HIST 229: Spectacles of Power in Europe, 1550-1700 (HC)

This collection of essays explores the relationship between international politics, diplomacy and the visual arts. Ranging across Western Europe, these essays demonstrate conclusively the subtlety and complexity of visual communication within early baroque court societies, which enabled artists to convey complex political messages through paintings.

This exhibition catalog explores the remarkable theatrical designs of Italy's influential Bibiena family in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their elaborate stage designs were used for operas, festivals, and courtly performances across Europe, from their native Italy to cities as far afield as Vienna, Prague, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Lisbon.

The essays in this volume provide a unique account of temporary architecture created for festivals of the 16th and 17th centuries, together with permanent architecture pressed into service for festivals in Italy, France, Austria, Scotland and German. The essays look towards classical sources while evoking political and practical circumstances and intellectual concerns.

This book focuses on the role played by the Habsburg dynasty and its various courts in this period in the development of art. It is also intended to structure concepts about art around the court as a political, artistic and cultural sphere rather than focus on nationalist considerations.

From the Renaissance festivals ballet, opera and even the proscenium arch theatre are derived. Festivals are therefore a vital part of European cultural history. Here Roy Strong provides a guide to their origins and purpose, and their lasting influence.

This book accompanies the opening of the V&A's newly redesigned Europe gallery, which features spectacular decorative arts from the 17th and 18th centuries made for the period's most important tastemakers, among them Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, and Catherine the Great. Outstanding art and domestic objects are discussed within their original contexts to highlight the rhythms and rituals of life during this period. Lavishly illustrated, the book includes essays explaining the grandeur of court interiors as well as more humble period rooms and intimate interiors.

This work of comparative history explores the array of ceremonies that Europeans performed to enact their taking possession of the New World. Frenchmen reproduced the grandeur of royal processions wherever possible, always ending in dialogue with the indigenous peoples. Spaniards made solemn speeches before launching military attacks. Dutchmen drew intensely detailed maps, scrutinizing harbors and coastlines as they disembarked. The English calmly laid out fences and hedges in the manner of their native shires. Through such activities each power considered itself to be creating imperial authority over the Americas; yet each failed to acknowledge the same significance in the ceremonies of other powers.

The Civilizing Process stands as Norbert Elias's greatest work, tracing the "civilizing" of manners and personality in Western Europe since the late Middle Ages, and showing how this was related to the formation of states and the monopolization of power within them.

In recent years scholars have increasingly challenged and reassessed the once established concept of the 'crisis of the nobility' in early-modern Europe. Offering a range of case studies from countries across Europe this collection further expands our understanding of just how the nobility adapted to the rapidly changing social, political, religious and cultural circumstances around them.

This book presents the first detailed study of the ancestry of the modern artist and the ideological transformation by which the artist emerged from his position as a craftsman, acquiring a status comparable to that enjoyed by representatives of the liberal arts and engaging like them in an intellectual activity. Central to the book is an analysis of the court and the artist's role within it.

The classic study of the life of the nobility at the royal court of France, especially under Louis XIV.

This book explores how rulers have sought to control their image through their appearance. Mansel shows how individual styles of dress throw light on the personalities of particular monarchs, on their court system, and on their ambitions. He looks also at the economics of the costume industry, at patronage, at the etiquette involved in mourning dress, and at the act of dressing itself.

Aristocratic dynasties have long been regarded as fundamental to the development of early modern society and government. Yet recent work by political historians has increasingly questioned the dominant role of ruling families in state formation, underlining instead the continued importance and independence of individuals. This volume provides a broad discussion on the formation of dynastic identities in relationship to the lineage's own history, other families within the social elite, and the ruling dynasty.

In state formation research, princely houses have been a blind spot. This collection of essays highlights the horizontal perspective (ruler, all children, siblings, cousins), in asking how the members of a princely family acted as a power network. The quest is to develop an understanding how this family network interplayed with other factors in the state formation process.

Through a thematic overview of court culture that connects the cultural with the political, confessional, spatial, material and performative, this volume introduces the dynamics of power and culture in the early modern European court. Thirty-five essays address topics including gardens, dress, scent, dance and tapestries.

Ranging in date from Elias's teenage years before the First World War to the 1930s, the writings in this volume were previously unpublished in English. They include the essay ‘On Seeing in Nature’, his doctoral dissertation ‘Idea and Individual’, a response to Karl Mannheim’s famous paper on cultural competition, and a number of short stories contributed to a newspaper.

Frans Pourbus the Younger, a Flemish artist by training was the most renowned portraitist of princes at the beginning of the 17th century. He was active in Flanders, Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, and then at the French court, His portraits in France include paintings of Henri IV, Marie de Medici and the young Louis XIII.

This volume analyzes the vogue for giants and dwarfs in late-medieval and early modern Europe. From chapters dealing with real dwarfs and giants in royal courts, to imaginary giants and dwarfs in nationalistic and ancestral traditions as well as metaphorical expression, scholars discuss their role in art, literature, and ephemeral display.

