More Art Zones
|
Noon Landscape Art Print De Staël, Nicolas 27.56 in. x 19.69 in. Buy at AllPosters.com Framed Mounted The word derives from a grove near Athens dedicated by the Ancient Greeks to the mythical hero Akademos, where Plato conversed with his pupils. The name was revived during the early Italian Renaissance in idealistic humanist circles, the most influential of which was the group gathered about Lorenzo de' Medici. The term academy was then used of any meeting of cultured and learned men to discuss the problems of science and philosophy. In the 16th century the word came to denote almost any regular gathering.
The earliest official academy of art was the Academia del Disegno founded by Vasari in 1563. Its immediate offspring was the Academia di San Luca in Rome ( 1593), the organization of which became the prototype of Lebrun's and Colbert's Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, founded in Paris in 1648. The latter, in turn, with its elaborate order of precedence, its mode of training, its artistic doctrines and its affiliate institution in Rome, was the model for similar enterprises throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
From the beginning, these official academies differed from such private studio academies as that of Bandinelli ( 1531) and that of the Carracci in Bologna (c. 1590), by their wider aims and their higher pretensions. Their object was to raise the artist from the level of the medieval craftsman to that of the creator by freeing him from the jurisdiction of the guilds. In order to achieve this, the founders of the official academies usually invoked the protectorate of the reigning monarch, a course of action which often resulted in the subservience of the new academicians to the Crown.
The pedagogic aims of the academy were not much emphasised in the early foundations. The artist still received his elementary training in the workshop of his master and the academy attempted no more than to educate him to fulfil the demands of the grand manner. It was only at the beginning of the 19th century that the academies added instruction in the actual technique of painting to their classes in drawing -- first after drawings, then after plaster casts and living models.
The conceptions of workshop and academy were united towards the end of the 19th century when schools of arts and crafts were founded, where not only sculpture, painting and architecture were taught, but also the crafts, typography, commercial art and industrial design. One of the most famous of all such schools in the present century was the Bauhaus. The academies themselves, however, did not follow this trend, but persisted in educating artists in the grand manner. The battle between independent progressive artists and the academies fills the annals of the 19th century. Only now are the academies slowly beginning to renounce their tenets and coming to terms with contemporary modes of expression.
|
 |
RSS Feed XML Sitemap HTML Sitemap Contact Us Privacy Policy