Browsing by Author "Galletti, Sara"

Bridging the disciplines of art history and cross-cultural studies using a feminist interpretive lens, this dissertation challenges historical narratives of exceptionalism and Eurocentrism through analysis of patterns in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women’s engagement with expanding worlds through their networks and visual representations of world-traveling people and imported objects. To arrive at an inclusive understanding of the significant relationship between the visual arts and cultural exchange, this dissertation offers a new perspective on the cross-cultural circulation that hallmarked early modern Europe by foregrounding women artists, who as a group have been traditionally excluded from the historical record. A data-driven methodology is used to analyze European women’s access to cross-cultural encounters with cosmopolitan courtiers, enslaved people, and imported curios of Asia, Africa, and the Americas through a database of 249 artists designed and populated for this dissertation. Visual analysis of artworks by a subset of these artists is conducted to understand the relationship between women’s worldly encounters and their subsequent creative choices in depicting artistic subjects that came to be considered exotic, thus positioning the artist as cultural mediator. This research makes a dual contribution: first, it challenges persistent narratives that frame women artists’ access to the world as unavoidably limited by gendered social norms. Second, it constructs a new narrative centered on cross-cultural exchange that moves beyond the limits imposed by traditional accounts that focus exclusively on male artists or treat women artists as anomalies. The first key finding of this dissertation challenges popular narratives that present early modern women artists as “magnificent exceptions” or as products of unusually tolerant environments. This project decenters traditional focal points of individual artists and cities through a database used to map artists’ connections and sites of encounter. The data visualized through maps, graphs, and tables demonstrate the geographic breadth and continuity of European women’s artistic activity. These analyses evince many nodes of activity to support the artists’ cross-cultural exposure. The volume of representations in which women artists engaged with wider worlds demonstrates that they actively participated in the history of cross-cultural circulation, rather than existing outside it. By restoring women’s rightful places in this history, we gain the opportunity to assess whether women artists challenged pre-existing imagery and attitudes of cultural imperialism. The second key finding stems from case studies organized by scales of physical and cultural distance, a structure that enables assessment of the relationship between the intimacy of the artist-subject encounter and the quality of the resulting representation. First, investigation of portraits of world-travelers artists encountered in courtly settings addresses whether women’s depictions aligned with conventional representations of the same subjects. Then, examination of women’s representations of manufactured curiosities and naturalia from Asia, Africa, and the Americas explores how such depictions distinctively relate to European desires for universal power and possession. Finally, this dissertation works to center the erasures of Black figures in visual constructions by women artists in early modern Italy by assessing how women’s representational choices participate in the perpetuation or subversion of pre-existing cultural narratives. These three lines of analysis circumvent the draw to exceptionalize certain figures by focusing on sets of relationships and bringing unnamed figures into the framework. Ultimately, although the artists’ choices conform to some racially biased conventions, they also open the possibility of collaboration with foreign individuals; pay homage to the production of artists from different continents; and create expansive roles for imaginary characters represented as Black. This analysis contributes to our understanding of women’s complex intersectional positions in matrices of variable power and access, and to the debate on their roles as producers of knowledge and culture.

This dissertation, For God and King: Jesuit Ephemeral Spectacles in France Under the First Bourbons, examines the contributions of the French Jesuits to the production, staging, and commemoration of festivals in the Assistancy of France. Members of the Society of Jesus produced the spectacles in this study and were the authors of the festival books that commemorated the events for posterity. Beginning with the nuptial entry of Maria de’ Medici into Avignon in 1600, and ending with the death of Louis XIII in 1643, the festivals analyzed were instrumental for cultivating the relationship between the Society and the Bourbon monarchy at a time when both entities were experiencing a rise in power and influence before arriving at an apogee in the second half of the seventeenth century. Crucially, this dissertation interrogates the use of ephemeral architecture and other apparatuses as a means of manipulating and transforming existing architectural spaces in order to construct new spaces that were agents in the transmission of the multi-layered messages on display in the festival’s iconographic programs.

