Art is in a state of crisis at the present, as it has been for many decades. We thought that for this, our first special section devoted to art, we would ask a number of distinguished art critics and historians to look back over the centuries to target the manifold sources of this crisis. We asked them to attempt to project into the future, even as we stand poised on the threshold of the third millennium, to see where the creative world could be headed.
It seemed particularly appropriate, then, to open our special section, Art in Crisis, with an essay by Umberto Eco on the theory of art in the Middle Ages. Art, Eco tells us, belonged to the realm of making, not doing. Art was viewed as construction, not as the expression of an individual's feelings. A theory of art was a theory of craftsmanship.
The maker, the creator, was an artifex. The word applied as well to a blacksmith or a sheepshearer as to a poet or a painter. For the Medievals, art at best produced beautiful images—images that existed only by virtue of the material that sustained them, whereas natural objects existed by virtue of divine participation. The governing word here is divine.
Life in the Middle Ages may have been short, brutal, and nasty for blacksmith and artist and sheepshearer alike, but there was no conflict as to what the artifex's role was in society. This was a time when there were no disaffected or alienated artists.
The first intimations of a divergence between the world of the arts and society at large can perhaps be traced to the early years of the fifteenth century. In 1400, artists were still regarded as lowly artisans, the servants of God and of rich patrons. It was only a few decades later, as Glenn Andres and Richard Turner remind us in their essay on the era of Cosimo de' Medici, that men began to entertain new ideas about the intellectual and social position of the artist. This was a time of the emergence of the mighty mercantile prince-patrons who virtually consumed artists, architects, and sculptors in the building and decorating of palaces, chapels, churches, and public buildings. Art no longer meant variations on traditional religious themes created uniquely to celebrate the glory of God.
The decades after 1430 witnessed a flowering of several artistic styles. There was an earthy religious art, unabashedly secular in tone despite its subject matter. There was an intensely expressionistic art. Religious paintings more and more reflected familiar contemporary life in all its warm intimacy. Two men of the cloth, Fra Angelico and Fra Lippo Lippi, emerged from the world of the Gothic aesthetic in Florence. Fra Angelico gloried in the fresh, cool colors that eventually would culminate in the work of Piero della Francesca and the Venetians. Fra Lippo Lippi infused the divine light in his paintings with that of the Tuscan countryside. The secular invaded religious art at every turn. Attitudes toward art and artists were changing dramatically.
Cosimo died in 1464. His son Lorenzo, soon to be known to history as "Il Magnifico," was still in his teens when three years later he assumed the leadership of Florence. Lorenzo de' Medici was a new man, and in the arts it was time for that new man. The Renaissance—with Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo—was waiting in the wings. The artist as we know him was about to make
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