Was Life Better Before The Industrial Revolution?

On this page I was mainly talking about medieval times, which ended around 1500 (give or take a century ). I agree it still takes some time them to enter the industrial age but the thread is about life before the industrial revolution (which to me includes the 'dark ages' )

 

I know.

 

Just to return for a moment to the topic of paintings. I think most of the paintings you are talking about must be from a period after the middle ages, as really there aren't that many depictions of ordinary scenes of life until the renaissance/reformation. It was artists from the Netherlands who were really the pioneers in that type of painting, and they gave us some extremely fine works.

 

No doubt there was some variation and people held slightly different views. In Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales' there are a wide variety of characters taken from different walks of life. No doubt they were willing to poke fun at religion on one level. No doubt they had learned a lot from living their lives. But their whole world view really does centre around the idea of religion,God, his divinely appointed monarch and the feudal lords who owe him fealty The majority of people at that time did think inside that box. And if they deviated from that, they were often well advised to shut up. The rack, the torture chamber, the stake awaited anyone who got too opinionated in the wrong way.

What I'm trying to get at here isn't a critique of religion, but I'm just saying that Christianity was certainly the 'official' view of the day, even if it was often subordinated to other ends or at times ignored. I'm sure people had their own individual views on things even back then, but it was a far narrower culture even for the intelligentsia than ours today.

 

That's why I thought of it while talking to Asmo.

I'm a fan of Rembrandt. Our state museum has a small but nice collection of his work. Of course, Italy also contributed a good bit to that genre.

 

The Italian masters of the renaissance did mainly religious or classically themed paintings as well as portraiture and depictions of battles. Where they show scenes of ordinary life, it's rarely the main theme of the painting but incidental to it.
That's because of the system of patronage under which they worked. They painted either for churches or for nobility, and the taste was for the classical. Really, the whole thing leading up to the high renaissance was about the re-discovery of classical form after the gothic and byzantine influences of the recent past.

The slightly later Flemish and Dutch masters worked in a very different ethos than the wealth and splendour of Italian renaissance courts. Religious subjects were still painted, but increasingly the focus shifted to scenes of everyday life. The reformation played a role in this, and the rise of the Dutch mercantile empire. The tastes of the Dutch merchants were very different from those of the Medici.

I love both the Italian and Dutch masters. If I had to pinpoint the main difference I'd say the Italians were painting an ideal, the Dutch were painting life.

 

I tend to skip over those sections in museums, gravitating instead to scenes from Venice and Tuscany.

Color palates used by the Dutch masters feel warmer and richer to me than any other.

 

It's that 'glazing' technique, where they used transparent oils to build up the colors. It allows light to bounce off the canvas and illuminate the transparent layers, giving the paintings a glowing quality. It must have taken forever to paint, as they had to wait for each successive layer to dry (just enough, on the surface) before they could put on the next layer of color. Oil paint takes months to dry, without modern chemical 'dryers' or 'japan dryer', it's called. It's the slow polymerization of the oils thats allowed those old paintings to last so long. When you add dryers, the oils dry faster but tend to crack and spall much sooner.

Those Dutch masters must have had several paintings in the works at a time, so they would have something to do while the others were drying between layers, lol. Says something about the pace of life back then, me thinks.

 

Myself I find I can appreciate even religious art from the Italian renaissance even if I don't believe in it. In fact some of the greatest works are religious in nature. But there's an element of pure artistry which goes beyond the subject matter. I can't really express my reaction to it or my feelings about it - in one way I find something that almost repels me, then I see some other aspect...
I've been to Florence, and surrounding places, and looked at a lot of art from that period.Florence itself is almost a work of art. I found it almost overwhelming. I got a strong sense of a brief period in history when there was this sudden explosion of culture, art, new ideas, along with the money to pay for it all.

As Italians go my favourites are Botticelli, Raphael and Titian. Three very different artists. And there are many others I like.

Also a long list of Dutch painters.When you say they're warmer, I know what you mean I think. For me the tones suggest a kind of immediacy. And painters like Vermeer were masters of light.

 

Jan Van Eyck is often credited as the first to use oil paint back in the 15th century.

 

The ones we have here are in incredibly good condition.

I never have as much time as I want in a great museum, so I tend to completely skip over those rooms. I could easily spend three or four days just in the main art museum building in Philadelphia, but I never get but one at a time.

Monet and Manet are two more of my favorites; definitely my top two French painters. Similar names, but nearly opposite styles. In many museum collections, my two favorite paintings often turn out to be a Monet and a Manet, for unrelated reasons. For me, nobody touches my emotions in a more powerful, direct, and intimate way than Edouard Manet. Monet just makes me want to stare and forget what time it is.

I like Picasso's early work, before he became famous.

So much great music written there too! I own quite a bit of Italian Baroque.

Too bad that the technology of the day allowed all that creative work to be experienced by so few people.

 

I like Monet and Manet too, along with lots of other art from different periods. I was only focusing on the Italian and Dutch masters because that came up in the discussion.


It's a sad fact that in many past epochs, art and culture were closed to most people and were the preserve of the rich only.

 

Well that just how art and high culture developed. Would it be better if there was no art and culture at all? At least it is all available for everyone now, and even when it is symbolic or idealized we can learn a lot of it about people and life back then. Priceless imo And like with everything, the peasants had their own kind of culture of course.

 

Without rich patrons a great deal of art would never have come into being. And some of it was on view to the public - eg the sculptures of Michaelangelo, many frescos in churches etc.

I suppose my saying it's sad that a lot of art was only for the rich reflects more my own contemporary views of things.

 

I'd like to mention that the architecture of the massive cathedrals in the various countries " over the pond" , as I have seen on PBS over the years, is truly spectacular and features some of the most beautiful artistic renditions ever done by the masters. Those architects, builders and artists are like none that will ever be seen again.

 

I find it odd that in a time when so few people were exposed to the arts, European societies were producing talent on a higher level than anything I see today. Just consider how many great composers Germany and Austria produced in a relatively short period of time. Why can't anybody do that now?

 

Very true. Europe has some beautiful old buildings.

And I fear you're right that we won't see that again. Now it's just crude functionality where buildings are concerned.

 

I wish I could find an easy answer for that, but I don't know. But we don't really know what makes one person a Mozart and another tone deaf and wholly non-musical. I've always thought that in some way artistic or musical genius is something a person is born with. True they have to work hard and develop their technique, but without that spark, no amount of technique alone can produce great art or music.

It's a thing that I've often wondered about - why should there have been so many great artists concentrated into short periods of history. Many historians will cite cultural conditions being right, previous developments in the particular art form etc, and no doubt that's true, but that alone doesn't account for it.

 

Isn't it about time for a conspiracy theorist to give credit to space alien DNA?