ABSTRACT
To say that art represents power can mean that art is powerful, that it shows where power lies, or that it serves the powers that be. The relationship between the visual arts and power in all these senses is an old theme in Renaissance studies. Giorgio Vasari, the courtier artist turned art historian, first codified the idea of the Renaissance as a period and a process in his Lives of Italian painters, sculptors, and architects (1550, expanded edition 1568). Vasari’s story of a “rebirth” of ancient art from 1300 to his own time has a political edge as propaganda for his native land and his patrons, the Medici dukes of Tuscany. Jacob Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), the charter text of Renaissance studies, opens with chapters on “the state as a work of art.” For Burckhardt, the art of statecraft and the political uses of art were driving forces of Italian Renaissance culture.
