine
(1917), the next two chapters explore Giacomo Puccini’s contribution
to modernism, melodrama, and Italian masculinity. Both Tosca and
La Rondine were met with critical ambivalence. Tosca was attacked as
precisely overly melodramatic. Gustav Mahler notoriously referred to
it as a “meistermachwerk” (“masterful sorry effort”; cited in Carner
36). Summarizing its initial critical reception, Alexandra Wilson
argues that “responses to Tosca were dominated by the idea that the
opera—with its obvious dramatic deceptions, its wooden characters,
its music contaminated by a surfeit of foreign influences, its cheap
melodrama posing as high art—was fraudulent at all levels” (Puccini
69). The opera was deemed “implausible” (Puccini 83), “a half-baked
display of theatrical effects,” (84–85) and unoriginal (88).5
Yet Arman Schwartz has noticed in Tosca’s early reception a second
theme: “Reviews of the premiere were harsh, critic after critic despair-
ing that Puccini had pushed the antimusical tendencies of verismo
to a disastrous conclusion.” Schwartz’s summary implies that critics
were disturbed by the work’s modernist reflexivity (234). (On criti-
cal objections to “noise” in Tosca, see also Wilson, Puccini 86–88.)
Even contemporary fans of the opera have suggested that “Puccini
produces a puzzling musical conflation of real and artificial elements”
(Schickling 132). (In composing Tosca, the lengths to which Puccini
went to capture certain details of papal Rome—from its dialect to its
liturgical music—are well known: Giger 305; Girardi Puccini la vita
73; Keeffe 20; Ravenni and Girardi; Schwartz.)
Long considered an anomaly, La Rondine seemed not to fit com-
fortably into any extant genre, a hybrid of Viennese operetta and
melodrama (Davis, Andrew 4; Bertolazzi). Were the opera simply to
have ended at the conclusion of the second act, it would have been
a comedy, the two lovers (who manage to fall in love in the space of
a single night) walking arm and arm into a happy future. Initially
TOSCA AND SOCIAL MELODRAMA 87
conceived as an operetta, La Rondine ultimately became “an opera

from top to bottom” (Puccini Giacomo Puccini 47n5; the words,
however, are those of the editor. For accounts of the circumstances
of this transformation, see also Fraccaroli 181–87; Girardi Puccini la
vita 143–44).
Critics found La Rondine either incoherent or overly derivative,
(Puccini’s own publisher, Tito Ricordi, rejected the opera as “bad
Lehár”; Puccini, quoted in Osborne 201; it was published instead by
Lorenzo Sonzogno) and at a time when, as a member of the Allied
campaign, Italy was at war with Austria. (On Puccini, the war, and
its influence on the composition, publication, and premier of La
Rondine, see Budden 345–50; Fraccaroli 184–92.) While the reviews
of the Monte Carlo premier were positive, when produced in Bologna
a few months later, the opera was “met with harsh criticism from the
press” (Wilson Puccini 173). Mosco Carner, for example, wrote of
the weak characterization of the two lovers, and a libretto “not suf-
ficiently light to be the sentimental comedy it would like to be, nor
serious enough for a tragedy” (cited in Girardi Puccini la vita 148).
In writing La Rondine, Puccini was even accused of being unpatri-
otic, the opera “out of keeping with the troubled mood of a nation
at war, and unacceptable as a serious work of opera” (Wilson Puccini
174). (The fact that the opera was originally commissioned by the
Viennese contributed to this sentiment.)6
The criticisms leveled against Tosca and La Rondine arise in part
from the way Puccini’s operas both reflect and contribute to changes in
the melodramatic sensibility. Spanning the years from 1858 to 1924,
Puccini’s lifetime coincided with an astonishing range of changes in
opera, both within Italy and beyond, from Verdi to Wagner to Saint-
Saëns to Massenet to Leoncavallo and Mascagni to Debussy to Berg
to Dallapiccola—that is, from Romanticism to verismo to modern-
ism. While his operas draw on the musical past, they are also turned
toward the future. For many of his contemporary modernist critics,
however, as a result of their debt to melodrama in particular, these
operas were deemed to be retrograde.
Rather, they were precisely configurations of the peculiarly modern
colocation of melodrama, melancholy, and masculinity. For both operas
are in a reflexive dialogue with historical representations of gender dif-
ference culled from melodrama, and both provide critiques of normative
masculinities as well as sympathetic portrayals of women who suffer the
abuses of male social, sexual, and political power. This dialogue with
the past is made possible by the generic link of Puccini’s heroines to the
figure of the long-suffering, “fallen” woman with a heart of gold.
Puccini’s melodramas are “male,” however, in a variety of differ-

ent, even queer, ways. Both Tosca’s and La Rondine’s attitudes toward
their heroines are wrought with contradictions. In both operas, she
is to some degree morally “blemished,” the implication being that
she is responsible for her fate and has brought on at least some of her
unhappiness via her own sexual behavior. Concerning Tosca, critics
have read this blemish as everything from excess jealousy to masoch-
ism. As for La Rondine’s Magda, her past as a kept woman ensures
that, in the future, she will be perceived as, in the opera’s words,
“contaminated.” This fallen woman—in both of these operas, a dis-
tinctly urban phenomenon—makes her entrée into melodrama in an
attempt to appeal to modern sensibilities.
However, in Puccini, this representation of the sexually tarnished
woman is always in tension with an acknowledgment that forces
beyond her control—forces directly linked to male power and pres-
tige—are equally if not more responsible for her unhappy fate. Tosca
in particular reveals that wanton sexuality is projected onto the hero-
ine by both her lover—for Mario refers to her twice in the first act as
“my siren”—and the villain, who calls her “a leopard.” Critics some-
times symptomatically replicate this move, Giampaolo Rugarli calling
her “almost feral” (127). These operas are male melodramas, then, in
the sense of being the product of a male composer and his librettists
struggling with changing gender roles.
Puccini’s melodramatic dialogue with femininity is further compli-
cated by his alleged overidentification with his female protagonists.7
In both operas, the primary story being told is that of the heroine,
and through their narrative construction, they invite the audience to
identify with these heroines. Tosca and La Rondine are thus also male
melodramas in the sense of having provided their composer with an
imaginary femininity—a characteristic they share with a variety of
modernist texts, perhaps most familiarly, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary
(Huyssen).
But Tosca is also a male melodrama in the sense of pitting the
hero Mario against the villain Scarpia, with Tosca in the middle, as
it were—according to a well-established nineteenth-century pattern
that traversed fiction and opera—while La Rondine’s Magda-in-the-
middle is torn between the banker Rambaldo and his young rival
Ruggero. Although this romantic triangle is a melodramatic formula
that predates both of these operas—Verdi’s La Traviata, for exam-
ple, is dated 1853, just a year after the stage adaptation of Dumas’s
novel—Puccini rewrites the formula in significant ways.
Musically, the modernism of Puccini has been underread by some

critics, and precisely because the composer had recourse, in these two
operas, to melodrama and its excesses. A disparaging of Puccini’s
melodramatic narratives went hand in hand historically with a ten-
dency to read Puccini off as a veristo (but a flawed one) and thus a
reactionary, someone whose music was derivative, middle-brow, and
not sufficiently estranging to be worthy of the modernist moniker.
The initial hostility with which Tosca was met, however, also suggests
that it produced in some critics the alienating effects characteristically
associated with modernism, while La Rondine’s debt to Vienna and
contemporary dance rhythms risked a modernist “internationalism,”
(and at a time when Italy was at war with Austria,) an epithet that
antisemitic critics in the Fascist years in particular marshaled in an
attempt to link modernism with both Bolshevism and “Hebraism”;
Amberson in fact ventures a link between the words of Puccini’s most
vicious critic and contemporaneous antisemitic rhetoric.8
Some musicologists argue that Puccini—and Debussy—are,
rather than Modernist, better characterized as post-Romantic (Earle,
Luigi Dallapiccola; Giger). Via a reading of Adorno, they argue that
the term modernism is only appropriately applied to such figures as
Schoenberg and Stravinsky and their radical challenges to tonality.9 I
instead adopt the broader view proposed by opera historian Körner,
who argues that “[t]he European experience of modernity gave rise
to a number of aesthetically different modernisms. . . . The perceived
modernist content is always dependent on the specific context of
reception” (“Music of the Future” 203).10
For the association of Puccini’s sensibility with Romanticism threat-
ens to overlook the contradictory ways in which his music was some-
times judged. Despite notorious detractors like musicologist Fausto
Torrefranca, according to one critic, “The aspect of Puccini’s music
that was most often stressed in the writings of his day was his harmonic
modernism” (Sanguinetti 223). In his review of Tosca, Puccini’s con-
temporary Ippolito Valetta referenced “certain ways of harmonizing
the scale, many successions of fourths, huge delays in the resolutions
of dissonances . . . rapid transitions through curious modulations, con-
trasts of rhythm, frequent syncopations, strong accents on the weak
beats of the bar”—in short, “all that modernism allows, nay demands”
(Valetta cited in Budden 199). The past 15 years have seen an excit-
ing reevaluation of Puccini’s efforts, and, in particular, one that draws
attention to the harmonic complexity of his work (Budden; Burton,
Recondite and Tosca; Conati; Keeffe; Mandelli; Sanguinetti) and the
“stylistic plurality” of the late operas in particular (Davis, Andrew 4;

for a rereading of Puccini’s libretti, see Arnesen).
As regards the effort to locate Puccini’s aesthetic, it is impor-
tant to recall that Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Pietro Mascagni
(1863–1945), Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857–1919), and Puccini were
contemporaries; Debussy is considered an Impressionist, Mascagni
and Leoncavallo, veristi. Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana is dated
1890; Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, 1892. Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande
was first performed in Italy in 1908; his Nocturnes for orchestra and
female chorus were written in 1899; his piano Préludes postdate Tosca
by roughly ten years. Thus, it is more accurate to suggest that Puccini
was in a musical dialogue with Debussy (rather than imitating his
French colleague). Impressionist experimentation with the whole
tone scale and the employment of open fourths and fifths moving up
or down the scale, termed harmonic planing, for example, are charac-
teristics of both composers.11
The years during which Puccini lived coincide with a significant
period in Italian history. Born just three years prior to Unification,
Puccini witnessed, in addition to the birth of the Italian state, the addi-
tion of Venice and Rome, the Great War, and the arrival of Fascism.
What links all four is the prolonged attempt to “invent” Italy, the aes-
thetic often employed as a means to accomplish this goal. However,
as Körner argues, despite the lamentations of certain Italian critics,
“Italian culture during the decades around the turn of the century
was profoundly cosmopolitan. Contrary to claims emphasizing the
role of opera in the nationalization of European society, internation-
alization was an important aspect of opera’s aesthetic as well as its
commercial success” (“Music of the Future” 202).
In an effort both to legitimize itself as a political unit and forge a
horizontal citizen-identity, all nation-states fabulate a continuous past
that spans from allegedly ancient roots to the present (Anderson). The
Italian case, however, was complicated by both the relative lateness of
Italian Unification—which occurred, as Körner suggests, during a
period of European intellectual and artistic cosmopolitanism—and
the hundreds of years during which the majority of the peninsula was
divided among the pope and various European royal families. It is not
surprising that the Fascists would have to reach as far back as Ancient
Rome in order to invent their particularly bombastic, racist, and jin-
goist version of Italian identity.
Additionally, Italy is being invented at the same time as Europe is
experiencing modernization and its melancholic effects. As Sandro
Bellassai has argued, Italian Fascism’s antibourgeois rhetoric, directed
at the “softness” of Giolittian Italy (1901–14), had its roots in wide-

spread concerns linked to modernization, including industrialization,
urbanization, transformations in transportation and communication,
technical innovations, and the development of mass cultural insti-
tutions like public education and publicity (37). These concerns,
however, predate the Fascist period, and are the result of nineteenth-
century historical transformations. Körner’s analysis argues that
the late nineteenth-century Italian reaction to Wagner particularly
reflects this “search for a response to the experience of modernity in
aesthetic modernism” (“Music of the Future” 199).
Summarizing some of the contradictions that greeted Puccini’s
reception in the artist’s own time, Giorgio Sanguinetti argues,
On the one hand, Puccini’s music was considered a dead weight on

the development of the new Italian musical language. . . . On the other,
no one could deny that Puccini had a certain expertise in handling
modern harmonies, even if it was often stressed that the use of such
harmonies was not the result of an original quest but rather was rather
an imprudent way of concealing what was fundamentally a traditional
style under a layer of modernity. (224–25)
Tosca’s arrival in 1900 stands as emblematic of Puccini’s liminality. In

terms of plot, it both draws on and reconfigures the tradition of social
melodrama, which, by the turn of the century, had a complicated rela-
tionship to bourgeois themes like social mobility and respectability.
But Puccini’s popularity fed into a certain avant-gardist critique of
the unrefined tastes of an allegedly bourgeois audience (Earle Luigi
Dallapiccola). Italy had to establish its modernist musical credentials
with recourse to standards imposed by its European neighbors while
simultaneously producing a uniquely Italian sound in the service of
inventing Italy—a project that paralleled Mussolini’s subsequent eco-
nomic and political efforts to “modernize” Fascist Italy while remain-
ing true to its alleged ancient roots in Imperial Rome. While at the
same time drawing on Italy’s long musical heritage, this modernism
had to reflect the most vigorously masculine, robust, and even “aris-
tocratic” trends in international modernism. As Earle suggests, out of
these contradictions arose Torrefranca’s rejection not only of Puccini
but all of opera as “impure,” too tied to “a mimetic or intensificatory
relationship to drama or gesture” (Earle Luigi Dallapiccola 42)—that
is, too melodramatic.12
Wilson emphasizes the way Puccini’s music was ridiculed for being
effeminate, and how this charge reveals both sexism and misogyny.
Earle instead suggests that what is at issue for Puccini’s critics is not
primarily gender but class. For by the first decades of the twentieth
century, Puccini’s works were being dismissed as bourgeois by crit-
ics who saw themselves rather as intellectual aristocrats (Earle Luigi
Dallapiccola 41). These critics were particularly scornful of the pop-
ulist aspects of Puccini’s musical melodrama. As Earle puts it, “For
Torrefranca, Puccini’s work is feminine and suited to feminine (and
feminized) audiences—which is to say decadent, childish, impotent
and all the rest—because it is easy” (personal correspondence). Earle
quotes Torrefranca’s characterizing of Puccini’s audiences as “the
lowest strata of the culture and that half class which is avid for violent
and imbecile emotions” (cited in Earle Luigi Dallapiccola 42). This
equating of femininity with mass culture, however, occurs across the
history of modernism. In other words, Earle and Wilson are both
right, for, as Huyssen suggests, in the nineteenth century the idea
developed that “mass culture is somehow associated with woman
while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men” (47).
Earle also cites Giannotto Bastianelli’s contention that by 1890, real-
ism was already passé (43). As a result, calling Puccini a veristo was,
and perhaps still is, a way of suggesting Tosca was retrograde.
The question of operatic verismo, its aesthetics, and its politics is
admittedly a complex one, though Andres Giger and Arman Schwartz
have provided two suggestive responses.13 Critical issues to be con-
fronted include the relationship between Emile Zola’s Realism and
Italian literary realism (referred to also as verismo), the fact that Italian
possesses the words realismo and verismo, the shared characteristics
of operas considered verismo (or realism), the relationship between
literary and operatic verismo, and the relationship between verismo
(literary and operatic) and modernism—all of which are themselves
further complicated by the postwar polemic concerning Hitler’s and
Stalin’s (but not Mussolini’s) promoting of a realist aesthetic and the
special case of music vis-à-vis the question of realism.
My own efforts to rescue Puccini from charges of provincialism
risk reinscribing the idea that the veristi were somehow reactionary.
But in fact opera itself as a medium complicates the attempt to imitate
the realist aesthetic as promoted by, for example, Zola (Schwartz). In
a study on melodrama, a sensibility that all too often has been dis-
missed as “not serious,” we should be wary of writing off the veristi as
provincial or reactionary (Bayman “Melodrama as Seriousness”).14
Schwartz challenges the equating of operatic verismo with real-
ism in fiction, implying that one of the primary characteristics of
realism—the effort to erase the traces of narrative enunciation—is, in
opera, impossible, given the medium’s high degree of artifice (231).

Unfortunately this leads Schwartz to neglect the way the excesses of
Puccini draw attention to opera as opera—despite Schwartz’s noting
of Tosca’s modernist reflexive devices: the portraying of characters
who are themselves performers, offstage singing, and “excessive” use
of bells (the main topic of Schwartz’s argument). He calls Tosca “a
realist stopping point between Wagner’s Romantic archaism and the
primitivism of Stravinsky” but then, immediately and contradictorily,
argues that “Tosca might be named as a key precedent for the fascina-
tion with unmediated sound that would soon form such an important
part of Italian Futurist aesthetics” (242). This then opens the door to
a highly specious positing of a relationship between Tosca and “many
of the more sinister works of the fascist era” (243). Specifically, “Tosca
exhibits an antisubjective impulse that has much in common with
other ‘Fascist’ and ‘proto-Fascist’ texts” (244). Virtually all the art-
work called modernist, however, participated, however unevenly, in
an attack on the Cartesian subject; that in part is what defines its
modernity.
Giger instead draws attention to the way in which, while, in litera-
ture and painting, realism is a reaction against Romanticism, music
histories tend to treat all of the nineteenth century as Romanticism
(286). Giger thus proposes defining verismo as post-Romantic Italian
opera characterized by its breaking with the conventions of the earlier
period, different operas breaking different conventions (289). Such an
argument, however, understates the link between nineteenth-century
Realism and some Italian operas from this period, a link that, cor-
rectly or not, critics like Bastianelli posited. These debates suggest the
continuing need to theorize more carefully the way historical change
occurs, its uneven pace, its lack of linearity, its elements of contin-
gency, and the difference between the heuristic value of historical
periodization and a lingering positivism that is part of the discipline
of history’s genealogy.
In the nineteenth century, even prior to Italian Unification, opera-
and theatergoing were both available to a broad public. Theater was
at the center of Italian municipal life, providing a space for the locals
to gather socially (Körner “Uncle Tom” 725). Even after Unification,
“the theatre remained the focus of municipal sociability in Italy”
(Körner “Music of the Future” 190). While private boxes were owned
or rented by the elite, the upper floors were more socially mixed.
A nascent sheet music industry helped carry opera melodies even to
audience members who could not afford to go to the theater, and
“opera and ballet were among the few cultural industries that toured
the entire peninsula, spreading from some of the world’s finest the-
aters in Milan, Venice, or Naples to countless municipal theaters in
smaller cities and staging performances at markets and trade fairs”
(Körner “Uncle Tom” 726). Bands, choral societies, street musicians,
and “a vast array of more modest vehicles added to the process of
dissemination [of opera], from printed materials such as postcards,
cigarette cards, and inexpensive ‘novelizations’ of opera stories, to
the adaptation of operatic stories . . . by puppet theaters, a popular
working-class entertainment in many late-nineteenth century Italian
cities” (Mallach 179). A peninsula-wide musical press contributed to
this dissemination of opera news.
According to Brooks, the primary vehicle for the melodramatic
sensibility ultimately shifts from Romantic theater to the novels of
Dickens, Balzac, and Henry James. Balzac was dead before Puccini
was born; Dickens died in 1870, and James’s and Puccini’s lives over-
lap, the former being 15 years older than the latter. That is, by the
time of Puccini (and even Verdi), the sensibility has “migrated” across
the arts, from theater to opera to the novel and back. (On melodrama
and Verdi’s operas, see Van, especially 88–145.) Tosca was based on
Sardou’s 1887 stage drama La Tosca, and Brooks for one identifies
Sardou as a melodramatist in the mold of Alexander Dumas fils
(Melodramatic 108); according to Brooks, both Dumas and Sardou
influenced the novels of James (Melodramatic 160). This suggests
how, in their own time, Puccini’s works could have been perceived as
both “retrograde” and “contemporary” simultaneously, depending
on one’s prejudices for or against melodrama.
T OSC A as Social Melodrama

Cawelti describes the transformations of melodrama from the theater
of Pixérécourt to Puccini’s times via a brief history of what he calls
“social melodrama,” which attempts to synthesize social criticism
with a melodramatic sensibility (33). Highlighting Puccini’s debt to
this subgenre, we might contrast his operas with those of Giuseppe
Verdi. Owing to their dialogue with verismo, Puccini’s operas make
reference to the contemporary (or near contemporary) social (how-
ever fancifully imagined). While several of Verdi’s operas are based on
melodramas, including Ernani, Rigoletto, and La Traviata, only the
latter is set in the nineteenth century.15 The lingering if dubious claim
that Verdi’s pre-Unification opera choruses expressed Italian patrio-
tism finds one of its historical conditions of possibility in the fact
that these operas do not directly reference the contemporary social,
as such expressions would presumably have risked provoking repri-

sals. Puccini’s concerns, however, are roughly contemporary. Most of
Puccini’s operas, including La Bohème, Tosca, Madama Butterfly, La
Fanciulla del West, La Rondine, and Il Tabarro, are set in the mid- to
late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.
In drawing on melodramatic traditions from a variety of time peri-
ods—and at a time when, according to Brooks, Flaubert has invented
an alternative—Puccini’s operas anticipate modernism’s critical
reflection on style. They are themselves in a complex dialogue with
the history of melodrama, a kind of pastiche reflecting in particular
the evolution of social melodrama. As a summary of its reception sug-
gests, however, in its time, Tosca was initially judged by some critics
as having gone too far.
One of the characteristics of late eighteenth-century melodrama is
the positing of a love triangle consisting of “a virtuous young lady of
some lower or ambiguous status . . . who was pursued by a male char-
acter of higher status and dubious intentions, a figure of aristocratic,
erotic, financial, and social power” as well as a younger, “purer” man
(Cawelti 33). This love triangle is a feature of the many versions of
La Dame aux camélias—including Puccini’s Manon Lescaut (and
Massenet’s Manon), and Verdi’s La Traviata. Madama Butterfly pres-
ents an interesting twist on the theme, as the second member of the
triangle is Pinkerton’s American wife, Kate.16 In all of these operas,
however, it is the heroine’s life as a “kept woman” (or, in Cio-Cio-
San’s case, Western clichés of the geisha) that lends ambiguity to her
status. In these operas, an eighteenth-century formula—the woman
of lower or ambiguous status—is “updated,” via the figure of the
kept woman, to respond to the perceived sensibilities of a nineteenth-
century audience.
Puccini’s operas take this one step further, providing a twentieth-
century take on this figure. For while both Tosca and La Rondine fea-
ture versions of this love triangle, as well as its three personages, both
operas rewrite the social drama’s heroine in a modern manner. Tosca
is a woman who makes her own living as an opera singer. Her status
is thus “ambiguous” in complicated ways, from the fact that she is
not dependent for her living on a man, to her exceptional talent, to
her status as performer, to the linking in the bourgeois imagination
of female performers with prostitutes. Tosca’s “performances” are not
limited to the stage, and, as an opera singer, she is authorized to
express a range of affects, including passion, jealousy, tenderness, rage,
and terror. Her career is highlighted throughout the opera: according
to Scarpia, part of her sex appeal lies in her status as a diva, and in the
third act, when Tosca and Mario plan their escape, Cavaradossi hopes
to “perform” his fake execution “like la Tosca in the theater.” But the
ambiguity of her status as actress is highlighted particularly when she
sings her most famous aria, “Vissi d’arte,” “I lived for art,” as it is this
life that has brought her to the terrible place of having to trade sex
for her lover’s life. Like many arias, “Vissi d’arte” functions as what
Daniel Gerould calls a “self-explanatory speech,” in which characters
in a melodrama “define their own situation, reveal the general line
of their conduct, and speak of the motives of their coming actions”
(125). Tosca is a modern updating of the eighteenth-century melo-
drama’s virtuous woman caught between two men.
Furthermore, it is precisely Tosca’s status as a performer—and the
way the opera reflexively highlights this status—that opens it up to
a modernist reading. Not simply because it invites us to reflect upon
gender as performance but also in the way that artistic depictions
of performance draw attention to what Richard Leppert has called
“the now-time of the performance moment” (cited in Day 172).
Leppert specifically connects this highlighting of the “now-time” of
performance to modernism—specifically, modernism’s self-conscious
exploration of temporality (Bergson is obviously a pertinent source
here) and the relationship between its explorations of temporality and
its probing of “the nature of selfhood.”17 In terms of this probing,
following on the heels of the torture of Mario is of course “Vissi
d’arte,” the aria in which she sings about the relationship between her
“performing” and “other” self, emblematized in the juxtaposition of
“I lived for art, I lived for love.”
Tosca links this modernist concern with temporality to the explo-
ration of the nature of the self in complex ways, but to cite briefly
other examples: during the opera, we are made to wait through per-
formances that literally interrupt the narrative. At the beginning of
the second act of Tosca, while he anticipates Tosca’s arrival, Scarpia
reminds us that it’s getting late. Tosca’s absence is highlighted when
Scarpia first sings “The Diva hasn’t sung yet” and then, to Sciarrone,
“You will wait for Tosca’s entrance.” We, too, wait for Tosca to begin
singing. From offstage, we hear a chorus, and then Tosca’s voice
underscores Scarpia’s interrogation of her lover Mario Cavaradossi.
Given that she has just finished performing (for the Queen of
Naples), when Tosca finally arrives to witness the torturing of
Mario—another way in which the narrative stops and we are forced
to confront the literal time of interrogation and then torture, as well
as to witness what that torture reveals to us about both Mario and
Tosca—Scarpia taunts her with “Never has Tosca played a more tragic
scene!” suggesting the unstable boundary between Tosca as actress

and self. Even the torture itself is presented as a scene for Tosca to wit-
ness, as Scarpia immediately then says to Spoletta, “Open the doors/
so she can hear his cries.” This scene is also highly melodramatic, for,
in typical melodramatic fashion (and as we saw in the case of Christ’s
Passion), virtue is horrifically tested (Brooks Melodramatic 35). This
holds true not only for Tosca but also for her lover.
Also pertinent in this respect is the opera’s much remarked upon
attempt to restrict its plot time and avoid extended temporal ellipses
(Girardi Puccini la vita 82).18 The last act plays in particularly melo-
dramatic ways with a stalling of time, first, as Mario waits for the
“mock” execution, and then, when Tosca waits for Mario to stir from
his feigned death. This stalling of the narrative contributes to the
melodramatic sensibility by building suspense and suggesting the
perils of not being able to read what lurks below the visible (the traces
of which are nonetheless present in that visible).
In operas that deploy the love triangle, the villain is either a man
of social power who has erotic designs on the young woman or the
man who “keeps” her. Rigoletto’s duke offers us a Verdian version of
this villain. In La Bohème, this villain never actually appears but is
rather offstage, particularly in the temporal ellipses between the third
and fourth acts. Butterfly’s Pinkerton’s status as a lieutenant in the
US navy rewrites the formula in keeping with its twentieth-century
setting, for he is at times both villain and hero. In the operas based
on La Dame aux camélias, this figure is doubled, represented by the
father of the young man and the wealthy rival: in the Manon operas,
this doubled role is fulfilled by the characters of Des Grieux pere
and Guillot Morfontaine/Geronte de Ravoir (though, in his version,
Puccini omits this father); in La Traviata, Giorgio Germont and the
Barone Douphol constitute this doubled villainous figure.
In Tosca, however, this villainous status is complicated by the fact
that Scarpia is chief of police in pre-Unification Rome—that is, a state
whose ostensible head is the pope. For while Pius the VI dies in exile
in Napoleonic France a few months prior to the opera’s action, he has
been succeeded by Pius VII, elected in Venice in March of 1800.19
The opera’s political setting is a complicated one, the Napoleonic
invasion having allowed for the declaration in 1798 of the short-lived
Roman Republic, one of whose leaders, Angelotti, is being sheltered
by the opera’s hero, Cavaradossi. Scarpia represents the reestablish-
ment of papal power in Rome, and Scarpia’s presence in the church
of Sant’Andrea della Valle suggests a link between his role as chief of
police and papal authority.
Yet it is also possible to read Scarpia as the man behind the then
King of Naples, who was himself the man behind the pope. In the
summer of 1800, when the opera takes place, Rome was ruled by
the pope, for the Papal States had been restored in October of 1799.
But that rule was secured by the troops of the rulers of Naples, the
reactionary Spanish Bourbon King Ferdinand IV and his wife, Maria
Carolina Hapsburg, daughter of Maria-Teresa and sister of Marie
Antoinette. Maria Carolina appears as a character in Sardou’s play and
is referenced in the libretto of Tosca. Scarpia works for Ferdinand IV,
and Puccini’s libretto suggests that it is to Maria Carolina that Tosca
might appeal to save Cavaradossi’s life.20
In trying to extract, under torture, a confession from Mario, using
his political power for personal gain, and sending Cavaradossi to his
death by firing squad, Scarpia—himself a Baron—allegorizes a tyran-
nical monarch, whether that monarch be Ferdinand IV, the pope,
or even the Savoy king Umberto I, ruler of Italy at the time of the
opera’s premiere (Davis, John; Schickling; E. Weber).21 Several crit-
ics have argued that, while Puccini himself claimed to be indifferent
to politics, the opera’s antiauthoritarian critique of political power
would have been read by its original audience as directed at the cur-
rent government (E. Weber 91; Schickling 127) while also feeding
the spirit of anticlericalism (Davis, John; S. Woolf suggests Puccini
shared this anticlericalism).
That, in the early years of the new nation, there was plenty of
anticlericalism in the air is well known (Davis, John; S. Woolf), and
this connection between Scarpia and the papacy has not gone unno-
ticed by recent directors who use Scarpia to critique the Catholic
Church. Such a critique heightens the opera’s melodrama in the sense
of foregrounding the failures of the traditional sacred and the need
to search elsewhere for a moral occult. The fact that, in the moment
of the opera’s initial reception, its critique of the sacred could be
read as also a critique of liberal Italy’s constitutional monarchy sug-
gests the complex ways in which melodrama signified in the Italian
context. For, while early melodramatic theater was fed by the spirit
of the Revolution, deliberately or not, Tosca calls up the specter
of the “failure” of Italian republicanism and, by extension, Italian
Unification. The role the Napoleonic conquest played in fostering
the Risorgimento; the lingering presence of the Savoy monarchy; the
unresolved claims of the pope; the painful reminder that Unification
was secured not by a popular uprising but also by a handful of dis-
gruntled intellectuals (some of them members of the nobility like
the Cavalier Cavaradossi); the support of southern peasants for the
Bourbon monarchy, this popular support referenced by the joy with

which the first act chorus greets the erroneous news that Napoleon
has been routed at Marengo—in its initial period of reception, Tosca
was haunted by all of these.
The third member of the triangle, the man whom the heroine
loves, is “a more worthy and innocent young man” with status dif-
ficulties of his own (Cawelti 33). Despite the fact that he is a Cavalier,
as an artist, Mario is presented with certain status difficulties, and his
politics also complicate his status, for he is a republican sympathizer,
someone who opposes papal power.
Mario’s most prototypically melodramatic moment in the opera is
perhaps his “E lucevan le stelle/And the stars were shining,” the aria
he sings as he awaits his execution. It provides an opportunity for
the male hero to weep openly at the unfairness of life and to critique
implicitly the structures of power responsible for his unhappy fate.
Set in the key of B minor, it provides a clear example of melodrama’s
impulse to signify on multiple levels simultaneously, as Mario strug-
gles to make present the profundity of his unrepresentable sorrow
and sense of loss.
In the first part of the aria, over a plaintive melody marked “dol-
icissimo, vagamente rubando” (literally, very sweet, vaguely rob-
bing—meaning with a free, subtly improvisatory rhythm) and played
by the clarinet, Cavaradossi sings a counterpoint figure (frequently
repeating the same note) in which he recalls a starlit garden where he
and Tosca made love. The language, emphasized by the horizontal
melody, is heavily imagistic, evoking sight (starlight), sound (Tosca’s
footsteps), scent (Tosca’s own fragrance), and touch (their embrace).
In the next section, he picks up the clarinet’s melody, his voice now
doubled by the violins, Cavaradossi first describing their lovemaking
and then crying out in despair. The aria ends with “And I die, desper-
ate! And I have never loved life so much!”
The melody of the aria reproduces the undulations of desire Mario
felt during their lovemaking, as well as the fluctuations of his pres-
ent emotions, their swelling and diminishing evidenced not only via
the “vagamente rubando” marking, but also the line of the melody,
which rises, rests on its highest note, and then falls again, and then
climbs even higher, rests, and falls again. The tessitura of the aria is
high and includes sustained notes, suggesting the depth and inten-
sity of Mario’s emotions, particularly as represented by the sustained
and then repeated G (the only time in the second section of the aria
where the melody line repeats five times a single note) and the slow,
marked climbing of the melody line to a high, sustained A, sung in
the aria’s concluding line on the last syllable of the (Italian) word
“loved.”
The typical melodramas of this period end with the virtuous hero-
ine marrying the right man. But in the “tragic” versions, the heroine
“succumbed to the villain’s plot” (Cawelti 34). Rigoletto is a variation
on this theme. Here again we see an obvious way in which Puccini’s
operas differ from this eighteenth-century formula, Tosca murder-
ing the villain and then committing suicide. Yet she has also suc-
cumbed to Scarpia’s deception, but only in part, for she resists his
sexual advances.
Here is Cawelti’s account of melodrama in the early nineteenth
century:
Social dominance, the ideas of middle-class domesticity, the dream

of romantic love, and the drive for social mobility were unified in
the popular moral vision of early nineteenth century England and
America. . . . The other basic principle of the melodramatic vision in
this period was the primacy of religion. (34–35)
European operas in which the “doubling” of the villainous figure in

father and older rival occur are also an instantiation of the changes
in melodrama Cawelti describes, for the father introduces the theme
of social mobility; it is he who attempts to separate the young lovers
in order to protect the young man’s reputation. Butterfly’s Pinkerton
himself represents a doubled figure, for he is both the young man
and, to some degree, the villain, precisely because his concerns with
social mobility and middle-class domesticity (and perhaps even “racial
purity”) foreclose the possibility of marriage to a “geisha.”
Once again, Tosca tampers with this melodramatic formula. Given
Tosca’s setting, we would not expect it to take up issues of social and
economic mobility to the degree we see in, for example, La Rondine,
but its ambiguous attitude toward religion via its portrayal of Scarpia
suggests a protest against the arbitrary authority of the church and
the way that authority is deployed against women. For in melodrama,
police, doctors, and other authority figures like Scarpia sometimes serve
specifically to assist in the disciplining of “unruly passions and desires”
such as Tosca’s (Landy “Introduction” 15). Tosca’s refusal to take up
her appropriate place in the social order—as Scarpia’s lover rather than
a financially and sexually independent woman—is precisely what moti-
vates and on some level empowers Scarpia to attempt to reconcile her
to the fact that her refusal of his demands can only end in death—her
lover’s, as well as her own; it also feeds the Baron’s sadistic desires.
An interesting way in which Puccini revises the heroine is via the

trope of Tosca as the “unruly woman”—the woman who, in a cri-
tique of sexism, refuses to behave appropriately, and via a variety of
different means, from affect to clothing to body type. One of the
means whereby Puccini evokes this unruly woman is in turn via the
trope of jealousy. Prior to Tosca making her entrance, it is Mario who
sets up a competition between her and Angelotti’s sister before insist-
ing to the contrary that Tosca is his “only thought,” and the Sacristan
who suggests an illicit relationship between the sister and Mario; it
is Mario who, when speaking to Angelotti, refers to Tosca as “a jeal-
ous woman” and so, in a melodrama in particular, we expect to see
his judgment of her confirmed. But when in fact she “acts” jealous at
the mention of L’Attavanti, it is to some degree just that—an act, and
Mario, appropriately, congratulates her performance with “Brava!”
That is, the musical expression of her fury is melodramatic in the
sense of being excessive, almost insincere—reminding us of Tosca’s
status as a performer. The section marked “agitando un poco”
(becoming a little restless) begins on one of her lowest notes, the
E above middle C, and culminates, on the phrase “Ah! The minx!”
on high B flat, one of the highest—the same note on which she will
cry out to God in “Vissi d’arte.” Extensive movement throughout her
range is typical of a virtuoso aria for women in particular, given that
women’s vocal ranges are generally larger than those of men and that
the notes on either end of the range have very distinctive timbres.
High notes suggest a pushing of the boundaries of the voice toward
its greatest intensity and virtuosity, while the low notes of the female
voice suggest sensuality, perhaps prototypically figured in the role of
Saint-Saëns’ Dalila.
When, after Tosca’s melodramatic outburst, the key changes to C
major, we know the two lovers are to some degree playing a scene,
perhaps even teasing each other. For the jealousy motif interrupts
what amount to two very long love songs, the first, sung by Tosca,
in which, in melodramatic fashion, the lyrics compare their love to a
starry country landscape, prefiguring Mario’s third act aria; the sec-
ond, a love duet initiated by Mario, in which he reassures her. Such
an interruption is characteristic of melodrama’s movement toward the
revelation of the elusive and heightens the drama of Mario’s insistence
that Tosca is his life and that he will always love her. With its subter-
fuges and delays, the jealousy interlude makes it possible for the opera
to move the spectator to a higher emotional level.
For, despite the score and libretto’s insistence to the contrary, ulti-
mately, Tosca is not quite the jealous creature she is made out to be.
She does not fall for the ruse of the fan planted by Scarpia to induce
her to betray Mario. That is, her jealousy is precisely not on the order
of a tragic flaw, the cause of her ruin. While, like Mario, Scarpia
imputes jealousy to her—and admits, in his aria at the end of Act 1,
that this imputed jealous turns him on—it is only Mario’s suffering
that forces Tosca to reveal Angelotti’s hiding place. It is as if Puccini
is deliberately playing games with us, not only presenting us with one
of melodrama’s most well-known themes but using that theme to give
the spectator a false narrative clue. Being familiar with the role of
the femme fatale, we wait for Tosca’s uncontrollable desire to lead to
Mario’s downfall, because that is how this tale usually ends, the irra-
tional, jealous woman punished as a result of her own unruly sexual
passions. But that is not where this story leads. Scarpia and Scarpia
alone is responsible for Mario’s suffering. Even Angelotti’s death is a
suicide, and not the direct result of Tosca’s revelation.22
Additionally, melodrama tends to be driven by plot rather than
character. As Budden suggests, “With Tosca Puccini confronts for
the first time an opera of action” (199). In melodrama, characters
stand for values or positions in a Manichean duality. To argue that
Tosca’s characters are “wooden” is thus to misread melodrama as a
sensibility. The lack of depth of characters is just one way in which
melodramas are not on the order of, say, Ibsen’s A Doll’s House or
Strindberg’s Miss Julie, both of which provide complex psychological
portraits of their characters—their personal histories, their conscious-
ness of being part of a larger society, and their sense of themselves.
The only time Tosca comes even close to this is in “Vissi d’arte,” for
reasons that are specific to Catholic melodrama and its relationship
to the sacred.
Although melodrama is not mentioned in the context in which
they appear, the words Rugarli uses to describe Tosca are highly sug-
gestive of how Tosca herself is a “figure” for the melodramatic sensi-
bility, and the prototypical melodramatic heroine. For in a description
of her character, he states that her “tragedy resides in her capacity to
see the absolute and in her incapacity to attain it” (127). Tosca senses
the moral order that guides the universe, and yet, in typical melodra-
matic fashion, that universe is immanent to but not realizable in the
world of action. That Tosca kills Scarpia yet ultimately fails to save
Mario (or herself) is not evidence of her weakness or a suggestion
that she is somehow to blame for her lover’s death, let alone that her
own suicide constitutes some kind of cosmic justice for her crime. For
Mario would have died no matter what Tosca did. What her murder
of Scarpia “accomplishes” is to remind us of the Manichean struggle
between good and evil—in this instance, Tosca and Scarpia—and her
suicide, the fact that life is often not fair.
Another interesting way in which Tosca intervenes in the history of
melodrama is through the positing, at the level of character, of several
different combinations of Manichean pairs: Tosca and Scarpia; Mario
(and Angelotti) and Scarpia (and Spoletta/Sciarrone); the Sacristan
and Mario; the Sacristan and Scarpia. (Rugarli calls Cavaradossi and
Scarpia archetypes of “il manicheismo pucciniano,” suggesting that
the male characters in Puccini are less “variegated”—and thus more
easily read as allegories—than his heroines; 11.) These multiple pair-
ings are made possible precisely by Tosca’s complicated articulation
of the contradictions between religious faith and secular political
culture.
For by the mid-nineteenth century, the social melodrama is char-
acterized by “an attempt to reconcile the increasing conflict between
traditional Christian views of the world and the secular values of
a rapidly changing society” (Cawelti 39). Tosca is marked by both
this attempt and its failure. It posits the tension between organized
religion and the values of the Enlightenment by embodying one in
Scarpia and the other in Mario, and casts the two as a Manichean
choice. However, it simultaneously attempts to reconcile them in
Mario and Tosca, both of whom have strong religious faith.
This leads also to a Manicheanism within Christianity: Tosca’s sin-
cere religious faith the direct opposite of Scarpia’s pretense. This is
one of several ways in which Italy’s Catholicism complicates accounts
of melodrama. On the one hand, in order to maintain the melodrama,
Scarpia must be construed as representing the abuses of papal power,
perhaps most potently captured in his claim, “Tosca, you make me
forget God.” On the other hand, Tosca’s piety suggests an attempt to
rescue Catholicism from these abuses.
A similar attempt to rescue Catholicism as what we might call
a cultural identity is the Manichean contrast between Scarpia and
the Sacristan, the latter embodying a specific version of the more
general figure of the inetto, the hapless, (in present-day parlance)
nerdy, clumsy, and often sexually frustrated male (on the inetto, see
Reich). A staple of Italian literature and film, the trope of the bum-
bling, complaining, often bigoted but ultimately harmless priest or
cleric acknowledges the role that local clergy have always played in
Italian daily life and offers a counter-masculinity to that of the hero.
Modern variations of this character are partisan Don Pietro Pellegrini
in Roma, città aperta, and, as we shall see, the priest who, in the
more recent film, Aclà, is justifiably harangued by his parishioners
for the church’s hypocrisy and yet seems to truly care about providing
the town’s children with an education. In both instances, the priests
adopt the mask of the inetto in order to pursue what they believe to
be moral, ethical goals.23
In Tosca, the Sacristan’s comic, inetto-like qualities are emphasized
by the “allegretto grazioso” theme with which he is introduced.
Beginning in the key of C major, the 6/8 time signature conveys a
comic tone, the march theme characterized by staccato triplets. His
taking of a pinch of snuff and his gluttony at the thought of the
untouched meal he has brought Mario reinforces this image of the
greedy but harmless officer of the church, and the Sacristan instigates
a change in tone, something that often occurs in melodrama. Such
changes act to heighten the drama by releasing the audience from the
expectation that something dire will at some point occur, for when it
does, we react all the more intensely, caught off guard by the sudden
revelation of the ethical universe immanent to the everyday.
Tosca’s attitude toward the sacred, then, is complex if not con-
tradictory, pitting the hypocrisy of organized religion against per-
sonal piety—a reference to the crisis in the sacred opened up by the
Reformation and not sufficiently resolved by the Council of Trent,
which managed to sidestep such issues as the limits of papal author-
ity and the question of communion under both kinds, as well as to
minimize the role in Catholic devotional life of Bible study by “put-
ting restrictions on reading vernacular translations” (O’Malley, Trent,
What Happened? 266). These restrictions remained in place into the
early nineteenth century (Maas).
Tosca’s relationship to the sacred, however, is even more complex
than this. The libretto refers to various acts of devotion and piety,
from her offering of flowers to the Madonna in the first act to the
laying of the crucifix on the chest of the dead Scarpia at the conclu-
sion of the second. But at times Tosca expresses what comes very near
to an admission of a loss of faith, perhaps most famously, in “Vissi
d’arte,” when she sings “In the hour of my sadness, why, why, God/
why have you repaid me like this?”
Even this refrain, however, is a faint echo of both Psalm 21:1, in
Italian, “Dio mio, Dio mio, perché mi hai abbandonato? Perché te ne
stai lontano, senza soccorrermi, senza dare ascolto alle parole del mio
gemito?”24 —the first line of which Jesus was said to have uttered on
the cross—as well as the Ave Maria’s “nell’ora della nostra morte.”25
Underscoring the relationship between her earlier acts of piety and
her questioning of her faith is the return, in “Vissi d’arte,” of a theme
that we heard in Act 1, first, when Tosca makes her entrance, and
then, when she places the flowers at the Madonna’s feet. (In Act 1,
the melody begins at rehearsal number 25 of the Ricordi score; in
Act 2, number 52.) Two times—when she places the flowers and dur-
ing “Vissi d’arte”—the theme, accompanied by a triplet pizzicato fig-
ure, is first played in counterpoint with Tosca’s vocal line before it
joins with (and doubles) that line, reinforcing the link between Tosca
and the Madonna.
In a characteristic melodramatic doubling, Tosca sings, in “Vissi
d’arte,” of the act we witnessed earlier: “Always with sincere faith/I
brought flowers to the altar.” Even more pointedly, the lines already
referenced—“perché, perché, Signore/ perché me ne rimuneri così”—
are sung twice in the aria. While the words are sung to different
melodies, the second time, part of the phrase repeats exactly the six
notes of the melody with which the scene of Tosca praying to the
Madonna ends. Puccini effectively extends the cadence in order to
include the climactic high note by moving to the first inversion of the
tonic chord and then proceeding through a standard perfect cadence.
What is more, the phrase “diedi fiori agl’altar” is set to the Madonna
melody—the same melody used for the second “perché, perché, Si-.”
That is, the Madonna melody appears at least three times in
the opera, once in Act 1 as underscoring when Tosca prays to the
Madonna, and twice in “Vissi d’arte.” In Act 1, the melody appears
when she is asserting her faith, and in Act 2, when she is questioning
it. And, in “Vissi d’arte,” the phrase “perché, perché, Signore/ perché
me ne rimuneri così” appears twice—but only the second time does
the Madonna melody accompany the phrase, and then, the resolu-
tion of the phrase is attenuated until the final syllable, (co)sì. Under
the held notes of the final line, we hear in the orchestra yet another
theme associated with Tosca—one she sang earlier in the act, while
Mario is being tortured: “Ah, stop this torture. It is too much to suf-
fer!” Tosca then picks up this theme herself to sing the final “perché
me ne rimuneri così.”
Repetitions, doublings, and delays, all of these are evidence of the
melodramatic sensibility’s struggles against the limits of signification
and a persistent attempt to make visible what by definition cannot
be seen: faith and its opposite, doubt. The Counter-Reformation’s
demand for renewed visible signs was itself evidence of the stubborn-
ness of faith to appear, once the Catholic Church had been wrenched
in two. And in Tosca’s two moments—the time period in which it is
set, the time period in which it was first performed—the question of
the role faith would play in a secular Italian state was far from settled.
Napoleon’s victory at Marengo, alluded to in the opera, reopens, at
the level of Tosca’s plot, the question of who will rule Rome. As for
the moment of the opera’s premiere, Pope Leo XIII, who reigned
from 1878 to 1903, sought to reclaim temporal power over Rome,
exhorted Italians to “cast off the Freemason yoke” and, like his pre-
decessor Pius IX, openly discouraged Catholics from taking part in
parliamentary elections (Furey 318).
In terms of the Scarpia/Mario contrast, many Italians saw Unification
as a way not to reconcile the modern state with Catholicism but rather
to substitute secular values for religious ones. For example, the new state
attempted to wrestle from the clergy concerns for the morality of its
citizens by substituting a late nineteenth-century discourse of “health”
for the traditional religious obsession with “purity” (Wanrooij). But
in terms of the Tosca/Scarpia pairing, the opera suggests, contra the
papacy’s official line, that the new secular state and Catholicism were
not at odds with one another. (Recall that Puccini did not live to see the
Lateran Pacts’ normalization of relations between the Catholic Church
and what was then the Italian Fascist state.)
In its ambiguity, the last line of the opera returns us to this impasse
between faith and doubt: “O Scarpia, before God!” For according to
Catholic doctrine, both murder and suicide are potentially mortal
sins. That Mario is the one character “free” from this taint is signif-
icant on a number of different levels. On the one hand, it rewrites,
in a modern fashion, the familiar nineteenth-century melodramatic
triangle by suggesting that it is Mario who is caught between Tosca
and Scarpia—a sign, however contradictory, of the changing role of
women in modern culture—and, like the virtuous woman of old,
in this tragic version of the triangle, it is he who has succumbed
to the villain’s plot. On the other, it casts Mario as a hero of the
Risorgimento and aligns Italian Unification with the moral good.
While the pile of bodies at the opera’s end is typical of melodrama’s
tendency to resolve, in the final scene of the last act, all of the opera’s
narrative and plot lines (Gerould 125), like Tosca’s jealousy, this is a
kind of “false” clue, as the particular plot of the relationship between
the Catholic Church and (nascent) Italian state is far from resolved.
Tosca thus seems to have it both ways, siding, in the figure of Mario
in particular, with both secularism and Catholicism.
For, by the end of the century, the “equation of traditional reli-
gious values and middle-class social values was no longer viable in the
social melodrama” (Cawelti 39). Accordingly,
increasing ambivalence about divine providence as the cornerstone

