The Poverty of the Avant Garde

Abstract

At its best art functions as an adjunct of humanism as a reflection of that attitude which is hospitable to the happy, natural, and wholesome enjoyment of the goods of human life in a refined civilization with the accompanying wisdom, temperance, sanity, and balance which that rightfully entails. This is what it was in Medicean Florence, the Venice of Carpaccio and Bellini, and the Dutch seventeenth century. The implication, of course, is that the artist occupies an assured and reputable social place; that he is himself an ingredient in that civic humanism which furnished the Bargello, the Palazzo Ducale, and the homes of the rich and substantial burghers of Haarlem, Leyden, Utrecht, and Delft. Donatello's statues were commissioned for Florentine decoration and embellishment. Giovanni Bellini was officially Pittore di Stato in Venice. Rembrandt's greatest canvases were commissioned for the town hall, the guild halls, and the poorhouse of his native city. European artistic culture from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries is founded upon the predominance of a commercial aristocracy and the society of wealthy middle-class merchants. Florence, Venice, Amsterdam, and Delft were all thoroughly conservative city-states, holding to old traditions and established laws, with a relatively high degree of stability and peace. Municipal government was oligarchical, run by the wealthy nobility or patrician bourgeoisie, and in this society