L'orazione accademica di Antonino Tantillo intorno all'arte istrionica. Un caso palermitano del 1622

The article deals on the oration on the art of acting composed in 1622 by Antonino Tantillo, a man of letters from Palermo, who conceived it for the Accademia degli Agghiacciati, founded in the Sicilian capital and formed by actors who regularly staged plays. The oration, transmitted as a manuscript, is fully transcribed and published in this number of AAR. This preliminary article focuses on the author, on the context where the discourse was pronounced, on the text as a whole and on some of its most significant passages including the analysis of the performances of two of the Accademia’s actors who, in 1621, played the main characters in the sacred tragedy La s. Agatha, written by the Jesuit Ortensio Scammacca. The text composed by Tantillo emerges as a rare attempt of systematically treating the theory and practice of acting in the XVII century, especially in tragedies. In it we can trace the relationships with the ancient rhetoric, with the anecdotal tradition on the actor and with the classical and Renaissance sources from wich Tantillo draws.