ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|15 pages

A productive conflict

The Colosseum and early modern religious performance

chapter 2|25 pages

A new sack of Rome?

Making space for Charles V in 1536

chapter 3|20 pages

Vienna, a Habsburg capital redecorated in classical style

The entry of Maximilian II as King of the Romans in 1563

chapter 5|19 pages

Making the best of what they had

Adaptations of indoor and outdoor space for royal ceremony in Scotland c. 1214 –1603

chapter 6|19 pages

From ephemeral to permanent architecture

The Venetian palazzo in the second half of the seventeenth century

chapter 7|29 pages

Contested ideals

Designing and making temporary structures for the Entrée of Louis XIV into Paris, August 1660

chapter 8|11 pages

Overcrowding at court

A Renaissance problem and its solution: temporary theatres and banquet halls

chapter 9|21 pages

Transformed gardens

The trompe-l’œil scenery of the Versailles festivals (1664–1674)

chapter 11|20 pages

‘Ascendendo et descendendo aequaliter’

Stairs and ceremonies in early modern Venice

chapter 12|17 pages

Permanent places for festivals at the Habsburg court in Innsbruck

The ‘comedy houses’ of 1628 and 1654

chapter 13|24 pages

La Favorita festeggiante

The imperial summer residence of the Habsburgs as festive venue

chapter 14|19 pages

Between props and sets

The Menus Plaisirs administration and space conversions in the French court, 1660–1700