Reading Henry Tresham’s Theatre Curtain: Metastasio’s Apotheosis and the Idea of Opera at London’s Pantheon

When London’s new Pantheon Opera opened in 1791, the artist Henry Tresham, not long returned from Italy, was paid to paint the ceiling and proscenium of the new auditorium and to provide a drop curtain. The curtain provided a focus for the new institution’s aspirations and for the audience’s attention on those inspirations when they arrived at the theatre. Its elaborate nature – the zodiac, the music of the spheres, ancient and modern composers, the passions, and with a centrepiece of the apotheosis of Pietro Metastasio – was the subject of a series articles in the press explaining the curtain’s allegory. All visual material was thought to be lost, but the recent identification of a preparatory watercolour of the apotheosis has offered an opportunity to re-examine both its place in the context of late eighteenth-century iconography and the place of Metastasio in the late eighteenth-century London opera house.