On Ponte dei Pugni (Bridge of Fists), which was the most famous venue for these spectacles, there are marble feet markings which were the starting positions for fighters.
Gotta love how some of the spectators on the larger Joseph Heintz the Younger painting enjoy the entertainment. Too bad that these images predate the invention of popcorn!
If anyone's played Assassin's Creed II (or any of the Ezio games) (these older games were produced with help from historians) Ezio's scar comes from a street fight on Ponte Vecchio in Venice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTXd7L01pI2
One time my wife and I were watching a documentary on Florence and I was convinced we’d been there, was asking my wife when we went. Turns out I’d played too much AC.
Interested in whether these bridge brawls were isolated to just Venice, maybe tanners and butchers had it out on all checks notes 3 of Florence’s main bridges
Great art is rooted in the hardest of human emotion. Is why we look back to ancient culture with reverance and sometimes nostalgia. We wouldn't want to be there in the midst of the brawl, most of us moderns would rather jump from the bridge. But our human spirit and memory recognizes the suffering and sacrifices of the ancestors. It's why there really isn't any "great art" anymore, at least in the classical sense, as those with the means to produce it don't have any great emotions. We will probably get there again, but like an LLM, sometimes humans need to reconstitute the entire corpus to make a rather small change
> those with the means to produce it don't have any great emotions.
Actually, re-reading your original post, this comes across as so asinine I do have to wonder if I'm replying to an LLM. Because it makes no sense to say that artists don't have emotions today that can compare to checks notes rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other.
there are incredibly wide swathes of society which go on about modern decadence and have outsized respect for violence as being somehow ennobling. As an example some people think the tough guys of the past who killed each other over women's handkerchiefs were real men and possessed of emotions more potent than those of the girly men that exist nowadays. This is not necessarily what was being claimed, just that there are claims like that so not sure why anyone crossing similar regions needs to be thought an LLM.
That said
>it makes no sense to say that artists don't have emotions today that can compare to...rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other.
The rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other came from a society with strict rules about honor and dueling, and they dueled over honor.
So I'm not sure if the artists of today do have emotions that compare to the particular emotions that were very common in a society with duels for honor that had a significantly different economic and educational system than our own.
Sure we're all humans, but we're not all exactly the same despite that.
>The gang members beating the shit out of each other come from a community with strict rules about honor and fighting, and they fight over honor.
Are you so certain that there are no longer groups with strict rules that feature individuals who enact violence upon each other over those rules?
Hell, they'll even fight over a lady wearing the wrong color, and fight in attempts to get ladies to wear their colors rather than the rivals'.
The act is perhaps less frequent, but I have no idea to the historical prevalence of such behavior as opposed to the prevalence of its existence in the media of the time. For instance, I am sure that there were not all that many people rescuing fair maidens from towers, but it crops up in the art of the time fairly often.
But, the prevalence of the behavior is not really at issue so much as the particular emotions which I think still exist given the example of gang members killing each other over women just as the Venetians of old did.
I do think that the behavior is somewhat unlikely to match up to old Venetian duels for honor; there is, I believe, no Code Duello for drive-bys.
At any rate I was trying to demonstrate that there are lots of people who hold these ideas and thus it is somewhat absurd to assume someone who thinks these things must be an LLM, but it is also true that I went off on a tangent arguing that not just was it not a surefire tell that it was written by an LLM (that the poster had an opinion the person I responded to found absurd), but also that there were perhaps arguments for the view as first posted.
So I will now put it in a different way: it is often said that history does not exactly repeat itself but it rhymes, sure, there is some rhyming going on between gangs and duelists and Samurai and Pirates and people doing violence for kicks in bar fights, but generally words that rhyme also mean different things and are different words.
So humans are alike and different at the same time; yes they can have similar emotions, but it seems sensible that perhaps bravos dueling in Venice or Florence would have different emotions that we might not understand, even of a complicated sort, available to them than is currently experienced by most artists - as per the original post that started this subthread.
sometime around the mid to late 1700s people started getting the idea that Hamlet was all about how he was a vacillating guy who could never come to a decision because the play's stated reasons for doing things were no longer believable, that is to say The Character Hamlet had significantly different emotions and opinions on things that we cannot understand or accept as stated.
