Renaissance Fun

Download or Read eBook Renaissance Fun PDF written by Philip Steadman and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle.
Renaissance Fun
Author :
Publisher : UCL Press
Total Pages : 418
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781787359154
ISBN-13 : 1787359158
Rating : 4/5 (54 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Renaissance Fun by : Philip Steadman

Book excerpt: Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.


Renaissance Fun Related Books

Renaissance Fun
Language: en
Pages: 418
Authors: Philip Steadman
Categories: Art
Type: BOOK - Published: 2021-04-13 - Publisher: UCL Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the au
The Grand Old Man and the Great Tradition
Language: en
Pages: 177
Authors: Luisa Bienati
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2010-01-01 - Publisher: U of M Center For Japanese Studies

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In 1995, on the thirtieth anniversary of Tanizaki Jun’ichirō’s death, Adriana Boscaro organized an international conference in Venice that had an unusally
Markings
Language: en
Pages: 0
Authors: Dag Hammarskjold
Categories: Biography & Autobiography
Type: BOOK - Published: 2006-10-10 - Publisher: National Geographic Books

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Perhaps the greatest testament of personal devotion published in this century." — The New York Times A powerful journal of poems and spiritual meditations re
The Memoirs of François René
Language: en
Pages: 324
Authors: François-René vicomte de Chateaubriand
Categories: Authors, French
Type: BOOK - Published: 1902 - Publisher:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Monteverde
Language: en
Pages: 598
Authors: Nalini M. Nadkarni
Categories: Nature
Type: BOOK - Published: 2000-03-09 - Publisher: Oxford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve has captured the worldwide attention of biologists, conservationists, and ecologists and has been the setting for extensive