Did the person who made the piece make something that is an ideal for them or did they make something as a commentary on the ideals or lifestyle of others?
“The historical sense (or the capacity for quickly guessing the order of rank of the valuations according to which a people, a society, a human being has lived; the ‘divinatory instinct’ for the relations of these valuations, for the relation of the authority of values to the authority of active forces)... has come to us in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe had been plunged by the democratic mingling of the classes and races: only the nineteenth century knows this taste, as its sixth sense.... ‘historical sense’ almost means the sense and instinct for everything, the taste and tongue for everything- which immediately proves it to be an ignoble sense... a dissatisfaction with what is one’s own, and admiration for what is foreign” -Nietzsche