Classicism and the Academies
In the 17th century the experience of the Renaissance hardened into rules. Art was to improve on nature through selection, follow reason and the ancient models – and the rules were to be taught in academies. Yet at the same time a question grew: might colour, feeling and the viewer’s experience matter more than all the rules?
The Renaissance had given art a new dignity: the painter and the architect were learned men who mastered proportion, perspective and the models of antiquity. In the 17th century the question was how this legacy should be managed. In Rome around 1600 two paths stood opposed. Caravaggio painted sacred stories using models from the street, in a sharp, dramatic light. Annibale Carracci and his circle, by contrast, sought to unite the study of nature with the harmony of Raphael and the ancients. Out of that conflict grew a theory that would shape Europe’s art institutions for two centuries: classicism, the doctrine that art should follow reason, select the best from nature and conform to proven models. The word classicism itself is later; contemporaries preferred to speak of good taste, of the rules and of the old masters. But the substance was clear: art should be intelligible, dignified and orderly, and it should show nature not as it happens to be but as it ought to be.
Classicism went hand in hand with a new kind of institution, the academy. The Accademia di San Luca in Rome was founded in the 1590s, and in Paris the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture was established in 1648. Under Louis XIV and his minister Colbert the French academy became part of the machinery of state, with the painter Charles Le Brun as its leading figure. In 1671 the architects too received an academy of their own. The academies taught, awarded prizes and held lectures, and they turned art theory into something that could be formulated, debated and taught. Behind this lay an old claim: painting, sculpture and architecture were liberal arts, intellectual work and not craft. Versailles, where Le Brun directed the decoration of the Hall of Mirrors in 1678–1684, shows what the programme meant in practice: architecture, painting, sculpture and garden were coordinated into a single image of the order of royal power.
The most influential formulation of classicism’s theory of beauty came from the Roman antiquarian Giovanni Pietro Bellori. In the lecture L’Idea (The Idea), delivered at the Accademia di San Luca in 1664 and printed as the introduction to his lives of the artists in 1672, he described how the artist carries within him an image of a higher beauty. He borrowed the word idea from the Platonic tradition, but in Bellori the idea does not come from a heavenly realm. It arises as the artist studies nature and selects the best, just as the ancient painter Zeuxis, according to legend, composed his Helen from the most beautiful features of several women. The idea is thus nature improved, not nature denied. Bellori also drew on a letter attributed to Raphael, in which the painter says that, since beautiful women are rare, he makes use of a certain idea that comes to him. It was precisely this attitude that Bellori wished to make into doctrine.
With this yardstick Bellori could pass judgement in two directions. The Mannerists, in his view, had abandoned nature and painted from fantasy. Caravaggio had made the opposite mistake: he copied nature as it was, without selection, with dirty feet and ordinary faces. The Calling of Saint Matthew is a good example of what the classicists reacted against – and of why Caravaggio was nonetheless so hard to dismiss. The heroes of Bellori’s account were instead Annibale Carracci, Domenichino and Nicolas Poussin, artists who in his eyes united the study of nature with ideality. Caravaggio’s influence was nevertheless immense. His light and his everyday figures spread through the Caravaggisti from Utrecht to Naples, and Rubens, the young Velázquez and Rembrandt all absorbed his example. The opposition between naturalism and idealism was thus not merely a theory but a live question in the studios.
Poussin, who lived in Rome for most of his life, became the model of classical painting. He wrote no treatise, but his letters and the conversations later recorded by Bellori and the French writer André Félibien reveal a painter who thought like a philosopher. In a letter to his patron Chantelou in 1647 he compared the different moods of painting with the ancient musical modes: one subject requires a severe tone, another a gentle or joyful one. Everything in the picture – gestures, colours, composition – was to be subordinated to the subject. In 1665, the year he died, he summed up in a letter that painting is an imitation with lines and colours of everything that can be seen under the sun, and that its end is delight (délectation). The formulation matters: even for the strictest classicist the goal was pleasure, albeit a rational one. In The Arcadian Shepherds (c. 1637–1638) a few shepherds read a tomb inscription, Et in Arcadia ego – even in Arcadia I am present, meaning death. The figures are as calm as those on an ancient relief, and the picture invites reflection rather than shock: the opposite strategy to Caravaggio’s.
