This important contribution to eighteenth-century European studies is the first to explore the relationships between artists, patrons and connoisseurs in Portugal in the period. Angela Delaforce describes the splendor and magnificent ceremonial of the court of the Braganca monarch, Dom Joao V, adorned with works of art he commissioned from the leading masters in Italy and France and made possible by the fabulous wealth arriving from colonial Brazil. The author has gathered together a wealth of previously unpublished archival material discovered in Portugal and Italy to trace the development of these fascinating patterns of international patronage.
This book provides significant new insights into the Enlightenment in Portugal and its relationships with other European cultural movements using Eugénio dos Santos (1711–1760) as a common reference point. Eugénio dos Santos was a Portuguese architect and city planner who, among other projects, was responsible for the plans to rebuild Lisbon after the earthquake of 1st November 1755. His artistic and technical training, architectural production, aesthetic preferences and some of the books in his private library point to a person who embodied the transition between two moments in Portuguese culture, with their specific characteristics and particular reception of the practices and ideas that circulated among European intellectuals and practitioners. Over the 18 chapters of this volume, several specialists in different disciplinary areas discuss ideas, libraries, printed and handwritten documents, drawings, printing techniques, and architects, philosophers and writers of the 18th century, in order to offer a broad view of a time period closely associated with the construction of modernity.
Reflecting a wide variety of approaches to eighteenth-century opera, this Companion brings together leading international experts in the field to provide a valuable reference source. Viewing opera as a complex and fascinating form of art and social ritual, rather than reducing it simply to music and text analysis, individual essays investigate aspects such as audiences, architecture of the theaters, marketing, acting style, and the politics and strategy of representing class and gender. Overall, the volume provides a synthesis of well established knowledge, reflects recent research on eighteenth-century opera, and stimulates further research. The reader is encouraged to view opera as a cultural phenomenon that can reveal aspects of our culture, both past and present. Eighteenth-century opera is experiencing continuing critical and popular success through innovative and provoking productions world-wide, and this Companion will appeal to opera goers as well as to students and teachers of this key topic.
This volume is dedicated to "Serenata and Festa Teatrale in 18th Century Europe", especially to the production of this music-dramatic genre at the courts on the Iberian Peninsula, in Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire where it was an integral part of court ceremonials and a privileged ritual of repraesentatio maiestatis. The 16 studies on patrons and artists, exceptional events and local traditions, reveal highly interesting material for the research on these up to now largely neglected genre. Any approach to these works full of metaphors, symbols and allusions has to take into account the context of the celebration and the resulting multiplicity of aspects: choice of themes, dramaturgical forms, textual and musical structures, vocal and instrumental ensembles, and the various options regarding the stage apparatus. "Serenata and Festa Teatrale in 18th Century Europe", edited by Iskrena Yordanova (Lisbon) and Paologiovanni Maione (Naples), inaugurates the series "Cadernos de Queluz", a subseries of "Specula Spectacula" by Don Juan Archiv Wien.
Cabinets of Experimental Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Europe is an ambitious contribution to the growing interest in how science came to engage the attention of a public outside the academic and professional spheres and how collections of instruments played a formative role in this development. Collections of physical instruments for research and demonstration appeared throughout Europe in the eighteenth century and the coverage of the book is correspondingly broad. While collections in different cultural and geographical locations had much in common, there were significant local modifications. The essays in this book illustrate how science, sometimes thought to be monolithic and universal, can maintain core intellectual characteristics and practical techniques while adapting to particular sites and circumstances. Contributors include: Jim Bennett, Sofia Talas, Huib J. Zuidervaart, Hans Hooijmaijers, Ad Maas, Tiemen Cocquyt, Inga Elmqvist Söderlund, Paola Bertucci, Marta C. Lourenço, David Felismino, Ivano Dal Prete, Ewa Wyka, Martin Weiss, and Paolo Brenni.
Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art covers all aspects of Rococo art history through a chronology, an introductory essay, a review of the literature, an extensive bibliography, and over 350 cross-referenced dictionary entries on prominent Rococo painters, sculptors, decorative artists, architects, patrons, theorists, and critics, as well as major centers of artistic production. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Rococo art.
A groundbreaking approach to Rococo religious d?r and spirituality in Europe and South America, The Spiritual Rococo addresses three basic conundrums that impede our understanding of eighteenth-century aesthetics and culture. Why did the Rococo, ostensibly the least spiritual style in the pre-Modern canon, transform into one of the world?s most important modes for adorning sacred spaces? And why is Rococo still treated as a decadent nemesis of the Enlightenment when the two had fundamental characteristics in common? This book seeks to answer these questions by treating Rococo as a global phenomenon for the first time and by exploring its moral and spiritual dimensions through the lens of populist French religious literature of the day-a body of work the author calls the ?Spiritual Rococo? and which has never been applied directly to the arts. The book traces Rococo?s development from France through Central Europe, Portugal, Brazil, and South America by following a chain of interlocking case studies, whether artistic, literary, or ideological, and it also considers the parallel diffusion of the literature of the Spiritual Rococo in these same regions, placing particular emphasis on unpublished primary sources such as inventories. One of the ultimate goals of this study is to move beyond the clich?f Rococo?s frivolity and acknowledge its essential modernity. Thoroughly interdisciplinary, The Spiritual Rococo not only integrates different art historical fields in novel ways but also interacts with church and social history, literary and post-colonial studies, and anthropology, opening up new horizons in these fields.
This volume aims to furnish a broader framework for analyzing the scientific and institutional context that gave rise to scientific academies in Europe—including the Accademia del Cimento in Florence; the Royal Society in London; the Académie Royale des Sciences in Paris; and the Academia naturae curiosorum in Schweinfurt. The essays detail the multiple backgrounds that prompted seventeenth-century savants—from Italy to England, and from Poland to Portugal—to establish new forms of scientific organizations, in which to institutionalize collaborative research as well as modes of communication with like-minded individuals and associations.
This book examines the Accademia degli Arcadi in its heyday, a little known phenomenon in Italian history in the first part of the eighteenth century. The Roman academy aimed for a peninsula-wide cultural renewal induced by literary reform. Operating within a papal-court society, it eschewed extant patronage systems and social hierarchies and introduced enlightened ideas to its members. By about 1730, the Arcadi was on the wane, the reform largely unmet. It was an easy target for critics, both its proponents and opponents, in part because of the visible role it assigned to women. By attending to the institution's policies, this book provides a rich understanding of the Arcadi's goals. It locates the organization's interest in theater, including the physical environment of the theatrical drama, as central to its operations. It is argued that, like a stage set, the Bosco Parrasio, the garden that the Arcadi built for its literary presentations, is a visual manifestation of Arcadian goals.
