long stood as a parable for the remarkable power of combining faith in the divine with human ingenuity. David’s sling was more than a primitive weapon; it was the crucial advantage that enabled the shepherd to win the day.
Through history, various kinds of metaphorical slings have enabled individuals and societies to rise like David above seemingly insurmountable difficulties and reach impressive heights of achievement. One of the more consequential of these innovations was devised on a rocky outcropping on the Greek Peloponnesus some five hundred years after the famous confrontation between David and Goliath, by a group of men who had never heard of either of them. What the Athenians invented on their citadel was a new political system of free, self-governing people. They called it demokratia.
Although hints of political self-determination had appeared in some ancient Mesopotamian city-states, the fact remains that until the end of the sixth century BC in Athens there was no comparable, deliberate effort to institutionalize a democratic government. The Athenians were fully conscious of their system’s novelty and would credit their freedom with empowering their small polis to lead the Greek allies in their triumph over the awesome Persian Empire. This political innovation coincided with the brilliant flowering of creativity known as the golden age of classical Greece, which set enduring standards of cultural excellence. During this period Athens’s greatest statesman, Pericles, commissioned grand monuments for the Acropolis, chief among them the exquisite temple to Athena known as the Parthenon – which remains, even in its ruined condition a timeless symbol of Western democracy.
Over the next two and a half millennia in the West, the ideal of democratic self-governance took on a variety of practical manifestations, from small city-republics to constitutional monarchies. These free societies have set a remarkable pattern of success and influence far beyond what their size or resources might have predicted. Among their accomplishments are a series of artworks that have acquired canonical status in cultural history and today stand as visible testaments to democracy.
This is not to say, of course, that no other form of government can inspire great art; any such notion is quickly dispelled by a stroll through the Pantheon in Rome, built for the emperor Hadrian, or a glance at Las Meninas, painted by Velázquez for King Philip IV of Spain. Indeed, a large proportion of the Western cultural patrimony was commissioned by royalty or clergy. This fact makes it all the more noteworthy that democracies have demonstrated a special capacity to inspire extraordinary works of art. The purpose of this book is to highlight the synergy between liberty and creativity, and so to bring a fresh perspective to both.
David’s Sling is thus a hybrid of political history and art history. It is based as much as possible on primary sources, which have been used to inform creative but plausible reconstructions of how the historical characters might have spoken and interacted. My goal has been to highlight the very human stories behind the selected objects of art in an effort to make them vital and vibrant for a contemporary reader.
The following chapters examine ten works of art and architecture representing democratic societies from ancient Athens to twentieth-century Spain. All of them have in some way transcended their original context to acquire a universal meaning or timeless aesthetic value. But they remain tributes to the free political systems that fostered them and which they were originally designed to honor.
Michelangelo’s David, for example, has come down to us as the quintessential image of male beauty, and as the greatest statue ever made by the greatest sculptor who ever lived. The statue has become so intertwined with the legend of Michelangelo that it is generally understood as an autobiographical statement. A great deal of scholarly attention has therefore been lavished on the figure’s oversized right hand, which is read as a sort of signature for the human hand that carved the great block of marble. And so it is, but that is only one piece of a larger puzzle. There is another hand: the left hand holding the sling with which David outmatched his foe. For Michelangelo and his contemporaries, David’s use of the sling was analogous to the startling achievements of the Florentine Republic. In just a few hundred years the city had transformed itself from a lackluster little market town into the first great financial hub of Europe – a success that fueled the cultural phenomenon we call the Renaissance, which in turn produced superlative works of art such as the David.
In addition to the Parthenon and the David, this book examines eight other works of art and architecture that would be highlights in any undergraduate art history course. There is the bronze portrait bust that is traditionally believed to capture the stern features of Brutus, founding hero of the Roman Republic. St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice is a splendid jewel adorning a city-republic that built its own solid ground and grew prodigiously wealty through maritime trade. Rembrandt’s Night Watch honors the citizen militias that proudly defended the liberty of the Dutch Republic, which like Venice reclaimed land from the sea and prospered far beyond its size. In The Last Breath of Marat, Jacques-Louis David memorialized the tragic sacrifice of the revolutionary “Friend of the People” in the turmoil surrounding the first effort to establish a French republic. By salvaging the Elgin Marbles from the decaying Parthenon and putting them on permanent display in London, Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin converted the work of Phidias into a proclamation that the British constitutional monarchy was the worthy heir of democratic Athens. Albert Bierstadt’s Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak conveys the huge potential of a young democracy in the untamed spaces of the New World, even while a brutal civil war threw the whole American project into doubt. Claude Monet offered his Nymphéas (Water Lilies) to the French Third Republic to commemorate its hard-won victory over imperial German aggression. Finally, Picasso’s harrowing Guernica is a denunciation of the existential threats to democracy, such as fascism, that gathered in the twentieth century.
Each of these objects is part of an individual polity’s narrative and gives us a snapshot of a point in its history. Some are prophetic of future greatness, others more retrospective. All provide tangible evidence of history that in some ways is more reliable than texts, offering powerful insight into successive efforts to establish and sustain a democracy. They are not isolated aesthetic objects; part of their value as historical evidence derives from their role in the public life of the communities that produced them.
These are not static objects that come down to us in a pristine state; indeed, only Monet’s Water Lilies cycle is currently displayed as the artist intended. They have all continued to have eventful histories to this day, which is testimony to their powerful sway over the popular imagination. Three of them – David, The Night Watch, and Guernica – were physically attacked in the twentieth century by disturbed individuals who became obssessed with them. Two of them, the Brutus and the horses from St. Mark’s, were forcibly abducted by Napoleon. And the Parthenon was destroyed not by marauding hordes of barbarians in antiquity but in the early modern period by the Venetians and the British who claimed their own democratic roots in ancient Athens.
While these works of art represent vastly different historical circumstances, there are common themes that emerge from their stories: the moral power of a free citizenry, the responsibility of citizens to defend their liberty, the role of the statesman in commissioning works of commemorative art, the benefits of economic competition, and the increasing significance of the independent artist in honoring the polity’s achievements. Moreover, there are connections between the works of art and their creators, just as there are links and echoes from one democracy to another. For example, the Roman republican tradition of portraiture exemplified by the Brutus inspired Rembrandt and was overtly imitated by some of the American founders. Jacques-Louis David felt a personal connection with Michelangelo because he shared the misfortune of facial disfigurement with the sculptor as well as a name with his most famous work. Great statesmen from Pericles to Georges Clemenceau understood the importance of fostering human creativity even in moments of national crisis. A resolutely undemocratic actor who well understood the power of art, Napoleon Bonaparte, appears in six of ten chapters, mostly in the context of a cautionary tale. This history is thus more than a sum of unrelated parts. Together, the stories of these works form a narrative
