How art periods rise and fall
The trope of the rise and fall of civilisations has been around since the first Greek historians put ink to parchment. The idea that Empires conquer, expand, grow decadent, and collapse is embedded in the human psyche. It makes sense to most people that artistic development should follow a similar pattern. But when examined closely, artistic development seems to follow quite a different path. There are times when states emerge with little to no artistic development, and times when art styles flourish in empires that are on the decline. What then accounts for the emergence of different art styles at different times?
Most art histories do not attempt to explain the emergence of different art periods. Instead they only document its examples, or decide that such developments are so complicated that nothing meaningful can be said about them at all. Despite the obvious limitations that come with attempting a comprehensive explanation of the rise and fall of art’s golden ages, it is possible to at least describe some unifying features. Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, Tang China, Heian Japan, Renaissance Italy. These are some of art’s greatest epochs and the story of how they rose and fell is still a mystery to most people.
Perhaps the best way to understand artistic development is as follows; periods of art production occur in high density civilisations where competing city states, or groups of patrons, are able to accumulate wealth. Meaning this process must be unimpeded by war, trade disruption, or the presence of a religious class that forbids artistic production. This formula generally holds true in civilisations that developed artistic golden periods throughout history.
In the cradles of civilisation, beginning around 5000 BC, almost all the settled states developed a relatively high degree of naturalism. Sumer, the Indus Valley, Egypt, the Minoans, the Yellow River, and the Olmecs civilisations, which is seen through their rapid advancements in bronze and stone sculpture. While these figures are not totally naturalistic they are much more lifelike than those of later periods. Around 3000 BC the art styles of all these settlements changed markedly as figures became rigid and standardised, rather than graceful, and poised. Due to a warming climate, and expanding settlements, all states suddenly had to contend with the threat of war.
The Sumerians were invaded by the Akkadians, the Minoans by the Mycenaeans, and the Indus by the Aryans. The Olmecs and the Chinese fought wars amongst themselves. In some cases the invaders copied and revitalised the art of their new subjects, in others it was wiped out. The Egyptians were not conquered but the need to fight foreign wars depleted state wealth and made earlier projects like the Great Pyramids impossible.
The reason that earlier art styles were more refined and naturalistic is that early states were not unified; they were groups of independent city states that competed with each other over trade and art. But with the rise of empires, styles became standardised and guarded under the watchful eye of an elite class of priests.
The natural disasters known as the Bronze Age collapse would wipe out many states in the Fertile Crescent, but artistic refinement would again return during the classical age. The period of classical philosophy was not just experienced by ancient Greece and Rome, it was a global phenomenon. Evidenced by the fact that during the 6th-4th centuries BC the philosophers Plato, Confucius, Zoroaster, Ezekiel, and the Buddha, all walked the earth.
We now know from the Greenland ice cores that the earth’s climate warmed and stabilised considerably during this period. Combined with the spread of Iron Age tools, this likely contributed to the larger population growth in the areas where new philosophical movements took hold.
Real naturalism, however, emerged in one place and one place only, Ancient Greece. The reason for this is likely the unique geographical makeup of the Greek city states. Situated in the Aegean Sea, they had access to trade routes across the Mediterranean. The islands made it difficult for one state to dominate all the others (although they tried), but Greece had the advantage of very high population density without political unification, and so artistic competition was able to flourish.
It is no coincidence that the first classical sculptures appear to us on the Island of Delphi in 525 BC, at the Siphnian Treasury. Delphi was a sacred site for the Greeks. The Oracle at Delphi sat there above a steaming chasm where she would speak the words of Apollo. No one state was allowed political control of the island, and all would make offerings to their own gods. The island of Sifnos, rich with mines of gold and silver, used their wealth to create a set of marble sculptures that men would travel from all corners of the civilised world to see. The sculptures at the treasury would inspire a young Phidias to create his marbles for the Parthenon in Athens. And so these same techniques proliferated across the Greek Kingdoms, and eventually were copied by Rome and Renaissance Italy.
Such a thing could only happen in a system where no one state had political control over all others. Hundreds of years earlier, an Egyptian pharaoh named Akhenaten had tried to change the rigid styles of Egyptian art, creating graceful, and natural sculpture that showed statues standing as real humans rather than abstract symbols. After he created his own religion around the sun god, Ra, he tried to found an entirely new art style. But shortly after his death, the capital was moved back and the ruling priests of Egypt expunged his name from the records. He was thereafter only referred to in documents as ‘the traitor’.
