Status Quaestionis

Introduction: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? The Art of the Ephemeral in Eighteenth-Century France

Elisa Cazzato — 2025-06-25

The etymology of the word ephemeral, ephēmeros, denotes something transient, fleeting, not long-lasting.1 In the arts, I argue that this notion can be applied to tangible requirements created to be experienced, rather than simply consumed (e.g. stage settings, symbols, and scents used during public celebrations); unique even when replicated with the same modalities (e.g. fireworks and of performances), and objects which represent the material arrangements of a more complex live-experience (e.g. dance costumes as indicators of movement).

“Mais, le lendemain matin”. Residues of the Ephemeral in Eighteenth-Century French Art

Mark Ledbury — 2025-06-25

This essay discusses how the Ephemeral was understood in eighteenth-century France, and asks how we can track what remains of ephemeral community and artistic experiences. With the help of some very suggestive remarks on ephemeral experience by historian Arlette Farge, the essay explores various ways the intensity and togetherness of ephemeral experience leaves its mark on visual art, by traces and various forms of accretion visible in artworks themselves. The essay draws on the work of Gabriel de Saint Aubin, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Jacques-Louis David.

Spectacular Blindness: Enslaved Children and African Artifacts in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Noémie Étienne — 2025-06-25

In this essay we explore the presence and display of African children and artifacts in eighteenth-century Paris via their visual, material, and textual traces. While considering how such traces can help conjure or visualize human lives and ephemeral events, we also probe a paradox we call ‘spectacular blindness’. Although individuals and artifacts of African descent were conspicuously visible at the French court, they were rarely fully seen – and, in the case of enslaved children, their subjectivity and the trauma they experienced were seldom acknowledged. We argue that the pervasive visibility of these individuals paradoxically made their humanity invisible to enslavers or turned that humanity into a tool for elite white self-expression and domination. Constantly put on display, they became spectacular blind spots, and, until recently, they have also been absent from most art historical narratives. Even today, their existence and portrayal can be met with disavowal and silence.

L’art du comédien au tournant des Lumières. Conscience de l’éphémère et sensibilité mémorielle

Ilaria Lepore — 2025-06-25

The issue of the ephemeral in theater seems strictly linked to the figure of the actor, since this most replaceable element of a performance, more so than a dramatic text or a musical score and more subject to perishing than the sets. Starting from a few reflections by the actor Talma, this paper aims to illustrate the rise of a memorial sensitivity intended to produce new forms of self-portrayals or narration of an actor’s identity. An ‘awareness of the ephemeral’ becomes sharper when actors start to carve out a figure of themselves – like in Talma’s case – away from their tradition. By breaking this bond of heritage, which involved the preservation and transmission of characters, their costumes, their attitudes and traits, and which was for the actor not only an archive of knowledge but, above all, an identity matrix, the actor renounces a sort of temporal continuity with the past, while simultaneously fueling their own future myth.

L’expérience éphémère d’Ériphyle (Voltaire, 1732): matériaux tangibles et réécritures d’une dramaturgie passagère

Renaud Bret-Vitoz — 2025-06-25

The success on stage of Voltaire’s tragedy Sémiramis owes its longevity to an earlier ephemeral artistic experience of fifteen years, the tragedy Ériphyle, whose original dramaturgy and poetic-scenic material Voltaire indirectly reused in his new play. Ériphyle is emblematic of theatrical ephemerality in different aspects. The play definitively disappeared from the Comédie-Française stage after only a few months and a semi-public failure. It has only survived in the form of manuscripts and posthumous editions which reveal two very different versions, one of which never stood the test of the stage. It also transposes numerous allusions to current events and political debates into an ancient and mythological plot. Finally, it uses innovative scenographic and non-verbal processes unequally experienced at the time, being most often still incompatible with the technical conditions of representation.

Un événement unique: le théâtre de la Révolution entre surgissement et disparition

Pierre Frantz — 2025-06-25

The theatre of the French Revolution is particularly suitable for a reflection on the ephemeral nature of theatre. Primarily, because it has disappeared from our stages, and secondly because it constantly confronted the contradiction between its aspiration to be part of History, at the very foundations of an eternal French Republic, and the reality of short-lived historical events that vanished as soon as they appeared. Its ambition was to fix what was slipping away – new customs, political dreams, current circumstances – and to inscribe them within performance and to intervene in the historical process, which is by definition ever-changing. The theatrical performance itself, which fixed meaning and often contradicting the text, had never played such a significant role, not only through the interaction of actors, sets, and costumes but also between the performance, the audience, and the historical circumstances.

