Richard I. Cohen, “Introduction,” in Richard I. Cohen, ed., Symposium: Art Patronage and Jewish Culture [=Ars Judaica, vol. 16] (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University, 2020), 1-2 (original) (raw)
Related papers
From maker to patron (and back). On gift exchange in the arts, 2021
In this inaugural lecture, Van den Braber addresses the seemingly simple question of what exactly it is that is exchanged between artists and benefactors. What do makers give their patron - and what does that patron give back to them? Van den Braber sheds light on successful and failed giving relationships in literature, the visual arts and pop music, and argues that these relationships raise important questions. How do we value culture? How much are we prepared to invest in it? How do we legitimize our donations to artists? And: how do artists justify their requests for help? And can patrons have a say in how a work of art looks, sounds or is presented? In the lecture, Van den Braber proposes ten principles for patronage research, reflecting on what patronage is, how patronage works, and through which discourses patronage becomes meaningful.
Le Museon, 2024
This essay is a provisional attempt to address the question of cultural patronage by long-distance merchants in the early modern Armenian diaspora. Why did Armenian merchants choose to patronize great works of cultural production, such as the building or renewal of churches, the establishment of schools or printing presses, and especially the commissioning of printed books? While scholars have recognized that the Armenian mercantile community in the early modern period if not earlier “dedicated a considerable part of its profits to the activities of piety or charity,” no scholarship seems to exist that explains why this was indeed the case. To address this lacuna, this essay proposes a new conceptual model for early modern patronage for cultural production across the Armenian diaspora. Through a close reading of unpublished archival documents such as last wills and testaments, kondaks (bulls or encyclicals), as well as largely untapped epistolary correspondence, published colophons of early modern printed books, funerary inscriptions from Armenian churches and cemeteries in India, as well as an eschatological doctrine elaborated by the medieval Armenian theologian Grigor Tat‘ewats‘i (Gregory of Tat‘ew, 1346-1409), the essay argues that patronage for cultural production was motivated by a variety of incentives ranging from otherworldly concern for the salvation of a patron’s and his relatives’ souls at the Parousia, as an act of charity to aid their confessional nation, to more worldly concerns such as the increasing the “social capital” or prestige power of the patron in the world of trade. Concern for the salvation of the soul through remembering the names of the dead inscribed in colophons (hishatakarans) and flat-surfaced tombstone inscriptions, the essay suggests, was probably among the most important of factors in incentivizing the mysterious act of cultural patronage. I call this model the “salvific economy of cultural patronage” to distinguish it from the more state-centric political economy of cultural patronage.
Perspectives on Philosophy of Management and Business Ethics, 2017
This chapter takes a look at the gift, in which academic interest has recently grown, especially after the release of Benedict XVI's social encyclical Caritas in Veritate. It outlines a genealogy of the gift, briefly presenting the three main stages of its evolution: (1) the ceremonial gift, typical of the ancient world and found in the cultural anthropological approach that the French tradition later adopted (Mauss, Caillé, Hénaff, etc.); (2) the moral gift, which Aristotle first outlined to explain the emergence of the city; and (3) the personal gift, developed in the Middle Ages thanks to Christian Revelation and its corresponding idea of the person.
Models of Gift Giving in the Preaching of Leo the Great
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 2010
Rabbinic literature on almsgiving centers on four themes-anonymous indirect giving, indiscriminate giving, justice for the poor, and the redemptive power of alms-which make up a comprehensive rationale for giving that was picked up by late antique advocates of Christian charity. Using the ninety-seven extant homilies of Leo I, bishop of Rome (440-461), I contrast the evidence for the Greco-Roman and Jewish models of gift-giving in the preaching and charitable activities of western bishops. First, I examine the four themes as they appear in rabbinic literature and in Leo's homilies. Second, I establish why one model of giving remained dominant in Rome in this period: that of redemptive almsgiving (i.e. giving alms in order to attain one's own salvation), a model that had become standard in western Christian texts on almsgiving by the end of the fourth century. 1 The dominance of this model in the West, as evident in the homilies of bishops like Leo the Great, poses a significant challenge to the thesis posed by Patlagean and adopted by Brown, namely, that the rise of the virtue of charitable giving in the fourth and fifth centuries had a significant impact on social and economic relations between rich and poor. Evidence from hagiography, law codes, inscriptions, sermons, and letters presents rather a different picture, one of bishops upholding the status quo while preaching an impossible ideal of justice for the poor. The Derridean concept of the "impossibility of the gift" helps to illuminate how the Greco-Roman patronage model inhibited the emergence of a new way of thinking about and acting towards the poor in these centuries.
