page_title: Chilean art
section_title: Critics of the Academy
hierarchical_section_title: Chilean art / Chilean Academy of Painting / Critics of the Academy
caption_attribution_description: Español: Paisaje de Laguna de Aculeo
context_page_description: Chilean art refers to all kinds of visual art developed in Chile, or by Chileans, from the arrival of the Spanish conquerors to the modern day. It also includes the native pre-Columbian pictorial expression on modern Chilean territory.
context_section_description: Despite the significance of the Academy, some art historians criticised this period as one of the dullest in the history of Chilean art. These authors based their criticism on Ciccarelli's attempt to copy the European model of teaching. In Europe, teachers were plentiful and the continent had vast art collections and plentiful patrons to draw upon. In contrast, Chile had only recently began its foray in the art world and was a country with almost no native art movement or established national identity, as well as a very modest national art collection, with people unable to afford fine art. The attempt to bring the European model to Chile by replicating its techniques has been seen as a failure in terms of the number of artists produced, especially for Ciccarelli, who presided over the academy for over 20 years.
  In the words of the art historian Antonio Romera, Ciccarelli was:
  "A dogmatic master, inflexible in defence of his aesthetic ideal, lacking the necessary ductility and eclecticism to allow students to follow their own path: that marked out by their own sensibility; by vocation; their intimate stimulation..."
  The same author states that Ciccarelli was unable to create the following and discipleship of his teachings that he wished for. Instead, his most successful students, such as Pedro Lira and Antonio Smith, did not care for his teachings and migrated towards other styles and workshops of their own.
  Pedro Lira also agreed that with these criticisms of Ciccarelli. In the mid-19th century, the Chilean aristocrat possessed little artistic knowledge inherited from the “Precursors of Chilean painting". The complicated nature of his teaching, his over-ambitious neoclassical pretensions, and his lack of flexibility earned him criticism from several of his students, but it also created a new appetite for neoclassical painting in Chile.
caption: Laguna de acúleo (Acúleo Lagoon) by Onofre Jarpa
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