Ephemeral Emblem: Jacques-Louis David and the Making of a Revolutionary Martyr

Daniella Berman — 2025-06-25

In December 1793, Maximilien Robespierre raised a virtually unknown child martyr, Joseph Bara, to cult status through Jacobin rhetoric. The painter Jacques-Louis David was tasked with both producing a commemorative portrait and organizing a Pantheonization ceremony. The resulting enigmatic canvas–more emblem than portrait–offers new modes of understanding David’s Revolutionary-era project and the contingent nature of artistic production during a turbulent era. Often considered unfinished, this painting’s materiality is reflective of the ceremony to which it is fundamentally linked. This article argues that both the Revolutionary fête and David’s newfound visual language should be understood as modes of ephemeral performance that cast the spectator as a co-maker of meaning, and that the painting does not represent the death of an individual figure but allegorically commemorates the unrealized ceremony. This article thus demonstrates the ways that the Revolution’s contingency manifested itself materially and conceptually in the arts.

Les feux d’artifices des frères Ruggieri à l’intérieur d’un théâtre. L’autonomie de l’éphémère dans le Paris du XVIIIe siècle

Emanuele De Luca — 2025-06-25

The Ruggieris were a family of pyrotechnicians from Bologna, active in Paris throughout the eighteenth century. On the one hand, they were ‘artificiers du roi de France’ and worked for public celebrations (both in the city and at court), on the other hand, they were crucial for the advancement of pyrotechnics across the Enlightenment. Appointed at Comédie-Italienne, they benefitted from a stimulating environment where actors understood the potential of pyrotechnics, allowing the Ruggieris to bring, indoors in a theater, tricks that had been mainly used for outdoor public celebrations (birth of the Dauphin, trade fairs, peace agreements, etc.). This article traces the history of the Ruggieris’ fireworks by reconstructing the innovations that lent sparkle to the art of pyrotechnics in eighteenth-century Paris. It envisions the ways in which the ephemeral celebration of fire was turned into an ephemeral theatrical experience, subject to the logics of spectacle, but also to repetition and profit.

Tra utopia e ricerca del consenso: fuochi e apparati effimeri di epoca napoleonica a Milano tra il 1801 e il 1803

Alessandra Mignatti — 2025-06-25

Public celebrations under Napoleon were political operations of propaganda and diplomacy, aimed to represent power and assert new values. In Milan, public festival also expressed a utopian vision of the city, with ephemeral structures that foreshadowed a new urban layout and a new society. Through critical analysis of archival sources and by examining and comparing different festive events from 1801 and 1803, including fascinating firework displays, this paper explores the vision behind these projects and how they evolved over the years, highlighting their utopian energy. The focus lies on the audience perceptions, along with the symbolism of the celebration. The aim is to understand the performative event in full – not only the desire to create consensus but also its aim to build a new identity. This analysis will allow reflection on the dichotomy between the ephemeral vs. the permanent and the historian’s responsibility to perpetuate the latter through time.

Witnesses of the Past: Costumes as Material Evidence of the Ephemeral Performance

Petra Zeller Dotlačilová — 2025-06-25

This article focuses on the theory and methodology of historical costume research, which starts with the garment in the archive and contains a comparative, collaborative, interdisciplinary and international approach. It includes the study of preserved eighteenth-century stage costumes in the Swedish Royal Armoury (Livrustkammaren), French costume designs, inventories, dance treatises from the period, experimental reconstruction and performance. Since the early Swedish theatre repertoire was based mainly on French plays and operas, and the costumes were heavily inspired by French design, this study can offer insights into the practice on French stages as well, from where little garments have been preserved. The study departing from costume’s materiality can provide insights into the long-lost performances of the past. Some examples will show what we can learn about costumes’ relation to the movement in the past, their relation to the lighting in the historic theatre, and the overall effect on the audience.

Noverre’s lament: inscription, posterity, and the ephemeral art of dance

Olivia Sabee — 2025-06-25

Jean-Georges Noverre defined pantomime ballet, or ballet d’action, as an ephemeral art. In his published writings, Noverre argued that to notate a ballet’s movement was both inadequate – in that the present day’s dance notation could not record a pantomime ballet – and inappropriate – in that the passions, the core of pantomime ballet, could not be recorded as discrete, repeatable units the way steps could have been. At the same time, Noverre was deeply invested in posterity, both his own, and that of pantomime ballet as a form. This essay examines the values of ephemerality and posterity in the writings of Noverre, reconciling the contradictions inherent in these values by considering Noverre’s views on what he considers appropriate means of documentation in view of future readers and dancers.

