Long before the Restoration spectaculars of the 17th century Lanci was designing elaborate and complicated theatre sets, using pivoted scenery, with up to three different scenes painted on boards, thus allowing the mood of the production to be altered in an instant.
The first, The State of Innocence (1677), was never staged, as his designated company, the King's, had neither the capital nor the machinery for it: a dramatisation of John Milton's Paradise Lost, it called for "rebellious angels wheeling in the air, and seeming transfixed with thunderbolts" over "a lake of brimstone or rolling fire".
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Basically home-grown and with roots in the early 17th-century court masque, though never ashamed of borrowing ideas and stage technology from French opera, the spectaculars are sometimes called "English opera".
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In terms of production the opera was a restoration spectacular, visuals included much mere mythological display to take advantage of the "machines" at the Dorset Garden Theatre, such as "The clouds divide, and Juno appears in a machine drawn by peacocks: while a symphony is playing, it moves gently forward, and as it descends, it opens and discovers the tail of the peacock, which is so large that it almost fills the opening of the stage between scene and scene" (Act I).