Between the Stage and the Street: Art and Artifice in Giordano Bruno’s Candelaio

The Italian Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno’s only literary work, the comedy titled Candelaio published in 1582, has been interpreted through a comparative analysis with either his philosophical writings or with other plays from the tradition of the commedia erudita. In this article, I focus on the Candelaio’s textual strategies by drawing on the analytical categories of dissonance and deflection in order to demonstrate how Bruno’s theatrical piece can be viewed as a polemical statement on aesthetics. The introductory peritexts of the work set the key parameters for reading his text as a conscious play on conventionality and thus provide the interpretive framework for disentangling the complex meanings embedded in the dramatic action of the five acts that follow. Ultimately, the comedy aims to question representational practices through an engagement with the debate over the nature and function of art and artifice that invested all of the arts during the Cinquecento.