Ephemerality on the Fringe. Exploring the Venues Hosting Power Quadrilles in Brussels on the Eve of Waterloo and Beyond (1814–1816)

Cornelis Vanistendael — 2025-06-25

After Napoleon’s escape from Elba, the Congress at Vienna stalled and Brussels temporarily became the political and military capital of Europe. The use of ephemerality is well documented for the Congress, much less so for Brussels on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. What eyewitness accounts do agree on for both cities is that everybody went dance mad. In Brussels, the troops of the ninth coalition that were to defeat Napoleon, famously rode ‘dancing into battle’. Politically speaking, there was ample reason to have pomp and circumstance. The House of Orange-Nassau did not have much credit in Brussels and needed to establish itself. As social climbers, they heavy-handedly used ephemeral means of propaganda to support their wobbly throne. This article discusses the ephemeral ballrooms that were constructed for the official celebrations of their restoration monarchy between 1814 and 1816.

Elisabetta Abignente and Laura Di Fiore (eds.), Spies in European Culture. 1815-1914. Representations, Networks, Practices, London, Bloomsbury, 2025, 199 pp., £ 76.50

Nicola De Rosa — 2025-06-25

Il recente volume curato da Elisabetta Abignente e Laura Di Fiore per i tipi di Bloomsbury è il frutto di una ricerca collettiva e internazionale sulla storia e l’immaginario dello spionaggio nell’Europa dell’Ottocento e del primo Novecento.

Dorrit Cohn, Menti trasparenti. Rappresentazioni narrative della vita interiore, a cura e con una Postfazione di Gloria Scarfone, Introduzione di Riccardo Castellana, Roma, Carocci, 2025, pp. 333, € 34,00.

Valentina Vignotto — 2025-06-25

Apparso per la prima volta nel 1978 per i tipi della Princeton University Press con il titolo Transparent Minds. Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, il saggio di Dorrit Cohn (Vienna, 1924 – Durham, nc, 2012), viene finalmente pubblicato, a quasi cinquant’anni di distanza, in una traduzione italiana integrale, grazie al lavoro meticoloso di Gloria Scarfone, che cura l’edizione per Carocci (febbraio 2025).

Leslie Stephen, I romanzi di Benjamin Disraeli. Con testo a fronte, a cura di Daniele Niedda, Roma, Edizioni Croce, 2023, 120, € 20,00.

Riccardo Capoferro — 2025-06-25

Poco nota in Italia, la figura poliedrica di Benjamin Disraeli è degna di attenzione da più punti di vista. Disraeli è stato un politico Tory di grande abilità e in tali vesti anche uno dei grandi architetti dell’impero britannico – fu sua l’idea di incoronare Vittoria Imperatrice delle Indie –, uno dei precursori delle dottrine sioniste, e uno degli autori del connubio (mai del tutto sciolto) tra conservatorismo e impero.

Pasquale Petrucci, Il piacere della lettura. All’ombra di Marcel Proust e di John Ruskin, Bologna, il Mulino, 2024, pp. 352, € 35,00

Caterina Caiola — 2025-06-25

Della necessità di ogni allievo di superare i propri maestri tratta Il piacere della lettura di Pasquale Petrucci, volume dedicato all’indagine e all’approfondimento del rapporto tra due delle personalità artistico-letterarie più rilevanti dell’Europa del XIX secolo, vale a dire Marcel Proust e John Ruskin. Articolato in tre sezioni principali, precedute da un prologo e chiuse da un epilogo, il libro ruota attorno ad alcuni temi centrali che orientano il discorso, funzionali da una parte alla contestualizzazione dell’ambiente artistico-culturale in cui si colloca il lavoro comparatistico, dall’altra alla descrizione della relazione implicitamente dialogica tra i due autori presi in esame.

Paolo Tortonese, L’occhio dell’anima. Storia di una metafora da Platone al Romanticismo, Roma, Mauvais Livres, 2024, 371 pp., € 25,00.

