In the early seventeenth century, the Arno River in Florence became the setting for extravagant water festivals with complicated productions of mock naval and land battles that included fantastic pageant ships, imaginative scenery, and impressive fireworks. An investigation of a Medici court diary, festival books, art, and other primary source material reveals a remarkable escalation in scale and sophistication of Florentine water spectacles between 1608 and 1619. The first event was the Argonautica, a naumachia that was staged for the wedding of Cosimo de' Medici and Maria Magdalena of Austria in 1608. Eight additional court-sponsored water festivals, arranged between 1611 and 1619, replaced a simple popular boat race that was held annually for the Feast of San Iacopo. The distinctive nature of these performances suggests a noteworthy effort by Grand Dukes Ferdinando I and Cosimo II to stage and record these festivals for the Florentines, foreign courts, and posterity. No one until now has identified and investigated this unusual cluster of elaborate Arno feste. This study contributes to the debate about the complicated nature of social and cultural intersections and interactions during the early modern period. These river pageants indicate an interest of the sovereign in sponsoring civic entertainments that touched all classes of society, and they created opportunities for elite and popular groups to share an experience in a communal space. Recovered information also adds to the discussion of how early modern rulers appropriated public spaces and civic traditions to assert their power and glorify their images. Grand Dukes Ferdinando I and Cosimo II used these water spectacles to display and promote their authority as well as communicate messages of their maritime and trade interests. These public feste were an effective way to promote and advertise the idea that the ruler and the realm were healthy and indeed thriving. But the river setting was a different kind of festive theater. Its large and fluid field presented unique opportunities and challenges for the organizers and the designers. This investigation provides new information on Florentine court-sponsored civic celebrations and illuminates aspects of the life and reign of Cosimo II, an often overlooked member of the Medici family.

This book tells the story of one dynasty's struggle with water, to control its flow and manage its representation. The role of water in the art and festivals of Cosimo I and his heirs, Francesco I and Ferdinando I de' Medici, informs this richly-illustrated interdisciplinary study. Else draws on a wealth of visual and documentary material to trace how the Medici sought to harness the power of Neptune, whether in the application of his imagery or in the control over waterways and maritime frontiers, as they negotiated a place in the unstable political arena of Europe, and competed with foreign powers more versed in maritime traditions and aquatic imagery.

Honorable Mention, 2021 LASA Mexico Humanities Book Prize, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Section In the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a team of indigenous grammarians, scribes, and painters completed decades of work on an extraordinary encyclopedic project titled General History of the Things of New Spain, known as the Florentine Codex (1575–1577). Now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence and bound in three lavishly illustrated volumes, the codex is a remarkable product of cultural exchange in the early Americas. In this edited volume, experts from multiple disciplines analyze the manuscript’s bilingual texts and more than 2,000 painted images and offer fascinating, new insights on its twelve books. The contributors examine the “three texts” of the codex—the original Nahuatl, its translation into Spanish, and its painted images. Together, these constitute complementary, as well as conflicting, voices of an extended dialogue that occurred in and around Mexico City. The volume chapters address a range of subjects, from Nahua sacred beliefs, moral discourse, and natural history to the Florentine artists’ models and the manuscript’s reception in Europe. The Florentine Codex ultimately yields new perspectives on the Nahua world several decades after the fall of the Aztec empire.

The seventeenth century was a period of immense turmoil. This book explores the methods by which a distinctive iconography was created for each Stuart king, describes the cultural life of the Civil War period and the Cromwellian Protectorate, and analyses the impact of the antiquarian movement which constructed a new sense of national identity. Through this detailed and fascinating discussion of seventeenth-century society, Graham Parry provides a clear insight into the many forces operating on the literature of the period.

This fourth volume in the European Festival Studies, 1450–1700 series breaks with precedent in stemming from a joint conference (Venice, 2013) between the Society for European Festivals Research and the PALATIUM project supported by the European Science Foundation. The volume draws on up-to-date research by a Europe-wide group of academic scholars and museum and gallery curators to provide a unique, intellectually-stimulating and beautifully-illustrated account of temporary architecture created for festivals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, together with permanent architecture pressed into service for festival occasions across major European locations including Italian, French, Austrian, Scottish and German. Appealing and vigorous in style, the essays look towards classical sources while evoking political and practical circumstances and intellectual concerns – from re-shaping and re-conceptualizing early sixteenth-century Rome, through providing for the well-being and political allegiance of Medici-era Florentines and exploring the teasing aesthetics of performance at Versailles to accommodating players and spectators in seventeenth-century Paris and at royal and ducal events for the Habsburg, French and English crowns. The volume is unique in its field in the diversity of its topics and the range of its scholarship and fascinating in its account of the intellectual and political life of Early Modern Europe.

A study of the Speziale al Giglio apothecary shop in fifteenth-century Florence, Italy.

As the first book-length study of waterborne festivities in Renaissance and early modern Europe, this collection of essays draws on a rich array of sources, many previously un-researched, to explore aspects of scenography, choreography, music, fashion, painting, sculpture, architecture, stage-and personnel-management and urban planning as evinced in spectacles staged on water. Bodies of water in all their variety are explored here: seas, rivers, fountains, lakes and canals and flooded improvised locations within or adjacent to great buildings all provided stages for elaborate and costly performances, utilising the particular qualities of water to reflect light and distort sound. The volume encompasses festivals marking a wide range of occasions from the election of civic officials, the welcome of a monarch, an investiture or coronation, to ambassadorial visits or the arrival of a royal or ducal bride or bridegroom. Often taking the form of re-enactments of naval battles or legendary seaborne quests, these festivals seek to buttress civic and national pride, make claims to mastery over the sea and landscape, and explore the imaginative as well as practical life of performance space which has been a hallmark of the research and publication of this volume's honorand, J.R. (Ronnie) Mulryne.