Weirdly favored, if it is an LLM. Of course bad actors will be training them out of the obvious rhetorical tells, but a complete lack of semantic reasoning will fortunately always be a valid reason to ignore or dismiss someone's arguments, human or chatbot.
Well "great" is rather subjective.
But in terms of collective agreement we can conclusive say there really isn't anything like the art of the past made today. As an artist I was invited to a much vaunted exhibition in Venice itself recently. It consisted of a woman sitting in urine ...but with a kind message asking bystanders to please not poop in her tank.. The link if you fail to believe it.
Consider that the "great impressionists" were not considered great when they began defining the style.
van Gogh sold one painting in his life, Vermeer died in debt, and that's just off the top of my head.
And it goes all sorts of ways, too. Bach was relatively succesful in life, but then largely forgotten for decades after his death, but never saw anything like the current prevalence of his influence.
We really can't say, today, what our kids or kids kids will be studying in art history, what'll be referenced in popular culture, etc.
I don't think we can conclusively say anything like that. Sure, a bunch of modern art is... odd, but that's more to do with the world generally being more ok with experimentation, and there's plenty of more classical work happening around the globe, even if it doesn't get the same recognition as various "clickbait", if you will. For instance, the bronze work of Luo Li Rong channels the art of the past pretty well, I'd say. https://mymodernmet.com/realistic-sculptures-luo-li-rong/
That's what I find so tedious about that particular type of modern art (e.g. Piss Christ). It's incredibly repetitive and not experimental at all.
It's always about transgression (body, gender, etc.), it pivots on a sophomoric "what is art anyway?" question, it drives audience discomfort in order to have a visceral reaction rather than any other kind of emotional response. In the end it elevates the artist's intention (in their mission statement) far over the reality of their art.
It's incredibly overdone and yet keeps coming back around...to an installation space near you.
Luo Li Rong managed to grab the other end of the spectrum: classically/romantically-presented T&A.
> Well "great" is rather subjective. But in terms of collective agreement we can conclusive say there really isn't anything like the art of the past made today.
Yes, but you claimed there was no great art in the "classical sense." Of course there's not; if it was contemporary then it wouldn't be classical.
Adding to that, your single data point to show the apparent vacuity of contemporary art which we can collectively agree on isn't very convincing at all when a dozen counter examples could trivially be found.
And all that while you admit yourself that what you're saying is completely subjective in any case.
I do not think this pseudo-intellectual desire to ape art styles of the past is really very compatible with the soul of an artist. Artists make two things: what moves them, and what they are paid to make. Ideally, these are the same thing.
No one is stopping you from commissioning paintings such as the ones you revere as the peak of art, by the way. Open your wallet if that's what you want. That's how great art was made back then. But if the depth of your insight on the human condition is whatever you're posting here, I do not know if your commissions would capture the meaning you seem to want.
Your absolutely correct. The Venice exhibition was made with 600 thousand euros of public money. The great art of the last age was also commissioned by rich nobility, basically the same as there was no public funds at that stage of developmemt.
So you admitted that the public purse and what it is willing to pay to commission for public art is useful measure of a pseudoscientific constant, namely that of the public consideration of the "great art" of that age. I'm not sure that fountains of human excrement convey the grandeur that your attributing to modern art however.
We can make better than the past for sure, there is no point to rehash the glory of old, but we so far have not. In archeology there is a constant and agreed upon "decadent" style that can indicate when cultures have experienced conditions, for external or internal reasons, that ultimately led to their decline and downfall.
It's amazing that we cannot recognize the same precursors in our own. But perhaps this is interdisciplinary blindness?
Actually this is a very interesting comment so I do want to continue to engage. Thanks for not rising to my tone, I suppose.
> So you admitted that the public purse and what it is willing to pay to commission for public art is useful measure of a pseudoscientific constant
No I did no such thing. I said rich people paid for art they wanted to exist in the past and still do today. It measures nothing.
> I'm not sure that fountains of human excrement convey the grandeur that your attributing to modern art however.