of society was accompanied by doubts about the two other value
complexes that were basic to the earlier melodramatic vision: the

purity and domestic submissiveness of women and the ideal of the
respectable, middle-class family.
This led to two alternate nineteenth-century developments: attempts

are made to modernize the sensibility and “social change and upheaval
became a primary background for melodramatic action” (Cawelti 40).
Tosca provides us with an example of both of these tendencies.
Given the thirty-five years that Puccini’s career spanned, we have
to add to Cawelti’s history Brooks’s claim that the work of Flaubert
instigates a “counter-tradition”: from melodrama’s “search for the
hidden signified and its metaphorical absent presence we are led rather
to the play of the signifier: the reader’s engagement with the plane
of representation as pure surface and with the process of narration”
(Melodramatic 198–199). Brooks is alerting us here to an important
characteristic of aesthetic modernism that is often underread or over-
looked (even, in this case, by Brooks): modernism is characterized by
the tension between these two traditions.
For certain quintessential works of modernism partake of both.
In Virginia Woolf, for example, we see a melodramatic struggle
to reveal what by definition cannot be seen, and, in so doing, to
uncover an “essential moral universe in a post-sacred era,” as well as
an experimenting with language that draws attention to the signify-
ing process (Brooks Melodramatic 15). In a novel like Mrs. Dalloway,
we are reminded of the way in which the Great War has both ren-
dered the melodramatic impulse more urgent and at the same time
more complex, given both a shaking of faith in the existence of any
sort of moral universe and an accompanying concern with processes
of signification adequate to the challenge of demonstrating that uni-
verse. Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism required an existen-
tial struggle between artist and medium whose perpetually receding
goal was on the one hand to make manifest a moral occult and on
the other to reinvent painting (canvas space, color, line, texture) so
that it might. The utopian impulse of both the Bauhaus and postrev-
olutionary Soviet art links them to melodrama’s promise of a more
just world. In this case, however, it is a moral universe currently
occluded by capitalism and not one that cannot one day be actual-
ized. These artistic movements demanded new forms of signification
adequate to this moral universe’s revelation, forms of signification
always in the process of being elaborated. Melodrama and modern-
ism were (and are) not anathema; Puccini himself participates in
both traditions.26
Melodramatic Music
As we have already seen, a number of Tosca’s themes or musical motifs
are regularly associated with characters—perhaps most famously,
Scarpia’s opening chords—a device that predates Puccini.27 This
technique serves several different melodramatic functions. A form of
character development that implicitly suggests the limits of the lin-
guistic and visual, these musical motifs also add to the overall expres-
sive quality of melodrama in terms of its goal of total theater or, in
the case of opera, Gesamtkunstwerk, a term coined by Wagner. These
motifs can be analogized with the Derridean notion of the supple-
ment in that they both add to the characterization and supply some-
thing missing, something at the limits of signification.
An additional way in which these motifs are in keeping with the
melodramatic sensibility is that there is no preexisting dictionary
to which one might turn to decode them. Rather, the relationship
between the character and the musical figure must be deciphered by
the audience. This produces the active, emotional engagement that
melodrama solicits; as Keeffe argues, Puccini’s musical motifs are
“triggers of conditioned reflexes; whatever form they take, however
fragmentary, they evoke that twitch of emotion that keeps us on the
edge of the seat” (21).
Another then contemporary trend that intensified the melodra-
matic quality of opera was a historical transformation in the relation-
ship between the singer as soloist and the orchestra as accompanist.
By Puccini’s time, many composers placed the voice and the orchestra
on an equal footing. Such a gesture is melodramatic in that it suggests
the limits of the voice to secure the opera’s meaning. Here again,
the notion of the Derridean supplement is pertinent, for refusing to
grant voice primacy over orchestral accompaniment is a deconstruc-
tive gesture in the precise sense of a reversal and displacement of the
traditional hierarchy whereby the singer led and the accompaniment
followed. Such a gesture is an instance of modernist reflexivity in as
much as it puts into question whether the orchestra is supplementing
the voice or vice versa
In her analysis of Puccini’s modernism, using the example of the
opening of Tosca in particular, Deborah Burton notes the “mosaic”
quality of the composer’s music (Recondite 38–40; in these pages,
she also provides a brief critical history of the use of this metaphor in
Puccini criticism). As Burton argues, “The clearest juxtapositions of
diverse elements occur on the musical surface by the abutment of con-
trasting styles at the level of the scene” (38). What is called “mosaic”
in Puccini criticism is called “collage” or “montage” by other mod-

ernist critics; it is one of the most typical characteristics of modernism
and may be found in the work of such diverse artists as Picasso, the
Futurists, Sergei Eisenstein, Hannah Hoch, and Frida Kahlo.
In Tosca, this stylistic clash sometimes corresponds to melodrama’s
Manichean differentiation between good and evil. That is, the jux-
taposition of various themes reinforces the polarity of the characters.
For example, in the opening of the opera, Scarpia’s chords are juxta-
posed immediately with a theme associated with one of his Manichean
opposites, Angelotti. But Angelotti is the Sacristan’s Manichean dou-
ble in terms of the battle between the secular values of the Roman
Republic and the Catholic Church, and so the Sacristan’s theme abuts
the patriot’s. Later, the Sacristan’s theme abuts one of Mario’s, the
two characters another set of Manichean pairings.
But Puccini’s juxtapositions occur in two dimensions, captur-
ing, through abutment, the linearity (and temporality) of music and
literary works, but also placing one theme on top of another, like
the spatial layering of cubist collage. One of the most melodramatic
instances of this collage-as-layering is Scarpia’s first entrance, wherein
his theme from the opera’s opening is repeated, this time, layered
over the singing of the chorus gathered for the rehearsal for the eve-
ning’s performance. This chorus sings, according to the opera’s logic
of doubling, first a celebration of the reactionary Bourbon monarchy
and its falsely imputed defeat of Napoleon (“We celebrate the victory!
Long live the King!)—aligning the chorus with the forces of political
repression—and then later, at the end of the act, a “Te Deum Gloria”
(signifying authentic religious piety). That is, the chorus represents
first one half of a Manichean pair, then the other.
Perhaps the most famous example of Puccini’s layering is this first
act finale, in which Scarpia’s declaiming of what he will do to Tosca
and Mario is sung over the voices of the crowd of clergy and faithful.
At first, the crowd simply recites, in Latin, under Scarpia’s aria, the
Apostolic Blessing. But then, it interrupts Scarpia with its sung “Te
Deum,” which is itself interrupted by his “Tosca, you make me forget
God.” Following this line, Scarpia joins the chorus to sing the rest of
the “Te Deum.”
Another noted example of these melodramatic juxtapositions
occurs at the end of Act 2: “In Puccini’s Tosca . . . after the scenes of
torture, the murder of Scarpia is made more horrifying by having his
death set to a stately and respectable old-fashioned Baroque dance,
the dramatic pathos magnified by the ironic tone” (Rosen 123). In
this instance, Puccini employs both types of collage, for, in a linear
fashion, Scarpia’s death is followed by the Baroque dance, one juxta-

posed with the other, but that dance is also layered on top of Tosca’s
actions as she performs her own version of the last rites.
Puccini’s “excessive” interest in capturing the Rome of the early
nineteenth-century papacy is also melodramatic, both in the sense of
the composer’s own struggle to make “visible” and “audible” a cer-
tain obstructed reality, but also in terms of the opera’s aesthetic. For
as Schwartz’s analysis demonstrates, a “heightened” sense of reality
necessarily chafes against the constraints of nineteenth-century real-
ism. Puccini’s having gone too far reveals that all realisms are con-
structed, the product of specific historical conventions.
Returning to the theme of Tosca’s multiple Manichean pairings, I
end this chapter by suggesting yet another way in which the opera is
an example of male melodrama. Roberto Alonge has read the scene
of Cavaradossi’s torture to effectively highlight its melodrama; but at
the same time this interpretation is ultimately unaware of its implica-
tions, particularly regarding Sedgwick’s notion of the homophobia-
homosocial-homoerotic continuum.28
Alonge notes with great care the differences between Sardou’s orig-
inal and the version produced by Puccini and his librettists. According
to Alonge, Puccini has rendered Scarpia more “puccinian,” more
intensely obsessed with his “sexual fantasms” (Alonge 110). This also
makes the opera more melodramatic, or at least more in keeping with
melodrama’s Manichean world. For Scarpia is the Manichean opposite
of Cavaradossi in terms of his relationship with Tosca.
While in Sardou, the search for a room in which to torture Mario
is improvised, in Puccini, there is an “institutionalized” space predis-
posed ahead of time for such torture—Scarpia’s quarters (Alonge 111).
Continuing this line of thought, Alonge argues, “Also in Puccini we
note that the torture chamber is in the vicinity of Scarpia’s room, the
room in which he lives, eats, and works” (112). Heightening the melo-
drama, Puccini combines the “seduction” of Tosca and the torture
of Mario so that they can occur simultaneously and within earshot
and sight of one another—also making possible the modernist stall-
ing of time. This stalling is a particularly effective way to re-present
torture, an act that attempts to defy the delay of signification—the
way, as a form of mediation, meaning of necessity follows perception
temporally—by evoking a terrifyingly perpetual present.
The proximity of Scarpia’s quarters and the torture chamber suggest
violence is part of Scarpia’s daily life. Emphasizing Scarpia’s sadism, the
writer stresses that the torture chamber is a double of Scarpia’s bed-
room in particular, each containing its own “bed.” Alonge’s reading
here is very powerful in terms of its account of the way Puccini’s treat-
ment links a predatory male sexuality with violence.
Given the emphasis on Scarpia’s sadism, one might think that
Alonge would now discuss the way in which Scarpia’s sadistic pleasure
is fed mutually by his seduction of Tosca and his torture of Mario,
so that the latter also includes a sexual charge. But this is not where
Alonge takes his argument. Instead, he reads the open window that
lets in the music of Tosca’s concert for Maria Carolina as creating a
space, Scarpia’s room, where echoes of sexual pleasure, of the swelling
and detumescence of the music, and the “spasms of the tortured” all
come together (114). The heterogeneity of the space as described by
Alonge echoes with certain theories of sadism wherein, for example,
the Fascist desire to obliterate the other is a reaction to the fear of
losing one’s own boundaries—that loss figured in a heteronorma-
tive culture by women and “others” who are alleged to be unable
to keep things straight. He then reminds us that the collocation of
these two spaces, bedroom and torture chamber, the sound circu-
lating freely between the two, is what motivates Tosca to tell Scarpia
where Angelotti is hiding.
Given where his argument has led, we are not surprised by the
conclusion he proposes: that “all physical violence is nothing less
than sexual violence” (118) and that torture and rape are equivalent
(117)—recognizably Sadian themes, particular in the Italian context,
as they replicate Pasolini’s conclusions in his Salò.
But the conditions of possibility of Alonge’s argument are prob-
lematic—just as Pasolini’s were—in that they inadvertently replicate
certain sexist and homophobic moves. For in order to make his case
concerning the equivalence of bedroom and torture chamber, like
Freud, Alonge understands sadism and masochism as two sides of
the same coin, as complementary pleasures. But the desire to destroy
the boundaries of the other is not the same as the desire to lose one’s
own boundaries. In a heteronormative culture, the loss of boundaries
is often depicted via the trope of penetration and is an element in the
vilification of both women and homosexuals. While, from a psycho-
analytic standpoint, in Leo Bersani’s formulation, masochism might
be a tautology for sex, this tautology is made possible by an under-
standing of sadism and masochism as distinct. Sadism is Oedipal,
ultimately, a reassertion of difference, the Oedipus Complex “suc-
cessfully” concluding when male and female accede to their proper
place, free of regret. While masochism is pre-Oedipal, a melodramatic
and melancholy attempt to transcend the body’s boundaries, decon-
struct gender, and dissolve into spasms of pleasure.
Alonge’s assumption of the Freudian model of the two perversions

as mirror images of one another, however, requires him to propose
what turns out to be a familiar idea: that women are “naturally” mas-
ochists. Of course, he doesn’t put it in such crude terms. Rather, he
argues (and without noting that Tosca is, after all, a fantasy constructed
by a group of men), “Tosca is attracted secretly to an obscure and
unconscious masochistic pleasure” (117). He makes this case by first
setting up the parallels between the piece of furniture on which Mario
is tortured and the divan on which Tosca throws herself, between
Scarpia’s torture chamber and Scarpia’s bedroom. Alonge particularly
notes that, in Puccini’s opera, Tosca lingers on this divan longer than
in Sardou’s version, and that the divan is in fact Scarpia’s bed.
Tosca as masochist reinforces a very old story, one shared by Freud:
that, in Sylvia Plath’s famous words, “every woman adores a fascist.”
Alonge realizes on some level that he has backed himself into this cor-
ner, for he ends his essay in a universalist gesture that seeks to treat
Tosca as “everyman,” suggesting that librettist Giuseppe Giacosa, at
the service of Maestro Puccini, “learned to excavate in the black of
the human soul, among the frightening wanderings of the psyche,
to force out, courageously, the monsters of the unconscious” (119).
But, given the history of gender difference, casting Scarpia as sadist
to Tosca’s masochist suggests, however inadvertently, that men and
women share different monsters at the level of the unconscious and
that sexism—as Jeanette in the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
puts it, a condition in which men always want to be the destroyer and
never want to be the destroyed (Winterson)—is linked, at the level of
biology, to destiny. Men are sadists; women are masochists.
Additionally, Alonge ignores what seems, from another, queer van-
tage point, obvious: if the divan is Scarpia’s bed, and Scarpia’s bed
is equivalent to the surface on which Mario is being tortured, then
Tosca is in some sense the substitute for Mario, Scarpia’s sadism “sub-
limating” itself in heteronormative sex. If Scarpia understands sex
and violence as equivalent, then perhaps it is Mario he really wants to
fuck. In other words, Puccini’s opera deconstructs Freud’s sadism/
masochism binary.
I am not suggesting that Scarpia is “really” gay. In fact, the oppo-
site: masculinity as sadism can only consciously act itself out on the
body of a woman, for the reversibility of homosex threatens to sug-
gest the potential of masochistic pleasure and a dissolving of the
boundaries of the self; for phallocentrism to succeeded, such plea-
sure must be repressed. And in a heteronormative dispensation, a
man cannot be “penetrated” by a woman without risking effeminacy.

That is, Scarpia’s attraction is not homoerotic, if by homoerotic in
this instance we mean the willingness to be used by another man.
Scarpia’s attraction to both Tosca and Mario is sadistic and heter-
onormative. It is made possible by the homosocial continuum, the
way it treats women as goods traded among men, the way it is both
homoerotic and homophobic at the same time.
I am not suggesting here that all heterosexual sex is equivalent to
rape, that all straight men are sadists, that no heterosexual men have
fantasies of being penetrated—even by women—etc. Such positions
deny the complexity of fantasy, the way one thing can stand for some-
thing else, the way the complex combination of conscious and uncon-
scious wishes, of fear and desire, require that fantasy not be taken at
face value. The assumption that all heterosexual sex is a form of rape
seems to be where Alonge’s analysis is leading. What I am suggesting
is, contra Freud and with Deleuze, that sadism and masochism are
two different “perversions,” and that, because of the fantastic con-
flating of the penis with the phallus, sadism is “lived” by Scarpia by
displacing his desire to violate Mario with his desire to violate Tosca
instead—yet another way in which Tosca is a male melodrama.
CH A P T ER 4
Puccini’s Sparrow: Longing and

La Rondine
If tragedy produces fear and pity, and comedy moves us through

laughter and the promise of rebirth, the melodramatic sensibility is
perhaps best characterized by longing and regret. In a world where
future happiness is guaranteed by religious conviction, longing is
abated—by prayer, the performance of good works, and the reassur-
ance of heavenly reward. Regret instead is expunged via the sacrament
of penance and the conviction to “sin no more”; as long as they live,
believers inhabit the possibility of repentance, forgiveness, grace, and
salvation.1 In a secular world, minus such reassurances, longing and
regret are but two sides of (modern) melancholia, melodramatic excess
an attempt to signify the intensity of these affects. Brooks suggests that
“melodrama represents both the urge toward resacralization and the
impossibility of conceiving sacralization other than in personal terms”
(Melodramatic 16). Characters in melodrama often seek to challenge
unjust social conventions or to battle with their own past and the way
it has trapped them, but because their struggle is a personal one, they
often fail. This is perhaps the most profound way in which melodrama
speaks of the unfairness of life, for one’s fellow human beings can be
unforgiving, dreams die, and justice does not always triumph.
While disavowal and the exigencies of life can distract us from
grief, longing and regret are neither a denial of the reality principle,
nor disavowal, repression, or sublimation. Instead, they recognize,
cognitively and at the level of the body, one’s present reality, but also
past happiness and the possibility that one’s reality might at some
point change for the better. They stare inadequacy in the face, but
with a view toward ameliorating it, and their liminality is precisely a
source of anguish, as they refuse both ignorance and resignation.
This “in betweenness” is precisely what lends longing and regret
expression in musical melodrama, for referring to this liminal state
requires modes of signification that exceed the everyday and refer

to a future in a constant state of deferral. Melodrama exploits to its
advantage the temporality of Western music and the ways in which
melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic patterns create expectations whose
fulfillment can be delayed or thwarted. Music is particularly skilled at
evoking the temporal in terms of both stasis and movement. The writ-
ings of Bergson crystallized modern concerns around the relationship
between the spatial and temporal, modernity itself a particular way
of understanding space and time. Various tempos suggest different
ways to measure the rate at which “time passes,” as Virginia Woolf
so famously wrote (To the Lighthouse). Melodies similarly can connote
travel or rest, a journey punctuated by stopping points, or a return to
where one began. Cadences offer reassurances or upset expectations,
and, in their deferrals, harmonic suspensions are particularly evoca-
tive of longing and even disappointment.
The extended high note, the portamento, the ability to move back
and forth between speech and song, the uniqueness of timbre, the
breadth of range, the interruption of a melody with silence—all make
vocal music a particularly rich vehicle for melodrama. The immediacy
of the human voice, its capacity to register affective states “beyond”
ideation, the phatic dimensions of language, and the voice’s how-
ever utopian urge to fill, with raw, unmediated expression, the gap
between perception and cognition—all of these are suited to melo-
drama’s grasping at a world beyond the everyday yet immanent to it, a
world always lurking below the surface but straining to be heard.
In Puccini’s La Rondine, the swallow of the title signifies the long-
ing to escape the strictures of one’s current life. Its first act opens
with an ascending run, suggesting a bird taking flight, but the first
melodic figure is a jaunty, syncopated, pentatonic tune that we will
hear again in the second act and will be associated with the nightclub
Bullier and all that it evokes—romance, carousing, youth, promise.
Then, as if interrupting the party, the tempo slows dramatically (4,
rehearsal number 1), and Puccini provides a four-measure musical
motif that suggests something of the specific way in which swallows
soar and dive.2
In the first three of the four measures, the swallow “lands” on a
pitch, descends to another close by, and then returns home to the origi-
nal pitch before flying off to a new one, while in the fourth, the bird
seems finally to come to rest (on the offbeat) but then immediately
takes off again to repeat the sequence. Capturing both the purposive-
ness and mystery of the bird’s movements, the motif is, in terms of both
melody and rhythm, both regular and random at the same time.
Figure 4.1 Movement and Stasis: The Swallow’s Search
The eighth note rest of the downbeat of each measure is “filled”

by an eighth note in the bass. This creates a call-and-response pattern,
the three eighth-note treble figure, played by both strings and winds,
responding to the call of the bass’s downbeat. This four-measure pat-
tern is immediately repeated, both rhythmically and harmonically, but
scored differently—the call an octave higher; the three note response
figure, as played by the first violins, an octave lower—as if the two
“birds,” one represented by the eighth note downbeat, the other rep-
resented by the three eighth-note pattern, are moving toward each
other to meet on the same branch (4–5).
Melodically, if the first phrase is, however temporarily, home, the
bird flies first down, then up—but not quite as high as home—then
down again, lower than before, creating a descending horizontal zig-
zag, as if the “treble” bird is in the process of landing, but that land-
ing is being attenuated. Combined, melody and rhythm thus suggest
a tension between movement and stasis, vertical and horizontal, the
swallow’s flight pattern seeming both purposive and random, a pat-
tern whose logic is beyond our understanding but recognizable as a
pattern nonetheless. The swallow’s flight suggests Brooks’s present
but obscure moral occult. We “see,” aurally, the bird flying, and we
even recognize a logic, but the pattern is not sufficiently regular to
allow its trajectory to be predicted with exactness; something is being
sought, something inscrutable and not nameable in words. The motif
then develops into a soaring melodic line until shortly before the cur-
tain rises and the singers begin.
Just a few pages later, this bird figure is picked up by the vocal
line but also varied rhythmically, once more evoking both the purpo-
sive and the random, the predicted and the unexpected (14, rehearsal
number 5). Three women—Yvette, Suzy, and Bianca, all friends of the
heroine—sing, individually, “Amore!” (Yvette) “O cielo!” (Suzy) “Io
struggo!” (Yvette) Svengo!” (Bianca), “Io cedo!” (Suzy) “Io muoio!”
(Yvette), creating a link between the desire to flee from unhappiness
and toward love (“Love!” “Oh heavens!”) and the necessary effort
involved in such flight (“I suffer!” “I swoon!” “I surrender!”; 15,
rehearsal number 5). Again we are given an inscrutable pattern, as the
words do not alternate regularly between the women. But because we
are in the worlds of both melodrama and operetta, the score is marked
“with exaggerated languor,” suggesting deliberate affectation, life as
theater, the women being both ironic and sincere at the same time,
flirting with the poet Prunier. A truth is lurking beneath the women’s
apparent posturing, and what seems comic may simultaneously be
serious—a trait of what later in the century will be called camp.
PUCCINI’S SPARROW 119
These opening passages tell the whole story of the first act, for,
dramatically, it will represent one of the opera’s Manichean pairings,
the glittering surface of the heroine Magda’s life as a kept woman
and the price she pays, the external glamor of the Parisian salon and
the unhappiness and longing just below that surface. Reading, in the
midst of the first act, Magda’s palm, her friend Prunier says, “It will
reveal to you your destiny! Maybe, like the swallow, you will migrate
over the sea, toward a bright land of dreams, toward the sun, toward
love”—a line that captures both melodrama’s figuring of emotion
via landscape, as well as its understanding of truth as present but
immanent (99–100). Later in the same act, alone on the stage, Magda
repeats these words, which then propel her toward the pursuit of her
dream of a happier life.
The first act of the opera asks whether such a “migration” from her
current circumstances is possible; when Magda worries he has seen
a bad omen, Prunier suggests Manichean possibilities: “Destiny has
two faces: a smile, a look of anguish? Mystery!” (101–02). The second
details Magda’s attempt to escape her gilded cage, leave Rambaldo—
the wealthy, jaded banker who keeps her—and find her dream of true
love. The third insists on the futility of this attempt; at its conclusion,
Magda sings, “I once more take flight and reclaim my pain” (421).
The opera concludes without answering the questions of whether
she returns to the strictures of her previously life or who (or what) is
to blame for Magda’s unhappiness—for there is no final version of
the third act, Puccini rewriting it three times. In each, however, the
opera ends with Magda singing “Let this pain be mine!” and then
the exclamation “Ah!” Sung on a high A-flat, this final vocal sound
suggests the impossibility of expressing in words the depths of her
disappointment.
Set in the Paris of the Second Empire, La Rondine is from later in
Puccini’s career than Tosca and provides a bridge from what Andrew
Davis calls his “Romantic” to his “late” style. A 2007 production of
La Rondine, mounted at the Fifty-Third Puccini Festival in Torre del
Lago, Italy, highlighted the opera’s modernist reflexivity via setting,
costumes, props, and staging (including dancers representing swallows).
La Rondine’s source material was by A. M. Willner and Heinz Reichert,
both contemporaries of Puccini, neither of them melodramatists per se.
Like Tosca, La Rondine both employs familiar melodramatic tropes and
rewrites and revises certain conventions of social melodrama.
La Rondine suggests a perverse, even queer conflict between the
two genres of operetta and melodrama, calling up social inequi-
ties and the often unsuccessful efforts of cultural forms like musical
theater to smooth over contradictions. As Richard Dyer suggests,

musicals play with fire. For, to provide utopian solutions to the mis-
eries required and reproduced by capitalism, musicals must refer to
the audience’s experience of that social reality. But to call attention to
capitalist deprivation—even if ultimately to offer a substitute, in the
form of utopian sensibilities—is to risk exposing injustices. Musicals
try to manage this contradiction, but, as Dyer suggests, they do not
always succeed.
A hybrid genre like La Rondine is under no obligation to convey
the “pure pleasure” of entertainment (Dyer).3 At the same time, the
opera’s second act is so indebted to musical comedy—and conveys
such unabashedly utopian sensibilities—that the shifts in tone can
be jarring. Assuming that Puccini was striving for verisimilitude, one
author, for example, laments Puccini’s inclusion, in an opera set in the
Second Empire, of modern dance rhythms such as the “tango, slow-
fox, one-step” (Bertolazzi). One of the reasons the opera continues
to be undervalued is that it is too close to musical comedy and thus
assumed to be trite, lowbrow, and not sufficiently complex to chal-
lenge familiar modes of perception, cognition, reception, and affect
(Fraccaroli 186; Girardi Puccini la vita 143; Jacobs xi). While, if read
closely, the opera is sufficiently innovative, precisely in terms of its
portrayal of issues of gender and class, this critique is familiar, a read-
ing of operetta as popular and thus debased culture.
The performance history of La Rondine and Puccini’s inability to
be “finished” with Magda suggests another kind of male melodrama,
wherein the composer cannot resolve the question of the woman’s
fate, and, in the process, wrestle from himself a work that meets
his satisfaction. The opera is particularly “incoherent,” and thus a
text where certain contradictions are revealed. But it also contains
unabashedly lush, beautiful music. Rather than rendering the opera a
failure, these conflicts contribute to its value—not simply “intellectu-
ally” or for reasons relevant to a feminist politics, but also because of
the wide range of affective responses it evokes—though of course the
three need not be unrelated.
Modern critics are largely inattentive to how the libretto (accord-
ing to Puccini, significantly reworked by Giuseppe Adami; cited in
Fraccaroli 185) rewrites the conventions of social melodrama. Fraccaroli
refers to the opera’s “banal and overused self-repetitions of situations
and episodes characteristic of fashionable scale-models of light opera”
(192). Budden instead calls the opera “ a traviata from which all the
larger issues have been banished” (344), while Rhea Jacobs calls it
“La Traviata lite” (xi; see also “L’operetta” d’Amico 54).
In this comparison, the gender politics of La Rondine’s rewriting

of Violetta, via Magda, is overlooked; in Budden’s words, Violetta
suffers from a “mortal illness that plunges” the character into “a
hectic pursuit of pleasure” that culminates in her “death in a state
of moral redemption” (344). None of this description applies to La
Rondine’s Magda: she is not ill, she leaves a life of material comfort
and a passionless relationship in order to pursue love, and, at the
opera’s conclusion, she has no need to seek moral redemption (as she
has already left Rambaldo for Ruggero) and is in a state of despair
and melancholy.
Budden also neglects the significance of Puccini’s treatment of the
two male characters who vie for the heroine. As a result, he under-
reads the significance of the opera’s deployment of social melodrama
and mistakenly accuses La Rondine of ignoring “the iron pressure
of bourgeois morality”—a particularly unconvincing reading of an
opera that is rather a demonstration of how the iron (and hypocriti-
cal) pressures of bourgeois morality destroy the happiness of both
hero and heroine. And while it is possible to read the opera’s conclu-
sion as one in which the sexual woman is punished for her transgres-
sions, Puccini’s inability to “finish” the opera is highly suggestive
of why this particular formula no longer “worked,” given historical
changes in both the role of women and the melodramatic sensibility.
(As early as November 1914, Puccini agonized, in a letter to Adami,
that “the third act makes me suffer horribly, to the point that perhaps
La Rondine will remain two acts and a postlude,” cited in d’Amico
“L’operetta” 51).
Michele Girardi also compares Magda to Violetta, contrast-
ing Violetta with Magda but without suggesting that Puccini had
intended one to be an imitation of the other (Puccini la vita). In fact,
he insists that La Rondine “lacks the moral struggle so dear to Verdi”
(Girardi Puccini la vita 148) and suggests that Magda herself is minus
the ethical commitments that animate Violetta’s decision to leave her
lover in order to save his reputation (Puccini la vita 155). According to
Girardi, unlike Violetta, “Magda de Civry is not the victim of a moral-
istic society. . . . The times surely have changed” (Puccini la vita 157).
While the comic lovers, Lisette and Prunier, are, as Budden argues,
“a cliché of operetta,” they are a trope that is inherited from com-
media dell’arte and not simply an imitation of the Viennese, Lisette
being one of commedia’s alternate names for Colombina. Budden’s
comparison of Prunier and Lisette to Count Camille and Baroness
Valencienne of Lehár’s The Merry Widow is telling. This reading
erases Lisette’s class status and way of interacting with both Magda
and Prunier—both of which precisely link her to the “crafty servant”

of both commedia and its predecessor, classical Roman comedy. She
is the prototypical “saucy wench,” a modern version of Smeraldina
from Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters, the unruly woman who gives
open, if comedic, expression to the injustices of gender and power
inequities and the way men seek to control women—and thus hardly
comparable to the married, refined (and older) Baroness Valencienne.
(Though the latter’s chafing against the strictures of her marriage to
her pompous husband is not minus a certain unruliness.)
As for Prunier, he is modeled after the Parisian dandy and perhaps
even a sly reference to his Italian incarnation, Puccini’s friend Gabriele
D’Annunzio. Prunier is a Pygmalion cum Henry Higgins/impresario
figure who unsuccessfully tries to turn his lover Lisette into a night-
club star. (On Puccini’s attempts to collaborate with D’Annunzio, see
Budden.) Budden’s comparison of Prunier to the elegant and roman-
tic Count Camille not only, as in the case of Lisette, misreads the
class position of the character, but also ignores La Rondine’s bur-
lesquing of the dandy. For, while Prunier claims to Magda’s trio of
friends that the woman whom he desires must be “refined, elegant,
perverse” (87–88), later, he admits to having fallen for an outspoken
ladies’ maid.
Prunier’s gendering is complex, for, on the one hand, after the
Wilde trials (though not before; Breward), in the Anglophone world,
the dandy was associated with homosexuality, and today’s spectators
may find it amusing that Prunier instructs Lisette on how to dress
and wear her makeup (though this instruction is in keeping with his
pretensions of being an impresario). On the other, given his pursuit of
Lisette and his flirtations with Magda, as well as that D’Annunzio’s
embodiment of the Italian dandy was not homosexual, it would be
too facile to read Prunier as a closet case, although he has perhaps
some queer characteristics (as D’Annunzio did). In the third act, he
performs as Rambaldo’s “wing-man,” the extent of which depends
upon which of the versions one consults. In all three, however, he is
the buddy who mediates between Magda and the scorned Rambaldo,
the three constituting a version of the eroticized triangle analyzed by
Sedgwick (Between Men).
Compared to the prototypical heroine of social melodrama, Magda’s
status is ambiguous in several contradictory ways. La Rondine’s first
act begins in the home of its kept woman, a Parisian salon—itself a
liminal site between public and private that provided women with a
certain autonomy and potential not only to refashion themselves but
to produce their own art. Given the opera’s iconography, Magda is
the caged bird who sings. The salon is a queer space, the kept wom-
an’s version of Woolf’s “room of one’s own,” with all the contradic-
tions this suggests; as Magda states, “In my house, the abnormal is
the rule” (12).
A familiar trope in melodrama, the “interrupted party” suggests
the way in which the moral universe might suddenly assert its pre-
rogatives, particularly when we least expect them. It is a public scene,
and so the stakes—and the affects that result—are more pronounced
than in the everyday. What is unusual in La Rondine is that this irrup-
tion of the moral dilemma is not caused by the arrival of either the
young man or even his older rival but rather something Magda herself
provokes via a series of events—her contradicting of Rambaldo, her
singing, her reminiscing of that night long ago when she felt free of
the obligations her life with Rambaldo has thrust upon her. Rather
than a man, she herself initiates the Manichean struggle to find her
place in an ethical universe.
In psychoanalytic terms, rather than causing desire, the man is
the object that Magda’s desire finds. When Magda meets Ruggero,
she has already expressed her unhappiness with her present life, and
he is no more than another man present at her salon, albeit a young
innocent from the provinces and thus at first glance the Manichean
opposite of jaded salon life as represented by both Rambaldo and, to
a lesser extent, Prunier. But even the attempt to make him a more
interesting character, via an aria inserted in 1920, falls flat, as the
song is primarily about Paris and not Ruggero, and in the final ver-
sion of the opera, he comes to represent instead the bourgeois social
mores that trap Magda. Initially, the opera is more about Magda’s
inner life than about her relationship with any particular man, and
perhaps this is the reason both why Puccini could not figure out what
to “do” with this relationship once the lovers unite and why Ruggero
comes off as such an uninteresting character. It also suggests that the
penultimate Manichean struggle is between Magda and all of the
men in terms of their determination to assign her a proper place in
their ethical universe. (Another way in which Magda as melodramatic
heroine is rewritten is via her age, for presumably, she is older than
Ruggero; Puccini himself compared the opera to Strauss’s 1911 Der
Rosenkavalier; cited in Budden 352.)4
In the second act, Magda abandons the persona of the kept woman
and dons the disguise of a different kind of woman of ambiguous
status, a seamstress, in order to return to a club where, one night
long ago, she had once had an amorous adventure as a grisette, sneak-
ing out of the house while her elderly aunt slept (59). In the third
act, she and Ruggero are lovers, though he is unaware that she was
Rambaldo’s lover until the opera’s conclusion (if ever; in the first ver-
sion, it is not clear that Ruggero realizes what Magda means when she
says “I don’t want to ruin you”).
These multiple identities—Magda the kept woman, Magda who
models herself after Doretta (the fictive ego ideal Magda sings of in the
opera’s most famous aria), Magda’s recollections of herself as a grisette,
Magda in disguise as a seamstress, Magda the lover of Ruggero—
remind us that “Magda” is not a stable identity. Through the character
of Magda we see femininity itself revealed as a performance and one
donned in response to particular needs and desires—not simply those
of the men around her, but sometimes even her own.
But the opera also reveals the limits of Magda’s agency, as ultimately
societal forces intervene to shape her fate. Despite her efforts, she is
not allowed to escape her past, characterized by her “illicit” economic
dependence on a man. Yet unlike Violetta, Manon, Mimi, and Cio-
Cio-San, she survives the opera (though in at least one contemporary
production, she does in fact die). However, escaping with her life
means continuing to suffer, Magda finding no redemption or tran-
scendence—though, again, the ambiguity of that final “Ah!” makes
it difficult to determine just what happens next. Puccini’s numerous
rewritings of the finale are significant in this regard, too, as it is the
extent of Magda’s agency that he cannot seem to determine. But in all
three versions, her attempts to inhabit the roles of mistress, wife, or
even redeemed sinner fail, and so, like many melodramas, the opera
reminds us of the unfairness of life and the social mores that circum-
scribe the performative choices of even a “modern” woman.
In keeping with the numerous parallels the opera draws between
Magda and the swallow, like Tosca, Magda is a singer (at least in the
context of her salon). In La Rondine, the narrative temporarily halts
when first Prunier and then Magda perform the opera’s most famous
aria, “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta,” rendered in English as “Doretta’s
Song.” This “performance within a performance” is crucial for a
number of reasons. It not only provides a melodramatic opportunity
whereby Magda “explains” her inner life to the audience, but the opera
also suggests that the act of completing Prunier’s half-composed song
is the catalyst that compels her to leave her old life behind in order to
“become” Doretta. Additionally, the opportunity provides her with
agency within the space of her salon, and her eagerness to take up the
challenge of completing the song is highlighted (34).
Immediately preceded by a recapitulation, in the orchestra, of the
“bird” melody (27–28), the first part of “Doretta’s Song,” as sung
by Prunier, is introduced with a series of ornate rolled chords in the

piano, creating a heightened sense of anticipation. After asking (rhe-
torically) his audience who among them might be able to imagine
Doretta’s tale, he narrates, in the historic past tense, the story of a
young woman who is offered riches by a king in exchange for love;
the young woman insists that gold cannot bring happiness. The line
seems directed at Magda, or at least this is how she hears it, as it is at
this point that she takes up the challenge of finishing the story.
In the middle of Prunier’s version, at two different points, are sev-
eral measures where the melody ceases. The orchestra, however, plays
the phrase that Magda will use to complete the aria (30–33; rehearsal
numbers 10–12). This melody represents Magda’s longing lurking
beneath the surface of the party, present but apparently unable to be
heard by the guests. Prunier’s pause also creates a heightened antici-
pation that is rewarded when in fact Magda sings her version.
Magda completes Doretta’s song in several different ways—an excess
of signification—by filling in these measures, altering Prunier’s text,
and adding a finale. Her version repeats the beginning of Prunier’s
lyrics, but in place of the king, and referring secretly to her own life
that night long ago, she sings of a student who kissed Doretta on the
mouth and revealed to her the mad passion of true love. The conclu-
sion of the song then refers even more directly to her present life:
“Ah! my dream! Ah, my life! What do riches matter/if at last happi-
ness flowers again!/Oh golden dream/to love like that!” (38–39).
Musically, “Doretta’s Song” is divided into two sections, a verse-
like opening and an aria, a lovely, lyrical waltz composed of extended
pitches. The two sections are themselves further divided in half, the
second half of each subsection building dramatically and musically
on the first, in a pattern that could be rendered as a/b/a1/b1 (verse)
and c/d/c1/d1 (aria, the last section followed by a coda). Typical of
melodies, these doublings remind us of the melos in melodrama.
The narrative structure of the song deliberately plays with the ques-
tion of who is narrating this story, as it, too, divides into sections. In
Prunier’s version, there is a semi-diegetic initial declamation, a rhe-
torical question, addressed to the story’s audience by an omniscient
narrator, which is then followed immediately by some brief exposition.
This section is itself followed by two examples of direct discourse: the
words of the king, immediately followed by Doretta’s response.
Magda’s version also begins in the historic past and provides
exposition. But it then switches narratological gears, and the lyrics
are exclamations minus nouns or verbs: “Mad love! Mad intoxica-
tion!” In other words, who is narrating here—Magda or Doretta—is
unclear. The next line is a rhetorical question posed to her listeners,

suggesting she has again taken up the position of narrator. But this is
followed again by exclamations lacking verbs, Doretta/Magda sing-
ing “Ah! My dream!” The single verb that follows, in the phrase “Che
importa la ricchezza,” is not in the historic past but in the present
(roughly, what good is wealth, what does wealth matter; 38).
In this section of the song, then, we are at times unable to deter-
mine whose words these are—Doretta’s or Magda’s or Doretta/
Magda’s—for they contrast riches with happiness, rejecting the for-
mer for the latter, and this itself parallels the two women’s stories.
Doretta’s song foreshadows the choice Magda will make between the
financial security of Rambaldo, allegorized in Prunier’s part of the
aria as a rich king, and her passion for Ruggero, figured as a presum-
ably poor student. Significantly, in both Doretta’s song and the opera
itself, it is the woman (Doretta, Magda) who chooses between the
two men rather than waits to be chosen.
In both Prunier’s and Magda’s versions, the verse begins harmoni-
cally on the dominant seventh chord and then moves through the
tonic before returning to the dominant seventh. The V7 I, “closed”
cadence, is extremely familiar, a musical cliché announcing “the end”
and “considered to have the greatest degree of finality to all the
cadences” (Nagley and Whittal). But the verse remains in the domi-
nant, which only resolves with the beginning of the aria, the effect
of which is to attenuate the anticipation of the tonic. The b phrase’s
simple melody, on a whole tone scale, is harmonized by triads moving
in diatonic parallel fashion up and down the scale—a characteristic
associated with Debussy and musical Impressionism—before return-
ing to the dominant seventh, as if one were simply playing triads up
and down the piano keyboard on all the white keys. The ear is seem-
ingly being pulled in one direction but then taken somewhere else.
Attenuated to delay its conclusion and the beginning of the next
section, the b1 section of the verse is a melodic figure repeated three
times, rising higher each time—like the swallow in flight. The effect
is to create a sense of swelling and diminishing, itself doubled by the
rise in pitch each time the five-note melodic figure is repeated.
Emotions fluctuate but at the same time reach toward an emo-
tional peak—that peak being the second part of the song. The effect
of this opening is to suggest restlessness, but restlessness with a pur-
pose, as demonstrated by the use of the tonic and five seven chords
and their familiarity.
Consisting of alternating phrases, (c/d/c1/d1), the second, “aria”
section of the song is characterized musically by extended high notes
Figure 4.2 The b1 section of the verse: swelling and diminishing
alternating with moving lines, as if the bird is both soaring and mov-
ing forward, or even in imitation of the flying of a swallow, for swal-
lows alternate between beating their wings rapidly and then floating.
It thus contrasts dramatically with the verse of the song in terms of
tempo, rhythm, and register.
The aria begins with one such high note, an A. In Prunier’s ver-
sion, this is the “unfinished” part of the aria and thus not sung by
him but only played in the orchestra. When Magda sings it, her guests
exclaim, “Delicious! Delicious! It’s exquisite! It’s exquisite!” These
exclamations “double” verbally the emotional effects of the aria, but
they are also ironic in that her guests do not realize what is hidden in
Magda’s song—both a critique of their shallow lives and the revela-
tion of her past.
The first few bars of the aria section constitute a transition
“between” Doretta and Magda, as the initial extended notes are not
as high as what will follow, suggesting that Magda is gradually trans-
forming into Doretta and that her emotions are swelling. This is also
the section of the aria where, narratively, we are not sure who is sing-
ing, Magda or Doretta.
When the first of the alternating phrases is repeated, (c1), it begins
on the syllable “Ah!”—a sigh, and the same vocal sound on which the
opera will end—connected to an even higher note—as if to express
something virtually inexpressible, and, in the process, strain toward
something not visible but present. This second high note is a C, the
highest in the opera, and is held. While the c phrase remains in tempo,
the c1 phrase slows down and then resumes tempo. It also includes
changes in the dynamics lacking in the first; specifically, a crescendo
up to the high C, and then a phrase marked pianissimo. These musi-
cal choices render the second iteration more intense, and Magda’s
longing grows to the point of leading into a coda section.
At the conclusion of the d1 section, the melody is attenuated via
tempo markings (allargando) and a kind of “false” ending, the har-
mony moving to the tonic to coincide with the last symbol of the
Italian word for happiness, felicità. However, the fact that Magda
sings an A, the third of the chord (rather than the tonic) on this syl-
lable, further attenuates the aria’s conclusion. This attenuation is then
itself attenuated, for the key moves momentarily to G minor by way
of a dominant seventh chord on D, before returning again to the V7
I cadence (giving us ii, V7, I, a standard cadence). The melody in this
attenuated ending is characterized by more extended high notes and a
further slowing of the tempo (sostenuto). The aria is followed by a few
additional bars of music, which include a return of the opening bird
Figure 4.3 The aria’s opening bars, section c: “Between” Magda and Doretta
Figure 4.4 Aria, C1 to conclusion: denouement, delays, ruses, resolution
theme (40). The effect of these delays, ruses, and resolutions is again
to suggest musically a kind of patterned randomness, our ear follow-
ing the logic of the harmony but then having that logic interrupted.
A staple of opera, the extended high notes Doretta sings are melo-
dramatic in the sense of being “excessive” displays of vocal virtuosity,
implying that the singer is coming close to exceeding his or her own
vocal abilities and transcending the limits of the quotidian. Unlike the
fioritura displays of vocal virtuosity found in Mozart and Rossini,5 or
in the bel canto of Bellini and Donizetti,6 which, via their elegant
and seemingly effortless, rapid changes in pitch seem primarily to
convey in Dyer’s terms the sensibilities of energy and abundance,
the extended high note conveys instead what Dyer calls intensity.
In Classical and early Romantic opera, however, these notes tend to
appear at the conclusion of the aria, indicating a final cadence. They
are thus typically harmonized with a dominant seventh chord, “pull-
ing” the ear toward the tonic and reinforcing a sense of closure.
In Puccini’s operas, the extended high notes often occur in the
middle of phrases. The notes slow down the musical phrase, creat-
ing a stopping point or suspension, as in Gianni Schicchi’s “O mio
babbino caro.” When they appear near the end of an aria, they act
as a penultimate emotional moment in the vocal line—as in “Vissi”
d’arte, or Cavaradossi’s E lucevan le stelle or Che gelida manina and
Mi chiamano Mimi of La Bohème—but are prior to the final cadence,
the musical phrase resembling the plot structure of a certain kind of
fiction: the high note constitutes the denouement, which is succeeded
by the “falling action.” Such a structure is highly melodramatic and
suggests that the singer’s emotion has reached such a level of intensity
that it cannot be contained by the forward movement in time of the
vocal line and risks stalling the aria. In Doretta’s aria, the highest
note occurs in the middle of the phrase.
La Rondine is not coy about Magda’s financial dependence upon
Rambaldo (57–58) but Magda herself longs for more than money, while
Rambaldo admits that his “romantic devil” is asleep (43).7 Almost
immediately after this reference to his sleeping devil, Rambaldo hands
Magda a pearl necklace—a fetish to ward off the intimation of castra-
tion he himself let slip. Referring to the words of Doretta and the
fact that she puts love before money, Magda replies, “It [the necklace]
doesn’t change my mind” (45). Momentarily recognizing the typically
obscured truth—her unhappiness with Rambaldo, the “l’uomo ‘pra-
tico’” (41; italics in the original)—Prunier in an aside then suggests a
connection between the Doretta of his dreams and Magda (46). When
her female friends speak of Rambaldo’s financial generosity, Magda
exclaims, “Money! Nothing but money!” (58–59). This leads directly

