The "Artist" is Born
Another fairly boring chapter. This one discusses the movement away from the trade guilds and towards the individual artist. I don't really, really understand how it all works because I wasn't paying much attention because it was really boring but it seems like people in trade guilds stopped seeing their techniques as trade secrets to be kept within the guild. They trained themselves and developed technique and wrote about them in books that allowed other people--not guildmen--to study and learn techniques of the different trades.
From there, it seems, you get the great artists of the Renaissance. A good part of this chapter talks about the artists of the Renaissance and what they did and what made them famous and why they are remarkable.
The interesting part of this chapter was the one that talked about how people who we would think of as children made much of themselves at very young ages. He lists as example Richard II, who at fourteen years old, "alone in a large field, faced Wat Tyler's massed rebels and pacified them with a speech" (page 84). Also, Rossini, who at fourteen first conducted an orchestra and led the Bologna Philharmonic at eighteen. Pitt the younger was Prime Minister in England at 23. Lagrange was professor of Mathematics at the Turin School of Artillery at only nineteen. And the list goes on. I was very impressed.
Another section of note was Barzun's A Digression on a Word where he explains the meaning of the word Man, meaning human and not male human. Also worth the read.
So, all in all, a boring chapter with a few interesting and exciting parts.
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