ABSTRACT
The concept of the artist-as a person endowed with extraordinary gifts and powers of imagination-is of relatively recent currency; it accommodates an historically specific set of attitudes and meanings. These, it is generally agreed, entail notions of social difference that matured in the late eighteenth century and were unknown to the medieval world. The idea of the artist was linked to decisive changes in the institutional structures which had regulated the production of images in medieval times, namely the dissolution of guild power, the process of state formation and the evolution of art markets. These aspects of change in the conditions of artistic creation are well established in the sociology and social history of art (Antal 1948; Hauser 1962; Martindale 1972; Wolff 1981). The following related features may be identified as correlates of the weakening of the ties that had once bound image-makers to guild craftsmanship-first in northern Italy and later in other western European societies.
