# The Classification of the Arts

Art History I · Artistic Languages · https://tryals.app/learn/art-history-i/the-classification-of-the-arts

## A System Invented in 1746

The idea that the fine arts belong together is not ancient. In 1746, **Charles Batteux** grouped them by a shared principle: the **imitation of beautiful nature**.

Before this, the Greek *technē* and Latin *ars* meant any skilled craft, including medicine. The eighteenth century assembled what we now call the **modern system of the arts**.

This system was defined by three key exclusions:

- **Craft** was excluded, which pushed out much work by women and non-European cultures.
- **Utility** was made suspect, ranking functional objects below contemplative ones.
- **The applied arts** were relegated to a lower status.

### Classifying the Arts

| Division | Criterion | Proposed by |
|---|---|---|
| Spatial vs temporal | Whether the work unfolds in time | Lessing (1766) |
| Imitative vs non-imitative | Whether it represents | 18th century |
| Autographic vs allographic | Whether forgery is possible | Goodman (1968) |
| Major vs minor | Institutional prestige | The academies |

**Lessing** distinguished arts of **space** from arts of **time**. Painting captures a single spatial moment. Poetry narrates actions over time. Each medium must obey its own material constraints.

**Hegel** ranked the arts by how well idea overcomes matter, placing heavy architecture lowest and poetry highest.

New media and conceptual art later broke this eighteenth-century framework. What survives are the underlying **questions** about medium and value.

> **Common pitfall:** treating the fine arts as a timeless category rather than an eighteenth-century invention.

## Practice questions

9 of this lesson's 14 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Arrange these contributions to the classification of the arts in order.

**Answer:**

1. Batteux reduces the fine arts to a single principle (1746)
2. Lessing distinguishes spatial from temporal arts (1766)
3. Hegel's lectures on aesthetics set out a hierarchy (1820s)
4. Duchamp's readymades propose selection as art (1910s)
5. Goodman distinguishes autographic from allographic arts (1968)

**Why:** The two-century gap between Hegel and Duchamp contains the whole life of the system: assembled in the eighteenth century, given a philosophical hierarchy in the nineteenth, and dismantled in the twentieth by works the scheme had no place for.

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### 2. Why does Lessing argue that painting should choose the moment just before a climax?

A. A single image must fix one instant, and the instant before invites the viewer to complete the action
B. Depicting the ultimate culmination of an event was considered too technically demanding for visual arts
C. The pregnant moment allows spatial arts to emulate poetry by narrating a temporal sequence across space
D. Eighteenth-century academic conventions strictly forbade the depiction of extreme emotional suffering

**Answer:** A. A single image must fix one instant, and the instant before invites the viewer to complete the action

**Why:** Because a painting has **one instant** to spend. Lessing's argument is that the moment before the climax leaves the outcome to be completed by the viewer, while the climax itself fixes and exhausts it. The advice follows from the medium rather than from decorum, which is what makes it an argument rather than a taste.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/the-classification-of-the-arts/why-does-lessing-argue-that-painting-should-choose-the-moment-just

### 3. The grouping of painting, sculpture, music, poetry and dance as "the fine arts" dates from antiquity.

**Answer:** False

**Why:** **False.** *Technē* and *ars* meant skill or craft and covered shoemaking and medicine alongside sculpture. The modern system was assembled in the eighteenth century, and treating it as ancient makes it impossible to ask why particular practices were left outside it.

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### 4. Complete the account of the system of the arts.

**Answer:** Batteux grouped the fine arts under the principle of the **imitation** of beautiful nature. Lessing divided them into **spatial** and temporal arts according to whether the work unfolds in time. Hegel ordered them by how far the **material** is subordinated to the idea. The category was built partly by excluding **craft**, which placed a great deal of work by women outside it.

**Why:** The last blank is the consequential one. Pottery, weaving, metalwork and embroidery were placed outside the fine arts, and the boundary tracked the gender and geography of who made what closely enough that the correlation is now part of the standard critique of the system.

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### 5. Which exclusions were built into the eighteenth-century system of the fine arts?

A. Objects made primarily to be used
B. Painting and sculpture
C. The applied and decorative arts
D. Craft practices such as weaving and metalwork

**Answer:** A. Objects made primarily to be used; C. The applied and decorative arts; D. Craft practices such as weaving and metalwork

**Why:** The first three define the boundary by what they exclude, and the exclusions were not neutral. Making utility suspect meant that an object designed to be used was, by construction, a lesser thing than one made to be contemplated, a judgement the Arts and Crafts movement and the Bauhaus both attacked directly.

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### 6. How many arts did Batteux group together as the fine arts on his shared principle?

**Answer:** 5

**Why:** **Five** — music, poetry, painting, sculpture and dance — with architecture and eloquence treated as mixed cases combining beauty with utility. That awkward annexe is where the whole later problem of the applied arts begins.

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### 7. The classical concepts of technē and ars encompassed skilled practices like medicine, whereas the eighteenth-century system separated 'fine art' by elevating pure contemplation. What followed from this theoretical shift for functional making?

A. Craft was entirely banned from European institutional training
B. Useful objects were subordinated to non-utilitarian works
C. All creative practices were now ranked solely by their medium format
D. Applied arts were praised for uniting aesthetic and practical ends

**Answer:** B. Useful objects were subordinated to non-utilitarian works

**Why:** Treating function as inferior to contemplation created an artificial hierarchy between pure aesthetics and craft. This was not a practical ban on manual trades, nor an embrace of applied utility, but a devaluation of everyday decorative making.

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### 8. Hegel ordered the arts by how far the material is subordinated to the idea.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True**, and the ordering encodes a real observation whatever one makes of the metaphysics: the arts differ enormously in how much sheer material must be overcome before anything can be expressed. A building must stand up before it can mean anything, and a poem need only be uttered.

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### 9. Roughly how many centuries old is the grouping we call "the fine arts"?

**Answer:** 3 (within ±1.5)

**Why:** Between **two and three centuries**: Batteux published in 1746. The number is worth carrying because the category feels timeless from inside, and knowing its date is what makes it possible to ask why particular practices were left out of it.

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