the castrato meets the cyborg

The Castrato Meets the Cyborg

Bonnie Gordon

The Opera Quarterly, Volume 27, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 94-121(Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

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The Castrato Meets the Cyborg

nbonnie gordon

university of virginia

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The beginning of the 1630s did not go well for the Barberinis. They sufferedthrough a plague, a war, and a lot of bad press generated by their successful pros-ecution of Galileo as a heretic. When Prince Alexander Charles Vasa of Polandcame to visit in early 1634, they took the opportunity to engage in some early-modern damage control. The grand procession, an opera, and a theatrical joustleft no room to question their greatness. One evening, as part of these events, thesoprano castrato Marc Antonio Pasqualini entered the house of a Barberini rela-tion on a chariot that was drawn by a giant metallic eagle and “moved above fourgolden wheels.”1 Dressed as Fame, he wore an elaborate costume of gold threadand sang to the audience with a voice created by surgery and years of training(fig. 1).

Pasqualini’s entrance serves as my point of departure for exploring the boun-dary between humans and machines in early modern Italy. I will argue for a reso-nance between castrati and machines—a resonance that insists that boundariesbetween humans and machines have always been porous. The altered bodies ofthe castrati existed within a long-standing tension between the organic and thehuman made. In the seventeenth century that tension created a ripe climate formanufactured singers, one that is still relevant today. Admitting that relevanceshould teach us something about the dangers of reading the past in terms of ourown historical period. It can also reveal the productively defamiliarizing possibil-ities of reading the castrato as an early hallmark of, and indeed entirely related to,our current experience of (post)modernity.

Focusing on Pasqualini and his chariot helps us see castrati outside the oper-atic and ecclesiastical contexts in which scholars most often consider them. To besure, at their height they existed within the operatic world and were products ofthat potent institution. But, considering them in spectacles like the Barberinis’and alongside early modern technologies allows for new understandings of thepeculiar reasons why these altered men played such an important role in musicmaking for nearly two hundred years, and why, in particular, this was so inseventeenth-century Rome when the Barberini family dominated cultural life.

The Opera Quarterly Vol. 27, No. 1, pp. 94–122; doi: 10.1093/oq/kbr015Advance Access publication on September 7, 2011© The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

To judge from the descriptions in primary sources, as well as the invaluablearchival work of Margaret Murata and Frederick Hammond on Barberini Rome,baroque Rome was a space of barely controlled chaos.2 A variety of events—fromfireworks to operas with onstage fountains and flying clouds—mixed illusion,machinery, magic, and music. There were animate and inanimate objects; actorsand animals; clamorous events with trumpets, drums, screaming, shooting, andother noises. Within this environment of sensory overload, at certain momentsthe visual and the aural coalesced, and the castrato’s voice acted not just as amusical effect, but also as a special effect.

Spectators of these events lived in a world in which mechanical philosophywas emerging, but earlier magical sensibilities still echoed. They experienced thecastrato as a kind of human machine, a variation among other wondrous objectscreated by technological attempts to manipulate and supplement natural materi-als. Castrati were “mechanized” to produce sounds in ways that “unmechanized”bodies could not. If, as Jonathan Sawday and others claim, anatomy theaters andpublic autopsies played on the conceit of the body as a machine, then operas andspectacles used the castrato as both a machine and a malleable object.3 Castratiand machines did not register as identical; everyone could tell the differencebetween a mechanical singing bird and an altered man singing an aria. Likewise,we in the twenty-first century can distinguish between the Terminator and theformer governor of California. But the distinction between constructed singersand machines was by no means absolute in the seventeenth century. The shared

Figure 1 Pasqualini as Fame, engraving by Francois Colllignon, Festa, fatta in Roma(Rome, 1635). This image is only available in print due to restrictions from the rights’holder.

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quality of quasi-magical instrumentality between our time and theirs can help usunderstand how and why castrati functioned in the seventeenth century and how,more generally, their liminality challenges some of our current conceptions ofearly modern thought.

I read this process of body alteration through the lens of cyborg theory,arguing for an early modern techno-culture that centers not on computers, wires,and sockets, but on hydraulics, motion, force, and theatrical illusions. Evenwithout electronic enhancement, Pasqualini and others like him inhabited thefluid bodily and ontological states that Donna Haraway has so persuasively identi-fied in the postmodern era. Castrati performed the cultural work of cyborgs bychallenging the boundaries of the human. We in the twenty-first century haveour techno-culture, but early modern Europeans had theirs, too.4 At the sametime, William Gibson’s famous description of cyberspace as consensual halluci-nation might apply to both past and present. How better to describe the spectacu-lar seventeenth-century performances that transformed city spaces into ragingfloods and regularly sent gods floating away on cloud machines that moved alongvertical tracks operated by winches?5

It’s important in attempting to understand the castrato to escape from ourcontemporary insistence that these extraordinary men were only victims of a bar-baric practice. Such a presentist assumption has often steered modern scholarstoward obsessing about why audiences tolerated mutilated men in their high-artoperas. Contemporary scholars have tended rightly to focus on changing attitudestoward gender that made the castrato’s presence in music making acceptableuntil sometime at the end of the eighteenth century, when it began to seem hor-rifying. The changes relate both to the increasing association of high voices withfemale roles and to the rise of enlightenment philosophies that raised culturalconsciousness about human rights and individual choice. Indeed to our modernsensibilities, trapped in a Freudian world, what stands out is the genital mutila-tion, not the emphatic voice.

But recall that mutilation was not uncommon in the early modern period, noris it now. Stories of castrati wounded at young ages for the sake of their art arehard for us to take. They make the singers seem so disempowered, so withoutagency—objects traded about with little or no regard for their individual humansubjectivity. To put this in perspective, the seventeenth century was an age inwhich bodies of all sorts were trafficked and mutilated. Fathers regularly gaveaway daughters in marriage to men older than themselves, and the Italians hadtheir own active slave trade and culture of human bondage. Indeed, we ought notto be so smug about our own raised consciousness; we have our own mutilationand traffic in bodies. I am thinking of both the global trade in human bodies andof athletes, models, and musicians who work their bodies to the point of mutila-tion every day.

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The Castrato in Seventeenth-Century Rome

Seventeenth-century Rome was the capital of a powerful state, a hub for daringand lucrative business ventures, and a site of numerous magnificent courts. Itserved as headquarters of the Roman Catholic drive to regain religious and cul-tural control over Europe and was a focal point for information garnered by mis-sionaries exploring lands outside of Europe. Yet even as Rome’s intellectual worldreached toward baroque ingenuity, the capital was still dominated by RenaissanceNeoplatonism and the classical thought generally associated with the previouscentury.

The castrato stands as a sort of poster boy for seventeenth-century Rome’s the-atrical, musical, and mechanical culture. In this “theater of the world,” castratiparticipated in almost every aspect of sacred and secular ritual, often standingalongside a variety of ingenious artifices designed to ravish the senses. The pro-ductions in which castrati appeared frequently juxtaposed them with other fabu-lous creations. The joust that gave Pasqualini pride of place as Fame, forexample, also featured the Barberini dwarf, elaborate carriages, and light shows.To move even beyond Rome, the century that witnessed a growing delight in thecastrato’s voice also saw an increasing enchantment with moving artificialfigures, fireworks, fountains that spat out rushing water, and talking statues. Assingers increased the capabilities of their voices to delight and incite wonder, sotoo did engineers and stage designers increase their ability to create wondrousartificial figures and devices.6

In the same year that Pasqualini performed as Fame, Athanasius Kircher, thefamous German Jesuit polymath, arrived in Rome.7 Kircher plays a non trivialrole in this story because the emphasis in his writings on the rare, marvelous,and paradoxical epitomizes the interests of most educated Europeans of his timeand intersects with the cultural forces that allowed castrati to flourish.Seventeenth-century visitors to his museum at the Jesuit Collegio Romano, whichhe called a theater of art and nature, encountered displays of rare artifacts andperformances of all kinds.8

The years of Pasqualini’s reign in Rome also coincide with an importantmoment in the history of the solo singing voice. By the 1630s, when the VenetianRepublic first institutionalized public opera, the fees earned by high-voicedsingers in leading roles generally exceeded those of tenors and basses. This trendbegan at the end of the sixteenth century when the high voice had become a hotcommodity. In most of Italy, however, and especially in Rome, the female voicesthat could produce those sounds came with a presumed lasciviousness fromwhich popes and cardinals felt they had to distance themselves. Such an avoid-ance of the female’s erotic appeal points to the peculiar situation of the Italiancastrato. Although Byzantine, Greek, Roman, Chinese, and Islamic traditions


employed men with altered genitals in sacred and secular rituals, only Italiansdeveloped and refined the process of training castrato voices, placing these“made” performers at the center of their music making.

Italian courts and churches hired the earliest castrati because they came withhigh voices without problematic female bodies and because their power and lon-gevity made them more practical than boy sopranos. The papal chapel recruitedthe first from Spain in the early 1560s, though they were by no means the onlyones doing it. These sixteenth-century castrati were neither any more virtuosicthan other singers nor predisposed to execute vocal pyrotechnics that exceededthe glottal effects used by all singers. However, by the middle of the seventeenthcentury this had begun to change, and singers like Pasqualini were constructed,acquired, and trained for the purpose of doing special performances. Listenersincreasingly heard and understood castrati as exceptional.

