Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914
A sweeping, beautifully written history of artistic patronage from 1000 to the present day by a Wolfson Prize-winning historian.‘Marks of Opulence’ is a magisterial survey of European art and artistic patronage from 1000 until the birth of modernism. Tracing the history from the discovery of silver in the Harz mountains, through the catastrophic effects of plague in the 14th-century, to the studied magnificence of papal and royal courts in the 16th- and 17th-centuries, Platt shows how the great and the good have always used art to bolster political power.Arguing that the acquisitive instinct – felt by all of us in different ways – is central to the history of Western art, Platt traces how art began to move out of the palaces of the aristocracy into the homes of merchants, bankers and industrialists. From the mid 19th-century onwards, and in the pre-war Belle Époque in particular, it was the immensely wealthy 'robber barons' and their widows – in London and Paris, in Berlin and Vienna, in Moscow and Barcelona, in Philadelphia and New York – who collected the work of the most innovative artists and broke the hold of the Academies on Western art.Professor Platt's ambitious sweep through a thousand years of artistic endeavour in the West argues throughout that a superfluity of money is the chief driver of high achievement in the arts, and for the transforming power of great riches.Note that it has not been possible to include the same picture content that appeared in the original print version.
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MARKS OF OPULENCE
The Why, When and Where
of Western Art 1000â1900 AD
Colin Platt
With the greater part of rich people, the chief enjoyment of riches consists in the parade of riches, which in their eye is never so complete as when they appear to possess those decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselves.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), Book One, Chapter xi.
Contents
CHAPTER ONE A White Mantle of Churches
CHAPTER TWO Commercial Revolution
CHAPTER THREE Recession and Renaissance
CHAPTER FOUR Expectations Raised and Dashed
CHAPTER FIVE Religious Wars and Catholic Renewal
CHAPTER SIX Markets and Collectors
CHAPTER SEVEN Berniniâs Century
CHAPTER EIGHT Enlightened Absolutism
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features â¦
âThe simple truthâ, wrote Philip Hamerton, âis that capital is the nurse and governess of the arts, not always a very wise or judicious nurse, but an exceedingly powerful one. And in the relation of money to art, the man who has money will rule the man who has art ⦠(for) starving men are weak.â (Thoughts about Art, 1873) Hamerton was a landscape-painter who had studied both in London and in Paris. However, it was chiefly as a critic and as the founding-editor of The Portfolio (1870â94) that he made his contribution to the arts. In 1873, Hamerton had lived through a quarter-century of economic growth: one of the most sustained booms ever recorded. He had seen huge fortunes made, and knew the power of money:
But [he warned] for capital to support the fine arts, it must be abundant â there must be superfluity. The senses will first be gratified to the full before the wants of the intellect awaken. Plenty of good meat and drink is the first desire of the young capitalist; then he must satisfy the ardours of the chase. One or two generations will be happy with these primitive enjoyments of eating and slaying; but a day will come when the descendant and heir of these will awake into life with larger wants. He will take to reading in a book, he will covet the possession of a picture; and unless there are plenty of such men as he in a country, there is but a poor chance there for the fine arts.>1
In mid-Victorian Britain, it was Hamertonâs industrialist contemporaries â many of them the inheritors of successful family businesses â who were the earliest patrons of the Pre-Raphaelites. A generation later, it would be American railroad billionaires and their widows who created the market for French Impressionists. âYouâve got a wonderful house â and another in the countryâ, ran a recent double-spread advertisement in a consumer magazine. âYouâve got a beautiful car â and a luxury four-wheel-drive. Youâve got a gorgeous wife â and she says that she loves you. Isnât it time to spoil yourself?â>2 If one manâs trophy asset is a BeoVision Avant, anotherâs positional good is a Cézanne.
Positional goods are assets, like Cézannes, with a high scarcity value. They appeal especially to super-rich collectors, wanting the reassurance of âthose decisive marks of opulence which nobody can possess but themselvesâ.>3 But for the fine arts to prosper generally and for new works to be commissioned, the overall economy must be healthy: âthere must [in Hamertonâs words] be superfluityâ. âAccept the simplest explanation that fits all the facts at your disposalâ is the principle known as Occamâs Razor. And while economic growth has never been the only condition for investment in the arts, it is (and always has been) the most necessary. Collectors pay high prices when the market is rising; even the best painters need an income to continue. It was Sickert, the English Impressionist, who once told Whistler, âpainting must be for me a profession and not a pastimeâ. And it was Sickertâs contemporary, Stanhope Forbes, who confessed to his mother, just before his fortunes changed: âThe wish to do something that will sell seems to deprive me of all power over brushes and paints.â Forbesâs marine masterpiece, A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach (1885), painted in Newlyn the following year, at last brought him the recognition he had craved.
Before that happened, Forbes had depended on the support of well-off parents. And very few aspiring artists, even today, can succeed without an early helping hand. âPrinces and writersâ, wrote John Capgrave in 1440, âhave always been mutually bound to each other by a special friendship ⦠(for) writers are protected by the favour of princes and the memory of princes endures by the labour of writers.â Capgrave (the scholar) wanted a pension from Duke Humphrey (the prince). So he put Humphrey the question: âWho today would have known of Lucilius [procurator of Sicily and other Roman provinces] if Seneca had not made him famous by his
