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Section III: Representations of social and political orders in residential cities

The third section of the handbook serves to exemplarily deepen and comparatively systematise the project from a cultural-historical perspective. The aim is to analyse forms and practices of representations of social and political orders, focusing on both visual and performative sign systems. All forms, media, and aspects of representation in the residential cities of the Holy Roman Empire are taken into account: visual art media, architecture, urban planning programmes and designs, performative media, collections of all kinds as well as the forms and practices of festivals and ceremonial. An essential concern of the research work is to be able to trace both the growing complexity and canon formation of artistic-communicative media as well as the changes in their value and hierarchy in the service of courtly and urban communication and representation and to clarify more precisely the roles of their producers or mediators (patrons, artists, elites) over the long period of investigation of the project. The concept of media has the function of a collective term: as an umbrella term deliberately chosen without reference to sources, it is intended to summarise the representations that cannot be subsumed under a single term in the language of contemporary sources, from art and architecture to museums, art and natural collections, and performative representations – ceremonial, processions and processions, etc.

The focus is on the urban perspective, but forms of courtly representation are also to be taken into account, insofar as they make the prince, court, and rule visible in the city. Particularly the contacts and exchange relationships between the city on the one hand and the prince and court on the other are to be considered under structural and personal aspects. The special interest is thus directed towards the question of visual and performative forms of expression of the polarity, cooperation, and coexistence of the urban and courtly spheres in their relationship to each other as well as in their respective internal structures. Visually, these spheres were usually closely related and interlocked in urban space using connecting or also hermetic elements (e.g. lines of sight, streets, building positioning, fortifications, location of the palace), which applies both to the residential cities that ‘grew’ over the centuries and to the systematically laid out planned and ideal cities (e.g. Ludwigslust, Kassel, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Rastatt). This interlocking is expressed above all in the enforcement of the urban structure and the occupation of the urban space with courtly functional buildings (administrative, military, memorial, and other representative buildings), but also in the aristocratic or princely town courts, which have only received greater attention in recent years. Their specific design, often oriented towards the courtly-fortificatory formal language of the residential palace, provided for well-calculated political signs in the urban space. The same applies to performative practices: processions, festivities, and ceremonies could serve to reassure and stabilise the social configurations of ‘city’ and ‘court’, but also to bring them together and connect them or even to take them over from one another. In this context, the conception and use of the various pictorial media (starting with portraits and coats of arms, through the history and donor pictures, to the festive decorations and descriptions) must also be subjected to a detailed examination and asked about the significance of the representative design of urban exteriors and interiors (the latter include above all town halls and churches) for the appropriate evaluation of the relationship between polarity, cooperation, and coexistence of the courtly and urban spheres.

Structure: Handbook Section III comprises three volumes - two regionally arranged volumes with exemplary analyses as well as one systematically arranged volume:

 

Volumes III/1 and III/2 (exemplary part): Volumes III/1 and III/2 provide exemplary analyses of twelve sites each, the selection of which is based on typological criteria in coordination with Handbook Section II and takes into account the state of research as well as the geographical distribution.

The articles concern, on the one hand, visual sign systems, hierarchy and synergy of artistic media, architectural and spatial programmes, interior and exterior designs and furnishings, special types of buildings and spaces such as castles and town halls with their representative functional spaces, city churches with their noble and bourgeois estates, dynastic and bourgeois tombs, castle chapels, armouries and fortifications, theatres, museums, chambers of curiosities, art, and natural history collections. On the other hand, performative representations are to be included: Festive events, ceremonial, receptions, processions, corresponding municipal and court regulations, and ordinances. Aspects of personal history are taken into account by focusing on creators and recipients, participants and audiences (patrons, artists, master builders, elites, court members, and city dwellers). Especially the artists and craftsmen in the service of the city and the court require a differentiated investigation about income structure, status, and prestige, social and regional origins as well as the different integration into the city and court networks.

The total of 24 studies in the two exemplary volumes of Handbook Section III, each with its own specific questions, are assigned to five sub-sections, which structure the topic by applying central analytical perspectives of the research project and on which the order of the systematic section (Handbook Volume III,3) is also based. These research perspectives, which are set in parallel for the handbook sections II and III, but are in part differentiated in terms of content, are based on the interconnected coordinates of times, spaces, and practices:

  1. Times and processes. Continuities - Caesuras – Transformations
  2. Spaces and relationships. Places - localisations – references
  3. Practices (1): building and ordering. Ideas - Planning – Design
  4. Practices (2): Presenting and illustrating. Representations - Signs – Performance
  5. Practices (3): Mediating and transmitting. Mediality - Imagination – Memory

 

Volume III/3 (systematic part): The systematic part offers a synthesis of the achieved state of research and builds both on the exemplary studies of Handbook volumes II,1-2 and on the material presented in the articles on places in Handbook Section I. The residence cities of the Holy Roman Empire are thus finally considered on a more general level, without, however, levelling out the considerable differences of the subject matter. Rather, the differences that exist between the residential cities in a synchronic and diachronic comparison are to be classified typologically. In doing so, the perspective changes from the description of individual places and the treatment of exemplary questions to the systematic presentation of subject areas. As a result, this subject matter is to be made accessible to the user of the handbook from different factual points of view in manageable text units, which at the same time refer to the other handbook volumes.

The structure of the exemplary section into five research perspectives is also used as a basis for the systematic section to structure the work process and subsequent usage throughout and to establish corresponding references. Each of these five research perspectives is assigned four to eight factual articles, each of which is devoted to a limited, but not too narrowly chosen topic. References are used to establish cross-references to the exemplary studies as well as between the factual articles and, if necessary, also to the articles on places. In addition, a text is included for each of the five overarching research perspectives, which, together with a conceptually guided overarching sketch, serves to further interlink the content of the systematic factual articles and the exemplary studies.