Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1985. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 348-379). / This dissertation concerns the extensive building program which Henri IV undertook in Paris from 1600 to 1610. Focusing on the place Royale (now called the place des Vosges) , the place Dauphine, rue Dauphine, and Pont Neuf, and the hôpital St. Louis, this study holds that Henri IV's urbanism was guided by an emerging view of the city as a unified entity. Drawing from newly uncovered notarial documents, the dissertation examines the form and the function of the monuments and argues that each building was embedded in its physical context, engaged in the life of the city, and informed by an underlying urban vision . First, the buildings were not autonomous geometric forms dropped into open spaces; they were conceived as parts of a larger urban composition, structured by axes which linked the monuments to major roads without however diminishing the quality of spatial enclosure which the designs also promoted. Second, the squares and the hospital were each charged with a program anchored in the commercial, social, and sanitary life of the city. The place Royale and place Dauphine were planned as residential and commercial squares to stimulate trade and manufacturing while the hôpital St. Louis was intended to minimize the convulsive effect of the plague on the city. Finally, the dissertation argues that the royal building program was not merely a sequence of unrelated improvements and isolated adornments, but rather a series of coordinated efforts to impose a unifying order on the city. The monuments were assigned functions which addressed the city as a whole . They were physically linked to more distant parts of the city, and they were composed to create grand urban vistas. The urban fabric was no long e r conceived as an accumulation of fragments contained within the walls; it was understood as a cohesive network with its own internal order. / by Hilary Meg Ballon. / Ph.D.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The present essay deals with the Charles Le Brun's theory of the representation of passions. It summarizes the most important publications about Le Brun's lecture on expression ("Conference generale et particuliere) and mention some neglected aspects, for example its relation to the tradition of ancient rhetoric or period manners. The lecture is set in the context of period quarrels (quarrel about the importance of drawing or colour, quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns) and a special attention is given to the sources wich were used by Le Brun to develop his theory (philosophical, rhetorical, medical and physiognomical studies, book of manners) It follows from the study of literature and sources that the Le Brun's theory was innovative in many aspects but still depended on the older tradition, probably more than was recently supposed.

No description available.

This thesis explores the first English translations of Molière's works published between 1663 and 1732 by writers that include John Dryden, Edward Ravenscroft, Aphra Behn, and Henry Fielding. It challenges the idea that the translators straightforwardly plagiarized the French plays and instead argues that their work demonstrates engagement with the dramatic impact and satirical drive of the source texts. It asks how far the process of anglicization required careful examination of the plays' initial French national context. The first part of the thesis presents three fundamental angles of interrogation addressing how the translators dealt with the form of the dramatic works according to theoretical and practical principles. It considers translators' responses to conventions of plot formation, translation methods, and prosody. The chapters are underpinned by comparative assessments of contextual theoretical writings in French and English in order to examine the plays in the light of the evolving theatrical tastes and literary practices occasioned by cross-Channel communication. The second part takes an alternative approach to assessing the earliest translations of Molière. Its four chapters are based on close analysis of culturally significant lexical terms which evoke comically contentious social themes. This enquiry charts the changes in translation-choices over the decades covered by the thesis corpus. The themes addressed, however, were relevant throughout the period in both France and England: marital discord caused by anxieties surrounding cuckoldry and gallantry, the problems of zealous religious ostentation, the dubious professional standing of medical practitioners, and bourgeois social pretension. This part assesses how the key terms in translation were chosen to resonate within the new semantic fields in English, a target language which was coming into close contact with new French terms.

This project is a transcription and translation of a letter from the Japonica Sinica 85 collection of the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu. It was written by an unidentified Jesuit who recounts three years of history (1655-1657) of the Tonkin kingdom (in present-day Vietnam), replacing the annual letters from those years that had been lost at sea. The account includes descriptions of their wars with Cochinchina, the succession of the kingship, and the funeral and burial of the Lê-Triṇh lord, Triṇh Tráng.

L’ensemble constitué par les céramiques en terre cuite à glaçure plombifère, auparavant regroupées sous le terme de « céramiques de Bernard Palissy » puis « suites de Palissy » ou « atelier d’Avon », n’a plus aujourd’hui d’attache géographique concrète ni d’histoire attestée. Il est en effet avéré que la légende et le mythe ont, depuis le début du XIXe siècle, toujours largement dominé. En dépit de leur présence importante au sein des collections publiques françaises et étrangères, la fragilité des connaissances actuelles sur ces pièces rend aujourd’hui leur étude approfondie indispensable. De nature fondamentalement transdisciplinaire, ce travail de thèse explore d’une part leur matérialité, avec la création d’un corpus des œuvres conservées en collections publiques (plats rustiques, pièces de vaisselle moulées, statuettes) et la prise en compte des analyses physico-chimiques ; d’autre part, par un travail minutieux de dépouillement d’archives et de recensement du matériel archéologique, il permet de mieux les situer dans une époque et dans un contexte de production parisien. Ces travaux reviennent ainsi sur l’histoire oubliée de ces objets en enquêtant sur leur origine, leur destination initiale et leur parcours depuis les collections du XVIIe siècle jusqu’aux celles des érudits du XIXe siècle qui les léguèrent en tant qu’objets d’art aux grands musées nationaux. / This PhD thesis studies the whole terracotta lead-glazed ceramics produced in France at the end of the XVIth century and the beginning of the XVIIth century usually attributed to Bernard Palissy himself or his unidentified followers under the name Palissy ware ceramics. Legend and myth are widespread since the beginning of the XIXth century. As a consequence the study of these pieces which have proved to be very numerous in the French and foreign public collections has become essential. This transdisciplinary research examines on the one hand their materiality putting together a body of work (rustique figulines, relief-moulded dishes, statuettes) and taking into account physico-chemical analyses. On the other hand, it helps to place these ceramics in their Parisian historical production context by a meticulous study of archives and archaeological material. The research investigates their origin, their initial destination from the XVIIth century to the collections of French scholars or national museums' collections in the XIXth century.

Introduced in French Salons as a parlor game, the literary portrait appears in mid Seventeenth-Century. It is similar to the literary portraits inserted in Roman à clé but it does not hide the identity of the subject behind a pseudonym, it depicts the individual as is. In a self-portrait subjects look at, observe, evaluate then describe themselves. They offer themselves to the gaze of others and propose a true reading of what they are. The self-portrait attempts to harmonize the appearance and the inner being, to render visible the essence of the person. However, in the Seventeenth Century, people reinvent themselves, and the answer to the question "who am I?" changes under the gaze of a sophisticated society where everyone must play the role assigned by their class and their gender. The nobility and the cultured elite want to be a work of art; the art of pleasing, the art of conversation, the art of story telling, and also the art of knowing others. Everything is hyperbole: nobles are gods and goddesses-when they are not fairies-and life is a vast performance where self-image and representation are tirelessly adjusted because the observer is looking to catch what is behind the façade. At court or in Salons, gazes interpret more than what is on display because they observe signs: body language and facial expressions convey feelings visibly and communicate them better than words. Charles Le Brun, painter of the Court of Louis XIV, stated that the face is not the mirror of the soul but the readable expression of passions. This study examines literary and artistic representations of three representative individuals: Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, and the Cardinal de Retz, with the intention of demonstrating that, for the Seventeenth-Century, the portrait is the place where the conflict between "the inner being" and "appearances", the discomfort of the visible and the veiled, and also the uneasy co-existence of honnêteté and amour-propre, converged.