Scholarship on the early modern Jesuits, Jesuit theater, and early modern festivals is extensive. The concentration of the literature on the Jesuits in Italy, Germany, and their missions outside the European continent belies the importance of the kingdom of France to the history of the Society and misrepresents the importance of the Jesuits to France and the Bourbon monarchy. The emphasis on Jesuit theater outside of France, or on French Jesuit theater under Louis XIV, disregards the important role played by Jesuit theater and ephemeral spectacles in promoting Jesuit colleges and reinforcing the Society’s standing in the kingdom in the early part of the century. Similarly, the perceptible trend in festival scholarship to eschew the early seventeenth-century, and the reign of Louis XIII specifically, discounts the function of festivals in asserting Louis XIII’s power and in cultivating an environment in which the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV could take root. A significant portion of festival scholarship present studies that either: a) analyze only part of the festival; or, b) fail to consider the implications of the sites and the architectural history of the built environment occupied by the festival.

Adopting a multifaceted, multidisciplinary approach to the study and interrogation of early modern festivals and ephemeral spectacles that is reflective of the multifaceted, multimedia nature of the subject, this dissertation analyzes early modern festivals as complete, multimedia works of art using a combination of site-specific, textual, and visual analyses. It examines the Jesuit contributions to these festivals and redirects the attention of Jesuit and festival studies to the first half of the seventeenth-century in France.

Investigating the manner in which architecture actively shaped and was transformed by the French royal family, “Rearing the Royals: Architecture and the Spatialization of Royal Childhood in France, 1499-1610” examines architecture's role in the monarchy’s symbolic self-representation, quotidian existence, and dynastic strategies at the châteaux of Amboise, Blois, Fontainebleau, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Using a range of sources from French, Spanish, and Italian archives, the project fuses archival research and close readings of buildings.

The unique relationship between the French royal children and architecture affected politics, court rituals, and architectural forms. Existent literature analyzes the construction and décor of royal châteaux, but little is known about their functions, which later renovations and a formal focus obscure. This dissertation argues that buildings engaged in mutually influential relationships with their occupants, indoctrinating the children and their entourages into the monarchy’s social hierarchy and cultural regime at a time when European politics were shifting. The dissertation contributes to and engages with architectural history, court studies, social history, and spatial theory, providing a multifaceted analysis of the royal family’s instrumentalization of architecture. By analyzing changes in the monarchy's modes of inhabiting its kingdom, from fortified towers to the socio-architectural experiment that was Versailles, this dissertation emphasizes the relationship between architectural manifestations of power and the monarchy's evolving political strategies.

Chapter 1 examines the distribution and location of the children’s apartments at Amboise, Blois, Fontainebleau, and Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the context of contemporary treatises on childhood by authors such as Erasmus and Montaigne, demonstrating how contemporary childrearing beliefs influenced the built environment. Spaces for the children’s domestic officers form the subject of Chapter 2, which asks how buildings visualized the court’s hierarchy and distinguished individuals, inviting intimacy or enforcing divisions between people. The château’s splendorous exterior concealed the disorderly life within, and Chapter 3 uses unpublished accounts to investigate the children’s unique use of their spaces and the impact the heirs exerted on architecture. Chapter 4 treats the ceremonial spaces where the children were born, baptized, and participated in events like coronations. Ceremony associated the heirs with the realm’s symbolically significant architectures, and the children’s movement around the kingdom’s network of residences constructed France as a state and the monarchy as a cohesive power. Chapter 6 examines the latter subject and its motivations of tradition, security, and health. The children’s itineraries, analyzed via a series of ArcGIS maps, reveal that the monarchs favored certain buildings under specific circumstances, each residence playing a distinct role in the monarchy’s territoriality.

In its interdisciplinary approach to the French children’s relationship to architecture, this dissertation views space as a fundamental building block of human society. Through a nuanced argument that architectural space and human activity are mutually influential, the study addresses questions at the heart of the humanities: who are we, how do we live together, how does architecture serve to mediate and unite or, conversely, to marginalize and exclude?