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only on the sensibility and generosity of their rich and powerful lords.

Only Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827) was the first to rescue the category of artists form their poverty and obliged servility under a lord. In fact, he could live as a professional musician in Vienna, although this town was culturally very conservative.

On the other hand, not all artists were good managers of their incomes. Rembrandt (1606-1669), among many examples possible, had become rich but his excessive expenses to buy and collect artworks, musical instruments and luxurious clothes led him to the financial ruin, adding to the decline of the orders coming from his buyers.

Today, the copyright laws guarantee high incomes to artists also for the reproduction, copy and diffusion of their artworks by other subjects that must be authorized by the authors. Nothing of this existed in the past, so that also plagiarism was very frequent and very difficult to prevent and legally pursue.

Until the end of the XVIII century, artists hadn't only to eat, pay their houses or ateliers and live, but also to buy colours, paper, tools, canvas and even elegant and very expensive clothes to have access to the luxurious courts that exploited them, like usual for Mozart and all the other musicians of his time.

I think only the fast and irresistible rise of the middle and upper entrepreneur classes, started at the end of XVIII century, with the boom of industry and trade overseas, could improve much the average artists' status and incomes. This, because a rich dealer or businessman usually considered artists with more respect and admiration; not anymore as servants, but as qualified and creative professionals. So, the most skilful artists in self-management could get richness and celebrity until becoming "immortal", thanks to the new mass-media of their times: magazines and books in the XIX century, then, also TV and Internet, in the late XX century.

The great artists become more and more "stars" and VIPs for their creations but maybe this didn't make easier the access to celebrity, that's always a conquest for a minority of artists who, frequently, are neither genial but only skilful and lucky money-grubbers, producing only what people want to see and hear, like the tons of commercial music and books produced every year today.
Today, art has become an industry in most of its fields, as never in the past and also its profits have exponentially raised, always only for a minority of artists.

In this manner, a modern

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