The Early Modern paterfamilias and the Profit Economy

Among fifteenth-century theologians, Saint Joseph became closely associated with the humble poor and working classes in a positive sense, supported by the ideals of the Franciscans and the Brethren of the Common Life, and reflected in the theological writings of Jean Gerson and Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, who relied upon the earlier devotion to the saint by Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153). In his Homilies in Praise of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Bernard emphasized Joseph's humility as complementary to that of his wife, which was the reason for her honor as mother of the Redeemer. The notion of humility as the remedy for man's pride through the Savior's human birth, as well as theological fascination with the sacrality of the poor and humble, is correlated with an increase in depictions of Joseph as a working man or as counterpart to the shepherds in scenes of the Adoration of the Shepherds, like the famous Portinari Altarpiece (1475–1476; Uffizi, Florence).

But a St. Joseph of extraordinary relevance to contemporary social concerns likewise grew from the rising centrality of the nuclear family and responsible paterfamilias in the increasingly urbanized market economy of the late fourteenth-, fifteenth-,and political clout, and the resultant waning of clerical power. While the centrality of wit and humor in early Renaissance art may be attributed in part to the nature of the artist's path to success in aristocratic and bourgeois circles, driven by courtly ideals of social exchange still rooted in a foregone feudal gift economy, the gift economy itself was rapidly declining and being replaced by a new, morally complex system reliant on personal profit.