Architectures of Festival in Early Modern Europe

This fourth volume in the European Festival Studies, 1450-1700 series breaks with precedent in stemming from a joint conference (Venice, 2013) between the Society for European Festivals Research and the PALATIUM project supported by the European Science Foundation. The volume draws on up-to-date research by a Europe-wide group of academic scholars and museum and gallery curators to provide a unique, intellectually-stimulating and beautifully-illustrated account of temporary architecture created for festivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with permanent architecture pressed into service for festival occasions across major European locations including Italian, French, Austrian, Scottish and German. Appealing and vigorous in style, the essays look towards classical sources while evoking political and practical circumstances and intellectual concerns - from re-shaping and re-conceptualizing early sixteenth-century Rome, through providing for the well-being and political allegiance of Medici-era Florentines and exploring the teasing aesthetics of performance at Versailles to accommodating players and spectators in seventeenth-century Paris and at royal and ducal events for the Habsburg, French and English crowns. The volume is unique in its field in the diversity of its topics and the range of its scholarship and fascinating in its account of the intellectual and political life of Early Modern Europe.

J.R. (Ronnie) Mulryne is Professor Emeritus at the University of Warwick, UK. Krista De Jonge is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Leuven. Pieter Martens is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leuven and the Université catholique de Louvain. R.L.M. (Richard) Morris was elected a Senior Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 2011 and is now completing doctoral research there.

Introduction: Making Space for Festival J.R. Mulryne 1. A Productive Conflict: The Colosseum and Early Modern Religious Performance Mårten Snickare 2. A New Sack of Rome?: Making Space for Charles V in 1536 Richard Cooper 3. Vienna, a Habsburg Capital Redecorated in Classical Style: The Entry of Maximilian II as King of the Romans in 1563 Mikael Børg Rasmussen 4. Fountains of Wine and Water and the Refashioning of Urban Space in the 1565 Entrata to Florence Felicia M. Else 5. Making the Best of What They Had: Adaptations of Indoor and Outdoor Space for Royal Ceremony in Scotland c. 1214 to 1603 Lucinda H. S. Dean 6. From Ephemeral to Permanent Architecture: The Venetian Palazzo in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century Martina Frank 7. Contested Ideals: Designing and Making Temporary Structures for the Entrée of Louis XIV into Paris in August 1660 Elaine Tierney 8. Overcrowding at Court: A Renaissance Problem and Its Solution: Temporary Theatres and Banquet Halls Sydney Anglo 9. Transformed Gardens: The Trompe-l'oeil Scenery of the Versailles Festivals (1664-1674) Marie-Claude Canova-Green 10. Ephemeral and Permanent Architecture During the Age of Ercole I d'Este in Ferrara (1471-1505) Francesca Mattei 11. "Ascendendo et descendendo aequaliter": Stairs and Ceremonies in Early Modern Venice Katharina Bedenbender 12. Permanent Places for Festivals at the Habsburg Court in Innsbruck: The "Comedy Houses" of 1628 and 1654 Veronika Sandbichler 13. La Favorita festeggiante: The Imperial Summer Residence of the Habsburgs as Festive Venue Andrea Sommer-Mathis 14. Between Props and Sets: The Menus Plaisirs Administration and Space Conversions in the French Court, 1660-1700 Pauline Lemaigre-Gaffier