Between 1348 and 1500—the longest period when the gap between rich and poor measurably narrowed—peasants and artisans grew wealthier but vanished as patrons of art, their memorials scrubbed from churches by elites. This project tackles a historical paradox that no one has systematically studied: why economic equality led to greater cultural inequality. While non-elites left thousands of detailed artistic commissions in their testaments, scholars have ignored these records because the physical objects were destroyed. The PI estimates that analysing wills across northern and central Italy will uncover 5,000 or more lost commissions, along with the church decrees and market mechanisms that erased them. The research is fundamental historical inquiry—it will not change infrastructure or medicine. But it challenges a core assumption about the Renaissance: that rising wealth naturally democratises culture. If the hypothesis holds—that elite anxiety over peasant prosperity drove them to monopolise artistic remembrance—it would rewrite our understanding of how inequality becomes embedded in cultural institutions. Similar historical work has reshaped how economists and policymakers think about wealth concentration and social mobility today.
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Centring on the long post-Black Death century, c.1348 to 1500, this project will explore two interrelated fields: economic equality and cultural history. The time-frame constitutes the longest period that can be quantified when the gap between rich and poor narrowed, and it poses a paradox. Just when peasants, artisans, and shopkeepers were becoming wealthier absolutely and relative to elites, they were vanishing as patrons of the arts, losing their powers to preserve their individual and family remembrance in parish churches, monasteries, or hospitals. This project will be the first to analyse the impact of economic equality on inequality within the cultural realm for any period. The objects of nonelites' artistic expressions and quest for everlasting memory before neighbours and God have been almost totally lost. However, their commissions remain alive within thousands of testaments, providing details of narrative predelle, chosen saints, and other compositional instructions. Yet scholars have ignored these great repositories of artistic commissions, except in extremely rare instances when the objects survive or an artist is known. From an archival pilot study, the PI calculates that this project would discover and analyse 5,000 or more commissions across large areas of northern and central Italy and with case studies north of the Alps. In addition, this project will investigate synods, decrees, testamentary clauses, and market mechanisms by which church and secular elites banished nonelites from commissioning works to celebrate their remembrance and destroyed their earlier works in ecclesiastical buildings. This project hypothesizes that the rise of peasant and artisan wealth, absolutely and relative to elites, propelled elites to search other arenas to preserve, then extend, their privileges and status in the wake of the Black Death. In turn, these anxieties drove cultural and artistic developments of the Renaissance that became deeply rooted in inequality.
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