Riccardo Antonangeli — 2025-06-25

Al crocevia tra storia delle idee, estetica e comparatistica letteraria, lo studio di Paolo Tortonese – uscito in francese nel 2006 come L’Oeil de Platon et le regard romantique e recentemente tradotto in italiano da Laura Tortonese – è un’indagine sul legame paradossale e misterioso tra arte e conoscenza, tra realtà sensibile e spirituale, corpo e anima, poesia e filosofia.

Paolo Zanotti, Il Gay. Dove si racconta come è stata inventata l’identità omosessuale, Milano, Ponte delle Grazie, 2024, 330 pp., €22,00.

Domenico Chirico — 2025-06-25

Nel capitolo tredici del suo saggio, in un passaggio che sembra dover solo fare da nesso logico, Paolo Zanotti (2005, 132) scrive «qualcosa di magico e sinistro aleggia sul mondo omosessuale». La frase è gnoseologica e delimitata da due segni di punteggiatura forte. Sembra non accettare repliche o postulati logici che ne possano ulteriormente chiarire il significato. Il lettore è chiamato a compiere uno sforzo interpretativo: se da un lato, infatti, riusciamo a rapportarla al senso generale del capitolo, in cui il critico sta cercando di ricostruire il rapporto tra omosessualità e vampirismo, dall’altro, per chi si è addentrato fino oltre la metà di quest’opera, la frase assume una serie di significati paradigmaticamente più ampi che forse costituiscono il punto di partenza per capire davvero il testo.

Il comico è un prestigiatore. Condizionamenti cognitivi ed effetti umoristici in Laurence Sterne e David Foster Wallace

Roberto Cucurachi — 2025-06-25

The essay aims to examine comedy and its mechanisms through the lenses of Benjamin’s medium theory, considering the cognitive elements involved in the perception of a narrative text and the impact of the structural features of the different devices in the reader’s expectations. If, in fact, the underlying mechanism of comedy relies on a system of expectation both deriving from the real world and from intertextual knowledge, the typographical and publishing habits are a solid base for humorous use. On this theoretical principle it’s possible to study the specific solutions deployed in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and in the works of D. F. Wallace, demonstrating the relationship between the dominance of narrative space inside and around the text and the cognitive response of the reader.

Pasolini al cinema: una mitologia della realtà

Giulia de Lange — 2025-06-25

A reconstruction of the relations between Pier Paolo Pasolini and cinema, considering the chronological convergence with the first approach to Greek drama, aimed at illustrating and explaining the poet-neoregist’s point of view towards the new filmic medium. In particular, the ‘mythical’ definition of reality filmed in the films acts as a guiding thread of the analysis, which, starting from a re-reading of Pasolinian cinema theory, arrives at the three films on myth: Edipo re (1967), Medea (1969), Appunti per un’Orestiade africana (1970). These are three works that more than the whole of Pasolini’s filmography represent the director’s ideology, as well as being three adaptations that explicitly mark the passage, the same one experienced by Pasolini in those years, from literature to cinema.

Immagini, motivi, reperti. Prospettive di iconologia letteraria in Lea Ritter Santini

Chiara Maciocci — 2025-06-25

The aim of this contribution is to account for the specific methodology of literary research used by the well-known Germanist and comparatist Lea Ritter Santini; a methodology characterised by its insertion in the path of the interdisciplinary approach – between the figurative arts and literature – that was opened up in the German context by Aby Warburg and Ernst Robert Curtius, and that in Ritter Santini took on the specific form of a ‘literary iconology’. In trying to paint a theoretical picture of literary iconology, an attempt will also be made to convey the sense of survey and historical reconstruction that her comparative work on texts and images has taken on; finally shedding light on a research whose primary objective was to reconstruct, by inventorying and recording affinities, a common morphology of imagery that was to characterise the European cultural tradition, understood, with Curtius, as continuous and unitary, albeit in the ruptures of its history.

Rappresentare la città degli anni Cinquanta: una questione di stile

Margherita Martinengo — 2025-06-25

The article analyzes the ways in which the city, the center of the dynamics of capitalist and industrialized society, is represented by Calvino in works referable to the project Cronache degli anni Cinquanta. The strategies with which urban space is depicted offer a privileged point of entry to define the style of the production examined; on the one hand, they reflect the still-living attraction toward the composition of works that represent and confront historical-social reality, and on the other hand, they are the result of a new formal research, marked by an awareness of the obsolescence of a certain type of realistic novel.