into her recounting of that night at Bullier.
In the third act, the circumstance that causes Ruggero to con-
tact his parents—and that set in play the events that will lead to the
dissolution of his relationship with Magda—is a lack of money. In
the final version, this lack is underlined by the arrival of three sales-
women who try unsuccessfully to sell the couple expensive fabrics. So
while, on the one hand, the second act Manichean choice for Magda
is between the “good” (romantic) Ruggero and the “bad” (practical)
Rambaldo, on the other hand, the two men also stand for love versus
money—itself construed as a Manichean choice.
Magda’s second major instance in which she sings openly about her
inner struggles is the extended section of the first act in which she
recounts to her women friends that evening long ago at Bullier. While
the term “bittersweet” is a cliché, Magda’s memories are happy and
yet twinged with sadness at how far she has strayed from that young
woman who one night stole away for a romantic adventure. Musically,
Puccini represents this emotional struggle chiefly via a subtle shifting
between major and minor.
The aria begins with a parlando section marked molto lento (58,
rehearsal number 22). The lyrics are those in which Magda first laments
her friends’ concerns with money, recalls a bit of that night, and then
wonders why her life today cannot be as it once was. This is sung
in counterpoint to the orchestra playing again the call-and-response
bird melody from the opera’s opening. This provides three different
means whereby the longing to fly from her cage is expressed—her
words, their musical setting, the repeated theme beneath it—as well
as evokes the tension between moving, via the parlando style, hori-
zontally, and, via the bird figure, vertically (as in the first section of
Cavaradossi’s E lucevan, wherein he sings a horizontal figure against
the clarinet’s melody). As we will see, this parlando style is itself cru-
cial, as in such moments “the singer is reduced to meditating on a
single note, as if lost in the act of recollection” (Rosen 169).8
The key then changes to A major, the time signature to 2/4, and
the tempo picks up slightly (orchestral page 61, rehearsal 23). Magda
begins to sing; the accompaniment, spare, outlines an open fifth in
the flutes, suggesting that the first chord is the V chord, drawing our
ear to the tonic, A. But the melodic line is harmonized by a very spare
pattern in the same key, played on the harp, its third measure contain-
ing an F sharp. This implies a harmonic progression including the
minor sixth chord—giving the melody a nostalgic quality. The actual
“arrival” at the key of A does not occur until the word “amore” (four
bars after rehearsal 24)—the attenuation of this arrival suggesting an

ambiguity of emotion.
This minor within the major provides a musical figuring for the
way these memories wed together conflicting emotions, happiness,
and longing. Throughout this section, the melody is built on both
the dominant harmony and the minor sixth (the key of F# minor also
being the relative minor of A major). The net result is bittersweet, as
we cannot seem either to leave (either) major or minor behind or to
rest comfortably in one of them.
Magda continues to reminisce, and her friends comment on her
young man’s generosity. Beneath them, at measure 26 (and now in
the key of D), the orchestra plays a typical waltz melody—as if to
bring back the music from that night. The melodic interest shifts to
the orchestra; for four bars, the vocal line returns to the parlando
style with which the section began. Here again, Puccini uses both
major and minor chords in the key of D. The waltz is both familiar
and not familiar, the minor seventh chords in particular creating the
bittersweet quality, combining as they do a minor triad and a major
triad simultaneously.
After building to a climax, the waltz turns pianissimo, the tempo
slows, and Magda finishes the tune, the last three chords prior to the
final A constituting a familiar cadence pattern: iii, IV, V, I, Puccini
again providing planing chords played up the diatonic scale until the
resolution in the tonic. Following Magda’s recounting to her friends
that night, Bianca, Yvette, and Suzy sing yet another extended waltz
that summarizes Magda’s night at Bullier: “A flight, a party, a lit-
tle beer” (82, rehearsal number 33). As in the case of the previous
waltz, a struggle occurs between major and minor mood, that strug-
gle sounding even more pronounced than in the previous examples
because the melody begins on a minor seventh chord.
In these waltz melodies, Puccini provides “melodramatic” musical
figures of longing, the longing itself marked by the contrast between
one’s present circumstances and the happy memories of the past. The
waltz is familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, major and minor,
melodic and dissonant, and at times harmonically spare, if only for
a measure or two. Puccini’s musical setting thus uses the multiple
resources of opera to bring meaning out into the open, while at the
same time suggesting the presence of the unknown, the sense that
there is something—a wealth of unnameable, ambiguous emotions—
that can only be gestured toward but never fully realized.
Concerning the love triangle, Rambaldo is not rewritten in any
significant ways. He is, however, jaded, calling love, the theme of
“Doretta’s” song, “un po’ appassito”—withered, dried up (perhaps

another reference to detumescence, 28)—to which Magda responds,
“Love is always new!”
While La Rondine’s Ruggero embodies qualities typical of the
third member of this triangle—he is young, innocent, and enmeshed
in status difficulties (Cawelti 33)—the opera is unique: in two of
its various incarnations, La Rondine’s male melodrama is a critique
of bourgeois masculinity directed at him and his inability to resist
restrictive social mores. La Rondine’s hero is dependent upon the
wealth of his family and eager to secure their consent to his marriage.
While it is the contrast between his status and Magda’s that becomes
the final focus of the opera, he is not particularly worthy. A naïve
fun-seeker in the first act, the second comes closest to portraying him
as both innocent and deserving of Magda’s love. In Puccini’s third
version of the third act, however, he is largely unsympathetic, unable
to stand up to his parents for fear of losing his privilege, and vicious in
his denunciation of Magda, while in the original, he does not have the
force of will to convince Magda that he will fight to hold on to her,
even in light of his family’s potential disapproval; instead, he pleads
with her not to leave him alone. (Implying that Ruggero is not suffi-
ciently “manly,” Budden describes him as craven; 368). Additionally,
because he never appears on stage alone, the audience is refused the
same access to his subjectivity that it has to Magda’s, and so he is a far
less engaging character.
The second act, in which Magda and her young man fall in love
at Bullier, is the most suggestive of operetta, featuring disguises,
mistaken identity, love at first sight, carousing, a grand waltz, and
romantic gestures repeated from Magda’s past, such as when Ruggero
orders “two beers” and “Paulette” and Ruggero write their names
on the marble bistro table. Several musical motifs from the first act
reappear. For example, the melody to which Magda sings “Maybe
like the swallow, I’ll migrate toward the sea” returns in the second
act as Magda (in disguise as Paulette) first meets Ruggero. At the cli-
max of their love duet (eight after rehearsal 30), the call-and-response
bird melody returns underneath the vocal line, both singers at the
top of their range. The first act waltz in which Magda first tells her
friends about the night at Bullier is repeated, and the waltz from the
first act that summarizes Magda’s story—“A flight, a party, a little
beer”—also reappears. This time, the chorus sings this same waltz
but to different words, celebrating romance. Later, Magda, too, sings
the same waltz, literally quoting her friends from the first act. All of
the musical longings uttered in the first act are thus fulfilled, at least
momentarily, in the second, the opera’s sensibility migrating from

melodrama to comedy, though always with a twinge of sadness.
New thematic material sung by Ruggero at rehearsal 35 devel-
ops into a quartet sung by the four leads that transitions to a cho-
ral celebration of love. The drama then turns melodramatic again
when Rambaldo unexpectedly arrives at Bullier and confronts his
mistress—another statement of the melodramatic trope of the inter-
rupted party—and her confrontation with him is particularly jarring
in terms of its change of tone. Sighing “Ah!” on a high B flat, she
pleads, “Leave me to follow my destiny! Leave me, leave me, it is
finished!” This public “scene” is immediately interrupted by a group
of drunken revelers singing “Ah! Viva Bullier! Here, only happiness
reins!” (an ironic commentary on the opera’s Manichean wedding of
comedy and melodrama) on top of which Magda asks Rambaldo’s for-
giveness if she has hurt him but insisting that she must leave him. In a
prophecy (another melodramatic trope suggesting the presence of an
absent truth), he warns, “May you not live to regret it!” 9 Following
his exit, the music of the revelers continues in the orchestra but is now
made even more lively by a syncopated figure, over the top of which,
from offstage, a soprano sings of the dawn chasing away the moon-
light and warning “Do not trust love!” The melodic material of the
quartet returns at rehearsal 44, Ruggero referencing the dawn, corre-
lating the physical world and the characters’ emotional lives. Having
“become” Doretta, Paulette, and la rondine, Magda sings, “I love
you, but you don’t know, you don’t know! See, I am afraid, I am too
happy, It is my dream, do you understand?”
In a narrative that is centered on a romance, the prototypically
melodramatic conclusion engages its audience in a very specific ver-
sion of melodrama’s “if only,” the “if only” of two lovers who cannot
see the moral and ethical order “beyond” their immediate circum-
stances. Sometimes what blocks them from this “resacralization” are
the social conventions in which they live. Sometimes, it is their own
ego and its unwillingness to cede to the ethical demands of the uni-
verse—the demand to forgive, or to be willing to live in the shadow
of the disapproval of their social milieu, or to persevere against seem-
ingly impossible obstacles like poverty. Melodrama implicitly sug-
gests that, “if only” the two lovers managed to transcend whatever
is blocking them from seeing one another—and their relationship—
authentically, in all of its promise and richness, they would find hap-
piness. But because they are blocked from having full confidence in
this alternate ethical universe, they succumb, and so their relationship
remains unrealized, in the realm of the “if only.”
In a comic world, by the narrative’s conclusions, whatever has man-

aged to block the realization of the potential of the romantic relation-
ship—parental disapproval, mistaken identities, lack of knowledge
of one’s self, pride—disappears, and we laugh at the couple’s initial
inabilities to have seen through life’s ruses and celebrate their even-
tually having conquered them. While tragedies, too, show the result
of the refusal to accede to the moral order, they suggest a transcen-
dence of the earthly via sacrifice—the sacrifice of the protagonist’s
life. The tragic hero, however, is isolated, either by superior status, or
tragic flaw, or both. There is a way, then, in which the tragic hero’s
struggle is singular, and this is why he or she must die to achieve
transcendence and restore order. When the narrative is centered on a
romance, the death of the couple is the sacrifice demanded to restore
the moral order of the socius. In the melodramatic world, we as audi-
ence can only sit by and watch, in sadness, seeing what the lovers can-
not and hoping against hope that one or both of the lovers will reach
an epiphany. If the bodily response most characteristic of comedy is
laughter and of tragedy tears, the bodily response to melodrama is
the cliché of “talking back” to the fiction, being so caught up in the
transparency and intensity that a bodily response of intervention in
the diegesis is required.
The three different versions of La Rondine suggest three different
instances in which the lovers cannot accede to the ethical imperative
to remain together at all costs. What changes from version to version
is who is responsible for this blockage. In the first version, it is Magda,
whose fear of social conventions and desire to preserve the reputation
of Ruggero prevent her from perceiving the authentic moral occult
obscured by social convention (because what makes this romantic
melodrama particularly effective and painful is the lingering hope that
her fears are unfounded and that love can in fact conquer all, a hope
shared by both the young Ruggero and the audience). In the second
version, it is Prunier who refuses to believe that Magda has experienced
an authentic change of heart (and morals) and so intervenes to convince
her to ignore that moral occult. In the third version, it is Ruggero who
chooses social convention and pride over the moral universe. As for why
Puccini could not find the solution for this dilemma, one answer is that
he simply could not turn an operetta into a melodrama. Another, that
changes in cultural understandings of gender, class, and their relation-
ship to one another placed too much pressure on the comic resolution.
The problems that interfered with the couple coming to the realiza-
tion of the authenticity of their relationship seemed insurmountable;
Puccini could not turn a melodrama into an operetta.
Puccini’s rewritings of the third act all offer alternatives to the

question of how to “resolve” the romantic triangle—a problem that
dates from Puccini’s earliest discussions with Adami (Budden 345;
d’Amico “L’operetta” 51). In a letter dated June 18, 1917, Puccini
defended his first version of the third act, calling it the best in
the opera—suggesting he had heard complaints (Puccini Giacomo
Puccini 62) and within a year he began to try and revise it (Puccini
Giacomo Puccini 73). By December of 1920, in another letter, he
mentions that he and Adami had “adjusted” the third act, though
this version was not yet complete and never performed in his life-
time—despite its having been published (Puccini Giacomo Puccini
111).10 What the various versions share with the tragic version of the
late eighteenth-century formula of social melodrama is the possibil-
ity of Magda’s return to Rambaldo, though it is only in the third
version that Rambaldo plays any direct role in the dissolving of her
relationship with Ruggero, and as I’ve suggested, even in this ver-
sion, whether the place she will “fly” is back to Rambaldo’s house
is ambiguous. Referring to the changes, Puccini wrote to his friend
Schnabl, “She remains alone etc abandoned etc etc,” suggesting, in
an almost comically laconic manner, that what really matters is that
she is made to suffer (Giacomo Puccini 112).
Musically, all three versions of the third act begin with an orches-
tral prelude, the arpeggiated chords in the cello and viola mimicking
the crashing waves of the sea. Harmonically, the prelude evokes a
lush, restless, and sweeping melody that then moves to the now famil-
iar harmonic planing pattern, chords on the diatonic scale (which ties
Puccini to Debussy). In this prelude, the harmony moves through
major, minor, and diminished chords, creating a sense of conflict-
ing emotions, happiness and longing, and movement rather than
resolution.
In all three versions, prior to the turn in the plot, when Magda and
Ruggero are still celebrating their love, the grand waltz from the pre-
vious act returns. Following Ruggero’s description of his plans for the
future, which include “the little hand of a baby,” an orchestral inter-
lude plays the waltz from the first act wherein Magda tells of when a
voice urged her to defend her heart. He exits, and Magda struggles
with whether or not she should reveal her past to him—giving us
direct access to her subjectivity:
What can I say to him? What to do? Continue to keep silent . . . Or con-
fess? . . . How could I do it? With a single gesture I could sink dreams,
happiness, passion, love! No! No! I must not speak! Nor can I keep
quiet! Continue the deceit to keep him for me? Oh my poor heart!
How much anguish! What pain! (336, rehearsal number 17)
Both the first and third versions also include some of the same music,
but sometimes set to different words. Sometimes the very words
sung by Magda in the first version are sung by Ruggero in the third,
and vocal lines are even reversed, a musical allegory of the difficulty
Puccini has in assigning the two genders their proper roles in this
failed romance.
In the first version, mentioning the many bills in his pockets,
Ruggero then reveals that he has written to his family asking both for
money and consent to the couple’s wedding (321). At this point, the
bird melody from the first act reappears, Magda singing, “‘Forever!’
I remember you said it that night [at Bullier] (328)!” Following an
interlude during which Prunier and Lisette are reunited with Magda,
Ruggero reenters with a letter from his mother; Magda then sings its
contents. Confirming her approval of their relationship—providing
Magda is “virtuous”—Ruggero’s mother ends the letter with “Give
her my kiss!” (391).
Magda begins to protest that she cannot receive this kiss. He asks
why, and underneath his singing, the bird melody again returns, but
at this point in the opera, it signifies in a variety of different ways—
Magda’s previous life and her longing to escape it, but also the pos-
sibility that she may be required to take flight once more. Magda then
begins to allude to her past as a kept woman, insisting that she cannot
enter his house (404). The two of them then sing a stern duet marked
“andante sostenuto e vibrato,” the dotted rhythms in the melody line
signifying the rigidity of social custom to which they must bend,
as well as the inevitability of confronting societal disapproval. In its
solemnity and repetitions, the music has a sense of the inescapability
of fate.
They then sing a love duet, arguably some of the most beautiful
music in the opera, in which he begs her not to leave him alone, but
she insists (408). Marked “andante mosso appassionato,” the duet is
characterized by a melody that begins on the fifth note of the major
scale (harmonized by the tonic) that then “hangs” for a moment, via
a slight ritard, on the sixth, before descending. The melody’s feeling
of suspension is increased by the dissonance between the sixth note
of the melody and the fifth in the harmony, the ear being pulled
toward the tonic despite the sixth of the melody. Harmonic planing is
used again to repeat this figure at the melody’s denouement, the line
beginning on the sixth note of the scale (harmonized by the iv chord)
and then hanging suspended on the seventh (creating a dissonance of

a second). This seventh is the highest note in the phrase, characteris-
tically sung in its penultimate moment. In the first version, the first
part of this duet is sung by Ruggero, to the lines “But how can you
leave me if I am consumed with tears, if desperately I cling to you! Oh
my divine love, oh life of my life, don’t break my heart!” (408–11).
In the 1917 version, Magda contrasts Ruggero’s future with her
own: “Tu ritorni alla casa tua serena . . . io riprendo il mio volo e la
mia pena” (420–21). What is interesting here is both the suggestion
and rejection of a parallel structure between the two phrases. The
rhyming of “serena” and “pena” creates a parallel, as do the words
“ritorni” and “riprendo.” But while Ruggero returns to his serene
home, Magda returns to her pain. The trope of migration suggests
that she may return to her previous life, but given both her reaction
to Prunier’s message from Rambaldo and her words to Ruggero—
“My soul, which only you know/my soul is with you, ah! with you
always”—some doubt is left.
In order to produce a coherent reading of the opera, Girardi dis-
misses all of Magda’s sentiments from the point at which she reads the
letter from Ruggero’s mother. Contrary to any cited textual evidence,
he suggests that the reason Magda leaves Ruggero is that she cannot
bear the thought of being shut up in a tiny house, “heart to heart
with Ruggero, with the blessings of his momma” (Girardi Puccini la
vita 148). Later, and comparing her again to Violetta, he adds, “The
woman’s illusion of a love fantasy materializes, like a romantic fling.
And no fling can ever measure up to the absolute love of Manon for
Des Grieux” (Puccini la vita 155). Such a reading requires Girardi
to insist, twice, that Magda abandons Ruggero so that she might
return to Rambaldo (Puccini la vita 143; 149; d’Amico makes this
same error, the editor of the collected Italian version of his essays
noting, however, that nothing in the opera authorizes this assump-
tion; d’Amico L’albero 140n14). In this reading, the sparrow is not an
allegory of the desire to escape from one’s present life but instead an
all too familiar statement about the flightiness of woman.
In order to make sense of the opera’s contradictions, then, Girardi
turns Magda into a “modern” Violetta—presumably this is what he
means when he says “times have changed” (Puccini la vita 157)—and
a bird-brain to boot, a woman who survives rather than commits
suicide because she has no moral compass (the implication being that
if her love were authentic, she would, like Violetta, have the decency
to die). Such a reading literally requires us to treat her last phrases of
the opera as if she is lying—despite the fact that Ruggero is no longer
around to hear the lies. Apparently, at the opera’s conclusion, we are

to assume that the woman who has been baring her soul to us for
the past few hours is really an empty-headed, superficial fool, a gold-
digger, a user who takes advantage of a country bumpkin to pursue
her romantic fantasies and leaves emotional disaster in her wake. This
reading also requires the critic to describe Ruggero as “penniless.”
Such a gesture ignores the fact that the young hero writes his parents
for money (which presumably they have, or he wouldn’t have bothered
to write) and assumes that somehow the wealthy and sophisticated
Rambaldo went to school with someone poor (Ruggero’s father).
The idea that a penniless man would escape to the south of France
with his lover—a lover that he assumes would then be welcomed with
open arms by his mother—is so distant from the audience’s under-
standing of how the material world works that it is virtually nonsensi-
cal. As Dyer suggests, if the utopian world presented in entertainment
is so far removed from the audience’s knowledge and affective experi-
ence of the world outside of the fiction, it simply doesn’t “work.”
But at the same time, Girardi’s analysis opens up the possibility
of a “queer” reading. For it suggests that, at the conclusion of the
opera, Magda has realized that she has no place. She cannot live in the
stultifying atmosphere of the bourgeois home proposed by Ruggero
and his sweet mother, who will in fact in all likelihood never accept
her past as a “contaminated” woman. In her letter, Ruggero’s mother
specifically states, “If you know that she is good, mild, pure, that she
is virtuous, she will be blessed!” (389). Whatever she may have done
in the past, given Magda’s current illicit relationship with Ruggero, it
seems unlikely that his mother will ever accept her into their home.
For, as I’ve suggested, Ruggero is clearly not poor or working class but
a member of the staid and hypocritical bourgeoisie so aptly described
by Flaubert in Madame Bovary.
Regardless of whether or not Magda flies back to Ruggero,
Girardi’s reading implies that she realizes that, in this historical and
cultural milieu, there is no place for a woman like her, no place where
she can find love. The excess of Ruggero’s vulnerability even suggests
something of his own failed attempts to confront the hypocrisy of
this bourgeoisie, as well as his raw need (the characterizing of him
as “craven,” a mamma’s boy, itself sexist). For he certainly cannot
believe that he is now going to marry his lover.
In both the first and third versions, Prunier carries a message from
Rambaldo asking Magda to return. Despite her protests to the con-
trary, he insists that he doesn’t believe she is happy. He persists, and
when she insists that he drop the subject, (“Tacete.” 378), he admits
that Rambaldo has sent him. La Rondine thus engages the issue of
the homosocial bonds between men—specifically how such bonds
provide a means of “coping” with women’s difference.
In the second version (performed in Vienna in 1920 [d’Amico
“L’operetta” 55] and at Palermo’s Teatro Massimo that same year
[Puccini Giacomo Puccini 82]) Prunier and Lisette are instrumental
in Magda decision to leave Ruggero (Budden 351), and Prunier in
particular pressures her to leave (Budden 366; d’Amico “L’operetta” 55).
Ruggero enters with the letter from his mother and kisses Magda but
leaves before she can respond, Prunier having hidden himself from
view. Prunier then returns, leading her to a table to write Ruggero
a farewell letter. Singing the final duet with Prunier, she departs
without seeing Ruggero again; Prunier “leads the sorrowing Magda
away” (Budden 351). What is perhaps most interesting in this version
is Prunier’s coercing of Magda. It also further highlights the homo-
social bonds between men and the damage they do to women in that
Magda is “passed” from Rambaldo to Prunier to Ruggero and back
again: in the first act, via Prunier’s prediction of Magda’s future—a
prediction that sends her from Rambaldo’s arms to Ruggero’s—and
in the third, via the duet with Magda, whereby Prunier has “replaced”
Ruggero in order to deliver Magda back to Rambaldo.
This interpretation is not meant to ignore the question of Magda’s
agency, but one of the factors that motivates her to “escape” to Bullier
is Prunier’s determination to immortalize a woman via his new song.
The contradictions of sexism allow Prunier the poet to reproduce
Magda as Doretta. But they also allow Magda to seize the oppor-
tunity—as she does when she offers her own version of Doretta’s
desires—and employ it in ways not utterly circumscribed by its condi-
tions of possibility. Throughout its history, melodrama has offered
opportunities to a variety of “queers”—as creators, as characters, as
spectators—to locate themselves via melodrama. This is one of the
sources of its appeal to women, gays and lesbians, and racial and eth-
nic others.11
In the third version, Rambaldo arrives in person to persuade Magda
to return home.12 He sings of how he has waited for her dream to
wane and for the little sparrow to return to her nest, emphasizing
how hard life must be for a dreamer such as she is. He then gives her a
gift, a brooch with a white swallow on a black background, and a wal-
let containing money; he adds that, if she returns to him, there will
be more (Puccini Giacomo Puccini 111n3).13 Magda does not take the
wallet (according to d’Amico “L’operetta,” he leaves it for her on a
table: 55), but she sees Ruggero arriving and begs Rambaldo to go.
Ruggero enters, and the bird melody returns. Holding in his hand
an anonymous letter, Ruggero repeats its words: “The woman that
you believe worthy of your life is the lover of Rambaldo!” He accuses
Magda of betrayal and lying and of having come to him “contami-
nated.” (In the first version, Magda says this about herself; 396.) His
accusations are set to the same dotted waltz melody that in the first
version accompanies Magda’s self-reproach. She replies, “I wouldn’t
speak for fear of losing your love. I was tied tightly to your heart like
a holy refuge! I was your devoted lover . . . your lover only!” At this
point, he sees the wallet, grabs it, and cries, “The money! It’s the
money! And it’s he [Rambaldo] who brought it to you. Damn your
love! Damn the past! Go!”
Now, set to the same “andante mosso appassionato” with which,
in the first version, Ruggero pleaded for Magda to stay with him,
Magda pleads with him to believe her. He continues to demand that
she leave and eventually stalks off. “My dream is finished. I have no
more hope,” she cries. Lisette joins Magda on stage to try to console
her, and Magda sings her final line. A variation on this final version,
Marta Domingo’s production in Bonn in 1995 had Magda kill herself
at the opera’s conclusion.
This version reveals most clearly the links between what Cawelti
identifies as the “social dominance” of the owning class, its desire
for social mobility, and its deployment of gender and sexual polic-
ing toward that end. The letter provides a code for social strictures
that are anonymous, arbitrary, and yet exert a damaging influence.
For receiving the letter “causes” Ruggero to lose, too, and not as a
result of any particular suspicions or concerns about Magda’s past on
his part. Implicitly chafing at the idea of an opera that reveals the
subordination of women and eschews the figure of the self-sacrificing
heroine, Budden argues that, in this third version, “Magda is fatally
diminished. Far better that the decision to leave should be hers” (368).
Yes, in the first version, she exercises her own sexual agency, but by
sacrificing her own happiness for a man—hardly a way out of the con-
tradictions of sexism. Girardi twice argues against this third version,
virtually repeating himself. Both times he insists that it is “more real,
perhaps, more in keeping with the actual but less poetic” (Puccini
la vita 149; 157). On the question of why Puccini wrote the ending
three times and tried so vigorously to have the third version pro-
duced, Girardi remains silent. D’Amico argues that Puccini “finally
decided in favor of the first [version,] materially destroying the scores
of the successive versions (though the parts remain)” (“L’operetta”
54). He adds, however, that what motivated Puccini’s revising was
the effort to render “more plausible the final estrangement of the two
lovers” (“L’operetta” 55).
Middle-class domesticity is precisely what is denied to Magda by her
past, the dream of romantic love crushed by her lover’s middle-class
background. But in the first version, the woman herself decides that she
cannot achieve happiness, and the social mores and strictures that deny
her happiness are revealed as to some degree arbitrary. Yet because the
woman herself reinvests in these mores by acceding to them, she is both
their victim and their perpetrator, a familiar image of femininity as self-
sacrifice. In all three versions, the opera reveals what Marcia Landy has
identified as a familiar melodramatic pattern: the “protagonist’s inevi-
table transgression against societal expectations.” By the conclusion of
the first version, however, Magda is “reconciled” to her own difference,
“in which case the resolution [of the plot] is not domestic containment
but isolation or death” (1991; 15). Melodramas of this sort threaten
to reveal “how gender and sexuality are instruments of social power,
ensuring compliance through both coercion and consent” (Landy 15).
But the implication of Landy’s words is that all three versions of the
opera share this motif, the first emphasizing consent, the second and
third, coercion. In other words, what seem like three different versions
of the opera are in fact not that unlike one another, the primary differ-
ence being the extent to which Puccini is willing to reveal what Landy
calls “gender and sexuality as instruments of social power.” By the end
of the opera, while one of the Manichean choices offered to Magda is
still love versus money, she herself has come to represent the former,
and all of the men, including Ruggero, the latter.
Of course, were this a work of realism, we would either consider
this lack of concern over money a significant hole in the plot or make
assumptions to justify her behavior—perhaps she simply assumes some
man will take care of her. But as a figure in a melodrama, Magda is
herself an allegory; as Goethe might say, she is the “particular [who]
serves” only as an instance or example of the general (cited in Benjamin
161) or what Schopenhauer might call the figure “intentionally and
avowedly chosen to represent a concept” (cited in Benjamin 161). She
represents the longing for personal happiness and a life (to borrow
from Dyer) both “intense” and “transparent.” Leaving Rambaldo,
she rejects the ennui and irony of the salon’s sensibility and chooses
instead passion and openness. But her suffering is at least in part ulti-
mately the result of, in not revealing to Ruggero the full details of her
past, allowing herself to not commit sufficiently to her own desires.
Both the larger social order and her willingness to accede to it are
what lead to her suffering.
In all three cases, there is no place for Magda to fly home to, for
she has no home in a society where men treat women as commodities
and then punish them for it. In creating sympathy for her—and turn-
ing her into one of life’s losers—La Rondine both contains female
sexuality and alludes to the arbitrariness and unfairness of such con-
tainment. It both reinforces and questions a moral universe that ren-
ders female chastity one of its highest values and enforces on women
certain obligations from which men are largely free.
For by the mid-nineteenth century, the social melodrama is char-
acterized by “an attempt to reconcile the increasing conflict between
traditional Christian views of the world and the secular values of a
rapidly changing society” (Cawelti 39). By the end of the century,
the “equation of traditional religious values and middle-class social
values was no longer viable in the social melodrama” (Cawelti 39).
Accordingly,
increasing ambivalence about divine providence as the cornerstone of

society was accompanied by doubts about the two other value com-
plexes that were basic to the earlier melodramatic vision: the purity
and domestic submissiveness of women and the ideal of the respect-
able, middle-class family. (39)
Despite the fact that La Rondine does not directly reference a crisis
in religious belief—as Tosca does—the question of what to do with a
woman like Magda suggests this crisis. She can no longer simply be
killed off—either via stoning or even the fortuitous contracting of a
fatal illness.
According to Cawelti, this ambivalence concerning divine provi-
dence led to two alternate nineteenth-century developments: attempts
are made to modernize the sensibility and “social change and upheaval
became a primary background for melodramatic action” (40).
La Rondine opens up questions concerning the way in which the idea
of “the purity and domestic submissiveness of women and the ideal of
the respectable, middle-class family” can be a source of unhappiness
(and in one version, even death) not only for women, but even for men.
But, in the context of the history of melodrama, Domingo’s rewriting
of the ending renders the opera less rather than more contemporary, as
it portrays her succumbing to the villain as complete.
Puccini’s numerous attempts to rewrite the third act also express a
certain difficulty around masculinity. For, while in all three versions,
Magda is abandoned, what is different is Ruggero’s role in her suf-
fering. Melodrama becomes, in this instance, a way to consider and
rework ideas around masculinity. Ruggero’s “emptiness,” his flatness

as a character, suggests that he is an allegory for a masculinity that,
in Puccini’s numerous rewritings, cannot seem to make up its mind
concerning the relationship between love and sex. In the first version,
the young hero chooses love over honor and is willing, in the eyes of
his society, to humiliate himself by revealing his desperate need for
Magda. In the second version, his society—and other men (in the
figure of Prunier)—conspire to “save” him from choices they feel are
socially inappropriate. In the third version, he is a spoiled, petulant
version of the man who prizes virginity above all else, and his igno-
rance and selfishness are willful.
In a very different way from Tosca, La Rondine, then, is also a
male melodrama, the various versions suggesting a certain crisis in
masculinity and a struggle to determine what constitutes the appro-
priate way of being a man in terms of his emotional availability, vul-
nerability, and willingness to humiliate himself for love—a trope
long associated with women. Puccini’s “dis-ease” with the finale of
the opera suggests that he was living through a time when gender
roles were undergoing shifts, and, as Cawelti suggests, wherein tradi-
tional notions of feminine domestic bliss were increasingly problema-
tized and even abandoned by writers of melodrama themselves (39).
Interestingly, however, when Cawelti charts the changes in melodrama
that occurred when this theme was no longer one in which melo-
dramatists could confidently invest, he does not propose Puccini’s
response: to make this theme of domestic bliss itself a subject of inter-
rogation (beyond the rather broad idea that melodramatists sought
to modernize the sensibility). Cawelti’s neglect suggests both the
uniqueness of La Rondine and its (and its creator’s) modernity.
CH A P T ER 5
“Normality . . . What an Ugly Word!”

Contemporary Queer Melodrama
Queer Melodrama?
The late nineteenth-century “swarming of disciplinary mechanisms”
created the conditions of possibility of a homo subject whose sexual-
ity inhabited a backstage reality, whose passions required a complex
process of revelation and disguise, whose dissimulations could them-
selves be read as indicative of unnameable desires, and whose body
itself became the stage on which the melodramatic sensibility was
performed (Foucault, Discipline 211; History). For, with its perpetual
threat of exposure, its requirement of the development of a poten-
tially decipherable yet always elusive system of signs, and its demand
for visible intimations of a meaning that paradoxically must not be
named let alone revealed, the closet is a machine for the production
of melodramatic subjects. And the subject of the closet is, by defini-
tion, melancholic, living the loss that accompanies the contradictory
demand that one reveal and conceal simultaneously one’s desires, and
with those desires, one’s very “essence,” the loss that follows in the
wake of the recognition that you will never be at home in your home,
that there is in fact no home for you. Longing, regret, muted suffer-
ing on the one hand; flamboyant, extravagant displays of affect and
sensuality on the other—whether it be in clandestine meeting places
with others of your kind or publicly “sublimated” through fashion,
art, “culture”—these are the melodramatic effects of the closet.
So what happens to melodrama when that closet door is flung
open? How does the genre respond to the increasing tendency of this
modern homosexual to speak, proudly and loudly, in its own name
and interests?
In a recent forum on politics and Italian film, Derek Duncan
asks the prescient question, “What’s queer about Italian cinema?”
Proposing that queer Italian cinema may exist “in its most robust
form outside commercial circuits of distribution” (257), he notes a
lack of congruence between, on the one hand, the proliferation, in
recent commercial Italian films, of representations of gay characters
and, on the other, the pleasures of queer spectatorship. Providing a
contingent definition of the difference between gay and queer,1 he
uses the latter
to reference sexual identities and practices which are not readily

assumed by familiar binary categories (gay/straight, male/female).
Queer recognizes the transversal and intersectional energies of sexu-
alities as they converge in and conflict with other modes of social defi-
nition, not always happily, but mostly productively. (261n2)
Queer—noun, adjective, and verb—deconstructs the binaries Duncan

describes. As a figure, it attempts, impossibly, to act as a placeholder
for the liminal, the in-between, the neither/nor and the both/and.
One characteristic that makes queer studies “queer” rather than simply
deconstruction is its insistent centering and displacing of sexuality and
gender as categories of analysis, as queer studies argues that, since the
late nineteenth century, these categories have taken on a certain pri-
macy that necessitates this critical move (Foucault, History; Sedgwick
Epistemology; Floyd). A related project: an interrogation of the broader
category of the normative and an attentiveness to the violence that
those subjects who will not obey have historically suffered.
Duncan uses Rey Chow’s critique of “identity-based criticism” to
begin to sketch out the difference between a gay and a queer cinema,
or at least the difference between the filmic representation of gay
and lesbian subjects and a cinema in keeping with Duncan’s working
definition of queer. Chow’s phrase refers to the desire of culturally
marginalized subjects historically excluded from official channels of
representation and legitimation (Mercer) to see themselves on screen,
the films that respond to this desire, and the knowledges produced
in response to such films. In contradistinction to gay identity-based
films, Duncan suggests that queer Italian cinema proposes to spec-
tators “modes of affective relationality beyond those offered in the
safer space of national cinema. . . . not films about a putative ‘me,’ but
affective texts which extend the spectator’s horizon of expectation
and structure of feeling beyond borders” (261).2
Duncan argues that “queer spectatorship complicates and com-
promises confident assertions of what constitutes national cinema
and the idea of the nation drawn from it . . . the hypothetically queer
“NORMALITY . . . WHAT AN UGLY WORD!” 149
Italian spectator does not limit himself to national products” (256).

For the term queer is both transnational and local; from virtually
the time of its initial employments, its ethnocentrism is recognized
(Champagne “Transitionally Queer”; Hawley) at the same time that
it circulates transnationally and is appropriated to varying degrees in
disparate locations (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan).3 “Queer” thus
also provides a potential mode of transculturation whereby non-
Western subjects might construct a sexual subjectivity that is neither
metropolitan nor indigenous but a hybrid of the two.
Aurelio Grimaldi’s 1992 film La discesa di Aclà a Floristella (The
Descent of Aclà to the Floristella Mine) and Gianni Amelio’s 2004 Le
chiavi di casa (The Keys to the House) are two Italian films that, in the
years between their production, historically traverse the shift in criti-
cal terminology from gay and lesbian to queer. To varying degrees,
both of these films withhold from us the putative if idealized—as
Duncan aptly puts it, “buff and pretty well-heeled” (259)—“me”
sought by gay identity politics, though, admittedly, in the case of
Aclà, this is in part the result of the historical circumstances in which
the film is set. For Aclà acts as a kind of placeholder for historically
prior forms of homoerotic subjectivity that do not correspond to the
metropolitan gay of late twentieth-century capitalism.4 Le chiavi, on
the other hand, is absent recognizably gay characters and yet also an
example of Italian queer cinema.
With its intense focus on social strictures and the unhappiness they
inflict on those who cannot or will not conform to their demands, the
melodramatic sensibility is particularly suited to provoke the kinds of
affective responses suggested by Duncan’s definition of queer. It is
for this same reason that melodrama has historically provided some
men and women, gay and queer, with a rich source of pleasure. Both
La discesa di Aclà a Floristella and Le chiavi di casa “reference sexual
identities and practices which are not readily assumed by familiar
binary categories” and recognize “the transversal and intersectional
energies of sexualities as they converge in and conflict with other
modes of social definition” (Duncan 261n2). For each film is “queer”
in its treatment of the son as occupying a liminal space between the
boy child and the adult man.
Given liberal Italy’s concerns around the inadequacy of Italian
masculinity, the Fascist attempts at forging a “new man,” and, with
the collapse of Fascism, the necessity of developing new models of
masculinity, the number of postwar Italian films that self-consciously
explored the relationship between father and son is not all that sur-
prising.5 Many contemporary Italian films continue to investigate
this relationship—so much so that this tendency has not gone unre-
marked; a recent book directed toward a nonacademic Italian audi-
ence provides both plot summaries and interviews with pertinent
directors, actors, and scriptwriters (Dal Bello). Given their subject
matter—their search for moral guideposts in an increasingly secular
world—many of these same films employ elements of a melodramatic
sensibility. As Bayman argues, melodrama renders “popular experi-
ences of hope and unfairness, and does so by employing a series of
recognisable symbols and configurations. . . . It expresses a sense of
society riven if not directly by class struggle, then by frustration with
domestic and public structures in which however the characters retain
faith as holding their only hope for fulfillment” (“Melodrama as”
94). Le chiavi and Aclà portray the family as both domestic and public
and situate that family largely (in the case of Le chiavi, exclusively)
beyond the home.
Historically, gender theorists have tended to concentrate on the
address and appeal of melodrama to female audiences (see, for exam-
ple, Landy; Gledhill, Home). A mode of film production once trivial-
ized through labels such as “weepies,” melodramas have in the recent
past been subject to a variety of kinds of feminist analyses, most of
which note the way melodramatic films figure the contradictions of
patriarchal capitalism as it attempts to deploy gender in the service
of the reproduction of relations of exploitation. Such analyses typi-
cally focus not only on the way melodramas define and construct
femininity but also how they articulate discourses of resistance. A
variety of recent “events,” including the provisional successes of the
women’s movement, men’s own greater sense of the problems of mas-
culinity, the gay rights movement, and neoliberal “post-feminism”
suggest that an exploration of the sometimes contradictory gender
politics of these films—with their portrayals of fatherhood in crisis,
their homoeroticism, and their insistent focus on the body of the
male child—will illuminate some of the significant vicissitudes of
contemporary Italian masculinity. (On how Italian films of the 1970s
reenvision Italian masculinity in light of then contemporary sexual
politics, see Rigoletto; on the problematic excision of the maternal in
male melodrama, see O’Rawe, 69–93 in particular. O’Rawe is par-
ticularly attentive to the contradictions of Le chiavi, contradictions
that prevent us from labelling the film uniformly “progressive.”)
These films portray the male child in a liminal space between
adolescence and adulthood, and this liminality provides one of the
conditions of possibility for an exploration of contemporary, “emer-
gent” Italian masculine subjectivities, both “gay” and straight.6 They
form part of a growing archive of contemporary discourse, dating

from the early 1990s and coinciding, according to some scholars,
with the “mani pulite” investigation and the demise of the so-called
First Republic, on Italian national character in general (Patriarca) and
“changing [Italian] masculine modalities” in particular (Zhang 239).
Both also deconstruct narratives of Italian nationhood.
Both films opt for an analytical, even “art house” style that is
somewhat in tension with their appeal to emotion and affect; both
come up against the limits of that vocabulary, however—specifically,
in their attempts to portray human suffering. Thus their recourse
to melodrama. The “synthesis” the two films represent is thus an
uneasy, perhaps queer one, but one that must, given these directors’
commitment to a “progressive” queer gender politics, avoid a simple
reinscription of hierarchical binaries, including male/female, ana-
lytic/emotional, mind/body, father/mother, art cinema/ commer-
cial film, Italian/non-Italian and heterosexual/homosexual.7
Set during the Fascist years, La discesa di Aclà a Floristella tells
the story of the Rizzuto family, poor Sicilians living in Enna. A work
of historical fiction, the film provides a portrait of life in and around
the Floristella sulfur mine. Seventeen-year-old Concetta has had a
baby by a married man, the forty-one-year-old Rocco Caramazza,
who already has nine children of his own. In an attempt to right
this wrong, Caramazza has found work for Concetta’s older brothers
Calogero and Pino in the Floristella mine and is now going to take on
one of the younger sons, Aclà. (The family’s father also works in the
mines.) The plot begins in the days immediately preceding the nearly
11-year-old Aclà’s descent into Floristella.
The miners leave for work every Monday and do not return until
Saturday night. Working conditions in the mines demand the pres-
ence of child labor, for, with their short stature, the boys, called car-
usi, are able to crawl into spaces too small for grown men. Once the
older man has loosened enough sulfur from the walls, his boys carry
the rocks in baskets through the tunnels and away from the pit, to
the main landing. When they are perceived as being lazy or if they
fall asleep while on watch for thieves, they are beaten—usually while
other men or boys look on; Aclà’s introduction to Caramazza consists
of a slap reminding the boy to be obedient, and one of the central
conflicts of the plot arises when Aclà refuses to submit to a beating.
The carusi have entered into a form of indentured servitude, the boy’s
parents receiving a sum of money in exchange for his labor. If Aclà
runs away, the money must be returned, or else the youngest son
must take his place.
In the heat of the mines, the men and boys strip down to a loin-
cloth that leaves their buttocks exposed. At night, they socialize and
sleep together, sometimes in one another’s arms, in a large under-
ground chamber. Isolated in the mines from women, the miners rely
on either the boys or each other for sex. The boys are able to work
time off their contracts by granting sexual favors; sometimes they also
receive gifts of food.
The most obvious ways in which the film references a melodra-
matic sensibility is in its investment in and critique of a number of
institutions including primarily the family, but also the workplace,
the church, and the Fascist state, all of which fail to protect the title
character from the brutalities of a life of poverty, but all of which,
minus the Fascist state, are appealed to as a continuing source of
hope: Aclà tries to fulfill as best he can the role of a son, taking care of
his father and younger siblings, hunting for food for them, and toil-
ing in the mines. He is portrayed as a hard worker whose child body
belies the physical strength of which it is capable, and he dreams of a
future wife in Australia.
Although the film critiques the church’s rigid sexual morality,
greed, and willingness to exploit superstition, it contrasts these with
both the beliefs of the faithful and the local parish’s own efforts to
combat illiteracy. When the priest solicits money from the miners for
the Feast day of St. Stephen, one miner shouts, “I say screw Saint
Stephen.” “The saints only come around for money,” Caramazza
adds. Another asks, “Does the Baron [who owns the mine] eat and
drink as he pleases because the saints said so?”
The men’s open acceptance of their own contingent homosexuality
is predictably unacceptable to the priest. But Aclà’s boss Caramazza
counters, “It’s God that has us screwing each other during the week
and our wives on Saturdays and Sundays.” The priest then tells them
that sex between men is a mortal sin. A miner responds, “I understand.
So on the feast of Saint Stephen you put the squeeze on the miners?”
But one man agrees to donate, only because he is devoted to St.
Stephen. The film shows the town celebrating the saint’s feast day,
emphasizing its contradictions, the way it makes possible certain com-
munity celebrations and communal rituals at the same time as it feeds
superstition. The poverty and daily struggle of the miners is con-
trasted with a procession of the statue of the saint, a woman repeat-
edly kissing the statue’s feet, and a series of shots of fireworks that
end the festival. Over these shots, we hear voices of people recount-
ing the amounts of money they donated in the names of their dead
loved ones, the Catholic faith offering them hope in the face of their
poverty. Aclà thus expresses an ambivalence toward the Catholic

