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From the age of emperor Constantine the Great to the Renaissance, the Italian Jews were represented in legends, paintings, and theater based on the Legend of the Discovery of the True Cross. This work provided the subject for some of the Italian masterpieces of art from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. The same Legend also generated an epic based on anti-Semitic elements. Some years following Piero della Francesca’s frescos on the Legend in Arezzo, one of the most important theatrical experimentations of the time took place in Mantua: a Jewish theater company performed for the court, and a Jewish actor and intellectual produced one of the first and most important treaties of Renaissance theater. Meanwhile in Florence, religious theater depicted the Jews according to different political situations.

GIANNI CICALI is Assistant Professor at the Department of Italian at Georgetown University. He is a specialist in Italian Theater from the 15th to the 20th centuries with an emphasis on opera and librettists; actors, politics and drama; the relations between the performing and the fine arts; the Commedia dell’Arte; and religious theater. His book Attori e Ruoli nell’Opera Buffa Italiana del Settecento (Lettere, Firenze, 2005) is a critically acclaimed account of Italian “Opera buffa” based on textual and archival research.