Pubblicato in “European Theatre Iconography”, Roma, Bulzoni, 2002, pp. 155-169.
In a French XVth century manuscript of Titus Livius’s History of Rome is depicted the abduction of the Sabines during a theatre performance, with the audience arranged on a wooden framework similar to the scaffolds used for mystery plays and jousts. The theatrical structure represented in the miniature, which resembles to the more famous Martyre de Sainte-Apolline of Jean Fouquet, differs from the fanciful theatre buildings described and depicted in late medieval sources. The illustration of the Titus Livius’s manuscript is also a crossroads of iconographical models and theatre icons. The representation in the middle is a bizarre patchwork of elements, revealing a blurred notion of the Roman theatre, and the observer’s eye tends to replace it with the figurative theme, the abduction of the Sabines, placed in the foreground as upon a stage.