6 ideas
A fifteenth-century picture is the fossil of a commercial transaction between a client who commissioned and paid and a painter who delivered to specification. Reading the contract terms alongside the image shows how much of what we treat as artistic choice (materials, figures, finish, deadlines) was set by what the patron demanded and what the market priced.
Early Quattrocento contracts specify quantities of gold leaf and grade of ultramarine, the blue costing several florins an ounce. Later contracts increasingly specify the master's own hand and pay for his time rather than his materials. Patrons moved from displaying wealth through precious substance to displaying it through the purchase of skill, and painters answered with more virtuoso technique and less gilding.
Visual perception depends on interpretive skills, categories and habits acquired from the everyday life of a culture, so viewers from different periods literally see different things in the same image. A painter anticipates the cognitive equipment of his public, which means reconstructing that equipment is a way of recovering what the picture was built to be seen with.
Florentine merchants were schooled in gauging, the quick geometric estimation of the volume of barrels, bales and irregular containers. That trained habit of reading solid forms as combinations of cylinders, cones and cubes let them take pleasure in painters like Piero della Francesca, whose pictures were built from the same regular volumes and proportional relations. A commercial numeracy became an aesthetic competence.
Preachers broke biblical episodes into stages the congregation already knew. The Annunciation, for example, was divided into the Virgin's successive states: disquiet, reflection, inquiry, submission, merit. Painters staged Mary's posture to hit one recognizable state, and viewers trained by those sermons identified which moment and emotion was shown. The pulpit supplied both the painter's program and the audience's decoding key.
Viewers read figure groupings and gestures through practices they performed themselves: bassa danza choreography, codified monastic hand signs, and preachers' gestures. Painted groups arranged like dancers or figures making conventional gestures therefore carried legible meaning about relationship and feeling that modern viewers miss. Contemporary critics' terms such as 'aria', 'prompt', 'devout' and 'ornate' name qualities that sat within this shared social vocabulary.