In Rome, by 1625, Pope Urban VIII declared the Cappella Pontificia at fullstrength with nine male sopranos and nine male altos. Barberini castrati also par-ticipated in a secular ensemble that included harp, lute, harpsichord, percussion,winds, and violins. When Urban went on vacation to the Castel Gandolfo, henever traveled without two trumpet players and a group of castrati virtuosi.9

Cardinal Alessandro Peretti Montalto and Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monteamong others also retained castrati in their households and paid for their train-ing.10 Thanks in part to these active cardinals, Rome constituted a focal point forthe castrato trade. Castrati produced there were trafficked—like books, objectsand theoretical treatises. Young castrati often went to Rome for training inwritten and improvised music, while dignitaries from other Italian courts lookedto Rome to fulfill their singing needs.

Pasqualini’s career exemplifies the ways in which the Barberinis privilegedtheir prized singers. In 1631, Cardinal Antonio Barberini secured a place for himin the Sistine Chapel choir and procured him a benefice at Santa MariaMaggiore. When the singer’s carriage met with bullet fire in 1637, the cardinaloffered six hundred scudi for information (no small sum!) and then apparentlytried to lock the singer up for safekeeping. Pasqualini was excused from thechoir because he had “been kept in his rooms by order of Sig. Cardinal Antoniofor a certain tiresome incident.”11 Pasqualini killed a servant the following year,but suffered no repercussions other than temporary exile. In 1641, Pasqualiniaccompanied the cardinal’s court to sing in Rossi’s Orfeo. Again, his presenceserved to elevate the cardinal’s court in the eyes of the French.

Resounding Bodies

The events celebrating the 1634 visit of the Polish prince to the house ofBarberini centered on the joust, the details of which appear in two paintings.

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Cardinal Guido Bentivoglio, the brother of Enzio Bentivoglio, who directed thespectacle, also produced a fabulous festival book.12 The book alone cost over sixhundred scudi (the price set on the head of Pasqualini’s shooter) and stood as adramatic printed performance of Barberini greatness. An illustration ofPasqualini’s performance as the goddess Fame was positioned in a prized place,and the text describes the castrato’s impact as a special effect (fig. 1).

Fame presented herself at the center of the room, where the ladies and noblemenhad assembled themselves, on a lovely chariot which was drawn by a great eagleand moved above four golden wheels. The body of the cart was subdivided bymany carvings adorned with leaves and golden decorations which stood out evenmore against the green background. But from the body of the same chariot overtwo harpies of silver rose the seat of Fame which was also supported from behindby a giant silver harpy. One went up to the said seat through two silver steps allworked with several arabesques and carvings[,] and on the extreme edge of thesurface where the eagle had the ropes to pull it two lovely silver vases adorned thefloor of the chariot. Fame, who sat majestically on top of it, appeared then sump-tuously dressed, and her dress, which was woven with many colors and gold[,]was also studded with a multitude of eyes, mouths, and ears. She held a goldentrumpet in her hand and on her shoulders she unfolded two wings which werealso full of eyes, ears and mouths. The Chariot stopped when it was necessary andwhile the people were waiting to hear what Fame would bring, she was accompa-nied by a harmonious consort of instruments and in these notes with a very sweetsong explained the reason for her arrival.13

Pasqualini’s appearance as Fame was just one of many instances in whichhumans functioned as special effects and in which their alliances with bothmachines and the natural came to the forefront. Fame’s wings, and those of theeagles drawing her chariot, evince the animal, while the wheels, which poweredmachines and populated machine books, stand as artifacts of human industry.Even in early modern Italy, the wheel was understood as a primary marker ofhuman technology and was used to move everything from the chariots that cartedpopes through processions to water that powered hydraulic machines. The silverharpies that carry Fame’s seat—half woman, half bird—are themselves liminalcreatures. Fame wields a golden military trumpet and bears responsibility forupholding the power of her patrons. The metallic sheen of Pasqualini’s costumefurther enhances his image as a constructed instrument, built, like the trumpet,through a human process. The multiple eyes and ears suggest a human bodyreduced to its component parts and reconstructed.

At the same time, Fame’s costume and performance here contain withinthem echoes of ancient mythological stories and the sound phenomena that wentwith them. Pasqualini’s costume nearly exactly re-creates Virgil’s description ofFame, in which she spreads her terrible wings, and each of her many eyes comes


with a tongue, a voice, and an ear. Allusions to Virgil’s Fame appeared in visualart, poetry, and musical entertainments throughout Renaissance and baroqueRome, and would have been familiar to many viewers. Virgil’s Fame repeatseverything, first in a whisper to a few, and then louder and stronger with eachbreath:

Pinioned, withAn eye beneath for every body feather,And, strange to say, as many tongues and buzzingMouths as eyes, as many pricked-up ears,By night she flies between the earth and heavenShrieking through darkness, and she never turnsHer eye-lids down to sleep.14

Already in this Latin context Fame acts as a resonant body, as a sound carrierwhose voice and noises far exceed her body. She is a reverberation whose soundis reflected so many times that no single source voice remains. The original bodyis in the end lost. The performative realization of the literary precursor highlightsa body that is comprised of fragments. Fame in other words is already a musicalinstrument of resonance. Pasqualini’s costume also recalls Ovid’s description ofFame’s home, “built of echoing brass.”15 Pasqualini’s voice on the figure of Famemay well have created an especially resonant body: an altered voice heralding animportant event, on a musical machine representing an already superhumansound. Resonance, when the vibration of one object causes another to vibratewith it, occurs widely in nature but is also re-created with natural, semi-natural,and artificial devices. Fame was herself a kind of acoustic effect, an animateamplification. As Fame, Pasqualini also then became a kind of acoustic effectthat further served as a literal mouthpiece for the Barberinis, singing with a “har-monious concert of instruments” as she announced her own arrival. She hadarrived from on high to call the audience to order. While the score has been lost,we have the words Pasqualini sang upon his entrance. As Frederick Hammondpoints out, the alternation of seven- and eleven-syllable lines suggests aMonteverdi-esque prologue.16

Io che sol frà le bocche,Invisibile altrui,Sù le lingue mortaliVò dispiegando l’aliQui vengo, e co’l sembiante

Quella sarò io, son’ioche le grand’alme, e l’opre

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Ignote al cieco MondoFò note, e col mio voloE’ termine al lor grido il Mare, e’l Polo.

I, who only in the mouths(am) invisible to others,spread my wingson the mortal tongues,(I) come here.

I will be the onewho makes known the great souls andthe works unknown to the blind World(and with my flight . . .)The sea and the earth will end their cry for help.17

Sixteen years after Pasqualini’s appearance as Fame, Jean Royeur arrived in Romeand promptly treated audiences to feats that called into question his status as amere human. Royeur performed his trick in the Piazza Navona, but by 1650 theFountain of the Four Rivers, created by the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini, hadturned the piazza into a permanent theater. The fountain itself enraptured audi-ences with its natural-looking figures and was unveiled with a parade led by noneother than the goddess Fame herself. As ingenious hydraulic machinery pushedwater though an opening between large man-made rocks, the human fountainRoyeur performed his own astounding feats. He ingested water and, through aninvisible force, turned it into a variety of other liquids. After consuming largequantities of plain water, according to a description by Kircher’s assistant KasparSchott, he began to vomit: “from his stomach he presse[d] out twelve or fourteenperfumed waters of different colors, most perfect liquors, wine alight with flame,and oil burning without wick, lettuces and flowers of all kinds, with full andfresh petals. He also exhibit[ed] a fountain by projecting water out of his mouthinto the air for the space of two Misereres.”18 Exploiting the blurred relationshipbetween the organic and the man-made, he did the work of a machine and, ineffect, became a work of art. Schott made this connection clear by drawing adirect parallel between Royeur and the stone fountain.19

Royeur’s liminal position was made explicit by Kircher, who attempted todetermine just where to place Royeur on the continuum between organic andmaterial. Royeur’s performance in the shadow of the fountain drew his attention,and he and his assistant, Schott, set out to prove that Royeur’s talent involved themanipulation of natural causes rather than the work of some intervention,demonic or otherwise. The puking Frenchman eventually appeared in Schott’s


encyclopedic Mechanica Hydraulico-Pneumatica as Machina VIII, alongside otherincontinent hydraulic machines. The years in which Royeur and Pasqualini wereactive in Rome were ones in which Romans nurtured a fascination with what wewould call machine culture and with the new technology of devices that extendedand replicated human processes. This move toward machines goes back to thesixteenth century. Giambattista Aleotti, for instance, published a translation ofHeron of Alexandria in 1589 that explained in detail how to make machines, andit served as a model for the costly machine books that were all the rage at theturn of the seventeenth century.20 In Rome during the middle of the seventeenthcentury, Kircher worked in print and in person to display machines created byhuman ingenuity and powered by some force of nature, air, or water to incitewonder and pleasure in spectators. These devices, like the castrato, existed in aperformative context for the amusement of princes. Visitors to the museum atthe Jesuit Collegio Romano might have encountered the regurgitatingFrenchman near a fabulous hydraulic organ, or a mechanical Jesus walking onwater, a machine for the composition of four-part harmony, or a perpetual screwthat allowed even the smallest boy to lift a large object.

