Journal of Art Historiography Number 13 December 2015
Art history at the art school: Revisiting the
institutional origins of the discipline based on the
case of nineteenth-century Greece
Eleonora Vratskidou
Scholarly courses at the art school: a blind spot of research
The elaboration of a theoretical discourse on art has been a main concern of art
academies since their creation in the sixteenth century. This concern was nurtured
by the need to regulate artistic production through the establishment of specific
norms and values, and, at the same time, it was intricately linked to the promotion
of the artist’s status and the legitimization of the artistic profession. The articulation
of theoretical discourse in the academies took place mainly in the framework of
conferences among peers – by and for an elite of peers – where multiple alternating
voices could engage in fruitful debate. However, towards the end of the eighteenth
and during the early nineteenth century the plurivocal structure of the conferences
was, in many cases, gradually replaced by actual courses offered by a unique
professor. Along with practical training, courses of history, archaeology, art history,
art theory and aesthetics were systematically incorporated into the academic
curricula in the context of larger pedagogical and institutional reforms. This is the
period in which Ancient Régime artistic structures were reformed, while new art
schools were created, and the academic system of art education expanded in the
recently founded nation-states of Europe and the Americas.
A series of questions arise from this development. Whereas courses in art
theory and aesthetics could be seen as a further pursuing of old concerns, courses in
art history were less expected. Why did artists need to study the history of art?
Engagement with the art of the past was certainly a salient aspect of academic
training, through the copying of art works of antiquity or of the Old Masters. But
what did this new kind of knowledge on past art – scholarly, systematized, often
with a claim to exhaustivity, codified in a course – have to contribute to artistic
practice? What were the artistic, political or economic grounds for the utterly novel
claim that art has a history, and this history has to be taught to artists? Another
major issue related to the introduction of scholarly courses in the art school has to
do with the fact that artists seem to gradually abandon the control over the
discourse produced on art to non-practitioners, to scholars who form gradually a
community of professional specialists. In this regard, how was the introduction of
art history courses in this particular moment related to the arising discipline of art
history?
I will focus here on the case of nineteenth-century Greece and the scholarly
teaching offered in the Athenian School of Arts, the first art institution of the
country, founded in 1837. The development of art institutions in Greece followed
very different trajectories from those observed in most western European countries.
The inception of the Greek art world coincides with the creation of an independent
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Greek State, in 1830, in a small territory sliced from the Ottoman Empire. The very
notions of ‘fine arts’ and the ‘artist’ actually had no equivalent in the Greek-
speaking world of the Ottoman Empire. These categories, and the cultural practices
to which they are linked, were shaped mainly through the foundation of a state
institution, the School of Arts, a development that had a lasting impact on the
conception both of artistic activity and the role of the artist. The interest of the Greek
case lies precisely in the fact that it represents a new art world formation, where all
the fundamental questions around the social production of art had to be thought
anew. Constructed almost ex nihilo, the Greek art world may be envisaged as a kind
of historical laboratory, permitting one to observe the very institution of practices
and concepts that one often tends to naturalise (or let their historical specificity be
blended away by anachronisms).
The founding of the School of Arts, and more generally the creation of an
artistic culture in Greece, was the outcome of a complex set of cultural transfers: the
School introduced art education based on Western European models that were
mediated by foreign professors and Greeks who had studied abroad, particularly in
Italy, France and Germany. In this process various European practices and
discourses were appropriated, combined and reshaped to confront the
particularities and needs of the local context. This is particularly the case with
scholarly teaching, which had a rather uneasy and discontinuous presence in the
curriculum of an institution intended to accommodate not only artistic studies, but
also technical education. Two significant moments in this fragmentary history of
scholarly teaching in the School can be singled out: one spanning from the
formation of the institution to the 1860s, and a second one covering the last two
decades of the century. Each of them provides interesting insights into the particular
nature, goals and implications of this new type of scholarly study of art proposed to
trainee artists. During the first phase, on which I will mainly concentrate here, the
study of ancient Greek art was an exclusive, ideologically informed focus:
interestingly, though, the approach to ancient art developed within the School took
a quite different orientation in comparison with the way this very exclusive field
was studied during the same period within the Athenian University. During the
second phase, starting in the 1880s, new orientations arose in scholarly training not
only in terms of an expanded temporal and geographical scope beyond Greek
antiquity, but also in the ways of understanding artistic activity and its values.
Studying the scholarly training in the Greek art school and its ‘laundering’ of
various European art discourses, I was brought to realise that this particularly
stimulating object has remained a kind of blind spot of research, lying as it is in the
intersection of two fields, the history of art education and the history of art history.
Before departing on my analysis of the Greek case, I may be permitted here a few
programmatic observations on the heuristic interest of this neglected topic for both
these fields. The study of scholarly courses, and more particularly of art historical
courses, offered in the art school may permit, on the one hand, a re-evaluation of
artistic training in the nineteenth century, and, on the other, a better understanding
of the varied institutional groundings of the discipline of art history.
