Should we still care about the world’s most famous painting?
Homer captures the joyless transition from slave labor to wage labor after the U.S. Civil War.
Master Artisan Utagawa Hiroshige depicts the dangerous divisions of labor in Edo Japan and the enduring culture of self-sacrifice rooted in Confucian ethics.
Millet depicts a new era of surveillance and control amid the end of communal property.
Vermeer captures the domestic and emotional work of maids in the Dutch Golden Age.
Carracci introduces dignity to working people while removing the sight of their own labor.
Humanism sought to resolve the idleness of peasantry and scarcity of labor for emerging mercantilism.
In Medieval France, the peasantry — derided as Jacques Bonhomme — perpetually toiled for the noble class.
Serfdom was a hereditary curse, preserved by the Catholic Church.
For Ancient Egyptians, death did not mean the end of labor.
Çatalhöyük was an egalitarian society that maintained a fundamental respect for life and labor.
