Arts and humanities
> Thursday, November 6, 2025 - 2pm - Bibliothèque de l'UFR ARSH
Interview with Anne- Madeleine GOULET, director of research at the CNRS (Centre d'Études Supérieures de la Renaissance), who will present the book co-edited with Michela Berti: "Noble Magnificence. Culture of the Performing Arts in Rome. 1644-1740".
The thirty chapters of this book are the fruit of the work of an international, multidisciplinary team of researchers and archivists brought together as part of the PerformArt project, funded by the European Research Council from 2016 to 2022. This project studied the artistic patronage of the great Roman aristocratic families of the 17th and 18th centuries through archival research campaigns.
After Innocent X's accession to the papal throne in 1644, and even more so after the Peace of the Pyrenees in 1659 - which led to a decline in the pope's power in his relations with other European states - Roman families redoubled their efforts to assert their social pre-eminence, not only through architecture and the fine arts, but also through the ephemeral performing arts: music, theater and dance, omnipresent throughout the year, and particularly during the intense period of artistic production that was the Roman carnival.
Research into the archives of these families reveals that their desire to flaunt their magnificence - an ideal well documented in the literature of the time - gave rise to sumptuary expenditure on a scale that could only be justified by the benefits (if not tangible, at least symbolic) they hoped to derive from it.
The essays in this book, which draw on socio-economic history, the history of ideas and the evolution of artistic practices of the period, make a major contribution to our knowledge of the courtly societies of the European Ancien Régime by integrating the performing arts into their analyses in an innovative way.
