Arty History
All those years of Art History classes and it takes a travel show about Germany for the lightbulb to come on that the big famous religous paintings from way back when were just early forms of advertising and political lobbying because the church had all the money and were the patrons of the arts of their day.. Had? Has! Funny, I don’t see the church spending too much money on art these days.
The host made a comment about how the church goers would have to look at the horrific images of hell and what happens to sinners to scare them onto the straight and narrow.
It occurs to me that this was like insurance for the church because they knew people wouldn’t be paying attention to what was being said so it had to be laid out graphically in front of them. I don’t mean the illuminations that were there for the illiterate masses to learn the stories…I mean the epic paintings of blood and gore and destruction. The pop-up ads of their day.
Or perhaps Pop-Culture is more what i was trying to say.