Art and Inequality in the Post-Black Death Century

后黑死世纪的艺术与不平等

• 批准号: EP/X023516/1
• 负责人: Samuel Cohn
• 金额: $ 262.76万
• 依托单位: University of Glasgow
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Research Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=EP%2FX023516%2F1
• 关键词: Art; Inequality; Post; Black; Death

Centring on the long post-Black Death century, c.1348 to 1500, this project will explore two interrelated fields: economic equality and cultural history. The time-frame constitutes the longest period that can be quantified when the gap between rich and poor narrowed, and it poses a paradox. Just when peasants, artisans, and shopkeepers were becoming wealthier absolutely and relative to elites, they were vanishing as patrons of the arts, losing their powers to preserve their individual and family remembrance in parish churches, monasteries, or hospitals. This project will be the first to analyse the impact of economic equality on inequality within the cultural realm for any period. The objects of nonelites' artistic expressions and quest for everlasting memory before neighbours and God have been almost totally lost. However, their commissions remain alive within thousands of testaments, providing details of narrative predelle, chosen saints, and other compositional instructions. Yet scholars have ignored these great repositories of artistic commissions, except in extremely rare instances when the objects survive or an artist is known. From an archival pilot study, the PI calculates that this project would discover and analyse 5,000 or more commissions across large areas of northern and central Italy and with case studies north of the Alps. In addition, this project will investigate synods, decrees, testamentary clauses, and market mechanisms by which church and secular elites banished nonelites from commissioning works to celebrate their remembrance and destroyed their earlier works in ecclesiastical buildings. This project hypothesizes that the rise of peasant and artisan wealth, absolutely and relative to elites, propelled elites to search other arenas to preserve, then extend, their privileges and status in the wake of the Black Death. In turn, these anxieties drove cultural and artistic developments of the Renaissance that became deeply rooted in inequality.

这个项目围绕着黑死病后漫长的世纪，从公元1348年到公元1500年，将探索两个相互关联的领域：经济平等和文化史。当贫富差距缩小时，时间框架构成了可以量化的最长时期，它构成了一个悖论。就在农民、工匠和店主相对于精英阶层变得更加富有的时候，他们作为艺术的赞助人正在消失，失去了在教区教堂、修道院或医院保存个人和家庭记忆的能力。该项目将首次分析任何时期经济平等对文化领域内不平等的影响。非精英人士的艺术表现和在邻居和上帝面前寻求永恒记忆的对象几乎完全丢失了。然而，他们的委托仍然活在数以千计的遗嘱中，提供叙事性的前奏、选定的圣徒和其他作曲说明的细节。然而，学者们忽视了这些巨大的艺术委托储藏库，除非在极其罕见的情况下，这些物品仍然存在，或者一位艺术家已经为人所知。根据一项档案试点研究，PI计算出，该项目将在意大利北部和中部的大片地区以及阿尔卑斯山以北的案例研究中发现和分析5000或更多的委员会。此外，这个项目将调查教会和世俗精英通过会议、法令、遗嘱条款和市场机制将非精英驱逐出委托工作，以庆祝他们的纪念，并摧毁他们在教会建筑中的早期作品。这个项目假设，农民和工匠财富的崛起，绝对和相对于精英阶层，促使精英阶层在黑死病之后寻找其他领域来保留，然后扩大他们的特权和地位。反过来，这些焦虑又推动了文艺复兴时期的文化和艺术发展，这些发展深深植根于不平等。