“Ephemeral Renaissance. A Multilevel Model of Digital Atlas for Performing Festivals.”

Renaissance festivals are complex historical and social ‘multimedia’ events. The challenge is how to combine social/literary data with visual/performing arts into a coherent analytical framework in order to recreate an articulated composition of these ephemeral spectacles, their symbolic value, and effect. This paper presents an update on the outcome of a newly-designed dynamic platform – a digital Atlas on festival in the Renaissance Italy, alias FRIDA. Organized into three full interactive sections, this Atlas aims to generate: 1) a series of geographic data reconstructing a virtual rendition of festivals’ itineraries (‘Event’); 2) visual analyses of the social networks of the historical agents who animated festivals (‘Backstage’); and 3) an interdisciplinary library of textual/visual/musical works recomposing these events (‘Memory’). By combining spatial, relational, and temporal data, this Atlas will enable to recapture in multimedia settings the circulation of people, models, and artefacts that composed the complex universe of festivals.