In Paris Poussin’s example was turned into doctrine. The academy’s lectures, which began in 1667, analysed individual works – often by Raphael and Poussin – with regard to composition, drawing, expression and colour. In the late 1660s Félibien formulated the ranking of subjects that the academy came to follow: at the top history painting with biblical, mythological and historical subjects, then portraits, animals, landscapes and finally still lifes. In 1668 Le Brun lectured on how the passions of the soul – fear, anger, admiration – should be shown in the face, and his drawings became models for generations of pupils. The shared assumption was that expression and beauty follow rules that reason can discover. How far the rules could be pushed is shown by a lecture on Poussin’s Eliezer and Rebecca in 1668. Philippe de Champaigne remarked that the camels mentioned in the Bible were missing from the picture, and Le Brun replied that Poussin had left them out so as not to distract from the main action. The question of what a picture must include and what it may leave out was debated with the same seriousness as a philosophical question.
The same faith in reason marked literature. Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art poétique (The Art of Poetry, 1674) became the handbook of classicism: love reason, strive for clarity, follow the ancient models, observe the probable and the fitting. But in the same year Boileau published a French translation of Pseudo-Longinus’ treatise On the Sublime, the ancient text on the elevated style that grips and overwhelms. Thus classicism’s foremost legislator himself introduced into European debate an idea that could not be reduced to rules – an idea that would become highly significant in the 18th century.
In architecture the question concerned proportion. François Blondel, the first director of the academy of architecture, maintained that the proportions of the classical orders were grounded in nature and pleased for the same reasons as musical harmonies. The physician and architect Claude Perrault, who had translated Vitruvius into French in 1673, objected in Ordonnance des cinq espèces de colonnes (The Ordering of the Five Kinds of Columns, 1683). He distinguished between a positive beauty, which everyone perceives – fine materials, careful execution, symmetry – and an arbitrary beauty, which rests on habit and convention. Proportions, he argued, belonged to the latter kind. The discussion was part of the larger Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, which Claude’s brother Charles Perrault set in motion in 1687 by claiming that the culture of his own age was on a par with that of antiquity. The most visible result was the east façade of the Louvre, with its long row of paired columns, built from 1667 by a committee that included Claude Perrault together with Louis Le Vau and Le Brun. Bernini had been summoned to Paris in 1665 to design the façade, but his Baroque proposal was set aside. The choice became a symbol of a French classicism that wanted to stand on its own feet.
Even nature was to be ordered. From the 1660s André Le Nôtre laid out the gardens of Versailles with straight axes, clipped hedges, geometric parterres and long reflecting pools. The garden was an image of the same idea as the academies’ teachings: nature is beautiful when reason has given it form. In the 18th century this very garden would become the target of a new taste, as the English landscape park set irregular, seemingly wild nature against the French order.
Within the academy of painting an equally fundamental dispute was under way, the one over drawing and colour. The classicists saw drawing as the rational core of art and colour as something that flatters the eye. Against them stood those who admired the Venetians and Rubens, whose Descent from the Cross relies on flesh, light and colour as much as on line. The leading spokesman for colour was Roger de Piles. The debate between the “Poussinistes” and the “Rubénistes” pointed towards a new question: perhaps art should be judged not primarily by rules, but by how it affects the person looking at it.
Outside the French system things looked very different. In Madrid Velázquez painted Las Meninas in 1656, a picture that follows few of the academies’ rules but is concerned precisely with the dignity of painting and with the viewer’s place before the picture. A few years later Velázquez was made a knight of the Order of Santiago, and the cross on his chest in the painting is usually taken to have been added afterwards – a sign that the painter now counted among the nobility rather than the craftsmen. By the turn of the 18th century classicism had created a shared language for art criticism and institutions that would long endure. But the centre of gravity was shifting from the rules of the work to the taste and feeling of the public. That is where the aesthetics of the Enlightenment takes over.