# Themes, Genres and the Hierarchy

Art History I · Iconography · https://tryals.app/learn/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy

## Subjects Are Not Neutral

A picture has a **subject**, but artists did not always choose it freely. For centuries, subjects were strictly ranked.

**André Félibien** formalised this order in 1667 for the **French Academy**:

| Rank | Genre | Justification |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | **History painting** | Moral choice, invention, human action |
| 2 | **Portrait** | Human figure, but records rather than invents |
| 3 | **Genre scene** | Scenes of ordinary life |
| 4 | **Landscape** | Natural world without human action |
| 5 | **Still life** | Inanimate things; requires only technical skill |

**History** painting meant any scene with **narrative and moral content and multiple figures in action**.

### What the hierarchy did

The ranking was an institutional machine with concrete effects:

- **Training**: The life class was central because history painting required the nude figure.
- **Prizes and commissions**: High standing depended directly on producing history paintings.
- **Access**: Academies barred women from the life class, excluding them from elite training.

**Why** were there few recognised women masters? The institutional rules created that outcome directly.

### The hierarchy comes apart

The system broke down across the nineteenth century. Middle-class buyers wanted domestic pictures rather than vast history canvases.

**Landscape** gained new prestige, while **Still life** became the site of radical formal experiments. Modern artists elevated the very genre **Félibien** placed lowest.

### Reading pictures today

Knowing the genre tells you what an artwork was **claiming** in its own time:

- Grand history paintings claimed intellectual seriousness and moral weight.
- Painting humble genres on a monumental scale challenged academic authority.

> **Common pitfall:** treating the hierarchy as mere personal taste. It was a rigid institutional system that controlled careers, training and public prestige.

## Practice questions

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

### 1. Sort each picture description by the academic genre it belongs to.

**Answer:**

- History painting: Figures in Livy scene, Allegory of Justice
- Portrait: Magistrate portrait
- Genre scene: Kitchen peeling scene, Tavern card players
- Still life: Fruit, glass on table

**Why:** The allegory belongs in the top category, which surprises people: "history painting" is a term of art covering anything with narrative and moral content and multiple figures in action, whatever its source. Getting that right is the difference between reading the hierarchy and guessing at it.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/sort-each-picture-description-by-the-academic-genre-it-belongs-to

### 2. Women were excluded from the life class in most academies, and history painting required the nude figure in action. Why does that pair of facts matter more than any judgement about talent?

A. Women actively chose lower genres due to domestic tastes and market demand
B. The academy formally ruled women lacked the capacity for moral invention
C. Prospective female artists chose to decline formal institutional training
D. It structurally barred women from training required for the highest genre

**Answer:** D. It structurally barred women from training required for the highest genre

**Why:** Because it makes the outcome **structural**. No judgement about ability is needed: if the top genre requires training in the nude figure and that training is closed, then the top of the hierarchy is closed too, by a mechanism nobody has to state. This is the shape of Nochlin's answer to her own 1971 question.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/women-were-excluded-from-the-life-class-in-most-academies-and

### 3. "History painting" in academic usage covers mythological and scriptural subjects as well as historical ones.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True.** The category is defined by narrative and moral content with multiple figures in action, not by whether the events happened. Scripture, myth, allegory and literature all qualify, which is why so much of what sits at the top of the hierarchy is not history in any ordinary sense.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/history-painting-in-academic-usage-covers-mythological-and

### 4. The academic hierarchy of genres was an institutional apparatus rather than a taxonomy of personal taste. What follows from this distinction for how we assess the historical under-representation of women masters?

A. Institutions merely codified social prejudices instead of actively structuring careers
B. Their exclusion reflected market demand for domestic scenes rather than moral canvases
C. Barring women from the life class severed their access to the highest-ranked genre
D. Academic rules relegated women to landscape painting because it required less invention

**Answer:** C. Barring women from the life class severed their access to the highest-ranked genre

**Why:** Treating the hierarchy as taste treats exclusion as passive consensus. In truth, institutional machinery directly regulated professional survival: withholding life-class training structurally prevented women from executing the moral anatomy required of history painting.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/the-academic-hierarchy-of-genres-was-an-institutional-apparatus

### 5. Complete the account of the hierarchy.

**Answer:** The ranking of genres was set out by **Félibien** in 1667 for the French Academy. The genre ranked first was **history** painting, and the genre ranked last was **still** life. Academic training was built around the **life** class, from which women were excluded in most academies.

**Why:** The last blank is where the hierarchy stops being an opinion and becomes a mechanism. The life class taught the nude in action, history painting required it, and closing the class closed the genre, which is a structural exclusion rather than a stated one.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/complete-the-account-of-the-hierarchy

### 6. How many ranks did Félibien's hierarchy of genres contain?

**Answer:** 5

**Why:** **Five**: history painting, portrait, genre scene, landscape and still life. The ordering runs by how much human action and invention each was held to require, which is a single consistent criterion, and why the scheme held together for two centuries.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/how-many-ranks-did-felibiens-hierarchy-of-genres-contain

### 7. Arrange the academic genres from the highest rank to the lowest.

**Answer:**

1. History painting
2. Portrait
3. Genre scene
4. Landscape
5. Still life

**Why:** Two genres ranked at the bottom, landscape and still life, became the vehicles for the most radical experiments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cézanne's apples and Cubism's tabletops belong to the genre Félibien placed last, which is a reversal worth pausing over.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/arrange-the-academic-genres-from-the-highest-rank-to-the-lowest

### 8. Dutch seventeenth-century painting had already inverted the academic hierarchy in practice.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** **True.** Landscape, still life and genre scenes dominated Dutch production and its market, in a society without a court academy imposing a ranking. Its rediscovery in the nineteenth century supplied a precedent for painters who wanted the hierarchy gone, a whole tradition of major achievement in the genres Félibien had placed last.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/dutch-seventeenth-century-painting-had-already-inverted-the-academic

### 9. Arrange these developments in the life of the genre hierarchy in order.

**Answer:**

1. Félibien sets out the ranking for the French Academy
2. Dutch painting is rediscovered and admired in France
3. A middle-class market for domestic pictures expands
4. Landscape and still life carry the most ambitious painting
5. Nochlin asks why there have been no great women artists

**Why:** The last item belongs on the same timeline because it asks about the machinery the first item built. Nochlin's essay is a question about institutions — training, access, prizes — and the hierarchy is where those institutions got their shape.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/art-history-i/themes-genres-and-the-hierarchy/arrange-these-developments-in-the-life-of-the-genre-hierarchy-in