ABSTRACT
This chapter explains that assessing the impact of humanism on the court arts might seem an uncomplicated procedure. Within the last decade, literature on the courts of Europe has been flooding from the press. Art and science, mind and body, image and ritual, arms and letters: all had long been shaped by Christianity and chivalry with their own iconography, artistic monuments, and literary heritage; their own codes of loyalty, service, honour, and courage; and their own accumulated erudition. The intellectual and emotional ambiguities are especially apparent in the Renaissance taste for triumphal forms. Coronations and funerals, ceremonies of birth and baptism, weddings, royal entries, diplomatic receptions the great rituals of court life defined the form of the courtly drama. Important political events had always been marked by celebrations, entertainments and spectacle but, in the closing decades of the fourteenth century, these began to take on a special character and to become increasingly complex, costly and fantastic.
