Leone de' Sommi and the Performing Arts

The publication of Leone de' Sommi and the Performing Arts is in many respects a cultural event.
 

The first of its kind, the anthology is dedicated to Leone de' Sommi (1527-1592), a playwright, theatre theorist, director and poet, who lived and created in Mantua at Gonzaga court, in a time when this city was a flourishing cultural and artistic center.
 

What makes de' Sommi of special relevance to modern development in the theatre, is the unique blend of his skills. In this respect, de' Sommi was what we would consider now an interdisciplinary artist, endowed with a modern artistic awareness of the importance of the theatre as a performative art.
 

The remarkable scientific achievement of the present anthology is to highlight de' Sommi's approach to theatre as a physical place and not merely as a rhetorical locus, and to make it the focus and purpose of academic discussion.
 

By engaging a stimulating and wide-ranging dialogue which examines an area of Renaissance multimedia forms of artistic expression, the anthology offers valuable access to the artistic world contemporary to de' Sommi, while implicitly asserting that every robust interpretation is also an act of creation.