Michelangelo. Van Gogh. Picasso. Warhol. Dali. Matisse. Da Vinci. Pollock. Rembrandt.
Carvaggio. Chagall. Maybe a Frida Kahlo in there.
Long before the current celebrity-obsessed age of social media,
capital-G Great Artists have been singled out, elevated, and praised.
We tend to associate art with individual artists, who are considered geniuses.
But… is this really the right way to think about it?
We can actually pinpoint very particular moments in history where this way of thinking began.
What is the myth of the Great Artist?
Where does this idea come from, and what, exactly, is “greatness”?
Hi! I'm Sarah Urist Green, and this is Crash Course Art History.
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The idea of the Great Artist, and of art history as a series of celebrity biographies,
comes from a specific time and place: Renaissance Europe.
Before that, across the world and throughout history,
a lot of art was made either collectively or anonymously,
or at least without a lot of individual fanfare.
Take the Medieval bestseller “The Book of Hours,” from 15th Century France.
The artist Enguerrand Quarton produced many of its images,
and yet he’s not exactly a household name.
This is because medieval European art was primarily produced by guilds,
or associations of artists, art-sellers, and craftspeople.
So, say you’re a wealthy Venetian trader and you
want to impress your friends with your new silk tapestries,
you’d tell everyone the guild you got them from.
Not the individual artist.
Guilds functioned essentially as intense training programs,
designed to turn apprentices into masters.
The formula was simple: you can become a master by doing what the master before you did,
exactly how they did it, through specific levels of accomplishment,
kind of like when you level up in a video game.
And that’s where we get the term masterpiece.
It was a work that demonstrated the artist’s skill had reached master level.
You’d won the game, and now had all the support and benefits of being in the guild.
But then, starting in the 1400s, guilds were no longer the only game in town.
Enter the Medicis, a family of wealthy merchants, bankers,
and political leaders in Florence,
who began to pay artists to do their thing, independent of the guilds.
Thanks to its key position along flourishing trade routes, Italy was flush with cash.
Bankrolling the next Renaissance art superstar became a status symbol.
And the patrons that funded those artworks?
They had a whole different idea of what made a great artist.
While guilds tended to reward technical skill and craftsmanship,
the Medicis and other patrons thought of painting and sculpture as valuable
if they expressed complex ideas and emotions.
This was the beginning of the “art vs. craft” debate.
Those in favor of art suggested that technical skill wasn’t enough:
to them, works of craft didn’t have the deeper meaning that makes something truly art.
In what’s considered one of the earliest art historical writings —
“The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” —
the author, Giorgio Vasari,
described great artists as having a nugget of genius that sets them apart from ordinary people.
I like to think of it as a chicken nugget of genius, personally.
We can track some pretty major shifts in how art was thought about through this book.
First, it was biographical.
This suggested that learning about artists’ lives was important to understanding the art they made.
Quite a difference from the guild model,
where you often wouldn’t have even known the artist’s name.
On top of that, the book framed art as an
intellectual pursuit and not just a feat of physical labor.
Vasari wrote, “the true difficulties [of art] lie rather in the mind than in the body.”
In other words: the era of the tortured artist had begun.
Like, take this painting made by none other than Vasari himself.
It shows St. Luke so engrossed in painting the Virgin Mary and baby
Jesus that they’ve actually appeared in the room to help.
Mary seems to be offering the artist direct guidance—
while also running some kind of angel-baby daycare?
Anyway, the mixing of paints and such–the physical labor–is relegated to the background,
and the moment of divine inspiration at the easel–that mental labor–
is in the foreground, up front and in focus.
This coincided with a rise in interest for the artistic style of naturalism,
which involved using light and shadow to make bodies look realistic and three-dimensional.
Vasari and others felt this style showed a deeper
scientific and philosophical understanding of the world.
Those personal preferences affected not only what kind of art they made,
but also which art and artists were written about,
and thus which artists were read about and became popular.
Of course, we can’t pin all of this on Vasari.
These changes were kicked off by a major shift in the way the art industry was structured,
a result of larger economic and political developments.
Maybe singling out Vasari is playing into the myth of the
great originator of the myth of the Great Artist…
whoa, this is getting intense, y’all.
In any case, around the 16th century,
a new type of institution cropped up to train young artists: art academies.
The most influential one, the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture,
was in Paris, founded in 1648 by King Louis the Fourteenth.
And art academies weren’t as freewheeling as independent patrons.
