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Artists' life has always been difficult and often frustrating, especially in the past centuries. Many of them knew hunger, debts, misery, humiliations and exploitation not only at the beginning of their career (this occurs today too), but also for their whole life.

Maybe many of us know that W. A. Mozart (1756-91) experienced misery and debts for the largest part of his life and he had also a family to care. When he died, he was thrown in a mass grave so that, today, the remains of this genius of music are lost and nobody can visit his grave.

Also Antonio Vivaldi, (1675-1740) died in misery in Paris and, more recently, Vincent Van Gogh (1853-90) lived in poverty, nearly never selling some of his paintings, finding only occasional jobs and tormented by nervous stress and mental problems. He remained nearly unknown during his life and only after his death (he committed suicide in 1890) his paintings were known, understood and appreciated for their great innovations in the use of colours and for the intensity of his pictures. The same bitter destiny was shared also by most of Impressionist painters.

The problem was that, for many centuries, artists' works were rarely well rewarded, except for the most famous of them, able or lucky in finding commitments from princes, kings, popes, high prelates and, later, rich merchants. Most of other artists, instead, although appreciated already in their age and even considered genial today, had many problems to live normally for the largest part of their life.

In most of cases, they were treated like common artisans workers and paid the same or little more, not as "masters of art", as we consider and respect artists today.
Then, many of their buyers were really stingy and ignorant about art, used to buy a painting or whatever other artwork only to decorate their houses as it was usual for rich people. The great experts of art, able to recognize the genius of an artist and reward it more generously, like Cardinal Scipione Borghese in Rome or Lorenzo De Medici in Florence weren't very common.

So, also the greatest artists had to experience the caprices and the stinginess of princes and kings that allowed them to work, like Michelangelo (1475-1564) in his turbulent relations with the "warrior" Pope Giulio II. Again, Mozart, when he worked for the Archbishop of Salzburg, Austria, had to eat his meals in the kitchen of the palace in which he worked, together with servants. Their copyrights weren't recognized and their rewards were based

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