Episode 43: Joan talks about Medieval art & the political role of art

Joan, a lawyer in NYC, got her undergraduate degree in art history, and here in the talkPOPc tent discusses the political role of art, comparing today's world to the art of the medieval world. Using Bronzino's chapel of Eleonora in the Palazzo Vecchio, Joan refers to the sociology of that world and how art reinforced power relations. Bronzino, who came right after Michelangelo, was like other artists of the time: driven by the politics, literature, philosophy, and religion.  Art is just part of a larger system. Joan, who dislikes modern non-representative  art but likes graffiti, thinks Medieval art, in her view, "dehumanized" the human form in that it wasn't realistic, but this was precisely their intention: the image was about the after-life, not this life. And the emphasis was on that as a way to keep the serfs and impoverished in line - their attention was kept on the afterlife instead of the political problems of this life. Renaissance, with all its sensuousness and body depiction, was then a repudiation of the church's power dominance of the medieval period.

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