Museums in the early modern period looked very different from the static col-lections and exhibits that we know today.21 Often called theaters of nature, theywere resounding spaces that served as important sites for performance anddisplay. Like the spectacles featuring castrati, they endeavored to inspire wonderin spectators and enhance the cultural capital of their patrons. Naturalists, likemusicians, took pride in their ability to amaze. The machines, instruments, andexperiments housed within museum walls occupied a space that bordered on thetheatrical. Kircher’s museum served as an actual theater for ceremonial visits. In1622, for example, the Collegio Romano sponsored a series of festivities to cele-brate the canonization of Saints Ignatius and Francis Xavier, for which thecollege was turned into a simulacrum of ancient Rome. The college museumitself provided a site for the staging of plays representing events in the lives ofXavier and Ignatius, including an opera—with a libretto by the mathematics pro-fessor Orazio Grassi and music by Kapsberger—that featured many castrati andelaborate stage machines.22

Schott made it very clear that he intended the museum to stimulate pleasureand curiosity:

There is, in the much-visited Museum (that we will soon publish in print) of theMost learned and truly famous Author mentioned above, a great abundance ofHydraulic and Pneumatic Machines, that are beheld and admired with enormousdelight of their souls by those Princes and literati who rush from all cities andparts of the world to see them, and who hungrily desire to know how they aremade.23

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He described Kircher’s mechanics as a service to “important men,” whom Schottsaid wanted to know “the reasons for the construction of Machines, and thecauses of the motions of engines. That I might satisfy their desires; I proceededin this little book, like an anatomist, to teach all the craft of the aforementionedMuseum of the Machines, and to relate things taught elsewhere by the sameauthor.”24 The original Latin employs the words fabricarum and anatomians, bothof which recall contemporary anatomy treatises and serve to bridge the gapbetween the machines and their human observers. The word “anatomy,” usedhere to describe both machines and humans, serves conceptually to link the two.For Schott, the machines aimed to please princes who

derive greater pleasure of their eyes and souls from these things than they mightexpect profit for their estate. Neither will we be satisfied with delighting only theeyes, we also prepare a feast for the ears, with various self-moving and self-sounding organs and instruments that we will excite to motion and sound only bythe flow of water and the stealthy approach of air with no less ease than skill.25

Schott, like his teacher, aimed to delight princes and pleasure their sensorium inall registers. He did so in part through tricks of natural magic. It is a theatricaldisplay that capitalizes on visual illusion and demonstrates the control of art overnature, of “man” over the human body. Schott goes on to promise readers that hewill demonstrate just how to create these effects that, he assures them, can beused to make already powerful princes even more powerful.

Outside of the museum, Pasqualini provided the kind of delight Schott dis-cusses by exciting the sensorium in all registers. From his debut in StefanoLandi’s Il Sant’Alessio, Pasqualini participated in almost every musical event spon-sored by his patron. He had by the 1640s earned the nickname Malagigi, whowas cousin to Rinaldo and a secondary magician in Orlando furioso. OdoardoCeccarelli, puntatore of the Capella Sistina in 1647, ascribed rare powers of creativ-ity to Pasqualini: he “was one of the most famous virtuosi in our college, even inall of Christendom. The incomparable artistry and refined elegance of his singingis a result of his own invention, a miracle in this profession in our century.”26

The words artistry and invention (artifizio e peregrine) imply the intervention ofhuman effort; they highlight the voice as natural and crafted and the singer asboth a creator and the created.

Theatrical Organs and Material Voices

The similarities in the way the singing voice and the hydraulic organ were under-stood to function highlight the connections between humans and machines inthe seventeenth century. I will make analogies between received understandingsof the way both instruments—the voice and the organ—sounded and the ways


both created theatrical spaces of sound. Both kinds of resounding bodiesoccupied a central place in the spectacular culture of early modern Rome, and bothfunctioned as instruments of reality and fantasy, composed of natural materialsthat made noise through hydraulic technologies, pumping fluids, and enhancedphysicality. Moreover, both varieties of sound machines had a shelf life—castratithe lifespan of a man and hydraulic organs not much more than fifty years. Thisrenders them essentially tacit to our modern ears, and thus audible only throughthe traces of history. They are not, in other words, like violins and harpsichordsthat still exist and can be reconstructed almost exactly. Understanding the perhapsodd juxtaposition of these two kinds of sound machines involves wanderingthrough treatises on singing and the building of organs and on theatrical produc-tions that made use of the castrato and those that featured the organ. This sectionmoves toward a brief mention of the castrato Angelo Ferrotti, who sang the charac-ter Magic in the 1642 production of Il palazzo incantato.

Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings about the organ oftenbrought to the fore its curiously animate nature and its usefulness as a site forexploring the connections between humans and machines.27 One of the most fas-cinating examples of this embodied language is Gioseffo Zarlino’s Sopplimentimusicali. Though it was published in 1588, his work continued to be read throughthe seventeenth and eighteenth century along with Giambattista Aleotti’s andGiambattista della Porta’s. In Sopplimenti musicali, Zarlino, who made a careerout of lambasting artificial music, raised the question of whether the organ oughtto be understood as an ancient or modern invention and pursues his answer in agenealogy of the word itself.28 He ultimately came down on the side of artificial,but in the process explained that the name organ emerged not in relation to aparticular instrument but because “it also suits all of the mechanical instrumentswhich are useful in any arts and sciences through the help of which one canbring any work to the desired ends.”29 Organs, in his terms, constitute anythingthat can change matter or immaterial forces. An organ or a tool is, by this model,both material and immaterial:

The hammer that the goldsmith uses to make nails and the saw that the carpenteruses to cut a plank are called tools or instruments [strumenti di lavoro]. Also moneywith which we buy the things that are necessary to human life is called a tool. It isnot simply the material things which have a permanent form; but those withoutform [imaterali] such as logic we call tool.30

Ideas and logic thus also count as tools; they have the potential to transform andto purposefully create something new. Zarlino went on to explain that the organacquired its name because it is constructed in the manner of the human body.

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Therefore I say, that the suggested ‘organ’ acquired this universal and commonname as its own particular name, from a certain excellence of its natural partswhich form the voice, which are called the natural instruments. Because [theorgan] was constructed in the way of the human body, with the pipes correspond-ing to the throat, the bellows to the lungs, and the keys to the teeth and the partthat sounds to the tongue, and so on with other parts which correspond to thesame ones in man. But to tell the truth our Organ[,] for which the material struc-ture is not very old, on the contrary it is rather modern, where the hoods wereadded; the hoods which from the box that used to contain the water which iscalled Sommiero give off the air which goes into the pipes like Virtruvio paints it.Before mentioning the place from which it acquired the name of hydraulic thereason can be seen that our organ is not a modern instrument except for withrespect to its first form in which the air which now is produced by the hoods isput in the place of the one that was made using water.31

Aleotti, Fabio Colonna, della Porta, and Kircher described more specifically theprocess that Zarlino theorized. They explained a technique that had been used inItaly’s iron foundries, using only water, air, and a recording barrel. As flowingwater entered a long vertical tube, it mixed with air. When the water flowed outthe end, the pressurized air separated to feed the organ pipes, and the waterdrove a paddlewheel. The wheel in turn drove a large barrel with pins thatopened the valves of the pipes that created pitch. Because they seemed to powertheir own sound, such mechanical organs blurred the line between man andmachine.

The singing voice was understood to work via a similar process. It was ani-mated by the breath, which supposedly pushed air from the chest through thethroat and into the mouth where tongue, lips, and teeth gave it articulation asspeech or song. Pitch and volume depended on how swiftly the air movedthrough. As late as the early eighteenth century, debate still raged about whetherthe voice functioned primarily as a wind or string instrument. Anton Ferrein’s1741 acoustical experiments that settled the matter by revealing the vibrating vocalcords were still a century away.32

As a consequence of the importance of breath, good singing became largely amatter of breath control; the organ similarly depended on controlling the air. Forexample in his 1602 Le nuove musiche, which described a training method andstyle of singing,Giulio Caccini insisted that: “A man must have a command ofbreath to give the greater spirit to the increasing and diminishing of the voice, toesclamazione and other passions.”33 Reflecting this masterful breath control, cas-trati earned endless praise for their “messa di voce,” their ability to “place thevoice.” Caccini, who had used the terms “il cresercere e scenare della voce,”described the messa di voce as the primary means of mastering tone.34 Singershad to adjust breath support to the change in vocal intensity in order to produce


a constant pitch and mitigate the natural tendency to strain or push. If a singertended to go sharp during the crescendo and flat during the decrescendo, breathcontrol allowed for a continuous pitch.

