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Introduction

The Festive City

December 21, 2012 - July 14, 2013

In early modern Europe (1500–1800), festivals enlivened civic spaces with a frequency, scale, and magnificence unrecognizable to us today. Festivals marked ritual moments, praised political agendas, and provided public entertainment. Europe's papal court, sovereign powers, civic governments, and high aristocracy sponsored festivals for all sorts of occasions, staging joyous entry processions when foreign dignitaries entered a city, celebrating coronations, marriages, royal births, and funerals, and honoring saint's days and carnival season.

Well-funded by the ruling classes, festivals mobilized all of the artists in cities such as Rome, Antwerp, and Paris, providing them with steady work and a large audience. These artists collaborated on architectural displays and decorations that were largely ephemeral. As festival culture reached its zenith in the 18th century, sustained by the centralized power of absolutist regimes, each monarch employed his or her own precision team of artists, architects, theater designers, and pyrotechnicians to produce ever more extraordinary and astonishing spectacles.

The books on view in these galleries were made to accompany festivals. Such books ensured that the grandeur and significance of ephemeral festivals extended beyond their immediate moment and locality. Expensive to produce, festival books were given by the sponsor to advantageous connections at foreign European courts and city governments or purchased for private libraries by wealthy collectors. The experience of paging through such weighty volumes and opening their large, fold-out plates was interactive and immersive, an event enjoyed in groups while reading aloud. Single-leaf festival prints, also on view, were made more quickly to document important political events. Both provided sought-after information, with their visual and textual inventories of every firework and piece of velvet clothing, and enumeration of every structure, its size, and materials. The products of unified, collective effort, the splendid works in these galleries represent European cities at the pinnacle of collaborative artistic production.

The Festive City is part of 2013, Year of Italian Culture in the United States.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the generosity of Vincent J. Buonanno, Patrick and Elsie Wilmerding, and the Brown University Library.

Selected Objects

Unknown artist

View of the Canal and Church of St. Barnabas with Battle of the Fists, from the series, ca. 1720

Michele Giovanni Marieschi, printmaker

The Regatta from Ca' Foscari in the Direction of the Grand Canal, from the series, 1741-1742

Gaetano Gherardo Zompini, printmaker

Lantern-bearer, from the series The Arts of Everyday Life in the City of Venice,, 1753

Antoine Hérisset, printmaker

View of the Royal Pavilion decorated for the Exposition of the Shroud of Turin, from the book, 1737

Jean-Louis Daudet, printmaker

Joyful Fireworks Machine representing the Jubilee of the Po (Machina de Fuochi di Gioia rapresentante i giubili del Po) from the book, 1737

Giovanni Battista Brustolon, printmaker

The Doge Crowned in the Scala dei Giganti (Stair of the Giants), from the series, 1766

Giovanni Battista Brustolon, printmaker

The Grand Canal on Ascension Day, from the series Views of the Buildings and Passageways that Make Up the City of Venice,, 1763

Bernardo Bellotto, printmaker

The Generous Turk, Pantomime Ballet performed in Vienna at the Court Theater, 1759
No Image Available

Guido Reni, designer and printmaker

Descrittione degli Apparati Fatti in Bologna per la venuta di N.S. Papa Clemente VIII (Description of the apparati made in Bologna for the entrance..., 1599

Gaetano Gherardo Zompini, printmaker

Keeper of Theater Boxes, from the series The Arts of Everyday Life in the City of Venice,, 1753

Giovanni Trevisan Volpato, printmaker

The Puppets (I Burattini), from the series, ca. 1765

Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune, printmaker

Le Bal Masqué (The Masked Ball), 1782

Jean-Michel Moreau le jeune, printmaker

The Royal Feast (Le Festin Royal), 1782

Stefano Della Bella, printmaker

Quadrille of Horses and Wagons around the Mountain of Atlas: The Horse Ballet in the Conjoined Theater at the Palace of His Highness the Grand Duke of Tuscany, from the book, 1661

Theodor van Thulden

Procession in Honor of the Most Serene Prince Ferdinand (Pompa Introitus honori serenissimi principi Ferdinandi Austriaci), 1642

Theodor van Thulden

The Stage of Welcome, 1642

More objects +

Exhibition Checklist

The Festive City

December 21, 2012 - July 14, 2013
View Checklist PDF

RISD Museum

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