When we visit art galleries and museums, an often common assumption regarding the works of art we are looking at, is that they were made for, and enjoyed by, a very small percentage of the population from which they came—most specifically, an “elite” or ruling class of people. I want to unpack this assumption, questioning the notion that the art of Western Europe was inherently, and by its very nature, “elitist.”
The Renaissance of Western Europe, which gave birth to such a rich and exceptional visual culture, had relatively humble origins. Its roots lay with the modest profession of the Italian notary, in the hill towns of northern Italy. For the world of late medieval Italy —inspired by Roman law— the notary had the job of drawing up documents for a variety of occasions, pertaining to all imaginable private legal matters (Cohen, 1980 and Martines, 1988).
It was the notary’s professional interest in language that made them some of the very first individuals—outside the walls of the monastery—to take a serious interest in the culture of antiquity; rediscovering in the ancient texts, the worlds of classical Greece and Rome.
This interest within the notarial profession came to ultimately define the mercantile class of people inhabiting northern Italian hill towns—with poets and famous writers like Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio emerging from within this culture. Thus, the origins of the Renaissance were not with the wealthy elite who inhabited the courts of Europe but rather amongst this early form of middle—or as has been termed, “middling”—class.
In fact, central to this mercantile identity, was an utter disdain for the Italian aristocracy. This was in part due to these towns of the later-middle ages, being plagued by hoards of young impulsive ‘alpha-male’ youths, who spent their time feuding with one another and imbuing a culture of violence across the streets of these communities.
By stark contrast, this emerging mercantile class-culture was formed on a sense of collective responsibility, social cohesion and a belief in the virtue of emotional restraint; for which models were seen in classical texts, such as Cicero’s letters and Virgil’s Aeneid (Cohen, 1980 and Martines, 1988).
It is certainly true, that over time the Renaissance did evolve from a mercantile cultural movement, into an identity, appropriated by the wealthy prince and aristocrat. However, it was the princes of Europe who mimicked this mercantile cultural world view—rejecting aspects of the impulsiveness and feuding of their medieval forebears—rather than the other way around.
By the mid-fifteenth century, a number of Renaissance scholars have argued, that something akin to a “consumer culture” of consumption emerged amongst the art-buying wealthy elite who had been busy appropriating this mercantile humanist identity. It is certainly undeniable, that an elite Renaissance culture, with its accompanying market consumption, emerged in fifteenth century Europe, continuing to expand and grow throughout the sixteenth century and creating quite a different Renaissance identity to the one that had been known by Petrarch and Dante (Najemy: 2008).
But the question I am posing here is not, ‘was there an elite culture and art market?’ But rather, were works of art specifically perceived as being by association “inherently” elite?
The Renaissance art biographer Giorgio Vasari, recounting an acclaimed preliminary drawing Leonardo da Vinci produced for a painting called ‘Our Lady with St. Anne and the Infant Christ’ appears to strongly refute this. As Vasari recounts:
‘This work… for two days… attracted to the room where it was exhibited a crowd of men and women, young and old, who flocked there, as if they were attending a great festival, to gaze in amazement at the marvels he [Leonardo] had created (Vasari p.266).’
Vasari’s account makes evident the incredible excitement felt by the local people, at the site of this innovative masterpiece, comparing it to the mood of “attending a great festival.” Vasari was, in this way, indirectly referencing the pivotal role works of art had for the average Renaissance person, in the collective festivity that was part of both the religious and social fabric of the time—something clearly not in any way limited to the world of an elite and wealthy few.
A current ‘in-vogue’ analysis of early-modern historians is to describe the Renaissance as an intellectual movement for which the local illiterate populace were utterly oblivious. In other words, the majority of the population of Europe wasn’t ‘dancing in the streets’, so to speak, every time a classical text was rediscovered or translated (Green, 2012).
However, if it is the vast visual and built culture of the Renaissance that we are talking about; then clearly the festive excitement associated with Leonardo’s preparatory drawing—and many other paintings and architectural wonders—were nothing short of a collective and socially universal cultural experience.
Similar accounts of collective festivity can be cited in Florence, at the time of Dante; with paintings of the Virgin by Giotto’s teacher Cimabue and a famous Madonna by the painter Duccio, in the city of Sienna, arousing a high level of euphoria and festive praise.
Thus, on their own terms, the local illiterate majority clearly had a religious and aesthetic identification with these revolutionary changes in art and culture that were just as real for them, as for the elite prince or humanist scholar.
