one thing this show clearly doesn’t get, which a lot of modern portrayals of premodern times don’t seem to get, is that in a preindustrial society where literally everything is handmade, people preferred (and prefer!) to take a little longer to make things beautiful. if you’re personally spinning and weaving and stitching every inch your new coat, you might as well take an extra afternoon to dye the fibers a really lovely yellow with some onion scraps, and spend a little longer to embroider on a nice pattern. if you’re personally carving every angle of every chair in your house, you may as well slow down and carve them with a beautiful and culturally significant design, especially if you know your great-grandchildren will be sitting in them. in a hyperconsumerist industrial society it’s expected that you just buy what you can afford and settle for however beautiful or ugly the thing happens to be, but it wasn’t always that way. the vast majority of people in the premodern world were hobbyist artists, and they dressed in and sat on and slept under and smoked with and ate out of their and their ancestors’ canvases every day