A lot about societies treatment of artists went downhill as soon as people forgot it's a craft one works at becoming skilled at, not some magical power you have bestowed upon you by fairies upon your birth.

The great masters were geniuses, but genius that was forged and honed from grueling apprenticeships and having the opportunity to do art 24 hours of the day via said grueling apprenticeships and or a rich patron.

I am not an artist, but I love to paint. Any skill I might have in it comes from hours and hours of art classes from a teacher who taught us classical style tools and techniques to improve. Am I pro level? No. But I've worked like hell to be satisfied with it more often than not.

A lot of helping that improvement was treating art as a physical skill. Learning the muscles both mental and physical of how to interpret what you see. It is absolutely a craft and one I don't envy any pro artist the hours upon hours it takes to make it look easy.

Artists used to be seen as craftsman providing a service in the days before photography. Interesting fact: a lot of European artists in the Renaissance and Middle Ages relieved the cost for their materials from their commissioner too. Its why some blue paints are azurite (the budget blue pigment)

A lot of those devotional paintings were commissioned by abbeys or monasteries that could only provide a small stipend for their paints, so azurite --much easier to source-- was the common blue in a lot of those Virgin Mary paintings. It fades over the centuries to a dark blue black.