In truth, it was actually only a very tiny fraction of usually allegorical paintings—for example, Botticelli’s Primavera—that spoke a language that was largely understood exclusively by and for a wealthy few. The overwhelming majority expressed subjects that were both profound in their meaning whilst being ‘banal’ in their comprehensibility to the local populace at large.
We should also be careful of not assuming that the more “natural” a work of art appeared, necessarily, the more accessible it would have been deemed. By the dawn of the seventeenth century, it would prove true to say that the common person was far more at home with the classically idealized depiction of biblical stories and saints’ lives, portrayed by artists like Raphael, than with the rugged and innovative Realism, then being instigated by the painter Caravaggio.
For example, Caravaggio’s quasi-informal treatment of the subject matter in his painting, the Madonna of Loreto—far from causing the common person to feel a greater affinity with the subject, actually drove them to ‘cackle’ with mocking amusement (Fig. 1, Baglione cited in Cavazzini, 2008).
By the later quarter of the sixteenth century, the private ownership of works of art had even become quite common - as Patrizia Cavazzini makes clear in her relatively recent book, Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome - appearing as it did, in the homes of people of every social rank and class within the city (Cavazzini, 2008).
In 1611 a barber, Bernardino Recanti is recorded as owning thirteen paintings of Christ and the twelve Apostles. A baker, Joannes Smit owned five sibyls—the foretellers of the coming of Christ from antiquity and a rather complex choice of subject, which certainly does not fit well with the official historical view associated with a man whose profession was making bread (Cavazzini, 2008).
The ownership of paintings by the common person, is also mentioned almost a century earlier, by the aforementioned art biographer Giorgio Vasari, with his disparaging, yet revealing remark: that every shoemaker around was known to own a Flemish landscape (Cavazzini, 2008).
By the late Eighteenth Century, the effects of the English Grand Tour of the European continent—but most specifically Italy and Rome—appear from a comment made by Horace Walpole, to have become socially universal (Rijser, 2012).
In a similar spirit of disparaging sarcasm to Vasari, Walpole recounted, ‘the taste for virtu (that is, knowledge of the fine arts) has become universal; persons of all ranks and degrees set up for connoisseurs, and even the lowest people tell familiarly of Hannibal Scratchi, Paul Varnish, and Raphael Angelo (Rijser, 2012).’
Behind the flagrantly class based prejudice and ‘send-up’ of artists names—meant to rather pathetically mimic regional British accents by Walpole—one notices some of the most famous of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting: Raphael, Michelangelo, Paolo Veronese, Annibale Carracci, and Andrea Saachi.
These artists appear to have become household names across the British social spectrum. This is all the more astounding, when one considers, that it would be a generation before there were any national galleries or public art museums in Britain.
Within decades of the National Gallery’s opening, it was realized that pollution levels endangered the paintings. However, talks to move the collection were entirely halted when a survey of attendance revealed that a new location would hinder the galleries geographical accessibility to a sizable portion of visitors coming from the laboring classes and trades people of London’s East-end (Bennett, 1995 and Saunders, 2000).
An 1857 Parliamentary Commission even concluded that the survival of the paintings was not the “end purpose of the collection” but rather their immediate accessibility. The commission in effect said: let the paintings deteriorate and perish if it means that all members of society at large can continue to access them (Bennett, 1995 and Saunders, 2000).
Such a popular spirit of aesthetic accessibility would continue to reign supreme throughout the Victorian era, with for example, paintings such as Luke Fields’ large Social Realist work The Widower—showing an emotionally broken widowed husband, with four children to feed—having to be manned by two security guards at the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, preventing the mass of crowds eagerly pressing in from damaging the picture in their enthusiasm (Fig. 2). A similar issue of serious crowd control occurred at the funeral of Frederic Leighton, with security being called in to man his unfinished last picture, Clytie (Trumble, 2007).
However, the Nineteenth century not only produced works of art for all the public; for the first time in history it broadly confronted elite social mores. One would, be hard pressed to find a painting that so directly confronted the marginalization of women in society, like George Frederic Watts’ Found Drowned. Watts’ painfully serene figure of a woman washed up on the banks of the river, took its title from a regular newspaper headline that accounted for the consistent number of girls who found themselves pregnant out of wedlock and in utter desperation, took their lives off one of the bridges of the River Thames (Fig. 3, Paxman, 2011).