Church that complicates Brooks’s account of melodrama.
Stylistically, the film relies heavily on chiaroscuro lighting motived
by the darkness of the family home, which has no electricity, and
the mines themselves, typically lit in an orange hue, as if by candle-
light. A melancholy and pronounced underscoring refers to Italy’s
long musical history. For example: over the opening credits, a female
voice sings, in free rhythm, a haunting Sicilian folk song sparsely
accompanied by strings, wind, and percussion, including hollow-
sounding bells. This chromatic melody calls up Sicily’s Islamic past.
In the opening sequence and over a series of shots of sepia photo-
graphs, Aclà’s mother provides, in voice over, a brief family history;
underscoring this voice over is a melancholy Baroque style pavane
scored for recorder, guitar, continuo, and a female voice singing on an
“ah,” and many scenes are underscored by a free meter classical guitar
melody similarly referencing the Baroque. Over shots of the men and
boys working the mines, the soundtrack provides a male voice sing-
ing a Latin chant accompanied by a sustained choral background of
men’s voices and violins, the violins doubling the repeated notes of
the vocal line, quarter notes played in a tenuto style, each separated
by a rest. The final scene is accompanied by a male and female duet
that in its lush orchestration, repeated descending chromatic triplet
motif, and “orientalist” melodic line, references late Romantic opera.
The music thus contributes to the emotional appeal of the film while
also reminding us that “Italianness” is itself (and has always been)
highly transspatial.
The desolation of the brown and rocky landscape of the mines,
emphasized by the sound of wind, provides a melodramatic correla-
tive for the characters’ inner lives. While the characters do not actually
speak in dialect, their Italian is heavily syllabic, the diction colloquial,
and the voices are often loud and animated, accompanied by physical
gestures, the vocal delivery and acting style emphasizing affect. There
are also extended scenes of the child workers, including Aclà, weeping
and crying out.
Necessarily broaching the subject of intergenerational sex, the film
also suggests how the close quarters of the mine can facilitate physical
relationships between men; these are explicitly contrasted with the
coercive sex between boys and men. The film highlights the romantic
relationship between Aclà’s brother Pino and his fellow miner Melino,
and, in a highly romanticized sequence to which I will return, the
film suggests, through a relay of gazes, that at least some other min-
ers may have similar affective and sexual bonds with one another.
On different occasions, we see prepubescent penises, and the car-

usi ’s naked buttocks are visible throughout the scenes in the mines.
Dialogue sometimes draws further attention to their penises and
buttocks. Even before Aclà’s descent into Floristella, the filmmaker
shows him urinating and getting dressed, implicating the audience in
a voyeurism directed toward the boy’s body, though that voyeurism
is tempered through lighting and shot distance.
The bodies of the adult male workers in the mines are sexualized
through a combination of the lighting, which draws attention to their
lean, muscled, nearly naked torsos, their muscles flexing as they work;
and camera angles, such as slightly low-angled shots that position the
viewer to gaze up at the miners’ masculine beauty. These particular
techniques are not usually applied to the bodies of the boys, though
there are times when the camera wanders over the tangle of sleeping
half-naked bodies and it is difficult to differentiate the age of the
males, particularly if they are lying on their stomachs and exposing
their buttocks to the viewer’s gaze. In this respect rendering indeter-
minate the age of the sexualized body, the film queers the division
between the adult and the child.
Any public discussion of intergenerational sex is necessarily fraught.
However, among some gay and queer self-identified men, early sexual
experiences with older men are not always perceived after the fact as
exploitative, and the film reminds us of this, protecting itself from a
certain policing of desire by setting the film in the past. Placing the
boy child in a liminal space requires that the binary adult/child be
deconstructed, and this deconstruction necessitates an engagement
with the question of childhood sexuality. Were we discussing hetero-
sexualized boy bodies, this would not cause concern, as we still tend
to take the heterosexuality of the child for granted and not to perceive
it as coercively enforced, the “natural” result of male biology, and
Aclà ultimately satisfies this expectation, allowing us to skirt some of
the more troubling implications of the film’s portrayal of boys.
Yet the film also provides a brilliant reenactment of the fluidity of
the continuum between homophobia, homosociality, and homoeroti-
cism. Living (working, sleeping, eating, relaxing) in such close physi-
cal proximity to one another, the men develop emotional bonds that
include a shared sense of devil’s humor at their “fate” and an awareness
of the ways they are exploited by a variety of institutions, including
the owners of capital and the church. This homosociality sometimes
sanctions or at least facilitates homoeroticism. But this homoeroticism
is always also colored by homophobia directed in particular at sexual
passivity, and homoerotic horseplay has an edge of menace to it.
Three scenes in particular illustrate this homosocial-homoerotic-

homophobic continuum, all of them not coincidentally involving Aclà
and the place he will occupy in this all-male social space of the com-
munity of miners. In the first, in which Aclà is noticed for the first
time by an older man who desires him—that desire emphasized by an
eye-line match between a medium close-up of the half-naked man and
Aclà’s seated, naked figure (sitting with his knees pulled to his chest,
his loincloth is not visible)—the man pushes Aclà against the wall
and offers him a “sulfur-cream cock.”8 In what will become a famil-
iar narrative pattern, Aclà’s brother Pino intervenes to protect him,
shoving the older man. This becomes the occasion for the film to
introduce the “special” relationship between Pino and another miner,
for the older miner suggests that if Aclà is like his brother, “We’re set.
Even the walls know about you and Melino.” He then sniffs the air
in front of Pino and says, “Your mouth still smells of cock.” This is
followed by several shots of groups of men laughing, the soundtrack
including boys’ laughter too, and then a medium close-up of Pino,
who shoves the man again and says, “Get out,” at which point the
fight is diffused.
In another sequence, an establishing long shot tracks across a
group of the men deep inside the mines to reveal several workers play-
ing cards together. One of them shouts, “Pino, your brother Aclà has
a nice butt.” At several points previously, the filmmaker has revealed
to us Aclà’s androgynous, shapely backside, implicating us in a sexual-
izing of his prepubescent body. The camera cuts in to a two shot of
Pino and the speaker, the man who previously came on to Aclà and
who teased Pino about Melino, continues, “He should be happy. It’s a
miner’s fate, to screw boys during the week and wives on the weekend
and holidays.” This shot is followed by a reestablishing shot of the
men, and another miner says, “In a week, his ass will be reamed out,
too, like his brother’s.” His words provoke a physical fight between
Pino and the speaker. The fight is interrupted by a two shot of Aclà
and one of his young friends, who says, “Look, that’s Melino.” This
is followed by an eye-line match between the boys and an insert, a
close-up of the handsome Melino’s face, the red light and shadows of
the mine emphasizing his masculine beauty. Melino is relatively the
same age as Pino, perhaps a bit younger, but clearly a man and not a
boy. Over the insert, Aclà’s friend continues, “He does it with your
brother.” The camera cuts back to a two shot of the boys, and the
friend continues, “But he’s touchy.”
The fight breaks up when, in a shot crowded with bodies, the
two men are separated and trade insults, and Pino, angrily gesturing
toward his own penis, shouts, “Kiss this,” as if to do so would be an

act of defeat and humiliation. As Domenico Rizzo argues, masculine
identity “tends to become inscribed in any action within a face-off
between men where the stakes are always a confirmation of virility”
(293–94). Humiliated by one of his fellow miners for allegedly taking
pleasure in being the so-called passive partner in anal sex, Pino’s ges-
ture and words are a reassertion of his masculine identity and virility.
Paradoxically, this assertion occurs at the expense of the other man’s
masculinity at the same time as it deconstructs the heterosexual/
homosexual binaries. For the logic of Pino’s insult is that to receive
fellatio is to confirm one’s virility—regardless of whether one is being
blown by a man or a woman. And the reverse is also true: to give
fellatio is to be womanly and, by implication, less than a man. In
Freud’s terms, masculinity in this instance has nothing to do with
sexual object choice and everything to do with sexual aim. Given the
contradictions of the homosocial, homophobic, homoerotic world of
the mines, at the same time that sexual passivity is associated with
femininity, gender is to some extent determined by what you do, and
not by with whom.
Later, we once again see the men in the large cavern where they
socialize and sleep. One of them tells of how he tried to seduce Aclà
with the promise of some olives, but the boy’s response was “no.” A
second miner chimes in, “He’s not like his brother.” The first one
adds, “He’s still a kid; his dick is hairless. Maybe not.” The miners
begin to tease Aclà about his modesty, the original miner insisting,
“Don’t worry, we’ll find you some dick hairs and make you a man.”
“Yeah, take your cloth off,” another one adds. “Leave my brother
alone,” Pino shouts.
Given the previous scene, we expect that this one, too, will escalate
into violence. Instead, it becomes an occasion for the men to engage
in some homoerotic horseplay that this time leads back into a com-
munal sense of shared oppression. “Lend a few [pubic] hairs to your
brother!” one of the miners shouts to Pino, who laughs along with
the other men. Aclà, however, remains unmoved. One of the min-
ers says, “Stop sulking, stupid. Why can’t we joke with you, among
friends?”
This scene is more homosocial than homophobic precisely because
what is sought from Pino through the trope of pubic hair is a simple
reconfirmation of his masculinity. The face-off between men ends, like
the first one, with the ratification of Pino’s virility, in this instance,
his body itself containing the signifiers of masculinity. Pino’s mascu-
linity has not been attacked; rather, the suggestion, made by one of
the men, that Pino has given all his pubic hairs to his lover confirms
him as “active” and therefore virile, as does his willingness to protect
his brother.
Aclà’s place in the scenario is complicated, however. On the one
hand, he is allowed—perhaps even required—to be feminized in the
world of the mines so that he might take up his proper position as the
beloved of an older man. Given his age, there is little question of him
being the active partner. On the other hand, one day, he, too, will
need to give up this role, lest he be considered unmanly—thus the
need for pubic hair. The film never broaches the question of whether
Aclà might himself enjoy sexual relations with one of the older min-
ers or even another boy. It thus at times seems trapped between dif-
ferent, contradictory modes of homosexuality, as well as a lingering
heteronormativity.
Not nostalgic for a Greek model, the film highlights the ways
in which the “contingent inversion” (Freud’s phrase, Three Essays)
expressed by the miners is often exploitative, and, arguably like this
Greek model, is homophobic and misogynist in its rejection of so-
called sexual passivity. Instead, the relationship between Pino and
Melino is contrasted with that of the miners who coax boys into sex.
The film thus suggests that some of the miners “are” “homosex-
ual” in as much as the phrase might indicate men whose chief erotic
and emotional bonds are with other men, while others are men who
resort to intergenerational homosex chiefly because of the specific
conditions of the mine.
The film’s portrayal of same-sex eroticism is necessarily in dialogue
with the contemporary Italian gay rights movement, and we see this
in both its insistence that certain kinds of same-sex encounters were
not only historically tolerated in Italy but to some degree sanctioned,
and its suggestion that Pino and Melino’s relationship is “different,”
foreshadowing what will become in the post-Fascist years a homo-
sexual identity. In terms of the former, the man who continually tries
to seduce Aclà with olives is a particularly interesting character, as he
never uses force and seems genuinely fond of the boy. His attitude
toward sex with boys is matter-of-fact. It is perhaps a cliché to suggest
that Mediterranean cultures, even today, distinguish between men
who have sex with other men, whether “contingently” or through-
out their lives, and men who self-identify as, if not gay, then at least
as “different” from hegemonic sexual subjects. Behind this cliché is
the recognition that the discursive construction of the “modern”
sexual subject is always necessarily in tension with historically prior
ways of understanding sexuality in general and homosexual desire
in particular (Sedgwick, Epistemology; Goldberg and Menon; Traub;

Sanchez). Particularly in areas of the world less dominated by highly
commodified and visible notions of gay style and identity than the
United States, competing versions of the social, cultural, and politi-
cal meaning of homosexual desire and behavior exist alongside and
sometimes in tension with one another. Aclà’s contradictory attitudes
toward a homosexual subjectivity are the product of history and not
some failure on the part of the filmmaker.
The film’s portrayal of adult consensual homosexuality seems
designed in part to offer a positive image of a virile gay male sexuality
to contemporary viewers, conveyed via the eroticization of the adult
miners’ bodies and the dance number, to which I now turn. Its rela-
tionship to material history is thus a complex one in which the past
is being reread in order to make what might strike us admittedly as a
somewhat nostalgic case for the validity of homoerotic relationships
prior to the invention of a nineteenth-century gay identity. For the
question of the status of, however problematic the term may be, mod-
ern gay identity during the Fascist years is a complex one, with some
historians arguing that there was no such thing as a gay community
and not even a word to describe the “top” in a male homosexual
encounter (Giartosio and Goretti).
But the film’s references to Fascism are muted. We learn, for exam-
ple, that the sulfur is being mined for use in bombs, but there are no
other visible signifiers of Fascism. In this regard and as Van Watson has
suggested, the film deconstructs the binaries national/local, this refer-
ence to Fascism a “national” interruption of the “local” economy and
its feudal political structure, for which the Baron stands as a metonymy.
Of pertinence here is also the film’s portrayal of the town priest and
the religious festival. For, as a result of both the Lateran Treaties (and
their normalization of relations between Italy and the Vatican) and the
continuing role in the life of the community played by the clergy,
“Catholic” refers simultaneously to a national and local identity.
The most overtly homoerotic scene in the film occurs not in the dark-
ness of the mine but in an open air space outside its entrance, a space that
not coincidentally resembles both a piazza and a soccer field. The edit-
ing, camera work, lighting, and mise-en-scene all work in this sequence
to convey a powerful sense of the erotic bonds that link some of the
miners to one another, as well as to suggest a high degree of tolerance of
these erotic bonds. That this scene is initially set for and interrupted by
the Baron suggests a link between the film’s deconstruction of the bina-
ries national/local (and modern/residual) and its commitment to queer-
ing sex and gender identity(and melodrama’s “interrupted party”).
When the sequence begins, some of the boys are playing soc-
cer. A foreman walks into the space, assisted by a man carrying a
gramophone. The foreman sets up the gramophone, shouting, “Get
back! The baron is coming! Get lost!” The men step back, and we
see a close-up of the foreman winding the arm of the gramophone
and starting the record, a tango. This is followed by a series of four
medium shots of miners, each shot framed as a portrait. Despite being
dressed in filthy and torn clothing, all of the men are handsome and
even dignified as they listen.
The scene then cuts to a medium close-up of Melino, who turns
his head. The next shot creates an eye-line match from him to a
medium close-up of Pino. Pino returns Melino’s gaze, and the next
shot returns us to a medium close-up of Melino, in which he motions
to Pino with his head, followed by another medium close-up of Pino,
who nods and begins to walk toward Melino, out of the frame. There
is a cut to another medium close-up of Melino, and the camera then
tracks left to follow him as he moves to Pino into a two shot in which
the men face each other, meeting one another’s gaze. A third man in
the background is positioned between them, watching. All of these
shots eroticize the homo gaze. The camera then cranes down the
couple’s bodies, and they join hands, the camera then tilting up and
craning out as they dance together, simply swaying from side to side
to the music as the other men watch.
The scene then cuts to a high-angle long shot of their dancing. We
see that they are surrounded by a circle of the men, including the fore-
man seated on a bench by the gramophone, the high angle suggesting
a collective identification. Following several cut-ins of the couple danc-
ing, we are then offered a medium close-up of three young men as they
watch Pino and Melino, a rack focus that begins with a single figure out
of focus in the foreground and two background figures in focus, the
shorter boy standing in front of the taller ones. Two of these men have
scarves tied around their heads—a costuming device that contradicto-
rily feminizes the men (from a current standpoint, though not in terms
of Italy’s past, and not even among certain men today) and highlights
their masculine beauty—and all are visibly dirty from the mines. This
shot is followed by a close-up of another man, who gazes and nods. An
eye-line match then links this shot to another man, in close-up, who
nods in return. We cut back to a close-up of the first man, the relay of
gazes suggesting that they, too, are lovers, and may soon begin dancing.
He looks out of the frame, presumably toward Pino and Melino.
The next shot is a handheld close-up two shot following Pino and
Melino as they dance, while the other boys and men in the background,
out of focus, look on, the camera beginning to move around them as
if in a 360 degree pan. This shot is interrupted by a close-up of the
foreman smoking and looking on, followed by a close-up of another
miner watching. We then return to a handheld medium close-up two
shot of Pino and Melino dancing, the camera moving in even closer to
frame their faces in profile. The net effect of this combination of shots
is to further eroticize the scene—a group of men watching two men
dance—and emphasize the men’s tolerance, if not outright desire, for
male homoerotic contact, the ambiguity of the meaning of their gazes
itself a melodramatic trope.
The scene then cuts to a long shot of a figure on a hill overlooking
the scene, a man who announces that the Baron is arriving. “Enough,
enough, get in place,” the foreman shouts, as he lifts the arm from the
gramophone and prepares to restart the tango.
This sequence presents the dancing between the two men as highly
romantic. Although their movements are rough and simple, that they
would even turn the situation of the Baron’s arrival into a public occa-
sion to dance is itself highly significant, emblematic of a subaltern
resistance that appropriates and transforms, however momentarily,
conditions of oppression into opportunities for self-fashioning—
although the film is perhaps overly sentimental in its suggestion that
these men are tough on the outside but sensitive on the inside, music
soothing the savage beast. The film thus risks a certain reinscription
of this cliché of the working-class gay man as sexy precisely because
he is working class. But the cliché itself is not simply “reactionary”
or “progressive” but is rather evidence of the ways in which capital-
ism attempts to make continued use of a style of masculinity ren-
dered increasingly obsolete by Fordism and Taylorism (Champagne
Aesthetic Modernism; Floyd).
That Pino and Melino are holding hands, as well as dancing to a
tango, further romanticizes the representation. Given our knowledge
of homophobia, we might suspect that the relay of gazes of the other
men is leading toward a potentially violent confrontation between the
dancing couple and the others. The film’s violation of this expecta-
tion is thus part of the appeal of the scene for contemporary gay audi-
ences in particular, but is also what renders it “queer,” particularly if
we have a knowledge of Italian culture from the period. For, given
the sex segregation of the society—something the film has already
repeatedly noted, via the portrayals of life in the mines—we do not
know which of these men have sexual feelings for other men and
which are engaging in the common cultural practice of same-sex
dancing (Giartosio and Goretti).
But the film cannot seem to broach the question of sex between
boys, and even the one boy who exhibits some consent in his sexual
relationships with an older man is clearly constrained by his need to
feed and ultimately free himself from his indentured servitude. Aclà
himself is constructed as heterosexual both in his refusal of offers of
sex and his stated desire to find a wife in Australia. That Aclà is the
film’s hero, the character who attempts, however unsuccessfully, to
free himself from the savagery of the mines, who asserts his inde-
pendence and will, and who is also one of the only characters in the
mines whose orientation appears to be exclusively heterosexual com-
plicates any attempt to read off the film’s politics as assertively queer.
For while the film romanticizes the homoerotic relationship between
Pino and Melino, it is unabashedly heterocentric in its portrayal of its
title character. As we have already learned from the sequence in which
the search for pubic hairs occurs, Aclà is so straight, he can’t even joke
about homosexuality.
Le chiavi di aasa is the story of a long-absent father finally tak-
ing responsibility for his disabled son. In the film’s opening scene,
set in a train station, the young father, Gianni, meets with Alberto,
the brother-in-law of the dead mother of Gianni’s son Paolo, so that
Gianni can continue on to Germany with Paolo. Paolo has epilepsy
and apparently cerebral palsy and is hearing impaired. (He is asleep
on the train as the two men talk.) Why Gianni and Paolo need to
travel to Germany to pursue Paolo’s treatment is never explained and
may be a subtle critique of the lack, in Italy, of quality health care for
the disabled. In any case, the trip across borders necessarily compli-
cates the question of Italian national identity in that Italy as a place is
virtually absent from the film, minus the train station—itself a pow-
erful allegory.
Concerning the film’s employment of a melodramatic sensibility,
perhaps most interesting is the way the film both invests in and points
to the failures of the family. When asked by Gianni why suddenly
Alberto and his wife are allowing him to see Paolo, Alberto simply
explains, “The doctor said to. Hopefully, seeing his father, a miracle
will happen; it works lots of times.” At first, in the hospital, Gianni
denies even being Paolo’s father, and early in the film, through the
device of a telephone call to his wife, the film reminds us that while
he is taking care of Paolo, he is neglecting his infant child at home.9
The theme of neglectful fathers is explored not only through
Gianni’s initial failures, however, as early in the film, Nadine’s mother,
Nicole—unnamed until the final credits and thus herself a melodra-
matic allegory—links his behavior to that of most fathers: “Strange
to see a man here. This is dirty work that falls to the mother, and the
father won’t do it. With one excuse or another, they back out. My
husband has always been afraid to get close to our daughter, to touch
her.” (Nadine is also at the hospital where Paolo is being tested, but
her disabilities are portrayed as more profound than his in that she
apparently cannot be understood by anyone but her mother.) Later,
Nicole again compares Gianni to Nadine’s father and accuses him of
being ashamed of his son.
Nicole’s own hybrid cultural identity—she lives in Lyon but speaks
French, Italian, and German—suggests she is identifying a trait of
masculinity not limited to Italy and, as we shall see, further contrib-
utes to the film’s melodramatic exploration of communication, its
possibilities and impossibilities. Also pertinent to the film’s gender
politics is that she seems to be the most “fluid” and “fluent” of the
characters in terms of crossing national boundaries. Nicole’s hybrid-
ity is further signified via the casting of British actress Charlotte
Rampling, whose star image embodies transnationality.
The narrative alternates between episodes in which Gianni tries,
and initially fails, to cope with Paolo’s needs—forgetting to give him
medicine, having difficulties disciplining him, allowing him to wan-
der off by himself in a strange city—and Gianni’s growing relation-
ship to Nicole, who tries to prepare him for the difficult life he will
face as the parent of a child with special needs. In a crucial scene,
Gianni admits that when Paolo was born, he didn’t want to see him.
In the very next scene, she tells him that, if he intends to stay close to
Paolo, he must prepare himself for suffering.
The representation of the relationship between Nadine and her
mother is particularly poignant. Nicole is, on the one hand, a role
model for Gianni and, on the other, someone who refuses to sen-
timentalize what is involved in taking care of a disabled child. In
a remarkable scene composed of just two shots, we see her initially
seated on a bench waiting for a train. Shot in medium close-up at
the right side of the frame, she is in focus, while the background is
blurred. The only sounds are a high-pitched, hollow whistle like that
of a glass wind chime and the rushing wind in the subway tunnel.
The shot continues in this way until, her eyes downcast, she begins to
cry. Gianni walks into the frame and sits down beside her, his back to
her. She confesses that for the past twenty years, every single minute,
as she has loved and taken care of her daughter, as her daughter has
sometimes looked at her with desperate eyes, she has said to herself,
“Why doesn’t she die?” The scene is prototypically melodramatic in
that we as audience members are required to scan Nicole’s face for
signs of a truth that is initially “blocked” and only able to reveal itself
via a profound effort.
We hear the sound of the train arriving, and this almost three-
minute continuous take, a cinematic representation of the figure of
the mater dolorosa—a figure that itself has been deconstructed via
Nadine’s mother’s previous confession of wishing her daughter might
die—ends when the camera cuts to the reverse shot, with Gianni now
in the foreground and her back to us, evoking a parallel between the
two characters. The subway train stops, the doors open, she walks
into the car, and it pulls away.
This paralleling of Nadine’s mother and Gianni is one of the cru-
cial ways in which the film “queers” gender, for Gianni is required
in the film to be both mother and father figure to Paolo. Beyond
the way that Nadine’s mother’s comments earlier in the film empha-
size the different gender roles assigned to the parents of the disabled
child, we see Gianni perform roles typically associated with that of
the mother, such as feeding and washing Paolo. However, in typical
father fashion, Gianni also takes Paolo to sporting events and tries to
help him meet up with his pen pal girlfriend.
Parallel to this investment in and critique of the institution of
the family is a similar exploration of the institution of medicine, the
film providing extensive, cinéma-vérité style shots of Paolo’s physi-
cal therapy that emphasize its grueling qualities and the emotional
distress it causes to both him and Gianni. At the same time, the film
highlights the doctor’s suggestion that parents sometimes interfere
in their children’s therapy. The critique of medicine is thus balanced
with the suggestion that it might also be relied upon to assist Paolo as
he attempts to cope with his disabilities.
Also relevant to a discussion of melodrama is the film’s frequent
reliance on chiaroscuro lighting, its focus on the (im)possibilities
of interpersonal communication, and its underscoring of much of
the dialogue. This underscoring includes an often unaccompanied
soprano saxophone playing a slow, chromatic, rhythmically irregu-
lar melody in a minor key, reminiscent of both jazz and French
Impressionism. Marcia Landy’s account of melodrama as engaging “a
constant struggle for gratification and equally constant blockages to
its attainment” is particularly pertinent to Le chiavi, with its repeated
focus on how barriers of language and ability thwart attempts at
interpersonal communication (“Introduction” 14). More than once,
the film shows us characters who literally speak different languages
(particularly, German and Italian, but also French and English) and
so cannot always understand one another, or who, because of being
disabled, cannot be understood by other disabled people, their care-

givers, or nondisabled people.
In his work on the director, Vitti argues that Amelio’s critical per-
spective on “macro-level social conflict” (304) emerges via his spe-
cific film aesthetic, including his refusal of “clear plot development
and resolution” (305). While I will subsequently discuss this aspect
of Le chiavi, here I want briefly to point out some of Amelio’s other
“queer” deconstructions of film form. For Le chiavi’s deployment of
melodrama works in tandem with its formal innovations—to para-
phrase Duncan’s account of queer cinema, not always harmoniously,
but productively.
The narrative of Le chiavi begins in media res, with very little
exposition. The first sequence is shot in a series of medium close-ups
alternating between Gianni and Alberto, who never appear in the
same frame simultaneously. In the second sequence, two shots con-
necting Alberto in medium close-up as he watches the train pull out
of the station from the platform are shot on the 180 axis, the first one
showing him from the back, the second showing us his face, with the
train appearing to change direction from the first shot to the second.
A handheld camera is used to track Gianni walking through the train,
the camera jerking in response to its movements. In a subsequent
scene, a long take with a handheld camera shows us Gianni walking
backward through the train; he is hanging on to Paolo as Paolo walks
forward on his crutches, telling Gianni that he doesn’t need help. The
camera tracks forward to follow them up to a point and then stops as
they move from one car to another. Here, the camera jerks not only
in response to the train but in a counterpoint to Paolo’s halting gait.
This motif is repeated in a scene in which Gianni and Paolo walk
down the corridor of the hospital, the camera tracking back to fol-
low them, and later, in scenes were Gianni is walking alone—as if he
has literally learned to walk in his son’s shoes. Rather than evoking a
sense of analytical distance, it suggests an identification with Gianni
and provides an instance of the film’s deconstruction of the father/
son binary.
Other formal characteristics of the film include location shoot-
ing, with at times a failure to adjust for lighting so that characters
sometimes speak in the dark; the use of camera movement in place of
editing; the use of nonactors, including people with special needs; an
improvisational quality to the dialogue, particularly Paolo’s; changes
in film stock that seem necessitated at times by the locations; the
inclusion of apparently “real,” fortuitous events, such as the senior
citizens’ alfresco talent show Paolo and Gianni watch in Berlin.
Close-ups, long takes, and a handheld moving camera are stylistically

predominant. The German characters speak in German, even though
they are not understood by Gianni and Paolo. There is often a startling
use of close-ups in which no words are spoken, as in a series of eye-
line matches between Paolo and Nadine’s mother or between Paolo
and a “normal” boy in a park who walks without the aid of crutches.
Historically, many of these characteristics traverse select examples of
Italian neorealism and their reworking via Third Cinema and French
Nouvelle Vague. Referencing the latter in particular, the film includes
intimate moments that reveal the growing relationship between father
and son, as when Paolo “teaches” Gianni how to smoke, pantomim-
ing the drawing of air in and out of his lungs, offering Gianni an
imaginary cigarette, and correcting Gianni’s technique.
The film thus treats the issue of the differently abled in complex,
perhaps even queer ways. On the one hand, it draws on familiar ten-
dencies to infantilize and feminize disability; it seems that at least
some of the physical closeness between father and son is only permis-
sible because Paolo is disabled and seems younger than he is. At one
point in the dialogue, Gianni suggests as much. But on the other
hand, it also undercuts this tendency by giving the son agency; more
than once in the film, Paolo explains to Gianni what the hospital
procedures will entail and, more poignantly, what Gianni must do to
keep Paolo healthy. Like many teenage boys, Paolo can’t stop playing
his video game. The inclusion of actual disabled people as actors—
one long-voiced complaint in disability studies is that disabled char-
acters in Hollywood are often played by able-bodied people—and the
foreign languages that are left untranslated and thus point to diffi-
culties in communication (dispelling the notion that the able-bodied
can always understand each other in the right way) also are unique in
their refusal of stereotypes of disability.
Perhaps above all there is a commitment to verisimilitude in regard
to the life experiences of the differently abled. Twice, asserting his
mobility and autonomy, Paolo “runs away.” While these assertions are
potentially dangerous to Paolo and apparently irrational (and thus a
source of anxiety for Gianni), they also remind us that Paolo is none-
theless a subject, albeit one whose logic is not always legible to the
able-bodied. In this regard, the film has a particularly complicated
relationship to melodrama, as if the sensibility were pointing to its
own limits. For Paolo’s will remains a mystery, not only to his father
but to us, and the film’s refusal to make his will legible—or to render
Paolo a “docile body”—is a riposte to the much more typical situation
in melodrama, where characters’ motivations and emotions are known
to the audience but blocked from one another, and where the ill or
disabled either overcome their adversity or are resigned to their fate
(on the notion of the Foucauldian disciplined body and melodrama,
see Brooks, “Melodrama, Body”). As we will see, in this particular
melodramatic narrative, virtue—in the form of either the overcom-
ing of disability or finding in it a source of transcendence—will not
triumph. As Nadine’s mother tells Gianni, “When someone like Paolo
loses himself in his darkness, all one can do is wait for his return.”
One sequence that seeks to describe at some length some of the
experiences of the disabled is the long scene of Paolo’s physical ther-
apy. A series of shots are edited together to suggest a passage of time.
In each sequence of shots, Paolo is working with a different piece of
technology. The primary sound in the sequence is that of the voice
of the doctor echoing in the room as she shouts both directions and
at times encouragement in German, sometimes clapping along as she
chants, “Left, right, left, right.” At a lower level, we hear the sound
of Paolo’s footsteps or the clinking of his cane, with Paolo ultimately
asking, in Italian, to catch his breath. Gianni eventually interrupts
the exercises, embracing Paolo, while the therapist angrily reprimands
him in German. The film thus gives us a sort of documentary sense
of what it is like for a child to undergo the rigors of therapy and for
parents to witness this process.
The films codes Paolo’s body in complex ways, sometimes giv-
ing us glimpses of him half naked or dressed in a tee shirt and white
briefs. In an early scene, we have seen him get up out of bed, dressed
in his briefs and tank top tee shirt, and leave a hotel room. On the one
hand, his jerking, labored gait, his hunched-over pose, and his inabil-
ity to dress himself make the scene difficult to watch. On the other,
when he gets up from the bed, his buttocks are partially exposed,
and the tee shirt he wears has a filmic history of being coded as sexy
(perhaps most famously by Clark Gable in It Happened One Night).
The actor himself is attractive in a nerdy sort of way, his skin dot-
ted with beauty marks. The scene comes to a climax when we see
Gianni, himself dressed in his underclothes, first catch up with Paolo,
restrain him, and then gently and lovingly wash and dry him with
a towel. The film emphasizes the sensuality of the scene by using a
moving camera, a continuous take, and close-ups of his father’s hands
as they first cradle Paolo’s face and then hold each of his hands, one of
them twisted by Paolo’s disability, the camera then moving up first to
Paolo’s face and then Gianni’s rugged, unshaven handsomeness.
In the extended therapy scene, Paolo’s body is particularly exposed,
its status as “sight” emphasized via the presence of hospital workers
recording the therapy sequence with digital cameras. Additionally,

the film provides several shots of Paolo as seen through a camera’s
viewfinder and then a computer monitor, framing him and his ther-
apy as spectacle. Paolo begins the sequence fully dressed, but then
there is a temporal ellipsis marked only by a cut, and we see Paolo
dressed only in his briefs or some kind of white loincloth (it is dif-
ficult to tell), therapeutic boots, and a machine strapped to his back,
with electrodes, themselves attached to wires, attached to his legs. He
now walks with a crutch. Paolo appears here to be a queer, even sexy,
cyborg (Haraway), half-human, half machine, and one is reminded
of Brooks’s contention that, in melodrama, “the bodies of virtuous
victims are typically subjected to physical restraint” (“Melodrama,
Body” 18). The actor who plays Paolo has a distinct body type, lithe
but developed, reminiscent of one of the ways in which the body of
Christ is depicted in Renaissance art, and we are reminded that Paolo
is not prepubescent. In other words, he is a man-child, for the muscles
of his shoulders, chest, and back are clearly visible, as is the shape of
his genitals beneath his loincloth.
The sequence provokes a variety of complex spectatorial responses.
Paolo’s efforts are sometimes painful to watch, his body bent over
and hunched, rendered all the more vulnerable by the jerky gait, the
wires, and his nakedness. The film presents his body in a disturbingly
queer manner, both oddly sexy and broken, and Amelio’s filming
techniques emphasizing but also interrupting our voyeurism via the
doubled view of his body, for we never see Paolo exclusively through
the camera viewfinder or computer screen—as if we were given a
point of view shot from the vantage point of the hospital cameramen.
Rather, we see both the image of Paolo being recorded and his “pre-
filmic” movements before the cameras. That is, his therapy is framed
for us as a sight.
This framing of Paolo as sight is also emphasized by a handheld
camera that moves down his body, as well as a tracking shot of Paolo’s
therapy presented from behind a table of seated hospital workers at
their computer monitors, the workers’ backs to us. (In other words,
we watch them watching and recording Paolo’s therapy.) At the end
of the sequence, Gianni rushes in to save Paolo from the grueling
routine, first kissing him and then holding him tightly against him,
Paolo’s nakedness emphasized by its contrast with Gianni’s suit.
Amelio then provides a two-shot close-up in which Paolo’s back is to
us, and we see Gianni cradle his son’s neck in his hands, Gianni press-
ing his face tightly against his son’s naked shoulder in an extremely
intimate gesture.
The film represents the growing physical closeness of Gianni and

Paolo in a way that is at times startlingly erotic, though the eroti-
cism is tempered by the brevity of the sequences. This eroticism is
complicated in part by the difference between Paolo’s actual age and
his physical appearance, abilities, and emotional maturity. Because
he seems younger than his age, his teenage body must be treated at
times as if it were a toddler’s—or so Gianni assumes. Their physical
relationship is also portrayed as if Gianni is making up for lost time,
holding, caressing, and carrying Paolo as he would have, had he been
around for his son’s infancy. Perhaps the intensity of Gianni’s affec-
tion for his son is also meant to counter a long representational his-
tory in which a primary form of physical interaction between Italian
fathers and their sons was corporal punishment—one relevant exam-
ple being precisely Aclà.
Film images of fathers taking (physical) care of their sons are still
relatively rare, given cultural fears around effeminacy and male homo-
eroticism (not to mention incest and pedophilia). Le chiavi confronts
and breaks these cultural taboos in a way that is both beautiful and
disturbing, portraying the relationship between Gianni and Paolo as
extremely physically affectionate and erotically charged; at the same
time, the film assigns both males a heterosexual identity. The exis-
tence of Gianni’s wife and child ratifies his heterosexuality, while one
strand of the narrative takes Gianni and Paolo on a quest to meet
Paolo’s pen pal “girlfriend” in Norway. This quest is one of Gianni’s
efforts to ensure that Paolo has a “normal” adolescence, the father
teaching the son the appropriate rituals of heterosexual courtship.
This is also the theme of another scene, in which Gianni helps Paolo
write an email to the proto-girlfriend Kristina. Yet at the same time,
the film constructs the father/son physical relationship as intimate to
the point of bordering on erotic. The casting of the handsome Kim
Rossi Stuart in the role of Gianni undoubtedly contributes to the
erotic charge of these scenes, as does the film’s melodramatic lighting
and music.10
For example, early in the film, Gianni helps Paolo to urinate stand-
ing up in the train, first tying his shoe, then lowering his underwear
a bit further and steadying him with one hand behind his back and
the other on his arm. The camera emphasizes the tender eroticism
of the scene, framing Gianni at Paolo’s feet in a low angle, and then
tracking and craning up past Paolo’s underwear and naked buttocks
to frame them in a two shot with Paolo’s lower body now outside of
the frame. The two males make eye contact, and Paolo tells Gianni to
go away because he can’t concentrate. The camera tilts up and pans
right to follow Gianni as he moves to the other side of the bathroom

car, facing away from his son. They continue to talk, and as Gianni
turns his head back to face Paolo, the camera follows his gaze back
left, framing them again in a two shot before continuing past him to a
medium shot of Paolo standing at the toilet and then back right again
to Gianni, also in medium close-up. Paolo laughs, “Don’t look at
me.” The scene is underscored with the plaintive, sustained soprano
saxophone melody. This representation of being “pee-shy” acknowl-
edges both the repressed infantile pleasures we may take in watching
other adults urinate, as well as its potential homoerotic charge.11 For
being pee-shy itself is a symptom of its homoerotic potential. Like
several scenes in Aclà, it also illustrates the homosocial/homoerotic
continuum.
While much of this physical intimacy between father and son is
motivated by Paolo’s circumstances and needs, as when Gianni cra-
dles Paolo’s head while he gives blood or dries him with a towel,
other sequences push this logic to its furthest point. It is only after
we learn that Paolo is actually fifteen, for example, that he is shown
taking a bubble bath with his father. Gianni sits at one end of the tub
splashing water, with Paolo wrapped inside his arms in a “spooning”
position as Gianni squirts water at their feet from the shower head.
The first shot of the sequence reveals their two supine bodies, Paolo
sitting with his back pressed up against his father’s chest. Gianni has
his arms and legs wrapped around his son. He bounces him gently
and splashes him, and we see Gianni’s hairy legs on the left and right
sides of the tub. We then cut in to a close-up of Paolo’s laughing face,
his head framed by his father’s arms and bouncing against his father’s
chest. The scene then cuts to a shot of two pairs of feet splashing
up and down, one between the other, as Gianni shouts, in German,
“Left, right, left right.” The camera then pans left across their bod-
ies first to Paolo’s face and then to Gianni’s unshaven face, and then
there is a cut back to Paolo’s laughing face as he leans his head against
his father’s hairy chest.
While some of the sexual overtones of the scene are muted by the
ways in which it refers to innocent, infantile pleasures—and in the very
next scene, as if to reinforce this intertextual reference and emphasize
the psychical reversibility of parent-child relationships, Paolo play-
fully spoon-feeds Gianni his dinner—the film cannot mask the mate-
rial evidence of their male bodies, particularly given that we have
already seen the adolescent muscles of Paolo’s back as he struggled
through physical therapy. And in this same “feeding” scene, Paolo
writes, “Gianni and Paolo,” as if the two are boyfriends (with all the
ambiguity this implies). Later in the film, the morning after Gianni
has retrieved a missing Paolo from the police station, they are shot
in medium close-up as they cuddle and snuggle in bed together, the
startling eroticism of the scene perhaps deliberately truncated when
Gianni falls comically through the space between the two beds.
While some male self-identified heterosexual readers of earlier
drafts of this chapter have chafed at my use of the word “erotic” to
describe the relationship between father and son, I want to push back
against this resistance. Given Freud’s description of the “birth” of
sexuality, no one would dispute that the relationship between mother
and child is erotic, at least from the child’s point of view. And only a
pre-Freudian understanding of sexuality would require us to construe
the pleasure the mother receives via breast-feeding her child as some-
thing other than erotic. In other words, neither Freud nor I construe
erotic as genital, and I cannot help but read the resistance to calling
the depiction of the father/son relationship erotic as a resistance to
the film’s “queering” of that relationship.
In the final scene of the film, Gianni comes face to face with the
full reality of Paolo’s disability, and, in a long take filmed as a two
shot with him and Paolo in medium close-up, he openly weeps—
out of fear, frustration, and helplessness; in mourning for Paolo and
Paolo’s dead mother; for reasons left unexplained. His extended sobs
rack his body and fill the soundtrack while Paolo’s gentle voice tries
to comfort him over the sound of his tears.
Once again reversing the parent-child relationship, Paolo puts his
arm around Gianni, telling him not to cry and promising him that,
if he stops crying, he will let him play with his Playstation. The last
image is an extreme long shot of Gianni and Paolo dwarfed by the
landscape but huddled together in the left of the frame, providing
melodrama’s familiar use of an external landscape as a correlative for
the internal, a landscape whose iconography is “indicative of the limi-
tations of conventional verbal language to express the intense psychic
and bodily pains . . . experienced by the characters” (Landy 15). Note
the similarity here to Aclà’s dream of escape via the sea, with which
that film ends. And, as Vitti has suggested of other films by Amelio,
narrative threads are left untied: we do not know how Paolo will
adjust to life with his new family, just as we do not know what will
become of Aclà once he has been returned to the mines.
Historically, the disabled person is a staple of melodrama, for
“the melodramatic body is the body seized by meaning” (Brooks
“Melodrama, Stage” 18). In melodrama, the body reveals a truth
that can’t otherwise be spoken, a truth inscribed on the body. In its
Manichean world, the disabled person, usually constructed specifi-

cally as ill, is one of life’s losers: someone who has been made unfairly
to suffer the physical consequences of the sins of another—Dr. Rank
of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House; or someone who at first seems to lack suf-
ficient character, perhaps best emblematized in the figure of the crip-
pled person who, via force of will and the love of friends, rises up out
of her wheelchair and walks (as in the case of Heidi ’s Clara); or else is
the representation of virtue masked or victimized.
While the verisimilitude of the film strains against this final inter-
pretation of Paolo’s disability, the film’s employment of the melodra-
matic sensibility requires some attempt to make sense of the body as
signifier. Before she knows Gianni is Paolo’s father, Nadine’s mother
asks Gianni if he needs to be forgiven something. When Gianni later
describes Paolo’s birth, he recounts how the sister and mother of
Paolo’s mother Giulia looked at him as if to say “it’s your fault.” He
also describes how he refused to let a priest perform on Giulia the
sacrament of extreme unction, how Paolo was “pulled out” at the last
minute, when a caesarean was too late but before his mother died.
The implication is that Paolo’s disability, if not caused by the cir-
cumstances of his birth, may have been exacerbated by it, and not by
“God’s will,” as Gianni makes clear when he describes his fury at the
thought of Giulia being given extreme unction, but by some moral
logic Gianni may however inadvertently have violated. The sugges-
tion is that somehow Paolo’s disability is Gianni’s fault.
For in melodrama, the disabled body is always something other
than itself, the disability standing for a truth straining to be revealed.
Given the film’s commitment to expressing with some degree of veri-
similitude the life of the disabled, Le chiavi ’s project is thus contra-
dictory. Piero Spila suggests that Amelio is more aware than any other
Italian director of the disparity between the plan to create a cinema of
social and moral commitment and the medium’s limits (cited in Vitti
305). This is one of the reasons why the film’s final refusal to provide
a happy ending is so crucial. There will be no miraculous recovery for
Paolo. Typically in melodrama, “the body of persecuted virtue is at
first expressionistically distorted, as in a hysterical conversion, then is
rewarded, fêted, married, and emblazoned with all the signs of the
public recognition of its nature” (Brooks “Melodrama, Body” 19).
But Le chiavi ’s refusal of redemption actually frees up the disabled
body to “be itself” rather than to be transformed into something else
like virtue revealed or fear overcome. Of course, there is no single,
“accurate” representation of the disabled, and representations are
precisely that—representations. In other words, I am not suggesting
that Amelio’s film manages to circumvent the ways in which our

knowledge of the disabled person is always mediated—and, in this
instance in particular, mediated by film.
The impossible possibility of representing the disabled body as
itself, however, is conveyed, in Le chiavi, via the tension between the
film’s employment of elements of the melodramatic sensibility and
the film’s reflexive, documentary techniques, the use of different film
stocks, for example, and the inclusion of random events—all vital to
the film’s project. As Vitti suggests,
Amelio hopes to create a narrative form in which social inquiry cre-

ates an opposition to the hegemonic discourse in order to force the
audience to get involved. Amelio’s method can be more effective
today than anesthetization and mythologization, traits found in Paolo
Sorrentino’s Il Divo (2008), and to a certain extent in Matteo Garrone’s
Gomorra (2008), where killing is presented as in video games. (305)
Neither anesthetization nor mythologization, but instead melodrama

and an exploration of the limits of filmmaking to capture the real,
one at times in tension with the other. For while melodrama invites
affective involvement, it also risks an allegorization of the disabled
body in a way that denies its historical and material reality—including
its erotic potential.
Le chiavi ’s refusal to make of the disabled body something else
finds its perhaps most poignant expression in the eroticization of
Paolo’s body. It is also the film’s most “queer” move. For the film
deconstructs not simply man/boy, male/female, father/son, but, cru-
cially, abled/disabled. Suggesting the erotic possibilities immanent
in Paolo’s body provides a glimpse of the disabled body as the sexual
body. Yes, such treatment necessitates a certain threat of the sexual
fetishization of the disabled. And signification requires that the image
of the disabled body always stand for something else, something other
than itself. Given the history of representations of the disabled, the
challenges of “embodying” the disabled are substantial. But, to para-
phrase Derrida, if all ways of giving in to this tendency to treat the
disabled body as allegory are not of equal pertinence, Amelio’s risk
may pay off (“Structure”). Le chiavi is queer in Duncan’s sense that,
via both melodrama and its commitment to a certain verisimilitude
in regard to the body of the disabled boy—including its potential
sexiness—the film is in this regard one example of “affective texts
which extend the spectator’s horizon of expectation and structure of
feeling beyond borders” (261).
What is the pressing significance, in Italy, of this exploration, via

