Whenever I listen to Beethoven's later works I think about the fact that they were written by a deaf man, and they mean so much more because of that.
Art is utterly inseparable from the artist. I believe this to be the main reason why pre-Renaissance art is mostly ignored. We can't put faces next to those works, so they don't matter nearly as much as those works for which we can.
Forgive me for hijacking your comment and planting a reference to one of my favorite Hieronymus Bosch websites (warning: contains music): https://archief.ntr.nl/tuinderlusten/en.html#
Imagine this website being made for a Stable Diffusion generated image...
Art is utterly inseparable from the artist. I believe this to be the main reason why pre-Renaissance art is mostly ignored. We can't put faces next to those works, so they don't matter nearly as much as those works for which we can.