Meanwhile, seventeenth-century writings on the human voice presented it asa raw material that, like stone, air, and water, could be shaped and molded. Inother words, just as the organ was described in embodied terms, so too was thevoice described in material ones. It moved like air but was understood to havesubstance that could be shaped like stone, wax, or metal. Camillo Maffei, adoctor, philosopher, and musician, made this clear in the Discorso della voce pub-lished in 1562, which remained an important document well into the eighteenthcentury.35 For Maffei, the voice stood as a malleable raw material that a singercould work on and mold. In 1645, Giovanni Vittorio Rossi (better known by hispen name Giano Nicio Eritreo) depended on these ideas in his description of asinger who could “move his voice from highest to lowest, passing it throughvarious turns. He could twist and bend it like the softest wax whenever hewished.”36

Describing his experimental attempts to build a hydraulic organ, della Portawrote about a process that mirrors that of the human voice. He described mixingair and water either in the end of a pipe or in his mouth. After many failedattempts, he found a way to create a “warbling sound and keep the tune” with theinstrument by forcing the air from the bellows to bubble in the chest.37

Let there be made a Brass bottomed chest for the organ, wherein the wind mustbe carried. Let it be half full of water. Let the wind be made by bellows, or somesuch way that must run through a neck under the waters. But the spirit thatbreaks forth of the middle of the water is excluded in the empty place. Whentherefore by touching the keys, the straps of the mouths of the pipes are opened,the trembling wind coming into the pipes makes pleasant trembling sounds,which I have tried and found to be true.38

Some of the effects were quite literally the same. The vibrato effect della Portawanted to create for the organ was next of kin to the singers’ tremolo, and theshared emphasis on tremolos from writers on singing and on organs highlightsthis kinship. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Kircher focused his workon the tremulant, a mechanical device installed on the organ’s windpipe thatrhythmically modulated the airflow to the wind chest and produced a vibrato withan almost constant frequency. In essence it rhythmically opened a breath hole inthe windpipe of the organ. Through the seventeenth century, the tremolo com-prised perhaps the most basic singing technique. In his treatise for singers,Lodovico Zacconi explained:

The tremolo, that is the tremulous voice, is the true portal to the passaggi and themeans of mastering the gorgia; just as the ship is made to move more easily when

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already in motion and the dancer moves better if he is prepared for the leap. Thistremolo should be slight and pleasing, for if it is exaggerated and forced, it tiresand annoys. Its nature is such, that if used at all, it should always be used sinceuse converts it into habit, for this motion of the voice helps and spontaneouslyencourages the movement of the gorgia and miraculously facilitates the undertak-ing of passaggi.39

More than terminological conjunction, the sympathetic relationship between thesounds made by the organ and by the vocal cords implies a similarity of materialproduction and of effect. In other words, the instruments both functioned andaffected the listener in similar ways.

As premier singers of their day, the castrati were all expected to be masters ofan exquisite tremolo. Describing the rigorous training of the castrato students ofVirgilio Mazzocchi in 1695, the composer and castrato Giovanni Andrea AngeliniBontempi explained that “the Roman schools oblige their pupils every day toemploy an hour in singing difficult and uncomfortable things, to acquire experi-ence, another [hour] in exercising the trill, another in passaggi.”40 WhenMonteverdi first heard Pasqualini sing in 1628 at the Farnese-Medici wedding,the young singer had apparently not yet reaped the benefits of such training pro-grams; the composer remarked rather despairingly that “he can do little orna-ments and something of a trillo, but everything is pronounced with a somewhatmuffled voice.”41

The fluid boundaries within which both castrati and hydraulic organs wereunderstood made them natural actors in the theatrical space that was earlymodern Rome, a theatricality that was heightened in both dramatic spectaclesand gardens. Kircher’s best-known examinations of hydraulic organs focused onthe Palazzo del Quirinale and the Villa Aldrovandi at Tivoli, both of which wereextraordinarily theatrical. The organs essentially told stories.42 By 1650, both hadattracted attention and inspired many written accounts. The organ at Palazzo delQuirinale was built by Luca Biagi in 1598 but elaborated upon by Kircher. It ani-mated a number of automaton figures, including a mechanical representation ofthe legend in which Pythagoras visits the blacksmith’s forge and discovers thelaws governing musical pitch (fig. 2). Kircher’s illustration anatomized the wholeextraordinary machine, showing exactly how the cylinder worked by means of per-forations that allowed poles to slip through and open the pipe. The stone figureof Pythagoras suggested the merging of human ingenuity and natural sound.According to the myth, while passing a blacksmith’s forge he noticed that the dis-tinct sound of each hammer creates a different but regular pitch; deciding toweigh them, he discovered them to be ratios of one another (fig. 3). Pythagorasroots music in the material and in man-made objects, but still depends onnature. The manipulation of nature’s materials create sound.


The organ at Tivoli, as described by Kircher, was populated by moving crea-tures that reflected a fascination with animate objects straddling the dividebetween the organic and mechanical. Crafted from natural materials—air, water,

Figure 2 Hydraulic organ; Kircher, Althanasius, Musurgia Universalis. 1650 ed.(New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970) p. 346.

Figure 3 Pythagorian Blacksmiths; Kircher, Althanasius, Musurgia Universalis. 1650ed. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970) p. 346 detail.

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and stone—their actual life force emerged from human ingenuity. The organ fea-tured a grotto in which the satyr Pan played a flute, accompanied by a cuckoo’s calland a rooster’s crow. According to Kircher’s description, the cuckoo bobbed hishead to a two-note call, and the rooster flapped his wings in time.43 Pan sang tothe nymphs in an easy scale, and the nymphs and Syrinx answered. The soundswere apparently consonant. The animate characters all displayed their pipes as ifannouncing their anatomy. The three pipes played in four-part harmony whilemoving figures delighted the eye; a smaller organ displayed an effigy of Echo. Inmythology, Pan, the half-human and half-animal god of rustic music, wanders thehills chasing nymphs and playing his pipes—which, like the hydraulic organ thatdisplayed this scene, originated in the modification and enhancement of nature.Pan fit together the pipes and joined them with wax, thus enhancing a naturalinstrument. Appropriately, the organ that featured the figure of Pan merged anultra-mechanical four-part harmony with the imitation of bird sounds.

These organs depended on a kind of artifice that was repeatedly enacted andtheorized in theatrical productions. Just to name a few: for Carnival in 1638,Bernini mounted a theatrical representation of an actual flood of the Tiber—L’Inondazione del Tevere—which included the purposeful breaking of a barricadethat pushed water furiously onto the stage. When members of the audience gotup to run away, another barricade arose out of nowhere and stopped the flood.Rome frequently lit up with fabulous fireworks displays, which, in addition totransmitting emblematic messages, blurred whatever faint lines existed betweenart and reality. Just three years after the joust, Piazza Navona set the stage for aseries of fireworks in honor of the election of Ferdinand III as king of theRomans.44

Bernini’s 1644 comedy Fontana di Trevi took as its central topic these kinds ofeffects.45 In this comic satire the character Aldoro, a satiric representation ofSalvator Rosa, begged to learn the secrets of the stage machine that had madeGraziano—the satirical mouth of Bernini—famous. In addition to the usual storyof cross-class love conflicts, the play put the business of stage artifice on display,complete with countless moments when the magic of the stage fails to work. Inone such scene, the stage appeared overcrowded with carpenters, painters, andother machinists, who worked on the sets. The scene suggested a larger culturalanxiety and the desire that stood behind it: desperation to make the machineswork, and faith in their ability to beguile. Bernini, like his voice in the play, was amaster of illusion, of creating inventions that fooled the eye and that highlightedthe ability of humans to trump nature. After much fuss over clouds that firstfailed to rise properly and then plopped to the ground, the comic manservantZanni announced, “Oh I see beautiful clouds float through the sky. In truthwhere there is naturalism there is artifice. Because of this fact the Prince, who isgoodness and courtesy itself, in order to see the work of a virtuoso such as


Mister Graziano, has to have it ordered with such rigor, that it is not derivedfrom nature but from artifice.”46

Seventeenth-century naturalism always depended on artifice. The materials ofmachinery and levies and pulleys created images from nature. The character Amiexplained that

the inventiveness, the design, is the magic art through which one can trick the eyeso as to surprise [the viewer], and to make a cloud appear on the horizon and haveit advance always clear and with a natural motion, and [to make sure that] as itgets gradually closer to the eye it enlarges, appearing bigger. To show the windrising and transporting it away here and there and then to have it go up, and notto have it come down as the counterweights would have it.47

Luigi Rossi’s 1642 Il palazzo incantato took on the same issues. Many scholarshave argued that it was produced primarily to show off Pasqualini’s vocal talents.Based on an episode from Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the production explicitlycombined magic and artifice. The cast for opening night included almost everyimportant male singer in Rome. Pasqualini was, of course, among them, playingthe heroine Bradamante. The opera began by staging the triumph of stagecraftand magic with a prologue accompanied by an eight-part instrumental ensemble.Music, Painting, and Poetry, each sung by a castrato, argued her particular caseas the most powerful of the arts. At the end of the debate, Magic flew in, finishedthe scene construction, and declared herself the unequivocal winner, discipliningthe others along the way. Her effects were new and different, she announced, andher spells would ultimately triumph over all the other arts. And then in a fabu-lous effect, a magic castle exploded out of nowhere, ready to host the shenanigansto follow.

