The financing of the artistic activity is shaping the forms of the artistic creations. The artist represents in his creations what has been ordered to him by his paying patrons.
2.1. From prehistoric cave art to oil paintings in the Christian cathedrals in 17th, 18th century Europe, the artists have represented visual representations of the beliefs of their societies or to be more accurate, the beliefs that the elites of their societies wanted their societies to honor. The elites or the institutions that they controlled used art creations as means to indocrinate their followers and as such we can assert that art was the advertisement of those times.
2.2. With the advent of the knighthood and the aristocracy in the Middle Ages, art ordering continued to serve as advertisement for the religious creed, religious and temporal power were indeed intertwinned. The contacts of the European aristocracy with foreign lands outside Europe shall shape a new outlook. During their crusades (12th-14th centuries) the European aristocracy discovers luxuries and richnesses absolutely unknown about in Europe, plundering the Muslim lands of the Middle East will introduce in Europe's palaces and castles the first non advertisement creations: silks and porcelain from China, copper wares, carpets and tapestries from the Middle East and so on. That will ultimately help to root firmly the concept of interior decoration in Europe. From these first ventures out of their own lands, the European aristocracy and their merchants developped a real thurst for more foreign adventures and lootings. Borrowing navigation techniques from the arabs and Chinese and adding their own technical improvements adventurous mediterraneans by the second half of the 15thj century will go after new lands to plunder.
2.3. With the advent of capitalism in the 16th , 18th centuries and after, the new rich in Europe and its outgrowth positions aped the aristocracy, building castle after castle that they filled with what had been looted in foreign lands. They also started wanting to differentiate themselves from their peers through purchases of original creations by local craftsmen. Painters were ordered portraits and landscapes, weavers were ordered tapestries, wood crafters were ordered furnitures and so on. In this last period, art shifted resolutely from pure advertisement of religious messages to interior decoration as such. That's also the time when French kings launched the production of luxuries in State Manufactures, as economic answer to British sea dominance and rising economic power. The best craftsmen and artists from Flanders, the Italian cities and Germany will be attracted to France through very favourable policies. State manufacturers plus the best of Europe's craftsmen of the time, that's what in the end will impose French aristocratic culture on all European royal courts and their aristocracies. French talent for devising and producing luxury goods dates from those times it is also the time when Paris established itself as the cultural center of the world.
2.4. Industrialization will expand the market for interior decoration. More and more people get the means to buy artistic creations and art resolutely detaches itself from advertisement to serve more and more exclusively people's interior decoration needs.
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