Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ANIMATE (Animation, Materials, Transcultural Ecologies: Performing Worlds at the Baroque Savoy Court of Christine of France)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-01-01 bis 2023-12-31
ANIMATE investigates the spectacles staged across the Duchy of Savoy – from its capital Turin to the top of Mont Cenis – during the lifetime of the regent Christine of Bourbon-France (1606-1663). By examining the natural resources, landscapes, and stagecraft that audiences would have seen in these performances, the research aims to construe these elaborate performances as a critical laboratory for thinking through the complexities of early modern global forces, the economic circulation they incited and the consequences on the landscapes they impacted. To pursue these aims, it focuses on a large archive of extant visual and textual documentation: twelve albums produced by court calligrapher, cartographer, and engineer Giovanni Tommaso Borgonio to document, over almost one thousand manuscript pages, as many performances in almost all their constituent elements (from lyrics to scenographies). Other 16th- and 17th-century textual and visual sources such as printed festival reports, travel narratives, natural history and medical treatises, and tax records are also relevant to this research. By way of an art historical and cross-disciplinary approach, the training objectives for the outgoing phase were i) to further enhance our understanding of early modern Italian visual culture in the context of global connectivity and associated methodological debates; ii) to acquire new methodological tools for the critical evaluation of aesthetic practices from the point of view of ecology. ANIMATE suggests that the theatrical events promoted by Christine were instrumental toward re-framing the Savoy Duchy as a resourceful, dynamic, and international actor on the European and, eventually, global stage of expanding commercial flows and consumption. In so doing, these spectacles show us a great deal about the world into which the Duchy was trying to fit. Analysis of these theatrical events, in which dancing bodies, natural history, and geopolitics were intertwined, yields crucial historical insights and a timely theoretical framework for transcultural studies of visual and material culture, performance, and gender as well as the history of science and the environment.
701 images from Borgonio’s archive of albums’ drawings, 90 primary sources and 140 (approximately) secondary bibliographic sources have been the object of investigation during the outgoing phase. The research activities were carried out at the UCLA YRL Research Library, the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles, the Huntington Library in Pasadena, and through the digitisations previously acquired from the National Library of Turin and the Simeom Collection (Archivio Storico di Stato della Città di Torino).
The four main chapters for the monograph resulting from ANIMATE have been written. The monograph - whose prospectus has been successfully submitted - will focus on how the interaction among bodily animation, poetic text, and stagecraft in the spectacles promoted by Christine of France represented contemporary dynamics of production, management, and consumption of natural resources, and their conversion to commodities.
A specific part of my results has been preliminarily disseminated in the Conference Proceedings of the 35th CIHA – Comite International d’Histoire de l’Art World Congress “Motion: Migrations” (Saõ Paulo 2022). The data related to this paper have been published in the UNIBO repository AMS Acta.
During the outgoing phase, the project was hosted by the Department of Art History at UCLA. The collaborations with the UCLA Center for Early Modern Global Studies, the Center of 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and the W. A. Memorial Clark Library have been conducive to the events organized as part of the project and their advertising. ANIMATE has also benefited from the establishment of new scholarly collaborations with the international project “Making Green Worlds - Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization”, the research networks “Oecologies” and "Earth Sea Sky", and the Ècole de Printemps in Art History.
By pursuing an art historical and cross-disciplinary approach, ANIMATE's training objectives for the outgoing phase were to expand my expertise in Italian visual and performative culture and to develop a global and environmental approach to the study of art history. The 35 activities (such as conferences, seminars, talks) I attended and participated (e.g. conferences, workshops, poster in research fair), as well as the 2 conferences and 2 workshops organised were carefully tailored to these objectives. Likewise, all the primary and secondary sources examined. The interdisciplinary scholarly exchange at conferences, as well as the feedbacks received through teaching, mentoring and outreach activities, have been crucial to the development of the monograph and its theoretical aims at the intersection of art history and economic history, performance and literary studies, micro and global narratives.
