“FRIDA. A Multilevel Digital Atlas for the Ephemeral Renaissance”

Design humanities projects have recently developed robust methods and effective tools for visual explorations making data accessible and usable to explore and understand the nature of complex issues related to historical phenomena. But what happens when scholars want to restore the materiality of ephemeral historical practices, like performative events or premodern festivals, which present intangibles, yet crucial, aspects of the political, artistic, and social life? This article will present the outcome of a newly-designed dynamic platform – a digital Atlas on festival in the Renaissance Italy, alias FRIDA. Using early modern Venetian festivities from 1450 to 1550 as our primary and initial case study, this digital atlas proposes a new method for combining three different interconnected levels of analysis – ‘Event’, ‘Backstage’, and ‘Memory’ -- and related visual languages -- from GIS cartographic visualizations to social network diagrams and to graphic representations via an experimental multimedia matrix -- that alone would be incapable of reviving the original complexity of festive rituals and understanding principles that framed the creation, perception, and phenological impact of early modern performance in its historical context. This three-level atlas aims to restore the ‘persistence’ and ‘effectiveness’ of the ephemeral beyond a specific moment in time and understand the dynamics with which the memorability of these performative practices is organized and evolves in new durable objects that were once preserved in printed texts and images, paintings, and narrative forms and are now scattered in historical archives.