The Art of the Renaissance and the Market for Popular Culture

        If you travel to Italy, you think about two things: The Roman Empire and Renaissance
 Art.  It's well travelled territory, before leaving I read two books that were just about the history of tourism in Italy.  You learn in the histories of tourism that the cities and country side of Italy are the original "object" of Anglo-American tourism.  Tourists, similar to those of today, have been visiting Italy and seeing the same things for more then 400 hundred years. 

         To travel to cities like Venice and Florence is to see places that exist wholly and entirely on their past.  In the case of Florence, that is a past that is almost entirely predicated on the collection of artworks from the 14th through 17th century.

        To criticize what these cities have become (ex. "Florence is a tourist trap.") is to miss the importance of how they became what they became.  You take a Florence for example- hell- take all of Tuscany.  This is an area that has contributed little to art or history in the last, um, four hundred years, and yet they literally support themselves on the money of people who come to their city to see art from hundreds of years ago.  People who come from all over the world, and have come, to the same places, for hundreds of years.  That's worth analyzing.  How did that happen?

       Any discussion of art in the Renaissance involves three types of art: architecture, sculpture and painting..  That's the first key fact for any substantive discussion of the Renaissance:  You're talking about architecture, sculpture and painting, specifically.  Any larger points must be linked to one of those forms of art.  Therefore while it is appropriate to discuss other issues ("the role of patronage in renaissance painting") in the context of specific art forms, you can't just talk about "the Renaissance" without discussing specific artistic forms.

      That's something that is true today, and it points to the dangers of generalization in the discussion of any artistic field in any era.

      The second fact is to be cognizant of the human environment under which the works of the Renaissance occurred.  After all, there is no Sistine Chapel in London.  You can't see Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" at the Louvre.  You can't remove the work of art from the physical location in which it appears. True a thousand years ago, true today.  In fact, one could argue that endure for art work x to endure, it's availability is key.  The inability for aficionados to seek out that work of art in generations subsequent might as well be a death blow for it's endurance.
    
      The third fact is to realize what it was about the Renaissance that was "different" from the works of art before and after.  Here, it is to ask the specific question about works of architecture, sculpture and painting which were pretty much made entirely within the greater Tuscan region in the 13th, 14th and 15th century.

  With Renaissance art, it was the combination of advances made by various earlier European renassances (to use Erwin Panofsky's term) which manifested themselves in the form of 'gothic' architecture in Northern Europe, with the incorporation of Christianized Classicism.  Painters in the Tuscan region were influenced by the high Gothic style via architecture.  They were in contact with the Roman tradition via their physical location- i.e. they could go see Roman ruins wherever.  And finally, they had a market, with cities and the church vying for their work first, and wealthy merchants responding to the challenge later.

  This market was then duplicated in other European capitals, and the artists in those places responded to the success of the of the Renaissance artists.

  And this all happened well before the printing press, let alone the internet.  And these are works of art which have a considerable market down to the present.  I think the story of Renaissance arts points to the absolute importance of the role of physical place in the production of any kind of art whether it be considered "serious" or "popular."

  Furthermore, the dissemination of succesful modes of artistic production is also "place-to-place" in that it moves from one center to another center, rather then just sort of diffusing outward into the ether.  That's an important lesson for internet era musicians or filmmakers.  Perhaps it may looks like art is increasingly separated from physical place, but that is an illusion generated by the advances in technology.  Underneath that appearance, the importance of place, of location, of geography- maintains.