As a maritime historian, one of the more striking ideas I’ve come across recently is one put forth by a naval history professor at King’s College in London named Andrew Lambert.He shows that throughout history there’ve been five what he calls “seapower-great powers.”From Athens to Great Britain, along with Carthage, Venice, and the Dutch Republic along the way, the few Great Powers that have drawn their identity from the sea have used art and architecture to shape, portray, and reinforce that identity.
In 1815, British artist J.M.W. Turner painted a picture that came to be known as The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire.It was a work designed in part to remind the English of something particular in the glow of their long-awaited final triumph over Napoleon secured at Waterloo that same year. The French Emperor had often derisively referred to the English as the Carthaginians, with the implication he and France were Rome, ready to consign the country, its shopkeepers, and its navy to the ash heap of history.It didn’t work out that way.
Turner regarded the painting as his masterpiece and at first actually wanted to be buried with it, but then thought better and left it to the British Museum with the stipulation that it always be on display.
It’s still there.It’s still on display as is another Turner maritime piece that we talked about last summer.Back in 1815, it was designed to remind people that the British were on the precipice of a new period in their history. One that, like Carthage, would be based on the sea.
Being a seapower was a conscious choice that smaller power could follow, intertwining its past present and future with life at sea, oceanic commerce, and the connections across the seas that navies—whether Athenian, Dutch or English—made possible.
“They built maritime temples which served as prominent seamarks and navigation beacons,” Lambert writes, and they “embellished their public spaces with the art of seapower – creating distinctive, cultural forms to express their divergent agenda. This consciously crafted identity spread beyond political elites and interested parties: it flowed into popular culture, pottery, coins, graffiti, books and printed images....”
Whether its hanging in our living room or appearing on our coinage, Art has the power to remind us of who we are.Whether we’re a person, a family, or an entire country.