Volti di Rossana Rossanda. L’‘opera’ inattesa di una “vecchia comunista”

Elisabetta Rea — 2025-06-25

More than four years after Rossana Rossanda’s death, a series of studies and editorial curations have helped restore her multifaceted yet cohesive intellectual profile. This contribution focuses on the two volumes (2023) that collect and present to readers Rossanda’s critical and journalistic writings: Aperte lettere, edited by Francesco de Cristofaro, and Volti di un secolo, edited by Franco Moretti. These writings, drawn from what can be considered the ‘second act’ of Rossanda’s intellectual life – her journalistic career, following her earlier political militancy –, stand as both a testimony to a ‘total work’ and a dizzying journey through the 20th century. They reflect its narratives, suspended between nostalgia and contradictions, its revolutions, as well as the complex configurations that the relationship between intellectuals and politics gave rise to. One might choose to engage with these writings as an anachronistic, ‘unexpected’ reader, appreciating the productive friction with the present.

I classici in partibus infidelium: Carena traduttore tra felicità e peccato (II)

Francesco Padovani — 2025-06-25

Carlo Carena was the translator of Einaudi classical texts for decades. Despite his assertion that the translated work matters more than the translator, his choice of authors to translate (Seneca and Plutarch for classical antiquity, Pascal, Erasmus, La Rochefoucauld for the modern age) outlines the development of a very personal trajectory. In fact, ancient and modern authors are read in the light of a restless Christianity, nourished by the reading of Augustine, Montaigne, and Pascal. This essay investigates the second half of Carena’s production as a translator (1992-2024), highlighting the cultural project that ambitiously integrates the ancient world and the modern world in the name of profound ethical and spiritual values. Through the translation of apophthegmata and sentences, the translator also addresses topics like the soul, human destiny and the pursue for happiness.

All’ombra di Anna. La coscienza arcaica di Elsa Morante

Vanessa Pietrantonio — 2025-06-25

The essay, setting aside the clichés concerning the antinomy between ‘realism’ and ‘unrealism’ (the epicenter of the critical debate that takes place around Italian fiction in the years in which Lies and Sorcery is published), aims, instead, to interweave the two terms, interpreting them in the light of that ‘realism of unreality’ proposed by Bachelard as the privileged axis around which both the dream world and the various forms through which imagination unfolds revolve. In the furrow of such a perspective – corroborated by a systematic reference to contemporary psychoanalysis, especially of French matrix – the analysis is characterized by a capillary scouring of the ‘subsoil’ of dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations that crowd Morante’s text, aimed at extending the recurring modules of the ‘family novel’ toward a field of archetypal images that find in the circularity of an ‘interminable’ mourning – Freud would define it – their origin as well as their provisional end.

Con Felicita ed Emma: echi flaubertiani e figure del fallimento femminile nelle novelle di Tozzi

Valentina Sturli — 2025-06-25

The article examines five novellas by Federigo Tozzi (Una figliola, Una donna, La zitella ghiotta, La vera morte and Donata), analysing the parable of the five female protagonists under the lens of existential failure and the failure of all aspirations. For each of the texts, through precise textual parallelisms, a comparative reading is proposed with two texts by Flaubert, respectively Un Coeur simple and Madame Bovary, to propose the possibility of a Flaubertian hypotext in the construction of some of the pivotal situations and characters of this part of Tozzi’s novelistic work.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow? The Art of the Ephemeral in Eighteenth-Century France

Elisa Cazzato — 2025-06-25

This monographic issue explores the notion of ephemerality in French artistic culture during the long Eighteenth-Century. The volume is highly interdisciplinary, featuring articles from art and theatre history, costume-making, and performance studies, extending the notion of the ephemeral to a wide range of examples. The authors investigate how, in order to exist, ephemerality needs materiality, since any creative process intersects with the material requirement that both artworks and performances need: materials, locations, settings, scripts, costumes, and bodies. This dichotomy enables historians to further analyse the cultural and political meanings of the ephemeral, connecting artworks to social contexts, dance costumes to movements, and public festivals to human reception. Rather than focusing solely on aesthetics, the volume interrogates how the ephemeral was experienced, recorded, and remembered and how its traces persist in artworks, texts, and collective memory. The contributions question the boundary between presence and absence, visibility and oblivion, reflecting on the long-term cultural implications of transience. In seeking what remains of the ephemeral, the volume challenges dominant narratives and reconsiders the politics of cultural memory.