What Apprenticeships in the Renaissance Can Teach Us About Quilting – Sewing Machines Los Angeles

Quilting exceptionalism, as with all traditional art forms, requires instruction, practice and lots of trial and error moments. To achieve a mastership level of performance, the aspiring quilt artist must go through many of the same steps that any painter, sculptor or poet must endure. The best example of developing amazing artistic talent was the result of the mentoring during the Renaissance.

The Renaissance brought a continent out of the dark ages and into a period of incredible advances in art and literature. It produced geniuses that to this day are used as benchmarks of talent. I think that, in part, these accomplishments can be attributed to the systems that nurtured such amazing ability.

All artists spent their adolescence as apprentices. They learned their craft from the ground up in their master’s workshop. Shop owners or other tradesmen applied to artistic masters to have their talented (mostly male) children go to live and learn. The apprentices were generally between the ages of 7 and 15. Each apprentice lived like a son with the master artist and from them learned the essentials of the craft.

Although the parents paid the master, the student also earned his upkeep. In the beginning the apprentice would clean the studio, sweeping and keeping things neat. They ran errands or did whatever simple task the master required.

As they became more familiar with the shop’s inner workings, they started to grind and mix pigments, prepare wooden planks (the Renaissance version of a painter’s canvas) or cleaned and prepared brushes.

Eventually the aspiring artist would be allowed to sketch and copy drawings. Then they advanced to the point where they might be allowed to paint backgrounds or minor characters.

An apprentice worked for years to learn his craft under a master artist. Once he was proficient he might travel to other workshops as a journeyman artist. The goal was to become a master himself so that he could be admitted into a guild, gain commissions from the guild and hire his own apprentices.

Guilds were trade organizations and each discipline had its own specific association. Painters, sculptures, wood carvers, writers or musicians could all be identified by which guild he belonged to. The guild accepted applications for admittance, but it also continued to inspect artworks and the materials that created them. It functioned as a quality control mechanism to ensure excellence in output.

The artists received their commissions through the guilds. Unless an artist had his own patron, he was dependent on his guild to provide work and patrons found the artists they supported through the guilds.

To make this first step of guild admittance, the artist would work on his own masterpiece. The word comes from the work that the apprentice prepared that would become his application to the guilds for the designation of master. So, literally, the masterpiece was the piece that allowed the artist to become a Master.

This system produced some of the most amazing artist ever. Those artists from the Renaissance, whose works endure, were obviously tremendously talented. But, they were discovered, nurtured and encouraged through a system that developed their inborn abilities.

They started out young. They learned the fundamentals. They were taught the basics and then, as each step in their education was perfected, they progressed to the next. They understood the business that they were entering into. They saw, firsthand the pitfalls and the rewards. They also learned when they could break the rules and how far those rules could be bent before breaking.

I am not advocating sending children off to work in the studios of quilters. I am not suggesting that parents hand their children off to quilt makers to mentor into master quilting artists. I am saying that putting in the time, effort, the financial requirements and the commitment to learning and practicing any art form at which one wishes to excel.

Structure, practice and learning fundamentals created some of the most gifted artists of all times. That recipe still works.