Crowds as a Support for Artistic Representations of Society

We will see, through this short paper, how, most of the time, crowds have not been used in art as a simple decorative element or subject. Indeed, whatever is the period, the place or the culture, representations of crowds were mainly done in a specific objective, sometimes for artistic purposes but not always. If today we do have a specific perspective on past artistic creations; it was a time were what we are considering as artworks were actually objects of the everyday life. In such a context, the message moving along the piece of work was certainly different. In fact, crowds appear to be, in many cases, a support for artistic creations: a mean to convey emotions and feelings and not only the subject or even a simple decorative aspect in a whole work. We will try to focus on some of the most representatives pieces of art that highlight this phenomenon into representations of society and daily life of people. That way, we will show how and why crowds may be a tool that transmit a whole set of information about an event, maybe an epoch.