Making Carolean Theatre Real : Johan Sylvius’s painted performances and their surroundings in the Drottningholm Palace

Abstract: The thesis concerns the artworks by Johan Sylvius in the staircase, upper vestibule, upper north guard room and upper gallery of the Drottningholm Palace, as painted performances. They are studied as performative cultural encounters with a historically situated beholder but will also be regarded in relation to their spatial and artistic surrounding. From the theoretical framework of performativity and reception aesthetics, the results indicate that the images have the potential to inscribe the beholder within certain postulates on power relations and politics of identity, through working with splendour, naturalism, narrative and the function of the rooms they are located in. The results further point to the images’ manners of effecting the beholder on several levels through an employed pluralism and lastly, that they both build upon and re-produce the relation between monarch/nobility, where the former is the sole figure who both grants status and can remove it in an instance.