Academic art, or academicism, was the painting and sculpture shaped by Europe’s official art academies, from their founding in 16th-century Italy to the early 20th century, with its peak in the 19th. Its pictures are large, precisely drawn and smoothly finished, with idealized bodies, theatrical gestures and careful archaeological detail, and they favor history, mythology and exotic subjects over everyday life. The academies replaced the old craft guilds and raised artists from the rank of artisans to that of educated men. Through their schools, prizes and exhibitions they decided for generations what counted as official art.
The first academy was founded in Florence on 13 January 1563 by Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici under the influence of Giorgio Vasari, with Michelangelo among its first members. In Bologna the Carracci opened their own academy in 1582. In Paris the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, founded in 1648, became an arm of the state; Louis XIV used it to glorify his reign, and in 1666 it opened a branch in Rome. Academies followed in Madrid (1752), St. Petersburg (1757) and London, where the Royal Academy was founded in 1768.
Academic doctrine ranked subjects in a hierarchy of genres. History painting, with biblical, mythological, literary and allegorical scenes, stood at the top because it showed the human body and carried moral lessons; portraits, scenes of daily life, landscapes and still lifes followed. In the late 17th century members of the Paris Academy argued whether Poussin’s drawing or Rubens’s color should be the model, and the quarrel returned in the 19th century as Ingres against Delacroix. Later masters sought to reconcile the two. Thomas Couture maintained that line and color could not be separated, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau said he would paint not a war but War itself.
Training at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris took four years and followed fixed steps. Students first copied prints after ancient sculpture, then drew from plaster casts, and only then from the live nude model; such figure studies were themselves called académies. Painting was not taught at the École until 1863, so students learned the brush in an academician’s studio. The top student prize, the Prix de Rome, sent the winner to the French Academy at the Villa Medici in Rome for up to five years. In the final round ten candidates, all French, male, single and under 30, spent 72 days shut in studios painting a history picture. Women were admitted to the École only in 1897.
The Paris Salon made or broke careers. Up to 500,000 visitors could pass through during its two months, and thousands of paintings hung frame to frame up to the ceiling. Artists fought to be hung on the line at eye level rather than skyed near the top. Thomas Couture triumphed in 1847 with The Romans in Their Decadence (Musée d’Orsay). At the Salon of 1863 Napoleon III bought Alexandre Cabanel’s Birth of Venus (Musée d’Orsay), a pearly nude afloat on the waves. Bouguereau’s own Birth of Venus (1879, Musée d’Orsay) and Jean-Léon Gérôme’s gladiator scene Pollice Verso (1872, Phoenix Art Museum) show the polished manner at its height.
Academies also shaped national schools elsewhere. In London, Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy from 1878, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted a sunlit antiquity of marble and silk, as in The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888, private collection). In Vienna, Hans Makart’s vast history pictures and lavish decoration dominated taste. Alexander Ivanov spent twenty years on The Appearance of Christ before the People (1837-1857, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow), and in Kraków Jan Matejko painted Polish history, as in The Battle of Grunwald (1878, National Museum, Warsaw). Women were long excluded: Johan Zoffany’s group portrait of the Royal Academicians (1771-1772, Royal Collection) shows the founding members Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser only as portraits on the wall.
Opposition grew from the 1850s. After works of his were rejected for the Exposition Universelle of 1855, Gustave Courbet showed them in his own Pavilion of Realism, and Realists attacked academic idealism and its slick, licked surfaces. In 1863 Napoleon III allowed a Salon des Refusés for rejected works, where Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe was mocked. Manet himself had trained for six years with Couture. Critics later called the style art pompier, a name usually traced to helmets in the pictures of David and his school that resembled firemen’s. In 1939 Clement Greenberg dismissed academic painting as kitsch. Since the Musée d’Orsay opened in 1986, showing it beside the Impressionists, it has returned to museum walls and the auction market.
