ARCHITECTURE AS PERFORMANCE IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE: COURT RITUAL IN MODENA, ROME, AND PARIS

"This book probes the role of culture in statecraft by examining how seventeenth-century rulers pressed art and architecture into political service. Alice Jarrard focuses on the ambitious Italian patron Duke Francesco d'Este of Modena, who deployed artworks strategically for his exiled family. The duke drew from vital Italian court traditions for his festival practices, imported opera theater designs from Venice, and called on famed Roman artists, including Girolamo Rainaldi, Francesco Borromini, Pietro da Cortona, and Gianlorenzo Bernini, to create palaces and portraits. His spectacular image informed Este projects in Rome and, through his designer Vigarani, who was summoned to Paris to build a theater, shaped the early cultural practice of Louis XIV. Demonstrating how performance brought paintings, sculptures, and buildings to life by dissolving the boundaries between distant courts, Jarrard reveals the dynamic role of art in seventeenth-century political discourse."--Jacket.