ABSTRACT

Since the 1960s, the festival architecture of baroque Rome has received a fair amount of attention (Berendsen 1961; Weil 1974; Fagiolo dell’Arco and Carandini 1977-8; Fagiolo dell’Arco 1997; Imorde et al. 1999; Schraven 2006). Similarly, the mostly short and prosaic written descriptions of seventeenth century festivals and processions have been repertoried and analyzed in terms of their strategies of representation and communication (Diez 1986; Frangenberg 1990; Fagiolo dell’Arco 1994; Nussdorfer 1998). This research suggests that ephemeral architecture and its reproduction in word and image offer a privileged view into the very mechanisms that define baroque art and architecture, and the intentions or agendas underlying these strategies. Anthony Blunt, for instance, has argued that the artistic practices of seventeenth-century Rome are deeply preoccupied with illusionism in the service of the communication of divine mysteries (Blunt 1978). Festival architecture, then, seems to push to its limit the research into the artistic means best suited to communicate such higher truths. Its lighter and more manageable construction and its ephemeral lifespan allowed for audacious and indeed spectacular designs, incorporating a multitude of techniques, media and imagery far more freely than permanent architecture, such as artificial lighting, large sculptures or heraldry on a monumental scale. The spectacular nature of festival architecture in seventeenth-century Rome points out the intrinsic theatricality of art and architecture in Rome during this period, and exemplifies the important role played by theatricality in the representation of institutions and the expression of power. In short, ephemeral architecture and its dissemination in word and image have been fruitfully examined as a “laboratory” for the design strategies and artistic means available to the seventeenth-century Roman artist and

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Drawing upon such research, my essay aims to address a related but different question: if, and how, festival architecture-and the events that occasion its creation-help to establish the meaning and subsequent interpretation of other, more permanent constructions? Even if the lifespan of permanent architecture far exceeds the duration of the feasts and festivals that intermittingly surround them, these festive moments sometimes coincide with, or result from, crucial moments in that building’s history, such as its foundation or consecration. Such moments anchor a building firmly to a specific moment in time and, one might say, to the place as it was then.