Best Article Award for Valeria De Lucca

Account books recording the massive expenses of staging Cicognini and Cesti's popular work Orontea at Palazzo Colonna in Rome (1661) offer the opportunity not only to reconstruct what costumes might have looked like, but also to speculate on the reasons why stage costumes were considered such an essential element of an operatic performance. Valeria argues that costumes fulfilled three important functions.  Through the use of rare and precious fabrics, lace, real and fake jewels and precious stones, costumes aptly represented the wealth of the family sponsoring the event. Far from being mere decorative elements, however, they also served an important narrative function in the opera, helping the audience to recognize the characters, their social status, their provenance and their age. Finally, by blurring the boundary between reality and fiction, they were also a fundamental vehicle of operatic verisimilitude, helping the audience navigate the fluid territory between life on and off the stage and generating a sense of ‘marvel' that was central to Baroque aesthetics.