academy of art, in the visual arts, institution established primarily for the instruction of artists but often endowed with other functions, most significantly that of providing a place of exhibition for students and mature artists accepted as members. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, a series of short-lived “academies” that had little to do with artistic training were founded in various parts of Italy. The most famous of these was the Accademia of Leonardo da Vinci (established in Milan c. 1490), which seems to have been simply a social gathering of amateurs meeting to discuss the theory and practice of art. The first true academy for instruction, the Accademia del Disegno (“Academy of Design”), was established in 1563 in Florence by the grand duke Cosimo I de’ Medici at the instigation of the painter and art historian Giorgio Vasari. The two nominal heads of the institution were Cosimo himself and Michelangelo. In contrast to the guilds, membership in the Accademia del Disegno was an honour conferred only on already-recognized independent artists. When Vasari’s academy fell into disorganization, his ideas were taken up by the Accademia di San Luca, reestablished as an educational program in 1593 at Rome by the painter Federico Zuccari and Cardinal Federico Borromeo. With its emphasis on instruction and exhibition, the Accademia di San Luca was the prototype for the modern academy. Among its functions, much-imitated in later academies, was the sponsorship of lectures given by members of the academy and later published and made available to the general public. Such discourses became the means by which academies fostered and gained public acceptance for particular aesthetic theories. The Accademia di San Luca was firmly established by 1635, having received support from the powerful Pope Urban VIII. All the leading Italian artists and many foreigners were members; the secondary aims of the institution—to obtain important commissions, to enhance the prestige of the members, and to practice exclusionary policies against those who were not members—were avidly pursued.
For the following two centuries, academicism dominated Italian artistic life. The decline of the church and then of aristocrats as patrons—those groups had formerly commissioned the painting of whole rooms at a time—resulted in the abandonment of the artist to an anonymous market of buyers who might commission one portrait or some other single easel painting at a time. This made exhibition essential to the artist’s success. The state-supported academy, being the only institution financially able to provide this service on a large scale, came to control public taste, the economic fortunes of the artist, and ultimately the quality of his art by its determination of standards in the work it chose to show.
In France the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was founded in 1648 as a free society of members all entitled to the same rights and granted admission in unlimited numbers. Under the sponsorship of the powerful minister Jean Baptiste Colbert and the direction of the painter Charles Le Brun, however, the Académie Royale began to function as an authoritarian arm of the state. As such, it assumed almost total control of French art and began to exercise considerable influence on the art of Europe. For the first time, the concept of aesthetic orthodoxy obtained official endorsement. The Académie achieved a virtual monopoly of teaching and exhibition in France, beginning in 1667 the long-lived series of periodic official art exhibitions called Salons. Thus, the idea, born of the Enlightenment, that aesthetic matters could be universally subjected to reason led to a rigid imposition of a narrow set of aesthetic rules on all art that came within the Académie’s jurisdiction. This approach found especially fertile ground in the Neoclassical style, which arose in the second half of the 18th century and which the Académie espoused with enthusiasm.
Meanwhile, numerous academies, usually state-supported and similar in structure and approach to the French Académie, were established throughout Europe and in America. By 1790 there were more than 80 such institutions. One of the most important to be founded was the Royal Academy of Arts in London, established in 1768 by George III with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president. Although Reynolds gave the obligatory discourses on the importance of harmony and uplifting conceptions in painting, the Royal Academy never dominated art as completely as academies on the European continent.
The first important challenge to the power of the academies came with the rise of Romanticism, which saw the artist as an individual genius whose creative powers could not be taught or externally controlled. Although most notable Romantic artists were absorbed into the academic system in the first half of the 19th century, eventually almost all artists of significance found themselves excluded from official patronage, largely because of the widening gap between their achievements and the taste of the bourgeois public to which the academies catered. The blow that finally broke the power of the academy was struck in France. After a series of unsuccessful compromises (e.g., the Salon des Refusés, established in 1863 by Napoleon III for painters excluded from the Académie), the Impressionists, who exhibited independently between 1874 and 1886, succeeded in winning the complete acceptance of the critics. In the 20th century the art academy became an important source of instruction, synonymous with the modern art school.