www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
T HE J OU R N AL OF I N D I AN P HI L O SO P HE R
FSSR
www.ssresearcher.com
MARCH 2013
VOLUME I NO I
THE NEW GENRES OF LANDSCAPE, GENRE PAINTING, ANIMAL PAINTING AND
STILL LIFE CAME INTO THEIR OWN IN THE 17TH CENTURY A.D.
MRS.JHILIK THAKUR
ASSISTANT TEACHER
SALDANGA HIGH SCHOOL(H.S.)
HOOGLY
A hierarchy of genres is any formalization which ranks different genres in an art form in terms of
their prestige and cultural value.In literature, the epic was considered the highest form, for the
reason expressed by Samul Johnson in his Life of John Milton: "By the general consent of
criticks, the first praise of genius is due to the writer of an epick poem, as it requires an
assemblage of all the powers which are singly sufficient for other compositions." Below that
came lyric poetry, and comic poetry, with a similar ranking for drama. The novel took a long
time to establish a firm place in the hierarchy, doing so only as belief in any systematic hierarchy
of forms expired in the 19th century.
In music, settings of words were accorded a higher status than merely instrumental works, at
least until the Baroque period, and opera retained a superior status for much longer. The status of
works also varies with the number of players and singers involved, with those for large forces,
which are certainly more difficult to write and more expensive to perform, given higher status.
The hierarchies in figurative art are those initially formulated for painting in 16th century Italy,
which held sway with little alteration until the early 19th century. These were formalized and
promoted by the academies in Europe between the 17th century and the modern era, of which the
31
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013
www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
most influential became the French Academie de peinture et de sculpture, which held a central
role in Academic art. The fully developed hierarchy distinguished between:






History painting, including narrative religious mythological and allegorical subjects
Portrait painting
Genre painting or scenes of everyday life
Landscape (landscapists were the "common footmen in the Army of Art" according to the
Dutch theorist Samul van Hoogstraten) and cityscape
Animal painting
Still life
The hierarchy was based on a distinction between art that made an intellectual effort to "render
visible the universal essence of things" (imitare in Italian) and that which merely consisted of
"mechanical copying of particular appearances" (ritrarre). Idealism was privileged
over realism in line with Renaissance Neo-Platonist philosophy.
The term is mostly used within the field of painting, and from the High Renaissance onwards, by
which time painting had asserted itself as the highest form of art. This had not been the case
in Medieval art and the art-commissioning sectors of society took a considerable period to fully
accept this view. The Raphael Cartoons are a clear example of the continuing status of tapestry,
the most expensive form of art in the 16th century. In the Early Medieval period lavish pieces of
metalwork had typically been the most highly regarded, and valuable materials remained an
important ingredient in the appreciation of art until at least the 17th century. Until the 19th
century the most extravagant objéts d'art remained more expensive, both new and on the art
market, than all but a few paintings. Classical writings which valued the supreme skills of
individual artists were influential, as well as developments in art which allowed the Renaissance
artist to demonstrate his skill and invention to a greater degree than was usually possible in the
Middle Ages.
RENAISSANCE ART
The hierarchy grew out of the struggle to gain acceptance of painting as one of the Liberal arts,
and then controversies to establish an equal or superior status within them
with architecture and sculpture. These matters were considered of great importance by artisttheorists such as Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da vinci, and Giorgio Vasari. Against the
sculptors, Leonardo argued that the intellectual effort necessary to create an illusion of threedimensionality made the painters' art superior to that of the sculptor, who could do so merely by
recording appearances. In hisDella Pictura of 1436 Alberti had argued that multi-figure history
painting was the noblest form of art, as being the most difficult, which required mastery of all the
others, because it was a visual form of history, and because it had the greatest potential to move
the viewer. He placed emphasis on the ability to depict the interactions between the figures by
gesture and expression.
32
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013
www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
Theorists of the Early and High Renaissance accepted the importance of representing nature
closely, at least until the later writings ofMichelangelo, who was strongly influenced
by neoplatonism. By the time of Mannerist theorists such as Gian Paolo Lomazzo and Federico
Zuccari (both also painters) this was far less of a priority. Both emphasized beauty as "something
which was directly infused into the mind of man from the mind of God, and existed there
independent of any sense-impressions", a view bound to further reduce the status of works
depending on realism. In practice the hierarchy represented little break with either medieval and
classical thought, except to place secular history painting in the same class as religious art, and to
distinguish (not always clearly) between static iconic religious subjects and narrative figure
scenes, giving the latter a higher status. Ideas of decorum also fed into the hierarchy; comic,
sordid or merely frivolous subjects or treatment ranked lower than elevated and moral ones.
