Writing about dance and the codifying of gestures in the Renaissance

A variety of texts, starting from the middle of the fifteenth century, assumed the task of describing and prescribing the posture and body movements expected in the practice of dance in a courtly context. The relative novelty of such well-defined discourse in relation to a dimension of human experience that until then had no consolidated vocabulary – neither within a written technical tradition nor in common language – made available, even to a non-specialist public, a wealth of terms that were rich in nuances and potential uses, even beyond their reference object and specific origin. While that writing practice, in itself, was also driven by a project of réduction en art, the heuristic enterprise – pioneered by Michael Baxandall – of reading painting through the lens of choreutic language has an emic foundation in the culture of the epoch. As the literature that defines court etiquette clearly shows, it also lends itself to being extended to other areas of the behaviour of the elite.