Florentine Water Festivals in the Seventeenth Century PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Florentine Water Festivals in the Seventeenth Century PDF full book. Access full book title Florentine Water Festivals in the Seventeenth Century by Mary McEntire Young. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Mary McEntire Young Publisher: ISBN: Category : Arno River (Italy) Languages : en Pages : 526
Book Description
In the early seventeenth century, the Arno River in Florence became the setting for extravagant water festivals with complicated productions of mock naval and land battles that included fantastic pageant ships, imaginative scenery, and impressive fireworks. An investigation of a Medici court diary, festival books, art, and other primary source material reveals a remarkable escalation in scale and sophistication of Florentine water spectacles between 1608 and 1619. The first event was the Argonautica, a naumachia that was staged for the wedding of Cosimo de' Medici and Maria Magdalena of Austria in 1608. Eight additional court-sponsored water festivals, arranged between 1611 and 1619, replaced a simple popular boat race that was held annually for the Feast of San Iacopo. The distinctive nature of these performances suggests a noteworthy effort by Grand Dukes Ferdinando I and Cosimo II to stage and record these festivals for the Florentines, foreign courts, and posterity. No one until now has identified and investigated this unusual cluster of elaborate Arno feste. This study contributes to the debate about the complicated nature of social and cultural intersections and interactions during the early modern period. These river pageants indicate an interest of the sovereign in sponsoring civic entertainments that touched all classes of society, and they created opportunities for elite and popular groups to share an experience in a communal space. Recovered information also adds to the discussion of how early modern rulers appropriated public spaces and civic traditions to assert their power and glorify their images. Grand Dukes Ferdinando I and Cosimo II used these water spectacles to display and promote their authority as well as communicate messages of their maritime and trade interests. These public feste were an effective way to promote and advertise the idea that the ruler and the realm were healthy and indeed thriving. But the river setting was a different kind of festive theater. Its large and fluid field presented unique opportunities and challenges for the organizers and the designers. This investigation provides new information on Florentine court-sponsored civic celebrations and illuminates aspects of the life and reign of Cosimo II, an often overlooked member of the Medici family.
Author: Mary McEntire Young Publisher: ISBN: Category : Arno River (Italy) Languages : en Pages : 526
Book Description
In the early seventeenth century, the Arno River in Florence became the setting for extravagant water festivals with complicated productions of mock naval and land battles that included fantastic pageant ships, imaginative scenery, and impressive fireworks. An investigation of a Medici court diary, festival books, art, and other primary source material reveals a remarkable escalation in scale and sophistication of Florentine water spectacles between 1608 and 1619. The first event was the Argonautica, a naumachia that was staged for the wedding of Cosimo de' Medici and Maria Magdalena of Austria in 1608. Eight additional court-sponsored water festivals, arranged between 1611 and 1619, replaced a simple popular boat race that was held annually for the Feast of San Iacopo. The distinctive nature of these performances suggests a noteworthy effort by Grand Dukes Ferdinando I and Cosimo II to stage and record these festivals for the Florentines, foreign courts, and posterity. No one until now has identified and investigated this unusual cluster of elaborate Arno feste. This study contributes to the debate about the complicated nature of social and cultural intersections and interactions during the early modern period. These river pageants indicate an interest of the sovereign in sponsoring civic entertainments that touched all classes of society, and they created opportunities for elite and popular groups to share an experience in a communal space. Recovered information also adds to the discussion of how early modern rulers appropriated public spaces and civic traditions to assert their power and glorify their images. Grand Dukes Ferdinando I and Cosimo II used these water spectacles to display and promote their authority as well as communicate messages of their maritime and trade interests. These public feste were an effective way to promote and advertise the idea that the ruler and the realm were healthy and indeed thriving. But the river setting was a different kind of festive theater. Its large and fluid field presented unique opportunities and challenges for the organizers and the designers. This investigation provides new information on Florentine court-sponsored civic celebrations and illuminates aspects of the life and reign of Cosimo II, an often overlooked member of the Medici family.
Author: Felicia M. Else Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0429890354 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 271
Book Description
This book tells the story of one dynasty's struggle with water, to control its flow and manage its representation. The role of water in the art and festivals of Cosimo I and his heirs, Francesco I and Ferdinando I de' Medici, informs this richly-illustrated interdisciplinary study. Else draws on a wealth of visual and documentary material to trace how the Medici sought to harness the power of Neptune, whether in the application of his imagery or in the control over waterways and maritime frontiers, as they negotiated a place in the unstable political arena of Europe, and competed with foreign powers more versed in maritime traditions and aquatic imagery.
Author: David Rosenthal Publisher: Brepols Publishers ISBN: 9782503541723 Category : Festivals Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
For more than a century the artisans and labourers of Renaissance Florence turned the city into their own 'empire' during times of public festivity. From the republic of the late 1400s through to the grand duchy of the early seventeenth century, up to forty brigades of men called the potenze, or powers, elected kings, carved out territories, and entered into a dialogue with citizens and with their Medici patrons. This study traces the rise and fall of this carnivalesque subculture for the first time. It describes how workers represented themselves, their neighbourhoods, and their trades on the public stage through rituals such as stone-fighting and jousting, and reveals how the politics of this festive world were closely linked to everyday patterns of social bargaining around the person of the prince. In the early 1600s the micro-states of the potenze were partially suppressed and they gradually disappeared from the Florentine urban stage. The account of this transformation presented here shows how Tridentine reform and economic crisis combined to undermine hypermasculine carnival ritual as a language of civic contract, confining the potenze to making pilgrimages to shrines and convents in the Florentine countryside. At the same time it is shown how economic and religious change empowered groups of artisan women to take up the model of the potenze in order to make their own collective pilgrimages outside the city walls. Through the story of the potenze, this book provides fresh insights into the dynamics of class and gender relations, and the nature of agency, in early modern Italy.
Author: Felicia M. Else Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 9781472410795 Category : Festivals Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
This book tells the story of one dynasty's struggle with water, to control its flow and manage its representation. The role of water in the art and festivals of Cosimo I and his heirs, Francesco I and Ferdinando I de' Medici, informs this richly-illustrated interdisciplinary study. Else draws on a wealth of visual and documentary material to trace how the Medici sought to harness the power of Neptune, whether in the application of his imagery or in the control over waterways and maritime frontiers, as they negotiated a place in the unstable political arena of Europe, and competed with foreign powers more versed in maritime traditions and aquatic imagery.
Author: J.R. Mulryne Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1317178920 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 343
Book Description
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.