Here is MagicBut even if I arrive near you without you noticingThe effects and operas are not new to you anymorebecause very oftenyour rhymes, your colors, and the singingentertain the souls with pleasant delight.The ultimate feat comes with industrious spells48

But it was the castrato Angelo Ferrotti, not the visual effects, who in the role ofMagic gave voice and power to this altering reality. Submerged in artifice, hisbody reminded the audience that, in the end, the castrato’s voice retained thesupreme power to extend and alter nature. Singing here comes across as a prolif-eration of simultaneous magical forms. But the voice, as in the material produc-tion of Magic’s song, set enchantment in motion. Song is, in other words, thenecessary precondition for magic in the world of this drama. Magic cannot be

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heard without the voice of the castrato. By setting up the castrato’s voice as theembodiment of magic, the voice of magic created a place for Pasqualini and theothers to do their musical thing. Il palazzo incantato is, as Frederick Hammondhas said, a singers’ opera, one that allowed the singing voice to shine through itsimprobable cast of lamenting and emoting characters.

Early Modern Cyborgs

I want to tie together Pasqualini, the hydraulic organs, and Rome’s spectacularculture by reading the castrato’s body through the lens of cyborg theory. Thisreading offers a different kind of material history of their lost voices and, in sodoing, moves away from what I see as the prevailing turn towards presentism inearly modern studies. It looks past the squeamishness about castrati in our phal-locentric world and sidesteps momentarily our privileged sense of civil rights. Italso contradicts the notion that we are the only properly technological era. Theworld has always had a place for creatures and objects produced by technique,but the techniques and the materials have varied according to time and place.Our fictional cyborgs range from the visibly mechanical to the almost human;think of the Borg from Star Trek or the Six Million Dollar Man, both of whomalready seem old-fashioned. And each of these fictional cases has an oddly accel-erated shelf life. In order to lay a claim to wonder, the technological aspect of thecyborg needs to be explicitly and recognizably new to postmodern eyes. In thisway, cyborgs are not unlike humanoid machines in that they are fetching if andonly if they are fresh; when they become dated or old they are promptly disav-owed, discarded, or disdained.

Furthermore, cyborgs in the real—as opposed to fictional—world tend to usesome technology to push and overcome the limits of individual human bodies.I am thinking of interventions like pacemakers that regulate the heart, or lasersurgery to fix eyes. In terms of materials associated with cyborgs, these days wethink in terms of computers, sockets, and wires. But as N. Katherine Haylesargues, someone can be a cyborg without having sockets or artificial bodyparts.49 In the early modern world the connections between humans andmachines centered on matter, hydraulics, pumping fluids, and enhanced physi-cality. Force worked on both humans and machines and served as their interface.This view lets us see the cyborg as a lens for understanding particular construc-tions of the human body, rather than as a historically proscribed term of art.

As Jonathan Sawday, Allison Muri, and others have insisted, the impulse tomerge man and machine—whatever we mean by those two complex terms—arose long before the twentieth century.50 Since prehistoric eras humans haveused tools to enhance their relationship with the material world, and sinceancient times, people have been designing inanimate objects that walk and talk.


In the 1490s, Leonardo da Vinci attempted to prove that nature was mechanicallyuniform and that humans could imitate the natural equipment of flying animals.“A bird is an instrument working according to mechanical law,” he wrote, “whichinstrument it is in the capacity of man to reproduce.”51 He invented severalmechanical devices that allowed human legs and arms to produce a birdlike flap-ping, and connected his devices to animate objects through the animating poten-tial of force. “Force is nothing but a spiritual power, an invisible energy which iscreated and communicated, through violence from without, by animated bodiesto inanimate bodies, giving to these the similarity of life, and this life works in amarvelous way, compelling all created things from their places, and changingtheir shapes.”52

While artisans and artists like da Vinci worked in raw materials such as stoneand gold, castrati and the surgeons who created them worked with the raw mate-rials of the malleable human body. By the end of the seventeenth century, thehuman machine would be more fully theorized. Thanks to Descartes, the periodis generally understood as the moment when philosophers first defined humansin terms of devices like clocks, perpetual motion machines, and other mecha-nisms; Descartes also famously imagined the body as a hydraulic system ofnerves.

Cyborg theory depends on the basic assumption that all matter, whethercreated by humans or not, exists on a continuum. This idea of the continuity ofmatter was especially potent in the premodern world in which, as Pamela Smithexplains, artisans engaged in an ongoing bodily struggle against matter, whichthey had to come to know and master through experience.53 Using slightly differ-ent terms, Caroline Bynum points out that all matter was understood as malle-able and “pregnant with creative potential.”54 The actual materials used in anycreative process had spiritual properties. For instance, in his writings onhydraulic machines discussed above, della Porta claimed that the phenomenalpowers of music to lead men into battle and calm beasts were as much about thematerials of the instruments as about the sounds themselves. “When I think it isnot against reason that the same may be done by the lute or harp alone, but whatis done by art or cunning, is more to be wondered at, which none can deny. Butif we seek out the causes of this, we shall not ascribe it to the Music but to theinstrument, the Wood they are made of, and to the skins. Since the properties ofdead beasts are preserved in these parts and of trees cut up in their wood.”55 Theexpressive power lay not in the abstract and immaterial sounds, but in the verymaterial wood and skins that comprised the sound-making instruments. Heexplains that because bears hate horses, a drum made with horse skin will scareaway a bear: “A Horse, that is a creature made obedient to man, has capitalhatred with a Bear, that is a beast hurtful to man. He will know his enemy thathe never saw before and presently prove himself to fight with him, and he uses

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art rather than strength for it. And I have heard that Bears have been driven awayin the wilderness by the sound of a drum, when it was made of a Horse skin.”56

Because of the danger of snakes and the like, fiddle strings made of serpents canwreak all kinds of havoc: “If Fiddle strings be made of Serpents, especially ofVipers, for being put on a Harp and played on, if women with child be present,they suffer Abortion, and Vipers are wont to do as much by meeting them, asmany write.”57

For della Porta, the power of sound came from the cunning mobilization andmodification of a natural material. In the case of castrati, that material was thevoice. Despite their employment of castrati, the church had always had problemswith the act of castration. Most people handled the procedure itself as a ratherunseemly business and avoided the details.58 They liked the voice but preferredto be kept innocent of the surgical operation that made it possible. What little wedo know about the production of the castrato voice depends on anecdotes,modern knowledge of hormonal effects, and a few scientific studies of castratedmen. What is clear is that the castrato’s body underwent a two-stage modification,comprised of the surgery, followed by training. I want to rehearse it in brief toshow that every element of the castrati’s training participated in a strategy of rec-reating their bodies for the purposes of singing.

Charles d’Ancillon’s 1707 account of the surgery is the most detailed we have.He graphically described the bilateral orchiectomy—the removal of both testes—which was generally performed between the ages of six and twelve. According tod’Ancillon, the testicles were either removed through an incision, or witheredthrough a crushing process that severed the ductus deferens.59

The boy five to seven years of age was placed in a hot bath to soften and makesupple the parts, making them more tractable. He was given a potent drink, thejugular veins were compressed, and when he became groggy, the organs weresnipped out with a knife with scarcely any pain. In the very young, constant com-pression and rubbing of the tiny gonads were done until they were no longerpalpable.60

The procedure had actually been understood since the ancient world, but thevocabularies used to describe the bodily transformations were markedly differentfrom our own. Aristotle made the connection between voice and genitals clear:

When the testes are removed the tautness of the passage is slackened . . . and thesource or principle which sets the voice in movement is correspondingly loosened.This then is the cause on account of which castrated animals change over to thefemale condition both as regards the voice and the rest of the form.61

Valeria Finucci contends that men whose genitals had been damaged to varyingdegrees were fairly common in early modern Europe. This suggests that medical


practitioners and philosophers would have had plenty of opportunities to observethe effects of the procedure.62 In addition to voice changes they would havenoticed other unique aspects of the altered bodies that visually marked castratieven before they opened their mouths. They had flat feet, never grew beards, hadluxuriant hair, tended toward obesity later in life, and developed very long limbsbecause the growth plates did not close properly. The effects of the operation ofcourse varied; those castrated at earlier ages, for instance, tended to show morefeminine attributes and to have higher voices.63

Modern science suggests that the castrati’s amazing voices and often strangeappearances were not simply the result of early surgery. Those alterations set offa series of changes in vocal folds, hormones, and, eventually, whole-body mor-phology.64 For example, in 1909 the dissected body of a twenty-eight-year-oldman who had been castrated at the age of ten revealed a barely visible thyroidgland and a small larynx with vocal cords the length of a coloratura soprano’s.65

Women have short, thin vocal cords and men have longer, thicker ones.Partial castration results in shortened vocal cords that produce higher pitches. Inunaltered men, the vocal cords increase by almost two-thirds at puberty, and thethyroid cartilage grows markedly, giving rise to the male Adam’s apple. In thosewho underwent the procedure, the larynx also failed to descend; its close proxim-ity to the head, along with the short, thin vocal cords, gave castrati voices an extrabrilliance. Though da Vinci presented the first anatomically accurate drawings ofthe vocal cords or folds—which consist of two infoldings of mucus membranesthat stretch across the larynx, vibrating as the lungs expel air—those cords wouldnot be fully understood until the nineteenth century. The impact of hormoneswould not be explained until the early twentieth century.

