Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture
This academy was founded in 1648, in response to pressure from painters, who demanded official recognition that they belonged to a learned profession requiring intellectual abilities and an academic training, rather than to a trade. Previously art and crafts had been rigorously controlled by the guilds. Charles Lebrun, Testelin, and Monsieur de Charmois persuaded the young Louis XIV to develop the Academy along the lines of those in Italy, to provide a system of instruction based on reason, rules, and study of the best masters. In 1665 the institution was given royal approval and funding. Rules, a code of practice, lectures, prize-givings, exhibitions, and a monopoly of life-classes were agreed and the Academy was given rooms in the Louvre. Colbert was appointed as vice-protector, and set about a programme of centralizing French art production and training which was to establish court and government control of patronage of the arts for over a century.
The social and political aims of the Academy were important, but the primary aim was educational. Students learned the practical aspects of painting or sculpture in the studios of their masters and only came to the Academy for instruction in drawing from Old Master drawings, then from casts, and finally from the life model. Painting was assumed to be an intellectual discipline requiring specialist education to be practised or understood. Mathematics, perspective, and geometry were taught, but the principal vehicle of indoctrination was the lecture or discourse.
Rules for young artists emerged from the analysis of pictures through a system of sequential categories. Fréart de Chambray identified the five most important visual categories as invention, proportion, colour, expression, and composition. Didactic qualities, expression, decorum, and appropriateness all figured in discussions about artistic scales of value. Attitudes to proportion and the intellectual pre-eminence of line were based on an understanding of the sacrosanct values of antiquity.
Competition was crucial to the idea of the Academy. Students were continuously assessed and graded. Those who attained the Grand Prix were given three years of subsidized advanced instruction in oil-painting. The Prix de Rome entitled the winner to four years of free study at the Académie de France in Rome—free, except that he must produce copies of the best (accredited) sculptures and paintings from Rome. The set subjects for this competition were, of course, drawn from classical writers.
In the early 18th c. the discourse system caused some Academic ideas to be discredited. The Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes between the Rubenistes (de Piles) and Poussinistes (Lebrun), which began in 1671, disputed the relative value of line and colour. The naturalism, realism, and truth attributed to colour triumphed over the abstract rigour of line. This refreshed official French taste and opened the doors of the Academy to a range of Venetian and Dutch-influenced artists such as Watteau, Fragonard, and Chardin.
The first three decades of the 18th c. were a disrupted period. Exhibitions known as Salons were irregularly held [see Art Criticism], the established hierarchy of subject-matter was overturned, and still life—or subject-free art—attained the same importance as history painting, while variety, sprightliness, and grace became recognized as qualities to be admired.
Throughout Europe the central importance of individuality and intuition in all the creative arts came to dominate thinking. In Revolutionary France David rebelled against the idea that genius could be taught or bounded by academies. The École des Beaux Arts replaced the Royal Academy in name, but the French system of academic art training continued to be very centralized and controlled, while painters continued to obtain their practical grounding in the studios of individual masters like David or Gros.
[Patsy Campbell]