They were actually…kind of a lot like guilds, even as they took power away from them.
There were strict rules, high standards, and an emphasis on technique.
But, academies took the art side of ye olde art vs. craft debate.
They basically absorbed the concept of skill into the myth of the Great Artist.
Being technically skilled became a component of being a “genius.”
And the academies had a bunch of new takes.
Take number 1: the King is amazing, we love him.
Nevermind the fact that we were founded by the King and that love is mandatory.
Take number 2: Painting is the highest form of art, especially history painting,
which told stories from the Bible and the ancient past,
or otherwise emphasized Moral Values of “Great Men”.
This was way more important than mere landscapes or still lifes or – worst of all –
regular people doing regular things.
Take number 3: Artists are prominent intellectuals –
people, specifically white men, of culture, wealth, and influence.
Their self-portraits emphasized this status, complete with dramatic lighting,
wistful gazes, furrowed brows, and serious stares.
And you better throw some paintbrushes or a
canvas in there so there’s no doubt they’re a great artist.
Many art academies did admit women,
but there were many obstacles to rising through the ranks.
Most notably, women weren’t allowed to study anatomy or draw male nudes —
which was required to become a history painter.
This all but locked women out of the category of Great Artist.
But, that doesn’t mean there weren’t women making great art at the time.
Like, the painter Artemisia Gentileschi,
whose self-portrait shows her as the very personification of painting.
And she wasn’t the only one.
Let’s go to the drawing board.
Women who did make their way into the art world showed they could absolutely
produce work just as accomplished and intellectual as the next guy’s.
Take this painting by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
It’s in the style of the self-portraits we saw earlier,
only this one contains layers of hidden meaning.
Vigée-Le Brun climbed the ladder of artistic success
to eventually become French monarch Marie Antoinette’s preferred artist.
When the French Revolution broke out, and things started to get all “Off with their heads!,”
she wisely split for Rome.
And while there, she made this portrait of herself painting Marie Antoinette.
The artist’s shadow on the canvas is a reference to the
ancient Greek myth about the origins of artmaking.
So the story goes, one night,
the daughter of a Corinthian potter took a piece of charcoal
and outlined the shadow of her lover on the wall.
He was about to embark on a long journey,
and she wanted to preserve his image in her memory.
The tale is often regarded as a mythic origin story of drawing.
The painting positions Vigée Le Brun as decisively in the artistic canon,
stretching back to the ancients.
But it also reflects how art serves a key role in
the writing of history and the making of “greatness.”
In recent years, evidence has emerged that
suggests women may have participated in academies more than we realized.
Which really begs the question:
were women excluded from being great artists, or just written out – and written off?
Centuries later, artists continue to explore the myth of the Great Artist,
and how it shapes culture.
Like, here’s Kerry James Marshall’s “Untitled (Painter),” from 2009,
which depicts a Black artist in front of her easel,
in the same pose made popular by the art academies.
At first it seems like she’s painting herself into the canon thing.
But a closer look at the canvas reveals that she's using a “paint-by-numbers” kit.
Marshall’s work makes me wonder
whether the artworks that made someone “great” weren’t born of some “nugget of genius,”
but were instead constructed based on the arbitrary rules of an elite few,
like a paint-by-numbers kit for turning someone into a capital-G Great Artist.
Marshall’s picture also makes me think about why I’ve never seen a Black woman,
or a Black man like Marshall himself, painted in this stereotypical “artist” pose before.
Did they exist, or were they like others written out of history?
And what about now?
Is there a formula for modern “greatness”?
And does it allow for traditionally excluded artists?
Those are some of the questions we hope to answer in future episodes.
But for now, I can tell you this,
in 2023, the Royal Academy of Arts in London – yes one of those academies –
elected Marshall as an Honorary Royal Academician.
While the field of art history has tended to be organized around individual artists,
it’s important to remember it hasn’t always been that way,
and that doesn’t reflect the way art is made everywhere in the world.
The myth of the great artist started in a particular time and a particular place.
And that had impacts worldwide — ones that continue today.
But the qualities that made artists “great” in Renaissance Italy don’t tell the whole story.
The more we recognize the perspectives that have been left out of the story,
the fuller and more complex our understanding of art, and history, becomes.
Next time, we’ll talk about what to do when great artists are… not-so-great people.
I’ll see you then!
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Art History which was filmed at the
Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields and was made with the help of all these ingenious people.
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