These creative people—and many others like them—continued to flourish throughout the sixteenth century, and into the early seventeenth. And what remained constant throughout that long period was the close interdependence of patrons and artists, neither of whom could do without one another. Indeed, one of the reasons that the magnificent creativity of the Renaissance lasted so very long after its genesis in the fourteenth century is that the most powerful men and women in Europe were growing ever richer, and gaining access to new sources of gold and precious goods, far beyond the imagination of
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