EXHIBITION REVIEW: ‘THE MASK OF CEREMONY’
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES,
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY,
NEW BRUNSWICK, NEW JERSEY
4 OCTOBER – 19 NOVEMBER 2004
Rutgers University (New Brunswick, New Jersey) recently put on display an
exhibition of some thirty recently acquired festival manuscripts and books
under the title, ‘The Mask of Ceremony.’ For a little over a decade, the
Department of Special Collections had been putting together a collection of
manuscripts and books commemorating festivals (and ceremonies) between
the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. This was a new venture for
Rutgers. By the summer of 2003, we had about twenty-five manuscripts and
books produced between 1520 and 1755, and the time seemed right to give
these celebratory materials some celebrity of their own by bringing them
together in an exhibit.
As the lines of the exhibit took shape, some objects in the collection
were not exhibited and others were borrowed, notably Domenico Fontana’s
account of his achievement in raising the Vatican obelisk in front of St. Peter’s
Rome, a book generously lent by the Watson Library of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art (New York).
The exhibit’s title, ‘The Mask of Ceremony,’ sums up its narrative: that
opulent and ingeniously organized spectacles served as gorgeous masks
concealing the real face of the society that invented and consumed them,
masks that infatuated those societies even while they recognized them as
illusions. The phrase ‘mask of ceremony’ was taken from the sixteenthcentury satirist, Traiano Boccalini. It had an analogue in a sermon that figured
in this exhibit, a coronation sermon in which Bishop Gilbert Burnet reminded
the new rulers of England, King William III and Queen Mary II, that
mortality – and the sobering prospect of divine judgment – were concealed
beneath the stately, ceremonial mask of monarchy. As accented in the exhibit,
the mask of ceremony concealed, not only the perennial inconveniences of
sickness, mental incapacity, revenge and death, but also the savage continuing
warfare between Protestants and Catholics and political centrifugality such as
Maria Teresa had to overcome to establish her rule over the Austrian
patrimony. One case in the exhibit contained treatises (largely Protestant)
hostile to the conspicuous consumption, the imagery, and other aspects of
festivals condemned by critics as pagan.
The exhibit included three unpublished English manuscripts (an
account of the meeting on the field of the Cloth of Gold, a record of patents
of nobility granted under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, and an eyewitness record of the investiture of Henry, son of King James I, as Prince of
Wales). The earliest festival books included were Graphaeus’s ‘Golden Book
of Antwerp’, celebrating the entrée of Charles V and Philip II (1549) and
Bouquet’s (attrib.) Bref et sommaire recueil of Charles IX’s entrée into Paris
(1572) and the subsequent coronation of his wife, Elizabeth of Austria. Later,
and more sumptuously depicted entrées were offered up in Barlaeus’s
celebration of the vagrant Marie de Medicis’ glorious reception at Amsterdam
(1638), Bidloos’ equally splendid record of William III’s homecoming into
The Netherlands (1691) after his coronation as King of England and his
victory in the Battle of the Boyne, and the arduously won twin receptions of
Maria Theresa into Vienna (1740) and Prague (1743). It was surprising how
many connections there were among individual objects, even in such a
relatively small collection. For example, the coronation book of Louis XVI
(1775) had an illustrious antecedent in the coronation of his mother-in-law,
Maria Theresa as Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, and a somber pendant in
the manuscript ledger of his household expenses (1791), recording an
illumination to celebrate the King’s acceptance of the French Constitution.
The book celebrating the wedding between Philip V of Spain and Elisabetta
Farnese, in Parma (1714), had an unhappy sequel in the magnificent volume in
which the City of Paris recorded its festivities for the Dauphins’ second
marriage (1747), his first having ended when his wife, a daughter of Philip IV
and Elisabetta Farnese, died. Other exhibits brought the dazzling splendours
of firework displays into conjunction with the macabre punctilio and elegance
of death rituals.
Professor Gorden Kipling, of the Department of English, University of
California at Los Angeles, opened with exhibit with a lecture on the Louis
Gaugères Bishop III endowment. The exhibit ran from 4 October - 19
November, 2004. A guide to the exhibition is available from the Department
of Special Collections, Archibald S. Alexander Library; Rutgers University; 169
College Avenue; New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901-1163; U. S. A.
Professor Karl F. Morrison, Rutgers University