In classical China, a great period of artistic mastery and philosophy was developed under the Zhou dynasty at the same time as classical Greece. A few centuries later China was unified under Qin Shi-Huang where the naturalistic style was fossilised, but it declined under later dynasties. Further innovations in Chinese painting and sculpture occurred during periods where China was split into competing states such as the Five Dynasties Period, and not when it was unified, as this political unity had the effect of stifling innovation.
It is important to note that mere decentralisation of power is not enough to produce artistic development. Other conditions are a dense population that allows for specialisation, and trade networks so that people are actually exposed to outside artistic influence. Among prehistoric peoples and tribal societies there was no development of city states to allow for artistic refinement. In cases like the civilisations of South and Central America, a high level of artistry was achieved, but a combination of repeating natural disasters, and geographic isolation made it impossible to maintain trade routes. A similar situation can be observed in sub-saharan Africa where kingdoms were cut off from each other by deserts and jungles so that large cities were difficult to maintain.
If art is then refined and improved in conditions of trade and competition, what accounts for decline in artistic styles? Based on numerous historical examples, it appears that art styles decline for three main reasons. The first is the rise of a political or religious class that censors art styles or abolishes them entirely. The second is the breakdown of trade and travel routes that may be caused by war or natural disaster, and the third is that artistic techniques simply become outdated as they are replaced. This happened historically with tempera painting, basket weaving, and bronze sculpture.
Under the Romans, Greek art styles spread throughout the empire, but after the Crisis of the Third Century, wars and natural disasters cut off travel routes. So many artworks were destroyed that few artists were left with the knowledge of the classical techniques. Sculptures after this period became far more simplified and abstracted. A reflection of an easternisation of the classical arts that continued with the Byzantine empire.
In the Middle East, the Islamic conquerors of the region first copied Greco-Roman styles and built upon a legacy inherited from Persia. But by the time of the Umayyad Caliphate the religion of Islam was being solidified under a class of religious scholars called the Ulama. In 721 AD, Yazid II commanded the destruction of all representational images in his kingdom, putting an end to millennia of artistic development in Mesopotamia. And while artistic development did occur in architecture and decoration during the golden age, the art of image making was mostly lost to the Middle East.
The tendency of ruling political classes to seek to ban or control art is understandable. By definition, empires have to be unified under a single political system, and to people of the ancient world the entire purpose of art is to aid religious worship, which was taken very seriously.
A similar dynamic of political-religious control over art was a constant struggle in medieval Europe, where the Church repeatedly engaged in iconoclasm, destroying artworks across the continent based on the same scriptural interpretations that inspired Yazid II. But they were never able to permanently implement this censorship, as the Catholic Church was a separate entity from the monarchs that ruled the kingdoms of Europe, and preferred to use art for their own purposes.
The theory of competition driving artistic innovation does need to be modified slightly as there are clearly cases where artistic production improves under unified political systems. This was the case in Ancient Rome, Song China, Chola India, and Japan during the Heian period. The reason may be that because of varying social conditions, competition was not considered a threat to political stability.
In the Roman example, an oligarchic system existed where the ruling families were represented in a senate, and would use spoils from foreign wars to fund vanity projects and compete for cultural prestige. Projects like the Colosseum and the victory arches were created in this way, using wealth obtained from foreign conquests.
In 11th Century China during the Song Dynasty the economy was driven by mercantile trade with ports along the Indian and East African coast. The importance of this trade allowed influence from different regions and competition between these port cities. This had the same effect on Indian art during the Chola dynasty, often considered one of their golden ages, and it is no accident that the great epics of Chinese Buddhism originate from this time.
Japan offers a slightly unusual example, showing an interesting case where a country experienced great artistic development without also seeing an economic boom. In 9th Century Japan, a series of natural disasters made the political situation unstable, and a rebellion in neighbouring China cut off contact between the two states. The weakening of the imperial family in Japan allowed the ascendancy of the Fujiwara clan, a powerful religious group who were able to throne and dethrone emperors at will. This decentralisation of military power occurred alongside artistic competition between the Buddhists and Daoists who had previously been censored by the imperial family.
