Did the city-state create great art?

 

Raphael's The School of Athens: the triumph of philosophy. But was it partly the result of Athens being a city-state?

City-states continue to fascinate world history commentators. Two of the most famous cultural cities in history, Athens and Florence, were city-states, and it is tempting to try to ascertain if, and to what extent, their status as independent entities was an influence on their cultural production. Like many tourists, I visit these cities with their stunning artefacts and marvel that a city could produce such art, architecture,  literature – and that’s just the start of it.

Of course, to answer this question turns out to be far more complicated that envisaged. One immediate problem is that of timing. The peak period for the political influence of the city state does not appear to correspond to the peak periods of artistic output. A widespread (although perhaps less fashionable today) view, for example by art historian Sydney Freedberg, is that the peak of the Italian Renaissance, at least for visual art, was the period 1490 – 1510, in Florence, when Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, and others were producing art in Florence. Then Leonardo moved to Milan and thence to Paris, Michelangelo and Raphael to Rome, and Florence fell under the control of the Medici (not for the first time) in 1512 – it’s tempting to associate the end of any kind of collective decision-making with a decline in art. But reading about the Italian city-states more widely suggests that their peak for collective decision-making was well before 1500. According to Daniel Waley (The Italian City-Republics, 1969), the city-states achieved political independence as early as the eleventh century, and were largely taken over by individual tyrants from the 14th century onwards.

Similarly, the “golden age” of Athens, the fifth century BCE, the age of Pericles, the Parthenon, and Socrates, was thought to have coincided with the peak of the Polis, the Greek city-state. But, it turns out, from a recent book by John Ma, Polis (2024) that the fifth century was a low-point in terms of government; the most successful period for the Greek city-state was the Hellenistic period, when Athens had lost all its political power and was under the control of the Roman Empire, yet retained its stability, prosperity, and collective government.

So what is the relationship between art and political systems? Is it simply facile to think that great art was created in periods of some kind of representative government, or should we recognize that the relationship is more subtle, that there might be hundreds of years between the two peaks, yet in some undefinable way, the effect of collective government lingered on and bore fruit in the creative output? I’m not the first to ask these questions, but I will certainly be thinking again about them when I next visit Florence.