Genre in painting defined by narrative subjects
History painting
is a genre in
painting
defined by its subject matter rather than any
artistic style
or specific period. History paintings depict a moment in a
narrative story
, most often (but not exclusively)
Greek
and
Roman mythology
and
Bible stories
, opposed to a specific and static subject, as in
portrait
,
still life
, and
landscape painting
. The term is derived from the wider senses of the word
historia
in
Latin
and
histoire
in French, meaning "story" or "narrative", and essentially means "story painting". Most history paintings are not of scenes from
history
, especially paintings from before about 1850.
In modern English, "historical painting" is sometimes used to describe the painting of scenes from history in its narrower sense, especially for 19th-century art, excluding religious, mythological, and allegorical subjects, which are included in the broader term "history painting", and before the 19th century were the most common subjects for history paintings.
History paintings almost always contain a number of figures, often a large number, and normally show some typical states on that is a moment in a narrative. The genre includes depictions of moments in religious narratives, above all the
Life of Christ
, Middle eastern culture as well as narrative scenes from
mythology
, and also
allegorical
scenes.
[1]
These groups were for long the most frequently painted; works such as
Michelangelo
's
Sistine Chapel ceiling
are therefore history paintings, as are most very large paintings before the 19th century. The term covers large paintings in
oil on canvas
or
fresco
produced between the Renaissance and the late 19th century, after which the term is generally not used even for the many works that still meet the basic definition.
[2]
History painting may be used interchangeably with
historical painting
, and was especially so used before the 20th century.
[3]
Where a distinction is made, "historical painting" is the painting of scenes from secular history, whether specific episodes or generalized scenes. In the 19th century, historical painting in this sense became a distinct genre. In phrases such as "historical painting materials", "historical" means in use before about 1900, or some earlier date.
[4]
Prestige
[
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]
History paintings were traditionally regarded as the highest form of Western painting, occupying the most prestigious place in the
hierarchy of genres
, and considered the equivalent to the
epic
in literature. In his
De Pictura
of 1436,
Leon Battista 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.
[5]
This view remained general until the 19th century, when artistic movements began to struggle against the establishment institutions of
academic art
, which continued to adhere to it. At the same time, there was from the latter part of the 18th century an increased interest in depicting in the form of history painting moments of drama from recent or contemporary history, which had long largely been confined to
battle-scenes
and scenes of formal surrenders and the like. Scenes from ancient history had been popular in the
early Renaissance
, and once again became common in the
Baroque
and
Rococo
periods, and still more so with the rise of
Neoclassicism
. In some 19th or 20th century contexts, the term may refer specifically to paintings of scenes from secular history, rather than those from religious narratives, literature or mythology.
Development
[
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The term is generally not used in art history in speaking of medieval painting, although the Western tradition was developing in large
altarpieces
, fresco cycles, and other works, as well as
miniatures
in
illuminated manuscripts
. It comes to the fore in
Italian Renaissance painting
, where a series of increasingly ambitious works were produced, many still religious, but several, especially in Florence, which did actually feature near-contemporary historical scenes such as the set of three huge canvases on
The Battle of San Romano
by
Paolo Uccello
, the abortive
Battle of Cascina
by Michelangelo and the
Battle of Anghiari
by
Leonardo da Vinci
, neither of which were completed. Scenes from ancient history and mythology were also popular. Writers such as Alberti and the following century
Giorgio Vasari
in his
Lives of the Artists
, followed public and artistic opinion in judging the best painters above all on their production of large works of history painting (though in fact the only modern (post-classical) work described in
De Pictura
is
Giotto
's huge
Navicella
in mosaic). Artists continued for centuries to strive to make their reputation by producing such works, often neglecting genres to which their talents were better suited.
There was some objection to the term, as many writers preferred terms such as "poetic painting" (
poesia
), or wanted to make a distinction between the "true"
istoria
, covering history including biblical and religious scenes, and the
fabula
, covering pagan myth, allegory, and scenes from fiction, which could not be regarded as true.
[6]
The large works of
Raphael
were long considered, with those of Michelangelo, as the finest models for the genre.
