Painting, Independence and Education. The evolution of Chilean Fine Arts in the 19th century

Abstract

The significant evolution of Chilean Fine Arts during the passage from the 18th to the 19th century has its raison d’etre in two factors. The first one was the boost to the systematization of artistic studies in the education of young artists. Since 1796, with the foundation of the Academia de San Luis in Santiago thanks to the erudite Manuel de Salas’ effort, the required forms of academic institution that recognized in drawing the essential discipline in the process of artistic learning, started to be set up.
From the 19th century onwards, the National Institute, the Painting Academy and other institutions started focusing artistic studies on Fine Arts rather than with the field of industry and agriculture.
The Chilean art painting experienced a change in artistic trends to forms that Antonio Romera in 1969 thoroughly defined as "tropical romanticism", and that from our point of view has the best performer in the French Monvoisin.
This consideration takes us straight to the second factor, that is, the presence in Chilean territory of foreign artists. The "travelers" who not only introduced innovative stylistic changes in Chilean painting, but also who accelerated the circulation of artistic treaties, books and engraves that, from Europe, nurtured a real remodeling of the discourse about aesthetic matters and of taste.
In the following pages, we are going to demonstrate how these circumstances, coexisted due to a social and politic context which allowed it, favoured a real development of Fine Arts in Chile.
Proof of it are the words pronounced by the Italian painter Alessandro Ciccarelli in the Painting Academy inauguration speech. Referring to his educational project to make Chilean Fine Arts more relevant, he applied the refined system that the theorist Winckelmann in 1764 applied to the study of Grecian Art History of the 5th century B.C.
The Prussian historian linked certain politic, geographic and climatic conditions to the creation of a positive context for the development of Arts. In Santiago this positive circumstances were developing in that moment, thus Ciccarelli gave to the young country the pleasant nickname of "Athens of South America".