Practice question · Multiple choice
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?
Hints
- Ask what the exclusion made impossible, rather than what it expressed.
- A career in the top genre needed training that was closed off.
Show the 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.
Practise Themes, Genres and the Hierarchy
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on Themes, Genres and the Hierarchy
- Sort each picture description by the academic genre it belongs to.
- "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?
- 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.