In the
Raphael Rooms
in the
Vatican Palace
, allegories and historical scenes are mixed together, and the
Raphael Cartoons
show scenes from the Gospels, all in the
Grand Manner
that from the
High Renaissance
became associated with, and often expected in, history painting. In the Late Renaissance and
Baroque
the painting of actual history tended to degenerate into panoramic battle-scenes with the victorious monarch or general perched on a horse accompanied with his retinue, or formal scenes of ceremonies, although some artists managed to make a masterpiece from such unpromising material, as
Velazquez
did with his
The Surrender of Breda
.
An influential formulation of the hierarchy of genres, confirming the history painting at the top, was made in 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 paisages 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 representent 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 pretendre a l'honneur que recoivent les plus scavans. Il faut pour cela passer d'une seule figure a la representation de plusieurs ensemble; il faut traiter l'histoire & la fable; il faut representer de grandes actions comme les historiens, ou des sujets agreables comme les Poetes; & montant encore plus haut, il faut par des compositions allegoriques, scavoir couvrir sous le voile de la fable les vertus des grands hommes, & les mysteres les plus relevez.
[7]
He who produces perfect landscapes is above another who only produces fruit, flowers or seashells. He who paints living animals is more 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".
By the late 18th century, with both religious and mytholological painting in decline, there was an increased demand for paintings of scenes from history, including contemporary history. This was in part driven by the changing audience for ambitious paintings, which now increasingly made their reputation in public exhibitions rather than by impressing the owners of and visitors to palaces and public buildings. Classical history remained popular, but scenes from national histories were often the best-received. From 1760 onwards, the
Society of Artists of Great Britain
, the first body to organize regular exhibitions in London, awarded two generous prizes each year to paintings of subjects from British history.
[8]
The unheroic nature of modern dress was regarded as a serious difficulty. When, in 1770,
Benjamin West
proposed to paint
The Death of General Wolfe
in contemporary dress, he was firmly instructed to use classical costume by many people. He ignored these comments and showed the scene in modern dress. Although
George III
refused to purchase the work, West succeeded both in overcoming his critics' objections and inaugurating a more historically accurate style in such paintings.
[9]
Other artists depicted scenes, regardless of when they occurred, in classical dress and for a long time, especially during the
French Revolution
, history painting often focused on depictions of the heroic male nude.
The large production, using the finest French artists, of propaganda paintings glorifying the exploits of
Napoleon
, were matched by works, showing both victories and losses, from the anti-Napoleonic alliance by artists such as
Goya
and
J. M. W. Turner
.
Theodore Gericault
's
The Raft of the Medusa
(1818?1819) was a sensation, appearing to update the history painting for the 19th century, and showing anonymous figures famous only for being victims of what was then a famous and controversial disaster at sea. Conveniently their clothes had been worn away to classical-seeming rags by the point the painting depicts. At the same time the demand for traditional large religious history paintings very largely fell away.
In the mid-nineteenth century there arose a style known as
historicism
, which marked a formal imitation of historical styles and/or artists. Another development in the nineteenth century was the treatment of historical subjects, often on a large scale, with the values of
genre painting
, the depiction of scenes of everyday life, and
anecdote
. Grand depictions of events of great public importance were supplemented with scenes depicting more personal incidents in the lives of the great, or of scenes centred on unnamed figures involved in historical events, as in the
Troubadour style
. At the same time scenes of ordinary life with moral, political or satirical content became often the main vehicle for expressive interplay between figures in painting, whether given a modern or historical setting.
By the later 19th century, history painting was often explicitly rejected by
avant-garde
movements such as the
Impressionists
(except for
Edouard Manet
) and the
Symbolists
, and according to one recent writer "
Modernism
was to a considerable extent built upon the rejection of History Painting... All other genres are deemed capable of entering, in one form or another, the 'pantheon' of modernity considered, but History Painting is excluded".
[10]
History painting and historical painting
[
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The terms
[
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]
Initially, "history painting" and "historical painting" were used interchangeably in English, as when Sir
Joshua Reynolds
in his fourth
Discourse
uses both indiscriminately to cover "history painting", while saying "...it ought to be called poetical, as in reality it is", reflecting the French term
peinture historique
, one equivalent of "history painting". The terms began to separate in the 19th century, with "historical painting" becoming a sub-group of "history painting" restricted to subjects taken from history in its normal sense. In 1853
John Ruskin
asked his audience: "What do you at present
mean
by historical painting? Now-a-days it means the endeavour, by the power of imagination, to portray some historical event of past days."
