Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance

by Mulryne; J.R.

• ISBN13: 9780754606284
• ISBN10: 0754606287
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Festivals were occasions to which Renaissance European courts devoted lavish resources. They marked all manner of state events and were charged with political, economic and cultural significance. The essays in this volume, by an international group of contributors, explore all of these aspects of court festivals and address occasions and topics particular to countries from England to Russia, Italy, France and Germany. They illustrate that festivals resulted both in the creation of high art, as in the work of Rubens, but most often in more emphemeral workmanship. Performances could be magnificent, though they were also fallible and occasionally disastrous. This collection demonstrates that these festivals provide fascinating material for all students of the political and artistic culture of the European Renaissance.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	ix
Notes on Contributors	xv
Acknowledgements	xxi
List of Abbreviations	xxiii
Introduction	1	(14)
J. R. Mulryne
Part I Recovering the Past
Early Modern European Festivals - Politics and Performance, Event and Record	15	(11)
Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly
The Renaissance Triumph and its Classical Heritage	26	(25)
Margaret M. McGowan
Part II Early Modern France and Festival
Court Festival and Triumphal Entries under Henri II	51	(25)
Richard Cooper
Etiquette and Architecture at the Court of the Last Valois	76	(25)
Monique Chatenet
The Politics of Festivals at the Court of the Last Valois	101	(17)
Nicolas Le Roux
The Financing and Material Organization of Court Festivals under Louis XIV	118	(19)
Chantal Grell
Part III Festivals for Charles V
The Two Coronations of Charles V at Bologna, 1530	137	(16)
Bernhard Schimmelpfennig
Charles V's Journey through France, 1539--40	153	(18)
R. J. Knecht
`Greater than Zeuxis and Apelles': Artists as Arguments in the Antwerp Entry of 1549	171	(28)
Jochen Becker
Part IV Ceremony and Elizabethan England
The Funeral of Sir Philip Sidney and the Politics of Elizabethan Festival	199	(26)
Elizabeth Goldring
`And the King of Barbary's Envoy Had to Stand in the Yard': The Perception of Elizabethan Court Festivals in Russia at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century	225	(18)
Victoria Musvik
Part V The Performance of Festival: Music, Theatre and Event
Rites of Passage: Cosimo I de' Medici and the Theatre of Death	243	(18)
Iain Fenlon
The Role of Music in Italian Court Festivals in the Early Renaissance	261	(9)
Nicoletta Guidobaldi
Musical Festivals at a Capital without a Court: Spanish Naples from Charles V (1535) to Philip V (1702)	270	(17)
Dinko Fabris
Music in Ferrarese Festivals: Harmony and Chaos	287	(7)
Flora Dennis
Checklists for Philostrate	294	(17)
Roger Savage
Part VI Festival and Architecture
The Theatrum for the Entry of Claudia de' Medici and Federigo Ubaldo della Rovere into Urbino, 1621	311	(24)
Peter Davidson
The First Temporary Triumphal Arch in Venice (1557)	335	(28)
Maximilian L. S. Tondro
Ephemeral Ceremonial Architecture in Prague, Vienna and Cracow in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries	363	(28)
Marina Dmitrieva-Einhorn
Index of Names	391