Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang.

g. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

Supplementary Ref

013

Art and Art Patronage

John Lane. Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, Green Books Ltd., 2003 Michael Wood. Art of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post-modernism, Summit Books, 1989

Traditional art patronage is face-to-face, even if sometimes full of conflict (as between Pope Julius II and Michelangelo). In such cases, the patron benefits from direct experience with the artist and from exercising some control over the final product. At the same time, the artist can respond directly to the patron and negotiate the terms of the relationship to his or her own advantage. The church embraces all the arts. In medieval times, it was the prime patron, and our cathedrals and parish churches are an incomparable example of architectural achievement and at the same time a great storehouse of the nations art treasures. Man has always made use of art forms as an expression of his efforts to find religious truth, and indeed almost all European art from the sixth to fourteenth century had a religious content and purpose. Though in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most great architects, sculptors, and painters carried out commissions for religious works from time to time, and biblical subjects continued to be popular for paintings intended for domestic decoration rather than for churches. Seen as a single type of institution, the academy of art has not always served the educational goals we are so familiar with today. For a long time, the education of young people in artistic practice and careers was only a secondary aim of the academy. In the earliest Italian academies of the 16th and 17th centuries, far more important than the training of new artists was the

legitimation of artistic production outside the guilds and the institutionalization of power and authority among different artists in the fine arts. Academies of art contributed to the professionalization of the fine arts in different ways, sometimes supporting the arts in general and contributing to the artistic authority and autonomy of the artists, at other times supporting only a select number of artists and distributing among them social prestige based on dependency on the court. Business companies are not charitable organizations although many of them contribute most generously to individuals charities. These contributions will be purely philanthropic or they will be related directly or indirectly to their own activities. Support for the arts will be inspired by quite different considerations. The ruling motive for business patronage is prestige. The expenditure is regarded as a public relations activity and is designed to impress those whose opinions are important. It is an indisputable fact that many of the greatest works of art could not have come into being and support of the prevailing economic elite; that is to say, the priesthood, royalty and the aristocracy of the society in which it was made. There would have been no cathedral at Amiensi, no Saint Chapelle ii in Paris, no Topkapi Palace iii in Istanbul, no Katsura Imperial Villaiv in Kyoto, no ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Romev, no Taj Mahal vi in Agra, no Ankor Wat vii , no Stourhead in Wilshire without the contribution of powerful, wealthy and influential patrons.

Saving My Revised GRE Issue GRE Issue(Manuscript under Review) Copy Right 2012 by James Jiang. All Rights Reserved Authorized and printed at Toronto, Canada, June 2012

On the other hand, there have come into being countless imaginative arts created by peasants, natives and craftsmen with relatively little and sometimes no expenditure. Simple nomad weaving is one of these. The pathway icons of rural India are another, as is the sand painting of Navajo and the punched decoration on Moroccan leather shoes. In the field of sound there is music: Negro blues or spirituals, work songs, and the vast treasury of folk music of all the nations of the world. The greatest poetry is in the work of the peoplethe Balladsand in music, the exquisite melodies of the Hebredian songs. It would be hard to find a finer poem by any English poet than Sir Patrick Spens. In those inexpensive times, evidence of the instinct to beautify found elegant expression among the common

people when they chose to decorate their homes, their environments and churchesconsider, for example, amongst so much else, the scrolls on a decorative weather vane, the hinges of a church door, the delicate appliqu-work of a coverlet, the sgraffito decoration of a harvest jug, the carving of an angel-head on a village tombstone. Such and similar decorative elements could never been created let alone considered, if expenditure had been restricted to the utilitarian basics. It is simply untrue that it was (and is) only the wealthy who can afford the luxury of aesthetics; the opposite may even be the case. Nowadays the affluent have become dependent on machinery for their needs, whereas the poorer people of the so-called Third World, described as undeveloped, are those who continue to take delight in the enhancement of decoration.

iii iv v 9 vi 5 1654 vii

ii