[11]
So for example
Harold Wethey
's three-volume catalogue of the paintings of
Titian
(Phaidon, 1969?75) is divided between "Religious Paintings", "Portraits", and "Mythological and Historical Paintings", though both volumes I and III cover what is included in the term "History Paintings". This distinction is useful but is by no means generally observed, and the terms are still often used in a confusing manner. Because of the potential for confusion modern academic writing tends to avoid the phrase "historical painting", talking instead of "historical subject matter" in history painting, but where the phrase is still used in contemporary scholarship it will normally mean the painting of subjects from history, very often in the 19th century.
[12]
"Historical painting" may also be used, especially in discussion of painting techniques in conservation studies, to mean "old", as opposed to modern or recent painting.
[13]
In 19th-century British writing on art the terms "
subject painting
" or "anecdotic" painting were often used for works in a line of development going back to
William Hogarth
of monoscenic depictions of crucial moments in an implied narrative with unidentified characters,
[14]
such as
William Holman Hunt
's 1853 painting
The Awakening Conscience
or
Augustus Egg
's
Past and Present
, a set of three paintings, updating sets by Hogarth such as
Marriage a-la-mode
.
19th century
[
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History painting was the dominant form of
academic painting
in the various national academies in the 18th century, and for most of the 19th, and increasingly historical subjects dominated. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods the heroic treatment of contemporary history in a frankly propagandistic fashion by
Antoine-Jean, Baron Gros
,
Jacques-Louis David
,
Carle Vernet
and others was supported by the French state, but after the fall of Napoleon in 1815 the French governments were not regarded as suitable for heroic treatment and many artists retreated further into the past to find subjects, though in Britain depicting the victories of the
Napoleonic Wars
mostly occurred after they were over. Another path was to choose contemporary subjects that were oppositional to government either at home and abroad, and many of what were arguably the last great generation of history paintings were protests at contemporary episodes of repression or outrages at home or abroad:
Goya
's
The Third of May 1808
(1814),
Theodore Gericault
's
The Raft of the Medusa
(1818?19),
Eugene Delacroix
's
The Massacre at Chios
(1824) and
Liberty Leading the People
(1830). These were heroic, but showed heroic suffering by ordinary civilians.
Romantic artists
such as Gericault and Delacroix, and those from other movements such as the English
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
continued to regard history painting as the ideal for their most ambitious works. Others such as
Jan Matejko
in Poland,
[15]
Vasily Surikov
in Russia,
Jose Moreno Carbonero
in Spain and
Paul Delaroche
in France became specialized painters of large historical subjects. The
style troubadour
("
troubadour
style") was a somewhat derisive French term for earlier paintings of medieval and Renaissance scenes, which were often small and depicting moments of anecdote rather than drama;
Ingres
,
Richard Parkes Bonington
and
Henri Fradelle
painted such works. Sir
Roy Strong
calls this type of work the "Intimate Romantic", and in French it was known as the "peinture de genre historique" or "peinture anecdotique" ("historical genre painting" or "anecdotal painting").
[16]
Church commissions for large group scenes from the Bible had greatly reduced, and historical painting became very significant. Especially in the early 19th century, much historical painting depicted specific moments from historical literature, with the novels of Sir
Walter Scott
a particular favourite, in France and other European countries as much as Great Britain.
[17]
By the middle of the century medieval scenes were expected to be very carefully researched, using the work of historians of costume, architecture and all elements of decor that were becoming available. And example of this is the extensive research of Byzantine architecture, clothing and decoration made in Parisian museums and libraries by
Moreno Carbonero
for his masterwork
The Entry of Roger de Flor in Constantinople
.
[18]
The provision of examples and expertise for artists, as well as revivalist industrial designers, was one of the motivations for the establishment of museums like the
Victoria and Albert Museum
in London.
[19]
New techniques of
printmaking
such as the
chromolithograph
made good quality reproductions both relatively cheap and very widely accessible, and also hugely profitable for artist and publisher, as the sales were so large.
[20]
Historical painting often had a close relationship with
Nationalism
, and painters like Matejko in Poland could play an important role in fixing the prevailing historical narrative of national history in the popular mind.
[21]
In France,
L'art Pompier
("Fireman art") was a derisory term for official academic historical painting,
[22]
and in a final phase, "History painting of a debased sort, scenes of brutality and terror, purporting to illustrate episodes from Roman and Moorish history, were Salon sensations. On the overcrowded walls of the exhibition galleries, the paintings that shouted loudest got the attention".
