academy

academy An association of artists, scholars, etc. that aims to maintain professional standards and to promote the affairs of its members. Although the name was applied to various informal gatherings of artists from c.1500, the first formal art academy was not set up until 1563, when the Accademia del Disegno was founded in Florence. It was the brainchild of Giorgio Vasari, whose aim was to emancipate artists from control by the guilds, and to confirm the rise in social standing they had achieved during the previous hundred years. Michelangelo, who more than anyone else embodied this change of status, was made one of the two honorary heads; the other was Duke Cosimo I de' Medici. The next important step was taken in Rome, where the Accademia di S. Luca was founded in 1593, with Federico Zuccaro as its first president. More stress was laid on practical instruction than at Florence, but the Academy was unsuccessful in its war against the guilds until it received support from Pope Urban VIII (Maffeo Barberini, reigned 1623–44), who recognized it as ‘an authority superior to the crafts guilds’. Thereafter it grew in wealth and prestige. There were few other permanent academies in Italy before the 18th century, but the word was frequently used of private institutions where artists met to draw from life. The most famous example of this kind was organized by the Carracci in Bologna in the 1580s.

Several institutions of the Carracci type were set up in northern Europe (the ‘academy’ founded in Haarlem in about 1600 by Cornelis van Haarlem, Hendrick Goltzius, and Karel van Mander was probably some kind of life drawing class). However, the first official art academy outside Italy was not established until 1648. In that year a group of French painters, moved by the same reasons of prestige as had earlier inspired the Italians, successfully petitioned Louis XIV to found the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Here too the guilds put up powerful opposition, and the Académie's supremacy was not assured until Louis's chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was elected vice-protector in 1661 and saw that he could use it as an instrument of state—for imposing official standards and principles of taste that would help to create a national artistic identity and a style appropriate for glorifying the king. Le Brun was appointed director of the Académie in 1663 and he and Colbert ensured that it assumed a virtual monopoly of teaching and over the exhibiting of works of art. Implicit in the Académie's theories and teaching was the assumption that everything to do with art can be brought within the scope of rational understanding and reduced to logical precepts that can be studied and taught.

After the middle of the 17th century, art academies were founded in Germany, Spain, and other countries and by the end of the 18th century well over a hundred were flourishing throughout Europe. Among these was the Royal Academy in London, founded in 1768. Everywhere the academies became champions of Neoclassicism in opposition to the surviving styles of Baroque and Rococo. There was some opposition to these bodies from the start, and towards the end of the 18th century French Revolutionary sentiment was especially bitter about the exclusive privileges enjoyed by members of the Académie; many artists, with J.-L. David in the lead, demanded its dissolution. This step was taken in 1793, but the École des Beaux-Arts, which took over its teaching role, embodied much the same principles.

The principal threat to academies came not from political developments, however, but from the Romantic notion of the artist as a genius who produces his masterpieces by the light of inspiration that cannot be taught or subjected to rule. Virtually all the most creative artists of the later 19th century stood outside the academies and sought alternative channels for exhibiting their works, although Manet for example, always craved traditional success at the Salon. Academies still retained prestige in conservative circles, but they were condemned out of hand by the adventurous, and in 1898, in his book Modern Painting, the novelist and critic George Moore (1852–1933) wrote, ‘that nearly all artists dislike and despise the Royal Academy is a matter of common knowledge’. In the face of competition from rival teaching institutions and artists' groups (such as the Slade School and the New English Art Club in England and the Sezessionen in Germany and Austria) academies tended to become more liberal, but by the middle of the 20th century they were increasingly marginalized. The word ‘academic’ now almost always carries a pejorative meaning, and is associated with mediocrity and lack of originality.