EMBODIMENTS OF POWER

Building Baroque Cities in Europe

Edited by Gary B. Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo

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“This collection is distinguished by richness of content. Indeed, it offers, in addition to a rich historical analysis, an analysis of documentary materials derived from careful research in various European archives and libraries…There also is a rich and comprehensive bibliography and a useful index.”  ·  Canadian Journal of History

The period of the baroque (late sixteenth to mid-eighteenth centuries) saw extensive reconfiguration of European cities and their public spaces. Yet, this transformation cannot be limited merely to signifying a style of art, architecture, and décor. Rather, the dynamism, emotionality, and potential for grandeur that were inherent in the baroque style developed in close interaction with the need and desire of post-Reformation Europeans to find visual expression for the new political, confessional, and societal realities. Highly illustrated, this volume examines these complex interrelationships among architecture and art, power, religion, and society from a wide range of viewpoints and localities. From Kraków to Madrid and from Naples to Dresden, cities were reconfigured visually as well as politically and socially. Power, in both its political and architectural guises, had to be negotiated among constituents ranging from monarchs and high churchmen to ordinary citizens. Within this process, both rulers and ruled were transformed: Europe left behind the last vestiges of the medieval and arrived on the threshold of the modern.

Gary B. Cohen is director of the Center for Austrian Studies and professor of history at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He teaches modern Central European social and political history and has published numerous articles and essays as well as two books in these areas.

Franz A. J. Szabo is director of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies and professor of Austrian and Habsburg history at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He has published widely in Europe and North America, including a prize-winning book on Habsburg enlightened absolutism.

Series: Volume 10, Austrian and Habsburg Studies

Contents

List of Illustrations
Introduction
Gary B. Cohen and Franz A. J. Szabo
Chapter 1. Embodiments of Power? Baroque architecture in the former Habsburg Residences of Graz and Innsbruck
Mark Hengerer
Chapter 2. Baroque Comes for the Archbishops: Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Johann Ernst Count Thun and Their Ideals of “Modern Art” and Architecture
Roswitha Juffinger
Chapter 3. Religious Art and the Formation of a Catholic Identity in Baroque Prague
Howard Louthan
Chapter 4. Prague, Wroclaw and Vienna: Center and Periphery in Transformations of Baroque Culture?
Jiří Pešek
Chapter 5. Representation of the Court and Burghers in the Baroque Cities of the High Road: Kraków, Wrocław and Dresden in a Historical Comparison
Jan Harasimowicz
Chapter 6. From Protestant Fortress to Baroque Apotheosis: Dresden from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
Barbara Marx
Chapter 7. A Tale of Two Cities: Nuremberg and Munich
Jeffrey Chipps Smith
Chapter 8. Searching for the New Constantine: Early Modern Rome as a Spanish Imperial City
Thomas Dandelet
Chapter 9. The Zodiac in the Streets: Inscribing Buon Governo in Baroque Naples
John A. Marino
Chapter 10. A Setting for Royal Authority: The Reshaping of Madrid, Sixteenth—Eighteenth Centuries
David Ringrose
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography 
Index