[23]
Orientalist
painting was an alternative genre that offered similar exotic costumes and decor, and at least as much opportunity to depict sex and violence.
Gallery
[
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See also
[
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Notes
[
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]
- ^
National Gallery, Glossary entry
;
History Painting Gallery
Archived
2016-08-30 at the
Wayback Machine
from The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Green and Seddon, 7-8; Harrison, 105-106
- ^
Green and Seddon, 11-15
- ^
"History painting"
.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary
. The Free Dictionary.
- ^
lobo (2020-07-02).
"The History of Painting. The evolution of Art"
.
Lobo Pop Art
. Retrieved
2023-06-08
.
- ^
Blunt, 11-12; Barlow, 1
- ^
See Reynolds below; nonetheless he bowed to convention: "In conformity to custom, I call this part of the art history painting; it ought to be called poetical, as in reality it is." (
Discources
, IV); for debates over terminology in the Italian Renaissance, see Bull, 391?394
- ^
Books.google.co.uk
, translation
- ^
Strong, 17, and 32?34 and generally on growth of historical painting.
- ^
Rothenstein, 16?17; Strong, 24?26
- ^
Barlow, 1
- ^
Lecture IV, p. 172,
Lectures on Architecture and Painting: Delivered at Edinburgh, in November, 1853
, 1854, Wiley,
Internet Archive
.
- ^
As shown in the usages in Barlow, Strong, and Wright
- ^
As in "The beautifully renovated Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam will open its doors to the public in 2013. To celebrate this event the Rijksmuseum will host a three-day symposium on Historical Painting Techniques. The central theme of the symposium will be the technical study of historically used painting techniques, the historical painting materials, their origin and trade, and their application in the painter’s workshop."
Rijksmuseum, "Painting Techniques - Call for Papers"
Archived
2013-05-31 at the
Wayback Machine
- ^
Pamela M. Fletcher (1 January 2003).
Narrating Modernity: The British Problem Picture, 1895-1914
. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p. 146 note 12.
ISBN
978-0-7546-3568-0
.
- ^
(In Polish)
Maciej Masłowski
: Dzieje Polski w obrazach,
Warszawa
1962
, ed. by "
Arkady
Publishers
"
- ^
Strong, 36-40; Wright, 269-273, French terms on p. 269
- ^
Wright, throughout; Strong, 30-32
- ^
"Entrada de Roger de Flor en Constantinopla | artehistoria.com"
.
www.artehistoria.com
(in Spanish). Archived from
the original
on 2018-11-16
. Retrieved
2018-11-16
.
- ^
Strong, 24-26, 47-73; Wright, 269-273
- ^
Harding, 7-9
- ^
Strong, 32-36
- ^
Harding, throughout
- ^
White, 91
References
[
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]
- Barlow, Paul,
"The Death of History Painting in Nineteenth-Century Art?" PDF
,
Visual Culture in Britain
, Volume 6, Number 1, Summer 2005, pp. 1?13(13)
- Blunt, Anthony
,
Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1660
, 1940 (refs to 1985 edn),
OUP
,
ISBN
0-19-881050-4
- Bull, Malcolm,
The Mirror of the Gods, How Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods
, Oxford UP, 2005,
ISBN
0195219236
- Green, David and Seddon, Peter,
History Painting Reassessed: The Representation of History in Contemporary Art
, 2000, Manchester University Press,
ISBN
9780719051685
,
google books
- Harding, James.
Artistes pompiers: French academic art in the 19th century
, 1979, New York: Rizzoli
- Harrison, Charles,
An Introduction to Art
, 2009, Yale University Press,
ISBN
9780300109153
,
google books
- Rothenstein, John
,
An Introduction to English Painting
, 2002 (reissue), I.B.Tauris,
ISBN
9781860646782
- Strong, Roy
.
And when did you last see your father? The Victorian Painter and British History
, 1978, Thames and Hudson,
ISBN
0500271321
- White, Harrison C.,
Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World
, 1993 (2nd edn), University of Chicago Press,
ISBN
9780226894874
,
google books
- Wright, Beth Segal,
Scott's Historical Novels and French Historical Painting 1815-1855
,
The Art Bulletin
, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 268?287,
JSTOR
Further reading
[
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]
- Ayers, William (ed.),
Picturing History: American Painting 1770?1903
,
ISBN
0-8478-1745-8
.
External links
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]