melodrama, of the relationship between fathers (or father figures) and
their sons? Homi Bhabha has defined the liminal as “the terrain for
elaborating strategies of selfhood—singular or communal—that ini-
tiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and
contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (2). In
both of these films, the son occupies a liminal space between adoles-
cence and adult male masculinity, and that liminality is emphasized.
Paolo’s disability prevents him from fully inhabiting normative mascu-
linity, defined in the film not only as heterosexual but also gendered
via sports. The film frequently draws attention to Paolo’s interest in a
variety of different sports, including basketball and soccer, his fanta-
sies of participating in them, and the likely reality that he will never
do so. In the case of Aclà, the film juxtaposes his attempts to inhabit
adult male masculinity with a visual reminder—shots of prepubescent
penises—that he and his fellow carusi have not reached sexual matu-
rity. While both films at some level define masculinity in traditional
terms, their emphasis on the liminality of the male child and their
recourse to melodrama open up “new signs” of masculine identity—in
the case of Aclà, contemporary gay male identity (through the figures
of Pino and Melino); in the case of Le chiavi, a non-homophobic—and
not simply homosocial—fatherhood, as well as the disabled subject as
a sexual one.12 Following on the insights of Zhang’s analysis, we might
also argue that the refusal of both of these films to engage in a detailed
exploration of the Italian state—emblematized in Aclà in the paucity
of references to fascism, and in the fact that Le chiavi takes place out-
side of Italy and thus makes almost no visible reference to recognizably
“Italian” space—is not simply a mark of a “post-national” European
Union. Rather, as Zhang suggests, Amelio’s cinema “emphasizes the
transitional aspects of the characters’ travels and masculine identities,
as well as social and cultural change in Italy” (240). Gianni’s internal
journey to a “new” masculinity that includes what I have termed a
non-homophobic fatherhood is accomplished via a literal journey out-
side of Italy; to become a new kind of Italian male, he must travel to
Germany and Norway. Similarly, Aclà’s “emergent” masculinity—one
that does not require him to replicate the violence of his family life and
its rigid gender roles—depends for its survival on a fantasy of escape to
Australia, the film here referencing not only the historical emigration
of many southerners to that country but also perhaps present concerns
around immigration.13 As Duncan suggests, a national cinema (and
the citizen-subject national cinemas seek to interpellate) may be anath-
ema to a queered masculinity.
Since the postwar years, Italian cinema has turned to the figure of
the child to explore, articulate, and perhaps renegotiate Italian mas-
culinities. Marcia Landy reminds us that the “impetus to melodrama
is stronger during times of ideological crisis” (15). Set, on the one
hand, in the Fascist past and, on the other, in contemporary, transna-
tional Europe, Aclà and Le chiavi similarly provide cinematic oppor-
tunities to investigate “new,” “emergent” masculine identities.
CH A P T ER 6
Özpetek ’s Queer Cinema
The films of Grimaldi and Amelio constitute two different responses

to the melodramatic sensibility as it is reworked via a queer ethos.
Ferzan Özpetek’s films provide yet another. Born in Turkey and edu-
cated in Italy, Özpetek explores expatriation, isolation, “migrating”
sexual and gender identities, and the forming of alternative commu-
nities. Like Amelio and Grimaldi, Özpetek “queers” not only male/
female and heterosexual/homosexual but also Italian/other, inter-
twining issues of national and sexual identity.
Özpetek continues to deploy the familiar tropes of melodrama,
but, in certain cases, via citation, and as camp. If yesterday’s camp was
a clandestine appropriation of the obsolete artifacts of heterosexual
culture redeployed for subversive, melodramatic, homo-communica-
tive ends (Tinkcom), post-gay-liberation queer camp takes the process
one step further. Reflections on camp are symptomatic of a new cul-
tural dispensation, suggesting a level of self-consciousness only pos-
sible after the fact. This level of self-awareness makes us suspicious of
those very post-Wildean categories to which we are subject. Thus we
arrive at the queer.
Mine vaganti’s (2010) debt to family melodrama is obvious. At the
same time, however, its employment of generic conventions of Italian
comedy both undercuts its melodrama and refigures the sensibil-
ity. (On the film’s hybridity, see Coconi, Judell, Raw). Highlighting
changes in cultural perceptions around homosexuality, numerous
characters try to convince the two “villains”—Stefania and Vincenzo,
a couple with two gay sons—that homosexuality in Italy today is nei-
ther uncommon nor an affliction. A new world is born at the end
of the film, one in which a variety of life’s losers are promised hap-
pier times. Like the prototypical comedy, this new world is figured
via a marriage, but a queer—and not gay—one. Unfortunately and
somewhat familiarly, the new dispensation is born via the sacrifice of
la mamma, a trope Baymen has noted in several Italian postwar melo-

dramas, including Nel gorgo del peccato, Vedi Napoli . . . e poi muori,
L’angelo bianco, and Wanda, la peccatrice (personal correspondence).
Hollywood’s perhaps most famous version of maternal sacrifice was
the 1937 Stella Dallas, but it lived on into the 1950s and includes,
for example, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. Hollywood melodrama
“often records the failure of the protagonist to act in a way that could
shape the events and influence the emotional environment, let alone
change the stifling social milieu. The world is closed, and the char-
acters are acted upon. Melodrama confers on them a negative iden-
tity through suffering” (Elsaesser 79). In Özpetek’s queer rendering,
the protagonists—grandma and grandsons—“reverse” these failures,
altering both the family environment and the social milieu that has
created the conditions of their suffering.
Some critics were ill at ease with Mine vaganti’s hybridity, high-
lighted in the arrival, relatively late in the narrative, of the four “out”
gay characters (Aystran). Perhaps the most virulent critique comes
from Edoardo Becattini, who argues that the film is “retrograde” and
the characters, bizarre. He specifically states that Özpetek’s vision
is “not that of someone who has the intention of creating a true
‘Italian queer comedy.’” This hostility is shared by certain fan reviews
(tornadoZ).
Duncan’s analysis is more sophisticated, suggesting that Mine
vaganti is one of a number of films that promote a new gay stereo-
type: gay men as “resolutely normal in their degree of physical attrac-
tiveness and material integration into the national economy” (259).
For Duncan, “a queer cinema with radical pretensions” should articu-
late “sexuality and other forms of relationality” in “more recondite
ways.”
Duncan does not dismiss Mine vaganti as without interest, how-
ever, for he notes that it “offers an indirect commentary on the
changed role of woman in Italian society. . . . the homosexuality of the
male characters is a prism through which to discuss the professional
life of women” (259). He reminds us that Özpetek’s films are often
thought to “do little of the work that queer as a contestational cat-
egory aspires to carry out” but then adds that the director’s films can
be read “in ways that challenge the heteronormative bias of commer-
cial cinema” (258). This chapter attempts, via a focus on melodrama,
such a reading.
Placed alongside one another, Becattini’s and Duncan’s comments
repeat a pattern similar to the one that emerges in the critical reception
of both Caravaggio and Puccini. For Duncan suggests that Özpetek’s
ÖZPETEK’S QUEER CINEMA 177
aesthetic may be too indebted to a cinematic realism dedicated to

presenting “positive images” of gay men, while Becattini implies the
opposite: the director’s films are not realistic enough in their por-
trayal of their gay characters, at least as represented by the visiting
friends. Duncan suggests the director’s films may be too indebted
to Chow’s identity-based criticism; Becattini faults Özpetek for not
being indebted enough.
Yet despite Duncan’s strategic hesitations, his comments reveal
that Mine vaganti is queer (in its treatment of its women characters,
for example.) Refusing simply to insert gay characters into typically
melodramatic narratives, Özpetek queers melodrama by exploring,
for example, some of the complexities of gay men’s relationships with
straight women—not simply in the two films discussed in this chap-
ter, but in others, including La finestra di fronte (2003) and Le fate
ignoranti (2001). An exploration of the melodramatic sensibility and
its role in articulating Italian masculinity and sexuality not only opens
Özpetek’s films to a queer reading but perhaps even queers queer cin-
ema. For melodrama is decidedly not recondite; its appeal is primarily
affective and not analytical.
M INE VAGANTI , Italian Comedy,

and Melodrama
Set in Lecce, Mine vaganti tells the story of a family’s attempts to
cope with the revelation that its two sons are gay. The family Cantone
owns a pasta-making business, and its bourgeois status is referenced
frequently, from the material wealth represented by the house, to the
presence of the two servants ordered around by Stefania, to the film’s
articulation and critique of both bourgeois moral standards and the
concern for “putting on a good face.” For Italians have historically
recognized that a stylish facade can be a source of both pleasure and
concern, this concern reaching a kind of denouement in Pirandello’s
ubiquitous trope of the mask.
This demand to look and behave “appropriately” is at various points
in the film both acceded to and resisted by the several “loose can-
nons” of its title—the grandmother, her daughter, her three grand-
children, their friend Alba, all of whom have suffered as a result of
having been made to submit to social mores and all of whom are ulti-
mately “redeemed.” For, by the film’s conclusion, the community’s
“willful misprison of virtue” (Brooks Melodramatic 30), embodied in
the mother and father’s homophobia, is undone by the grandmoth-
er’s sacrifice, which, in characteristic melodramatic fashion, refers to
what should have been known all along: life’s losers—homosexuals,

“hysterical” straight women—may in fact be heroes.
The fictional portrayal of a bond between gay men and straight
women can be a source of great pleasure. But such relationships can
also be material for comedy (television’s Will and Grace), through
the trope of unrequited (or at least unconsummated) love. One of the
ways in which Mine vaganti averts the misogyny of the portrayal of
the “pathetic” straight woman who longs for the gorgeous gay man
she cannot have is that the trope itself is deconstructed. On the one
hand, the boozy (though not unattractive) aunt does flirt with several
men whom the audience recognizes as “obviously” gay. (Given her
melodramatic role as someone who both sees and refuses to see, how-
ever, her flirtation may itself be an act.) But on the other, the terms
of the trope are reversed through the figure of the gay man whose
friendship with a beautiful woman becomes so emotionally intimate
that neither he—nor we—are quite sure where it might lead. And it is
the woman rather than the gay man who sets the relationship’s physi-
cal boundaries.
The narrative of the fate of the gay sons is framed by another,
a series of flashbacks that provide the larger emotional context in
which the family’s problems will ultimately be “resolved.” For many
years ago, the grandmother was, for unexplained reasons, required
to marry not the man she loved, but instead his brother. The film’s
plot cuts back and forth between past and present, evoking a parallel
between them but only gradually revealing the relationship between
the two, the grandmother reliving her past in parallel with the cur-
rent trials of her grandsons. As the grandmother explains,
I spent my whole life with him. He stayed with me even when he

wasn’t there. In my imagination, I went to sleep and woke up with him
every morning. All these years I have never stopped loving him. It was
a beautiful thing but unbearable. Impossible loves never end. They are
the ones that remain forever.
The scene is accompanied by a motif from previous scenes, a tune

played on an unaccompanied accordion, which, as we will learn at the
film’s conclusion, references not only the past but the grandmother’s
personal history.
Ultimately, the grandmother sacrifices herself so that her family
can break free from the restrictions of social convention. Her suicide
literally makes it possible for her daughter and three grandchildren to
find the happiness she could not, as well as for the parents to reconcile
with their sons. For, as we will see, her voice-over “performs,” from
the metaphysical world her spirit now inhabits, this happy ending, a
celebration of virtue first misprized and then acknowledged.
But it is also a melancholy conclusion, a marriage the grandmother
has resigned herself to rather than chosen. In death, the grandmother
reconciles herself to what she could not in life, and the relationship
between that reconciliation and her family’s future happiness is fig-
ured in an imaginary space in which “everyone”—the characters who
inhabit the past, including the grandmother’s young self, her new
husband, her brother-in-law, the guests at her wedding reception on
the one hand, and her older self’s family, dressed in mourning for her
funeral on the other—dances happily together. Özpetek stages this
final scene so as to emphasize the simultaneity of past and present,
for, from the vantage point of the wedding reception and where it is
located spatially, we can also see the grandmother’s funeral cortège.
Like most melodramas, the film reveals certain contradictions,
from the fact that the price of happiness is the grandmother’s life of
misery, to the impossibility of a gay Italian wedding. For, while there
are some same-sex couples dancing in the film’s conclusion, neither
of the two gay sons is pictured in this way—a particularly interesting
choice, given the fact that one of the sons is portrayed as happily part-
nered. The happy ending the film references, however, is art making
itself, and the way telling stories allows that most melodramatic of
passions—love—to endure.
Mine vaganti sets the stage for the present family’s conflicts via
its framing story, Özpetek’s formal choices conveying the melodra-
matic sensibility. The credits appear over a blurred long shot of a tree-
filled, autumn landscape, the wind rustling the leaves. The images
are accompanied by diegetic sound, and we ultimately hear offscreen
footsteps, and a bride walks into the frame from the foreground as
the image focuses. Depicted via a series of tracking shots taken from
camera distances ranging from close-ups to long shots, she is walking
deliberately through the countryside, the breeze catching her veil.
Eventually, a frontal shot of her face in tight close-up reveals tears
in her eyes. The film then cuts to a series of long shots depicting her
walking past several ancient stone buildings, some in states of ruin,
and twice we see her turn to see if she is being followed. Arriving
at one such building, she climbs the steps, flings open a door, and
enters.
This image is highly contradictory. On the one hand, it pres-
ents us with typically melodramatic, Manichean “objective correla-
tives” (Brooks Melodramatic 171; Benjamin would instead call them
allegories). The “artificiality” of the bridal dress—we see the way

it encumbers her movements—juxtaposed with the natural land-
scape, suggests both the restrictions the marriage will impose on the
woman and the restless beauty of nature: domestication versus free-
dom. And the breeze at times sounds agitated and menacing, mirror-
ing her inner emotional state. But there is also something startlingly
beautiful about this juxtaposition and the way the wind catches the
dress, a kind of reflexive visual interest in sensuality for its own sake
that threatens to complicate (though not undercut) the melodrama,
reminding us that, in melodrama, what the visual signifies is not self-
evident.
The film then cuts to a frontal close up of an elderly woman gaz-
ing forward; her face is divided almost exactly in half lengthwise by
light and shadow, the rustling of the breeze providing a sound bridge
between the two temporalities. The camera tracks back slightly, and
we hear a music box playing a waltz in a minor key. This close-up then
cuts to an eye-line match from the woman to two black-and-white
family photos. The camera tracks in closer to the photograph on the
left, a handsome young man framed in a medium shot wearing a
white shirt, tie, and suspenders. An accordion is added to the musical
soundtrack, punctuating the mood of nostalgia. We also glimpse a
flash of red fabric on which the photos rest.
The film then returns to the past, and we see this same man from
the photo, now shown in close-up gazing toward the camera, back-lit
as if the sun is coming through a window, leaving his face partially
in shadow. He rises from a seated position, the camera tilting with
him. An eye-line match links the man’s gaze to a close-up of the bride
as she walks in the door of the stone building and toward him, the
nondiegetic music now taken over by a piano and violins playing an
accompaniment figure; the accordion returns, playing the melody.
After a series of shots in which she walks toward him, a close-up of
her face highlights her tears. She tilts her head down, and the camera
follows the direction of her gaze to reveal a gun in her hand. As she
raises the gun, the camera tilts up to return to her face.
The film cuts first to a close-up of him, the eye-line match sug-
gesting he is the one she is preparing to shoot, but then back to the
present, to nearly the same close-up we previously saw of the elderly
woman, though the camera has moved in tighter—as if the two tem-
poralities are connected through an eye-line match from his point of
view. She gazes down, and we cut back to the past, to a frontal shot
of the bride’s torso framed from her breasts to her waist. The cam-
era tilts up her body as she raises the gun and presses it to her own
chest. The camera tilts further up to reveal her face as she looks down
toward the gun, and she takes a deep breath. The film then cuts back
to a close-up of the elderly woman who, in a kind of match on action,
continues the bride’s inhalation, subtly lifting her chin. Her head is
turned slightly so that now her face is illuminated, but her left cheek
remains in shadow. All of these “melodramatic” formal choices suture
the two temporalities to one another.
The camera tracks out slightly from the close-up of the elderly
woman and then cuts back to the man, still framed in close-up, as he
walks toward us (and the bride). The music stops for just a few sec-
onds, and then changes to a different, more agitated melody, played
exclusively by strings. The camera cuts to a shot of the bride, and then
the man walks into the frame, creating a two shot in which we see
him struggle to take the gun away from her. After a series of shots of
them struggling, the film cuts outside the room to a long shot of the
stone buildings, and we hear the gun fire. The music stops. We have
no idea which of the two was harmed, if either.
We then cut back to the present and are shown a close-up of a
wedding photo of the bride, but she is with a different man (he has
a mustache). The film then cuts to reveal almost the whole of the
photo, and we see, on the left, the hand of an elderly woman and
the same red fabric from a previous shot. The music stops, we see
the hand place the photo on a bed’s red bedspread, and hear first the
sounds of birds—as if we have woken at dawn from a bad dream.
From offscreen, a woman’s voice calls “Teresa!” The film cuts to a
medium close-up of the elderly woman as she turns her head, her
face now mostly shadowed but her right cheek illuminated. The off-
screen voices motivate her to walk out of the frame (and the room)
and toward the voices.
Introducing several additional characters, the next scene portrays
the arrival home of the younger son, Tommaso. The scene serves to
establish Tommaso’s close relationship with his grandmother, and his
entrance itself is “melodramatic,” “staged” for his mother and grand-
mother via a poem in which his grandmother declaims a line that
is then answered by the voice of Tommaso, offscreen and out of his
grandmother’s sight.
The sequence then cuts to a celebratory alfresco family dinner, the
camera circling the table from behind the family members as we are
introduced (or, in some cases, reintroduced) to them: the unmarried
Aunt Luciana, whose vanity demands that she forgo her glasses and
who has a lover (or two) disguised as a thief in the night. There is
one additional way in which, much later in the film, she is marked
as the family’s “black sheep”; she confides to one of Tommaso’s gay

friends, with no regret, and after deliberately being told not to bring
up the subject, that, as a young woman, she ran away to London with
a young man who ultimately left her, taking her money and jewelry.
Significantly, she adds that her brother Vincenzo came to get her.
An unidentified young man from the previous scene is revealed to
be Tommaso’s brother Antonio, the manager of the family factory.
During dinner, he and his grandmother talk business, and she reminds
him of the sage advice of their deceased Uncle Nicola. Antonio and
Tommaso’s sister, Elena, also work for the company. She attempts to
join the business dinner conversation but is immediately cut short by
her dismissive father, Vincenzo. Elena’s husband, Salvatore, who also
works at the factory, is a source of irritation for Vincenzo. Also pres-
ent are Teresa and the other family servant, Giovanna. Teresa stands
waiting to attend to the family, while Giovanna is seated at a separate
table, feeding Elena and Salvatore’s two pudgy daughters. These are
comedic types, and the family banter is accompanied by a typically
Italian-sounding folk waltz, guitar and violins alternately playing the
melody, and violins playing the pizzicato accompaniment. Another
“type,” not introduced in this particular scene, is Vincenzo’s mis-
tress, whose “vulgarity” is contrasted with Stefania’s more elegant
comportment.1
The camera movement is itself indicative of the complex relation-
ship of melodrama to realism. The circling motion reads as a reflexive
device that also conjures up documentary. That is, like melodrama, it
is both non (if not anti) realist and realist at the same time, reflexivity
drawing attention to the act of filmmaking, and documentary style
providing a “realist” alibi. The distinct camera movement melodra-
matically references the real while also attempting to capture some-
thing “beyond,” the restlessness of the camera a metaphor for this
struggle against the limits of the visible. Özpetek employs this same
camera movement at several crucial moments in the film.
Eventually we learn that the bride in the opening sequence is the
grandmother, and that the man with whom she struggles is the Uncle
Nicola referenced earlier. Her husband’s brother, he is the man whom
the grandmother has loved all of her life. This is only made explicit
later in the film.
Tommaso has returned home from Rome in order to make an
announcement. His family has planned an important dinner for their
business associate Brunetti and his daughter Alba, who works with
Antonio as a manager at the factory. The dinner is meant to cele-
brate Tommaso’s joining the business. Prior to the dinner, however,
Tommaso confides to Antonio his melodramatic plan: he will inter-

rupt the celebration with three announcements: “The first is that I
never studied Economics and Business in Rome; a year ago, I got my
degree in literature.” The second is that his life’s ambition is not to
work in the pasta factory but to be a writer; recently, he has finished
a novel, and is awaiting a response from a publisher. But “the thing
that is important, Antonio, is that I am gay.”
Antonio’s reaction is difficult to read—not only for the audience,
but for Tommaso, too. At the same time, however, the scene is shot in
such a way that invites us to search for the subtext behind their faces,
the meaning that is present but elusive, for Özpetek uses a series of
close-ups in a rhythmic, shot-reverse shot pattern. The lack of visible
reaction from Antonio and the laconic quality of his responses invites
us to contemplate the truth behind his eyes. Antonio then tries to talk
him out of his plan, asking Tommaso why he wants to tell his parents.
He suggests that his brother go back to Rome and live his life in peace
as a writer, and no one will suspect he is gay. But Tommaso reminds
Antonio that their father expects him to sign on as a partner. “So sign
on, what does it matter?” “I don’t want this responsibility,” Tommaso
responds. Antonio persists. “Why do you have to say it in front of
everyone? . . . Brunetti, . . . you know what a big mouth that one has!”
Tommaso’s answer reveals an attempt to rewrite the script of the
family melodrama to his advantage, using its stultifying conventions
to free himself from its burden. It is also a subtle, reflexive reference
to the way family melodrama not only becomes a way to “represent”
family conflicts but in turn provides a narrative framework through
which we learn to read our “real” lives. “Because if I say it in front
of everyone, papa will throw me out. I pack my bags, the business
remains in your hands, I’m free. No choice.” The scene ends with a
close-up of Antonio’s face, which, once more, is difficult to read, and
a lighthearted sound bridge of guitar music leads to a scene of the
brothers playing soccer in a parking lot at the factory.
When the night of the dinner arrives, Tommaso barely begins
his rehearsed speech before Antonio himself seizes the opportunity.
Prefacing his announcement by telling the story of someone who
always did what his parents expected of him, without ever saying
what he wanted or revealing who he was, Antonio comes out, at one
point saying the Italian version of “I am gay. Queer. A fairy. A fag.”
As Tommaso had predicted, his father is furious; he throws Antonio
out of the house and fires him, suffering a heart attack in the process.
Tommaso is left to run the business with Alba, whose behavior is
frequently erratic.
In the midst of Tommaso trying to prevent his father from hav-

ing another heart attack, should it be revealed that Tommaso him-
self is gay, his partner Marco and three of their gay friends, Davide,
Andrea, and Massimiliano, arrive, stopping off on their way to the
beach. Helped by his grandmother, who tells him that if you always
do what others ask, life is not worth living, eventually, Tommaso finds
the courage to tell his father of his plans to become a writer. Now
that Tommaso is also “saved”—this is how she describes Antonio’s
“release” from the family—the grandmother is free to end her life.
At her funeral, via a voice-over, her words are literally appropriated
by Tommaso, who in an unspecified future will tell the family’s story
and presumably find success as a writer, the film itself coming to alle-
gorize this successful telling of the family’s story.
M INE VAGANTI and the Manichean

The family business occupies a characteristically melodramatic,
Manichean role: on the one hand, it represents a form of both finan-
cial and emotional sustenance for the family; on the other, it embod-
ies the social forces that police desire. Related to the former is the use
of pasta-making as an allegory. When Tommaso talks with his grand-
mother about Antonio, his grandmother describes pasta-making as
creating a bond between her and her grandson. She recounts touch-
ing the warm, soft pasta as it leaves the machine. The pasta metaphor
is ambiguous, and the speech is a significant part of the long road the
film takes to explain the framing story of the bride and Nicola. The
factory also provides her granddaughter Elena with an opportunity
to free herself from others’ perceptions of her, as, in Vincenzo and
Antonio’s absence and with the approval of Tommaso, she takes a
greater role in the business, and when Tommaso comes out to her—at
work—her attitude is comically matter of fact: after considering the
possibility, she has concluded, “I’m not gay.”
The example of Elena and her immediate acceptance of her broth-
ers’ sexuality suggests a Manichean split between the characters. As is
typical of family melodramas, we are invited to identify with the “vic-
tims,” Tommaso and his grandmother, but also Antonio and Alba
and even Elena and Luciana. Acting as the “villain,” the homophobic
father, Vincenzo, is particularly concerned with how both his social
standing and business reputation will be negatively affected by this
scandal—the threat figured via his business partner Brunetti, who,
at the “coming out dinner,” tells a homophobic joke that seems to
goad Tommaso into speaking (before his coming out is hijacked by
his brother). Alba’s relationship to her father mirrors this Manichean

split. In addition to being homophobic, he is portrayed as emotion-
ally unavailable and a gossip.
Mother Stefania is only slightly more sympathetic. Afraid that the
maids have revealed to their friends Antonio’s homosexuality, she
threatens to fire them, and when in this same scene her mother-in-
law objects to Vincenzo’s attitude, Stefania tells her, “It’s better not to
speak of these things. The doctor says we must return to a normal life
as soon as possible.” The grandmother’s response is one that beautifully
captures the hybridity of the film, as it is a line that could be spoken in
either a melodrama or comedy: “Normality . . . what an ugly word!”
The film in fact confronts at least two moral dilemmas. After years
of hiding himself, Antonio admits that he can’t take it anymore. But
Tommaso is afraid that, if he comes out, too, his father will fall apart.
The second dilemma concerns Vincenzo’s pride. In his coming out
speech, Antonio virtually taunts him: “What will they say in town
tomorrow? . . . What will you say when you meet them in the street?
What?” In the first case, we see the melodrama of the split self, being
true to one’s desires versus putting on a false front for others; in the
second, a variation of the first, we see the melodrama of family loyalty
versus conformance to unjust social mores.
As if melodrama and comedy is itself a Manichean pair, the drama
of Antonio’s coming out scene is undercut almost immediately. After
Stefania announces, “He’s gone,” there is a brief silence that is filled
by a rapid drum riff. This is followed by Luciana’s “I read somewhere
that half of the Italian population is bisexual,” which is itself punctu-
ated by the same riff. Salvatore adds, “Anyhow, there are worse things.
Sickness, hunger, famine. Death. Isn’t it true, papà?” Vincenzo lunges
at Salvatore, the drum riff becomes continuous, and he clutches his
arm and then falls, grabbing the tablecloth in the process, and pulling
it and most of the table’s contents to the floor.
Similarly, Özpetek uses comedy to mock Vincenzo’s obsession
about what people will think of him. While still in his hospital bed,
one of the first questions Vincenzo asks Tommaso is, “Who knows?”
Even his “For me, it’s like he was dead,” is rendered ridiculous, not
only by his exaggerated affect but by the fact that, unbeknown to
him, he is revealing this to his other gay son. A subsequent scene
portrays a virtually delirious Vincenzo misreading the innocent
remarks of a waiter as somehow indicative of the fact that the whole
town knows his “shame.” His desperate attempt to show a public face
leads to tears, as he imagines that everyone’s laughter in a crowded
piazza is directed at him, the quickening pace of the editing and the
exaggerated echoing of the laughter on the soundtrack punctuating

his panic and delirium. In another scene, we see him weeping hysteri-
cally over a photo album. In all of these scenes, the melodramatic is
rendered reflexively comic, camp.
Melodrama and Homosexuality as Trope

Mine vaganti uses the trope of the homosexual to work out its melo-
dramatic concerns around both the visible and the intelligible, asking
questions relating to who can see what and under what conditions,
and who cannot see what appears to be directly in front of their faces,
as well as what is the meaning of the unsaid. Vincenzo’s mistress
actually tells him, while he’s still in his hospital bed, that it is not
unusual for a family to have more than one gay member, but whether
or not she knows that Tommaso is also gay is not revealed. Aunt
Luciana is one of the most interesting characters in this regard, as she
seems both to see and not see—a trope doubled by the film’s focus
on her impaired vision. In the middle of the narrative, when both
Tommaso and the grandmother are defending Antonio to Vincenzo,
Luciana adds, with characteristically melodramatic ambiguity, “It’s
more exhausting to stay silent than to say what one thinks,” the
unspoken “meaningfulness” of the sentence punctuated by shots of
her mother, Stefania, and Vincenzo all turning their heads to look at
her in response to this laconic sentence.
Rummaging through her son Antonio’s drawers, muttering,
“There’s nothing, no proof, less than nothing,” and insisting to
Tommaso that, if Antonio were “that word,” she would have noticed
it, Stefania finds visible proof of his homosexuality—some photos of
him with his former lover, an employee whom he, in fear of being
discovered, fired from the pasta factory. But in this same moment,
she inaccurately “remembers” an incident from Antonio’s childhood,
when, one day at the beach, he wove her a basket of leaves. She tells
the story to Tommaso with her face in profile, which renders it par-
tially lit by sunlight coming from a window, and partially shadowed.
Other scenes in the film similarly make a melodramatic use of light-
ing, dividing people’s faces in particular between light and shadow.
As Stefania watches Antonio pack to leave the house, her face is split
down the middle horizontally, half in shadow, half in light, and the
rooms through which Antonio walks are heavily shadowed. Late in
the film, we see a shot of Alba sleeping, her face divided between light
and shadow, followed by a shot of Tommaso and Marco sleeping,
their faces lit amid the shadows.
“A basket of leaves is a feminine thing,” she says. Tommaso cor-

rects her, saying, “Mama, it wasn’t Antonio. I made you the basket.”
She turns her head to face him, the majority of it is now in shadow,
and we see a look pass across Stefania’s face, her expression difficult
to read. This is cut with an eye-line match to Tommaso, who in the
silence looks down uncomfortably. The camera cuts back to her, and
she utters an inscrutable “ah,” before she turns away, suggesting she
does and does not know the truth. The scene is rendered particularly
comic by a musical motif I will discuss shortly. Later in the film,
Vincenzo similarly “mis-remembers” the incident, but Stefania pre-
tends she doesn’t know what he’s talking about—again suggesting
she both knows and doesn’t know.
When Tommaso tries to convince his father that homosexuals
don’t have their sexuality written on their forehead, the father insists,
“How could we not see it? I don’t understand. You can recognize it
immediately from how they speak, from how they move, from how
they walk,” the melodrama being both expressed and undercut comi-
cally as the father himself acts out, unconsciously, flamboyant physi-
cal gestures. “That one instead didn’t make a gesture, he didn’t do
a thing, he dressed normally . . . to hide it from us all,” Vincenzo’s
ignorance again comically and melodramatically referenced by the
fact that he is saying these things to his other gay son. And, in a scene
parallel to this one, Stefania asks Tommaso’s lover Marco, a doctor, if
homosexuality is something that can be cured, if perhaps it will pass
with time. “But doesn’t it ever happen that one of them turns around,
becomes normal?”
Unlike the other characters, Alba, however, is able to read the
signs. She knows before Tommaso tells her, and we see it in her face
earlier in the film, when her father is telling the homophobic joke at
the dinner table, and a few minutes later, when Antonio comes out.
Because, just prior to this scene, we have already watched her decipher
Tommaso’s sexuality when he compliments her on her shoes. These
scenes not only establish her character and develop the trope of the
friendship between the gay man and straight woman; they also help
to establish her as a kind of parallel to Tommaso.
A scene that illustrates brilliantly melodrama’s struggle with the
unsaid is one in which Alba tries to tell Tommaso that she “knows.”
When she asks him if he was angry with Antonio for not confiding
in him previously “this thing,” Tommaso plays dumb: “What thing?”
She tries again. “This thing.” Tommaso explains that he and Antonio
haven’t spoken much in years. “That’s a shame,” she responds. Once
again, Tommaso plays dumb: “Why is it a shame?” As they speak,
Özpetek frames them in a two shot, Alba on the left, Tommaso on

the right, both shown in profile, but while her face is illuminated, his
is in shadows.
Alba tries once more: “When there are two of you, it’s easier, no?”
Once again, Tommaso plays dumb. “Two of us? What are you try-
ing to say?” Not willing to transgress the social boundaries, but still
desiring to make legible the unsaid, she responds, shrugging, “What
I said.” At this point, they both laugh, and look into one another’s
eyes, suggesting that, without revealing the secret, the secret has
been revealed.2
As the scene continues, it also suggests a building of intimacy
between the two. A romantic pop song plays on the soundtrack, and
we see alternating shots of them eating, the camera tracking in closer
to the person opposite the other, creating a series of eye-line matches
in an effort to signify their growing intimacy. Later in the film, we
see them become even closer, as he talks about his love for his partner
Marco with her, and she reveals her secrets to him.
Özpetek frequently uses camera movement and editing as vehi-
cles for the melodramatic sensibility. In fact, in both “coming out”
scenes—Antonio’s coming out as gay; Tommaso’s coming out as
a writer—we are given a series of shots in which the camera tracks
across the table in alternating directions, revealing the expressions
of people, both Antonio himself and the other dinner guests, seated
across the table. The framing is such that we repeatedly see someone’s
head in the foreground, as if the action were being filmed at the eye-
level of the dinner guests themselves but moving behind their backs.
Özpetek is using the camera melodramatically, struggling against the
constraints of the medium. He wants to view simultaneously the reac-
tions of the various family members to the revelations of the two
brothers—something impossible, given the limits of the medium as
they are defined by melodrama.3 The grandmother’s face is particu-
larly poignant in both of these scenes, for it reveals her joy at the
courage of her grandsons but also suggests a melancholy memory of
the choice she couldn’t make.
The scene immediately following Tommaso and Alba’s growing
intimacy in some sense parallels the previous one, in that Tommaso
asks his grandma if Antonio ever confided in her. Her answer is
another symbol of how melodrama “works,” rendering it another
instance of Özpetek’s post-gay-liberation,“reflexive” approach to the
sensibility: “Yes he told me about it; but he also couldn’t tell me about
it.” It is in this scene that his grandma reminds him that a life lived for
others is not worth living. The importance of the scene—and the way
it represents an opportunity for the grandmother to “save” Tommaso

when she couldn’t save herself—is punctuated by the fact that, imme-
diately after it, the plot flashes back to the framing story, and we learn
that neither she nor Nicola were hurt by the fired gun, and that he has
convinced the grandmother to follow him back to her wedding.
Around this theme of inscrutability and inscrutable sexuality, how-
ever, we as audience members are placed in an analogous position in
relation to Alba in particular. We (and Tommaso) are first introduced
to her in a scene the film never explains in detail: she keys a car and
then smashes in one of its mirrors with the heel of her shoe. Another
repeated trope is her reckless driving. We know these things stand for
something, but what, we aren’t sure.
Later in the film, we learn her emotional secret: when she was
fourteen, she began taking care of her dying mother by herself, her
father, perpetually absent. She now feels lost; after her mother died,
“There was no one for whom I was important.” Melancholy music
punctuates the scene, and, as her eyes well up with tears, Tommaso
touches her cheek. The series of eye-line matches in close-up evoke
a sexual tension. She moves closer, as if she’s going to kiss him, but
instead says, “I’m tired. We’ll see each other tomorrow.” Emotional
buildup and blockage, revelation and disguise, visual ambiguity—all
melodramatic tropes.
Ultimately, she confesses that, like Antonio, she is the victim of
Lecce’s gossip, perceived as being crazy, that she does strange things
and no one can stand her. Tommaso’s response is to kiss her on the
mouth, which makes them both smile. Yet she remains inscrutable,
particularly in terms of her relationship with Tommaso. Later in the
film, we see her looking at Tommaso and his partner Marco in each
other’s arms, but her expression is ambiguous. Obviously not disap-
proving, but pensive, a mixture of pleasure, longing, and regret.
On a variety of different levels, in a variety of different moments,
then, the film stages certain problems of intelligibility and the vis-
ible. What is the relationship between the flashbacks and the present?
When Antonio comes out, is he “really” coming out, or is this some
elaborate ruse to protect his brother? Why does Alba behave the way
she does? Will Tommaso and Alba develop a romantic relationship?
They’re Here, They’re Queer. Now What?

In addition to being a source of comedy, the arrival of the four gay
friends compounds the film’s melodramatic concern around visibility.
Will Tommaso’s secret be revealed? Who will and will not be able to
figure out that they are gay? Under his family’s roof, will Tommaso be
able to express his love for Marco? The scene in which the friends are
introduced to Tommaso’s family includes a funny and poignant shot
of Tommaso standing with his four friends, as if they were posing for
a “family” portrait, that is then connected, via an eye-line match from
the point of view of the five gay men, to a shot of Salvatore, Luciana, a
seated grandma, Elena, Stefania, and Vincenzo gazing back at them.
There are then cut-ins to close-ups that invite us to study the family
members’ faces to try and guess who knows and who doesn’t.
The bodies of the gay men are themselves theatricalized. On the
one hand, they are in good physical shape, described by Vincenzo
as “handsome” and “athletic.” On the other, they have to struggle
to contain their homosexuality, which at any moment threatens to
reveal itself. Here the film offers a historical reference to the closet as,
invited to have dinner with the family, they discuss whether or not
they were “discovered,” and plan together what they will wear and
how they will comport themselves, alternately warning one another
teasingly not to appear gay and refusing to disguise themselves. In
these moments, the film engages what Michael Warner defines as a
particularly “queer” sensibility, an attitude that, if sex is an indignity,
it’s an indignity every one of us shares. When Andrea brags that he is
a lawyer and implies he will have no trouble disguising his sexuality,
Davide makes a pun on the Italian word “foro,” which can refer either
to a hole or the court: “If they call you the prince of the foro, it isn’t
because you’re so great in court!”
Several times during the dinner, their homosexuality literally bursts
out, threatening to reveal the truth behind the visible. For example,
Andrea—initially asked by the grandmother why he is angry (a refer-
ence to his attempt to “look” straight”)—excitedly recognizes the
designer of Alba’s dress, trying to explain it away by saying his fiancée
has one just like it. After the dinner, they argue among themselves
about who gave the most convincing performance.
Later, in a scene at the beach, Andrea, Davide, and Massimiliano
unapologetically lip sync and dance a choreographed routine to the
song “Sorry I’m a Lady” while standing in the sea, performing for
Tommaso, Marco, and Alba. The song, in English, includes the line
“They don’t make men like you in our city.” This is the film’s most
overt reference to homo-history and camp, and the song has the same
“feel” musically as an ABBA tune. Like a number in a Hollywood
musical, this sequence interrupts the narrative to celebrate this com-
munity of friends, into which Alba is welcomed, as she is invited into
the water to join them. Marco follows, while Tommaso looks on.
This musical number provides an outpouring of affect. Despite its

hip thrusts and dramatic poses, even the dance routine cannot con-
tain their queerness, and so the dance dissolves into splashing and
horseplay.
Music is a crucial element of Özpetek’s films, but in Mine vaganti,
references to the genre of melodrama are also conveyed overtly, via
popular Italian songs that the characters themselves sing, a cappella.
That is, the melodramatic songs themselves are brought reflexively
into the narrative of the film. Two of these particular songs are then
integrated into the film’s (nondiegetic) soundtrack: “Cinquantamila
lacrime” (“Fifty Thousand Tears”), which Tommaso sings as he pre-
pares for what he had hoped was his coming out dinner and then is
later played over a montage of Tommaso’s “new life” in the pasta fac-
tory, including the shot of Vincenzo hysterically weeping; and “Una
notte a Napoli” (“A Night in Naples”), which the men sing, referenc-
ing Salvatore’s home in the south and Massimiliano’s having flirted
with him on their first meeting.4
Another melodramatic pop song becomes a way of expressing the
unsaid and creating a bond between the “social inferiors,” the gay
men, and the servant Giovanna. Andrea begins to sing a melodra-
matic (and “gay”) song, “The Way We Were.” The singing is over-
heard by Giovanna, the lowest person on the totem pole, who is silent
for the majority of the film. She then begins to sing it loudly herself, to
the men’s stupefaction. This moment is an acknowledgment that she
knows, but also creates a link between the characters—not only the
gay man with the straight woman, but also the historically “gay” labor
of service work with her status as a servant. Interestingly, as part of
performing as heterosexual, Massimiliano is told to invent for himself
a new, high status occupation: “Don’t say you’re a flight attendant.”
Mine vaganti’s nondiegetic music parallels the emotional qual-
ity of the scene, revealing a struggle against the limits of visual and
verbal signification. Many scenes use musical underscoring in this
traditionally melodramatic manner, including the end of Antonio’s
coming out scene, when he gets up to leave the table. Sometimes,
however, Özpetek uses nondiegetic music to undercut the melodrama
of a scene, deploying the orchestration in a characteristically comedic
manner, as a counterpoint to the visual images and narrative. At the
dinner table, as soon as Antonio’s initial speech concerning the pain
of life in the closet finishes, and with the announcement that he is
gay, the soundtrack features four bars of a simple, mischievous, slow
waltz, consisting of three measures played in an “ohm pa pa” pattern
by violins, the first note of the triplet the root of a triad, the other
two, repeated minor thirds. This motif is played three times, each on
a different chord, and then we hear a measure of a sustained note.
As the last note is held, above it, a glockenspiel plays a chromatically
descending line, a pattern of two slurred eighth note, the second note
repeated to become the first note of the next pair. The waltz repeats
for four more bars, but this time, when it stops, Antonio’s parents
laugh, thinking he has been pulling their leg, but we can see in the
faces of some of the other guests that they know he is telling the
truth. A variation of this same waltz is repeated when Stefania finds
the incriminating photo of Antonio and again when she shows them
to Vincenzo, music punctuating the comedy.
At the beach, Tommaso learns from Marco that his manuscript
has been rejected. It is here that “Una Notte a Napoli” is inserted,
melodramatically, into the score. But that melodrama is immediately
undercut when, as Marco and the other three gay men drive away,
continuing on to the beach at Gallipoli, the song becomes diegetic,
a song on the car stereo with which the men sing along. Alba and
Tommaso then talk about his novel. She asks about its subject, and he
describes a melodramatic plot, saying it is about two people who can
no longer be together; one suffers and the other does not. And, as in
all melodramas, this “surface” is itself a signifier of something else:
“But maybe what I wrote is that you don’t need to be afraid to leave,
because everything that really counts never leaves us, even when we
want it to.” She responds, “Therefore ultimately we leave nothing and
no one. . . . Che bella fregatura!” (Translated loosely, “What a fucking
mess.”) One of the film’s now familiar sad melodies begins to play on
the piano, a slow, rubato waltz, as close-ups of each of their faces are
connected through a series of eye-line matches. In characteristically
melodramatic fashion, Alba’s swearing could refer to the loss of her
mother—as it seems to be another version of the story Tommaso’s
grandmother told Alba, about the grandmother’s love for Nicola—or
even” and Tommaso’s “impossible” relationship.
In the very next scene, Tommaso reveals to his family that he wants
to be a writer. We see the grandmother’s face pass through a variety of
emotions, not all of them clear, but we recognize that she is happy for
Tommaso. She gets up from the table to go for a ride, and we cut back
to the past, seeing her and Nicola walking, his arm around her.
A dissolve then provides a panning shot of the grandmother’s face
in the mirror, and then a second panning shot across Vincenzo and
Stefania turned away from one another in bed, their expressions seri-
ous but otherwise inscrutable. The film them returns to the grand-
mother, and, in the mirror, we see her reflection. On the soundtrack is
a waltz played by violins and accordions. Through a series of tracking

shots left connected to one another via dissolves, alternating between
extreme close-ups of her face and shots of her face reflected in a three-
way mirror, we see her deliberately putting on makeup and then ear-
rings. When she is finished, the camera tracks left and stops at a single
reflection, but also showing the back of her head in the foreground,
out of focus and in shadow. The same visual motif we have seen sev-
eral times in the film, the composition suggests the absent presence
of truth, an obscure sense that something lies beyond the mirror’s
reflection. She looks at herself approvingly.
She then begins eating a pastry. The camera tracks out, and we
see she is surrounded by an allegory: gorgeous deserts; the camera
cuts to a further distance, and we see even more gorgeous desserts,
the camera tracking lovingly across them and then back to her face in
the mirror.5 A series of jump cuts portray her face in the mirror as she
eats pastries, her face, that of the unruly woman, ecstatic; as the scene
continues, the editing and music speed up, alternating between shots
of the desserts and jump cuts of her eating.
We then see what we think is the repetition of a family ritual we
had seen earlier, in which Tommaso’s grandma comes into his room
to throw open the curtains and wake him. He asks if he has slept too
long, and she says no, you woke up at the right moment. She adds,
“You were right to resist. Always make your own mistakes.” “Is this
what a true gentleman does?” he asks. “No, gentlemen have nothing
to do with it. This is what people do who want to be happy. Good
morning, my love.” Tommaso then hears offscreen voices crying, and
he follows them to see his grandmother dead in bed, surrounded
by desserts; she has died from a self-induced diabetic coma. At her
bedside are Teresa, Stefania, Vincenzo, and Luciana. The camera
tracks in to her, and the image is particularly melodramatic in its
realism; food has spilled down the front of her dress, and her hair is
disheveled, suggesting the “horror” she has been willing to endure in
her search to “transcend” this world. The image then dissolves to a
blurred image of a hearse.
The closing sequence of the film makes clear the way la mamma’s
sacrifice has healed the community’s wounds, reminding us of a trope
from tragedy. A passage from Brooks is extremely pertinent to this
aspect of the film: “Melodrama substitutes for the rite of sacrifice an
urging toward combat in life, an active, lucid confrontation of evil”
(Melodramatic 206). The trajectory of the film traces this substitu-
tion, for, whereas the grandmother “had” to die (and marry not her
true love but his brother), Tommaso and the other loose cannons do
not. Here again we see why melodrama has appealed historically to

