SPECTACLE · The lure of the foreign stage: Italian art and artistry serving the French and European spectacle.
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-11-01 → 2023-10-31
- EU contribution
- €269,003
- Participants
- 2
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
The lure of the foreign stage: Italian art and artistry serving the French and European spectacle.
SPECTACLE is a multidisciplinary investigation intersecting histories of culture, art, stage design, and theatre. It aims to define the cultural meaning of ‘spectacle’ and ‘spectacularity’ in France and in a selection of European capitals in the long 18th century. Specifically, this project investigates how Italian artists from different backgrounds provided key contributions to French and European spectacle broadly conceived (e.g. public and private performances, propaganda events) and how their creations could be used as tools of socio-political communication. Outcomes of this project have been achieved and disseminated via publications, conferences, seminars, and podcasts. Overall objective: investigate the meaning of ‘spectacularity’ in European 18th century culture SO1) establish a new interdisciplinary understanding of spectacle by: a) using primary source examples of the use of the terms ‘spectacle’ and ‘spectacular’ and the cognates across European Languages; b) exploring the theorization of ‘spectacle’ in current literature across art, theatre, and performance; c) deploying examples of the collaborative creation of spectacle (stage designers, decorators, firework-makers, circus performers); SO2) to chart specific examples of the collaborative networks behind the creation of new forms of spectacle and explore the extent to which these can be defined in terms of transnational networks of communities. In particular, exploring the aspect of migration for political reasons. This research has led to the following expected results: 1. An analysis of how stage designers dealt with different artistic commissions (both public and private) and official artists (e.g. painters who worked for the official government) 2. An inquiry into Franco-Italian networks of creativity and innovation in post-Revolutionary and early Napoleonic Europe. This was to reveal how theatre and the actual medium in which artists chose to work highlights interesting connections, collaborations, and continuities while also highlighting insufficiently studied relationships between politics and the performing arts.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The proposed research is a multidisciplinary investigation on the role of spectacle during the radical transformation of European politics and culture in the decades between 1780 and 1820. Its principal aim is to define the cultural meaning of ‘spectacle’ and ‘spectacularity’ in eighteenth-century France. This will be achieved via an exploration of key contributions of Italian artists from different backgrounds and expertise (the designer Ignazio Degotti, the fireworks technicians in the Ruggieri family, and the circus performer Antonio Franconi and his family) to French and a wider European spectacle broadly conceived (e.g. theatre settings, public and private performances, propaganda events). Historians have examined cultural phenomena including theatre, visual arts, music, and popular manifestations as part of a more refined understanding of the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary process. However, the world of stage creation and popular festivals was inherently contingent, transient, and ephemeral. Due to this, artists and designers have not been given the same critical attention paid to musicians, dramatists, or visual artists. My research will cover this gap of knowledge in a growing body of scholarship which is only now beginning to address historical theatre production. Rather than reducing the purveyors of stage design to the ‘background’ of theatre and cultural history in their own ‘micro history,’ the novelty of my approach comes from integrating décor into cultural histories of seeing, experiencing, and remaking the world. By chronologically and biographically assembling visual and historical archival sources (sketches, wills, letters, contracts, private networks) scattered in diverse cultural institutions, the study will bring to the foreground material aspects of the spectacle-creative process and illuminate the interweaving lives of these artists, finally affording a deeper understanding of ‘spectacularity’ in European eighteenth-century culture.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA · VeneziaCoordinatorItaly
- NEW YORK UNIVERSITY · NEW YORKUnited States
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union