How Democracy and Liberty Unleash Great Art
WASHINGTON -- One of presidential candidate Ted Cruz's top foreign policy advisors also happens to be a top-notch art historian.
That background has allowed Dr. Victoria Coates to study how democracy and freedom have led to some of the greatest artistic achievements of mankind.
Coates contends as liberty frees up a civilization, it also unleashes the artists in that society to flourish creatively. And the wealth unleashed by flourishing free markets can undergird those artists as they go about creating stunning beauty.
Coates' new book, David's Sling: a History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art, shows how civilizations enjoying liberty will often commemorate their most heroic deeds and citizens through great art.
Coates pointed to Athens' Parthenon, not only a massive and beautiful work of architecture atop the rocky Acropolis, but covered with hundreds of works of art all glorifying the deeds and history of the Greek city-state as it embraced democracy and freedom more than two millennia ago.
"What the Athenians invented on their citadel was a new political system of free, self-governing people," she said. "They called it demokratia."
Coates told CBN News, "It's in front of the Parthenon that Pericles stands up and says 'We are Athens and the reason that we are the greatest city in Greece is we are a democracy.'"
"And he really believed that building this enormous, beautiful, perfect temple with its extraordinary sculpture was a way to celebrate that. And he wanted the message to be here for us, for future generations," she said.
Her book examines how flourishing Florence during the Renaissance could afford to pay for great works of art by the likes of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.
"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," she said.
"David is the kingpin of the book and gives my book its name. From Samuel we know that the shepherd David was so pure in his faith that he could kill the giant Goliath with his slingshot. So we make the sling the metaphor for democracy," the David's Sling author explained.
This massive statue was created when a free Florence was in danger of being taken over once again by the then out-of-power Medici family.
"Very few people know Michelangelo was a committed democrat with a small 'd' and carved this statue very much to be a tribute to the Florentine Republic and very much against the Medici family," Coates stated. "And so what most people don't know is that was its original context. He was a warrior for freedom."
Coates summed up the value of all the art she examines in David's Sling.
"They remain tributes to the free political systems that fostered them and which they were originally designed to honor," she writes.
