Art Then & Now

One thing that really struck me yesterday in class was the amount of time allotted for Domenico Ghirlandaio to paint the Adoration of the Magi...30 months! As a student of art, I can't imagine ever spending that much time on one painting. An artist today could create an entire body of art for an exhibition in that amount of time. We are living in an era where everything is convenient and fast and artists today don't have the patience to create works of art that they once did. I even question how often Ghirlandaio was working on this piece for it to take him that long, but when you look at the detail in the image and think of how in depth the processes of painting were it starts to make sense. Now that paints come readily available in tubes, who would purchase minerals and grind them into powders to create paints? I believe that artists now have so much more freedom of creativity than the Renaissance artists did because times have changed and there are things that are more acceptable in today's society; but also because Renaissance artists were mostly limited in what they could paint by who would commission them. At the same time, I think that Renaissance artists may have been much more knowledgeable of a variety of subjects like math, science, literature and religion.