The Birth of Ballet

Dance as theoretical art and the passage from hall to stage

Between the fifteenth century and the early sixteenth, a decisive transformation took place: dance ceased to be merely an aristocratic practice and became a regulated discipline with masters, treatises, and its own technical terminology. In the climate of Humanism, the body was revalued as the measure of universal harmony. No longer a simple instrument, it became proportioned, geometric, and above all educable. In this Italian context, dance was born as theoretical art. Figures such as Domenico da Piacenza wrote the first true choreutic treatises. In his De arte saltandi et choreas ducendi (mid-fifteenth century), dance is described as a science of movement, founded upon measure, memory, agility, and manner. It was no longer mere entertainment, but rational construction of gesture. In Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici (the Magnificent) was not only a refined statesman but also an enthusiastic dancer and author of choreographies and texts for the canti carnascialeschi, demonstrating how dance had become an art worthy of the highest intellectual circles.

The Italian Courts as Choreographic Laboratories

The courts of Ferrara, Milan, Mantua, and Urbino became centers of choreutic elaboration. Here worked masters such as Guglielmo Ebreo da Pesaro, who refined and disseminated Domenico’s system (writing the fundamental treatise De pratica seu arte tripudii), and Antonio Cornazzano, who integrated dance and literary culture. Dance functioned as a diplomatic instrument, a sign of nobility, and a demonstration of bodily control — and thus an expression of political order. The educated body became the perfect metaphor for the ordered State. A supreme example of this synthesis occurred in Milan in 1490 with the Festa del Paradiso: a grand allegorical spectacle with texts by the Florentine poet Bernardo Bellincioni, music by Franchino Gaffurio, and stage sets, costumes, and theatrical machinery designed by none other than Leonardo da Vinci.

From Hall to Stage: The Court Ballet

In the sixteenth century, dance took a further leap forward with the development of spectacular festivities, intermedi, and dynastic celebrations. Movement entered scenic space, and the court ballet was born. In Italy, this phenomenon developed well before France, through Medici festivities, ducal celebrations, and the spectacles of the Intermedi, which integrated music with perspectival scenography and allegorical poetry with collective choreography. The apex of this evolution was reached in Florence in 1589 with the famous Intermedi of La Pellegrina, whose final dances — including the celebrated Ballo del Granduca — were choreographed and set to music by the Roman composer Emilio de’ Cavalieri. The body was no longer merely aristocratic; it became symbolic, representing power, cosmic harmony, and hierarchy.

The Passage to France

In 1581, with the Ballet Comique de la Reine organized at the French court, the form assumed a more unified structure. The initiative was conceived and guided by Italian artists active in France, confirming the constant Italian matrix. It was the Florentine Catherine de’ Medici, who had become Queen of France, who imported the splendor and masters of the Italian courts to Paris. The Ballet Comique was orchestrated and choreographed by an Italian, the Piedmontese Baldassarre da Belgioioso (Frenchified as Balthasar de Beaujoyeulx), who systematized what Italy had already elaborated for decades. From this moment onward, the term “ballet” began to designate an organized spectacle, with allegorical plot, coordinated choreographic sequences, and scenic unity. In this irreversible process, dance had become spectacle.

The Renaissance Body

In the Renaissance, dance embodied three fundamental principles: Proportion (the body as mathematical measure), Hierarchy (ordered disposition in space), and Political Representation (movement as celebration of power). The birth of ballet was not an artistic accident but the product of a culture that placed man at the center as measure, the court as theatre of power, and the stage as symbolic machine. Musical figures such as the lutenists Joan Ambrosio Dalza and Francesco Canova da Milano, or composers of frottole such as Bartolomeo Tromboncino, provided the ideal sonic fabric upon which this rigid yet elegant architecture of bodies was codified.

Toward the Baroque

By the end of the sixteenth century, ballet was fully codified, integrated into musical spectacle and already prepared to develop its own technical virtuosity. The seventeenth century would bring greater theatricalization, separating professional dancers from nobles and leading to the birth of choreographic academies. The body was about to become the spectacular machine that would dominate Europe from this point forward.