The article analyzes set of normative sources which regulated the exercise of the profession of painters and sculptors in Brno in the 18th century (guilds’ statutes, government’s decrees, civic regulations, judicial sources etc.). The study interprets the decline of the artists’ guild organization in Brno in the 1750s in a wider perspective of economic and administrative reforms in the Habsburg monarchy. These reforms were marked by several particular initiatives made by the artist’s corporation in Brno, who came up with own unsuccessful proposals of various changes of the traditional city’s guild system. The study states that such initiatives should not be explained simply as symptoms of a changing urban society in Central Europe during the Enlightenment era, or as a consequence of the dynamics of proto-industrialization and the establishment of new economic as well educational institutions, but also as a result of the new product market and the demand shifted towards less expensive and more fashionable goods.
A number of art historians have noted how in around 1800 the social function of the visual arts in the Czech Lands fundamentally changed and a new ideal of bourgeois vizuality emerged. At the same time, visual culture in the Age of Enlightenment came to be seen as a ‘movement of knowledge’ through different cultural spheres. Reacting to the discussion of Daniela Tinková’s view of the Enlightenment as a process of spreading and democratizing knowledge and extending information networks, the present text develops these ideas and considers other ways in which art in the Czech Lands during the Enlightenment could be conceptualized. We point out that new centres of culture and broad-based social penetration brought not only changes in the way information on the visual arts was disseminated, but a new situation in which the exchange of knowledge across a variety of social and educational fields was no longer restricted to the hitherto clearly defined professions that had established the prevailing terminology and methodology in their own domains. For example, professional artists might now explore all sorts of fields of knowledge, while traditional humanistic art-theoretical discourse began to attract not only dilettante ‘amateurs’ but also a new class of professional art experts and critics with no formal artistic training. and The study of art thus became an independent branch of knowledge, a component of education, a source of cultural and historical memory, and a badge of patriotism and personal identity. A similar shift can be observed in modes of visual perception, which in the Enlightenment were moulded by an endeavour to extend the traditional range of art consumers and recipients by means of aesthetically oriented education and training. There was also a clear attempt to fulfil the ideal of public art based on modern criteria of ‘taste’, aimed at eliminating persisting social barriers and the cultural monopoly of established aristocratic elites and creating a template for a bourgeois visual culture (sensibility, reappraisal of hierarchy of genres, instruction in drawing, growth of graphic art, etc.). This movement of knowledge also made it far easier for recipients to find their bearings in the art market (exhibitions, reviews, advertisements) by providing them with criteria for judging the quality of artworks and, more generally, promoting the visuality of the dawning industrial age (public access to art collections, industrial exhibitions, the first museums, etc.), and hence to a hitherto unseen extent opening up the world of visual art to the wider public.