After mentioning the late XVIth century reception of the myth of Medea, between Euripide and Seneca, this essay focuses on the ‘Medea essule’ (1602) written by the bolognese scholar Melchiorre Zoppio, founder and prince of the Accademia dei Gelati. The tragedy, avoiding the ‘impasse’ of the infanticide, chose the last sequence of the myth of Medea, disowned by Aegean too after the famous events of Corinto, exiled by Athens and returned in her homeland, the Colchis, in order to regain the power for her son, Medo. Between romance elements and contaminations of the myth (Zoppio draws on and alters Igino’s version), the tragedy represents a meditation on the human facts and refers to reality through the dramatization of power and its legitimacy issues. Evident are on the one side the link between the tragedy and the political treatises, from Seneca to Machiavelli and to the contemporary Botero, on the other side the baroque oriented rhetorical structure of the text, where concealment becomes the fulcrum of the action, in a lights and shadows play, and semblances of truth and deceptions shuffle and cross with paradoxical and mazy suberversions. So that the particular choice of Medea’s mythical course, with all the conversions it is put through, shows to the modern Bolognese scholar more than one possibility of painful allusions to the ethical and civil background of his time.
Metamorfosi di un mito. Una 'curiosa' «Medea» del primo Seicento
DISTASO, Grazia
2005-01-01
Abstract
After mentioning the late XVIth century reception of the myth of Medea, between Euripide and Seneca, this essay focuses on the ‘Medea essule’ (1602) written by the bolognese scholar Melchiorre Zoppio, founder and prince of the Accademia dei Gelati. The tragedy, avoiding the ‘impasse’ of the infanticide, chose the last sequence of the myth of Medea, disowned by Aegean too after the famous events of Corinto, exiled by Athens and returned in her homeland, the Colchis, in order to regain the power for her son, Medo. Between romance elements and contaminations of the myth (Zoppio draws on and alters Igino’s version), the tragedy represents a meditation on the human facts and refers to reality through the dramatization of power and its legitimacy issues. Evident are on the one side the link between the tragedy and the political treatises, from Seneca to Machiavelli and to the contemporary Botero, on the other side the baroque oriented rhetorical structure of the text, where concealment becomes the fulcrum of the action, in a lights and shadows play, and semblances of truth and deceptions shuffle and cross with paradoxical and mazy suberversions. So that the particular choice of Medea’s mythical course, with all the conversions it is put through, shows to the modern Bolognese scholar more than one possibility of painful allusions to the ethical and civil background of his time.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