During the Renaissance landscape, genre scenes and still lifes hardly existed as established
genres, so discussion of the status or importance of different types of painting was mainly
concerned with history subjects as against portraits, initially small and unpretentious, and iconic
portrait-type religious and mythological subjects. For most artists some commitment to realism
was necessary in a portrait; few could take the high-handed approach of Michelangelo, who
largely ignored the actual appearance of the Medici in his Medici Chapel sculptures, supposedly
saying that in a thousand years no one would know the difference (a retort Gainsborough is also
said to have used, with a shorter timeframe). Many portraits were extremely flattering, which
could be justified by an appeal to idealism as well as the sitter's vanity; the
theorist Armenini claimed in 1587 that "portraits by excellent artists are considered to be painted
with better style [maniera] and greater perfection than others, but more often than not they are
less good likenesses". On the other hand, numbers of courtly sitters and their parents, suitors or
courtiers complained that painters entirely failed to do justice to the reality of the sitter.
The question of decorum in religious art became the focus of intense effort by the Catholic
Church after the decrees on art of the Council of Trent of 1563. Paintings depicting biblical
events as if they were occurring in the households of wealthy contemporary Italians were
attacked, and soon ceased. Until the challenge of Caravaggio at the end of the century, religious
art became thoroughly ideal.
17TH AND 18TH CENTURY ART
The new genres of landscape, genre painting, animal painting and still life came into their own in
the 17th century, with the virtual cessation of religious painting in Protestant countries, and the
expansion of picture buying to the prosperous middle class. Although similar developments
occurred in all advanced European countries, they were most evident in the enormously
productive schools of Dutch Golden Age painting andFlemish Baroque painting. However no
theorists emerged to champion the new genres, and the relatively small amount of Dutch
theoretical writing, by Karel van Mander, Samul Dirksz van Hoogstraten, Gerard de Lairesse and
others, was mostly content to rehash Italian views, so that their writings can seem oddly at
variance with the Dutch art actually being produced in their day. The hierarchy was mostly
33
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013
www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
accepted by artists, and even genre specialists such as Jan Steen, Karel
Dujardin and Vermeer produced a few history paintings, which were better paid when
commissions could be obtained, but in general far harder to sell. The unhappy history
of Rembrandt's last history commission, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis (1661) illustrates
both his commitment to the form and the difficulties he had in finding an audience. In Flanders,
as well as great quantities of pure genre works, there was a trend towards history paintings with a
major genre element, whether animals, landscape or still life. Often the different elements were
painted by different artists; Rubens and Frans Snyders often co-operated in this way.
An influential formulation of 1667 by Andre Felibien, a historiographer, architect and
theoretician of French classicism became the classic statement of the theory for the 18th century:
Celui qui fait parfaitement des païsages est au-dessus d'un autre qui ne fait que des fruits, des
fleurs ou des coquilles. Celui qui peint des animaux vivants est plus estimable que ceux qui ne
représentent que des choses mortes & sans mouvement ; & comme la figure de l'homme est le
plus parfait ouvrage de Dieu sur la Terre, il est certain aussi que celui qui se rend l'imitateur de
Dieu en peignant des figures humaines, est beaucoup plus excellent que tous les autres ... un
Peintre qui ne fait que des portraits, n'a pas encore cette haute perfection de l'Art, & ne peut
prétendre à l'honneur que reçoivent les plus sçavans. Il faut pour cela passer d'une seule figure à
la représentation de plusieurs ensemble ; il faut traiter l'histoire & la fable ; il faut représenter de
grandes actions comme les historiens, ou des sujets agréables comme les Poëtes ; & montant
encore plus haut, il faut par des compositions allégoriques, sçavoir couvrir sous le voile de la
fable les vertus des grands hommes, & les mystères les plus relevez.
He who produces perfect landscapes is above another who only produces fruit, flowers or
seafood. He who paints living animals is more estimable than those who only represent dead
things without movement, and as man is the most perfect work of God on the earth, it is also
certain that he who becomes an imitator of God in representing human figures, is much more
excellent than all the others ... a painter who only does portraits still does not have the highest
perfection of his art, and cannot expect the honour due to the most skilled. For that he must pass
from representing a single figure to several together; history and myth must be depicted; great
events must be represented as by historians, or like the poets, subjects that will please, and
climbing still higher, he must have the skill to cover under the veil of myth the virtues of great
men in allegories, and the mysteries they reveal".
