Academy

An academy is a type of artist-run organisation whose aim was to raise the professional and social status of the artist and to provide systematic training. The word derives from the grove of Akademos near Athens where the philosopher Plato taught, and by the Renaissance it had come to denote learned assemblies. The first true art academy is usually considered the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, founded in 1563 with the involvement of Giorgio Vasari under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici; it asserted the idea that painting, sculpture, and architecture were liberal intellectual arts rather than mere crafts. On its model arose the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture (1648), and the Royal Academy of Arts in London (1768) headed by Joshua Reynolds. Academies established hierarchies of genres, canons of taste, and annual salon exhibitions, and in time became themselves symbols of the conservatism against which the avant-gardes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rebelled.