The four main chapters for the monograph resulting from ANIMATE have been written. The monograph - whose prospectus has been successfully submitted - will focus on how the interaction among bodily animation, poetic text, and stagecraft in the spectacles promoted by Christine of France represented contemporary dynamics of production, management, and consumption of natural resources, and their conversion to commodities.
A specific part of my results has been preliminarily disseminated in the Conference Proceedings of the 35th CIHA – Comite International d’Histoire de l’Art World Congress “Motion: Migrations” (Saõ Paulo 2022). The data related to this paper have been published in the UNIBO repository AMS Acta.
During the outgoing phase, the project was hosted by the Department of Art History at UCLA. The collaborations with the UCLA Center for Early Modern Global Studies, the Center of 17th- and 18th-Century Studies and the W. A. Memorial Clark Library have been conducive to the events organized as part of the project and their advertising. ANIMATE has also benefited from the establishment of new scholarly collaborations with the international project “Making Green Worlds - Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization”, the research networks “Oecologies” and "Earth Sea Sky", and the Ècole de Printemps in Art History.
By pursuing an art historical and cross-disciplinary approach, ANIMATE's training objectives for the outgoing phase were to expand my expertise in Italian visual and performative culture and to develop a global and environmental approach to the study of art history. The 35 activities (such as conferences, seminars, talks) I attended and participated (e.g. conferences, workshops, poster in research fair), as well as the 2 conferences and 2 workshops organised were carefully tailored to these objectives. Likewise, all the primary and secondary sources examined. The interdisciplinary scholarly exchange at conferences, as well as the feedbacks received through teaching, mentoring and outreach activities, have been crucial to the development of the monograph and its theoretical aims at the intersection of art history and economic history, performance and literary studies, micro and global narratives.
Activities in the return phase will be conducive to improve the third objective, namely to reinforce my mastery of an object of study – the early modern courtly performance – that was expressed through all the available linguistic potential (e.g. words, body movements, two-dimensional scenery, scenic sculptures). ANIMATE advances our understanding on how courtly theatre staged world-changing transformations – environments into resources and resources into commodities. In so doing, it probes new ways of investigating art history and early modern performative culture through the lens of mobility and ecological upheaval. This project enriches the composite puzzle offered by three types of studies and debates: first, studies that have called attention to the non-straightforward ways early modern states across the Italian peninsula have projected themselves on the global stage of colonial commercial flows; secondly, studies concerned with the mobility of resources and commodities, their agency, modes of consumption and making of consumer experiences; third, recent researches exploring the foundations of environmental thinking, early modern approaches and conceptualization of nature, and current debates about climate change.
The conference “Converting Natural Resources – Representations, Performances, Narratives”, held at UCLA on 1 and 2 December 2023, co-organized and co-sponsored with the project "Making Green Worlds - Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization", brought together scholars from a range of humanities disciplines and perspectives at the intersection of art history, ecocriticism and economic history to explore the complex relationships between resources, labour and consumers in the early modern world. By examining a wide range of textual, material and visual sources, the papers questioned their value and use in rethinking the demands and state of the humanities. The conference brought together graduate students, museum curators and academics, as well as residents and visitors to California.
The research data and outputs stemming from ANIMATE will be useful to scholars and students in the humanities (visual and performative arts historians, science historians, philologists, anthropologists, environmental scholars, and gender scholars) and, as the outreach event has demonstrated, to non-academic public interested in the field.
The conference “Converting Natural Resources – Representations, Performances, Narratives”, held at UCLA on 1 and 2 December 2023, co-organized and co-sponsored with the project "Making Green Worlds - Early Modern Art and Ecologies of Globalization", brought together scholars from a range of humanities disciplines and perspectives at the intersection of art history, ecocriticism and economic history to explore the complex relationships between resources, labour and consumers in the early modern world. By examining a wide range of textual, material and visual sources, the papers questioned their value and use in rethinking the demands and state of the humanities. The conference brought together graduate students, museum curators and academics, as well as residents and visitors to California.
The research data and outputs stemming from ANIMATE will be useful to scholars and students in the humanities (visual and performative arts historians, science historians, philologists, anthropologists, environmental scholars, and gender scholars) and, as the outreach event has demonstrated, to non-academic public interested in the field.