No one would blame them for producing what they do not like
themselves, any more than one would blame a pill-maker for producing
pills that he would not swallow himself. The pill-maker and the
furniture-maker are both tradesmen producing objects in answer to a
demand. They have no prestige and no conscience is expected of them.
Now in Italy in the fifteenth century this distinction between the
artist and the tradesman did not exist. The painter was a tradesman; he
kept a shop and he had none of that peculiar prestige which he possesses
now. But of the tradesman more was expected than is expected now; for
instance, good workmanship and material were expected of him and also
good design. He did not produce articles merely to sell, whether they
were pictures or wedding-chests or jewelry or pots and pans. He made all
these other things just as he made pictures, with some pleasure and
conscience in his own work; and it was the best craftsman who became a
painter or sculptor, merely because those were the most difficult
crafts. Now it is the gentleman with artistic faculty who becomes a
painter; the poor man, however much of that faculty he possesses,
remains a workman without any artistic prestige and without any
temptation to consider the quality of his work or to take any pleasure
in it. This is a commonplace, no doubt; but it remains a fact, however
often it may have been repeated, and a social fact with a constant evil
effect upon all the arts.
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