gay and lesbian subjects. Those critics who see the film’s portrayal
of Vincenzo’s lack of acceptance of his gay sons as dated of course
could not have predicted, for example, any number of recent remind-
ers of homophobia, from the response of some of the French pub-
lic to gay marriage, to the crude homophobia of the US Tea Party
and those Republican political figures who pander to it, to Nigerian
and Russian politics. We desperately want to believe that things have
changed. And of course, to some degree, they have. But, in the pres-
ent political climate in particular, an “active, lucid confrontation of
evil” seems very much required.
Over the image of the hearse traveling through the streets of
Lecce, the grandmother’s voice asks, “Who knows if these places will
remember me? If the statues, the facade of the church, will remember
my name?” Tommaso then takes up her voice, speaking in the first
person, as if he were she: “I want to walk one last time through these
streets that welcomed me long ago.” She and Tommaso’s voice alter-
nate, she tells her story, he tells her story. The time between when one
voice ends and the other begins to shorten, until we hear his voice
alone, speaking as the grandmother, attempting to heal the family
wounds: “To my grandchildren Antonio, Elena and Tommaso, I leave
all that I have to you, but the land that was Nicola’s I want Antonio
to have.” On the image track are shots of the funeral crowd, and as
she speaks to them, we see the family members to which she refers.
“You must return here, Antonio, because here is where you belong.
You will have the earth, the force that lives when we die”—a melo-
dramatic image of the transcendence of the earthly visible. We see
Tommaso in the crowd, and he continues in his grandma’s voice,
“You, Luciana, will have everything you need, but you must have
courage; the thieves don’t need to force their way through the win-
dow; it is your house.” She tells his parents, “There is nothing you can
do to not love Antonio. The earth cannot wish the tree ill.” On the
image track, we see Antonio being hugged by Luciana.
The funeral scene thus “heals” the family, though Vincenzo’s rela-
tionship to his sons remains ambiguous: a cut creates an eye-line match
between the two gay sons and Vincenzo’s gaze, who then turns his
head away. The grandmother’s voice continues: “Tommaso, write of
us, our history, our earth, our family.” He/she continues, “The good
things we did and above all the mistakes we made, the things we did
not accomplish because we were too small for life, which is so big.”
The pallbearers’ places are taken by Antonio, Tommaso, and
Salvatore; Vincenzo then joins them. “The loose canon has gone;
that’s what they called me, thinking I had not heard them. But the
loose canons bring disorder, putting things in places where no one
wants to let them stay, to mix things up.”
Eventually, there is a cut to a shot down a long, narrow street, and
we see the characters walking toward us as the camera tracks back,
Vincenzo in the middle, Stefania on one arm, his sister Luciana on
the other. The grandchildren form a second row. Behind the grand-
children walk Teresa and Giovanna, and behind them we see Alba’s
father, Alba, and Salvatore. Behind them, the rest of the mourners.
The shot then cuts to a close-up of Stefania’s face. She then turns her
head behind her and walks to Antonio, grabs his arm, walks between
her two sons, and smiles, the camera following her.
At this point, nondiegetic music begins to play, a violin dance mel-
ody in a brisk two four time accompanied by a syncopated accordion.
In a minor key, the music sounds like something from an Eastern
European soundscape, but such music is actually difficult to place
definitively, a reminder of the cultural hybridity of the Mediterranean.
The funeral procession continues, the camera tracking back as they
walk forward. But then, from a side street, the procession is joined by
Nicola and the young grandmother/bride, connecting both the two
different narrative trajectories and, in so doing, the past and present.
The music gradually crescendos, and now the violin melody is fol-
lowed by accordion fills. The camera tracks in to the grandmother/
bride and Nicola, the funeral now behind them. We cut on the 180
axis to see a two shot of the grandmother and Nicola from behind,
then another cut to a frontal shot of them in medium close-up, the
hearse passing behind them as they walk forward.
Tommaso continues to narrate in the grandmother’s voice as
the camera tracks back with the grandmother and Nicola and the
funeral procession continues behind them. “Nicola taught me the
most important thing of all.” As they walk forward and the camera
tracks back, we see the two planes of time now physically separating.
As they continue to walk toward us and the camera tracks back, they
pass figures in period clothes, cuing us in to this dual temporality.
Tommaso/the grandmother continues: “To smile when you feel bad,
when inside you would like to die.” We then cut on the axis to see
them walking from behind, the camera now tracking forward; they
now appear to be in the past once more, nodding their heads at wed-
ding guests as they walk toward a fenced-in garden. The scene cuts
once again to a shot on the axis, and we see the way the distance
between the past and the present has increased; Nicola and la nonna
as a bride walk further away from the present.
This pattern of cutting on the axis between two shots of the grand-
mother and Nicola continues until we cut to a close-up of the groom,
creating an eye-line match between the grandma and her new hus-
band, the man with the mustache, from the photographs; he smiles.
A female voice joins the music, singing in Turkish and accompanied
also by guitar. We cut on the axis once more to the two shot of Nicola
and the grandmother, and Tommaso continues in his grandmother’s
voice: “We die and then we return. Like everything.”
But how is it that we return? Italy’s relationship to melodrama
is a complex one, and the rejection of the sacred that characterized
the French Revolution never occurred in quite the same way in Italy.
But the film seems to be suggesting here that the way we return is
through melodrama itself, the sensibility now reflexive in a way that
it was not in, say, the nineteenth century. Whatever meaning we find
in life is not simply the result of the effort to catch a glimpse of a
moral universe beyond the visible, but to tell stories about that uni-
verse. Here again, we see, in Özpetek’s film, not past versus present,
or melodrama versus modernism, but some kind of uneasy balancing
of the two. The film suggests, as many melodramas do, that there
is redemption in suffering, but the form the redemption takes is art
making itself. On the one hand, this seems like a very old Romantic
story. On the other hand, the reflexivity of the film asks us to contem-
plate the melodramatic structure of meaning making itself—evidence
of which we find, as was the case with Tosca, in the negative critical
reception and its discomfort with melodrama.
The film ends with a scene in which the bride and groom enter
the reception and dance, the camera moving through the crowd,
and, eventually, left, to a seated Luciana. A hand enters the frame to
offer her a dance, and she takes it, the camera following her as she
rises, revealing Nicola. The camera now moves through the crowd,
and, alongside the original wedding guests, we see Stefania danc-
ing with Andrea, Elena dancing with Davide, Salvatore dancing with
Massimiliano, Teresa dancing with Giovanna, and Vincenzo talk-
ing to Antonio. The camera then tracks to reveal Alba dancing with
Marco, whose gazes motivate a tracking shot to Tommaso pictured
from behind, walking away from us. The camera tracks forward with
him until he turns around, and the camera tracks in to a close-up, his
face in sharp focus in the foreground, wedding guests in the back-
ground. We cut, an eye-line match is created between him and a two
shot of Marco and Alba dancing, returning his gaze. We cut back to
him in close up, he smiles, and the screen goes black.
Critics who accuse the film of stereotyping gay men miss the point:
the gay characters are acutely aware of gender identity in particular
as a performance, but not one that is always entered into voluntarily.
The men’s inability to hide the signifiers of their homosexuality sug-
gests that, sometimes, what is visible is true. The film’s refusal to
settle for one or the other, the visible as true, the visible as obscuring
the true—a refusal that occurs on a number of different levels, from
its narrative to its formal choices—is what renders the film’s sensi-
bility as “queer,” a deconstruction—and not simply a rejection—of
the “either/or” of modern categories of gender/sexual identities as
well as the genres and sensibilities through which these categories are
articulated and lived.
Özpetek tends to work more than once with the same actors, creat-
ing a virtual “troupe,” which facilitates a reading of both characters
and themes across films. Serra Yilmaz, for example, always plays a ver-
sion of the unruly woman. On the other hand, many of his gay charac-
ters are played by straight actors, some of them famous, who seem less
afraid of “playing gay” than many of their Hollywood counterparts,
and an actor may play a gay character in one film and a straight char-
acter in another. The same actor who plays Mine vaganti’s hysterically
homophobic father several years earlier played an openly gay charac-
ter in another Özpetek film, Saturno contro (Saturn in Retrograde).
There is a sense, then, in which even the director’s casting is queer,
refusing to typecast some actors, relying on the established star image
of others.
Saturno contro (2007) is one of the director’s most melodramatic
films, though it also has comic moments. The film explores common
melodramatic themes: sudden illness, marital infidelity, and grief, but
it integrates also the more recent melodramatic trope of a father com-
ing to terms with his gay male son. Saturno contro, too, is a kind of
hybrid, for its melodramatic search for deeper meaning is thwarted by
a concern that perhaps the universe is not moral but random, evok-
ing what the Italian cover of the DVD calls “a comedy with some-
times melancholic, bitter overtones.” It, too, constitutes an example
of queer melodrama.
Lorenzo and Davide are lovers; Lorenzo works with Roberta,
while Davide is a famous writer who pens fables. The three are part
of a circle of friends: two married couples, Neval and Roberto and
Angelica and Antonio; Paolo, a budding writer; Sergio, an older gay
man. The story features two plot lines: Antonio has an extramarital
affair; Lorenzo experiences a cerebral hemorrhage, goes into a coma,
and eventually dies. Following his death, the film explores how his
friends cope with their grief.
The historical importance of melodrama for homosexually identi-
fied men is referenced in the very opening of the film, when we see
Sergio watching a melodrama on television and reciting the dialogue.
Rather than introduce him to Paolo, Lorenzo, at whose house the
party is being held, says, “It’s not the moment to disturb him.” A shot
of the television screen shows us Meryl Streep in a brown wig. Neval
calls Sergio mummia, mommy; we later learn that he self-identifies
as “frocio” (another word used in Italy to designate homosexuals),
and not gay. When he is asked if frocio and gay mean the same thing,
Sergio responds, “Yes, but I’m antique.” Later in the film, Roberta
refers to Sergio as (Hitchcock’s) “Rebecca, the first wife.”
In Saturno contro, the characters’ Manichean struggle is with life
itself, good represented by friendship, love, and the ability to connect,
however fleetingly, with another human being. Evil is represented
by forces that are almost unnameable: the randomness of life; the
inability to fully control and understand one’s own desires and needs
and the resulting impossibility of communicating them to the people
we love; good intentions that somehow produce bad results. The pat-
terned randomness of that struggle is allegorized in the very title of
the film, Saturn contro, as it refers to astrology, a theme throughout
the film. Roberta does horoscopes; Sergio tells us it’s the only thing
she manages to get right.
At the level of narrative, the salvation offered by the film is via a
community of life’s losers, a variety of different queers: homosexual
men; a straight female drug addict; a policeman who stutters; his
wife, an outspoken, plus-size Turkish woman (the film sardonically
commenting upon the way her identity is marked in Italy as “other”
when someone asks, “Are you a foreigner?” and she responds, “No.
Turkish.”); a “failed” married couple; a young man who refuses to
have his sexuality labeled; a deceivingly ditsy female hairdresser; a
female nurse who drinks on the job. At times, the narrative itself feels
“queer,” so dispersed and without direction that it does not seem
really to belong to any of the characters (or else it belongs to all of
them).6 In fact, Lorenzo, whose voice-over begins the film and is the
center of the community and would thus seem to be the film’s pro-
tagonist, spends the majority of the film in a coma offscreen.
Inserting his homosexual characters into a larger social milieu is
one way Özpetek suggests that they are in fact queer (rather than sim-
ply gay). Another indication of the community’s queerness is that its
boundaries are porous. The film begins with a “new arrival,” Paolo;
Neval’s husband Roberto, who is also part of the group and not sim-
ply her spouse, makes a late entrance. Other characters—the nurse
who tries to help the friends cope with Lorenzo’s illness; Lorenzo’s
stepmother Minnie; Lorenzo’s estranged father Vittorio—move in
and out of the community, touching in a positive way its collective
life. Clearly this is not an identity-based community but one brought
together in some instances randomly but held together by friendship
and tragedy. The film’s final image is itself a queer metaphor: a ping-
pong game, portrayed as both meaningless and meaning saturated at
the same time, both silly and deadly serious, as camp always is.
Another way in which the community is queer is that, like many
circles of gay friends, this group includes members who have a vari-
ety of intimate relationships with one another. One of the much
commented-upon sources of the energy and creativity of queer cul-
ture is the way it makes use of the sexual to create alternative kinds of
relationships (Warner); one-night stands turn into lasting friendships;
former lovers remain close friends; a wife and her husband’s mistress
share confidences. Many of the characters in Saturno, and not simply
the gay ones, share a sexual past.
Yet, in its portrayal of this queer community, conditions specific to
“gay” life are also referenced. Most obviously, the film explores the
complex relationship of a gay son to his heterosexual father.7 The film
is particularly careful not to demonize Vittorio. Minnie tells Sergio
that Vittorio loves his son very much, and that it was Lorenzo who
decided to leave his father’s house and not the reverse. While, follow-
ing his son’s death, Vittorio at first wants to disobey Lorenzo’s final
wishes by having him buried near his mother, eventually, he changes
his mind, having him cremated and giving his ashes to Davide. Even
this is a queer melodramatic gesture in that it complicates the stereo-
type of the homophobic father, not denying it, but suggesting that,
at least in some cases, relationships between gay and lesbian children
and their parents can be redeemed. Its sentimentality expresses the
utopian longings of an audience long denied self-representation.
The film also references gay life via the trope of illness. In Saturno,
that illness is not HIV, which is, however, referenced in Özpetek’s
Le fate ignoranti. But it is virtually impossible for anyone of the
director’s own generation to see Saturno without being reminded
of HIV—the randomness with which it struck; the ways in which,
in the face of first lack of medical knowledge and then government
apathy, people relied on their friends to provide them with “com-
munity support”; the new kinds of communities and forms of world-
making that HIV demanded and made possible; the bedside visits,
the time spent in hospital waiting rooms, the funerals and memorial
services. But very much in keeping with Özpetek’s queer sensibility,
Lorenzo’s illness is not the “center” of the melodrama—we never
once see him, for example, in his hospital bed, his friends’ postcoma
contact with him taking place offscreen—and perhaps the reason
the director chose not to give Lorenzo HIV is that in the early years
of the epidemic in particular, many people fought not to have their
whole identity consumed by the HIV virus.
Like melodrama, music has played a vital role for expressing affects
required to be hidden in everyday life, as we saw in Mine vaganti.
Opera, musical theater, and pop music have long had gay and lesbian
fan followings, these fans often embracing all three genres. Özpetek’s
soundtrack includes songs in a variety of languages—French, Turkish,
Spanish, and Italian—as well as orchestral music, prototypical for the
director in its use of violins and accordions. Sometimes the music
punctuates the mood of a scene, sometimes it contrasts with it.
Sometimes it is pop music, sometimes it resembles Romanticism.
Numerous aspects of the film display the melodramatic sensibility:
emotional excesses and blockages (in the midst of a conversation with
Davide, Antonio begins to sob but then stops himself from telling
Davide about his infidelity; Davide struggles with expressing his grief
but ultimately collapses in sobs); instances in which we both know
and do not know something simultaneously. Concerning the diffi-
culty of expressing certain affects, Sergio suggests that Lorenzo made
others happy because he had no fear of expressing his feelings. This is
why he is the center of the group, as he suggests the utopian sensibil-
ity of a world both transparent and rich in emotional intensity. The
fact that it is he who dies suggests the way melodrama both holds out
the possibility of transcendence via the everyday but simultaneously
suggests the non-realizability of that transcendence. The fact that it
is also a comedy, however, ensures, at its conclusion, that there is a
release from the unfairness of life and into a universe that is just—or
at least sometimes nonmalevolent.
As a melodrama, the film also speaks profoundly of the unfair-
ness of life, not simply in terms of the randomness of illness but also
the heteronormative societal strictures that thwart our happiness.
Lorenzo’s nurse, for example, confides to Roberta that Lorenzo’s
father wants to move him to a home for the terminally ill. When
Roberta replies that neither Davide nor any of the rest of Lorenzo’s
circle were aware of this, the nurse replies, “What are you? Only
friends, and in this case that doesn’t count for shit.” As an ironic alle-
gory of their unnameable union, the film presents an eye-line match
connecting a shot of Vittorio’s gaze to one that tracks across Lorenzo

and Davide’s closet, where we see the two men’s clothes intermingled
with each other. This, too, seems also to be a reference to HIV, as it
brought to crisis the issue of the state’s failure to imagine family as
anything other than a heterosexual couple, hospitals regularly bar-
ring lovers and friends from access to their sick loved ones and long-
estranged families reinserting themselves to claim mementos of their
dead children’s lives, sometimes at the expense of that child’s friends
and lovers.
The characters’ struggle to perceive what seems to be lurking just
beneath the surface, a presence they know but cannot name and feel
powerless to act against. Dark forces erupt at the moment when one
is most happy and unsuspecting. In a religious dispensation, we make
sense of tragedy by blaming the wrath of God or the Fates, or else a
loving God whose plans simply remain beyond human comprehen-
sion. The Greek gods of tragedy demanded a sacrifice that resulted in
purification. The Judeo-Christian God made a similar bargain, and
allegedly because of it, no matter what trials we face, a better world
awaits us. But in the secular world of melodrama, all we can do is, on
the one hand, struggle to anticipate the next sorrow, read the world
for signs of its portents, and, on the other, when we misread the signs
and are struck down by fate, produce a cry that we hope manages to
reach whatever logic or force that ensures that the world is moral and
ethical.
When we are faced with the incomprehensibility of a universe that
has to be moral for us to go on living, the “if only” of melodrama is
an attempt to feel some sort of control or agency—even if that moral-
ity is beyond us. A melodramatic film like Saturno contro shows us
the portents that its characters cannot see—so that we will not make
this same mistake, so that we will read the signs correctly. We hear in
Angelica’s words what she can’t, her own perhaps justified blaming
of herself for Antonio’s affair. We know from a thunderstorm that
something terrible is going to happen. Just before he collapses, we
hear Lorenzo’s voice-over, and via this voice-over and a combina-
tion of point of view shots from his perspective and an “omniscient”
camera that wanders over the surface of the party, our/Lorenzo’s
gaze panning the table, we are alerted to what the characters cannot
recognize, the approaching calamity.
A world where there is not something like grace is affectively
unimaginable, unbearable, and so melodrama proposes that if we
learn to read the world with more care, we might be saved from the
worst. At the same time, it reminds us of our lack of knowledge and
the importance of acting ethically even in the face of our ignorance,

“as if” we believed in a moral occult. In the hospital, Sergio asks, “If
talking to someone in a coma is useless, why does the nurse encour-
age it?” Roberto answers, “Because one never knows.” Later, when
Roberta asks the nurse if, in his coma, Lorenzo is suffering, she
answers, “We don’t know.”
Not surprisingly given the plot, the film provides highly melodra-
matic expressions of grief, turning to landscape in particular to do so.
Davide isolates himself in a neglected home in the country, his arrival
underscored by lush violins and an improvised accordion melody, the
beauty of the mountain vistas, foliage, and sunlight emphasized via
the widescreen format and a slow-panning camera. His friends arrive,
uninvited, and there is a point of view shot from Sergio to a panning
and tilting shot of the forest-covered mountains, again emphasiz-
ing the natural beauty of the location. Davide seems ill at ease with
everyone’s arrival, and it provokes a scene, Davide saying to Sergio,
“You cannot imagine my pain. You think you know everything, but
you don’t know shit. You don’t know what it means to have outlived
him, otherwise you would not be here. And you would have left me
in peace.”
The friends instead insist on making dinner and staying. Davide
wakes early the next morning, and we see him walking first through
the house and then the woods. An accordion solo begins, eventually
accompanied by violins playing a slow melody. Via a series of shots—
some tracking to follow him, some still, some long shots, some close
ups—we follow him until, in long shot and from behind him, we see
he has reached a clearing.
From what seems to be Davide’s point of view, we see the sea, the
rising sun reflecting off the water and dividing the frame in two, light
and dark, the scene accompanied by a sweeping melody in the orches-
tra. The accordion rejoins the soundtrack, and the camera tilts down
and then tracks back so that we are briefly looking straight down at
Davide, the camera then craning down behind him and stopping at
a medium shot, so that we see him juxtaposed against the sea on his
right, a mountain on his left, and green treetops at the bottom of the
frame. The accordion and violin music swells, the accordion playing
virtuoso improvised figures, and the camera cuts to a close-up of
Davide weeping. He starts to sob audibly and tremble, looks down,
and the camera tracks slightly back as he tilts his head first down and
back. The camera then cuts to a shot looking straight down on him
as he tilts his head back, sobbing, and we see that he is perched on a
wooden railing, rocky cliffs below, as if he intends to kill himself. The
image resembles a crucifixion scene shot from above, as if God were

looking straight down at Jesus. Davide’s sobs increasing in volume,
the music stops, and we hear the whistling of the wind as the camera
tracks back slightly. He then falls to a sitting position, the camera
turning slowly clockwise, and we hear the sound of an airplane and
his continuing sobs as he falls all the way to the ground. The image
is disorienting in that we cannot tell if it is the camera or the world
that is turning.
Beyond community, the film offers up the admittedly familiar
trope of art itself as salvation—not simply in the form of the ping-
pong game but the film itself. For it is an allegory of Lorenzo’s line,
spoken earlier on in voice-over and then repeated at the film’s conclu-
sion: “I want everything to remain as it is now, for always, even if I
know that for always doesn’t exist.” For film is precisely a now that at
least theoretically remains as it is for always, even though the viewer
will cease to exist. Like all acts of signification, its condition of possi-
bility is an absence. Özpetek seems to be referencing here the specific
temporality of a visual and aural recording: a now that is no longer, a
once that has returned. This temporality is particularly suited to the
melodramatic sensibility, as it allows for a perpetual yet immediate
contemplation of signs that will never fully yield their meaning—the
record of the passing of time itself an allegory of the ability of sense
to be eluded.
Following Davide’s subsequent outpouring of grief, we cut back
to the house and then outside, Antonio begins bouncing a ping-
pong ball against the paddle. Silently, he and Davide begin to play,
Antonio eventually saying a simple “sorry” when he misses the shot.
The other characters begin to come out of the house and join in,
laughing. Eventually, all of them are grouped around the table, play-
ing. Lorenzo’s voice-over repeats his earlier monologue: “As I said,
there are moments like this one when I succeed in feeling happy. I
don’t really know why, but to see Davide together with our friends
makes me feel secure.” As he speaks, the camera pivots around the
table, showing us his friends as they play. “I know what they say, I
know what they think, and even if they are always the same things, it
makes me content. I don’t want surprises, novelty, unexpected turns
of events. I want everything as it is now to stay this way always. Even
if I know that for always doesn’t exist.” The camera continues to
move around the table, past Roberta and then Davide to show us the
house, and we hear the sound of ping-pong balls offscreen, but when
the camera completes the circle, everyone is gone, the table looks
weathered, we hear the sound of the wind, and the gray light over
the sea suggests the sun is setting. The camera continues to circle
around the empty table.
This final voice-over suggests that the film’s moral universe is
somewhere “between” the religious and the material, as we are unsure
how to place the location of Lorenzo’s voice. Is it someone’s memory?
Is Lorenzo still present, even in death? While the film’s characters
do not transcend their earthly suffering, they survive it—even if that
survival is, like all things human, temporary, fleeting.
The artwork itself memorializes. It is realized action in the face
of grief. Not salvation but survival—which are not quite the same
things. The moral imperative becomes to help one another survive
the sadness that is inevitable. Saturn in Retrograde suggests no happy
ending, no catharsis, or salvation, just daily acts of sustenance, like
playing ping-pong or going to the movies.
Conclusion
In its problematizing of the visible as a means of securing truth and

its search for an alternate, secular moral universe—a nonreligious
spirituality, or a moral occult that is not guaranteed via religious
faith—melodrama is “modern.” This particular impulse also informs
the work of the many modernists who did not simply reject significa-
tion but rather sought to refer to a reality beyond the immediately
visible, from the cubists to the Futurists to the Metaphysical painters;
from Kandinsky’s to Rothko’s concerns with the spiritual in art; from
Virginia Woolf 1 to Ama Ata Aidoo; from André Bazin to Germaine
Dulac.2 Such work is ultimately better understood as allegorical rather
than mimetic, the modernist artwork not a mirror of the universe but
a heterocosm that nonetheless refers, via allegory, to a real.
According to Brooks, ultimately, the melodramatic sensibility com-
petes with another, one he associates with Flaubert, a sensibility that
abandons the search for “deeper” meaning and concentrates instead
on the surface of signification (Melodramatic 198–200). There is
perhaps something queer in this new sensibility, too, another con-
tribution of Oscar Wilde, signified in his adage that “it is only shal-
low people who do not judge by appearances”—the Italian notion of
la bella and la brutta figura prefiguring Wilde’s warning (26). These
musings take us back to Sedgwick and her insistence that the hetero-
sexual/homosexual binaries underwrite all of late nineteenth- and
twentieth-century cultural production (Epistemology). In any case,
these two traditions or tendencies are in many modernist works in
dialogue with one another, the allegorical impulse in tension with an
exploration of the potentials and limits of the artist’s medium.
Melodrama constitutes an interesting “bridge” across historical
changes in Western aesthetics, for if prefigured by the Baroque and
fabricated in the Enlightenment, it is attenuated in the Romantic
period and then survives into the present in a variety of different,
ruined forms—from television soap operas to hybrid films like Mine
vaganti—because the search for a moral universe that melodrama
pursues cannot be left behind, at least not in the present. However
reflexive modernism may become, signs will have meaning—that is

their condition of possibility. However much art might try to evoke
the literal, the drive to refer can only be deconstructed, rendered
material for contemplation, maybe even, to steal from Marxist termi-
nology, sublated, but never simply left behind. This is true particu-
larly of linguistic works, as language that circumvents the ideational
is virtually impossible. Short of some kind of cataclysmic disaster that
wiped away all traces of the past, we will always and not yet ever be
modern, in the specific sense of attempting to cope with the melan-
cholia that the failures of signification engender. While the form that
the transcendental signifier takes historically varies, the sign can only
be deconstructed, never dispensed with completely.
I was in Italy revising this manuscript when Elliot Rodger killed
six people and wounded thirteen others before taking his own life.
Searching a few days later for citation information on Sylvia Plath’s
poem “Daddy,” I was taken by Google to a website called “Return
of the Kings”—Google undoubtedly following the traffic generated
by the revelation that this deeply troubled young man was part of
a virtual community of like-minded males. Openly misogynist and
Fascist, the website included praises for both Mussolini and Hitler; it
also took Plath’s words literally.
Masculinity studies followed in the wake of feminism and gender
studies. It began from the premise that culture exaggerates, to the
advantage of men, whatever biological differences between the sexes
it purports to know and was rooted in male gender theorists’ pro-
found sense of alienation from, dissatisfaction with, and perhaps even
loathing of hegemonic masculinities. I myself was once accused by a
student of being a male man-hater.
Unlike Jews critical of the military policies of Israel or queer peo-
ple who challenge the LGBT movement’s sometimes unreflective
recourse to a discourse of civil rights, however, men critical of mas-
culinity are not usually accused of self-hating. (And perhaps my stu-
dent’s comment is evidence that he did not consider me a “real” man.)
Working in masculinity studies does not usually cast one as a traitor
to one’s gender, either. Freedom from charges of self-loathing is a
sign of the privilege of being a man, because no one seriously thinks
that the dominator loathes himself. It makes perfect sense to posit the
shamed subaltern who internalizes that shame. But masculinity is so
hegemonic that not wanting it is almost unimaginable, and so one is
accused, rather, of not “measuring up” to real men.
Patriarchal, phallocentric masculinity is under attack—as it should
be. The topic of sexual violence is more frequently discussed in the
CONCLUSION 207
media than ever before, though admittedly it often tends to be pro-

jected onto an “other.” Men’s sense of their power to “manage”
women is increasingly challenged, and White men are being asked
to own up to the privileges of masculinity: the sense of entitlement
and freedom with which one enters a public space, for example, the
willingness to speak one’s mind without fear of being intimidated or
shamed or subject to physical violence, the career opportunities that
arise as a result of one’s maleness, the lack of having to cope on a daily
basis with sexual intimidation. When these powers and privileges are
compromised, clearly, for some men, it is terrifying.
Lately I have noticed the way that, at least according to the fan-
tasies embodied in amateur porn in particular, many men, whatever
their gender/sex identifications, use sex to attempt to escape their
masculine selves (Bersani, Vogler). Men who have sex with other
men in particular seem bent on pushing the boundaries of theatri-
cal, ritualized, masochistic humiliation and the pleasures of contact
with lower orders of being. I don’t fully trust, however, this pushing
of boundaries, in part because I simply have not yet thought about
it sufficiently. At some level, it seems another sign of male privilege,
as men are freer than women to experiment sexually without dimin-
ishing their social power or fearing rape, while, in a sexist culture, a
female masochist is redundant. (I am being somewhat arch here; for a
more nuanced reading of female masochism, see Sanchez.) However,
men who push these boundaries presumably are not in full control
of the psychical effects of their actions, as desire is always a site of
both pleasure and danger. And plenty of men perceived as effeminate
confront on a daily basis the fear of homo- and cross-gender-phobic
violence.
Most of the time, there is very little positive one can say about
masculinity. And I hope that this book is not read as some kind of
apologia for Italian sexism, despite the ways I have sometimes insuf-
ficiently attended to the more sexist tropes of the male melodramas
examined here. Like all hegemonic masculinities, Italian masculinity
as it is lived remains largely a mystery to me, however, something I
observe as an outsider, and I am still frequently caught off guard by
the blatant sexism of much Italian television. Of course, I, too, ben-
efit from masculine privilege and am of the generation of queers who
learned from straight men the narcissistic pleasures of—and increased
sexual attention that results from—having “a good body.” Having
spent over a decade of their lives being shamed in the school gym,
however, obviously, men like me inhabit the space of the athletic club
differently from many of their cohort.
But keeping in mind that one recognizes the contradictions of

another culture more readily than those of one’s own, I have deliber-
ately chosen not to be overly critical of the ways in which Italian men
figure and inhabit their gender. That project is better left to an Italian
not at home in his or her home, someone with a deeper familiarity
with Italian masculinity as it is lived today. Not hailing from Italy or
even being properly trained in Italian studies, my position vis-à-vis
questions of nationhood and discipline is also liminal (though I con-
fess to what is among many Italian Americans a somewhat typical but
highly affective imaginary identification with Italy).
As Duncan’s analysis suggests, one of queer theory’s projects is
an interrogation of Italian studies’ historically irreducible disciplinary
investment in nationalism—a project that finds common cause with
a variety of “deconstructed” versions of Italian studies today, from
Italian film studies to postcolonial studies in Italy. My hope is that
my queer location as an outsider on the inside makes the contradic-
tions of hegemonic masculinities more legible to me. There is, then, a
melodramatic impulse behind my scholarship, the way it struggles to
bring out into the open a truth resistant to being exposed. I have also
attempted in this analysis a colocating of this melodramatic sensibility
with post-structuralist models of textuality and modernist reflexiv-
ity. Such a colocating hopefully results in a critical engagement with
modernism that at the same time resists the logic of the “post,” if by
post we mean a textuality cut loose from any possibilities of refer-
ring, in however a mediated manner, to that thing we call life. For
melodrama remains a popular form through which to explore con-
temporary, lived moral dilemmas—around race, gender, and sexual-
ity in particular. The increased commodification of identity brings
with it certain contradictions that melodrama cannot always contain.
In their referring to political and social realities, melodramas, like
musicals, play with fire (Dyer).
Writing about texts that one finds, in a number of complex
ways, erotically interesting exposes the intimacy of textual analysis.
Revealing what you see and feel when you look at particular texts
can be unnerving. Depending on what you write, it leaves you open
to charges of sexism, racism, neocolonialism, homophobia; it reveals
what turns you on and requires you to face the possibility of being
shamed or ridiculed for it, called bizarre or delusional, or accused of
having an agenda or reading too much into a text—as if the produc-
tion of knowledge of human culture could ever be disinterested and
as if any reading could claim to be a simple transcription of a univo-
cal meaning. But deconstruction brings with it a certain obligation
CONCLUSION 209
to attend to a text and say what one sees, and then to reflect upon
how such a sighting is historically possible, as well as that to which
it might be blind. Whatever my quarrels with the sometimes overly
polemical and unnecessarily divisive tone of the queer unhistoricists,
I am nonetheless sympathetic to their queer efforts to trump the posi-
tivism card.
The contradictions of Italian masculinity, as they are worked
through, over, and out in works of art, provide an occasion for anti-
homophobic inquiry and so demand our attention. Italian cultural
production is somewhat unique in this regard, at least compared to
that of much of the rest of the so-called West, twentieth-century
examples of Italian art often unjustly ignored due to the historical
taint of fascism. And for someone like me—who grew up wearing
navy and brown so as to try and avoid drawing attention to him-
self –Italian men’s fashion, for example, is a source of profound plea-
sure. To be authorized to wear pretty clothes has provided me with a
great deal of happiness.
But this happiness is always in tension with an awareness of my
privilege, and I am somewhat ashamed of my melodramatic attach-
ment to Italian clothes. Italian men’s fashion allows me to gesture
toward a truth that other clothes do not, to struggle to bring into
being a subjectivity resistant to and even defiant of hegemonic defini-
tions of gender and sexuality, but also one that I know authorizes me
to move into certain classed and gendered spaces in a way that, with-
out both the authority of fashion and a great deal of practice, I never
would have dared. On the other hand: by virtue of fortuitous coin-
cidence, traveling recently through northern England, I was publicly
humiliated by a drunken young man for wearing what he felt were
inappropriately gendered trousers—trousers designed by an Italian.
The best one can do is to continue to explore these conundrums,
to make legible the grounds of one’s reading itineraries, and to foster
an attentiveness to the texts of Italian masculinity, an attentiveness
that might open up history to its contradictions so that alternatives
might appear. At a time when, in the US academy, the pressure to
produce instrumental knowledge is oppressive—perhaps even, to risk
the melodramatic, dangerous—keeping a space open for speculation
seems a worthwhile project. Even if one’s speculations are sometimes
dismissed as being too queer for words.
No tes
Introduction: Italian Masculinity and Melodrama

1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.
2. Additionally: the Austrian soldier Franz in Visconti’s Senso claims
that Italian revolutions are full of “confetti and mandolins”; the leer-
ing German Major Bergmanns of Rossellini’s Roma, città aperta
analyzes the Italian character in similar terms.
3. As an antidote to this melodrama and cynicism, de Sanctis calls for, in
Stewart-Steinberg’s words, “realism and the scientific method” (16).
4. I use these terms, anachronistically, to refer to same and different gen-
der object choice respectively, keeping in mind that the categories homo-
sexual and heterosexual are the product of the nineteenth century.
5. On the coexistence of competing models, see Sedgwick, Epistemology
44–48. On some of the ways in which an imaginary Islam figured in
the invention in the so-called West of sodomy, for example, as well
as the way early Christianity linked male homosexual behavior with
effeminacy, see Jordan 10–22, in particular.
6. Williams argues that “independently of Greek influence, Roman
moral traditions always allowed for sexual practices between males
in certain configurations and contexts” (14). Pollini adds, “Although
ambisexuality was the norm for the Roman male, it was a qualified
norm because . . . a Roman male citizen was expected to be the pen-
etrator (fututor, paedicator,or irrumator)” (24). Eva Cantarella notes
that Roman society had its own mores around homosexuality that
were then augmented in the late republican period by Greek practices.
Concerning knowledge of Suetonius’s biographies of the Caesars
during the Renaissance, in 1470, two different editions appeared in
Italy (Rolfe 206).
7. Because Antinous was not a freeborn Roman, their liaison—evidence
of which survived antiquity to solicit disapproval from early Christian
(and some pagan ) writers of the third and fourth centuries AD
(Pagels; Cantarella)—created no contemporary scandal (Williams 64).
8. I have deliberately not translated these Latin terms, for, as Cantarella’s
argument suggests, their meanings continue to be debated.
9. In late antiquity, however, Roman sexual ethics changed to the point
where, by the time of Justinian, homosexual activity was treated as a
crime punishable by castration and even death. See Cantarella.
212 NOTES
10. As Floyd notes, “This reification of desire compels a reconstitutiton

of the very gender epistemology that mediates it,” for psychoanalysis
itself notes that, on the one hand, what is presumed to be normal is
the situation wherein desire is fueled by gender difference. On the
other hand, it acknowledges that desire can also be fueled by gen-
der sameness (Floyd 64). This contradiction played itself out in early
sexological (and literary) discourse (Hewitt).
11. Reading Sedgwick, Floyd argues that while the reification of desire
makes possible the construction of majority (heterosexual) and
minority (homosexual) sexual subjectivities, a universalized sexual
desire “presupposes a sexual desire irreducible to and disruptive of
subjectivity as such” (Floyd 62).
12. Although significantly more sophisticated than many critiques of
Foucault’s account of the homosexual as a nineteenth-century per-
sonage, ultimately, Jordan’s argument that medieval theologian
“Peter Damian attributes to the Sodomite many of the kinds of fea-
tures that Foucault finds only in the nineteenth-century definition”
of the homosexual is unconvincing (163). For Damian’s account of
subjectivity is of course a religious one, while the modern homosex-
ual is, according to Foucault, the product of a complex interweaving
of juridical, medical, psychoanalytic, and literary discourses, the reli-
gious playing a comparatively minor role. However, Jordan’s locating
in the past of the discursive traces of what will become the homo-
sexual is impressive. See also, for example, his reading of a medieval
account of the physiological characteristics of the sodomite (123).
13. My assumption is that a transdisciplinary approach will yield differ-
ent insights than a more restricted analysis might. Clearly, I have
more training as a reader of film than of either painting or music.
As a result, I have had to forgo a discussion of some finer points—
for example, the influence of northern painting on Caravaggio, or
Puccini’s musical relationship to the veristi. Hopefully the breadth of
view made possible by placing various art forms alongside one another
will be sufficiently gratifying for the reader to forgive me any overly
speculative claims. At the same time, throughout the book, I have to
varying degree relied upon terms from the analytical vocabularies of
painting, music, and film. Given my training, this is particularly true
of the film chapters. I trust that the reader “outside” of these disci-
plines will bear with me as I demonstrate some of the formal means
whereby the melodramatic sensibility is conveyed.
14. John W. O’Malley credits Pope Pius IX with equating “everything
that happened since the Reformation” with the modern world (22).
15. Writing about Puccini’s Tosca, for example, as one writer put it, “secular-
ism would prove to be a much weaker force in liberal Italy than in [the
contemporaneous] France of the Third Republic” (Davis, John 144).
16. To differentiate late Renaissance poet Ottavio Rinuccini’s works from
operas, Tomlinson calls the former “music-dramas.” Monteverdi set
NOTES 213
Rinuccini for voice; Tomlinson specifically mentions the only surviv-

ing fragment of Monteverdi’s opera L’Arianna (579).
17. Perhaps not coincidentally, Caravaggio’s The Musicians and The Lute
Player may illustrate this genre, dear to his patron Francesco Maria
del Monte. Macioce 236.
18. On the development of opera and its relationship to the pastoral play,
see Ronga; Ferrari-Barassi 31–35 in particular.
19. On the pastorale, see also Savio, “Pastorale.”
20. On the relationship between French and Italian theater at the origins
of melodrama, see Carlson; Kimbell 461. Kotzebue’s memoirs of Italy
were translated into French by Pixérécourt (Kotzebue Souvenirs).
The two playwrights were—and are—often linked (Dickinson 21).
Many of Kotzebue’s plays were themselves translated into Italian and
performed in Italy (Kotzebue Commedie scelte; on his success, 8 in
particular).
21. Reading Deleuze and Massumi, Hennessy highlights “the facet of
intensity that is unassimilable to consciousness and symbolic order-
ing” (213).
22. Amelio implies that his decision to come out is at least in part moti-
vated by the much publicized suicides, in 2013, of several gay youths
in Rome. “Gianni Amelio.” On his coming out, see also Aspesi.
1 Caravaggio and the Melodramatic Sensibility

1. Spear instead argues that it was Roger Fry’s twentieth-century efforts
that led to a reevaluation of Caravaggio “in earnest” (24).
2. Gilbert approvingly cites Howard Hibbard in this regard, and
Gilbert’s study is devoted to developing this thesis (79). Some three
hundred years earlier, critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1616–90) spe-
cifically (and grudgingly) admired in the Deposition of Christ “its
spontaneous classicism translated in a natural style” (cited in Sgarbi 35).
Freedberg also locates in Caravaggio this mixture of realism and clas-
sicism; see 64 in particular.
3. In 1603, Cardinal Ottavio Parravicino suggested that Caravaggio’s
paintings were “halfway between sacred and profane.” Cited in
Richards 42. Richards adds, however, that the meaning of this phrase
is still debated.
4. Because as a group these critics to whom I refer call Caravaggio
either a naturalist or a realist, I will use the terms interchangeably—
recognizing, however, that some scholars draw a distinction between
the two. See note 11, below, for an example in which two critics use
the terms interchangeably.
5. Wright is referring here to The Madonna of the Pilgrims, some-
times called the Madonna of Loreto. While Bellori lists it among the
Caravaggios “that displeased,” (cited in Gilbert 177) it was not ever
rejected.
214 NOTES
6. Dempsey thus calls Caravaggio’s naturalism “specular”—one that

“produces the effect of light reflecting, mirrorlike, from the smooth
surface of the painting itself, and hence of an actual world in a moment
of flux,”—the other, “macular,” a naturalism based on a loose brush-
stroke and associated with Titian and the Venetian painters (96).
Like M. H. Abrams, Dempsey reminds us that the “universe”
mimetic art imitates cannot automatically be equated with the quo-
tidian, as, in different historical periods, the “real” that artists were
exhorted to mimic was defined in different ways. Both Dempsey
and Abrams link this reminder to Aristotle’s Poetics, as does Braider
(“Fountain” 289), who speaks of two different Renaissance tradi-
tions of imitation, one that mimics the external world, the second,
other artworks and their idealization of reality (“Fountain” 286–
87). According to Braider, Caravaggio breaks with the past by imi-
tating not an idealized but a quotidian reality (“Fountain” 291).
However, Abrams and Braider disagree about Philip Sidney in par-
ticular, Braider quoting Sidney to demonstrate that the latter was a
proponent of art as mimesis (“Fountain” 287) and Caravaggio as a
naturalist (“Fountain” 291). In order to make this case, however,
he alters the supporting quote from Sidney, dropping the last few
words. According to Abrams, by the time of Caravaggio, the purpose
of art is understood, at least by Sidney, as not primarily imitation but
rather persuasion (14). My own reading of Caravaggio as melodrama-
tist is thus supported by Sidney’s (and Abrams’) implicit contentions
that Baroque art’s focus is what Abrams calls “pragmatic” or rhetori-
cal rather than mimetic, and that Caravaggio’s artwork needs to be
understood, as Benjamin suggests of the Baroque, not as imitation
(mimesis) but allegory (rhetoric)—and, by extension, not naturalism
but melodrama.
7. Martin goes to tortuous lengths to make the “naturalism” label stick.
He notes “the trompe-l’oeil realism” of the Basket of Fruit without
mentioning the highly unnatural flatness of the image, its blank back-
ground, and the unconventional point of view—as if we are staring
at the basket dead on (62). Straining to account for the combination,
in the Calling of St. Matthew, of biblical and contemporary costume,
Martin asserts, “In his determination to translate the biblical event
into the terms of ordinary experience, Caravaggio actually carries his
‘naturalism’ to the point of inconsistency” (58).
8. Caravaggio’s aesthetic in these large-scale religious paintings cannot
be extended to the entirety of his work. Also, given my focus, I have
not taken into account whatever changes in his style occurred over
the course of his career.
9. Rahill suggests that melodrama emerged in France and England simul-
taneously, though he still credits Pixérécourt with being “the father of
the form” (xiv). In the German context, Pixérécourt’s colleague, August
von Kotzebue, is usually credited with melodrama’s development.
NOTES 215
10. The bibliography on Caravaggio is immense. As a nonspecialist, I

enter into this discussion gingerly and with a great respect for all of
the art historians whose work I discuss, even those with whom I take
issue. For a forceful Freudian reading, see Bersani and Dutoit.
11. For a fascinating essay on the methodological problems of reading
seventeenth century Italian painting, see Cropper and Dempsey.
About Caravaggio they argue first for an acknowledgement of his
“revolutionary realism” but then insist that “to treat his art as natu-
ralistic only . . . is equally to misunderstand it, normalize it, to give it
generic identity, to suppress its revolutionary stance in relation to the
traditions of both art and nature” (498).
12. While Davenport suggests that “references to Caravaggio in nineteenth-
century France are limited” (29n18), she nonetheless links French
Romanticism and Caravaggio, “that prototypical Romantic” (25).
13. No such painting by Caravaggio is in the Doria Pamphili today, and
I cannot determine to what existing Caravaggio, if any, this refers.
The 1937 Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts of the City of Detroit
mentions having acquired such a painting and lists it as an early work
of the artist’s (Ford 70). Presumably this refers to the Fruit Vendor,
now attributed to an anonymous “Pensionante del Saraceni” (Spike
CD-ROM 351). But the museum’s account of the provenance of the
painting does not include the Doria Pamphili; instead, it lists the
painting as being in London from at least 1806. Prior to that, it was
believed to have been in Rome. In another version of his memoirs,
Kotzebue attributes what sounds like Simon Vouet’s Fortune Teller
to Caravaggio and claims he saw it at the Capo Di Monte (Travels,
Vol 2, 168). Or else the painting referenced is The Card Sharps, now
at the Kimbell museum, but that painting was in Rome at the time
of Kotzebue’s travels to Naples. We know from his memoirs that
Kotzebue also traveled to Paris and visited the Louvre.
14. At the time, however, it was thought to have been painted by Guido
Reni, not being attributed to Caravaggio until after Pixérécourt’s death.
15. Franklin instead dates the painting’s commission to “some time after
July 1602” but suggests that it was completed within a year or so (18).
16. San Luigi dei Francesi provides an excellent opportunity to compare
the styles of the two rivals, as, in addition to its Contarelli chapel, it
contains a Baglione depicting the visit of the magi.
17. Additionally, like me, Bayman believes that Brooks’s argument needs
to be rethought in light of Italian melodrama in particular, “given
the way that suffering in Italian melodrama is so definitely related to
a Catholic understanding of the universe and its meaning” (personal
correspondence).
18. “The growth of self-administered devotions among the laity . . . reduced
lay dependence on the parish clergy” (Wright 7). O’Malley provides
a brief survey of reform councils in the century prior to Trent; see
Trent, What Happened 23–48.
216 NOTES
19. Wright insists that it was secular rulers, rather than either “papal pre-
rogatives” or “curial centralization,” that hampered this reassertion
of the authority of local bishops (12).
20. Paul III’s predecessor, Clement VII, “had had Copernicus’ theory
explained to him” (Shrimplin 270).
21. Caravaggio lived with Cardinal del Monte from roughly 1595–1600
(Christiansen Caravaggio Rediscovered 10). Cardinal Scipione
Borghese also patronized both the painter and the scientist (Westfall)
and in his correspondence Galileo mentions meeting Girolamo
Mattei, nephew of Caravaggio’s patron the Cardinal Mattei, after
Caravaggio’s death (Galilei 17).
22. Caravaggio’s still lives are notorious for their portrayal of overripe
fruits.
23. Derek Jarman’s film effectively suggests the lengths to which
Caravaggio must have gone to stage his compositions, given that he
painted from life. See also in this context Christiansen’s comment
that “all of Caravaggio’s contemporaries viewed his practice of paint-
ing from a live model to be the single most outstanding feature of his
work” (“Caravaggio and ‘L’esempio’” 422).
24. According to some critics, that inexpressible is the artist’s inner life
(Sgarbi, Freedberg). Such conclusions reveal Romanticism’s lingering
influence on Caravaggio studies and risk a symptomatic and anachro-
nistic repetition of Romantic conceits.
25. Compare Brooks’s account of the melodramatist to this descrip-
tion of Caravaggio’s paintings: “Caravaggio represents the ‘decisive
moment,’ in which reality is composed before us to give us back its
profound meaning” (Sgarbi 43). Or this, from Fried: “one begins to
imagine a split or division between the inward condition which by its
very nature can seem unrepresentable (if nevertheless somehow intu-
itable), and the outward being” (The Moment 101). It is this split that
melodrama continually explores. In her account of the Baroque and
what she terms “the major foundation of its aesthetic”—allegory—
Christine Buci-Glucksmann writes, “allegory has a sensual charac-
ter. It is grounded in a realism of pathos and passion that fragments
realty, exasperates it, and mortifies it by staging—in painting, as in
theater or opera—a veritable dramaturgy of passions” (6).
26. The artist in effect rejects what Varriano has called the two ways in
which, “according to the classical doctrine of Imitation, the vulgarity
of Nature must be transformed in order to create Art” (20).
27. For a refutation of the idea of the overarching influence of Borromeo,
see Hall and Cooper, who argue that his influence was local, con-
fined primarily to his own Archbishopric.
28. For an initial summary of the debates around the theological content
of Caravaggio’s works, see Christiansen “Caravaggio’s ‘Death.’”
29. In fact, a church like Sant’Agnese did both, combining small size
with an elaborate Baroque interior. For a comparison of architect
NOTES 217
Borromini’s and Caravaggio’s aesthetics, see Saggio 14–19, who

argues that both artists “composed from below” (19). Also of obvi-
ous significance: Il Gesu is the mother church of the Jesuits, char-
acterized by a history of “unconditional papal service” (Puca). Hall,
however, recently argues that, in certain cases, transformations of
church space such as the removal of rood screens were the result of
the efforts of post-Tridentine secular rulers and not directed by eccle-
siastical authorities (3–4).
30. O’Malley’s argument is that, while the pope saw the goals of the
Council as an attempt to reassert, in the face of Lutheran heresies,
true church doctrine, the Emperor hoped for a reconciliation with
the Lutherans.
31. Zuffi attempts to identify several recurrent models; see 164.
32. Admittedly, Diderot is speaking specifically here of easel painting,
and Varriano suggests that at least some of Caravaggio’s formal
choices have to be understood as unique responses to the problem of
creating paintings suitable for the physical spaces for which they were
intended (Varriano 35–50) Gilbert, too, pursues, quite convincingly,
this argument. On concerns around the phrase “Classical Hollywood
Cinema,” see Hansen “Mass Production.”
33. According to Benjamin, this is what distinguishes the Baroque and
Romanticism, allegory and symbol, for the symbol posits “the unity
of the material and the transcendental object” 160. Interestingly, he
calls the positing of this unity a “distorted conception of the sym-
bol,” and it is this reading of the symbol that animates both Day’s
and Cowan’s claims that Benjamin does not reject the symbol but, in
Cowan’s argument, “deconstructs” it (111).
34. Similar to Sgarbi, Puglisi argues that Caravaggio “challenged post-
Tridentine standards of decorum in religious art” (28). Richards
more cautiously suggests, “the question of the specific influence of
religious currents on Caravaggio’s art continues to provoke debate”
(56). Franklin also describes Caravaggio as “frequently at odds with
official church teachings” (22). Varriano concludes that it is “unlikely
that Caravaggio followed Tridentine or post-Tridentine prescrip-
tions with any conscious intent” (76). Unfortunately, as evidence, he
cites the rejection of certain commissions—a continuing matter for
debate.
35. Vodret argues that this painting shows a detailed knowledge of the
Book of Judith, which describes that Holofernes was beheaded in two
blows. See 101–2.
36. The commentary in the oratorio suggests that the saint is already
dead, but, based on my own observation, I suggest that, as Vodret
argues of the Judith painting, what is being capture here is “between”
life and death.
37. Varriano argues, “The presence of the spectator is implied in nearly
all Caravaggio’s work, and that presence is a crucial component of
218 NOTES
the realism for which he is renowned” (49). Suggesting that realist

texts acknowledge the presence of the spectator strikes me as an idio-
syncratic version of realism, arising from Varriano’s determination to
establish Caravaggio as a realist. In most definitions of realist painting,
literature, film, and drama, it is precisely the spectator’s presence that is
denied, as Diderot’s previously cited comments imply. In most theories
of realism, the sign’s effacement of itself is necessarily accompanied by
a denial of the reader’s presence precisely because reality itself is not
“staged” for anyone but God. Caravaggio’s eschewing of linear per-
spective is precisely a rejecting of this “centering” of the spectator.
38. In this particular canvas, color rather than line is used to create the
illusion of the arch having depth.
39. As Mancini has it, it is “impossible to put in one room a multitude
of people acting out the story, with that light coming from a single
window, having to laugh or cry or pretending to walk while having
to stay still in order to be copied” (108–9). For a fascinating geneal-
ogy of the “decorum concepts” that argues that their meaning can
only be understood “as they appear on the page, in their rhetorical
embeddedness” (87), see Gaston.
40. Varriano provides a brief history of gesture in Italian painting, and
traces changes in Caravaggio’s portrayal of facial expressions across
his career (101–13).
41. Braider provocatively suggests that Renaissance perspective of neces-
sity also deconstructs the subject, as the subject is itself produced by
the painting. The subject is both the one who seizes a space and the
one for whom a space has been constructed, a space that must be
occupied; in Althusserian terms, perspective transforms the observer
into the subject who is hailed by the painting. Whatever illusory mas-
tery perspective produces, that mastery is dependent upon having sub-
mitted to the painting’s logic. Without referring to Foucault—and,
unfortunately, using the term “person” rather than subject—Braider
comes close to positing a Foucauldian understanding of the subject
as one who is both the subject of and subject to: the not-object whose
autonomy has been conferred (and not willed; in Althusser’s term,
interpellated) by dint of being subjugated by an Other. See Braider
“Fountain” 304.
42. According to Buci-Glucksmann, “Distinct from a homogeneous,
geometrical and substantialist Cartesian space, the open, serial,
Baroque spatiality, in the process of becoming and in a metamorpho-
sis of forms, derives from recovery, coexistence, the play of light and
forces, the engendering of beings from the undulating line and the
ellipse. All aspects of a topological space that refuses identification
and fixed localization of the object” (28).
43. I am smoothing over the opposing ways in which theorists of the
Baroque read Aristotle and Plato, but it would take me too far afield
of my topic to investigate the various interpretations of the two.
NOTES 219
44. This reading of the Baroque foregrounds what Gail Day has called
“the allegory-symbol distinction as a dichotomy” and the way that
distinction has been framed in contemporary art theory as “the
opposition of dialectics [the symbol] and deconstruction [allegory]”
(106). Day’s own response is to suggest that “the concept of allegory
itself seems torn” between the two (107). The contradiction between
Romanticism’s embrace of Caravaggio and rejection of allegory seems
worth pursuing (though Benjamin suggests the rejection of allegory
was a misreading on the Romantics’ part). Both Day and Cowan
argue that Benjamin does not reject the symbol but complicates it.
45. “The language of the baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion in
the part of the elements which make it up” (Benjamin 207).
46. Alternately, Braider suggests that the extent to which the idea of the
Cartesian subject ruled the Classical age has been overstated by its
critics, including Foucault (Matter).
2 Caravaggio’s Melodramatic Male Bodies

