Institutionality and aesthetic canons: the Beautiful art in Chile since the fundation of the painting Academy up to the Centenary

Abstract

The Fine Arts in Chile were dependent to the guidelines of the state and some social groups during the second half of the XIX century and first decades of the XX mainly. Since the foundation of the Academy of Painting, the government and the social oligarchies had a very tutelary role over the teaching processes, the patrimony, the diffusion and the rewarding systems. The leading class valued an artistic canon whose iconographic and aesthetic repertories were related with the European academic tradition.

This model is institutionalized in the country through the teaching of painting and sculpture, the official collections, the saloons and the artistic writing.