A conference held in Venice in 2013 generated this volume's fourteen essays; turning largely on Austria, France, and Italy, their specific subjects will interest historians of art, court culture, theater, and urban studies.
Several authors engage the legacy of ancient Rome. Mårten Snickare focuses on the Colosseum, whose scale and historical resonances made it a locus for performing and gauging the triumph of Christianity over paganism. For Charles V's 1536 entry into the Eternal City, Richard Cooper quotes Paolo Giovio's aperçu “ruinas Urbis antiquas et modernas” (Rome's ancient and modern ruins) to evoke impactful demolitions that opened up vistas around venerable monuments and paths of movement (46). Crowned King of the Romans (heir apparent to the imperial throne) in Frankfurt on 20 November 1562, Maximilian II entered Vienna on 16 February 1563. Mikael Bøgh Rasmussen explores the interrelated iconographies of three triumphal arches, a novelty in the capital. To my mind, the specific model was the Arch of Titus, with its single opening and, importantly, friezes that depict hierarchical processions made legible both compositionally and through surviving written texts. Three fountains along the parade route spouted red and white wine, and those colors signaled Austria itself.
Investigating celebrations for the marriage of Francesco I de’ Medici and Joanna of Austria in 1565, Felicia M. Else points out that the humanist adviser Vincenzo Borghini examined accounts of earlier festivals, which proves that these protocol-driven and conspicuous events served as enduring points of historical and emulative reference. To be sure, providing fountains of red and white wine in Florence was deemed an appropriate nod to a well-established and distinctive ultramontane tradition. Although prominent Neptune imagery provided a suitably classical allusion for the festive installations and the permanent public water fountain in the Piazza della Signoria, it had also appeared in 1539, in Cosimo I's own wedding, and in 1548, when he witnessed Philip II's entry into Genoa.
Seventeenth-century dynastic marriages between the Medici and the Austrian Habsburgs occupy Veronika Sandbichler, who considers theaters—one set in a remodeled structure, one newly built—in Innsbruck. Marie-Claude Canova-Green surveys the siting and staging of theatrical performances held in the gardens of Versailles in 1664, 1668, and 1674, all, so to speak, chronicled in prints. Andrea Sommer-Mathis turns to La Favorita, the imperial summer residence near Vienna, and its gardens; indeed, engravings related to plays produced there in 1699 and 1700 are modeled on the Versailles prototypes. Lucinda H. S. Dean enumerates functions that defined the royal court in Scotland from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century and required indoor and outdoor ephemeral transformations of public and private spaces. One intriguing peculiarity here is that so many monarchs were either children or infants when they acceded to the throne.
Regarding arches raised for Louis XIV's entry into Paris in 1660, Elaine Tierney extracts from surviving contracts details about worksite organization and timing, materials, degrees of oversight exercised by corporate patrons, freedom accorded to artists to use their expertise and judgment, and viewing platforms (échaufauds) erected on the initiative of private individuals and groups. However, a problem arises when she writes that “[Jean] Marot depicted [a] triumphal arch in glorious isolation, looking more like a permanent stone edifice than a temporary construction crafted out of canvas, plaster and wood” (144). Of course, once pictorial and other decoration was affixed, the supporting wooden armature was invisible to all, so it makes no sense to evince failure or deliberate omission on the printmaker's part. Recall, too, what Marot actually did: while seated in a properly equipped studio, he used drawings to create prints. Most likely made by others, such drawings preceded the construction and ornamentation of ephemera and thus have no relationship to them. Instead, they embody idealized views, and the reproductive printmaker followed suit.
Monochrome prints obviously cannot capture the colors that animated painted canvases or plaster statuary, but that does not mean that black-and-white imagery is irremediably deceptive or illegible. To effectively exploit the abundant surviving imagery associated with festivals, we should focus on how and what they communicate, not on what they demonstrably or allegedly lack.