You've quite missed my point if you're looking for grandeur in it. I see an artist pushing the boundaries of art. Your questioning of its value is the value (or, part of it).
> we so far have not.
That can't be stated definitively even if we limit ourselves to large-scale painting. But of course, we have far more media available to us today than 2D paintings and other traditional art forms. Breathable tanks of piss, films, video games - none of these existed in the 17th century. And each of them is capable of evoking great emotions, greater even than looking at a painting of a hundred Venetians beating the shit out of each other. You've never watchec a movie that left you feeling awe? Ah, even the piss? Sure. What if it was a thousand women in a tank of piss? Use your imagination - that's what art is about.
> In archeology there is a constant and agreed upon "decadent" style that can indicate when cultures have experienced conditions, for external or internal reasons, that ultimately led to their decline and downfall
I have never in my life heard of this claimed in an academic setting - only from retro-fetishist cranks, if you'll pardon me saying, making some "hard times create strong men" argument (which can't be entertained, being ahistorical). Nor can I think of any such phenomenon in ancient Greco-Roman history from Mycenae to the Visigoths. Are you able to expand on that?
Look at the incredible amount of art dismissed by this ideology: Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Rothko, Pollack, Coltrane, Lou Reed, the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, James Joyce, almost all of literature, centuries of genres in every field. Hemingway might agree, but didn't really live it out past a certain point.
By its argument, people in wartorn nightmares should be making 'great art': Gaza, eastern Congo, etc. The most violent parts of the wealthy world should be where 'great art' comes from.
> there really isn't anything like the art of the past made today
Little is made like it was in the past, thankfully. It's not like it used to be. The world changes.
> As an artist I was invited to a much vaunted exhibition in Venice itself recently.
I think you'll need to convince people of that claim, especially given the unsophisticated old cliches expressed in this thread which don't seem to reflect much understanding.
For any outsiders who have never experienced authentic mosh-pit dancing, I wish to testify to their value.
A good, organized mosh-pit is a safe place, and even a place where men (ok mostly men) can find camaraderie, encouragement and support. Mosh-pits are enjoyed by guys with some anger issues or simply need to get out aggression in a controlled way, and yeah, they wear spikes and leather and pull off their shirts, but the actual mosh-pit dancing is structured, ritualized, and supportive.
The mosh-pits I've danced in begin with a central "vortex" of guys who begin marching/stomping in a circular direction and flailing their arms around, mostly to establish a "personal space" or a "keep out zone" to indicate they're actively moving. And then they contrive to bump/bash into one another. And there are also bystanders or non-participants who stay on the border of this dance circle who also have the active role of keeping the dancers on-track and acting like the ropes in a boxing ring, cushioning them and bouncing them back into the vortex. The dancers aren't punching or kicking or striking to hurt others, but the physical contact is authentic and helps them feel alive. There's an informal choreography and style to mosh-pit dancing that's been refined over decades; styles may differ but they usually converge based on genres and locale.
Though these guys may be individually angry and bitter, and the music we're dancing to is abrasive, aggressive and rough, the dancers can respect one another, and they hold themselves to an honor code of safety and concern for others' well-being, because it is, ultimately, a catharsis and a dance, in a club or venue among neighbors and friends, and while a few bad apples can spoil a night's fun, I was pleasantly surprised when I tried it out myself.
Yep. Every mosh pit I've been in, when someone goes down, everyone around stops and gets them back up and out to safety if necessary.
(Granted, not every mosh pit is like that. There are some bands who are notorious for having dangerous pits, a few genres that encourage it, and a few concerts where people have been badly injured.)
On Ponte dei Pugni (Bridge of Fists), which was the most famous venue for these spectacles, there are marble feet markings which were the starting positions for fighters.
Gotta love how some of the spectators on the larger Joseph Heintz the Younger painting enjoy the entertainment. Too bad that these images predate the invention of popcorn!
> predate the invention of popcorn
Popcorn's been around for thousands of years.
Let me correct myself:
Too bad that these images predate the wide availability of popcorn in the old world and its common usage as a snack eaten during entertainment.
