Martin Warnke, The Court Artist. On the Ancestry of the Modern Artist, translated by David McLintock. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Extract

Martin Warnke's book, The Court Artist, first published in German in 1985, could well be subtitled, “How the Bourgeoisie Stole Credit for the Liberation of Art from Craft,” for the author sets out to redress what he sees as an injustice wrought by the middle-class against history. According to Warnke, contrary to common opinion, the origins of the “autonomous consciousness of art and artists” lie not in the world of the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century commune but, rather, in that of the late medieval and early modern court. He suggests that the current misconceptions about the origins of “modern” attitudes towards art and artists derive from late eighteenth-century anti-monarchical sentiments which, building on an enduring middle-class suspicion of courtly culture, condemned that world as corrupt and repressive and therefore antithetical to the emergence of a truly free, creative artist. This position was philosophically reinforced in the nineteenth century by the creation of the concept of a Zeitgeist. It was argued that the emancipation of the artist could not have come from the perverse, retrograde world of the aristocracy but must have arisen from the people who were participating in a Renaissance spirit of optimistic freedom which was reflected in the revival of humanistic forms and the creation of a liberating culture.