Category: Social Sciences, Italy
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From the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the royal and aristocratic courts behind Europe’s most illustrious festivals printed elaborate, illustrated volumes to record the celebrations that they organized to mark births, deaths, betrothals, weddings, coronations, and visits. Often circulated for the benefit of rival noble families and in the interests of self promotion, festival books are fascinating witnesses to aristocratic culture and art during the Early Modern period.
The Theater that was Rome About From the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, when the books, maps and single sheet prints that appear on this web site were made, Rome presented itself as a theater of the most advanced engineering feats of the period, as well as of the technological skills to execute and record the decorative programs that went with them. Maps of the city in its new guise as the powerful center of Christendom also documented the growth of curiosity about its antique history and pagan past, displaying all the forms of cartographic knowledge available throughout the period.