Inigo

Abstract: Art and PowerRenaissance Festivals, 1450-1650. The spectacular festivals mounted by the princes of the Renaissance period were both a remarkable marriage of the arts and a complex and subtle expression of political theory. The skills of musicians, composers and poets, dramatists, actors, dancers, painters, architects and engineers were needed to realise such events. They drew on the medieval tradition of state entries and tournaments, and merged this with the rediscovered half-imagined, half-historical world of antique festivals to produce an art-form of extraordinary refinement. From the Renaissance festival derive ballet, opera and even the proscenium-arch theatre of today; festivals are therefore a vital part of our cultural history, but their often arcane allusions and thought-processes make them difficult to appreciate. Roy Strong provides a sure and scholarly guide to their origins and raison d'etre in the first half of his book, and then goes on to study four case histories, the emperor Charles V, Catherine de' Medici in France, the grand duke Ferdinand in Tuscany, and finally the English court masque under Charles I. The themes which emerge are the use of festivals to unify diverse or divided dominions, as in the cases of the Holy Roman Empire and France, and their use as a means of glorifying rulers, whether a dynasty, as with the Medici in Florence, or an individual, as with Charles I. Within the political framework many of the greatest artists of the Renaissance can be found at work, from Leonardo da Vinci to Inigo Jones, from Brunelleschi to Rubens. SIR ROY STRONG was Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1974 to 1987, prior to which he was Director of the National Portrait Gallery. His books on Elizabethan and Jacobean paintings are standard reference works, as is his work with Stephen Orgel on the court masques of Inigo Jones. He has, more recently, given great impetus to the study of garden history, through his lecturing, writing, and television presentations, which include

Abstract: Introduction K.Sharpe & P.Lake - Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c.1590-1630 M.Smuts - Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary Culture D.Norbrook - Ben Johnson among the Historians B.Worden - Ben Johnson and the Limits of Courtly Panegyric M.Butler - The King's Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England K.Sharpe - Politics and Pastoral: Writing the Court on the Countryside L.S.Marcus - Chivalry and Political Culture in Caroline England J.S.A.Adamson - The Politics of Portraiture J.Peacock - Inigo Jones and the Politics of Architecture J.Newman - Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth Century England P.Lake - 'Raylinge Rymes and Vaunting Verse': Libellous Politics in Early Stuart England, 1603-1628 A.Bellany - Bibliography - Notes and References - Notes on Contributors - Index

Abstract: The great formal gardens of Tudor and Stuart England are a lost art form. This book sets out to evoke both the people and the ideas that led to the creation of the English Renaissance garden. The great formal gardens of Tudor and Stuart England are a totally lost art form. Swept away by the exponents of the landscape style in the 18th century, they are now seen in the form of Victorian re-creations around the ancient manor houses of England. But before Repton, Capability Brown and Henry Wise, England had been open to all the impulses that made the Renaissance garden. Up to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642, the response had been some of the most legendary garden complexes of Renaissance Europe: Henry VIII's Hampton Court, Burgley's Theobalds, Lord Pembroke's Wilton. Intertwined with this story, which touches on the history of politics, art, architecture, literature and ideas, are some of the great figures of the age: Robert Cecil, Francis Bacon, Inigo Jones, Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford, Charles I and Henrietta Maria, John Evelyn and Andrew Marvell. The study includes some visual material in the form of plans, diagrams, views and engravings of the lost gardens of Tudor and Stuart England.