In both the cases of Song China and Heian Japan, the political decentralisation was ended by military conquests. In China’s case by the Mongols, and in Japan’s by the Samurai. It is therefore not surprising that these artistic golden periods were so uncommon. Even so, in periods of military occupation or plague, techniques were often kept alive by religious institutions in both Asia and Europe, as the religious authority that controlled art production was weakened.
Europe found itself in a similar position of political disunity during the Renaissance, where classical art flourished under the independent city states of Italy. Particularly in newly-founded Florence and independent Venice. The new wealth of these trading states created competition between the ruling Italian families like the Medici who funded both Leonardo Da Vinci and Michaelangelo.
These same classical techniques spread across Northern Europe, but the new sensual art styles experienced a backlash from the Catholic Church which avidly covered genitals with fig leaves in the 16th Century. The adoption of Renaissance styles by Protestant states then forced the Catholic countries to backtrack and develop a more extravagant Baroque style to win back Protestant converts. Soon it was the Protestant’s turn to have a conservative backlash against art, and thousands of statues were destroyed by Puritans from Britain to Germany in the 17th century.
If one side of the Wars of Religion had triumphed in the European continent, it is possible that a religious political class would have destroyed many of the artistic achievements of the Renaissance just as the Caliphs had in the Middle East. Fortunately the wars ended with a compromise at the treaty of Westphalia, allowing competition between the nation states of Europe where none could dominate the continent. The model ultimately led to the flourishing of Enlightenment values and the Industrial Revolution.
In the aftermath of World War 1, political systems were created that fossilized earlier art styles with strict regulation. The Fascist states did this with classical Greco-Roman art, banning modern art that they considered ‘degenerate’, and the Communist states did the same with 19th Century realist painting. Both of these systems fossilised art styles in much the same way that medieval theocracies had done.
One important aspect of this entire thesis is the idea of civilisational decline itself. In our own time, many are concerned about the seeming decline of western art. Modern art appears to function as a form of applied philosophy with little to no evidence of artistic skill. Compared with the art academies of 19th Century Europe, this seems to be a considerable backwards step, and was pointed to as evidence of decline by 20th Century writers like Oswald Spengler.
What then accounts for the supposed decline in western artistic development? One thing to bear in mind is that when the classical composers like Motzart and Beethoven were alive, and Enlightenment painters first showed their works, they were only accessible to the top few percent of the educated aristocrats.
Alongside the development of mass media entertainment, art forms over the 20th century were made to appeal to a much broader audience, who were naturally less educated than the aristocratic elites. This explains what appear to be cultural downgrades in art, music, and literature. As these things are available to nearly 100% of the population today, the most popular songs, books, and artworks will naturally appeal to a much lower common denominator.
The challenge of the modern world then, is in some sense to resist popularisation of artistic mediums, and to revitalise them using our institutions. Unfortunately, contemporary art institutions seem to be doing exactly the opposite.
The ideology presently described as cultural Marxism, or intersectionality, is every bit as censorious as the puritans of the past who engaged in iconoclasm. Interestingly this development has a long history in the art world. Conceptual art as a discipline, inspired by a mixture of German puritanism and French existentialism, started out as a protest movement. Firstly against World War 1 in Switzerland, and then as part of the 1960s protests against the Vietnam War. Conceptual art then took over most of the artistic institutions in the 1980s and has since become fused with a dogma present in almost every western art institution.
Like the puritan groups that came before them, they too turn art galleries into shrines for moral preaching where viewers are shown images of human suffering and encouraged to donate as penance. They also possess marauding gangs of followers that tear down images that offend them, and preach an apocalyptic doctrine that can only be avoided by strict piety. Fortunately at least they are unlikely to succeed in taking over art institutions entirely, but they are doing a great amount of damage in the process.
The idea of competition among art styles is a generally useful way to think of artistic development, although it will always be incomplete. Development in art is inextricably tied to development of technology and religious belief, and rests on cultural conditions so specific that it is impossible to ever construct a comprehensive model. In spite of its limitations however, it is high time that more art historians attempt to explain artistic developments in a comprehensive fashion. As without it our attempts to understand the art of our own time will always be futile.
In future, perhaps with better sources and archaeological methods, we will better understand the conditions under which artistic development occurs. But until then we will have to make do with the history that is left to us, and use it to the best of our ability.