Reconceptualising the Sala dei Cavalli: Extending Historic Interpretations through the Viewer's Experience

Abstract

In Italy, there remain centuries-old palazzi and villas with intact interiors. The Sala dei Cavalli in Mantua, now a public museum, is one such room. Yet there is little scholarship in English on its history as being fully-furnished when it was newly completed in 1530, or Italian Renaissance domestic interiors in general. While it is impossible to re-create this room as accurately as it was conceived, this article proposes a re-conceptualisation of the early sixteenth-century Renaissance Italian Sala dei Cavalli, through a combination of the viewer's experience, as mediated through conventional art history and the contemporary conceptual photography of photomedia artist Jo-Anne Duggan. Conventional art historical methods explore: the cultural and social conditions that shaped the room; the architectural theories that reflect the concepts behind its design; the patron and architect; notions behind a room's formal style; and historical material culture relevant to the room. Duggan's photographic images go further by providing a fresh perception of the room's history that challenges scholarly approaches through insights on subjective, sensory, imaginative and time- collapsing concepts. The result for the viewer is a more complex, nuanced knowledge of the Sala dei Cavalli than has been interpreted by previous scholars in the English language, reflecting ways that viewers today engage with the world of historical museums and art.