Editing Decorative arts (section)

==Renaissance attitudes==
The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative in European thought can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as [[Vasari]] promoted artistic values, exemplified by the artists of the [[High Renaissance]], that placed little value on the cost of materials or the amount of skilled work required to produce a work, but instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master such as [[Michelangelo]], [[Raphael]] or [[Leonardo da Vinci]], reviving to some extent the approach of antiquity.  Most European art during the [[Middle Ages]] had been produced under a very different set of values, where both expensive materials and virtuoso displays in difficult techniques had been highly valued.  In China both approaches had co-existed for many centuries: [[ink wash painting]], mostly of [[landscape art|landscapes]], was to a large extent produced by and for the [[scholar-bureaucrats]] or "literati", and was intended as an expression of the artist's imagination above all, while other major fields of art, including the very important [[Chinese ceramics]] produced in effectively industrial conditions, were produced according to a completely different set of artistic values.{{cn|date=February 2024}}