Academic art is the kind of painting that Europe's official art academies taught, exhibited and rewarded from the 1600s to the end of the 1800s, with the French Academy in Paris as the model for all the others.
An academic picture rests on careful drawing and a smooth surface where no brushstroke shows. Its bodies are idealized, more perfect than any real model, and its noble subjects are taken from history, the Bible and ancient myth.
Its best-known example is Alexandre Cabanel's The Birth of Venus, a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1863, the official exhibition where French painters made their names. The goddess lies on the waves, one arm bent above her head, and she looks out from under her elbow.
Her skin is smooth and even from head to foot, and nowhere can the eye catch the trace of a brush. That surface is exactly what the academies trained their students to produce.
Schools like the ones that trained Cabanel took their name from philosophy. The Academy was Plato's school in ancient Athens, and Renaissance artists borrowed the word to give their trade the dignity of a place of learning.
The first art school to carry the name opened in Florence in 1563. Duke Cosimo I de' Medici, head of the family that ruled the city, founded an Academy of the Arts of Drawing.
He did it at the suggestion of Giorgio Vasari, a painter who also wrote the lives of the great Renaissance artists. Michelangelo was among its first members.
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Paris followed in 1648, and its Academy went much further than the Florentine one, because it would one day teach, exhibit and reward. Until then, French painters and sculptors had been organized in guilds, like any other trade, and were treated as craftsmen.
A group of artists around Charles Le Brun, the painter who would later direct the decoration of Versailles, wanted out of the guild and its trade rules. They set up the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, with membership based on merit alone, to raise the artist above the craftsman.
The new body did not stay a simple society of artists for long. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister who ran the finances and the arts for Louis XIV, took control of it and put it to work glorifying the King.
From then on, the same institution taught young painters and chose what went on its walls. What a beginner learned and what the public was allowed to see passed through a single door.
One system, many styles
That institution lasted two centuries, and the pictures it approved changed along the way…
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