1. This is arguably not true of The Penitent Magdalene (1594–95),
Martha and Mary Magdalene (c. 1598), or St. Catherine of Alexandria
(c.1598), but only the first of these is in Rome, at the Doria Pamphili.
2. While the OED argues that the term incarnation may be found in
the (late Latin) works of Jerome and Ambrose, it traces the etymol-
ogy of the word carnal to the Latin carnalis, fleshly, the different
senses of the term carnal as “related by blood,” “corporeal,” and
“sexual” all dating roughly from the turn of the sixteenth century.
3. Hoping to ward off the specter of homosexuality, elsewhere, an
Italian writer reads, via a citation from the Council of Trent, the
androgyny of Caravaggio’s “Bacchini” as a symbol of Christ’s youth
(Mascherpa 27). For another religious interpretation of the Boy with a
Basket of Fruit, see Coliva. Without naming names, Guarino emphat-
ically refutes the suggestion that this painting is not the Baptist but
rather Gilbert’s profane “Pastor Friso” (128). He pointedly asks why
Michelangelo can be cited as the source of innovations in religious
painting, but not Caravaggio.
4. Both the Phaedrus and the Symposium maintain a space for sexual
gratification via masculine friendships. In the former, a lesser kind of
love is described, one in which the friendship is consummated. Such
a friendship does not achieve the heights of philosophy but is still
noble in its own right. In the latter, a flirting Alcibiades arrives to
complicate Socrates’s final speech and thus keeps in play the debate
concerning the relationship between sexual and Platonic love.
5. While “the sensuous in the Counter-Reformation church” is increas-
ingly recognized, (Hall and Cooper), O’Malley qualifies his remarks
by adding that, in the post Tridentine years, “Augustinian influences
remained strong, sometimes very strong” (“Trent, Sacred” 41).
220 NOTES
6. Gilbert’s positing of a synthesis between naturalism and classicism

in Caravaggio provides the condition of possibility for misreading
the nudity in Caravaggio’s paintings, for, emphasizing naturalism, he
assumes that, because of its quotidian familiarity, in the artist’s own
time, male nudity would have gone largely unremarked and, conse-
quently, not perceived as erotic. Contra Gilbert, Varriano describes
Clement the VII as “obsessed with modesty” (61). Gilbert’s reading
cannot explain, for example, why the genitals of the Capitoline St.
John are clearly visible and yet disguised by shadow in the Doria
Pamphili copies, particularly given that the first record in the inven-
tory of one of the copies dates from 1666 (Marini 135). Despite that
it hopes to delineate those differences “that we can note without
need of in-depth investigation,” astonishingly, a study comparing the
paintings fails to mention this obvious variation (Correale 39). Even
owing to the conditions of the Doria copies, for anyone willing to
look, the differences between the treatments of the boys’ penises is
obvious. Beyond degree of shadow, in the Doria paintings, the boys’
genitals are differently shaped from the original’s and painted with a
softer line; see Correale 29 for a detail.
7. By Caravaggio’s time, Mannerists like Rosso Fiorentino (1494–
1540), Camillo Procaccini (1551–1629), Pontormo (1494–1557),
Bronzino (1503–1572) and Beccafumi (1486–1551) are all experi-
menting with muscular male bodies, but Caravaggio’s style—his use
of light and color palette in particular—is a rejection of Mannerism.
On the other hand, as Gilbert notes, Carracci’s classicism leads him,
too, to paint muscled naked men. In most of the above mentioned
painters’ representations of Christ, however, he is classicized in the
sense of having a more “bulky” muscular torso than the Christ of
Caravaggio, who tends to be more lithe.
8. Not that all Renaissance artists were not concerned with this. As
Steinberg argues, “As for the sexual component in the manhood
of Christ, it was normally left unspoken, suppressed originally by
the ethos of Christian asceticism, ultimately by decorum” (15). The
examples of Christ’s sexuality from the Renaissance I discuss are pre-
cisely several that I would propose courted a failure of decorum, and
decorum was precisely a concern of Counter-Reformation writers.
9. O’Malley argues of the late twelfth and early thirteenth century that,
“To a degree never experienced before, the most urgent and fun-
damental task facing theology was how to reconcile the Bible with
philosophy” (“Trent, Sacred” 39–40). (He adds that, while Plato’s
influence was strong in the Middle Ages, his works were not trans-
lated until the fifteenth century; 40).
10. It is telling that this same scholar calls the Mantegna painting “strik-
ingly lacking in Albertian decorum” and cites its relationship to
Caravaggio’s Deposition (Eisler 13).
NOTES 221
11. The ignudi of the Sistine Chapel did seem to have further opened the
door to a variety of different ways to render the male body an erotic
spectacle, from a neoclassicism to Mannerism to Caravaggio’s work, at
least until the more strenuous observers of the Counter-Reformation
started adding fig leafs to everything, including Michelangelo’s statue
of the Risen Christ.
12. For an early Renaissance example of a scene of baptism where in fact
the garment Jesus wears eroticizes his nudity, see Ghiberti’s 1427
bronze on the baptismal fount in the baptistery of Siena’s Duomo.
13. The Sistine Chapel’s earlier baptism, as well as the baptisms, origi-
nal and copies, at London’s National Gallery (copy), the Musée des
Beaux-Arts de Rouen, The Canterbury City Council Museum (copy),
all earlier than the Polittico, feature a Christ whose hands are closed
in prayer; all also feature a simpler loincloth. The Vienna version,
which features the more elaborately tied garment, depicts Christ with
his hands folded, however.
14. This trope is also used by Bronzino in his Return from Egypt of
c.1540, also called The Panciatichi Holy Family, in which the infant
St. John squeezes his cousin Jesus’s nipple.
15. This painting was itself anticipated by a 1512/1515 flagellation
by Perugino’s student Bacchiacca, now at the National Gallery
in Washington, DC, which forms an interesting bridge between
Perugino’s and Signorelli’s depictions and del Piombo’s. In
Bacchiacca’s version, one of the torturers is completely naked except
for a cap. Both the other torturer and Christ wear slender, elaborately
folded loincloths that sit low on their hips. As in Signorelli’s version,
the figures are posed in a triangular shape, and, as in both Signorelli
and del Piombo’s versions, set against a backdrop of classical architec-
ture. One difference is the deep perspective of Bacchiacca’s version,
as well as the fact that the architecture is itself set against a land-
scape. The influence of Perugino on this painting is unmistakable,
but Bacchiacca’s depiction is arguably more stylized than any of the
other examples, excessively elegant, given its subject matter.
16. A shepherd in the Nativity scene in Messina is similarly exposed,
his shirt having slipped off his shoulder to reveal his muscular torso.
Another instance in which exposed male flesh both does and does
not make sense narratively is the Messina Raising of Lazarus, for,
while we would expect the grave diggers to be in some state of
undress, why their arms are lit so as to draw our eyes to them cannot
be explained by the narrative content of the painting.
17. Other examples of prominent rear-ends include the young figure
in the foreground pulling the cards out of his back pocket in the
Kimbell Art Museum’s I Bari, emphasized by both the luxurious
fabric and the framing of the scene; the figure in the right foreground
whose shovel strikes the dirt in the Burial of St. Lucy—once more,
222 NOTES
his rear-end, and the shoulder of the male figure opposite him, are
two of the brightest spots in a very dark painting, and the attention
on his buttocks is “doubled” by the elaborate folds of the silvery gar-
ment he wears, which is itself reminiscent of the garment worn by
the executioner in the Malta decapitation of St. John; in the Calling
of St. Matthew, the figure whose back is to use—though admittedly,
in this instance, what is highlighted by the lighting are the muscles
of his legs beneath his tights; the man crouched down and about to
hoist up the cross on which St. Peter is hung. All of these of course
can be attributed to both the narrative portrayed and Caravaggio’s
skill in portraying light and fabric, though this does not explain why
the buttocks are often illuminated, as in the Martyrdom of St. Peter.
Yes, it is the result of the placement of the source of the light, but why
Caravaggio chose to place the light in this position is not always clear.
As is also the case with the Malta St. John, for example, in the Burial,
there appear to be at least two sources of light. Because there are sev-
eral planes of action—the crowd in the background; the priest and
St. Lucy’s mother in front of the crowd; in the foreground, St. Lucy’s
prone body, the grave digger on the left, and the grave digger on the
right—it is difficult for the viewer to construct a single logical point
from which the source of light originates. This painting is one in
particular in which Caravaggio’s failure to adopt the conventions of
Albertian perspective contributes to this difficulty in spatially locat-
ing the source of the light.
18. Similarly, the scene of St. Peter’s martyrdom provides our gaze with a
particularly sexy saint, nipples erect, chest muscular, and abs defined
via the saint’s attempt to raise his head.
19. And he looks familiar; perhaps he is the same model that was used to
portray the executioner on the far left in the Martyrdom of St. Peter;
perhaps he is the tormentor who stands to Christ’s right in the Cecconi
Crowning of Thorns; Papa has suggested he is also the man who holds
the Baptist’s head in the London Salomé; 16. He also resembles one
of the men helping to lift Lazarus’s body from its grave.
20. In terms of this one-quarter profile, both surviving versions of the
Supper feature a figure similarly depicted, though neither is as virtu-
oso as the one in the Flagellation, the technique of the Brera version
inferior and the London version more highly defined.
21. Both Leo Bersani and Elizabeth Cowie have, in admittedly different
ways, theorized the ways in which what is sought in the sexual act is
not orgasm but rather its delay, orgasm being a kind of necessary inter-
ruption that maintains sexual fantasy. For both writers, then, delay and
deferral are what constitute the specific pleasure of the sexual.
22. The Malta St. Jerome makes a similar use of the red drapery. It, too,
is excessive in terms of its volume and contrasts markedly with the
brown tones and looser brush stroke used to depict the bedroom in
which Jerome is seated.
NOTES 223
23. In a third Baptist, in the Galleria Borghese, the model is a differ-

ent type, but he possess certain similar characteristics—red cloak,
exposed nipple, and the white cloth that covers the saint’s genitals.
24. Admittedly, Benjamin is writing here of a particular allegorical fig-
ure, but, even in the naming of that figure, he equivocates. Thus he
writes, “Everything about history . . . is expressed in a face—or rather
in a death’s head” (160).
3 T OSC A and Social Melodrama

1. On the popularity of Meyerbeer in Italy, see Körner, “ Music of the
Future,” 196. Donizetti’s Chiara e Sarafina, o il pirata, also featured
a libretto by Felice Romani after a text by Pixérécourt; another of the
playwright’s works is the basis for Donizetti’s Otto mesi in due ore;
Luigi Cherubini’s Faniska is yet another opera based on a text by
Pixérécourt.
2. Van argues that, unlike early post-Revolutionary “bourgeois” melo-
dramas, operatic melodrama “had no pedagogical pretensions,
springing as it did from roots that were more classic, dramatic, and
tragic” (92). Unfortunately, this conclusion does not consider the
classical axiom that all art delights and instructs. Furthermore, in
the case of both melodramatic theater and opera, the audience was
drawn from both bourgeois and working classes.
3. One of the most successful Italian ballets of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury was based on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin
(Körner “Uncle Tom”). Without using the term, Körner implies that
Italian ballet was characterized by melodrama (“Uncle Tom” 729).
4. Usually included in this group are composers Ildebrando Pizzetti
(1880–1968), Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973), and Alfredo
Casella (1883–1947), and critics Fausto Torrefranca (1883–1955)
and Giannotto Bastianelli (1883–1927). See also Sachs.
5. Tosca’s librettists were Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa.
6. The opera was commission in October of 1913 by Siegmund
Eibenschütz and Heinrich Berté of the Vienna Carltheater, a theater
dedicated to light opera (d’Amico “L’operetta” 50).
7. For a summary of the tendency among critics to conflate Puccini him-
self with his heroines, see Wilson, “Modernism,” 434–35. Rugarli
instead proposes Puccini’s wife Elvira as the source of his heroines.
8. Concerning Torrefranca’s 1912 critique of Puccini, Giacomo Puccini
e l’opera internazionale, Amberson provides this useful sum-
mary: “Echoing Otto Weininger’s notorious Sex and Character
(1903) . . . and reflecting the nationalistic milieu, Torrefranca accuses
Puccini and, by extension, verist opera itself of effeminacy, moral
degeneracy, physical impotence, infantilism, and vulgarity” (viii).
9. Calling this post-Romantic period “progressivist” instead, Earle also
suggests that Puccini’s operas are “remarkable examples of a fully
224 NOTES
commercial genre that can incorporate extreme technical sophistica-

tion alongside very broad social appeal” (personal correspondence).
Andreas Huyssen instead proposes that “contrary to the claims of the
champions of the autonomy of art, contrary also to the ideologists of
textuality, the realities of modern life and the ominous expansion of
mass culture throughout the social realm are always already inscribed
into the articulation of aesthetic modernism” (47).
10. An interesting demonstration of the value of Körner’s thesis is Sherry
D. Lee’s linking of Tosca to Alban Berg’s Lulu, both of which, in
modernist fashion, “play on the dynamics of looking, seeing, and
being seen” (171). Lee’s essay is particularly interesting in terms of
the way it suggests a link between Tosca’s reflexivity and Adorno’s
account of modernism (172).
11. As Gabriella Biagi Ravenni and Michele Girardi suggests of Tosca,
“Combining the late 19th-century sensibility of the play by Sardou with
modern modes of expression, ardently admired by Arnold Schoenberg
and Alban Berg, though no less passionately deplored by Mahler,
Puccini, in the best way possible, ushered in the 20th century.”
12. Wagner’s operas were both immensely popular in Italy and constituted
a kind of touchstone or foil (depending upon how one understood
Italian opera’s role in a trans-European context) for Italian compos-
ers. On the reception of Wagner in Italy, see Körner “Music.”
13. Surveying criticism from the period, Giger specifically notes that
Victorien Sardou, author of Tosca’s source material, was “counted
among the verismo authors” by some Italian literary critics (282). On
verismo, see also Corazzol.
14. For a sophisticated analysis of the problem of what might constitute real-
ism in music in the postwar period in particular, see Earle “‘In onore.’”
15. Körner implies that we might add La battaglia di Legnano to this list
of Verdian operas set in the past and perceived, at least by some of its
critics, as melodramatic (“Music of the Future” 192).
16. De Van argues that Verdi’s other melodramas include four figures:
the hero, the tyrant, the heroine, and the judge (95).
17. To cite just a handful of examples of modernist experimentations with
temporality—specifically, the attempt to “re-present” literal time in
opposition to the fictive time of the nineteenth-century Realist novel
and its necessary temporal ellipses—that also open up onto questions
of what constitutes selfhood: Virginia Woolf’s prose in The Waves,
the films of Stan Brakhage, and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search
of an Author.
18. Though clearly there is a temporal ellipsis between Act 1 and Act
2, indicated at the beginning of Act 2 by the libretto’s “È notte.”
Girardi calculates the total hours of story time covered by the plot as
16 (Puccini la vita 80).
19. Sardou’s play is set days after the Battle of Marengo. The libretto of
the opera also makes reference to Napoleon’s victory there.
NOTES 225
20. It was not until the Concordat of 1801 that relations between the
pope and Napoleon were normalized, Napoleon agreeing to recog-
nize Catholicism as the religion of the majority of France.
21. Umberto I was assassinated in July of 1900 as retribution for a mas-
sacre in Milan in 1898 in which unarmed civilians were fired upon
by government troops. On these events as a backdrop to Tosca’s pre-
miere, see E. Weber (91).
22. Because he is writing a particular kind of psychobiography, Rugarli is
required to equate Tosca with Puccini’s wife, Elvira; because Elvira
was jealous, so must be Tosca. Given Puccini’s numerous and well-
documented love affairs, his wife’s jealousy was hardly irrational.
23. While the theme of femininity as masquerade has been a staple of
feminist analysis for decades, until recently, far less attention has been
given to masculinity as performance. Pirandello’s Henry IV, how-
ever, suggests as much (Champagne Aesthetic Modernism).
24. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why do you remain
so far from me, without helping me, without listening to the words of
my lamentations?”
25. “At the hour of our death.”
26. And given its trenchant critique of bourgeois morals, even Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary is far from simply an exercise in the play of signi-
fication. The narrator of Julian Barnes’ novel Flaubert’s Parrot cap-
tures this tension in Flaubert when, in defending the French novelist,
Barnes’s narrator writes on the one hand that “the greatest patriotism
is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly,
viciously” (131) and on the other, that Flaubert “teaches you the most
exact use of language” and the “pre-eminence of . . . Style” (134).
27. Scholars debate the extent to which Puccini’s use of motifs follows
Massenet (Keeffe 21; Girardi Puccini) or Wagner (Wilson Puccini
40–46).
28. Briefly: on the one hand, capitalist patriarchal society depends upon
certain bonds between men (fathers “giving away” their daughters to
another man, for example, or the numerous ways in which business
deals are sealed on the golf course or over a two martini lunch). On
the other, it must ward off the overt eroticization of these bonds, lest
it provoke either a homosexual panic or, given the complex, contra-
dictory historical relationship of male homosexuality to masculinity,
a gender panic that threatens to undermine capitalism’s reliance on a
gendered division of labor and the coding of certain non-remunerated
forms of (“feminine”) labor as nonwork.
4 Puccini’s Sparrow: Longing and L A R ON DI N E

1. Of course, the Protestant Reformation brought to a head long-
standing disputes around the role that good works played in securing
one’s place in heaven, the question of grace, the status of clergy as
226 NOTES
intermediaries between God and the believer, the necessity of the sac-
rament of penance, and the question of one’s “personal” relationship
with God/Jesus—all of which further justify locating traces of the
melodramatic sensibility in the crisis inaugurated by Protestantism.
2. Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers refer to the 1917 orches-
tral score.
3. However we might want to deconstruct the binaries “art/entertain-
ment,” Dyer is certainly correct that, throughout its history, aesthetic
theories produced in the West have always drawn a line between the
two. See Abrams.
4. This theme of the relationship of the older woman to the younger
man reappears in 1950s Hollywood melodrama, perhaps most
famously, in Douglas Sirk’s melodrama All that Heaven Allows.
5. For example: Constanza’s music in Mozart’s The Abduction from the
Seraglio; Ottavio’s “Il mio tesoro” in Don Giovanni, also by Mozart;
Rosina’s “Una Voce Poco fa” from Rossini’s Barber of Seville.
6. For example, Norma’s “Casta Diva” by the former; Norina of Don
Pasquale’s “Quel guardo, il cavaliere” by the latter.
7. In the context of Italian literature, the trope of the sleeping devil
implies detumescence, if not impotence, as it calls up Boccaccio’s
famous story of the corrupt holy man who seduced a naïve young girl
by telling her that he needed to put the devil (his penis) back into hell
(her vagina). In Boccaccio’s story. eventually, the young girl exhausts
her lover, and so his devil, too, seems to have fallen asleep.
8. Interestingly, Rosen is writing here of Beethoven’s An die ferne
Geliebte—what some might consider, at least initially, a far cry from
La Rondine.
9. In other words, his statement is one of the conditions of possibility
for a subsequent “if only,” should his warning be found in the future
to have been valid. Whether or not his warning ought to have been
heeded, it suggests that there is a moral occult beneath the surface
of everyday life, and that, at some future moment, the signs of that
moral occult will be revealed, proving him either right or wrong. This
is evidenced in Puccini’s three rewritings of the end of the opera. For,
while Magda must suffer, the cause of that suffering is, for Puccini,
never settled, except that, however you slice it, that cause is secular—
bourgeois morals, acceded to in two instances by Magda herself, and,
in the third, by Ruggero.
10. Puccini mentions this third revision again to Schnabl in a letter dated
March 4, 1921, calling it “a miracle even in terms of its dramatic
unfolding!” He hoped to have it produced again in Monte Carlo in
1922 by Raoul Gunsbourg (175). That plan never came to fruition,
and after the failure to remount the opera in Monaco, he wrote, “By
now this opera is condemned” (181). He persisted, hoping, even in
1924, to have the opera produced in Paris.
NOTES 227
11. In the United States, melodramas of racial difference, as problematic

as they might in certain respects be, have traversed the history of the
melodramatic sensibility, from, for example, Uncle Tom’s Cabin to
the various versions of Imitation of Life to Lorraine Hansberry’s A
Raisin in the Sun.
12. Given that it was destroyed, I have reconstructed the third version
from other scholars’ accounts, as well as the recording of the previ-
ously mentioned 2007 production.
13. One of the English translations of this third version includes the wal-
let, calling it a purse, but omits the broach. In this version, the wallet
is embroidered with the sparrow; Puccini La Rondine 87; d’Amico
provides this same account—no broach, but rather a wallet embroi-
dered with the bird: “L’operetta,” 55.
5 “Normality . . . what an ugly word!” Contemporary

Queer Melodrama
1. All definitions of the queer are necessarily provisional, as queer is a
figure of liminality and works to resist definitions.
2. For earlier critiques of identity-based criticism and its accompany-
ing politics, see Champagne Ethics, E. Clarke and Gledhill “Recent
Developments.”
3. In the case of Italy, for example, the term “queer” surfaces in the title
of a paper presented at the 1995 Congresso nazionale dell’AISEA,
(Associazione Italiana per le Scienze Etno-Antropologiche), the
theme of which was “Identità, differenze, conflitti” (Notezie 146).
The first official gay pride parade in Italy was held in 1994 in Rome.
See Malagreca, Pustianaz, and Scarmoncin et al.
4. There are also ways in which, however, in its melodramatic romanti-
cizing of the gay couple, Aclà also evokes and appeals to those who
see gay identity as possessing transhistorical characteristics. In other
words, it is also susceptible to a highly affective reaction of “That is
me! But in the Fascist past!”
5. Two notable works of Italian neorealism, Roberto Rossellini’s Roma,
città aperta and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette, explore in melo-
dramatic fashion the obligations of fathers and even father figures to
their sons. Ruth Ben Ghiat has analyzed the portrayal of masculinity
in Italian films of the immediate postwar years for the ways in which
such films respond to the crisis of masculinity that occurred as a
result of the defeat of fascism. Vincent Rocchio has examined recent
attempts to figure the father/son relationship in a number of Italian
films he argues owe a debt to neorealism. On the figure of the child
in Italian film, see, most recently, Hipkins and Pitt.
6. While he does not focus on either melodrama or the body of the
child, Gaoheng Zhang offers a compelling reading of two other
228 NOTES
Amelio films, Lamerica (1994) and Il ladro di bambini (1992), in

terms of their exploration of “masculine identity formation and limi-
nal space” (240).
7. Without calling it melodramatic, for example, the New York Times’s
Stephen Holden specifically faulted for its excesses Aclà’s musical
soundtrack, which he claims “imposes a pretentiously heavy-handed
religiosity to the miners’ suffering.”
8. Rather than doing my own translations, I am relying here on the
film’s subtitles.
9. When, on the other end of the line, the baby begins to cry, he is at
first dismissive of his wife’s concern and wants to keep telling her
about his day with Paolo.
10. Rossi Stuart appears “metrosexual,” a decidedly modern incarnation
of la bella figura whose physicality is closer to a soccer player or swim-
mer than either a gladiator or an ephebe. Additionally, Rossi Stuart’s
mother was an Italian model, and his face is handsome in a way that
has been described by fans as “pretty” and even “gorgeous.” See, for
example, Square.
11. Despite the mass of evidence on the Internet concerning the invest-
ment of some subjects, homo and hetero, in what is known as “water
sports”—something so banal that even Oprah Winfrey once dis-
cussed it on her television show—some readers have questioned my
construction of the scene of Paolo urinating as erotic. Frankly, the
level of denial required to deeroticize urinating is so great that it is
hard to know where to begin to respond, though I might offer as one
example humorous posters in the men’s room of the US chain restau-
rant “Smokey Bones,” placed directly above the urinals, advising men
to keep their eyes forward!
12. As Irigaray argues, in patriarchy, “the ‘incest’ involved in homosexual-
ity has to remain in the realm of pretense” (192; italics in the original).
To reject the heterosexual economy of men as agents of exchange
and women as commodities (192) and “openly interpret the law”
by engaging in homosex (193) would provoke “a general crisis” and
bring “one sort of symbolic system to an end.”
13. At one point early in the film, a series of eye-line matches connecting
Aclà’s gaze to the sight of his parents making love, his father’s naked
ass thrusting into his sleeping mother’s motionless body, suggest the
young man’s disillusionment with this model of lovemaking.
6 Özpetek’s Queer Cinema

1. This trope also appears, for example, in Fellini’s 8 ½. In both films,
the contrast between the mistress and the wife is Manichean, and, in
both cases, the wife knows but pretends not to know about the other
woman.
NOTES 229
2. Another, briefer scene that reminds us of the tension between the said
and the unsaid is one in which Teresa gives the grandmother a shot
of insulin, as she has diabetes. The grandma looks at Teresa and says,
“How ugly you are!” Teresa responds, “I love you too, Signora.” The
scene is underscored with a melancholy melody played on a piano.
3. In other words, he could, for example, have used a more reflexive
device like a screen split to reveal everyone’s faces simultaneously,
but such a choice would obviously not be in keeping with the film’s
aesthetic.
4. Elena clearly recognizes Massimiliano’s flirting when she both intro-
duces herself as “the wife” and, over dinner, catches (and interrupts)
his cruising of her husband. These moments reveal Elena’s ability to
know what she sees and undercut the potentially misogynist image of
the wife oblivious to the possibility of her husband’s “latent” homo-
sexuality. Salvatore is so opaque, however, that it seems he is just
being “friendly” and has no clue that his intentions are being read
otherwise.
5. Özpetek uses this same allegory in La Finestra.
6. It is a commonplace in film studies that, driven by the heterosexual
male character’s desires, many narratives are Oedipal stories that cul-
minate in achieving a goal and winning a woman as a prize.
7. The fact that the “resolution” of the conflict between father and son
only occurs after death suggests melodrama’s refusal of transcen-
dence in this life, as in, for example, Dark Victory, whose very title
testifies to this refusal.
Conclusion
1. For a sophisticated account of Woolf’s modernism that, without
mentioning melodrama, complicates Brooks’ distinction between
the melodramatic sensibility and Flaubert’s modernism, see Koppen,
who argues that we might read “Woolf’s project of aesthetic trans-
mutation of life into art in To the Lighthouse in light of a conception
of art as at once disembodied and embodied, as a conversion/turn
away from life and as experientially grounded” (378, italics in the
original).
2. Aidoo’s modernism allegorizes the divided consciousness of the post-
colonial subject, for example, while Bazin trusts that cinema might
restore to reality its ambiguity.
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Inde x
Abrams, M. H., 214n6, 226n3 162; Nadine’s Mother

Adami, Giuseppe, 120–1, 138 (Nicole), 161–3, 165–6, 171;
Adorno, Theodor, 12, 89, 224n10 Paolo, 161–73; lighting,
Adwa, 3 163–4, 168; music, 162,
aesthetic modernism. 163, 169
See modernism Felice chi è diverso, 24
aesthetics, 9, 12, 14–15, 21, 33, Ladro di Bambini, Il, 228n6
59, 60, 62–3, 72, 85–6, Lamerica, 228n6
90, 164, 177, 205, 217n29, Amico, Fedele d’, 120–1, 138, 140,
226n3, 229n1 142–3, 223n6, 227n13
affect, 3, 10, 12, 21–2, 24, 40, 83, Anderson, Benedict, 90
101, 120, 147, 151, 153, André, Michel, 13
185, 191 Anicet-Bourgeois, Auguste, 85
see also capitalism Antier, Benjamin, 85
affective mapping. See Flatley, Antinous, 5–6, 211n7
Jonathan antiquity, 7, 57, 211n7
agency, 53, 124, 142, 143, 165, 201 see also Rome
Aidoo, Ama Ata, 205, 229n2 Aristotle, 34, 214n6, 218n43
Albertian perspective. Arrotino, Uffizi, 71
See perspective art, 12, 27–8, 34–6, 40, 47–51, 55,
allegory, 17, 21–2, 34, 40, 48, 54, 86, 96, 122, 147, 151, 209,
55, 70, 82–3, 144, 184, 212n13
214n6, 216n25, 219n44, and entertainment, 19–21, 120,
229n5 141, 226n3
see also Benjamin, Walter; and memorialization, 12, 179,
melodrama 196, 203–4
Alonge, Roberto, 110–13 postrevolutionary Soviet, 107
Althusser, Louis, 218n41 theories of, 32, 37–8, 52–3,
Amberson, Deborah, 85, 89, 223n8 56, 60–1, 64, 107, 205–6,
Amelio, Gianni, 8–9, 22–5, 149, 214n6, 215n11, 216n26,
164, 167, 170–3, 175, 218n41, 219n44, 223n2,
213n22 224n9, 229n1
Chiavi di casa, Le, 149–50, see also Baroque; Bauhaus;
161–74 Caravaggio, Michelangelo;
characters: Alberto, 161, melodrama; modernism;
164; Gianni, 161–71, 173; Renaissance; Artigas,
Kristina, 163, 168; Nadine, Mariano, 32
248 INDEX
Aspesi, Natalia, 213n22 allegory, on, 22, 98, 140, 161,

Australia, 152, 161, 173 172, 203, 217n33, 219n44,
Austria, 66, 87, 89, 211n2 223n24
Aystran, Fiona, 176 baroque, on the, 34–5, 41, 48,
52, 62, 214n6, 216, 217n33,
Bacchiacca 219n45
Flagellation of Christ, 221n15 classicism, on, 35
Baglione, Giovanni, 29 Berezin, Mabel, 14
Visit of the Magi, 215n16 Berg, Alban, 87
Balzac, Honoré de, 94 Lulu, 224
Barnes, Julian Berger, John, 52–3, 55
Flaubert’s Parrot, 225n26 Bergson, Henri, 96, 116
Baroque, The, 13, 15–16, 28, 33, 35, Berlusconi, Silvio, 3–6, 57
55, 67, 71, 81, 86, 109–10, Bernini, Gian Lorenzo
153, 216n25, 218n43 Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, 59
as response to the Reformation, St. Teresa in Ecstasy, 15, 44, 59,
36, 38, 40–1, 47, 58–9, 73 81, 82
theories of the, 30, 34, 39, Bern-Joffroy, André, 13
42, 48–9, 51–3, 62–5, Bersani, Leo, 83, 111, 207,
78, 82–3, 205, 214n6, 222n21, 215n10
216n29, 217n33, 218n42, Bertolazzi, Rossella, 86, 120
219n45–45 Bhabha, Homi K., 173
see also Benjamin, Walter; Bible, The, 104, 220n9
Caravaggio, Michelangelo; Boccaccio, Giovanni, 30, 226n7
melodrama body, 41, 52, 54, 57, 59, 60, 76, 82,
Bastianelli, Giannotto, 92–3, 223n4 115, 151
Bauhaus, The, 107 ancien régime, 59
Baxandall, Michael, 37 disabled, 150, 161–8, 171–3
Bayman, Louis, 10, 14, 25, 30, 45, female, 22, 72, 101, 112, 147,
47, 65, 70, 92, 150, 176, 151, 171, 180, 222n17,
215n17 228n13
Bazin, André, 205, 229n2 male, 4, 14, 24, 28, 41, 42,
Becattini, Edoardo, 176–7 64–5, 69, 7–4, 80, 147, 150,
Beccafumi, 220n7 152, 154–6, 165–8, 170,
Beethoven, Ludwig van 207, 221n11, 227n6, 228n13
An die ferne geliebte, 226n8 see also Christ; embodiment
bel canto, 132 Bolshevism, 89
bella figura, la, 4, 6, 15, 228n10 Borghese, Cardinal Scipione, 36,
Bellassai, Sandro, 90 55, 216n21
Bellini, Vincenzo, 132 Galleria Borghese, 223n23
Norma: Casta Diva, 226n6 Borromeo, Charles, 36, 51, 58,
Bellori, Giovan Pietro, 29, 39, 45, 216n27
213n5 Borromini, Francesco, 216n29
Ben Ghiat, Ruth, 227 Bourgeoisie, 18, 19, 45, 91, 92, 95,
Benjamin, Walter, 22, 34, 40, 48, 121, 123, 135, 141, 177,
83, 144, 179, 214n6, 223n24 223n2, 225n26, 226n9
INDEX 249
boys, images of 221n11, 221n16–17,

see Caravaggio, Michelangelo; 222n18–20, 223n23
Amelio, Gianni; Grimaldi, angels, representations of, 47, 56,
Aurelio 68, 77–81
Braider, Christopher, 25, 52, 214, Bacchini, 61, 77, 219n3
218n41, 219n46 Baroque, and the, 28, 33–5,
Brakhage, Stan, 224 41–2, 49, 52–3, 55, 58–9,
Braudel, Fernand, 14 62–4, 67, 71, 73, 78, 82,
Breward, Christopher, 122 214n6, 216n25
Bronzino, 220n7 boys, representations of, 47, 55,
Noli me tangere, 60 61, 77, 219n3, 220n6
Panciatichi Holy Family (Return chiaroscuro, 42–6, 50, 52–3, 61,
from Egypt), 221 68–72, 74, 76, 79–80, 83,
Brooks, Peter, 2, 13–16, 19, 21, 28, 220n6, 221n16–17
30, 33–4, 36, 38, 40, 42, 46, classicism, 28, 35, 45–6, 48, 50,
48–51, 56, 59, 60, 64, 94–5, 54, 56, 60, 69–70, 78, 81,
97, 107, 115, 118, 153, 166–7, 213n2, 216n26, 220n6,
170–1, 177, 179, 193, 205, 220n7
215n17, 216n25, 229n1 clothing, treatment in
Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 38–9, Caravaggio’s paintings, 46–7,
52–3, 216n25, 218n42 64, 68, 73, 77, 81, 214n7
Budden, Julian, 87, 89, 102, 120–3, Contarelli Chapel, 41, 77, 80,
135, 138, 142–3 215n16
Burton, Deborah, 89, 108 Counter-Reformation theology
and, 32, 36, 39, 49, 56,
Caesar, Julius, 1, 6, 7 58–9, 70, 81, 217n34–5
Caesar Must Die decorum and, 34, 40, 45, 59, 61,
see Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio 70, 217n34, 218n39, 220n8,
Calandra, Nicola 220n10
see Frascia homoeroticism and, 9, 52,
camp, 14, 25, 118, 175, 186, 190, 54–62, 64, 66, 71, 78, 80,
199 219n3, 221n17, 222n18
Cantarella, Eva, 6–7, 211n8–10 Medici patronage of, 32
capitalism, 6, 14, 55, 107, 149, 150, paintings: Annunciation, 29, 46,
154, 160, 225n28 68; Bari, I, 221n17; Basket
and affect, 4, 11, 14, 20–1, 33, of Fruit, 214n7; Beheading of
51, 120, 141, 149 St. John the Baptist, 41, 42,
and gender/sexuality, 7, 8, 11, 43, 44, 49, 61, 71, 222n17;
18–19, 21, 51–3, 120 Boy with a Basket of Fruit,
Capuana, Luigi, 18 55, 219n3; Burial of St.
Carandini, Silvia, 42 Lucy,, 44, 49, 221–2n17;
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi Calling of St. Matthew, 41,
da, 5–6, 9, 13, 24, 27–84, 47, 61, 77, 221–2n17, Card
176, 212n13, 213n1–5, Sharps, The, 215n13; Cecconi
214n6–8, 215n10–16, Crowning of Thorns, 222n19;
216n22–8, 219n1, 219n3, Conversion of St.
250 INDEX
Caravaggio, Michelangelo Baptist, 61, 74, 75; Salomé,

Merisi da—Continued 222n19; Seven Acts of
Paul, 46; Conversion of St. Mercy, 47, 77; St. Matthew
Paul, rejected version, 56; and the Angel, 59, 77; St.
Crucifixion of St. Andrew, Matthew and the Angel, lost,
72; David with the Head of 27; Supper at Emmaus, 40,
Goliath, 83; Deposition, The, 42, 49, 222n20; Taking of
29, 49, 58, 213n2, 220n10; Christ, 27, 38, 49, 72–3
Ecce Homo, 27; Flagellation realism and, 22, 27, 28, 35, 37,
of Christ, 42, 61, 222n20; 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 47, 49,
Flagellation of Christ, 54, 60, 61, 68, 69, 73, 82,
Naples, 67–71; Rouen, 83, 213n2, 213n4, 214n6–7,
69–71; Judith Beheading 215n11, 217n37, 22 (see also
Holofernes, 41, 217n35; naturalism)
Lute Player, the, 213n17; Romanticism, and, 27–8, 48,
Madonna dei Palafrenieri, 50–1, 215n12, 216n24
55; Madonna of the Pilgrims/ scientific revolution, 31–3, 39,
Loreto, 29, 40, 47; Madonna 55, 63–4, 216n21
of the Rosary, 49; self-portraits, 54, 73, 82–3
Martha and Mary sexuality of, 55–6, 58, 60–1, 78,
Magdalene, 219n1; 81
Martyrdom of St. Ursula, 77; theater, 28, 34, 40–4, 54, 59, 68,
Martyrdom of St. Matthew, 77, 84
41, 45, 49, 56, 61, 83; Caravaggisti, 52
Martyrdom of St. Peter, 81, Carducci, Giosuè, 3
46, 222n18; Musicians, Carli, Gian Rinaldo, 17
The, 213n17; Narcissus, 79; Carlson, Marvin, 213n20
Nativity with Sts. Lorenzo Carner, Mosco, 86, 87
and Francis, Palermo, lost, Carracci, Annibale, 22, 46, 50, 72,
27, 44, 77; Nativity, Messina, 73, 220n7
44, 221n16; Penitent Pietà with two angels, 69
Magdalene, 219n1; Raising Cartesian subject, 52–4, 82, 93,
of Lazarus, 41, 42, 221n16, 218n41–2, 219n46
222n19; St. Catherine of Casanova, 5
Alexandria, 41, 77, 219n1; Casella, Alfredo, 223n4
St. Francis in Ecstasy, 78, Casillo, Robert, 2
79, 80, 81; St. Jerome, 42, Catholicism, 8, 28, 36–40, 46–7,
43, 60, 222n22; St. John 49, 51, 57–64, 81, 98, 102–6,
the Baptist, Martyrdom of, 152–3, 158, 215n18
43, 47, 74, 75, 76, 220n6; Italian Culture and, 14–15, 24,
Capitoline St. John the 39, 103, 106, 109, 212n15,
Baptist, 72, 219n3, 220n6; 225n20
Corsini St. John the Baptist, see also Baroque; Caravaggio,
61, 74, 75; Doria Pamphili Michelangelo; Grimaldi,
St. John the Baptist, 220n6; Aurelio; Puccini, Giacomo;
Kansas City St. John the papacy; Reformation
INDEX 251
Cavallini, Ivano, 17 San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane,