If anyone's played Assassin's Creed II (or any of the Ezio games) (these older games were produced with help from historians) Ezio's scar comes from a street fight on Ponte Vecchio in Venice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKTXd7L01pI2
One time my wife and I were watching a documentary on Florence and I was convinced we’d been there, was asking my wife when we went. Turns out I’d played too much AC.
Ponte Vecchio is in Florence
Interested in whether these bridge brawls were isolated to just Venice, maybe tanners and butchers had it out on all checks notes 3 of Florence’s main bridges
You're right, Florence!
I love reading the little vignettes of history. Thanks for posting!
Great art is rooted in the hardest of human emotion. Is why we look back to ancient culture with reverance and sometimes nostalgia. We wouldn't want to be there in the midst of the brawl, most of us moderns would rather jump from the bridge. But our human spirit and memory recognizes the suffering and sacrifices of the ancestors. It's why there really isn't any "great art" anymore, at least in the classical sense, as those with the means to produce it don't have any great emotions. We will probably get there again, but like an LLM, sometimes humans need to reconstitute the entire corpus to make a rather small change
> those with the means to produce it don't have any great emotions.
Actually, re-reading your original post, this comes across as so asinine I do have to wonder if I'm replying to an LLM. Because it makes no sense to say that artists don't have emotions today that can compare to checks notes rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other.
there are incredibly wide swathes of society which go on about modern decadence and have outsized respect for violence as being somehow ennobling. As an example some people think the tough guys of the past who killed each other over women's handkerchiefs were real men and possessed of emotions more potent than those of the girly men that exist nowadays. This is not necessarily what was being claimed, just that there are claims like that so not sure why anyone crossing similar regions needs to be thought an LLM.
That said >it makes no sense to say that artists don't have emotions today that can compare to...rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other.
The rowdy Venetians beating the shit out of each other came from a society with strict rules about honor and dueling, and they dueled over honor.
So I'm not sure if the artists of today do have emotions that compare to the particular emotions that were very common in a society with duels for honor that had a significantly different economic and educational system than our own.
Sure we're all humans, but we're not all exactly the same despite that.
>The gang members beating the shit out of each other come from a community with strict rules about honor and fighting, and they fight over honor.
Are you so certain that there are no longer groups with strict rules that feature individuals who enact violence upon each other over those rules?
Hell, they'll even fight over a lady wearing the wrong color, and fight in attempts to get ladies to wear their colors rather than the rivals'.
The act is perhaps less frequent, but I have no idea to the historical prevalence of such behavior as opposed to the prevalence of its existence in the media of the time. For instance, I am sure that there were not all that many people rescuing fair maidens from towers, but it crops up in the art of the time fairly often.
But, the prevalence of the behavior is not really at issue so much as the particular emotions which I think still exist given the example of gang members killing each other over women just as the Venetians of old did.
I do think that the behavior is somewhat unlikely to match up to old Venetian duels for honor; there is, I believe, no Code Duello for drive-bys.
At any rate I was trying to demonstrate that there are lots of people who hold these ideas and thus it is somewhat absurd to assume someone who thinks these things must be an LLM, but it is also true that I went off on a tangent arguing that not just was it not a surefire tell that it was written by an LLM (that the poster had an opinion the person I responded to found absurd), but also that there were perhaps arguments for the view as first posted.
So I will now put it in a different way: it is often said that history does not exactly repeat itself but it rhymes, sure, there is some rhyming going on between gangs and duelists and Samurai and Pirates and people doing violence for kicks in bar fights, but generally words that rhyme also mean different things and are different words.
So humans are alike and different at the same time; yes they can have similar emotions, but it seems sensible that perhaps bravos dueling in Venice or Florence would have different emotions that we might not understand, even of a complicated sort, available to them than is currently experienced by most artists - as per the original post that started this subthread.
as an example - the Theme of Hamlet https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-theme-of-hamlet-3926a88...
sometime around the mid to late 1700s people started getting the idea that Hamlet was all about how he was a vacillating guy who could never come to a decision because the play's stated reasons for doing things were no longer believable, that is to say The Character Hamlet had significantly different emotions and opinions on things that we cannot understand or accept as stated.
