I was reading Paul Johnson's Art: A New History the other day and was struck by something he mentioned regarding the commissioning of a new set of bronze doors for the baptistry of the cathedral in Florence in 1401. There was a competition for the job and it was won by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378 - 1455). He eventually did two sets of doors which took him fifty years! You have to understand that these were very large doors displaying scenes from the Bible in low-relief sculpture:
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I mention this to point to the enormous significance the arts had in early modern European society. There is a musical connection, not to the bronze doors, but to the construction of the new cathedral itself, consecrated on March 25, 1436. The music commissioned for this event was Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume Dufay. I can't track down what he was paid for this work, but I'm pretty sure that it was not anywhere near the cost of the cathedral, or even one of the doors. Dufay did pretty well, but music never paid as well as architecture or sculpture.
Still, it is sobering to realize that our ancestors placed such enormous value on both religion and the arts that ornamented and illustrated religion that they would compare with an item as huge as the budget for defence of the state. The arts in contemporary society are of very tiny significance in comparison. Even if you are Billie Eilish or Adele.
Here is Dufay's Nuper rosarum flores:
I don't understand this yearning for a mythic past where people took the arts more seriously. The splendor of European art, architecture, painting and music was an elite spectacle unavailable to people who were not aristocrats. The percentage of the population reading poetry, looking at masterpieces in museums, and listening to (and playing) classical music is vastly larger now than it was at any time during this past "golden age." And that is before we get into more contemporary art forms like movies, TV, graphic novels, video games and so on.
ReplyDeleteI think it is more showing a deep appreciation for the enormous pains artists took in the past to achieve the results they did. The thing with the cathedrals, the other amazing art and architecture and even a lot of the music is that it was meant to be displayed to the ordinary folk--but yes, ultimately for the glorification of the aristocracy.
ReplyDeleteBut I doubt very much that the proportion of the population reading poetry now is higher than, say, a hundred or two hundred years ago. Does anyone read poetry any more? And the proportion of the population that listens to classical music is estimated to be around 3%. Wouldn't it have been much higher in the past? Bach, for example, composed and supervised the music for three churches in Leipzig that presumably were attended by most of the citizens.
I don't know if three percent of people in Europe could read at all in 1401, much less read poetry. Mass literacy is a new phenomenon. And the houses of worship where Bach played weren't full of peasants, they were full of aristocrats and bourgeois merchants. I guess you could split hairs about the definition of "classical" music, but if you are including all the music of substance and intellectual merit, including jazz, film scores etc, there is no comparison at all between the present and the past.
ReplyDeleteThe main thing that turns me away from classical music is not the music. I like a lot of the music! But I just don't see the European aristocracy as particularly romantic or appealing. The monuments they built to themselves don't do much for me aesthetically, either.
I have seen Carl Schachter approvingly echo Heinrich Schenker's belief that works of genius can only come out of aristocracies, and that our (sort of) democratic societies can only produce mediocrity. Yearning for artistic aristocracy is right next door to yearning for aristocracy period.
ReplyDeleteYou have got to stop accusing me of yearning!!
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I was gonna write something about Zwingli and Calvin and iconoclastic movements in the arts scenes ... but I might save that for later. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm not accusing you, it's more of a larger trend in the music departments where I work, the publications that I read, the album covers, the posters, the whole toxic ideology. I know it's unfair to vent in your comments section.
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