Making and Masking Reality in French Fine and Performing Arts, ca. 1640-1815

FAIN: FW-50062-09

Barbara Louise Witucki
Utica College of Syracuse University (Utica, NY 13502-4857)

This project aims to refocus and expand the content of an interdisciplinary seminar on literature and the fine and performing arts in the long eighteenth century. Through this project, the content of the seminar will be limited to the influences between Rome and France, with the major focus on France. A study of the spectacles performed during the reign of Louis XIV, the literature behind these spectacles, decoration and the decorative arts of seventeenth and eighteenth century French interiors, the architectural principles underlying Renaissance, Baroque, and Neoclassical architecture, and the relationship between the fine and the performing arts and literature, will allow me to articulate basic principles which lie under the surface changes. These principles, once articulated, should help organize the course material so that students will gain an appreciation of what has remained enduring through the millennia.