Right but (and I could be wrong here) it seems like lamenting this is largely a recent thing. Renaissance artists were focused on creating the best possible work, not lamenting that they had to make paintings for money and not for their own desires.
You are making quite the assumption there. There are quite a few among us focusing on creating the best possible work. And there are quite a few back then who did the opposite. Wouldn't you wonder where the conception that things were different came from?
As I said, I could be wrong. If you have an example of artists in the distant past lamenting the fact that they can’t do what they want and instead must make art for money, I’d be glad to read them.
I didn’t say people today aren’t creating the best possible work, I said this focus on the juxtaposition between the market and the self seems like a recent thing to me.
Depends on how you define "lamenting". Unless there are diaries of the artists in question, it is very difficult to know the private thoughts of people in the distant past. That said, there are certainly well-documented stories of artists being forced to change their work because of (unreasonable) demands from their patrons.
One example is the Windsor guildhall [1], where the architect was forced to add extra columns "for safety reasons" even though he knew they were unnecessary and even though they conflicted with his artistic vision. He was clearly unhappy with this and made them all an inch short of the ceiling as a demonstration to later generations, even though it was impossible to see this from ground level so he still got paid.
Michelangelo would also appease his patron (gonfaliere Soderini) while he was present, famously by faking the altering of the nose of his statue of David. Then some years later while Soderini had fled to Rome for unrelated reasons, Michelangelo publicly made fun of Soderini and mentioned that he only worked for him because he paid so well [2].
These are just some examples that readily came to mind, I'm sure there are many many more. The concept of patronage has existed at least since Roman times, and very much implied that the artists involved would spend their time glorifying their patron instead of just doing "what they want".
Da Vinci perhaps did not lament, but hustled hard to minimize the amount of boring commissions people were most willing to pay for (portraits of noblewomen, of merchants' daughters etc.). And, when he did take a boring commission work, he could procrastinate on it for years, or never finish it at all.