Allegorical painting was raised above other types of history painting; together they were
the grand genre, including paintings with religious, mythological, historical, literary, or
allegorical subjects—they embodied some interpretation of life or conveyed a moral or
intellectual message. The gods and goddesses from the ancient mythologies represented different
aspects of the human psyche, figures from religions represented different ideas, and history, like
the other sources, represented a dialectic or play of ideas. Subjects with several figures ranked
higher than single figures. For a long time, especially during the French Revolution, history
34
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013
www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
painting often focused on depiction of the heroic male nude; though this waned in the 19th
century.
After history painting came, in order of decreasing worth: portraits, scenes of everyday life
(called scènes de genre, or "genre painting", and alsopetit genre to contrast it with the grande
genre), landscapes, animal painting, and finally still lifes. In his formulation, such paintings were
inferior because they were merely reportorial pictures without moral force or artistic
imagination. Genre paintings—neither ideal in style, nor elevated in subject—were admired for
their skill, ingenuity, and even humour, but never confused with high art. The hierarchy of
genres also had a corresponding hierarchy of formats: large format for history paintings, small
format for still lifes. This had occasionally been breached in the past, especially in large Flemish
works, and the monumental Young Bull of the Dutch artist Paulus Potter, as well as the
large Butchers' Shop ofAnnibale Carracci. But for the most part the relative prices obtainable for
the different genres ensured the hierarchy of size also; it would not have been economic to paint
a very large subject from the lower genres, except for commissioned group portraits. Rubens'
largest landscapes were painted for his own houses.
The use of the pictorial elements of painting such as line and color to convey an ultimate
unifying theme or idea was regarded as the highest expression of art, and an idealism was
adopted in art, whereby forms seen in nature would be generalized, and in turn subordinated to
the unity of the artwork. It aimed at universal truth through the imitation of nature. Later
dissenting theorists, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, held that this focus on allegory was
faulty and based on a wrong analogy between the plastic arts and poetry rooted in
the Horatian dictum ut picture poesis ("as is painting so is poetry").
The British painter Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses of the 1770s and 1780s, reiterated the
argument for still life to the lowest position in the hierarchy of genres on the grounds that it
interfered with the painter's access to central forms, those products of the mind's generalising
powers. At the summit reigned history painting, centred on the human body: familiarity with the
forms of the body permitted the mind of the painter, by comparing innumerable instances of the
human form, to abstract from it those typical or central features that represented the body's
essence or ideal.
Though Reynolds agreed with Félibien about the natural order of the genres, he held that an
important work from any genre of painting could be produced under the hand of genius:
"Whether it is the human figure, an animal, or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however
unpromising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce
emotion, in the hands of a painter of genius. What was said of Virgil, that he threw even the dung
about the ground with an air of dignity, may be applied to Titian; whatever he touched, however
naturally mean, and habitually familiar, by a kind of magic he invested with grandeur and
importance."
Though European academies usually strictly insisted on this hierarchy, over their reign, many
artists were able to invent new genres which raised the lower subjects to the importance of
35
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013
www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
history painting. Reynolds himself achieved this by inventing the portraiture style that was called
the Grand Manner, where he flattered his sitters by likening them to mythological
characters. Jean-Antoine Watteau invented a genre that was called fetes galantes, where he
would show scenes of courtly amusements taking place in Arcadian setting; these often had a
poetic and allegorical quality which were considered to ennoble them. Claude Lorrain practised a
genre called the ideal landscape, where a composition would be loosely based on nature and
dotted with classical ruins as a setting for a biblical or historical theme. It artfully combined
landscape and history painting, thereby legitimising the former. It is synonymous with the
term historical landscape which received official recognition in the Académie française when
aPrix de Rome for the genre was established in 1817. Finally, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin was
able to create still life paintings that were considered to have the charm and beauty as to be
placed alongside the best allegorical subjects. However, aware of this hierarchy, Chardin began
including figures in his work in about 1730, mainly women and children.
19TH CENTURY
Until the middle of the 19th century, women were largely unable to paint history paintings as
they were not allowed to participate in the final process of artistic training—that of life drawing,
in order to protect their modesty. They could work from reliefs, prints, casts and from the Old
Masters, but not from the nude model. Instead they were encouraged to participate in the lower
painting forms such as portraiture, landscape and genre. These were considered more feminine in
that they appealed to the eye rather than the mind.
