The civic cornucopia of ornament: Somatic visioning of the festive city in the 'Florentine Picture Chronicle' (1470--75).

摘要

Long disparaged by critics as chiefly decorative, in recent years there has been a surge of interest in ornament for examining the early modern observer's sense of identity in relation to the experience of the urban environment. Ornament has also been reexamined as a site of engagement with sensorial affect. However, how ornament visualizing the dialogue between somatic responses to the city and the spatial mapping of an emerging Renaissance civic identity has not yet been explored. Yet ornament reflected an experience of embodied spatiality for the Renaissance viewer that hinged on the viewer's somatic responses to the festive city. Overlooking ornament's increasingly complex relationship to space in the late fifteenth century perpetuates the misconceived notion of a break between late medieval beliefs in magic and the Renaissance's embrace of geographic rationality, and thus does not allow us to understand how this period was characterized by both thought systems (which are often posited as binary).;My dissertation, "The Civic Cornucopia of Ornament: Somatic Visioning of the Festive City in the Florentine Picture Chronicle (1470-75), examines the central role of ornament in shaping the viewer's civic experience of the city in early modern Florence. I study the Florentine Picture Chronicle, an overlooked collection of 87 history drawings whose highly ornamental, 'cornucopian' style fused vegetal motifs of fertility and abundance from classical culture with calligraphic lines. What results are city scenes in which festival architecture and costume highlighted a hybrid antiquity in order to ground Florence's civic values in an ancient, esteemed historical continuum. To thus decorate the city was a strategy for imbuing images as propaganda so as to create a somatic experience through representation that triggered cultural memories of the ancient past. My work brings together critical studies on early modern architecture, affect, magic, and theatre in order to demonstrate how ornament was crucial to reinforcing Florentine civic mythologies inscribed in the environment. It lays the groundwork for the study of ornament as a new framework for reintegrating overlooked yet vital Renaissance beliefs within modernity's historiographical trajectory.