ABSTRACT

Eventually the taste for art would be taken up more widely, certainly by the merchants but also the middle classes, so that demand for art of itself would increase during a period of economic prosperity. During the sixteenth century most of Glasgow's mercantile trade had been confined to coastal trade in the west of Scotland, but in the early seventeenth century, business began to expand. The great creative milieux of Western civilisation and capitalism Venice, Florence, Edinburgh, London, Amsterdam, Paris and Lisbon all of these great cities had a period of great wealth creation and intellectual development, a golden age. So although the long waves, as conceptualised by Kondratieff himself, refer only to industrial capitalism, a similar pattern of growth punctuated by periodic downturns is observable over a much longer period of time. According to Robert Lopez nothing less than the birth of capitalism occurred not in the quattrocento but in the trecento.