Practice question · Multiple choice
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?
Hints
- What specific training pipeline did the Academy control to maintain its ranking of artists?
- Did the absence of women stem from market preferences, or from institutional barriers to elite technique?
Show the 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.
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.
- Complete the account of the hierarchy.
- How many ranks did Félibien's hierarchy of genres contain?
- Arrange the academic genres from the highest rank to the lowest.
- Dutch seventeenth-century painting had already inverted the academic hierarchy in practice.
- Arrange these developments in the life of the genre hierarchy in order.