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

This volume contains nineteen contributions, deriving in part from the EURESCO conference series, and treats European court festival traditions, with particular focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essays, divided into six thematic groups, present aspects of festivals in France, Italy, and England.

Part 1, "Recovering the Past," contains magisterial essays by Helen Watanabe-O'Kelly on the printed festival document and the difference between spectacle and ceremony and by Margaret McGowan on the classical heritage of the Renaissance triumph. While the former focuses on the objects of the festival, the latter concerns itself with the use of the past in the present of the triumphal arches for sixteenth-century French royal entries.

Part 2, "Early Modern France and Festival," presents four very different essays: Richard Cooper on triumphal entries under Henri II, Monique Chatenet on the relationship between architecture and festival under the last Valois, Nicolas Le Roux on the politics of these same festivals, and Chantal Grell on the financing of festivals under Louis XIV. Cooper demonstrates the stylistic unity of early festivals and the growing tendency to print a livret, appending a checklist. Chatenet examines the development of etiquette in sixteenth-century France and its reflection in the architecture of the royal chateaux. Le Roux provides an overview of secular and liturgical festivals under the last Valois, while Grell reinterprets documents published by Marie-Christine Moine, Les Fétes à la cour du Roi-Soleil (Paris, 1984).

Part 3, "Festivals for Charles V," contains three essays: Bernhard Schimmelpfennig on the two coronations of Charles V at Bologna in 1530, Robert Knecht on the Emperor's journey through France in 1539–40, and Jochen Becker on the Antwerp entry of 1549. Schimmelpfennig presents Charles's coronations both as emperor and as king of Lombardy contextually with a view toward the printed festival account. Knecht demonstrates that the French made many concessions to Charles, arguing that Francis I wanted the return of Milan. Becker shows that printers of Serlio's books on architecture were closely involved in the design of the 1549 triumphal entry.

In Part 4, "Ceremony in Elizabethan England," Elizabeth Goldring examines the funeral of Sir Philip Sidney and how it aspired to the status of a royal obsequy by casting Sidney as a Protestant martyr and involving etiquette far above his actual rank. Viktoria Musvik employs reports by Russian ambassadors to show how they interpreted English court festival.

Part 5, "The Performance of Festival Music: Theatre and Event," attempts to recreate the acoustic world of the festival in the frequent absence of printed scores and other documentary evidence. Ian Fenlon investigates the 1574 funeral of Cosimo I, demonstrating how the Florentines created a new tradition and mounted obsequies of unprecedented magnificence. Nicoletta Guidobaldi continues the reconstruction of the rich acoustic dimension of Italian festivals and interprets two well-known paintings by Domenico Morone against the backdrop of Milanese festivals ca. 1490. While Dinko Fabris focuses on urban sacred and secular festivals in Spanish Naples 1555–1702, Flora Dennis's study examines musical aspects of five tournaments from Ferrara. Roger Savage presents an overview of spectacles within Shakespeare's plays and of treatises on acting and stagecraft ca. 1600. With the emphasis on music and Italian festivals in this section, the absence of any mention of the readily available University of Illinois dissertation, "Ducal Patronage of Music in Mantua, 1587–1627: An Archival Study" (1989), by Susan Parisi is striking.

Part 6, "Festival and Architecture," a recurring theme throughout the volume, receives special attention in Peter Davidson's essay recreating the physical world of the entry of Federigo Ubaldo della Rovere and Claudia de' Medici into Urbino in 1621. Maximilian Tondro's essay focuses on the triumphal arches erected for the entry of the dogaressa into Venice in 1557. Marina Dmitrieva-Einhorn concludes the volume with an overview of ephemeral architecture...