Practice question · Put in order
Arrange the academic genres from the highest rank to the lowest.
- Genre scene
- History painting
- Portrait
- Still life
- Landscape
Hints
- The ranking runs by how much invention and human action each requires.
- The genre with no human action at all ranks below one that depicts ordinary life.
Show the answer
- History painting
- Portrait
- Genre scene
- Landscape
- 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.
Practise Themes, Genres and the Hierarchy
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More questions on Themes, Genres and the Hierarchy
- Sort each picture description by the academic genre it belongs to.
- Women were excluded from the life class in most academies, and history painting required the nude figure in…
- "History painting" in academic usage covers mythological and scriptural subjects as well as historical ones.
- The academic hierarchy of genres was an institutional apparatus rather than a taxonomy of personal taste.…
- Complete the account of the hierarchy.
- How many ranks did Félibien's hierarchy of genres contain?
- Dutch seventeenth-century painting had already inverted the academic hierarchy in practice.
- Arrange these developments in the life of the genre hierarchy in order.