It’s a new account (2h old as of me commenting) and it does read like LLM content to me.
Weirdly favored, if it is an LLM. Of course bad actors will be training them out of the obvious rhetorical tells, but a complete lack of semantic reasoning will fortunately always be a valid reason to ignore or dismiss someone's arguments, human or chatbot.
> It's why there really isn't any "great art" anymore, at least in the classical sense
This is a tautology, no? There's plenty of great art being made today by people feeling the same emotions as those in the past.
Well "great" is rather subjective. But in terms of collective agreement we can conclusive say there really isn't anything like the art of the past made today. As an artist I was invited to a much vaunted exhibition in Venice itself recently. It consisted of a woman sitting in urine ...but with a kind message asking bystanders to please not poop in her tank.. The link if you fail to believe it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/07/arts/design/venice-bienna...
Modern art and artists indeed do mirror the feeling of their age.
Consider that the "great impressionists" were not considered great when they began defining the style.
van Gogh sold one painting in his life, Vermeer died in debt, and that's just off the top of my head.
And it goes all sorts of ways, too. Bach was relatively succesful in life, but then largely forgotten for decades after his death, but never saw anything like the current prevalence of his influence.
We really can't say, today, what our kids or kids kids will be studying in art history, what'll be referenced in popular culture, etc.
I don't think we can conclusively say anything like that. Sure, a bunch of modern art is... odd, but that's more to do with the world generally being more ok with experimentation, and there's plenty of more classical work happening around the globe, even if it doesn't get the same recognition as various "clickbait", if you will. For instance, the bronze work of Luo Li Rong channels the art of the past pretty well, I'd say. https://mymodernmet.com/realistic-sculptures-luo-li-rong/
> experimentation
That's what I find so tedious about that particular type of modern art (e.g. Piss Christ). It's incredibly repetitive and not experimental at all.
It's always about transgression (body, gender, etc.), it pivots on a sophomoric "what is art anyway?" question, it drives audience discomfort in order to have a visceral reaction rather than any other kind of emotional response. In the end it elevates the artist's intention (in their mission statement) far over the reality of their art.
It's incredibly overdone and yet keeps coming back around...to an installation space near you.
Luo Li Rong managed to grab the other end of the spectrum: classically/romantically-presented T&A.
> Well "great" is rather subjective. But in terms of collective agreement we can conclusive say there really isn't anything like the art of the past made today.
Yes, but you claimed there was no great art in the "classical sense." Of course there's not; if it was contemporary then it wouldn't be classical.
Adding to that, your single data point to show the apparent vacuity of contemporary art which we can collectively agree on isn't very convincing at all when a dozen counter examples could trivially be found.
And all that while you admit yourself that what you're saying is completely subjective in any case.
I do not think this pseudo-intellectual desire to ape art styles of the past is really very compatible with the soul of an artist. Artists make two things: what moves them, and what they are paid to make. Ideally, these are the same thing.
No one is stopping you from commissioning paintings such as the ones you revere as the peak of art, by the way. Open your wallet if that's what you want. That's how great art was made back then. But if the depth of your insight on the human condition is whatever you're posting here, I do not know if your commissions would capture the meaning you seem to want.
Your absolutely correct. The Venice exhibition was made with 600 thousand euros of public money. The great art of the last age was also commissioned by rich nobility, basically the same as there was no public funds at that stage of developmemt. So you admitted that the public purse and what it is willing to pay to commission for public art is useful measure of a pseudoscientific constant, namely that of the public consideration of the "great art" of that age. I'm not sure that fountains of human excrement convey the grandeur that your attributing to modern art however.
We can make better than the past for sure, there is no point to rehash the glory of old, but we so far have not. In archeology there is a constant and agreed upon "decadent" style that can indicate when cultures have experienced conditions, for external or internal reasons, that ultimately led to their decline and downfall.
It's amazing that we cannot recognize the same precursors in our own. But perhaps this is interdisciplinary blindness?
Actually this is a very interesting comment so I do want to continue to engage. Thanks for not rising to my tone, I suppose.
