Arnold Hauser Quotes

The new Christian ideal of life did not at first alter the outward forms of art, but did alter its social function.

The art of representing the human figure in the ancient world begins and ends with ‘frontality’.

There can be no question that such a gap existed in early Christian art. What has been praised in it as deliberate simplification, masterly concentration or conscious idealizing and intensifying of the actual is in reality often just incapacity and poverty, just a helpless inability to render natural forms correctly, and a primitive bungling of the drawing.<p>This clumsiness and ungainliness of early Christian art is not mastered until after the Edict of Toleration, when it became the official art of state and court, of aristocratic and educated circles.

The end of the Neolithic age betokens almost as universal a re-orientation of life, almost as profound a revolution of economy and society, as its beginning. Then the break was marked by the transition from mere consumption to production, from primitive individualism to co-operation, now it is marked by the beginning of independent trade and handicrafts, the rise of cities and markets, and the agglomeration and differentiation of the population.

At last the bourgeois has a theatre of his own in which he really feels at home. In every little town there is a modest building, and in the big cities those new palaces of stone or marble whose remains still survive.

The unity of the Middle Ages as a historical period is quite artificial. In reality they fall into three entirely distinct cultural periods—the natural economy of the early Middle Ages; the courtly chivalry of the high Middle Ages; and the urban bourgeois culture of the late Middle Ages. At any rate, the divisions between these three epochs go deeper than those which mark the beginning and the end of the Middle Ages as a whole.

Rousseau’s ideas were in the air; he only expressed what many of his contemporaries knew, namely that they were faced with a choice and had to decide either for Voltairianism, with its reasonableness and respectability, or for the surrender of historical traditions and a completely new beginning. There is no personal relationship in the whole history of European culture with more profound symbolic significance than that between Voltaire and Rousseau.

The historical importance of the Carracci is extraordinary; the history of the whole of modern ‘church art’ begins with them.

The late Middle Ages not merely has a successful middle class—it is in fact a middle-class period.

The stereotyped style of cultic representations was well known as early as the Neolithic age, but the stiffly ceremonial forms of courtly art are absolutely new and come into prominence here for the first time in the history of human culture. They reflect the rule of a higher, superindividual social order, of a world which owes its greatness and splendour to the favour of the king. They are anti-individualistic, static and conventional... All the good things and the charms of life are connected, for the privileged members of this society, with their separation from the other classes, and all the maxims which they follow assume more or less the character of rules of decorum and etiquette. This decorum and etiquette, the whole self-stylization of the upper class, demand among other things that one does not allow oneself to be portrayed as one really is, but according to how one must appear to conform with certain hallowed conventions, remote from reality and the present time. Etiquette is the highest law not merely for the ordinary mortal, but also for the king, and in the imagination of this society even the gods accept the forms of courtly ceremonial.

In spite of the growing differences of income, the ever-increasing concentration of capital and the steady increase of the proletariat, in a word, in spite of the growing opposition between classes, there is everywhere a certain social levelling that, at last, puts a definite end to the privileges of birth. This is the last stage of the trend towards the abolition of social distinctions which had been going on since the days of hereditary monarchy and authoritarian priesthood. The decisive step was due to the Sophists, who invented the completely new rationalistic conception of areté,independent of birth and breeding, to which every Greek without exception could attain. The next step in this levelling is taken by the Stoics, who first enunciated standards of human value that are free from all tinge of race and nationality. The Stoics’ freedom from national prejudice merely expressed a state of affairs already achieved in the kingdoms of Alexander’s successors, just as the liberalism of the Sophists is merely a reflection of the social conditions due to the rise of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie of the cities.

If the resistances in one direction are impossible to overcome, then the artist’s invention and powers of expression turn to a goal the way to which is not obstructed, and it is very unusual for him even to be aware of the fact that his achievement is a substitute for the real thing. Even in the most liberal democracy the artist does not move with perfect freedom and unrestraint; even there he is restricted by innumerable considerations foreign to his art. The different measure of freedom may be of the greatest importance for him personally but in principle there is no difference between the dictates of a despot and the conventions of even the most liberal social order. If force in itself were contrary to the spirit of art, perfect works of art could arise only in a state of complete anarchy. But in reality the presuppositions on which the aesthetic quality of a work depends lie beyond the alternative presented by political freedom and compulsion.

The ‘spirituality’ of this art, in which scholars have tried to find all the essentials of the later medieval conceptions of art, is in reality only the same indefinite sort of spirituality which inspired the last centuries of paganism.

The partial absorption of art by domestic industry and by domestic female crafts, that is to say, the fusion of artistic activity with other activities, is a retrogression from the standpoint of the division of labour and professional differentiation.

The structure of the nobility is changed along with that of the state, but it preserves its continuity with the past intact. Knighthood, on the other hand, as the exclusive warrior-class and upholder of secular culture, decays completely. The process is protracted and the ideals of chivalry do not lose their alluring splendour from one day to the next—least of all in the eyes of the middle classes. But behind the scenes everything is set for the fall of Don Quixote.—The decline of the knighthood has been connected with the new methods of warfare introduced in the late Middle Ages, and it has been pointed out that the heavily accoutred cavalry suffered a severe reverse whenever they met the infantry of the new mercenary armies or the foot of the peasant brigades.