Introduction: art in the first industrial society

The book opens with a discussion of the rapid economic and social changes that overtook the region in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and, in particular, the consequences for urban cultural life. The changes produced important debates about the importance of culture, and particularly the visual arts, in a modern, civil society. The promotion of the visual arts became an important part of the civic humanist agenda and consequently they became central to the identity of the new industrial, commercial and professional classes.