Yet by the very end of the Nineteenth century, a very different art world was emerging, in the form of the commercial gallery. It quite rapidly usurped the world of the grand public gallery and art exhibitions.
Where the former had made it an aim to attract the full social fabric of society, the commercial gallery was—and is still located—in the most exclusively elite and wealthy suburbs and streets of our cities. Elitist cultural areas in the Nineteenth Century obviously existed; the birth of the modern auction house in Nineteenth century New York is a good case in point. However, auction houses did not singularly define the contemporary expression of art the way the commercial gallery would.
As John Carey has argued in his book Intellectuals and the Masses, the rise of Modernism could certainly be perceived—from a particular perspective—as promoting a singular branch of aesthetic elitism. That perspective was definitely apparent in the fact that the avant-garde, in both art and literature, came from an almost exclusively educated and middle-class identity (Carey, 1992).
If for example, Dada was opposed to Victorian culture, this was predominantly due to the impulse of the young middle-class, rejecting the world of their parents. Like much of the avant-garde, their aesthetic concerns were greatly contained within the socially narrow confines of bourgeois European identity, rather than broadly addressing the social and cultural fabric of society at large (Strecker, 2012).
Western culture had perhaps, only twice before, come close to the cultural opacity of Cezanne, Picasso, James Joyce and, Virginia Woolf. Mannerism in the sixteenth century and the Rococo in the Eighteenth, had aspects within their aesthetic make up, that limited their cultural function to a more singular and insular identification with the aristocratic elite. Aspects within both Baroque and Neoclassical movements had reacted to this, by reasserting the importance of arts collective communicability.
The commercial gallery then, cemented the notion of an “art-scene” as opposed to a unified collective cultural voice, formerly embodied in annual public exhibitions like the Paris Salon or the Royal Academy Exhibition.
In this new art world, one could be a part of it, or opt out; much like one could be into Punk in the 1980s, or a particular sports code/specific social club. This cultural reality was made evident, in the now ubiquitous question, “are you in to contemporary art.” It would be much harder for someone living a century earlier to have asked such a question, with such a sense of blasé choice—and culturally impossible at the time of the Renaissance.
Post-war state funded art schools have only fostered this “cloistering in” of an insular looking aesthetics—from the uncritically absorbed mantra of the baby-boomer Abstract Expressionists to the post-1960s conceptual art hipsters—it has all become about cultivating an insular culture.
The black irony of the comedian John Waters sums this up well, in an interview he paraphrased the most poignantly anti-cultural endorsement of the present situation with the statement, “You may not like contemporary art, but contemporary art hates you even more (Waters, 2011).”
The vast majority of art critics today are too busy sealing their reputations within this insular scene—penning Pindaresque eulogies to each and every piece of “lower than banal” mediocrity that passes their way.
One can only but hope for a solution to this current culture of elitism, such as the non-careerist’s art critics—the likes of Denis Diderot—to arise and question the “Rococo vapidity” of the present status quo.
Dominique Millar is a professional artist and is currently researching for a PhD into art reform in late sixteenth century Italian art. His work can be seen at www.dominiquemillar.com; email him at [email protected]
Reference List:
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Routledge: 1995).
Carey, John. The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 (Faber and Faber: 1992).
Cavazzini, Patrizzia. Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth Century Rome (Pennsylvannia State University: 2008).
Cohen, Jere. “Rational Capitalism in Renaissance Italy” in American Journal of Sociology Vol.85, No.6, May 1980.
Green, John. “The Renaissance: was it a Thing? – Crash Course World History #22” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vufba_ZcoR0 Retrieved on September 3, 2013.
Martines, Lauro. Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (John Hopkins University Press: 1988).
Najemy, John. A History of Florence: 1200 – 1575 (Wiley-Blackwell: 2008).
Paxman, Jeremy. The Victorians: Their Story in Pictures (DVD) (British Broadcasting Corporation: 2009).
Rijser, David. Raphael’s Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome (Amsterdam University Press: 2012).
Saunders, David. “Pollution and the National Gallery” in The National Gallery Technical Bulletin Vol. 21, 2000.
Strecker, Jacqueline. The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-1937 (Prestel Publishing: 2012).
Trumble, Angus. Love and Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2007).
Vasari, Giorgio (1568), trans. George Bull Lives of the Artists: Volume 1 (Penguin: 2001).
“John Waters on Contemporary Art” http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkgskt_john-waters-on-contemporary-art_creation, Retrieved September 3, 2013.
