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Dance and the Garden: Moving and Static Choreography in Renaissance Europe*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Jennifer Nevile*
Affiliation:
University of New South Wales

Abstract

In the Renaissance there were close similarities between the static choreography of the formal gardens of the nobility and the moving choreographies performed by the members of the court. The principles of order and proportion, the expression of splendour, the geometrical forms, were all fundamental principles of both Renaissance court dance and the formal garden. The patterns in both these art-forms were meant to be viewed from above. This close similarity in design principles between the horticultural and kinetic arts existed right through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and continued into the seventeenth century.

Type
Studies
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1999

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Footnotes

*

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics Colloquium, Sydney, June 1994 and the Annual Conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars, Toronto, May 1995. I would like to express my thanks to my colleague Graham Pont, who first inspired me to look at the formal gardens in Europe.

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