Especially in the past, visual arts weren’t only a matter of beauty, they had a didactic function: in the Middle Ages, for instance, famous pictorial works in churches aimed at teaching the tenets of the Gospels to people who were largely illiterate.
Frescoes, portraits and paintings could also work as an instrument of political propaganda: just think of the way Napoleon was portrayed or, even closer to our days, the unrealistic portraits of Mussolini and Hitler – the latter even depicted in a medieval knight armor, grotesque paladin of insanity and evil, by Austrian artist Hubert Lanzinger – made exclusively to deliver a message of power and strength to the masses.
