Although rarely studied by art historians today, court banquets were among the most important art forms of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; created by the leading artists and commissioned and appreciated by the most prominent and influential patrons. Many of the most famous of these events were held under the auspices of the Valois Burgundian dukes and duchesses, who ruled the Lowlands and portions of France from 1363-1482. The Burgundian Valois court was a major center of artistic patronage, particularly associated by its contemporaries with lavish entertainments and the successful integration of art and political ritual. Late medieval banquets are today only accessible to us through the mediation of contemporary verbal and visual descriptions, payment records, and scattered physical evidence in the form of tapestry, metalwork and other items once used in the feast hall. Rather than attempting to reconstruct any single event, this dissertation identifies recurring elements of feast descriptions and material culture connected to the Burgundian court. This material is used to uncover the underlying expectations brought to and fostered by such events, expectations that also influenced artistic practice and patronage outside of the feast hall.;Based on this evidence, a new picture emerges of late medieval and Renaissance artistic culture. Attention to the processes of perception and an accompanying interest in ambiguity were central to the experience of pleasure and ethical thought in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and that banquets were key sites for both self-display and identity formation during this period. Moreover, these banquets challenge modern assumptions about the place of time-based and performance media in the history of art, as well as the nature of magnificence, wonder, the foreign, and spectacle.
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