The castrati’s voice exemplifies the notion of cyborg as Haraway famouslydefines it: “a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular histori-cal, cultural practices.”66 I am not positing the castrato as an automaton, an earlymodern machine that might be understood as the precursor to the robot. Rather,their voices represent an ontological merging of cultural and natural artifacts.Hayles’s understanding of the post-human helps make this point; in her readingof the postmodern age, the body stands as the original prosthesis, and it is con-tinually modified by its interactions with intelligent machines: “The original pros-thesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body withother prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we wereborn.”67 The cyborg as a post-human body placed on a continuum to the com-puter is, of course, fundamentally of our world. But the castrato’s voice also art-fully enhances the human body and the sensorium and connects the organicbody to the technologically produced object.

This is reflected in the castrati’s training, which focused on changing andincreasing breath capacity and vocal control. Many of the training techniques

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would have also been used for female singers, as well as tenors and basses, butthe implications are different for singers whose bodies have been altered for thepurpose of creating a particular kind of voice. And, though the eighteenthcentury represented the peak of castrato training, earlier singers certainly receivedsimilarly intense training. Castrati almost always participated in extensive trainingwhile either boarding with their teachers or residing at conservatories. This par-ticipation allowed for constant surveillance as they practiced for up to eight hoursa day. Since they lost no time to changing voices, they could train continuouslyfrom as early as the age of six or seven. Cardinal Francesco Barberini’s householdincluded a stable of boy castrati—putti musici or castratini—trained in his house-hold at his expense, with compensation paid to their parents. In his much-cited1695 Historia musica, the castrato and composer Giovanni Andrea AngeliniBontempi describes the rigorous training of the students of Virgilio Mazzocchi,which involved four hours of singing plus other activities:

Another [hour] in the study of letters, and another in the instruction and exerciseof singing, both with the teacher listening and before a mirror, to accustom them-selves to make no unbecoming motion; neither of the waist, nor of the brow norof the eyes, nor of the mouth. And all these were the occupation of themorning.68

After lunch, the vigorous protocol continued with half an hour each on theoryand counterpoint, followed by an hour of written counterpoint and the study ofletters. Students spent the rest of the day practicing the harpsichord or composi-tion. This brought the young castrati up to eight hours a day of training, andtheir business was not yet done. They completed their regimen with outside exer-cises in which they

were to go often to sing and to listen to the response of an echo outside PortaAngelica near Monte Mario, to judge one’s own [accenti] oneself, going to sing inalmost all the music that was performed in the churches of Rome, and observingthe styles of singing of the many illustrious singers who flourished in the pontifi-cate of Urban VII; imitating these styles and justifying it to the teacher, when onereturned home; then in order to imprint these more firmly in the minds of thestudents, the necessary explanations were made and the necessary advice wasgiven.69

Bontempi’s description resembles the programs that Nicola Porpora would pre-scribe for his students, among them Farinelli, in the next century.

The castrati’s radically constructed voices position these special singers withinthe muddy space between human and machine that is identified with cyborgs.According to Haraway, cyborgs “are not about the Machine and the Human, as if


such Things and Subjects universally existed. Instead cyborgs are about specifichistorical machines and people in interactions.”70 Haraway explains that

The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine.But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. Theycould n0t achieve man’s dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author tohimself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To thinkthey were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-centurymachines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural andartificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many otherdistinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are dis-turbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.71

The hydraulic organ, the puking Frenchman, and other such creatures andmachines suggest that things were every bit as muddy in the early modern worldas they are today. But the terms of that muddiness were fundamentally differentand thus perhaps less accessible from our modern vantage point. Cyborg theorytends to assume that the boundaries between subjects and the outside worldwere radically reconfigured by modern technology. However, the castrato providesjust one example of an early modern phenomenon that opened up a space forexercises in instrumentality and machinery and that troubled the relationshipbetween the real and the virtual.

The castrato in performance functioned in ways that might productively beread as a kind of virtual reality. Virtual reality is, to quote Gibson again, a kind ofconsensual and collective hallucination. The voices of castrati represented themeans of transportation/hallucination amidst tremendous spectacles. Or perhapsthe agents of hallucination were different than anything Gibson had in mind. Weuse headphones, 3-D goggles, and computer screens—each, in a sense, a host toand a means to accentuate special effects. Early modern viewers and listenerswere transported through the magic of stagecraft, which included singing, light-ing, and other arts. Theatrical effects like Bernini’s floods and Pasqualini’s per-sonification of Fame used multiple sensory effects to create an altered reality thatwe need to label as high tech.

I opened my essay with the heralding of the Barberini’s joust featuringPasqualini. I am going to end it as the spectacle concluded: with a tremendousboat of musicians gliding through the Piazza Navona (fig. 4). One thousandtorches turned the night sky into dawn. Artificial waves camouflaged the lowwheels of the boat, underscoring the ability of humans to imitate and extendnature. “When a very sweet sound of instruments started, every whisper in thetheater ceased immediately and it was soon filled with angelic voices.”72 To thesound of music and the four cannons sticking out of the portals, the boat sailedaround the square, pausing at the boxes of various dignitaries. At the request of

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the public, the pageant of ships later processed during daylight, causing “univer-sal delight.”

As in most court spectacles, the music that Mascardi described as possessingsuperhuman grace was itself a special effect. It sounded most powerfully atmoments when it assaulted the senses not just aurally, but also visually, in thiscase through the accompanying spectacle of the brightly lit sky. This concludingparade featured a bevy of liminal creatures, including a strange and monstrousfish plated in gold that sat on the bow of the ship; a siren with a double tail; bac-chantes; satyrs; and sixteen fishermen clad in blue robes covered with silverscales, who ran alongside the boat carrying torches. Each of these creatures—likethe castrati themselves—had long-held associations with sound, excess, and thelimits of humanity. Half-human, half-animal, and in possession of unrestrainedpassion, satyrs with their ever-present pan pipes had long been associated with akind of liminal music. Sirens represented dangerously seductive bird women.Juxtaposing these mythological figures with and embodying some of them in thebodies of castrati on elaborate stage machines completely confused the alreadyfluid boundaries between human, animal, and machine.

This was an ephemeral experience that temporarily transported the spectatorsfrom their world to that of the stage on the piazza. To acknowledge the transfor-mative potential of voices, lanterns, and wheels is to confirm Derrida’s imperativeto move beyond privileging the subjective access to reality. As he suggests, wemust move beyond our presentist understandings of the divide between humanand machine, natural and artificial, and what is real and what is not. Consideringthe castrato in this context also suggests that the Derridian critique of presence,

Figure 4 The Musicians Boat, Festa, fatta in Roma, (Rome, 1635). This image is onlyavailable in print due to restrictions from the rights’ holder.


in which the voice always inhabits a very special place, has not done much to dis-courage or lessen the presentism that tends to accompany questions regardingcyborgs and the boundary between human and machine. If Derrida has insistedthat no experience of material events is fundamentally absolute, it is neverthelesstrue that most current engagements with post-structuralist thought seem stillinvested in giving some pride of place to the way we inhabit the world.

I don’t merely mean to push back the dates of technology and cyborgs to theearly modern period. I also want to show that considering the castrato alongsidehydraulic organs and lighting effects can push against some essentializing under-standings about the voice. There is a notion of authenticity ascribed to the voicethat makes it seem to speak, in modern terms, both from immaterial subjectiv-ities and the material body—it is supposedly the ultimate metaphysical experi-ence. The voice is associated with an experience that often comes across asutterly unmediated. To consider the castrato’s constructed voice in the context ofan early modern cyborg and machine culture is to insist that the voice is not onlymediated, but that it is materially constructed. It is once again to assert the voiceas a kind of expression that emerges from real flesh and blood. And perhapsmore importantly, to see the early modern castrato as a special effect and as acyborg is to defamiliarize our own moment as well as that of the seventeenthcentury. It forces us to see both the astonishing virtual realities constructed byearly moderns and the all-too-barbaric mutilations of and traffic in human bodiesthat characterize our world today.

notes

Bonnie Gordon is an associate professor inthe department of music at the University ofVirginia. She is currently at work on a bookentitled “Voice Machines: The Castrato, theCat Piano, and Other Strange Sounds.” She hasalso written on Monteverdi, female singer-songwriters, and music in Thomas Jefferson’sAmerica.

Earlier versions of this paper were given at theannual meeting of the American MusicologicalSociety (2008); University College Cork, Ireland(2010); American Academy in Rome and MaxPlanck Institute for the History of Science(2009); New York University (2008). I would liketo thank Anna Brickhouse, Jane Barnes OliviaBloechl, Martha Feldman, Emily Gale, ManuelLerdau, Richard Wiestreich, and Richard Will fortheir help with this article.

1. “Condotto sopra quattro ruote messe àoro.” Festa, fatta in Roma alli 25 di FebraioMDCXXXIV (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1635), 4.

2. Frederick Hammond, Music and Spectacle inBaroque Rome (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1994); Margaret Murata, Operas for thePapal Court 1631-1668 (Ann Arbor: UMI ResearchPress, 1981); Maurizio Fagiolo del’Arco, La festabarocca. Corpus delle festa a Roma (Rome:DeLuca, 1997).

3. Jonathan Sawday, “Forms Such as NeverWere in Nature,” in At the Borders of the Human:Beasts, Bodies, and Natural Philosophy in the EarlyModern Period, ed. Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, andS.J. Wiseman (London: Palgrave Macmillan,1999).

