09 Mär 2023
18:15  - 19:45

Forum eikones, Rheinsprung 11, 4051 Basel

Veranstalter:
eikones - Zentrum für die Theorie und Geschichte des Bildes, Universität Basel

Öffentliche Veranstaltung

Zoë Opačić (Birkbeck): Designed to Impress: the Rise of the Square in Late Medieval Europe

Keynote Lecture of the workshop Know your place: (Re)Constructing Spaces in Premodern Visual Cultures.

Event poster

This lecture will focus on an intersection of medieval ritual and urban setting on the example of the largest public space in medieval Europe: the town square. The fourteenth century marks a high point in Central Europe for the development of imposing, purposefully designed squares, which were often part of a more ambitious urban re-organisation. Krakow, Prague, Nuremberg and Vienna all experienced a profound architectural transformation in order to create a stage for religious and quasi-religious rituals. In Prague the internal developmental logic began with the Old Town Square and culminated in the creation of the colossal Charles Square, which articulated Roman imperial aspirations of the new ruling dynasty. In Nuremberg the Hauptmarkt provided a stage to serve the aspirations and ceremonial requirements of its powerful burghers, while removing the right to existence of its previous Jewish inhabitants. In all these examples the squares acted as a civilising and organising principle of entire districts with administrative and religious foci – the town hall, a major chapel or a church, a pillory or a fountain - placed alongside quotidian structures, such as shop stalls, cellars and salting houses.

It will be argued that in Central Europe architects simultaneously developed novel ideas about urban decorum, deriving from, but nonetheless distinctive from Italian concepts of planned public spaces. Instead of proto-perspectival principles discernible in the design of Italian Tre- and Quattrocento piazzas, these important cities developed concepts of urbanism as a liturgical and kinetic experience. Thus, architecture and its meaningful juxtapositions created an overlay of temporalities and symbolic meanings which could be unlocked through carefully enacted rituals. However, in contrast to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea that ceremonies are ‘bricolage’, a pastiche of symbols brought together in a game, Prague especially demonstrates that the rules of the game can be implied or even dictated in architectural and spatial terms.


Veranstaltung übernehmen als iCal