page_title: Proscenium
section_title: Renaissance
hierarchical_section_title: Proscenium / Renaissance
caption_attribution_description: English: The stage at the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza, Italy, showing the three-dimensional sets designed by Andrea Palladio.
context_page_description: A proscenium is the metaphorical vertical plane of space in a theatre, usually surrounded on the top and sides by a physical proscenium arch and on the bottom by the stage floor itself, which serves as the frame into which the audience observes from a more or less unified angle the events taking place upon the stage during a theatrical performance. The concept of the fourth wall of the theatre stage space that faces the audience is essentially the same.
  It can be considered as a social construct which divides the actors and their stage-world from the audience which has come to witness it. But since the curtain usually comes down just behind the proscenium arch, it has a physical reality when the curtain is down, hiding the stage from view. The same plane also includes the drop, in traditional theatres of modern times, from the stage level to the "stalls" level of the audience, which was the original meaning of the proscaenium in Roman theatres, where this mini-facade was given more architectural emphasis than is the case in modern theatres. A proscenium stage is structurally different from a thrust stage or an arena stage, as explained below.
context_section_description: The oldest surviving indoor theatre of the modern era, the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (1585), is sometimes incorrectly referred to as the first example of a proscenium theatre. The Teatro Olimpico was an academic reconstruction of a Roman theatre. It has a plain proscaenium at the front of the stage, dropping to the orchestra level, now usually containing "stalls" seating, but no proscenium arch.
  However, the Teatro Olimpico's exact replication of the open and accessible Roman stage was the exception rather than the rule in sixteenth-century theatre design. Engravings suggest that the proscenium arch was already in use as early as 1560 at a production in Siena.
  The earliest true proscenium arch to survive in a permanent theatre is the Teatro Farnese in Parma (1618), many earlier such theatres having been lost. Parma has a clearly defined "boccascena", or scene mouth, as Italians call it, more like a picture frame than an arch but serving the same purpose: to delineate the stage and separate the audience from its action.
caption: The "proscenium" (stage) at the Teatro Olimpico. The central archway in the scaenae frons (or proscenio) was too small to serve as a proscenium arch in the modern sense, and was in practice always part of the backdrop to the action on-stage.
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