Art History I / The Classification of the Arts
Practice question · Fill in the blanks

Complete the account of the system of the arts.

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

Word bank: imitation · spatial · material · craft · invention · utility

Hints
  1. The first blank is the shared principle Batteux proposed.
  2. The last blank names what was placed outside the category.
Show the 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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