pressure seems fair enough.

Some artists rebelled. After enjoying huge success early in his career, Rembrandt delighted in telling patrons to get lost if he did not appreciate their demands. Such declarations of independence could backfire. As Paul Crenshaw, an art historian, points out, when Rembrandt ran into financial trouble later in his career, he struggled to find a patron willing to bail him out.

The legacies of Shakespeare, early and late Rembrandt (if not the middle bits) and others might suggest that patronage was a rip-roaring success. But there is a survivor bias in such a reading. Everything now accepted as great benefited from patronage; but so did lots that is now forgotten. Plenty of dross was paid for, points out Werner Gundersheimer, a historian of the Renaissance, andsomething more powerful: the market. From the late 18th century the burgeoning middle class pushed patrons to the fringes of artistic life by buying reading material, prints and more in their thousands and later their millions. High culture was no longer the preserve of the rich, but a permanent fixture of bourgeois life.

Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defines a “patron” as “a wretch who supports with indolence and is paid with flattery.”

Where profit was not possible, the patron persisted, points out Jonathan Nelson, a professor at Syracuse University in Florence. Putting on an opera still requires deep pockets, just as it did in 18th-century Europe. But mass-market books, photographs and phonographs had, by the mid-20th century, largely commodified culture. The change broke the direct connection between artist and audience, creating