Sources of art: the need to impress

Hi David

Your essay emphasizes the role of religion as a source of art, the clergy patronizing artists in order to make the gods more accessible to the public.

You also mention the patronage of the high-ranking as a source, emphasizing their desire to be immortalized as a major motive. I think another very important motive, true for the high-ranking and for the religious clergy, is to impress others. I'd like to expand on that a bit.

Much great art (and I include architecture here) was commissioned in order to impress the viewers with the power, wealth and success of the person or group who owned it. The great cathedrals of Europe are one example. Anybody going through them would realize that they were meant to persuade the visitor that they were, indeed, divinely inspired portals to eternity.

Court art has much the same motivation: to impress with the might of the noble who owns it. Catherine the Great built an enormous palace in Petrograd; it's about 300 feet long. The visitor must walk a path along the entire length of it to get to the main entrance. Clearly, Catherine wanted to be sure that visitors appreciated and were impressed by the size of her palace.

Court art other than architecture does much the same thing - it is grand, opulent, obviously expensive. I think it's interesting that there is also court art that is not especially opulent, but that is forbidden by edict from being owned by the common folk and because of this is as unreachable to them as the intrinsically expensive art is. Yoruba beadwork, said to be the prerogative of the royalty, is a good example of this.

The roots of artistic traditions is a fascinating topic, and I'm very glad that it got introduced in your inaugural essay.

Regards,

Steve Price