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Famous Arnold Hauser Quotes

“But the artistic program of the Counter Reformation, the propagation of Catholicism through the medium of art among the braod masses of the population, is frist accomplished by the baroque. It is obvious that what was in the mind of the Council of Trent was not an art which, like mannerism, appealed merely to a thin stratum of intellectuals, but a people's art, such as the baroque in fact became. At the time time of the Council, mannerism was the most widespread and the most live form of art, but it in no way represented the particular direction which was best calculated to solve the artistic problems of the Counter Reformation. The fact that it had to yield to the baroque is to be explained, above all, by its inability to master the ecclesiastical tasks committed to art by the Counter Reformation.”

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Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“They have not the slightest awareness of how restricted their idea of "universality" is and of how few they are thinking when they talk about "everybody" and "anybody". Their universalism is a fellowship of the elite - of the elite as formed by absolutism. There is hardly a rule or a requirement of classicistic aesthetics which is not based on the ideas of this absolutism. The desire is that art should have a unifor character, like the state, should produce the effect of formal perfection, like the movement of a corps, that it should be clear and precise, like a decree, and be governed by absolute rules, like the life of every subject in the state. The artist should be no more left to his own devices than any other citizen; he should rather be guided by the law, by regulations, so as not to go astray in the wilderness of his own imagination.”

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Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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“In a conservative courtly culture an artist of his (Rembrandt's) kind would perhaps never made a name for himself at all, but, once recognized, he would probably have been able to hold his own better than in liberal middle-class Holland, where he was allowed to develop in freedom, but which broke him when he refused to submit any longer. The spiritual existence of the artist is always in danger; neither an authoritarian nor a liberal order of society is entirely free from peril for him; the one gives him less freedom, the other less security. There are artists who feel safe only when they are free, but there are also such as can breathe freely only when they are secure. The seventeenth century was, at any rate, one of the period furthest removed from the ideal of synthesis of freedom and security.”

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Book:The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque
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