Academicism

ACADEMICISM. - This name, to which an element of negative criticism is not foreign, has been given to that way of understanding and teaching art which, favored by the artistic Academies (v.), had its greatest development in the early 1800s, identified by some with Neoclassicism. Many of its rules survived even in the Romantic and Verist periods.

Academicism has been accused of having favored, with its theory of ideal beauty derived from the classics, a paganizing tendency even in sacred art; of having overvalued manual skill, giving rise to the phenomenon of virtuosity; of having placed compositional, linear and chiaroscuro values above all others; of having claimed to codify the rules of art, favoring 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 1800s and in the 1900s.

Today, without denying all foundation to those accusations, there is greater fairness toward a movement that was able to rely on famous theories (Baumgarten, Winckelmann, Lessing, Algarotti, Milizia, Cicognara) and that counted famous artists among its followers. And certain very modern tendencies, as a reaction to the character art has assumed in recent decades, hark back, even without confessing it, to some principles of the despised Academies, as when they orient themselves toward compositional rigor and toward closed forms.

Corrado Mezzana