Toward the end of the 19th century, painters and critics began to rebel against the many rules of
the Académie française, including the status accorded to history painting, which was beginning
to be bought mainly by public bodies of one sort or another, as private buyers preferred subjects
from lower down the hierarchy. In Britain the Pre-Raphaelite movement tried to revitalize the
history painting, with mixed success; other movements made similar efforts. Many PreRaphaelites ended their careers mainly painting other subjects. New artistic movements included
the Realists and Impressionists, which each sought to depict the present moment and daily life as
observed by the eye, and unattatched from historical significance; the Realists often choosing
genre painting and still life, while the Impressionists would most often focus on landscapes.
REFERENCES
1.Zlonoga B, Gerber A (February 1986): A case from practice, pp.171-2
2.Baddeley, .D. (2000): The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory, Trends in
Cognitive Science, pp.417-23
3.T.L. Brink(2008): Psychology:A Student Friendly Approach, pp120
4.Neisser U.(1982); Memory observed, San Francisco Feeman.
36
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013
www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
5.Anderson, J.R. (196): Language, Memory and Thought, Erlbaum,pp.201-208
6.Fagan J.F.(1974): Infant recognition memory: The effects of length of familiarization and type
of discrimination task, Child Development, pp.351-356
7.Rovee-Collier C. (1999): Current Directions in Psychological Science, The development of
infant memory,pp.80-85
8.Egerton, FN. (2007). “A history of the ecological sciences, part 23: Linnaeus and the economy
of nature”, Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 88 (1): 72-88..
9.Kormandy, E.J.; Wooster, Donald (1978). “Review: Ecology/economy of nature-synonyms?”.
Ecology, pp.59.
10.Hector, A.; Hooper, R. (2002):“Darwin and the first ecological experiment”,Science 295
pp.639-640.
11. Sinclair, G. (1826):“On cultivating a collection of grasses in pleasure-grounds or flowergardens, and on the utility of studying the Gramineae”, London Gardener’s Magazine, pp.115.
12. May, R. (1999):“Unanswered questions in ecology”, Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society,Biological Sciences, pp.354
13. Meysman, F. J. R.; Middelburg, Jack J.; Help, C. H. R. (2006):“Bioturbation: A fresh look at
Darwin’s last idea”, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 21 (22): 688-695.
14. Acot, P. (1997). “The Lamarckian cradle of scientific ecology”,Acta Biotheoretica, pp.185193.
15. Simberloff,D. (1980): “A succession of paradigms in ecology: Essentialism to materialism
and probalism”, Synthese 43, pp. 3-39.
16. Gleason, H. A. (1926). “The individualistic concept of the plant association”, Bulletin of the
Torrey Botanical Club, pp.53
17. Wilson, D. S. (1988): “Holism and reductionism in evolutionary ecology”, Oikos 53 pp.269273.
18.Ruth Benedict (1959): Patterns of Culture Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, pp. 3
19.Cook, John 1978 “Cultural Relativism as an Ethnocentric Notion,” in The Philosophy of
Society, pp.69
37
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013
www.ssresearcher.com
ISSN 2319 – 618X
20.Executive Board, American Anthropological Association(1947):“Statement on Human
Rights” in American Anthropologist, 49(4) pp.539-543
21.Steward, Julian (1948): “Comments on the Statement of Human Rights” in American
Anthropologist ,50(2) pp.351-352
22.Barnett, H.G.(June 1948): “On Science and Human Rights” in American Anthropologist
50(2), pp.352-355.
23.Renteln, Alison (1988): “Relativism and the Search for Human Rights” in American
Anthropologist 90(1) pp.56-72
24.Schmidt,Paul 1955 “Some Criticisms of Cultural Relativism” in Journal of Philosophy 52:
pp.780-791
25.Hartung, Frank (1954): “Cultural Relativity and Moral Judgements” in Philosophy of
Science 21,pp.11-125
26.Stocking, George W. Jr.( 1982 ):“Afterward: A View from the Center” in Ethnos 47, pp.172286
27.Geertz, Clifford (1984 ):“Anti- Anti-Relativism” in American Anthropologist, 86 (2)
pp.263-278
28.Kroeber, Alfred (1949): “An Authoritarian Panacea” in American Anthropologist 51(2)
pp.318-320
38
THE JOURNAL OF INDIAN PHILOSOPHER
MARCH 2013