Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 79

One of the key documents in the history of European art is the petition for the founding of a Royal Academy in France in 1648. The complete text is reproduced in Art in Theory 1648–1815 IB4 (pp. 80–6). However, we have thought it helpful for the purposes of the present anthology to excerpt a short passage which is often overlooked in focussing on the Academy’s attempt to free art from the craft restrictions of the guilds and institute painting as a fully fledged liberal art. This passage contrasts the status of art under the enlightened patronage of Louis XIV to its status under the despotism of the Ottoman Turks. The argument is that highly accomplished portraits of the monarch, capturing not only his physical appearance but also his inner qualities, can, if ‘carried into the further reaches of the world’, aid in the spread of civilization. By the same token, restrictions on the visual arts of the kind found in Islam, are seen to hinder the progress of civilization. The text was translated for Art in Theory by Chris Miller.

[T]hough Your Majesty has distinguished himself by very remarkable actions, his portraits, which are carried into the further reaches of the world, have played a great part in converting to adoration the admiration elicited in foreign minds by his renown….

Yes, painters and sculptors may pride themselves, Sire, that they can not only express the very least lineaments of the face, but that they can go beyond these to inclinations, and exhibit these to the eyes of those who have the least tincture of physiognomy. One might indeed add, that those who laid the foundations of the Ottoman Empire had these arts in such high esteem that they banned them in every land that came under their yoke; either because they deemed men unworthy to enter into competition with their Creator, or because they wished to maintain their subjects in ignorance, lest painting, which is a form of writing, if we are to trust to the interpretation of it given by the Greeks, should enlighten and improve them no less than the characters of printed books or manuscripts.