The Castrato Meets the Cyborg

Abstract

The beginning of the 1630s did not go well for the Barberinis. They suffered through a plague, a war, and a lot of bad press generated by their successful prosecution of Galileo as a heretic. When Prince Alexander Charles Vasa of Poland came 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 joust left no room to question their greatness. One evening, as part of these events, the soprano castrato Marc Antonio Pasqualini entered the house of a Barberini relation on a chariot that was drawn by a giant metallic eagle and “moved above four golden wheels.”1 Dressed as Fame, he wore an elaborate costume of gold thread and 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 boundary between humans and machines in early modern Italy. I will argue for a resonance between castrati and machines—a resonance that insists that boundaries between humans and machines have always been porous. The altered bodies of the castrati existed within a long-standing tension between the organic and the human made. In the seventeenth century that tension created a ripe climate for manufactured singers, one that is still relevant today. Admitting that relevance should teach us something about the dangers of reading the past in terms of our own historical period. It can also reveal the productively defamiliarizing possibilities of reading the castrato as an early hallmark of, and indeed entirely related to, our current experience of (post)modernity.

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