This website supports sustained, interdisciplinary consideration of the role Early Modern women played in the hands-on production of visual and material culture in the courts of Europe and Asia (c. 1400-1750).
This collection of studies, Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts of Europe (c. 1450-1700) (Amsterdam University Press, 2021) was edited by the website's co-founder. See the college icons above for the Tripod catalog book records.

Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth century, princely courts dominated the Italian political scene. These courts were effervescent centers of cultural production. As such, they became a model for European monarchies who imported Italian courtly forma del vivere ('style of life') to legitimize their power and to define social status.

Contributors explore the role of landscape in the articulation and expression of imperial identity and the mediation of relationships between the court and its many audiences in the early modern world. Nine studies focused on the geographical areas of East and South Asia, the Islamic world, and Europe illuminate how early modern courts and societies shaped, and were shaped by, the landscape.

The appearance of automaton clocks during the Renaissance was made possible by technical advances that allowed small mechanical figures to be created. Thus, miniature and portable versions could be produced of the large mechanical figures that had adorned grottos and gardens since the the time of Alexander the Great. Important discoveries, as well as the development of commercial relations with Asia and America, stirred up a new fascination for exoticism with mechanical versions of elephants and lions becoming popular.

Scholars view the relationship between rulers and their leading subjects across Europe. While monarchs wanted to perpetuate a system in which they could watch over members of the regional elite at court, they also sought to make use of them as local administrators, as long as they remained loyal. Essays include: "Clothing the Royal Family : the intersection of the court and city in early Stuart London."

This decisive contribution to the long-running debate about the dynamics of state formation and elite transformation in early modern Europe examines the new monarchies that emerged during the course of the 'long seventeenth century'. It argues that the players surviving the power struggles of this period were not 'states' in any modern sense, but primarily princely dynasties pursuing not only dynastic ambitions and princely prestige but the consequences of dynastic chance.

Researchers have convincingly emphasised the public nature of courtly events, procedures, and ceremonies. Nevertheless, court life also involved pockets of privacy, which have yet to be systematically addressed. This edited collection addresses this lacuna and offers new interpretations.

In the early modern period, rulers demonstrated their power and influence through carefully curated "display"--their presence in court ceremonies, their palaces and their contents, and their portraits. Henrietta Maria of France (1609-1669), queen consort of King Charles I of England, embraced these opportunities for display with particular flair. This richly illustrated book develops a powerful picture not just of the images, fashions, interiors, and buildings shaped by the queen's directorial influence but also of the political and religious factors that governed her choices and policies of court display.

This interdisciplinary study examines painted portraiture as a defining metaphor of elite self-representation in early modern culture. Beginning with Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (1528), the argument traces a path across the ensuing century towards the images of courtiers and nobles by the most persuasive of European portrait painters, Van Dyck, especially those produced in London during the 1630s.

This book explores the fascinating life of the most documented musician of the seventeenth century. Born in 1626 into a bourgeois family in Pistoia, Italy, Atto Melani was castrated to preserve his singing voice and soon rose to both artistic and social prominence. His extant letters not only depict the musical activities of several European centers, they reveal the real-life context of music and the musician: how a singer related to patrons and colleagues, what he thought about his profession, and the role music played in his life.

Catalog of over 350 miniature portraits of European kings, queens and family members. They represent primarily the ruling houses of France, Italy and the Habsburgs. They were commissioned as keepsakes and pledges in marriage negotiations.

Discussing monarchies throughout Europe, from Britain to Russia, Monod tells how sixteenth-century kings and queens were thought to heal the sick with a touch, were mediators between divine authority and the Christian self in quasi-religious ceremonies, and were seen as ideal mirrors of human identity. By 1715, the sacred authority of the monarchy had been supplanted by an ideology fusing internal moral responsibility with external obedience to an abstract political authority.

The Power of Place explores the nature of power--the power of kings, emperors, and popes--through the places that these rulers created or developed, including palaces, cities, landscapes, holy places, inauguration sites, and burial places. Ranging across all of Europe from the first to the sixteenth centuries--from Prague and Seville to Palermo and the Oslo Fjord--David Rollason examines how these places conveyed messages of power and what those messages were.

In the period between the Renaissance and the French Revolution, the court was paramount in European political and cultural life. It was not only the princes' place of residence, it functioned as the seat of government, the stage for factional and dynastic rivalries, and often as a major source of artistic patronage. Explore twelve of the great European courts. Learn how these households were run, how the architecture of their palaces and gardens was adapted to the routines of courtly life, what role the courts played in the princes' relations with the wider community of the realm, and how magnificence and ritual were deployed to political ends.

Funerals were among the most extravagant princely ceremonies in Europe. They evolved, more than has generally been believed, as masters of these solemn occasions devised subtle new ways of capturing spectators' emotions. These essays reveal a variety of ceremonies in French, Spanish and other European courts.

