Canto XLV Greed Quotes

To really get the gist of this line, you need to know that Pound is referring to Francesco Gonzaga, a rich dude who lived in Mantua (that's in Italy) back in the old days. Here, Pound is implying that in ye olden times, people like Gonzaga were willing to pay artists to create great art without any expectation that they would make money off the art some day. The idea of having something beautiful was way more important than having money. Pound wishes people still felt that way.

Unfortunately, artists nowadays don't always have some rich patron to take care of them. Instead, they have to create art that they can make money off of if they plan on oh, you know, feeding themselves. For Pound, though, this is a terrible part of modern life, because it encourages greed in artists, who can't do their work well if they're thinking about selling it to some ordinary Joe. Beauty needs to be their first priority. In other words, Pound wishes there were still rich patrons who would pay artists to create beautiful work.

Pound offers us a lengthy list of people who never would have become great artists in a world with moneylending and modern finance. In other words, he says that great artists would never have existed if the old world had chased money the same way the modern one does. Beautiful art is completely incompatible with a desire to make profits, and the modern world always tends to side with profit over beauty.