After Rousseau, the legacy of Herder has been paramount for the character and diffusion of many nationalisms. To Herder is generally attributed the belief in cultural diversity and the salient role of language in defining nations. He is regarded as the father of cultural nationalism, which conceives of national identity as a product of cultural factors, of which language is the most prominent and decisive. . . .

But Herder also recognized the role of other elements of culture. Though he generally gave primacy to language and literature, and thereby encouraged the study of philology, Herder felt that all the arts compose an organic whole which shapes the distinctive identity of the nation. Thus, of music, he wrote:

But music, however rude and simple, speaks to every human heart, and this with the dance constitutes Nature's general festival throughout the earth . . . for the music of a nation, in its most imperfect form and favorite tunes, displays the internal character of a people.

What interests Herder is the collective "personality," in which all cultural expressions play their part. "What nature separated by language, customs, character, let no man artificially join together by chemistry." It is the whole that precedes the parts, the communal character its expressions; and everything that contributes to the distinctive quality of that character repays detailed study, since it affords vital clues to the true nature of a people, more than any military or political history. . . .

It is with the visual arts that I am here concerned. I shall argue that they have played an important role in the development of nationalism, just as the nation and national identity have had a major impact on the development of the visual arts from the mid-eighteenth century, and perhaps earlier; and that this is not only because of the various functions of the visual arts but also because of the special qualities of visual imagery.

Images have always played a decisive role in nationalism. While sounds and words may reflect the subtle changes of human emotions and communal fortunes, paintings and sculptures lend to those emotions and fortunes an immediacy, but also a permanence, that music and literature often lack. I am not denying the power of music to stir collective emotions; the advent of Belgium in a Brussels opera house, and the powerful national emotions evoked by the historical operas of Verdi, Wagner, and Mussorgsky, are all too familiar. . . . But visual imagery, and the uses of paint and marble to capture a single, decisive moment, can endow the national face with a vivid force and enduring power that other arts, existing in and through chronological time, cannot.

How is this power displayed? What are the functions of the visual arts for national communities? And why are artists so often attracted to the national ideal?

Let me start with the national functions of the visual arts, notably painting and sculpture. In the first place, a national art is didactic and emulative. It seeks to depict and teach the public virtues of the commonwealth. It purveys to its audience visions of the good society through the medium of noble and heroic acts. It is imbued with "moral historicism." That is, a national art seeks in the history of the ethnic community those virtues and qualities which it desires to recommend to present generations in the public interest. These are usually civic virtues of order, honesty, courage, magnanimity, moderation and the like. They are portrayed and taught through exempla virtutis, heroic acts in the nation's past that display civic virtues which are held up as worthy of emulation in the present.

Second, a national art is often celebratory. It seeks to extol and magnify the nation and its heroes. The place of the popular visual arts during the great journées and festivals of the French Revolution is well known, as is the role of Jacques-Louis David as chief celebrant. But the visual arts have also been prominent in celebrating the historic exploits surrounding the birth of the nation, from the famous She-wolf of Rome to the series of paintings by John Trumball of the American War of Independence in the Capitol in Washington, or Diego Rivera's series of murals on themes from Mexican history.

Celebration often overlaps with commemoration. Sculpture and architecture play a particularly important part in preserving collective memories of individuals or events of the national past, which as Durkheim had early on noted of totemic religion, was an essential element in collective ritual. The spate of monuments and statue-making in nineteenth-century France, notably of the figure of Marianne, is well known; but other monuments, from the Albert Memorial and Cenotaph in London to the Afrikaner Voortrekker monument in Pretoria and the Yad Vashem monument to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, attest to the supremely commemorative role of architecture and sculpture, often in combination, in capturing the symbolic essence of the nation.

This leads to two more fundamental functions of a national art. The first is crystallization. I mean by this, the ability of the visual arts to render the idea of the nation in a fixed and permanent form, and thereby to endow it with an enduring, monumental quality which it seems to lack in everyday life. Hence the importance of temples, columns, obelisks and the like, as well as great friezes of monumental sculpture. The Pantheon in Paris, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials in Washington, Nelson's Column in London, the millennial column in Budapest, the Valhalla temple at Regensburg, are not only commemorations of specific events or persons; they are attempts to render in stone or marble the grandeur and character of a nation. As such, they are intended to crystallize in the spectator the national ideal, to give it generalized but tangible expression.