The V&A has one of the world's greatest collections of 17th- and 18th-century European decorative art. Eighty masterpieces from this magnificent collection, acquired and used by rulers of power, wealth, and taste, provide the focus of this book. Each is contextualized in one of five thematic sections that highlight an important aspect of European courtly life: the importance of war; the role of religion; the peaceful arts of the domestic interior; and the magnificence of personal adornment. Superb new photography reveals a broad range of objects, including paintings and sculpture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and furniture, textiles and dress, prints and drawings.

This book contains thirteen essays on European princes and princely culture between 1450 and 1650. Many products of medieval and renaissance culture literature, music, political ideology, social and governmental structures, the fine arts, and even forms of devotional practice found their best expression in the context of the courts of greater and lesser princes.

In this richly illustrated book, a number of scholars provide additional examples and perspectives on the importance of monarchs for architecture and architectural policy.

This book, based on a major exhibit, challenges the popular assumption that Rubens only painted one type of woman. Instead it shows a range of proud and complex heroines, full of character and gravitas. Essays focus on topics such as the identities of Rubens' sitters, 17th century artistic theory and practice, and Rubens' treatment of the human body

Rubens was one of the greatest creators of classical allegory. When he painted for pleasure, he used pagan myth to express and celebrate themes of love, beauty and the creative forces of nature, often in wonderfully idiosyncratic ways. He also respected the religious restrictions placed on the depiction of pagan tales. Most of his mythological paintings were made for private settings.

European culture as it developed in the Renaissance made accommodations with ancient paganism. The classical gods and their legends were allegorised, transformed into symbolic figures or emblematic scenes that might accord with Christian morality. At the same time a secular space was created in art for the depiction of the most popular myths, above all the love stories. These stories were not only attractive in themselves; they offered the opportunity to depict nude figures in narrative action, which the example of antiquity held forth as the highest goal for painting.

France and England are often seen as monarchies standing at opposite ends of the spectrum of seventeenth-century European political culture. On the one hand the Bourbon monarchy took the high road to absolutism, while on the other the Stuarts never quite recovered from the diminution of their royal authority following the regicide of Charles I in 1649. However, both monarchies shared a common medieval heritage of sacral kingship, and their histories remained deeply entangled throughout the century. This study focuses on the interaction between ideas of monarchy and images of power in the two countries between the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the Glorious Revolution.

For women at the early modern courts, clothing and jewellery were essential elements in their political arsenal, enabling them to signal their dynastic value, to promote loyalty to their marital court and to advance political agendas. This is the first collection of essays to examine how elite women in early modern Europe marshalled clothing and jewellery for political ends. Essays encompass women from courts in Denmark, England, France, Germany, Habsburg Austria, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Sweden.

This collection of essays concerns issues involving clothing at royal courts 1400 to 1815. Authors address the connections between clothing and politics, the images that kings and queens crafted through their wardrobes, court styles and fashion, and the life of court clothing on the stage, in film, and in fashion designs. Essays in English analyze court dress in 18th century England, Emperor Rudolph II, Charles II, and representations of Empress Josephine.

Staging the Table in Europe represents the first book-length study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century illustrated handbooks for cooking and dining that provided instruction for nearly every element of the dining experience, from expertly carving meats and fruits to folding napkins into animal forms, performing tableside magic tricks, and creating tablescapes for courtly banquets.

The author examines not only regal paraphernalia such as crowns, scepters, thrones, and orbs, but also the painted portraits, sculptures, tapestries, carved ivories, jewelry, coins, armor, and, eventually, photographs created to display their owner’s sovereign power, a vast collection of works that now forms a significant portion of the cultural heritage of Western civilization.

This book traces the history of lace in fashion from its sixteenth-century origins to the present. It explores the connections between lace and status, addressing styles in lace worn at royal courts, including Habsburg Spain and Bourbon France. Featuring new research on lace in portraiture, women lace makers, and lace as a signifier of power, the essays are richly illustrated.

Presents essays dedicated to women as producers of visual and material culture in the early modern European courts. Chapters address works by women who occupied a range of social and economic positions within and around the courts and across media, including paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles. Accompanied by the Global Makers: Women Artists in the Early Modern Courts digital humanities project (www.globalmakers.ua.edu).

"Observers in England, Spain, France and many other European states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew increasingly alarmed by the growing influence of favourites, or minister-favourites. These individuals appeared to be usurping powers and duties normally exercised by monarchs. In this pioneering book, a team of international scholars considers the emergence of favourites in Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Zenith of European Monarchy and its Elites: The Politics of Culture, 1650-1750 focuses on a previously neglected key elite bonding strategy; explains how a common identity was forged by erecting cultural defences against outsiders; and demonstrates how the power and prestige of the ruling classes rose to unprecedented heights." "Essential reading for students and scholars of early modern European history, this fascinating new study shows how the period 1650-1750 gains a new coherence - as the pinnacle of Europe's monarchies and their elites."--BOOK JACKET.