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Despite the extensive literature on art academies and the renewed
perspectives on the history of nineteenth-century art education,1 art history and
other scholarly courses taught at the academies remain largely overlooked. The
names of the professors or the courses’ titles may be known, but the actual content
of the courses is ignored, as is, more importantly, their potential impact on artistic
practice. While the official conferences of art academies have attracted important
scholarly interest,2 the systematization of scholarly training in the nineteenth
century has not yet found its specialists.
The implicit prejudice here – informed by the hierarchical and tense relations
between theory and practice – is most probably that scholarly courses are of minor
significance in the history of art education. Overcoming this kind of prejudice may
help revise dominant conceptions regarding the institutions of art education in the
nineteenth century. Often considered as rigid and conservative due to their practical
curricula, these institutions could be seen under a different light if one focuses on
their scholarly curricula. I argue that precisely these courses provided, in many
cases, a locus of reflexivity within established academic traditions, where academic
principles, values and norms could be reassessed or even severely questioned.
Scholars appointed as professors at the academies were often the driving
forces of institutional reforms, and contributed not only to the remodelling of
practical training, but also to the revision of its theoretical underpinnings. Franz
Kugler’s (1808-1858) role in the context of the reforms of the Berlin Akademie in the
1840s is paradigmatic in this regard.3 Unlike eighteenth-century conferences,
scholarly courses were usually offered by outsiders from various academic fields,
who operated within different disciplinary protocols and thus were less bound to
academic doctrines, which they were ready to look at from a fresh and, in any case,
different external perspective. Hippolyte Taine provides a very good and well-
1 Important in this regard is the volume by Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd, eds, Art
and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. On
the German case in particular, see Ekkehard Mai, Die deutschen Kunstakademien im 19.
Jahrhundert: Künstlerausbildung zwischen Tradition und Avantgarde, Köln: Bohlau, 2010. See
also for a long overdue inquiry into teaching practices in the private studio: Alain Bonnet
and France Nerlich, eds, Apprendre à peindre. Les ateliers privés à Paris, 1780-1863, Tours:
Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2013.
2 See for instance the critical edition of the conferences of the French Academy by Jacqueline
Lichtenstein and Christian Michel, eds, Les Conférences de l’Académie royale de peinture et de
sculpture, 5 vols, Paris: éd. Beaux-arts de Paris, 2004-2012. On the lectures of the Royal
Academy in London, see mainly Robert Wark, ed., Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997; Gisela Bungarten, ed., J.H. Füsslis (1741-1825)
‘Lectures on Painting’: das Modell der Antike und die moderne Nachahmung, 2 vols, Berlin: Mann,
2005.
3 See especially Leonore Koschnick, Franz Kugler (1808-1858) als Kunstkritiker und
Kulturpolitiker, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Berlin: Freie Universität, 1985, 204-234;
Mai, Die deutschen Kunstakademien, 175-186. Interesting in this perspective is also the case of
Karl Josef Ignatz Mosler (1788-1860), painter and professor of art history at the Akademie of
Düsseldorf, a close collaborator of Cornelius in the major reform plans of 1820. See Nikolaus
Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present, New York: Da Capo Press, 1973 (1st ed. 1940), 213.
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studied example.4 Elsewhere I had the opportunity to check this hypothesis in
detail, based on the case of Stylianos Konstantinidis, who taught art history and
aesthetics at the Athenian School of Arts from 1879 to 1896 – the second phase
referred to earlier. His courses on aesthetics in particular were mainly informed by
the work of the French theorist Eugène Véron (1825-1889), one of the pioneers of
scientific aesthetics in France. Adopting Véron’s positivistic outlook, Konstantinidis
rejected artistic laws derived a priori, and sought to provide artists with ‘scientific’
ones, based solely on the functioning of human perception and feeling as
established by new research in the fields of physiology and experimental
psychology. His teachings severely undermined the normative character of ancient
art upon which academic authority was founded until then, while at the same time
his emphasis on the values of individuality and artistic originality, leitmotifs in
Vérons’ texts, brought into question the dominant regime of evaluating artistic
activity, based on an ideal of ‘national conformity’ both in terms of stylistic choices
(the paradigm of ancient art) and subject matter (Greek subjects).5
The teaching of art history in art academies has also remained overlooked
within the constantly expanding field of art historiography, athough accounts of the
institutionalisation and professionalisation of the discipline6 are still rather minor in
relation to the study of discourses and the formation of various interpretative
schemes and methodologies, or to biographical accounts, which privilege influential
art historians. Focusing mainly on the university and the museum, scholarship
tends to neglect the role of academies and art schools. Nonetheless, art academies
count among the first (in some cases, they are indeed the first) institutional homes of
art history, and played an important role in the shaping of the discipline well before
the establishment of autonomous university chairs. In Berlin, for instance, twenty
years before the foundation of the University in 1810, or some forty years before the
foundation of the public museum in 1830, the Akademie der bildenden Künste was the
4 Morton M. G., Naturalism and Nostalgia: Hippolyte Taine’s Lectures on Art History at the École
des Beaux-Arts, 1865-1869, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Providence: Brown University,
1998; Philip Walsh Hotchkiss, ‘Viollet-le-Duc and Taine at the École des Beaux-Arts: on
thefirst professorship of art history in France”, in Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Art History and
its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline, London, New York: Routledge, 2002, 85-99.
