Art and Inequality in the Post-Black Death Century

以黑死病后的漫长世纪（约1348年至1500年）为中心，该项目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，这个时间框架构成了可以量化的最长时期，这构成了一个悖论。就在农民、工匠和店主相对于精英变得更加富有的时候，他们作为艺术赞助人的身份正在消失，失去了在教区教堂、修道院或医院保存个人和家庭纪念的能力。该项目将首次分析任何时期文化领域内经济平等对不平等的影响。在邻居和上帝面前，非精英艺术表达的对象和对永恒记忆的追求几乎完全消失了。然而，他们的委托仍然存在于成千上万的遗嘱中，提供了叙述前奏，选定圣徒和其他作曲说明的细节。然而，学者们忽略了这些艺术委员会的巨大宝库，除非在极其罕见的情况下，这些物品得以保存或一位艺术家为人所知。根据一项档案试点研究，PI计算出该项目将发现并分析意大利北部和中部大片地区的5000个或更多的委托，并对阿尔卑斯山以北的案例进行研究。此外，本项目将调查教会会议、法令、遗嘱条款和市场机制，教会和世俗精英通过这些机制禁止非精英委托作品来庆祝他们的纪念，并摧毁他们在教会建筑中的早期作品。这个项目假设，在黑死病之后，农民和工匠财富的崛起，无论是绝对的还是相对于精英的，都促使精英们去寻找其他领域，以保护并扩大他们的特权和地位。反过来，这些焦虑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。

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.