4. Questioning the relationship betweencastrati and the limits of humanity from adifferent perspective, Martha Feldman hasconsidered in her important work on themythology of the castrato the ways in whichthese singers called into question boundariesbetween human and animal. See for exampleMartha Feldman, “Births and Surprising Kin: The

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Castrato’s Tale,” in Italy’s Eighteenth Century:Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour,ed. Paula Findlen, Wendy Wassyng Roworth, andCatherine Sama, afterword by Franco Fido(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

5. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York:Ace Books, 2000), 51.

6. For histories of the castrato see ValeriaFinucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity,Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003);Roger Freitas, “The Eroticism of Emasculation:Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato,”The Journal of Musicology 20, no. 2 (2003): 196–249; John Rosselli, “The Castrati as aProfessional Group and a Social Phenomenon,1550–1850,”Acta Musicologica 60 (1988): 143–79;Patrick Barbier, The World of the Castrati: TheHistory of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon,trans. Margaret Crosland (London: Souvenir,1996); Angus Heriot, The Castrati in Opera(London: Secker and Warburg, 1956); andRichard Sherr, “Guglielmo Gonzaga and theCastrati,” Renaissance Quarterly 33, no. 1 (1980):33–56.

7. Kircher was a huge influence not justthrough his presence but through his books,which were printed in large numbers—1,500copies of the Musurgia Universalis alone—andwidely distributed through Jesuit channels. In1652, for example, more than three hundredJesuits came to Rome from all over the world toelect a new superior general, and each of themwent home with a copy of one of these stunningvolumes. For more on Kircher and hisimportance in Rome see David Stolzenberg, ed.,The Great Art of Knowing: The BaroqueEncyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher (Stanford:Stanford University Libraries, 2001); and PaulaFindlen, Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man WhoKnew Everything (New York: Routledge, 2004).

8. On the museum see Paula Findlen,Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, andScientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley:University of California, 1994); and Eugina LoSardo, Athanasius Kircher: il museo del mondo(Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 2001). The literatureon the problems with the female voice is vast inand out of musicology. See for example BonnieGordon, Monteverdi’s Unruly Women: The Power ofSong in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004); SuzanneCusick, “‘There was not one lady who failed toshed a tear,’ Arianna’s Lament and theconstruction of Modern Womanhood,” EarlyMusic 12, no. 1 (1994): 21–45; and Wendy Heller,Emblems of Elegance: Opera and Women’s Voices

in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 2004).

9. Hammond, Music and Spectacle, 46.10. See John Walter Hill, Roman Monody,

Cantata, and Opera from the Circles aroundCardinal Montalto (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1977); and Keith Christiansen, “Music andPainting in Cardinal Del Monte’s Household,”Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 213–27.

11. Hammond, Music and Spectacle, 240.12. Festa, fatta in Roma; Andrea Sacchi, Joust in

Piazza Navonna (Rome: Museo di Roma).13. Ibid., 4-5. “La Famma in un vago Carro, il

quale da una grand’aquila condotto sopraquattro ruote messe à oro, appresentossi nelmezzo della sala, dove erano adunate le Dame, ediversi altri Cavalieri, Si scompartiva il Corpo delCarro in molti scanellamenti adornati confogliami, e fregi d’oro, che in campo verdemaggiormente spiccavano. Ma dal corpo delmedesimo Carro s’alzava sopra due Arpied’argento il seggio della Fama, il quale pure daun gran Arpa d’argento per la parte di dietroveniva sostenuto. Salivasi al detto seggio per duegradi d’argento tutti lavorati di varii arabeschi &intagli, e sù l’estremo del piano, ove l’aquilahaveva I legami per tirarlo, due leggiadri vasid’argento adornavano il pavimento del Carro. Lafama, che maestosa sedeva sù la sommità diesso comparve poi superbamente vestita, e lasua veste, che di varij colori era tutta con orotessuta veniva ancora da una moltitudined’occhi, di bocche, di orecchie tempestata.Portava una tromba d’oro in mano, & alle spallespiegava due ali anch’esse ripiene d’occhi,d’orecchie, e di bocche. Fermossi il Carroquando fù di bisogno, e mentre si stavaaspettando d’intendere quello che la Fama fusseper apportare, ella accompagnata conun’armonioso concerto d’instrumenti in questenote con suavissimo canto spiegò la cagionedella sua venuta.”

14. Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald(New York: Vintage Books, 1983), 101.

15. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Books IX-XV, trans.Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1994), 2:183.

16. Hammond, Music and Spectacle, 215.17. Festa, fatta in Roma, 6.18. Kaspar Schott, Mechanica

hydraulico-pneumatica dum figuris aneis, etprivelegio sacrae Cesare majestatis (Frankfort:Herbipoli, 1657), 311–12. “Qui è stomacho suodeprimit duodecim, quatordecimvè diversorumcolorum aquas odoriferas, liquoresperfectissimos, vinum adustum quod incenditur,oleum saxi quod sine ellychnio comburitur,


lictucas, & flores omnis generic, integris &recentissimis foliis. Fontem etiam exhibetprojiciendo aquam ex ore in altum per spatiumduorum Miserere.”

19. Grafton also discusses Royeur in thecontext of technology and machines. SeeAnthony Grafton, “Magic and Technology in EarlyModern Europe” (Dibner Library Lecture,Smithsonian, Washington, DC, October 15,2002).

20. Giambattista Aleotti, “Gli artifitosi etcuriosi moti spiritali di herone,” (Ferrara, Italy:Vittorio Baldini, 1593).

21. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature.22. On the various ceremonial visits see

Origine del Collegio Romano e suoi progressi,L’Archivio della Pontificia Università Gregoriana142. This manuscript forms the basis of thedescriptions of ceremonial receptions given inthe Collegio Romano provided in R. GarciaVilloslada, Storia del Collegio Romano dal suoinizio alli soppressione della compagnia di Gesù(Rome: Typis Pontificiae UniversitatisGregorianae, 1954), 263–96. On theatricalproductions in the Collegio Romano during thistime, see Irene Mamczarz, “La trattatistica deiGesuiti e la pratica teatrale al Collegio Romano:Maciej Sarbiewski, Jean Dubreuil e AndreaPozzo,” in I Gesuiti e i primordi del Teatro Baroccoin Europa, ed. M. Chiabò and F. Doglio (Rome:Centro Studi sul Teatro Medioevale eRinascimentale, 1995), 349–87. See alsoJean-Yves Boriaud, “La Poésie et le théâtre latinsau Collegio Romano d’après les manuscrits duFondo Gesuitico de la Bibliothèque NationaleVittorio Emanuele II,” Mélanges de l’ÉcoleFrançaise de Roma, Italie et Mediterranée 102,no. 1 (1990): 77–96.

23. As cited in Michael John Gorman and NickWilding, “Technica Curiosa: The MechanicalMarvels of Kaspar Schott (1608–1666),” in Latechnica curiosa, ed. Michael John Gorman, PaoloGallazzi, and Nick Wilding (Rome: Edizionedell’Elefante, 2001), 261.

24. Schott, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica,4. “Viri Principales et Litterati, avideque sciredesiderant, & Machinarum constructarumrationes, & machinalium motionum causas.Horum desiderio ut satisfacerem, omnium dictiMusei Machinarum fabricam & quasianatomians edocere, aut alicubi jam ab ipsoAuctore edoctam enarrare, brevi opusculoaggressus sum.”

25. Schott, Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica, 5.26. Alberto Cametti, “Musicisti celebri del

seicento in Roma: M. A. Pasqualini,” Musicad’oggi 3 (1921): 69. “Il Pasqualini era uno dei più

famosi virtuosi del nostro Collegio, anzi di tuttala Cristianità. Ne magnificava cosicosì le dotivocali: L’incomparable artifizio e peregrinaleggiadria di cantare tratta da sua propiainventione, miracolo in questa professione delnostro secolo. Odoardo Ceccarelli, puntatore dela Capella Sistina 1647.”

27. There is extensive literature on hydraulicorgans. See for example Patrizio Barbieri, “TheNew Water Organ of the Ville D’este Tivoli,” TheOrgan Yearbook 33 (2004): 33–41; HorstBredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult ofthe Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolutionof Nature, Art, and Technology, trans. AllisonBrown (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1995);Robert J. Silverman and Thomas L. Hankins,Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1995); and PatrizioBarbieri, “Giambattista Della Porta’s ‘Singing’Hydraulis and Other Expressive Devicesfor the Organ,” Journal of theAmerican Musical Instrument Society 32 (2006):145–66.

28. Gioseffo Zarlino, Sopplimenti musicali(Venice: Francesco d’Franeschi, 1588).

29. Ibid., 288. “Conviene etianiadeo à tuttiquelli Istrumenti materiali, che servono à qual sivoglia Arte ò Scientia, con l’aiuto de i quali sipuò condurre in quella alcuna opera aldesiderato fine.”

30. Ibid., 288. “Il Martello, che adopera ilFabro nel fare i chiodi, & la Sega, che adopera ilLegnaiuolo à segare sender l’Asse, sono dettiIstrumenti. Il Denaro anco, col quale,comperiamo le cose necessarie al viverehumano, è detto Istrumento. Et non pur le cosemateriali, c’hanno la forma loro permanente ; maquelle che non hanno cotal forma, com’è laLogica: diciamo Istrumento.”

