Intrusions Against the Baroque Interior

Det Kongelige Akademi holder i foråret 2023 en forelæsningsrække om renæssance, manierisme og barok. Adjunkt Natalie Koerner giver den 7. forelæsning i rækken med titlen "Intrusions Against the Baroque Interior".

This lecture uses a combined social-architectural approach to argue that privacy was materialised, experienced, instrumentalised, and, to some extent, protected before it was conceptualised as a value and a right in the nineteenth century. 

I pursue this argument by investigating two cases of window smashing in the early modern university town of Helmstedt and in architectural sources. I extract architectural evidence from On the Art of Building in Ten Books by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1572) as well as from other architectural treatises of the period and region by Joseph Furttenbach (1591–1667) and Leonhard Christoph Sturm (1669-1719), who cites Nicolaus Goldmann (1611–1665), in order to show how windows and facades of the private house held important regulatory abilities between the house and the neighbourhood, the public and the private, and the open and the closed. These abilities were linked to environmental factors as much as to honour and safety. 

I combine the architectural insights with an in-depth reading of two well-documented but not yet analysed court cases of nocturnal window smashing involving Professor Johann Barthold Niemeyer (1644–1708). This evidence allows us to show how experiences of intrusions via broken windows share qualities with today’s conceptualisation of intrusions of privacy and thus point to the presence of notions of privacy in early modern societies.