Viewpoint - ‘Smasher’ Harper joins the Philistines of history

By Oliver Whitehead

The Harper government’s latest move to deny support to film and television programming that it deems offensive is an assault on the values of civilization.

As such, of course, it is nothing new; the Harper Conservatives have merely taken their modest place in a long but dismal line of authority figures whose fear and suspicion of the power of creativity has stifled the expression of original ideas for centuries.

In Renaissance Florence, ruling families such as the Medici showered wealth on the arts, nurturing an unprecedented flowering of culture enriched by the work of Botticelli, Donatello, Michelangelo and many more. This philanthropy helped to enshrine Florence as a timeless centre of civilization (not to mention paying dividends a thousand times over in tourist revenue.)

But it nearly all came to an end in the 1490s, when for a few years Florence came under the power of the arch-conservative Dominican friar Savonarola.

Savonarola moved the Florentines to frenzies of penitential passion with his sermons. His message was clear: Florence had strayed from the true Christian path by embracing humanism, and no-one was more to blame for this than the artists who had been inspired by their pagan predecessors, the Greeks and Romans, to find beauty in such “offensive” subjects as the nude human body. Such sexually explicit content must not be tolerated. Accordingly, Savonarola arranged a “bonfire of the vanities,” urging citizens to burn their luxuries and works of art. Not only the wealthy but the artists too (Botticelli himself helped to stoke the flames with several paintings) were pressured into proving their piety by making a public display of repudiating the body of art they had helped to build.

Fortunately the labyrinthine politics of the Italian Renaissance put an end to Savonarola, who antagonized Pope Alexander VI (a pontiff who, far from objecting to gratuitous sex, encouraged it in the Vatican) and was tortured and burned shortly thereafter. The culture wars broke out again in the years following the Reformation, with the English puritans playing their heroic part
in the fight against art. One of them, William Prynne, wrote a diatribe against the theatre, the art form through which, if no other, Shakespeare had assured England a founding role in Western civilization.

To Prynne, however, the theatre, including Shakespeare, was “offensive” beyond measure: its list of transgressions included boys dressing up as girls, prostitutes soliciting in theatres and many more. For all of this, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Webster and the rest must be consigned to oblivion.

King Charles I thought differently and condemned Prynne to mutilation by cutting off his ears. But, in contrast to Italy, the arts had a harder time of it in England, and before long Prynne’s allies were gaining power, led by such crusaders as William “Smasher” Dowsing, a member of Cromwell’s army who made a point of destroying art-works in as many churches as he could vandalize.

In France, we see a subtler form of repression: the august Academy, ostensibly founded in order to nurture national art, imposed restrictions which in the end merely succeeded in promoting mediocrity. Its rules for dramatic form were, in fact, so universally revered that riots broke out in the theatre when Victor Hugo wrote a play that dared to violate them.

Right up until the 1870’s the Academy exerted such control over public taste that Claude Monet and his fellow Impressionists were excluded from the Academy’s official exhibitions and hence, effectively, from the market. Edouard Manet, one of the more avant-garde painters of his time, caused special scandal with his “offensive” work Déjeuner sur l’herbe by introducing the sexually explicit subject of a female nude in the real, contemporary setting of a Paris park, rather than in the context of classical myth (which the Academy at least, unlike Savonarola, sanctioned.)

Will governments ever stop suppressing creativity, innovation and originality? Perhaps these forces are and always will be too threatening to those in power. But a look at history makes it quickly clear that such small-mindedness is not in the long-term interest of a nation or the people who live in it.

Oliver Whitehead is an adjunct professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures.

Source: The Western News