31. Ibid., 288. “Per la qual cosa dico, chel’Organo proposto s’acquistò questo nomeuniversale & commune d’Organo proprio &particolare, per una certa eccellenza dalle partinaturali, che formano la Voce, che si chiamanoIstrumenti naturali: percioche fu fabricato allguisa del Corpo humano, corrispondendo leCanne alla Gola, i Mantici al polmone, i Tasti à iDenti, & colui che sona alla Lingua, & cosi l’altreparti di esso à quella che sono nell’Huomo. Maveramente l’Organo nostro in quanto ad unaparte della forma materiale, non è molto antico,anzi moderno: percioche sono aggiunti ne iModerni i Mantici, i quali dalla Cassa checonteneva l’Acqua detta hora Sommierosomministrano il Vento, che passa nelle Canne :come nel sudetto luogo dipinge Vitruvio; dal ches’acquistò il nome di Hidraulica; il perche si può

120 bonnie gordon

58. Giuseppe Gerbino, “The Quest for theSoprano Voice: Castrati in Renaissance Italy,”Studi Musicali 33, no. 2 (2004).

59. Charles d’Ancillon, Eunuchism Display’d.Describing All the Different Sorts of EUNUCHS;The Esteem They Have Met with in the World, andHow They Came to Be Made So (London: E.Curll, 1718), 148–49.

60. Ibid., 37.61. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L.

Peck (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1990), vol. 1.2, bk. 716, p. 521.

62. Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade:Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the ItalianRenaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,2003), 248–49.

63. For a modern medical explanation of thesechanges see Meyer M. Melicow and StanfordPulrang, “Castrati Choir and Opera Singers,”Urology 3, no. 5 (1974): 663–70, as well as EnidRhodes Peschel and Richard E. Peschel,“Medicine and Music: The Castrati in Opera,”Opera Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1986): 21–38. Freitas, in“The Eroticism of Emasculation,” also assessesthe medical literature on this subject. See pages226–28.

64. For details on the procedure see Freitas,“The Eroticism of Emasculation”; GiuseppeGerbino, “The Quest for the Soprano Voice:Castrati in Renaissance Italy,” 303–57; andPeschel and Peschel, “Medicine and Music: TheCastrati in Opera,” 21–38.

65. Julius Tandler and Siegfried Grosz, “Überden Einfluß der Kastration auf den Organismus,I. Beschreibung eines Eunuchenskelets,”Archivfür Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen 27(1909): 35–61.

66. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto:Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in

the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgsand Women: The Reinvention of Nature (NewYork: Rutledge, 1991), 149.

67. N. Katherine Hayles, How We BecamePost-human (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1999), 3.

68. Bontempi, Historia Musica, 170. “Un’altranegli studi delle Lettere; & un’altra negliammaestramenti & eserciti del Canto, e sottol’udito del Maestro, e davanti ad uno Specchio,per assuesarsi a non far moto alcunoinconueniente, ne di vita, ne du fronte, ne diciglia, ne di bocca. E tutti que[s]ti eranogl’impieghi della mattina.”

69. Ibid., 170. “Erano l’andar spesse volte ecantare e sentire la risposta da un’Eco fuoridella Porta Angelica, verso Monte Mario, perfarsi giudice da se stessi o de’propri accenti,l’andare a cantar quasi in tutte le Musiche chesi saceuano nelle Chiese di Roma; e l’osseruarele maniere del Canto di tanti Cantori insigniche fiori vano nel Pontificato di Urbano Ottavo;l’esercitarsi sopra quelle, & il renderne leragioni al Maestro, quando si ritornaua aCasa: il quale poi per maggiormenteimprimerle nella mente de’Discepoli, vi facevasopra i necessari discorsi, e ne dava i necessariauuertimenti.”

70. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium. FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience™(New York: Rutledge, 1996), 51.

71. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” 193–94.72. Vitale Mascardi, Festa, fatta in Roma. “Al

cominciare d’un dolcissimo suono distrumenti cessò ad un tratto ogni susurro nelTheatro, il quale ben presto riempissi diangeliche voci.”

122 bonnie gordon

vedere, che’l nostro Organo non è Istrumentomoderno, se non in quanto all’alteratione dellasua prima forma: percioche il Vento, che hora sifa con i Mantici, è posto in luogo di quello, chesi facea col mezo dell’acqua.”

32. Anton Ferrein, Mémoire de l’Académie royaledes Sciences, séance du 15 Novembre 1741 (Paris:1754).

33. Giulio Caccini, “Le nuove musich (1602)” ed.H. Wiley Hitchcock, Recent Researches in theMusic of the Baroque Era, vol. 9 (Madison, WI:A-R Editions, 1970), 13.

34. Ibid., 13.35. N. Bridgeman, “Giovanni Camillo Maffei et

su Lettre sur le Chant,” Revue de Musicologie(1956): 10–34. Translation modified from CarolMacClintock, Readings in the History of Music inPerformance (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1979), 47.

36. Giano Nicio Eritreo, Pinacotheca altera II(Amsterdam: 1645), 217.

37. John Baptist Porta, Natural Magick(Magia Naturalis) (Sioux Falls, ND: NuVisionPublications, LLC, 2005), 359. Original publishedas Magia Naturalis. (Naples, Italy, 1558).

38. Baptist Porta. Natural Magick, 359.39. Lodovico Zaconi, Prattica di musica

(Bologna: Forni, 1592), bk. 1, fol. 55, chap. 62, p.60: “tremolo, . . . cioe la voce tremante e la veraporta d’intrar dentro a passaggi, & diimpataonirse delle gorgie. perche con piu facilitdse ne vi la Naue quando che prima e mossa: chequando nel principio la si vuol mouere. & ilsaltatore meglio salta, se prima che salta sipromoue al salto Questo tremolo deve esseresuccinto, e vago; perché l’ingordo e forzatotedia, e fastidisce Ete di natura tale che vsandolo,sempre usarsi deue; accioche l’uso si conuerti inhabito; perche quel continuo mouer di uoce,aiuta. & uolontieri spinge la mossa delle gorgie.& facilita mirabilmente i principij de passaggi.”

40. Giovanni Andrea Angelini Bontempi,Historia Musica (Perugia: Costantini, 1695; repr.,Geneva: Minkoff, 1976). “Le Scuole di Romaobligano i Discepoli ad impiegare ogni giornoun’ora nel cantar cose difficili e malageuoli, perl’acquisto della esperienza; un’altra, nell’esercitiodel Trillo; un’altra in quello de’ Passaggi.”41. Margaret Murata, “Further Remarks on

Pasqualini and the Music of MAP,”AnalectaMusicologica 19 (1979): 125. “Qualque giorgettaet qualque trillo, ma il tutto pronunciato con unacerta voce alquanto ottusa.”

42. Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis,1650 ed. (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 1970),346.

43. Kircher, Musurgia Universalis, 343.

44. On these multiple events see MaurizioFagiolo del’Arco, La Festa Barocca; and FillipoClementi, Il carnevale Romano nelle cronachecontempraree, 2nd ed. (Rome: 1939).

45. Cesare D’Onofrio, Gian Lorenzo Bernini,Fontana di Trevi commedia inedita (Rome:Staderini Editore, 1963).

46. Ibid., 60. “Zanni: O! belle nuvole vedoandar per aria. Infatt dov’è naturalezza è artifitio.Che ol Prenzipe ch’è l’istessa bontà, e cortesiaper veder l’opera d’un virtuos com l’è ol siorGratian, habbia da farghela comandar con tantrigor, non l’hà del natural, ghè artifizio [sic].”

47. Ibid., 74. “L’inzegn, el desegn, è l’ArteMazica per mezz dei quali s’arriva à ingannar lavista in modo da fere stupier, e di fere spiccaruna nuvola dall’orizzonte e venir inanz semprespiccada con un moto naturel, e a man, a manche la s’avvizina alla vista dilatandose apparir piùgrand. Mostrer che ’l vento l’azisi e la trasportivia in zà, e in là e poi, se ne vada in sù, e noncalarla zù comuod fan i contrapis.”

48. Eccovi la Magía.Ma se ignota pur giungo a voi d’appresso,Nuovi già non vi son gli effetti, e l’opre,Ché sogliono ben spessoLe vostre rime, i color vostri, e ’l cantoL’alme ingannar’ con dilettoso incanto

Ddramma di Giulio Rospigliosi che fu poi PapaClemente IX, MS 633, Biblioteca Corsiniana,Rome.

49. N. Katherine Hayles, “The Condition ofVirtuality,” in Language Machines: Technologies ofLiterary and Cultural Production, ed. PeterStallybrass, Nancy Vickers, and Jeffrey Masten(New York: Rutledge, 1997), 201.

50. Jonathan Sawday, Engines of theImagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise ofthe Machine (London: Routledge, 2007).

51. Irma A. Richter, The Notebooks of Leonardoda Vinci (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998),104.

52. Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, ed. Irma A.Richter and Thereza Wells, preface by MartinKemp (Oxford University Press, 2008), 60.

53. Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Artand Experience in the Scientific Revolution(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15.

54. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation andRedemption: Essays on Gender and the HumanBody in Medieval Religion (New York: ZoneBooks, 1992), 256.

55. della Porta, Magia Naturalis, 371.56. Ibid.57. Ibid.


the castrato meets the cyborg

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