Times of Festival is a new online lecture series on festivals in Europe and beyond from the perspectives of social history, art history, history of music and literature, and anthropology. Convener and organiser: Eckart Marchand (Bilderfahrzeuge Project / Warburg Institute)

All sessions are free via zoom.

Wednesday 20 January 2021: 5.30pm (UK time)
Reinhard Strohm (Oxford University): '"Laus urbium" - early musical compositions in praise of cities'
Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23528

This paper will address the question of origins. Celebrative music was a dominant practice throughout the Middle Ages, both in the sacred sphere, where festal plainsong was always central to the liturgy, and in the secular, where Latin panegyric song already surfaces in the 11th-century Carmina Cantabrigensia. The polyphonic and panegyric motet addressing a secular subject, however, seems to arise around 1400. Several of these motets, which will be considered musically and textually, are of Italian origin and their texts praise Italian cities (Padua, Vicenza, Florence) rather than princely or ecclesiastical authorities; prominent composers such as Ciconia and Du Fay are involved; there are musical intertextual links between some of them, and signs of a developing author - and work - consciousness in music. Did Leonardo Bruni's Laudatio Florentinae urbis play any part in the constitution of this musical genre? The festal occasions for which these works may have been created, and their relationships with ecclesiastical music on the one hand, and political poetry, on the other, are also part of this inquiry.


Wednesday 24 February 2021: 5.30pm (UK time)
Matteo Casini (University of Massachusetts, Boston): 'A Society on Show: State Processions in Renaissance Venice (1495-1600)'
Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23571

From the well-known Palm Sunday Procession in 1495 to the early 17th century, the main State processions in Venice were extraordinary feasts in which intense acts of religious devotion were intertwined with civic splendour and symbolism. Long corteges developed with hundreds of participants, particularly in St. Mark's Square, and their exhibition lasted hours. The church and confraternities appeared with the Corpus Christi and "mysteries and figures" while the highest classes surrounded the doge in a precise hierarchy. With such an intense participation and schedule the main public processions were capable, as the paper will show, to enlighten fundamental social, religious, ceremonial and cultural ideals and tensions featuring the "Most Serene Republic of Venice" in the late Renaissance.


Wednesday 17 March 2021: 5.30pm (UK time)
Susanne Kuechler (UCL): 'An Anthropological Perspective on Festival, Time and the Image'
Booking: https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23572

Much of contemporary thought on the nature of the image is shaped by the attention directed by Aby Warburg to the image's own temporality, one that is widely credited by its 'survival' (Didi-Huberman 1990, 2002). Warburg's vision was of 'Nachleben' as an alternative to what he called a 'panoramic view of history' (Warburg 1999:585), comprised of chronologies, influences and the occasional genius. In tracing an image's Nachleben Warburg thought to fashion a new methodology, one that is sensitive to the image's own capabilities to extend itself in time in a transformational and generative manner that is conducive to translation. This paper will show the resonance of Warburg's methodological aspiration with recent theoretical work in anthropology on the nature of the image, and will turn to case studies from Oceanic art. The attention of anthropological theory to the image's own propensity to unfold itself, traceable as patterns of similarity and difference, will be shown to enable the contemplation of complex sequences underpinning the distributive economies of maritime societies in ways that matter in localized and historically specific ways.


Jon Millington
Events and External Relations
The Warburg Institute
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The School of Advanced Study at the University of London is the UK's national centre for the facilitation and promotion of research in the humanities and social sciences.


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