Key factors of collective consciousness, public festivals experience a new intensity in the first modernity. By suspending daily activities and gestures, they create another world that is transformed by magnificence and is a real “life peroxysm”. The codes, values, fears or joins of a society are not only represented but also intensified, so that the festival can be seen as the place of visibility of a society by excellence, where it stands and represents itself. And it is certainly through the execution of fireworks that this company develops itself in the most spectacular way. As a paradigmatic expression of ephemeral pleasure and waste, fireworks can showcase superfluous or extraordinary events. They are the symbol by excellence of the somptuary expenditure in which the great people acquire a glove and honour, manifest their extraordinary power and superiority. Fireworks are the culmination of festivities, ranging from civil festivals (such as marriages, coursoms or royal and principled entrances), military festivals (such as victories, peace signatures, impeachments, etc.) to religious ceremonies (betatifications or canonisation of saints, local patron saints, etc.). Images and texts describe inlassically the crowd of people in the streets, spanning windows, cracking on the roofs of the city’s homes, or walking from neighbouring regions to see the triomphal lights that often close their greetings. These massive gatherings of people around the fires are part of a kind of exaltation, a contagious euphoria that burns into cries and gestures, a climate of special tension where, as we would like to show, the meridian is confused with effroi, nature with artifice and pleasure with instruction. But this sublime experience of the ephemeral is in turn sublimented by the images and printed texts (relations or festive booklets) that describe them and are responsible for maintaining a lasting memory of them, texts and images which, as will be discussed, are riddled with ideological challenges and harsh visual strategies to represent the ineffable.