/vr/ - Retro Games

>>3960483
Ultimately the artist is limited by the means available to create art (whether material or technical), and what the patron, if any, is looking for. Any other limitation is self-imposed. This is why, during the Renaissance, you typically see religious and, occasionally, mythological themes in art: the primary patrons were the church, royalty, and the wealthy. During the 17th and 18th centuries, art starts becoming more and more democratized, and you start seeing secular things like genre paintings, operas and fully instrumental music (as opposed to the sacred vocal music that dominated the Renaissance), and secular plays and, eventually, the novel. At this stage the artist is limited by the contents and standards of beauty expected by the middle class audience. When the Romantic era comes along in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, however, things become quite different. A cult of the artist emerges, and much more emphasis is put specifically on self-expression, and artists are more free to do strange things, eventually leading to the highly avant-garde proto-modernist works of people like Wagner, Baudelaire, and Manet. But of course, doing strange things was always a possibility: just look at the highly chromatic music of late Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, the very distorted proto-expressionistic paintings of Mannerist artist El Greco, the extremely discursive and nonlinear narrative of the 18th century novel Tristram Shandy. Is this art created under strict limitations? Perhaps to an extent, but these were all artists willing to take risks, and willing to expand the range of artistic possibilities available to us, and we are grateful to them for it.