The Matter of Ephemeral Art: Craft, Spectacle, and Power in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

<jats:p>Through a close reading and reconstruction of technical recipes for ephemeral artworks in a manuscript compiled in Toulouse ca. 1580 (BnF MS Fr. 640), we question whether ephemeral art should be treated as a distinct category of art. The illusion and artifice underpinning ephemeral spectacles shared the aims and, frequently, the materials and techniques of art more generally. Our analysis of the manuscript also calls attention to other aspects of art making that reframe consideration of the ephemeral, such as intermediary processes, durability, the theatrical and transformative potential of materials, and the imitation and preservation of lifelikeness.</jats:p>

Print and Pageantry as Early Modern Tools for Public Diplomacy: French-Language Pamphlets on the Habsburg-Bourbon Weddings (1614–1615) and Marie de Médicis’s Tour of the Low Countries (1638)

“…"Pageantry" and related terms, such as "pomp" and "spectacle," will be used here as container concepts meant to designate both court and civic entertainments and ceremonies in early modern Europe that in contrast to the text-based drama or enacted theater of the period were not commonly scripted in writing but instead foregrounded embodied, ritual, and visual performance, such as dancing, gesturing, and pyrotechnical displays. 5 Pageants may include balls, ballets, masquerades, staged tournaments, and firework dramas, as well as coronations, nuptial blessings, triumphal processions, and ratification ceremonies. Both print and pageantry are rarely discussed alongside each other in contributions on early modern diplomacy and neighboring subjects like the news media and correspondence networks of the period.…”