page_title: Royal entry
section_title: Classical influence
hierarchical_section_title: Royal entry / Origins and development / Classical influence
context_page_description: The Royal Entry, also known by various names, including Triumphal Entry, Joyous Entry, consisted of the ceremonies and festivities accompanying a formal entry by a ruler or his representative into a city in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period in Europe. The entry centred on a procession carrying the entering prince into the city, where he was greeted and paid appropriate homage by the civic authorities. A feast and other celebrations would follow.
  The Entry began as a gesture of loyalty and fealty by a city to the ruler, with its origins in the adventus celebrated for Roman emperors, which were formal entries far more frequent than triumphs. The first visit by a new ruler was normally the occasion, or the first visit with a new spouse. For the capital they often merged with the Coronation festivities, and for provincial cities they replaced it, sometimes as part of a Royal Progress, or tour of major cities in a realm.
  From the late Middle Ages entries became the occasion for increasingly lavish displays of pageantry and propaganda.
context_section_description: Educated folk of the Middle Ages had close at hand an example of an allegorical series of entries at a wedding, in the frame story that opens Martianus Capella's encyclopedic introduction to all one needed to know of the arts, On the Wedding of Philology and Mercury and of the Seven Liberal Arts.  With the revival of Classical learning, Italian entries became influenced by literary descriptions of the Roman triumph. Livy's account was supplemented by detailed descriptions in Suetonius and Cassius Dio of Nero's Greek Triumph, and in Josephus of the Triumph of Titus.
  More recherché sources were brought to bear; Aulus Gellius' Noctes Atticae furnished a detail that became part of the conventional symbolism: coronation with seven crowns. Boccaccio's long poem Amorosa visione (1342–43), following the schema of a triumph, offered a parade of famous personages, both historical and legendary, that may have provided a model for Petrarch, who elaborated upon Livy in an account of the triumph of Scipio Africanus and in his poem I Trionfi.  Castruccio Castracani entered Lucca in 1326 riding in a chariot, with prisoners driven before him.  Alfonso V of Aragon entered Naples in 1443 seated on a triumphal car under a baldachin, as is shown by a surviving bas-relief on the earliest, and still perhaps the most beautiful, permanent post-classical Triumphal arch, which he built the same year.  In Italian, specific meanings developed for trionfo as both the whole procession, and a particular car or cart decorated with a display or tableau; although these usages did not spread exactly to other languages, they lie behind terms such as "triumphal entry" and "triumphal procession".
  The emphasis began to shift from the displays as static tableaux that were passed by a procession in festive but normal contemporary dress, to the displays' being incorporated in the procession itself, a feature also of the religious medieval pageant; the tableaux were mounted on carri, the precursors of the float, and were now often accompanied by a costumed throng. The carnival parades of Florence that were refined to a high pitch in the late quattrocento set a high standard; they were not without a propaganda element at times, as in the lavish parades of Carnival 1513, following the not-universally welcomed return of the Medici the previous year; the theme of one pageant, more direct than subtle: The Return of the Golden Age. With the French invasions of Italy from 1494, this form of entry spread north. Cardinal Bibbiena reported in a letter of 1520 that the Duke of Suffolk had sent emissaries to Italy to buy horses and bring back to Henry VIII of England men who knew how to make festal decorations in the latest Italian manner.
  Charles V was indulged in a series of Imperial entrate in Italian cities during the Habsburg consolidation after the Sack of Rome, notably in Genoa, where Charles and his heir Philip made no less than five triumphal entries. Impressive occasions like Charles V's Royal Entry into Messina in 1535 have left few concrete survivals,  but representations were still being painted on Sicilian wedding-carts in the 19th century.
  After Mantegna's great mural of the Triumphs of Caesar rapidly became known throughout Europe in numerous versions in print form, this became the standard source, from which details were frequently borrowed, not least by Habsburg rulers, who especially claimed the Imperial legacy of Rome.  Although Mantegna's elephants were difficult to copy, chained captives, real or acting the part, were not, and elaborate triumphal carts, often pulled by "unicorns" might replace the earlier canopy held over the prince on horseback.  The woodcuts and text of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 were another well-known source, and Petrarch's I Trionfi was printed in many illustrated editions; both were works of mythological allegory, with no obvious political content.  Entries became displays of conspicuous learning, often with lengthy Latin addresses, and the entertainments became infused with matter from the abstruse worlds of Renaissance
caption: Piero della Francesca, 1472, Federico da Montefeltro and his wife in triumphal cars, hers drawn by unicorns.
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