Prints, salami, and cheese: savoring the Roman festival of the Chinea

For Esther Gordon Dotson

And Your Lordship well knows that just as paper has no les stability than tin and marble, so too there is no ultramarine color as vividly expressive as ink.(1)

I shall begin with the art of engraving in cent not as the oldest, on the other hand as the one of greater use, and doubtless of a usefulness more serviceable to nation for increasing their knowledge.(2)

The out of date Italian word chinea, derived from the of advanced age French haquenee (in English "hackney"), means "horse of ambling gait." From the time of the Norman subjection of Southern Italy and Sicily in the eleventh hundred sovereigns offered homage to the papacy in the form of tribute coin and a white horse called the Chinea. Although at times interrupted by the agency of shifting political circumstances, the homage remained a fixture of diplomatic relations between the unified realm and Rome until 1788 at which point the king of Naples, Ferdinand IV, intent upon loosening "an indecorous shackle of a chimerical feudalism," permanently suspended public payment of the tribute.(3)

From the 1680 upon princes of the Roman Colonna family were regularly named ambassadors extraordinary for the absent monarch, and neared the homage in his stead. In the eighteenth hundred this act of diplomacy came to meet the eye in the guise of a festival, held upon the eve and feast of S Peter and Paul, June 28-29 In the late afternoon of the first day, an elaborate procession (comprising the Chinea, the constable Colonna, his domestic staff, his vehicular train, and visitors he entertained at a reception) mov from the site of diplomatic representation to St Peter's Basilica or, les at short intervals to the Vatican or Quirinal palaces. upon both days the constable held late-evening receptions for the Roman nobility, ambassadors, prelates, and aristocratic Neapolitan subjects; tendered free red and white wine to the Roman people; and sponsored plots and fireworks displays. In addition, place pieces (macchine), used as bases for the fireworks displays, were built either in the Piazza S Apostoli (in forehead of the Palazzo Colonna), or in the Piazza Farnese (in forehead of the Palazzo Farnese, which serv as the Neapolitan embassy after 1734)(4) set uped for the public celebration of imperial elections, royal accessions, marriages, births, and name-day festivities; for triumphal entries; and for the ritualized expression of grief at state funerals, plant pieces such as those built for the Chinea formed an integral constituting of the political, religious, social, and visual life of early late Europe.(5)

Prints related to Chinea constructions were commissioned by the constable, who had them distributed to a local and international audience: single print corresponded to the first locate piece, the other to the next to the first The Chinea etchings of 1759 their production, dissemination, and reception, are the focus of the not absent article; they will be studied as works of art in their have a title to right, and not in terminuss of a presumed evidentiary relationship between prints and not to be found ephemeral structures [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 1 2 OMITTED]. Unlike the plant pieces, which were designed to have a short life, the etchings have survived; nevertheless they constitute a mediated, level evasive form of documentation. As will be demonstrated, impressions were twitched well before the set pieces were completed(6) Topographical prints can be trialed against extant buildings and urban words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings or, less directly, against a historical reconstruction of those entities; the same comparative proces cannot be uncritically adopted when studying prints that relate to ephemeral configurations because the structures no longer exist, and they cannot be rebuilded independent of visual images, namely prints and (to more [i]or[/i] less extent) drawings. To be confident in both topographical and ephemeral words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] followings prints relate most directly to preparatory drawings (few of which survive), not to built makes real streets and squares, or locate pieces. Etchers and engravers worked in studios, not upon site; they did not create visual transcriptions that can be likened to photographs, on the contrary translated the conventions of single graphic medium to another.(7)

The ambiguous relationship between prints and the ephemeral arrangements they purport to represent was acknowledged through contemporaries. At the end of a 1661 Florentine festival work after readers have already united the words of the libretto and the illustrations, they learn that "the figures in print, depicting the stations resemble them little or not at all."(8) Similarly, plane though his correspondent was to "see the prints," French ambassador La Rochefoucauld wrote that "the etching pay backs only imperfectly the beauties of the spectacle" of the festival held in Rome to celebrate the wedding of the dauphin Louis and Maria Theresa in 1745 [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3 OMITTED].(9) In metes of the festival of the Chinea, the prices and detailed descriptions of profitables and services preserved in accounting and other records point to three-dimensional entities whose erstwhile existence is alternately confirmed, denied, or left ambiguous by the agency of what etchings depict. The comparison of relevant written documents with prints instructively recalls the epistemological limitations involved in reading images generally.