> So you admitted that the public purse and what it is willing to pay to commission for public art is useful measure of a pseudoscientific constant
No I did no such thing. I said rich people paid for art they wanted to exist in the past and still do today. It measures nothing.
> I'm not sure that fountains of human excrement convey the grandeur that your attributing to modern art however.
You've quite missed my point if you're looking for grandeur in it. I see an artist pushing the boundaries of art. Your questioning of its value is the value (or, part of it).
> we so far have not.
That can't be stated definitively even if we limit ourselves to large-scale painting. But of course, we have far more media available to us today than 2D paintings and other traditional art forms. Breathable tanks of piss, films, video games - none of these existed in the 17th century. And each of them is capable of evoking great emotions, greater even than looking at a painting of a hundred Venetians beating the shit out of each other. You've never watchec a movie that left you feeling awe? Ah, even the piss? Sure. What if it was a thousand women in a tank of piss? Use your imagination - that's what art is about.
> In archeology there is a constant and agreed upon "decadent" style that can indicate when cultures have experienced conditions, for external or internal reasons, that ultimately led to their decline and downfall
I have never in my life heard of this claimed in an academic setting - only from retro-fetishist cranks, if you'll pardon me saying, making some "hard times create strong men" argument (which can't be entertained, being ahistorical). Nor can I think of any such phenomenon in ancient Greco-Roman history from Mycenae to the Visigoths. Are you able to expand on that?
Look at the incredible amount of art dismissed by this ideology: Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, Rothko, Pollack, Coltrane, Lou Reed, the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, James Joyce, almost all of literature, centuries of genres in every field. Hemingway might agree, but didn't really live it out past a certain point.
By its argument, people in wartorn nightmares should be making 'great art': Gaza, eastern Congo, etc. The most violent parts of the wealthy world should be where 'great art' comes from.
> there really isn't anything like the art of the past made today
Little is made like it was in the past, thankfully. It's not like it used to be. The world changes.
> As an artist I was invited to a much vaunted exhibition in Venice itself recently.
I think you'll need to convince people of that claim, especially given the unsophisticated old cliches expressed in this thread which don't seem to reflect much understanding.
> consisted of a woman sitting in urine
For example, that's all you understood.
> We wouldn't want to be there in the midst of the brawl, most of us moderns would rather jump from the bridge.
People in some moshpits would beg to differ.
For any outsiders who have never experienced authentic mosh-pit dancing, I wish to testify to their value.
A good, organized mosh-pit is a safe place, and even a place where men (ok mostly men) can find camaraderie, encouragement and support. Mosh-pits are enjoyed by guys with some anger issues or simply need to get out aggression in a controlled way, and yeah, they wear spikes and leather and pull off their shirts, but the actual mosh-pit dancing is structured, ritualized, and supportive.
The mosh-pits I've danced in begin with a central "vortex" of guys who begin marching/stomping in a circular direction and flailing their arms around, mostly to establish a "personal space" or a "keep out zone" to indicate they're actively moving. And then they contrive to bump/bash into one another. And there are also bystanders or non-participants who stay on the border of this dance circle who also have the active role of keeping the dancers on-track and acting like the ropes in a boxing ring, cushioning them and bouncing them back into the vortex. The dancers aren't punching or kicking or striking to hurt others, but the physical contact is authentic and helps them feel alive. There's an informal choreography and style to mosh-pit dancing that's been refined over decades; styles may differ but they usually converge based on genres and locale.
Though these guys may be individually angry and bitter, and the music we're dancing to is abrasive, aggressive and rough, the dancers can respect one another, and they hold themselves to an honor code of safety and concern for others' well-being, because it is, ultimately, a catharsis and a dance, in a club or venue among neighbors and friends, and while a few bad apples can spoil a night's fun, I was pleasantly surprised when I tried it out myself.
Yep. Every mosh pit I've been in, when someone goes down, everyone around stops and gets them back up and out to safety if necessary.
(Granted, not every mosh pit is like that. There are some bands who are notorious for having dangerous pits, a few genres that encourage it, and a few concerts where people have been badly injured.)