F. Testa - Abstract

In seventeenth century, during the reign of Madame Royale Christine of France, in the Duchy of Savoy the ballet de cour had a crucial role in building the image of power, acting as an authentic “political document” (E. Tesauro).

The Dono del Re delle Alpi, staged in 1645, on the occasion of Madame Royale’s birthday, celebrates the pacification of the State after the civil war turmoil. The feast is made of a banquet with entremets, followed by a ballet à entrées.

Through a complicated structure made of allegories, symbols, heraldic references and memories of the dynastic history, the show represents an image, ideologically oriented, of the Savoy state on the threshold of modernity: a territorial entity still fragmented and heterogeneous, unified by the cult of dynastic continuity and its emblems of medieval heritage, but intentioned to shape itself as an absolute monarchy, adorned by that Royal title for which the House of Savoy had yearned for a long time, a title the show constantly hints at, even from the title itself, which evokes the mythologem of an archetypal and founding “alpine regality”, ancestral legacy of the lineage.