5 Eleonora Vratskidou, L’émergence de l’artiste en Grèce au XIXe siècle, unpublished doctoral
dissertation, Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 2011, 461-513.
6 A major reference for this last perspective is the work of Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als
Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. For the
French case, see Lyne Therrien, L’histoire de l’histoire de l’art en France. Genèse d’une discipline
universitaire, Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1998. See also the collected volumes, Mansfield, Art
History and its Institutions; Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Making Art History: a Changing Discipline
and its Institutions, New York, London: Routledge, 2007. For a transnational perspective, see
Matthew Rampley, Thierry Lenain, Humbertus Locher, eds, Art History and Visual Studies.
Transnational Discourses and National Frameworks, Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2012. See most
recently the excellent studies by Eric Garberson on cases of Berlin-based scholars during the
first half of the nineteenth century, where teaching in art academies is also taken into
account: Eric Garberson, ‘Art history in the university: Toelken – Hotho – Kugler’, Journal of
Art Historiography, 5, December 2011; ‘Art History in the university II: Ernst Guhl’, Journal of
Art Historiography, 7, December 2012.
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only institution to offer regular courses on ancient art, taught by Karl Philipp Moritz
(1756-1793) and later by Aloys Hirt (1759-1837).7 The primacy of the art school in the
institutionalization of the discipline was arguably the case in France, where courses
on art history and aesthetics were first introduced in the Parisian École des Beaux-arts
after the major reform of 1863 (taught by Eugène Viollet le Duc, Hippolyte Taine
and later Eugène Müntz).8 The same phenomenon is also observed in more recent
art world formations, such as in the Academia Imperial de Belas Artes in Rio de
Janeiro, where the major painter and scholar Pedro Américo (1843-1905) was the
first to teach art history courses (along with archaeology and aesthetics) in the early
1870s.9 Taking academies into consideration may thus help to grasp better the
multiple institutional frameworks involved in the formation of the discipline.
Art academies were multi-facetted, hybrid institutions in which various
(sometimes competing) intentions, actors, and publics came together. One could
argue more particularly that academies lay at the intersection of the artistic and the
scientific field. As training centres, as well as competition and exhibition venues,
academies functioned as instances of consecration within the artistic field. At the
same time, academies produced an historical and theoretical knowledge on art, and
hosted in their curricula a variety of fields – history, art history, aesthetics,
archaeology and classics, or even literature – that, precisely during the first half of
the nineteenth century, were shaping their disciplinary identities and negotiating
their boundaries.
A key question in this perspective is to examine to what extent and in which
ways this particular institutional location affected art historical discourses produced
within its walls. I refer to it as a particular location in the sense that it provided a
direct contact with art practitioners as well as an exposure to the problems of art
practice and the concerns about the character and the quality of contemporary
artistic production.10 Did adapting to the needs of art training generate different
7 Claudia Sedlarz, ‘Incorporating Antiquity. The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast
Collection’, in Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand, eds, Plaster Casts. Making, Collecting
and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010, 206-207. On
Hirt in particular, see Claudia Sedlarz, ed., Aloys Hirt. Archäologe, Historiker, Kunstkenner,
Hanover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn, 2004.
8 This being said, one should not ignore the lectures on ancient and medieval archaeology at
the Cabinet des médailles of the Royal Library and the École des Chartes in the first half of the
century; see Therrien, L’histoire, 37-79.
9 See especially Madalena Zaccara, Pedro Américo: um artista brasileiro do século XIX, Recife:
Ed. Universitária da UFPE, 2011, 74-85.
10 This is not to imply that concerns about the quality and future of current artistic
production were the privilege of art scholars teaching at the academies. Scholarship
produced by the first generations of art historians, inside or outside the academies, was
intertwined with their interest in the art of their time, and its future development. Besides,
most art scholars were actively engaged in art criticism. Franz Kugler’s Handbuch der
Kunstgeschichte (1841-1842), largely regarded as the first handbook of art history, placed the
diversity of past art into a coherent narrative extending up to the present, and intended
above all to reflect on and inform contemporary artistic practice. Springer’s last part of his
own multi-volume Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte, entitled Die Kunst von 1800 bis zu Gegenwart,
was first published no later than 1858, and is even more telling in this regard. Concerning
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