a Christian context, mainly due to the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman books of antiquity through translations made by the highly cultured Moorish civilization which had occupied Spain since the 9th century. Artists such as Benvento Cellini, Michelangelo, Albrecht Dnrer, and Pieter Brueghel viewed themselves as more than hired hands of the royalty, Church, and nobility who patronized them. They saw themselves proudly as self-made men who lived by their talents and wits. They would leave unforgettable manifestations of their genius and humanity for future generations to ponder. And it would be their personal glory as artists that posterity would admire, not the reflected glory of their elite patrons.
The progress of art is measured not just in the amount of personal freedom that the times permit, but how well this freedom is used to make soulful representations of contemporary life.
Nonetheless the theme of arthstic freedom is central to the modernist quest. In this realm some forerunners were historic creative figures of the past such as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Beethoven, Goya, Balzac, and Zola, all of whom successfully expressed themselves fully while their works often flew in the face of the bourgeois society they uneasily coexisted with.
Marx's analysis of the bourgeoisie focuses on the political and economic centralization by which loosely related provinces and regions were solidified into modern nation-states.
Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs service (477).
On the cultural front this meant official art academies with narrowly defined concepts of aesthetic purity, which could be firmly counted on to censor unruly artists by either ignoring or denouncing them in the tightly controlled n...