The concept of satisfying material and spiritual needs extended into all fields in pre-industrial times. James J. Walsh writes:
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“This mingling of the useful and the beautiful is of itself a supreme difference between the thirteenth century generations and our own. Mr. Yeats, the well known Irish poet, in bidding farewell to America some years ago said to a party of friends, 
that no country could consider itself to be making real progress in culture until the very utensils in the kitchen were beautiful as well as useful. Anything that is merely useful is hideous, and anyone who can handle such things with impunity has not true culture” (The Thirteenth, Greatest of Centuries,[New York: Fordham University Press, 1946], 113).