2
Genres and Contested Hierarchies
From the Renaissance onwards there was an understanding among the scholars and institutions of art that
certain kinds of paintings and sculptures, those representing edifying historical, religious or allegorical
themes and narratives, should enjoy the highest status. The hierarchy of genres (or subject types) became
an integral part of artistic culture right through to the nineteenth century and provided a fundamental
structure for most writing on art (Wrigley, 1993, 289–290). The varying subject matter of art was
awarded status in relation to the presence, role and importance of the human figures represented; the
grandeur and rhetorical power of the chosen subject (as opposed to the everyday or “common”); the
amount of erudition – in history, literature, the classics or religion – required; the degree of idealization
or imaginative transformation evident in the style of representation (as opposed to “mechanical” copying
of directly observed objects, sitters and locations); and the degree of “genius” or invention displayed in
the way a particular narrative or subject was conceived.
The genres of art were codified in 1669 by André Félibien, who was at the time an honorary amateur (a
kind of consultant scholar) to the Académie royale in Paris. In his Preface to the Lectures of the Royal
Academy of Painting and Sculpture (Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture) he
expressed the basis of academic hierarchies of genre as a preference for “...a particular kind of art quite
separate from the artisan’s manual skill and physical materials, involving the prior creation of pictures in
the mind, without which a painter and his brush cannot create a perfect work. This art is not like those in
which hard work and manual skill alone can create beauty.” Félibien went on to specify that those works
including the human figure (“God’s most perfect work on earth”) must stand above the rest; artists must
represent “historical and legendary subjects and ... the great actions recounted by historians or the
pleasing subjects treated by poets,” which must be ranked above portraiture. As far as other subjects
were concerned, he felt that it was more difficult to paint animals than inanimate objects (“fruit, flowers
or shells”) and more difficult to paint landscapes than either of these (Félibien, 1669, 35; my
translations).
This hierarchy of genres codified academic values and served to protect the status of history painting. It
remained influential throughout the eighteenth century within European academies of art and in art
criticism. By the middle of the century, drawing manuals included sets of prints on a wide range of
subjects that reinforced such hierarchies, proceeding (in order of importance) from the human figure to
landscape, still life and other motifs (Hsieh, 2013, 409–411). At the same time, however, changing
conditions in the art market and evolving social, political and moral imperatives (which will be
discussed in Chapters 3 and 5 ) led in practice to a blurring of Félibien’s categories and values:
academies were forced to respond to such changes by adopting a more inclusive approach to artists and
subjects of all kinds. Notions of “quality” also began to challenge the preeminence of subject matter. In
France the 1750s and 1760s witnessed a resurgence of interest in still life, landscape and genre subjects
(the latter in the more restricted sense of representations of scenes from everyday life) that had already
been so popular elsewhere, especially in seventeenthcentury Holland. Patrons and buyers began to tire
of “history” subjects, especially when poorly executed, and to prefer the high quality, naturalistic
paintings by still life and landscape artists such as Oudry, Chardin and Vernet (Levey, 1993, 162; Wrigley,
1993, 299).
This tendency later played a part in a major uprising against the Académie royale just after the start of the