How painting was actually taught
Every painter in the atlas was trained by a system: a bottega, a guild, an academy, an atelier. Those systems had admission rules, set exercises with set durations, models on schedules, fees, competitions, and doctrines, and they are documented in treatises, memoirs, and institutional records. This atlas reconstructs them, school by school, from those sources.
The arc runs from the Renaissance workshop, where a boy ground pigments for years before touching a brush, through the guilds and the great state academies, to the private ateliers that trained the moderns, and it ends at the question painters still ask today: atelier or online.
École des Beaux-Arts
The French state system where competition decided everything: entry by exam, rank deciding your seat in the life room, and the Prix de Rome as the summit of a ladder made entirely of concours.
Imperial Academy of Arts
The total institution of art education: boys entered at eight, boarded on cabbage soup, climbed a ladder of medals for up to fifteen years, and the Large Gold Medal bought a locked-cell masterpiece and years in Rome.
Académie Julian
The open-door Paris atelier where anyone who paid could draw from life: no entrance exam, women trained to the same curriculum as men, and the concours ran the room.
Art Students League of New York
The student-governed league with no curriculum at all: autonomous studios, monthly enrollment open to anyone, and each teacher a law unto themselves, which is exactly how it trained a century of American painting.
The Florentine bottega
The first academies: Vasari and the Carracci
The Guild of Saint Luke
Pacheco’s workshop and the Seville system
The Royal Academy Schools
The Pennsylvania Academy
The Munich Academy
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
The teachers behind these systems have their own pages in the Painter Atlas: Bridgman, Vanderpoel, Chistyakov, Bargue, Hale, and the rest of the education wing. The transmission lines between them are mapped in the lineage graph.