RENOVATION. HABSBURG-LORRAINE PALACES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: PRAGUE CASTLE, THE ROYAL PALACE IN BRUSSELS, AND THE PALAZZO PITTI IN FLORENCE

Abstract

This dissertation defines renovation as a historical process of addition, destruction, selection, and preservation that impacted imperial and royal palaces in terms of architecture, collecting, pictorial, sculptural, and interior decoration. This process took shape within the Habsburg-Lorraine administration, a vast bureaucratic apparatus that planned, promoted or hampered different projects. By tracing the renovation of three major Habsburg-Lorraine palaces - Prague Castle, the Royal Palace in Brussels, and the Palazzo Pitti in Florence - between 1750 and 1780, this study identifies the artistic methods and iconographic goals of the renovation process, defines its legal and constitutional constrains in relation to the arts, and contextualizes the process within the wider activity of the administration of the State. As bureaucratic procedures determined the outcome of the process, the archival documentation provides the language and the strategies that different administrators implemented to promote or hinder the renovation of a palace. As an observable phenomenon, the process of renovation emphasizes the centrality of bureaucracies in managing the process itself. Architects, painters, heads of departments, secretaries, clerks, advisers, and the sovereign operated as bureaucrats with different degrees of responsibility and authority. The exchange of ideas and opinions manifested in drawings, reports, dispatches, resolutions, notes, contracts, and account books. Within the larger context of art history, this dissertation offers a model of research that identified the administrative procedures of imperial and royal commissions whether they had been realized or just planned or currently lost. The vast bureaucratic apparatus of the Habsburg-Lorraine administration, like any other bureaucracy throughout the centuries, played a crucial role in defining and determining artistic projects that still constitute a considerable part of the European heritage.