Cawelti, Stanley, 14, 33, 94, 95, 36
99, 100, 103, 106, 107, 135, San Francesco a Ripa, 59
143, 145, 146 San Luigi dei Francesi, 29,
Celano, Thomas, of, 78 215n16
Champagne, John, 4, 7, 61, 149, San Pietro in Montorio, Church
160, 225n23, 227n2 of, 66
Cherubini, Luigi Santa Maria del Mercato, 65
Faniska, 223n1 Santa Maria del Popolo, 46
Chorpenning, Joseph F., 38, 81 Sant’Agnese in Agone, Church
Chow, Rey, 148, 177 of, 36, 216n29
Christ, representations of, 24, 27, Sant’Agostino, 29
38, 41, 55, 73–4, 76, 78–9, Sant’Alvise, 17
97, 104, 167, 203, 219n3, Sant’Andrea della Valle, 97
220n7, 221n11, 222n19–20 Cicisbeo, 3–5
baptism of, 65–6, 221n12–13 Clarke, Eric O., 20, 227n2
Deposition of, 29, 49, 56, 213n2, Clarke, Hilary, 3
220n10 classicism, 6, 22, 32, 38, 44, 50,
divinity of, 42, 60, 62–3, 65, 77, 56–7, 62, 65, 66, 69–71,
80–1, 145, 221n11 76, 81, 122, 132, 216n26,
humanation of, 47, 59, 61–71, 217n32, 219n46, 221n11,
73, 77, 80–3, 219n2220n8, 221n15, 223n2
220n10 see also Caravaggio, Michelangelo;
ostentatio genitalium, 61 Carracci, Annibale
ostentatio vulnerum, 61 Clement VII, Pope, 216n20, 220n6
Passion of, 17, 41–2, 49, 56, 60, Closet, The, 5, 122, 147, 190, 191,
62–72, 78–81, 83, 97–8, 201
105, 109–12, 203, 220n10, Coconi, Angeliki, 175
221n15 Cohen, I. Bernard, 31
Resurrection of, 40, 42, 49, 60, Colish, Marcia, 57
70, 221n11 Coliva, Anna, 219
see also Bacchiacca, Bronzino, Colombani, Alfredo, 17
Caravaggio, Ghiberti, Colombina, 121
Guercino, Mantegna, comedy, 16, 18, 86–7, 104, 115,
Piombo, Perugino, 118, 120–2, 136, 137–8,
Signorelli, Il Sodoma, Titian 170, 175–8, 182, 184–7, 189,
Christianity, 6, 8, 30, 33, 49, 56–7, 191–2, 197, 200
59, 62, 72, 81, 103, 145, see also Özpetek, Ferzan
211n5, 211n7, 220n8–9, commedia dell’arte, 2, 121–2
225n1, 225n7 Conati, Marcello, 89
Christiansen, Keith, 35, 38, Concordat of 1801, 225n20
216n21, 216n23, 216n28 Concordat of 1984, 14
Chu, Henry, 5 consubstantiation, 62
Churches Cooper, Tracy, 38, 216, 219n5
Gesu, Il, 36, 217 Copernicus, 24, 32, 216n20
San Brizio, Capella di, 64 Corazzol, Adriana G., 18, 224n13
252 INDEX
Cornaro Chapel Dempsey, Charles, 28, 35, 46,

see Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 214n6, 215n11
corporeality D’Ennery, Adolphe, 85
see embodiment Dent, Edward J., 16, 18
Correale, Giampaolo, 220n6 Derrida, Jacques, 108, 172
Correggio, 44 Descartes, René, 52, 54
Corriere della Sera, 17 desire, 7, 8, 20–1, 81–3, 99–100,
Counter-Reformation 102, 111, 113, 123, 147,
see Baroque; Reformation, 154–5, 157–8, 160, 184, 198,
Catholic response to; 207, 212n10–11
Council of Trent Dickens, Charles, 94
Cowan, Bainard, 34, 217n33, Dickinson, Thomas, 213n20
219n44 Diderot, Denis, 38, 217n32,
Cowie, Elizabeth, 222n21 217n37
crafty servant, 122 Dionysus
Cropper, Elizabeth, 215n11 iconography, 61, 74, 122, 170
Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo, 149 disability, 161–6, 170–3
cubism, 109, 205 see also Amelio, Gianni,
Le Chiavi di Casa
Dahlhaus, Carl, 18 divina fanciulla, 8
Dal Bello, Mario, 150 Domingo, Marta, 143, 145
Dallapiccola, Luigi, 87, 89, 91, 92 Donizetti, Gaetano, 132
Dall’Orto, Giovanni, 8 Chiara e Sarafina, 223n1
Damian, Peter, 212n12 Don Pasquale, 103: Norina, Quel
dandy, 122 guardo, il cavaliere, 226n6
D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 122 Otto mesi in due ore, 223n1
Dark Victory, 229n7 drama, 2, 15–17, 19, 29, 34, 38–9,
Davenport, Nancy, 215n12 40–2, 45, 65, 86, 91, 94–5,
Davis, Andrew, 86, 90, 119 101, 104, 109, 116, 119,
Davis, John Anthony, 98, 212n15 125, 128, 136, 185, 191,
Day, Gail, 96, 217n34, 219n44 217n37, 223n218
Debussy, Claude, 87, 89, 126, 138 pastorale, 16, 213n18
Nocturnes, 90 see also names of individual
Pelléas et Mélisande, 90 dramatists
Préludes for piano, 90 Dulac, Germaine, 205
deconstruction, 4, 6, 23, 83, 108, Dumas, Alexandre, 18, 85, 88, 94
111–12, 148, 151, 154, 156, Dame aux Camélias, La, 95, 97
158, 163–4, 172, 178, 197, Duncan, Derek, 23, 147–9, 164,
206, 208, 217n33, 218n41, 172–3, 176–7, 208
219n44, 226n3 Dyer, Richard, 10, 20–1, 52, 77,
decorum 120, 132, 141, 144, 208,
see Caravaggio, Michelangelo 226n3
Delacroix, Eugène, 28
Deleuze, Gilles, 20, 72, 113, Earle, Ben, 25, 89, 91, 92, 223n9,
213n21 224n14
D’Emilio, John, 20 Ebert-Schifferer, Sybille, 32
INDEX 253
Edelman, Lee, 83 see also Amelio, Gianni; Grimaldi,

effeminacy, 3–6, 8–9, 61, 91, 113, Aurelio
157, 159, 165, 168, 207, Feldhay, Rivka, 32
211n5, 223n8 Fellini, Federico
Eisenstein, Sergei, 109 8 ½, 228n1
Eisler, Colin, 63, 220nn10 Amarcord, 3
Elsaesser, Thomas, 13, 28, 85, 176 femininity, 4, 80, 88, 92, 124, 144,
embodiment, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 52, 146, 150, 156, 187, 225n23
54–6, 63–5, 74, 83, 103, feminism, 5, 26, 120, 150, 206,
122, 135, 162, 172, 177, 225n23
184, 207, 219n2, 229n1 femme fatale, 102
aesthetics of, 59, 60 Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor,
subjectivity and, 24, 52–3, 56, 31
149, 158, 209, 212n12 Ferdinand IV, King of the Two
Empire, Holy Roman, 31 Sicilies, 98, 109
Empire, Second, 119, 120 Ferrari-Barassi, Elena, 213n18
Enlightenment, The, 19, 33, 34, Ferrone, Siro, 18
40, 103, 205 Ficino, Marsilio, 57
entertainment, 3, 19, 20, 21, 94, film, 1, 5–6, 8–9, 29, 103, 203–4,
120, 141, 226n3 212n13, 212n23, 218n37,
ephebe, 5, 78, 228n10 224n17
eroticism, 54–5, 60–2, 66, 68–72, disability and, 165–8, 170–2
78, 80–2, 95, 97, 122, images of fathers and sons, 3,
157–60, 168, 170, 172, 208, 149–5, 150–2, 161–73,
220n6, 220n8, 221n12, 175, 177, 182–7, 190–2,
221n17, 222n18, 221n21, 194–201, 227n5, 227n35,
228n11 228n13, 229n7
see also Christ, representations melodrama, 10, 18, 22, 25, 150,
of; gay; masochism; sadism; 152, 179, 182, 189, 191,
sexuality; queer 193, 196, 198, 200–2, 205
ethics, 6, 33, 49, 104, 121, 123, studies, 208, 229n6
136–7, 201–2, 211n9, 227n2 see under individual directors and
Etruscan, 2 titles; see also melodrama;
eucharist queer cinema
see Incarnation fioritura, 132
Flatley, Jonathan, 10, 11, 12, 13,
face-off, 156 22, 32, 33, 55
Farnese Palace, 50, 72 Flaubert, Gustav, 95, 107, 205,
Fascism, 89, 90–1, 93, 106, 111, 229n1
173–4 Bovary, Madame, 88, 141,
Catholicism and, 14 225n26
fatherhood, 3, 62, 97, 100, 141, Floyd, Kevin, 7, 148, 160,
149, 150–2, 161–73, 177, 212n10–11
182–9, 195, 197, 199–200, Ford, Edsel B., 215n13
225n28, 227n5, 228n13, Foucault, Michel, 5, 51, 147, 148,
229n7 166, 212n12, 218n41, 219n46
254 INDEX
Fraccaroli, Arnaldo, 87, 120 Gillgren, Peter, 38, 49

France, 18–19, 28, 31, 97, 141, Gilman, Charlotte Perkins
212n15, 214n9, 215n12, Herland, 20
225n20 Girardi, Michele, 18, 86–7, 97,
Francis I, King of France, 31, 98 120–1, 140–1, 143, 224n11,
Franciscans, The, 73 225n27
see also St. Francis of Assisi Gledhill, Christine, 19, 20, 28, 150,
Franklin, David, 215n15, 217n34 227n2
Frascia, 17 Gloeden, Wilhelm von, 4
Freedberg, S. J., 43–4, 46, 82, Goldoni, Carlo, 18, 122
213n2, 216n24 Goretti, Gianfranco, 158, 160
Freud, Sigmund, 5, 7, 11–12, 72, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, 6
111–13, 156–7, 170 Graham-Dixon, Andrew, 36
Oedipus Complex, 111, 229n6 Gramsci, Antonio, 10, 19
Fried, Michael, 27, 33, 38, 42, 46, Great Britain, 18, 28, 39, 66, 162
51–2, 55, 82–3, 216n25 Gregory, Brad S., 13, 31
absorption, 43, 53–4 Grimaldi, Aurelio, 8, 9, 22, 23, 24,
Furey, Francis Thomas, 106 25, 149, 175
La dicesa di Aclà a Floristella, 23,
Gable, Clark, 166 103, 149–58, 161, 168–70,
Galilei, Galileo, 24, 32, 39, 216n21 173–4, 227n4, 228n7,
Garreau, Joseph E., 16 228n13
Garrone, Matteo characters: Calogero, 151;
Gomorra, 172 Caramazza, Rocco, 151–2;
Gaston, Robert W., 218n39 Concetta, 151; Melino, 153,
gay, 8, 9, 20, 22–4, 55, 112, 142, 155, 157, 159–61, 173; Pino,
148–50, 154, 157–8, 160, 151, 153, 155–7, 159–61,
173, 175–9, 182–200, 173; Priest, 103–4, 152,
213n22, 227n4 158; lighting, 153–5, 158;
see also Amelio, Gianni; Grimaldi, music, 153, 159–69, 228n7
Aurelio; Özpetek, Ferzan; Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 16
sexuality Il pastor fido, 16
Gazzetta Musicale di Milano, 85 Guarino, Sergio, 56–7, 219n3
Geczy, Adam, 32 Guattari, Felix, 20
Generazione dell’80, 85 Guercino, 28, 71
Germany, 4, 13, 16, 18, 28, 39, 41, Gunsbourg, Raoul, 226n10
161, 162, 163, 165–6, 169,
173, 211n2, 214n9 Hadrian, 5–6
Gerould, Daniel, 96, 106 Hall, Marcia B., 58, 216n27,
Giacosa, Giuseppe, 112, 223n5 216n29, 219n5
Giger, Andreas, 86, 89, 92–3, Handel, G. F., 16
224n13 Hansberry, Lorraine
Gilbert, Creighton E., 27, 32, 39, Raisin in the Sun, A, 227n11
48, 50, 56, 60–1, 72, 77, 78, Hansen, Miriam, 5, 217n32
81, 213n2, 213n5, 217n32, Haraway, Donna, 167
219n3, 220n6–7 Harris, Beth, 63
INDEX 255
Hawley, John C., 149 Inquisition, Roman, 32

Hebraism, 89 intermedi, 16
Heidi Irigaray, Luce, 228n12
Clara, 171 Islam, 153, 211n5
Hennessy, Rosemary, 11, 14, 21, Italy, 2, 4–8, 11, 13–15, 18–19, 23,
213n21 26, 28, 39, 67, 76, 85, 87,
Henry II, King of France, 31 89–91, 93, 98, 119, 157–8,
heresy, 32, 36, 37, 53, 62–4, 81, 161–2, 173, 175, 196, 198,
217n30 206, 208, 211n2, 212n16,
heteronormativity, 61, 82, 111, 112, 213n20, 223n1, 223n3–5,
113, 154, 157, 161, 176, 200, 224n12–13, 227n3, 227n5
228n12 art, 9, 209
heterosexuality mani pulite, 151
see sexuality see also Amelio, Gianni; art;
Hewitt, Andrew, 83, 212n10 Caravaggio, Michelangelo;
Hibbard, Howard, 213n2 Fascism; masculinity;
Higgins, Henry, 122 Özpetek, Ferzan
Hipkins, Danielle, 227n5
Hitchcock, Alfred Jacobs, Rhea, 120
Rebecca, 198 James, Henry, 94
Hitler, Adolf, 4, 92, 206 Jarman, Derek, 5, 216n23
HIV disease, 12, 199, 200, 201 Jesuits, The, 31, 64, 216n29
Hoch, Hannah, 109 Jesus. See Christ, representations of
Hollywood, 22, 23, 38, 77, 165, Jordan, Mark D., 211n5, 212n12
176, 190, 197, 217n32, Judas, representations of, 72, 77, 83
226n4 Judell, Brandon, 175
Holofernes, 41, 56, 217n35
homoeroticism Kahlo, Frida, 109
intergenerational, 153–4, 157 Kandinsky, Wassily, 205
see also sexuality Karlstadt, Andreas von, 30
homophobia, 6, 20, 23, 111, 113, Keeffe, Bernard, 86, 89, 108,
154, 156–7, 160, 173, 177, 225n27
184–5, 187, 194, 197, 199, Kimbell, David R., 85, 213n20
208 Kirby, F. E., 16
homosociality, 110, 113, 142, 154– Koppen, Randi, 229n1
6, 169, 173 Körner, Axel, 19, 85, 89–91, 93–4,
Horace, 6 223n1, 223n3, 224n10,
Hugo, Victor, 18, 28, 85 224n12, 224n15
humanism, 15, 33, 37, 57, 73 Kotzebue, August von, 18, 28,
Huyssen, Andreas, 88, 92, 223n9 213n20, 214n9, 215n13
Ibsen, Henrik Lacan, Jacques, 52

Doll’s House, A, 102, 171 Landy, Marcia, 10–11, 19, 22, 29,
Impressionism, 90, 126, 163 33, 40, 100, 144, 150, 163,
Illica, Luigi, 223n5 170, 174
In Coena Domini, 31 Langdon, Helen, 29
256 INDEX
Lateran Pacts/Treaties, 13, 106, 158 Mannerism, 22, 45, 47, 60, 73,
Lavin, Irving, 42 220n7, 221n11
Lazzarone, 28 Mantegna, Andrea
Lee, Sherry D., 224n10 Dead Christ, 61, 63–4
Lehár, Franz, 87 Marcuse, Herbert, 21
Merry Widow: Camille, Count, Marengo, Battle of, 99, 105,
121–2; Valencienne, 224n19
Baroness, 121–2 Maria Carolina, Queen of the Two
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 52–3 Sicilies, 98, 111
Leo XIII, Pope, 106 Marinetti, F. T., 8
Leonardo, Laura, 9 Marini, Maurizio, 220n6
Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 87 Martin, John Rupert, 28, 214n7
Pagliacci, 90 Mascagni, Pietro, 87, 90
Leppert, Richard, 96 Cavalleria Rusticana, 90
Libretti Mascherpa, Giorgio, 32, 219n3
see opera masculinity
Liebert, Robert S., 66 Italian, 1–9, 15, 23–5, 61, 86–7,
Lindenberger, Herbert, 16 91, 103, 122, 149–50, 162,
Lippo, Antonella, 41 168, 173–4, 177, 183,
literature, 5, 18, 19, 28, 38, 48, 92, 207–9, 219, 226n7,
93, 103, 109, 183, 212n12, 227n5–6
217n37, 224n17, 226n7 machismo, 5–6, 23
see also under names of muscles, representations of, 43,
individual works 52, 61–2, 64–5, 67–9, 71–4,
London, 3, 49, 60, 182, 215n13 77, 80–1, 154, 167, 169,
Lotti, Antonio 220n7, 221n15, 17, 222n18
Ama più chi men si crede, 16 as performance, 225n23
Louvre, Musee du, 29, 60, 215n13 queer, 22, 56, 61, 68, 73, 81–2,
Lunari, Luigi, 16 86–7, 112, 135, 145–6, 156,
Luther, Martin, 36–7, 217n30 160, 206–7, 225n28
see also Amelio, Gianni;
Maas, Anthony, 104 Caravaggio; Christ,
Macioce, Stefania, 213n17 representations of; gay;
Madonna, representations of, 29, Grimaldi, Aurelio; Özpetek,
34, 39, 40, 46–7, 49, 55, 59, Ferzan; Puccini, Giacomo
77, 104–5, 213n5 mass at Bolsena, 62
see also Caravaggio, Michelangelo; mass culture, 91–2, 217, 223n9
Puccini Giacomo Massenet, Jules, 87, 95, 225n27
Mahler, Gustav, 86, 224n11 Manon, 95, 97, 124, 140: Des
Malagreca, Miguel, 227n3 Grieux, 97, 140; Manon,
Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 223n4 124, 140; Morfontaine,
Mallach, Alan, 94 Guillot, 97
Mancini, Giulio, 29, 44–5, 218n39 Massumi, Brian, 213n21
Mandelli, Alfredo, 89 Mastroianni, Marcello, 5
Mann, Thomas, 4 Mattei, Cardinal, 36, 216n21
INDEX 257
Mattei, Girolamo, 216n21 hero, 88, 96–7, 99, 103, 106,

melancholy, 11–13, 55–6, 60, 67, 121, 135, 137, 141, 146,
73, 81, 87, 90, 111, 115, 161, 178, 224n16
121, 147, 153, 179, 188, heroine, 9, 87, 88, 95–6, 99, 100,
189, 197, 206 101, 102, 103, 118, 119,
melodrama, 22, 90–2, 94, 96, 107, 121, 122, 123, 143, 223,
120, 124, 140–2, 148–50, 224n16
156, 160–2, 172, 174, 187–8, iconography and, 21, 40, 122,
201, 209, 216n25, 223n2, 170
226n4, 229n7 imitation/mimesis and, 22,
allegory and, 17, 22, 34, 54–5, 34–5, 53–4, 82, 83, 91–2,
82, 140, 161, 172, 229n5 205, 214n6, 216n25–6
the body and, 4, 22, 24, 28, 40, the interrupted party and, 123,
41, 45, 54, 56, 59, 64, 65, 136, 158
70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 78, 82, Italian terminology and, 15–18,
111, 112, 115, 137, 147, 212n16, 213n17–20
150, 165, 166, 167, 170, Italy and, 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 15, 16,
171, 172, 190 18, 19, 28, 39, 85, 86, 93,
Catholicism and, 13–15, 24, 98, 103, 162, 173, 196,
30–84, 97–101, 103–6, 109, 208, 211n2, 211n3,
152–4, 158, 215n17 211n2–3, 213n20, 215n7,
correlatives and, 73, 136, 153, 223n3
170, 179 landscape and, 101, 119, 136,
costuming and, 17, 42, 46–7, 74, 153, 170, 179–80, 202
76–7, 101, 119, 159 (see also chapter five)
deferral and, 12, 72, 116 life’s losers and, 145, 171, 175,
emotions and, 11, 12, 14, 21, 29, 178, 198
40–1, 45, 47–8, 51, 80, 92, lighting and (see Amelio, Gianni;
99, 101, 108, 119, 126, 128, Caravaggio, Michelangelo;
132–4, 136, 138, 141, 146, Grimaldi, Aurelio)
151, 153, 154, 157, 163, 165, loss and, 11–13, 20, 32–4, 49,
168, 176, 178, 180, 184–5, 55–6, 59, 73, 99, 104, 111,
189, 191, 192, 200 135, 143, 147, 192
evil and, 33, 42, 56, 81, 103, Manicheanism and, 30, 33, 35,
109, 193–4, 198 42, 53, 56, 70, 81–2, 102–3,
excess and, 2, 4, 18, 21, 47, 50, 109–10, 119, 123, 133, 136,
52, 54, 56, 58, 65, 70, 74–6, 144, 171, 179, 184–5, 198,
88–9, 93, 101, 110, 115, 228n1
125, 132, 141, 200, 222n22, martyrdom and, 41, 44–5, 49,
228n7 61, 64, 72, 77, 81, 83,
the family and, 2, 59, 107, 135, 221n17, 222n18–19
139, 145, 150–3, 161, 163, masochism and, 64–5, 72, 82,
170, 173, 175–86, 188, 190, 88, 111–13, 207
192–4, 201 (see also chapters melos and, 17, 125
five and six) metonymy and, 82–3, 158
258 INDEX
masculinity—Continued 167, 173, 182–3, 186,

music and, 3, 10, 16–17, 21, 189–90, 194, 196, 197, 205
24, 40, 108, 109, 111, 116, see also names of individual
120, 128, 134, 136, 139, composers, filmmakers,
153, 159, 160, 168, 180, painters, and works
181, 183, 189, 191, 195, melodramatists, 28, 35–6, 38, 94,
196, 200, 202, 203 (see also 119, 146, 214n9
chapters three and four) see also names of individual
realism and, 18, 22, 23, 40, 49, authors
54, 144, 182, 193 (see also melodràmma pastorale, 16, 213n18–19
Caravaggio, Michelangelo; melologo, 16
Chow, Rey; Duncan, Derek; Menelaus, 41
Özpetek, Ferzan) Mercer, Kobena, 148
repression and, 21, 109, 112, 115, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 52
169 Merton, Robert K., 31
romantic triangle and, the, 88, Messina, Antonello da, 46
95, 97, 99, 106, 121–2, Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 85, 223
134–5, 138 (see also names of Margherita d’ Anjou, 85
individual works) Michelangelo, 50, 56, 73, 219n3
sacrifice and, 62, 137, 201 Ignudi, 50, 72, 221n11
and la mamma, sacrifice of, Risen Christ, 221n11
175, 177–8, 184, 189, 193: Sistine Chapel, 64, 72, 221n11,
L’Angelo bianco, 176; Nel 221n13
gorgo del peccato, 176; Stella Mirandola, Pico della, 57
Dallas, 176; Vedi napoli . . . misogyny, 23, 91, 157, 178, 206,
e poi muori, 176; Wanda, la 229n4
peccatrice, 176 see also sexism
social, 91, 94–7, 100, 103, 106–7, modernism, 6, 11, 13, 22, 24, 32,
119–24, 135–9, 143–6 35, 86, 87–8, 92–6, 107–10,
(see also chapters three and 119, 196, 205–8, 224–5,
four) 229n1
transcendence and, 39, 124, 137, and internationalism, 89–91,
204, 229n7 223n8
tropes and, 48, 82–3, 119, 175, modernity, 11, 13, 33, 46, 55, 85,
189, 207 89, 91, 93, 116, 146
villain, 88, 96–7, 100, 106, 145, modernization, 10, 11, 85, 90, 91,
175, 184 107, 145, 146
virtue and, 42, 56, 95, 96, 97, Monte, Cardinal Francesco Maria
100, 106, 139, 141, 166, del, 32, 36, 60, 87, 213n17,
167, 171, 177, 179 216n21
visibility and, 15, 21, 33, 34, 35, Monteverdi, Claudio, 16, 212n16
36, 38, 40, 42, 45, 46, 47, Arianna, 212n16
48, 49, 50, 52, 53, 58, 59, 62, Orfeo, 17
63, 64, 68, 70, 78, 97, 105, More, Thomas
110, 128, 147, 154–5, 158–9, see St.
INDEX 259
Mosse, George, 4 212n16, 216, 223n1–2,

Mosso, Angelo, 3 226n5–6
Mozart, W. A., 132 libretti, 16–18, 85, 87–8, 98,
Abduction from the Seraglio, 17: 101, 104, 110, 112, 120,
Constanza, 226n5; Pasha 223n1, 224n19
Selim, 17 see also under individual
Don Giovanni: Don Ottavio, composers
226n5 operetta, 17, 86–7, 118–19, 120–1,
music, 9–10, 15–17, 23, 85–94, 135, 137
116, 119–20, 126, 128, O’Rawe, Catherine, 10, 22, 26, 150
132–9, 153, 159–60, 180–1, Osborne, Charles, 87
183, 190, 192–3, 195–6, Osgood, Josiah, 6
224n14 Özpetek, Ferzan, 175–204
musicals, Hollywood, 77, 120, Finestra di fronte, La, 177, 229n5
208 Hamam, 9
see also names of individual Mine vaganti, 175–9, 186, 191,
composers, filmmakers, and 193, 197, 200, 205
works characters: Alba, 177, 182–90,
Mussolini, Benito, 3, 4, 91, 92, 192, 195–6; Antonio,
206 182–9, 191, 192, 194–6;
Brunetti, 182, 183, 184,
Nagley, Judith, 126 185, 187, 195; Davide, 184,
Napoleon Bonaparte, 97–9, 105, 190, 196; Luciana, 181,
109, 224n19, 225n20 184–6, 190, 193–6; Marco,
nationalism, 3, 4, 7, 10, 13, 19, 23, 184, 186–90, 192, 196;
85–7, 90, 98, 148–9, 151, Massimiliano, 184, 190–1,
158, 161, 162, 173, 175, 176, 196, 229n2;
208, 223 Nicola, Uncle, 182, 184,
naturalism, 27, 28, 35, 39, 45, 49, 189, 192, 194–6; nonna, la,
50, 54, 60, 69, 70, 71, 78, 176–9, 181–2, 184–6, 188,
214, 220n6 189–90, 192–6, 229n2;
see also Caravaggio; Michelangelo Salvatore, 182, 185, 190–1,
neoplatonism, 37, 50, 57 194–6, 229n2; Stefania,
Nicomedes IV of Bithynia, 6 175, 177, 182, 185–7, 190,
192–3, 195–6; Tommaso,
Oldani, Louis J., 16 181–96; Vincenzo, 175,
O’Leary, Alan, 22 182, 184–7, 190–6;
Olson, Todd P., 36, 48 lighting, 163–4, 168,
O’Malley, John W., 31, 33, 36, 180–1, 186–8, 193, 229n2;
37, 57, 58, 104, 212n14, music, 178, 180–3, 185,
215n17, 217n30, 219n5, 187–93, 195–7, 229n2;
220n9 Cinquantamila Lagrime,
Onori, Lorenza M., 71 191; Una Notte a Napoli,
opera, 2, 3, 8–9, 15–19, 24, 84–146, 191
153, 200, 205, 212n5, Saturno Contro, 197, 201, 204
260 INDEX
Özpetek, Ferzan—Continued Patroclus, 41

characters: Angelica, 197, 201; Paul, III, Pope, 32, 216n20
Antonio, 197, 200–1, 203; Pensionante del Saraceni
Lorenzo, 197–204; Minnie, Fruit vendor, The, 215n13
199; Neval, 197–9; Paolo, perspective, 14, 28, 38–9, 42,
197–8; Roberta, 197–8, 200, 44, 46, 50, 52–4, 64, 82,
202–3; Sergio, 197–8, 200, 93, 109, 217n37, 218n38,
202; Vittorio, 199, 200, 201; 218n41–2, 221n15, 221n17
music, 200, 202–3 vanishing point, 39, 52, 78
Perugino, Pietro, 72, 221n15
Pagels, Elaine, 211n7 Baptism of Christ, Rouen version,
painting, 8–10, 13, 17, 22, 52–3, 221n15
86, 93, 218n40 Polittico d i Sant’ Agostino, 65–6
characteristics of melodrama phallocentrism, 112–13, 206
and, 28–30, 32–5, 39–51, Philip II, King of Spain, 31
54, 76–7, 84, 107, 212n13, Piero della Francesca, 46, 71
216n25 Piombo, Sebastiano del, 66, 68,
the Counter-Reformation and, 71–2
36–8, 58 Flagellation of Christ, 67, 221n15
homoeroticism and, 55–7, 60–75, Pirandello, Luigi, 9, 177
78–83, 219n3, 219n6, Henry IV, 225n23
221n15–17 Six Characters in Search of an
see under individual painters; see Author, 224n17
also Baroque, melodrama; Pitt, Roger, 227n5
Renaissance, perspective Pius IX, Pope, 106, 212n14
Paleotti, Gabriele, 30, 36, 37 Pius VI, Pope, 97
pali, 6, 205 Pius VII, Pope, 97
Palisca, Claude V., 16 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 223n4
Paolo, Gannicola di Plath, Sylvia
see Smicca Daddy, 112, 206
Paolucci, Antonio, 58 Plato, 6, 50, 57, 59, 62, 218n43,
Papa, Rodolfo, 222 220n9
papacy, 6, 8, 13–15, 30, 31, 33, 36, Phaedrus, 56, 219n4
38, 86, 97–9, 103–6, 110, Symposium, 56, 219n4
216n19, 217 Poliziano
see also Clement VII, Council of Orfeo, 17
Trent, Paul III, Pius VI, Pius Pollini, John, 211n6
VII, Pius IX, Reformation Pontormo, 220n7
Paris, 86, 119, 122, 123, 215n13, positivism, 50, 93, 209
226n10 Posner, Donald, 56
Parravicino, Cardinal Ottavio, Prodi, Paolo, 32
213n3 Puca, Pascquale, 217n29
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 111 Puccini, Giacomo, 6, 8–9, 18, 22,
Salò, 3, 111 84, 106, 115–16, 125, 133–5,
Patriarca, Silvana, 3, 151 138–44, 176, 223n7–9
INDEX 261
Bohème, La, 95, 97, 132: Mimi, 101, 103–4, 109; Scarpia, 88,
124, 132 95–8, 100–4, 106, 108–13;
Butterfly, Madama: Cio-cio- Sciarrone, 96, 103; Tosca, 88,
san, 95, 124; Kate, 95; 95–106, 109–13, 124, 145,
Pinkerton, 95, 97, 100 225; E lucevan le stele, 99,
Elvira, wife of, 223n7, 225n22 132–3; Madonna, The, 33–4,
Fanciulla del West, 95 104–5; Marengo, Battle of,
Gianni Schicchi: O Mio babbino 99, 105, 224n19; Vissi d’arte,
caro, 132 96, 101–5, 132
Manon Lescault, 95, 124, 140: Puglisi, Catherine, 29, 55, 217n34
Des Grieux, 97, 140; Ravoir, Pullella, Philip, 3
Geronte de, 97 Pupillo, Marco, 56
Rondine, La, 24–5, 86–9, 95, Pustianaz, Marco, 227n3
100, 120–3, 136–7, 142,
145–6, 226n8, 226n10, queer, 5–9, 23–4, 88, 147–9, 151,
227n12–13 154, 161, 164–5, 167, 170,
characters: Lisette, 121–2, 139, 173, 175–7, 183, 191, 197,
142–3; Magda, 88, 119–26, 199, 200, 205, 208
128, 132–46, 226n9; cinema, 23–4, 147–9, 164,
Prunier, 118–19, 121, 122– 176–7
6, 128, 132, 137, 139, 140– Italy, 4–9, 11, 23, 157–8, 173,
2, 146; Rambaldo, 88, 119, 175, 198, 208, 227n3
121–4, 126, 132–4, 136, studies, 5–6, 148, 208
138, 140–4; Ruggiero, 88, see also gay; Amelio, Gianni;
121, 123–4, 126, 133, 135– Grimaldi, Aurelio; Özpetek,
46, 226n9; commissioned, Ferzan
by, 87: Berté, Heinrich, 223;
Eibenschütz, Siegmund, Rahill, Frank, 13, 18, 28, 214n9
223; Doretta’s Song, 124–6, Rampling, Charlotte, 162
128, 132, 135–6, 142; and Ravenni, Gabriella, 86, 224n11
longing, 58, 115–16, 119, Raw, Timothy E., 175
125, 128, 133–5, 138–9, Reformation, The, 15, 51–2, 55,
144, 147, 189, 199 64, 104, 212n14, 225n1
Tosca, 17, 24, 54, 85–113, 119, Catholic response to, 8, 13, 24,
124, 145–6, 196, 212n15, 28, 30–40, 46–7, 56–60,
223n5, 224n10–11, 224n13, 63, 70, 81–2, 105, 217n30,
224n18–19, 225n22 219n3, 219n5, 220n8,
Bourbon monarchy and, 98–9, 221n11
109 iconoclasm, 28, 37, 59
characters: Angelotti, 97, 101–3, Trent, Council of, 28, 31–4,
109, 111; L’Attavanti, 101; 36–7, 39, 47, 50–1, 57, 60,
Cavaradossi, Mario, 3, 96–9, 104, 215n18, 217n30,
103, 110, 132–3; Maria 219n3
Carolina, Queen of the Two Reich, Jacqueline, 5, 103
Sicilies, 96, 98, 111; Sacristan, Reichert, Heinz, 119
262 INDEX
Renaissance, 33, 57, 73, 81, 211n41 Rossi, Joseph, 16

art, 6, 16–17, 32, 37–8, 46–7, 52, Rossi Stuart, Kim, 168, 228n10
56, 60–1, 63–6, 71, 78, 167, see also Amelio, Gianni,
214n6, 218n41, 220n8 Le chiavi di casa
optics, 39, 59, 64 Rossini, Giacomo, 132
see also names of individual Barber of Seville, 226n5; Rosina,
artists; classicism, drama; Una Voce poco fa, 226n5
neoplatonism, painting; Rothko, Mark, 205
perspective Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 17
Reni, Guido, 215n14 Pygmalion, 16
Restoration, The, 19 Rugarli, Giampaolo, 88, 102–3,
Richards, Sandra, 37, 213n3, 223n7, 225n22
217n34 Rust, Giacomo
Ricordi, Tito, 87 Contadina in corte, La, 17
Ricordi publishing, 85, 105
Rigoletto, Sergio, 150 Sachs, Harvey, 223n4
Rinuccini, Ottavio, 212–13n16 sacraments, 38, 115, 171, 226
Risorgimento. See Unification sadism, 65, 72, 100, 110–13
Rizzo, Domenico, 156 Saggio, Antonio, 32, 46, 216n29
Rocchio, Vincent, 22, 227n5 saints, 8, 37, 61, 64, 84, 152
Rocco laws, 8 see also Caravaggio, Michelangelo
Rolfe, John, C., 211n6 Ambrose, 219n2
Romani, Felice, 223n1 Anne, 55
Romanticism, 18, 48, 196, 205, Augustine of Hippo, 6, 57, 65,
217n33, 219n44 219n5
musical, 17, 87, 89, 93–4, 119, Bonaventure, 78
132, 153, 200 Catherine of Alexandria, 41
see also Caravaggio, Michelangelo Dominic, 49
Rome, 1, 6, 13–15, 28–9, 31, 36, Filippo Neri, 15
46, 59, 61, 66–7, 72, 74, Francis of Assisi, 15, 77–81
76, 86, 90, 97–8, 103, 106, Jerome, 42, 43, 60, 81, 219n2,
109–10, 122, 182–3, 222n22
212n6–7, 211n9, 213n22, John, 41, 43, 44, 47, 49, 56, 60,
215n13, 219n1 61, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 81,
ambisexuality and, 211n6 220, 221n17
first gay pride parade, 227n3 iconography, 21, 40, 61, 74,
HBO’s, 4 122, 170, 219n3
Imperial, 4, 7, 91: Justinian, Lawrence, 77
211n9 Lucy, 41, 44, 49, 221n17
Republican, 97, 98, 109 Luke, 66
Ronga, Luigi, 213n18 Martha, 219
Rosen, Charles, 109, 133, 226n8 Paul, 6, 56, 77
Rossellini, Roberto, 211n2, 227n5 Peter, 38, 41, 46, 81, 221n17
Roma, città aperta, 215: Teresa, 15, 44, 59
Bergmann, Major, 211; Thomas Aquinas, 57
Pellegrini, Don Pietro, 103 Thomas, Doubting, 42, 70
INDEX 263
Thomas More: Utopia, 20 68, 73, 74, 75, 77, 78, 79,
Ursula, 41 80, 81, 82, 83, 87, 95, 110,
Salomé, 43, 71 111, 113, 121, 146, 148,
Saltzman, Lisa, 12 150, 154, 158, 160, 168,
Salutati, Coluccio, 37 169, 170, 172, 173, 175,
Sanchez, Melissa E., 158, 207 176, 197, 211n5, 211n7,
Sanctis, Francesco de, 3, 211n3 211n9, 220n6, 220n8–9,
Sanguinetti, Giorgio, 89, 90, 91 222n18, 225n28, 229n6
Sardou, Victorien, 94, 98, 110, object choice, 4, 5, 7, 11, 82,
112, 224n13, 224n19 123, 156, 211n4, 228n10,
Savina, Barbara, 57 228n13
Savio, Francesco, 16, 213n19 see also Caravaggio; Christ,
Savoy, House of, 13 representations of;
Umberto I, King of Italy, 98, 225 masochism; sadism;
sbandierare, 6 subjectivity; Virgin Mary,
Scarmoncin, Laura, 227n3 representations of
Schickling, Dieter, 86, 98 Sgarbi, Vittorio, 27, 39, 51, 77,
Schnabl, Riccardo, 138, 226n10 81, 213n2, 216n24–5,
Schoenberg, Arnold, 89, 224n11 217n34
Scholasticism, 57 Shapiro, Michael J., 10, 12, 14,
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 144 54
Schütze, Sebastian, 27, 29 Shea, William R., 32
Schwartz, Arman, 86, 92, 93, 110 Shrimplin, Valerie, 32, 216n20
Sedgwick, Eve K., 7, 110, 122, 148, Sica, Vittorio de
158, 205, 211n5, 212n11 Ladri di biciclette, 227n5
Selfridge-Field, Eleanor, 16 Signorelli, Luca, 64, 66, 68, 72–3
sexism, 20, 88, 91, 101, 111, 112, Flagellation of Christ, 65,
140–3, 207, 208 221n15
see also misogyny Lamentation over the Dead
sexuality, 4–10, 23, 56–7, 61–2, 72, Christ, 65
81, 88, 111, 113, 144–5, Pietà, 65
147–51, 154, 156–8, 161, Sirk, Douglas
168, 170, 173–7, 184, 187, All that Heaven Allows, 226n4
189, 190–1, 198–9, 201, 205, Imitation of Life, 176, 227n11
208–9, 211n5–7, 212n10–11, Smicca, 66
222n21, 228n11, 228n13 Snediker, Michael D., 83
aim, 156 Snickare, Mårten, 38, 49
bisexuality, 5, 6, 185 Society of Jesus
female, 8, 34, 55, 72, 80, 81, 95, see Jesuits, The
101, 111, 132, 145, 148, Socrates, 219
207, 228n13 Sodoma, Il
homoeroticism, 6, 56, 57, 60, Christ at the Column, 66
61, 78, 81, 150, 154, 168, Deposition, 66
212n12, 228n12 Sodomite, 211n5, 212n12
male, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 52, 54, 55, Sonzogno, Lorenzo, 87
56, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, Sorba, Carlotta, 19
264 INDEX
Sorrentino, Paolo Tarnas, Richard, 32

Divo, Il, 172 Tassi, Niccolò, 17
Spear, Richard E, 28, 213n1 Tasso, Torquato
Spike, John T., 32, 215n13 Aminta, 16
Square, 228n10 Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio
Squarzina, Silvia, 56 Cesare deve morire, 1
St.-Saëns, Camille, 87 theater, Italian, 1, 10, 15–19, 28,
Samson and Dahlila: Dahlila, 101 84, 93, 94, 96, 98, 108, 118,
Staël, Madame de 213n18–20
Corinne, 2–3 Tiepolo, Gian Battista, 47
Steinberg, Leo, 56, 57, 60–4, Tiepolo, Gian Domenico, 47
220n8 Tinkcom, Matthew, 175
Stendhal, 2 Titian, 44, 71, 214
Stewart-Steinberg, Suzanne, 3, Noli me tangere, 60
211n2 Tomlinson, Gary, 16, 212n16
Stone, David M., 27, 83 tornadoZ, 176
Stowe, Harriet Beecher Torrefranca, Fausto, 89, 91–2,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 93, 94, 223, 223n4
227 tragic hero, 137
Strauss, Richard transubstantiation, 62
Rosenkavalier, Der, 123 Traub, Valerie, 158
Stravinsky, Igor, 89, 93 Trent, Council of
Strindberg, August see Reformation, The
Miss Juli,e, 102 Trexler, Richard, 62, 64, 80
subjectivity, 6, 10, 15, 17, 20, 24, trompe-l’oeil, 36, 66, 71, 214n7
28, 36–41, 51–6, 67, 69, see also perspective
71, 74, 76, 80, 82–3, 93, Turièllo, Pasquale, 3
135, 138, 141, 146–50,
153, 157–8, 165, 173, Uccello, Paolo, 46
175, 182, 192, 194, 207, Umberto I, King of Italy.
209, 218n41, 219n46, See Savoy
229n2 Unification, 8, 13, 90, 93, 98,
gender, 7–8, 11, 23, 111, 144, 106
148, 156, 158, 197, 207–9, unruly woman, 100, 101, 102, 122,
212n10 (see also individual 193, 197
works, characters) Urban, Sylvanas, 28
sexual, 5–8, 24, 82–3, 102, Utopianism, 20–1, 52, 77, 107, 116,
110–11, 121, 143, 148–9, 120, 141, 199, 200
175, 197, 199, 212n11–12, abundance and, 20, 132
222n21, 228n11 community and, 5, 20, 49, 81,
subaltern, 19, 160, 206 152, 155, 158, 175, 177,
Suetonius, 6, 211n6 190, 193, 198–9, 203
Summers, David, 52–3 energy and, 20, 132
intensity and, 2, 20–2, 40, 45,
Talvacchia, Bette, 60 51–2, 91, 99, 101, 115, 128,
INDEX 265
132, 137, 144, 168, 170, virtú, 7

200, 213n21 Visconti, Luchino
transparency and, 20–1, 52, 77, Senso, 211n2
137, 144, 200 vision, 34, 39, 51, 52, 53, 78, 100,
107, 145, 176, 186
Valentino, Rudolph, 5 see also Baroque, The
Valeriano, Pierio, 57 Vitti, Antonio, C., 23, 164, 170–2
Valetta, Ippolito, 89 Vodret, Rossella, 41, 217n35
Valleriani, Matteo, 32 Vogler, Candace, 83, 207
Van, Gilles de, 85, 94, 223n2, Vouet, Simon
224n16 Fortune Teller, The, 215n13
Van Watson, William, 23, 158 voyeurism, 82, 154, 167
Varriano, John, 28, 32, 37, 42, 46,
48, 56, 216n26, 217n32, Wagner, Richard, 87, 93, 225n27
217n34, 217n37, 218n40, Gesamtkunstwerk, 108
220n6 popularity in Italy of, 85, 91,
Vasari, Giorgio, 66 224n12
Vatican, 5, 13, 29, 158 Wagstaff, Christopher, 10
see also papacy and names of Wallace, William E., 79
popes Wallerstein, Immanuel, 10
Vaughan, William, 28 Wanrooij, Bruno, 106
ventennio Warner, Michael, 83, 190, 199
see Fascism Warrack, John, 16
Verdi, Giuseppe, 85, 87–8, 121, Warwick, Genevieve, 27, 42, 48
224n16 Washington Post, The, 3
Battaglia di Legnano, 224n15 Weber, Eugen, 98, 225n21
Ernani, 94 Weber, Max, 33, 52
Germont, Giorgio, 97 Weininger, Otto, 223n8
Rigoletto, 97, 100, 150 Westfall, Richard, 216n21
duke, 97 Whittal, Arnold, 126
Traviata, La, 88, 94, 95, 97, Wilde, Oscar, 8, 122, 205
120: Violetta, 121, 124, Williams, Craig, 211n7
140 Williams, Raymond, 54
verisimilitude, 18, 22, 35, 46, 56, Willner, A. M., 119
63, 70, 120, 165, 171, 172 Wilson, Alexandra, 86–7, 91–2,
see also realism; naturalism 223n7, 225n27
verismo, 18, 22, 85–94, 223n8, Winfrey, Oprah, 228n11
224n13 Winterson, Jeanette
vero, il, 46, 51, 58 Oranges are not the Only Fruit,
Vienna, 66, 86–7, 89, 121, 142, 112
221n13, 223n6 Woolf, Stuart, 98
Virgin Mary Woolf, Virginia, 205
see Madonna Mrs. Dalloway, 107
virilità, 7 The Waves, 224n17
virility, 4, 5, 8, 11, 61, 156–8 To the Lighthouse, 116, 229n1
266 INDEX
Wright, A. D, 27, 29, 30–1, 33, 36, Zardo, Antonio, 17–18

38, 213n5, 215n18, 216n19 Zhang, G., 151, 173, 227n6
Zola, Emile, 92
Yanitelli, Victor, 16 Zuffi, Stefano, 69–70, 73, 77, 83,
Yardley, Jim, 3 217n31

John Champagne Italian Masculinity As Queer Melodrama Caravaggio Puccini Contemporary Cinema

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Global Masculinities

Edited by Michael Kimmel and Judith Kegan Gardiner

Michael Kimmel is a professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at

Published by Palgrave Macmillan:

Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism

Men and Masculinities Around the World: Transforming Men’s Practices

Constructions of Masculinity in British Literature from the Middle Ages

Becoming the Gentleman: British Literature and the Invention of Modern

Men and Masculinities in Irish Cinema

The History of Fatherhood in Norway, 1850–2012

Masculinity and Monstrosity in Contemporary Hollywood Films

Stars and Masculinities in Contemporary Italian Cinema

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-47480-3

All rights reserved.

Introduction: Italian Masculinity and Melodrama 1

1.1 St. Jerome Penitent, 1608 43

advances in scholarship and applies them to men’s lives: gendering

us to lose ourselves in the two simultaneous dramas. This is particularly

theatricality, and, as de Staël insinuates via the term “indolence,”

Historian George Mosse notes both that modern European mas-

heterosexual, allowing for promiscuous pairings: the virile emperor

historically competing models are historical accretion (which is not

A final, particularly suggestive and pertinent example: while, in

had no Wilde trials; it had, however, a Marinetti critical of them. It

Queer Italian Male Melodrama

natural essence or dehistoricized national character. The attempt to

non-philosophers can reveal “tensions and ambiguities that are at the

Affective potential is included in what Marx means by labor—that is,

melancholia, wherein, in the latter, the mourner experiences uncon-

operative the essential moral universe in a post-sacred era” (Brooks

secularization of the peninsula. Yet these hardly severed the historical

To state this in the strongest terms, my initial claim is that

Melodrama and M ELODR ÀMM A

of Pixérécourt (Garreau 124; Brooks Melodramatic 14) and the

Complicating the problem is that a genre of opera called melodràmma

Another Italianist credits Gian Rinaldo Carli, and not Rousseau,

Additionally, Carli refers to Poliziano’s Orfeo (which was not an opera

Italy is not usually understood as having contributed to the develop-

Melodrama, Class, Power

Christine Gledhill contends, “With the passing of hierarchical social

represents a victory over repression. We could conceive this repression

Brooks’s words echo Marcuse’s concept of surplus repression, which,

Melodrama and Allegory

express the intense psychic and bodily pains or pleasures experienced

As I suggest via a reading of Benjamin, rather than being mimetic,

Melodrama and Italian Queers

immediately recognizable, and, second, to produce “positive,” “real-

the cinema of Aurelio Grimaldi both destabilizes and reaffirms the

With its emphasis on the problematizing of national identity and link-

Grimaldi combine, sometimes uneasily, the melodramatic sensibility

O’Rawe of The Italianist (whose excellent contribution to this series I

Caravaggio and the Melodramatic

(215).5 Richard E. Spear notes Caravaggio’s “marvellous realism” (22);

by Michelangelo Caravaggio” (Souvenirs 414–415).13 Pixérécourt was

Louis Bayman has suggested one of the problems of locating in

The question of transcendence is the main sticking point theoretically

He also reminds us, however, that it is virtually impossible to distin-

Melodrama, the Counter-Reformation, and