Gift exchange and art collecting: Padre Sebastiano Resta's drawing albums
The Art Bulletin, 1997
The fame of great men ought always to be estimated by the means they use to acquire it." So wrote Francois, duc de la Rochefoucauld, in his Reflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1663), reflecting an aristocratic preoccupation with the methods of achieving reputation. His words elucidate why early modern Europeans perceived all transactions, including economic ones, as negotiated through a network of social relations, and thus as expressions of status. Nowhere was this more so than in the elite world of art collecting, where not only the size and quality of the collection but also the methods of its acquisition were understood to embody social rank. The genteel manner of acquiring a collection was through the exchange of gifts with friends and fellowcollectors. Thus, the acquisition of art was not a means to an end but an end in itself. Although a widespread phenomenon throughout the history of art patronage, gift exchange nonetheless has been neglected by art historians.' Scholarly examination of giftgiving economies originates in anthropological literature with Marcel Mauss's justly celebrated book of 1925, Essai sur le don, forme archaique de l'change.2 Under the powerful impact of Mauss's study, not only anthropologists and sociologists but also historians have taken up the theory of the gift. By contrast, art historians working with economic data on patronage and collecting have largely confined their analysis to the statistical. Through examination of gift exchange within art patronage, this paper seeks to move the economics of collecting beyond prices and purchases to a consideration of its social characteristics. The network of human relations through which art is exchanged, in any period, has much to tell about how audiences perceive and receive art objects. Thus, my study of gift giving also reconfigures art historians' understanding of the history of reception, examining issues of audience response by looking through the prism of exchange. Central to my analysis is a case study that epitomizes the social characteristics of gift exchange as an economic system in early modern Europe. Padre Sebastiano Resta, from Milan, but based in Rome between 1665 and his death in 1714, was one of the most discerning and ambitious collectors of artists' drawings in his day, amassing some 3,500 sheets collated into thirty albums ranging from the primi lumi to the late seventeenth century. His work as a collector is commemorated in various portrait drawings by artist friends from his circle of acquaintances. The Artist Carlo Maratta, for example, depicted Resta before an open album as if discussing a drawing with the viewer (Fig. 1).3 He inspired the English architect and agentJohn Talman to describe his work as follows: I have lately seen a collection of Drawings the finest without doubt in Europe, for the method and number of rare designs ... they are books that ought to be in the Q[uee]n's Library.... They were at first collected by the famous Father Resta, a Milanese, of the oratory of Philippo Neri at Rome; a person so well known in Rome, and all over Italy, for his skill in drawings, that it would be needless to say any more of him, than that these collections were made by him. .. 4 Thanks to the rich archival sources concerning the formation of his collection, the case of Resta is particularly informative on his methods of making acquisitions, providing a rare window onto early modern collecting practices. Resta's extensive notes on the drawings in his collection often detail how he acquired individual sheets, and his correspondence with collectors up and down the peninsula includes long discussions of acquisitions. His letters reveal that his sources I would like to thank the following for their contributions to this paper:
The issue of the gift in ancient Christianity needs to be addressed with regard to the subject of a Christian economy. In structural and genealogical terms the gift in Christian theology is concerned with a system of exchange between God and man. Following the creation of the world, and thanks to the pact between God and his chosen people (Old and New Testament), the divine economy – namely the governing rules for the ‘house’ inhabited by divine Persons – became the paradigm of historical evolution (the history of salvation) and therefore, in principle, the model of exchange relations within Christian society. Since the apostolic age every Christian community has claimed to be founded on the charisma – spiritual gift of grace – that God bestowed through his incarnation and resurrection and which he continues to lavish on his believers through the sacraments and signs of his power, miracles. The relations of gift and exchange between God and believers are not only concerned with the ethical-anthropological field (the Christological model of gratuitousness, which counters pagan sacrifice, based on the reciprocity of do ut des) but also the economic sector of the exchange of material goods. Indeed, from the beginning believers formed a religious community within the broader Roman-Imperial society and were therefore subject to twofold conditioning. On one hand, the Christological apparatus powered by pastoral activity fuelled the concept of the gift as gratuitousness so that it became associated with alms and the pardoning of sins. On the other hand, Christians were also subject to the political-social ties of a civilization in which the system of the archaic gift (euergetism, munificence, sacrifice, vengeance) was one of the cornerstones (if not the main foundation) which supported and explained the political-social order and the pivotal system of mythical-ritual representations (religion) which reflected and established it. Ancient and traditional cultures based their identity and oriented their social dynamics and system of exchange towards an ideal of stability, preserving a form of organization whose reference model lay in a mythical past. Through ritual, image and word, cultural memory once again focuses on this past as an interpretive key to the present. Instead, Christianity is based on a mythodynamic principle of the transformation of the world founded on an economic apparatus. As the heir and continuation of Hellenistic Judaism, this new religion develops a theology, a rational discourse on the divine, in which the dynamics of the exchange of goods and the circulation of gifts play an essential role. In this way, Christianity purports to establish an economy of gratuitousness, at the same time justifying it through material expediency and spiritual benefit. The evangelical economy and its successive rereadings by the Fathers of the Church, provide multiple reworkings of the paradox according to which one can only become rich by becoming poor, divesting oneself of the superfluous and donating it gratuitously to those who need it, in keeping with the model of the poor Christ – poor not so much in the sense of being devoid of material goods as in the sense of being incarnated in our flesh with the human condition of need and suffering, from which we are redeemed thanks to the divine gift of his perfection. Because of this, he is seen as the only one who can pardon our sins. The spiritual and material life of the Christian is reflected and explained in this complex interplay of economic metaphors, which are concerned with the semantic fields of commerce, money, market, treasure, gift, pledge and redemption. The words and gestures of the theological economy represent and establish the tie that binds this world to the future kingdom of salvation thanks to an ambiguous system of pledges, gifts and counter-gifts (sacraments, relics, deeds of charity). It is a veritable metonymic chain woven into history, whose fundamental first link is the body of God incarnated. In light of recent sociological thinking, it could be claimed that Christianity purports to test and make explicit all the implicit paradoxes in the system of the gift, or the interest of disinterest. Naturally, in the concrete nature of historical life the interference of the Christological apparatus in the ancient paradigm of reciprocity (archaic gift) led to many different formations of compromise. I intend to examine some examples of this ambiguity both with reference to the conceptual and discursive field (credo, charisma, caritas) and the field of ritual and devotional practices (alms, ecclesiastical euergetism, offerings to saints, miracles and relics, votive offerings) and see how they developed in the centuries of transition between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.