Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard

Re:Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard by woofie11 on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @12:25PM (#23325659)

Fine art was available to more of the population than you'd think. The world population doubled in the past 45 years. In contrast, during the Roman period, the world population took about 500 years to double.

Wealth accumulated over generations. In that time, if your great-great-great grandfather had a piece of artwork, there was a good chance it was yours now.

We have negative stereotypes of the past, and there were periods of history when that was true, but there were advanced periods too. The Bronze Age empires were pretty impressive until roughly 1300 BC. We had a dark age for a while. The Roman Empire was very impressive. Then we had a dark age for a while.

And you also want to think of the social structure. Rich people employed poor people in households. Even if I owned nothing personally, I'd be exposed to art in my master's household.

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Re:Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard by Ma8ee on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @06:01PM (#23330615)

Except something like 98% of the population were farmers and most of them were never allowed into a rich man’s house

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Re:Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard by Retric on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @07:17PM (#23331352)

More like 70% to 90%, just the city of Rome got up to 750k-1M people let alone all the other cities in the empire. A great deal of this was due to Egyptian farmers ability to grow multiple crops per year on the same land. Fishing was similarly extremely productive in terms of labor to food production.

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Re:Roman mosaic floor found under Italian vineyard by Gibbon1 on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @09:19PM (#23332270)

I remember reading somewhere that urbanization in Roman Empire was higher than before and after. Like 20% or something.

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