ACCADEMISMO. - This name, not without an element of negative criticism, has been given to that way of understanding and teaching art which, Academies (v.), reached its fullest development at the beginning of the nineteenth century and has been identified by some with neo-classicism. Many of its rules survived even during the Romantic and realist periods.
Academicism has been accused of having fostered, through its theory of ideal beauty derived from the classics, a paganizing tendency even in sacred art; of having overvalued manual skill, thus giving rise to the phenomenon of virtuosity; of having placed compositional, linear, and chiaroscuro values above all others; and of having sought to codify the rules of art, encouraging a correctness devoid of spontaneity and invention.
In these faults of academicism the cause has been sought of the numerous artistic rebellions that broke out in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth.
Today, without denying all basis to those accusations, there is a more equitable attitude toward a movement that could draw upon famous theories (Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Lessing, Algarotti, Milizia, Cicognara) and counted renowned artists among its followers. Certain very modern tendencies, moreover, reacting against the character assumed by art in recent decades, return, even without admitting it, to certain principles of the despised Academies, as when they tend toward compositional rigor and closed forms.