Realism (arts)
In art, realism is generally the attempt to represent subject-matter truthfully, without artificiality, exaggeration, or speculative or supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, although these terms are not necessarily synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe. Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, often refers to a specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the commoner and the rise of leftist politics. The realist painters rejected Romanticism, which had come to dominate French literature and art, with roots in the late 18th century.
In 19th-century Europe, "Naturalism" or the "Naturalist school" was somewhat artificially erected as a term representing a breakaway sub-movement of realism, that attempted to distinguish itself from its parent by its avoidance of politics and social issues, and liked to proclaim a quasi-scientific basis, playing on the sense of "naturalist" as a student of natural history, as the biological sciences were then generally known.
There have been various movements invoking realism in the other arts, such as the opera style of verismo, literary realism, theatrical realism and Italian neorealist cinema.
Visual arts
When used as an adjective, "realistic" distinguishes itself from "realist" art that concerns subject matter. Similarly, the term "illusionistic" might be used when referring to the accurate rendering of visual appearances in a composition. In painting, naturalism is the precise, detailed and accurate representation in art of the appearance of scenes and objects. It is also called mimesis or illusionism and became especially marked in European painting in the Early Netherlandish painting of Robert Campin, Jan van Eyck and other artists in the 15th century. In the 19th century, Realism art movement painters such as Gustave Courbet were not especially noted for fully precise and careful depiction of visual appearances; in Courbet's time that was more often a characteristic of academic painting, which very often depicted with great skill and care scenes that were contrived and artificial, or imagined historical scenes.Resisting idealization
Realism, or naturalism as a style depicting the unidealized version of the subject, can be used in depicting any type of subject without commitment to treating the typical or the everyday. Despite the general idealism of classical art, this too had classical precedents, which was useful when defending such treatments in the Renaissance and Baroque. Demetrius of Alopece was a 4th-century BCE sculptor whose work was said to prefer realism over ideal beauty, and during the Ancient Roman Republic, politicians preferred a truthful depiction in portraits, though the early emperors favored Greek idealism. Goya's portraits of the Spanish royal family represent a sort of honest, unflattering portrayal of important people.A recurring trend in Christian art was "realism" that emphasized the humanity of religious figures, above all Christ and his physical sufferings in his Passion. Following trends in devotional literature, this developed in the Late Middle Ages, where some painted wooden sculptures in particular strayed into the grotesque in portraying Christ covered in wounds and blood, with the intention of stimulating the viewer to meditate on the suffering that Christ had undergone on their behalf. These were especially found in Germany and Central Europe. After abating in the Renaissance, similar works re-appeared in the Baroque, especially in Spanish sculpture.
Renaissance theorists opened a debate, which was to last several centuries, as to the correct balance between drawing art from the observation of nature and from idealized forms, typically those found in classical models, or the work of other artists generally. Some admitted the importance of the natural, but many believed it should be idealized to various degrees to include only the beautiful. Leonardo da Vinci was one who championed the pure study of nature and wished to depict the whole range of individual varieties of forms in the human figure and other things. Leon Battista Alberti was an early idealizer, stressing the typical, with others such as Michelangelo supporting the selection of the most beautiful – he refused to make portraits for that reason.
File:Henri BIVA, ca 1905-06, Matin à Villeneuve, Salon 1906 postcard - original painting, oil on canvas, 151.1 x 125.1 cm, private collection.jpeg|thumb|Henri Biva, Matin à Villeneuve, –06
In the 17th century, the debate continued. In Italy, it usually centered on the contrast between the relative "classical-idealism" of the Carracci and the "naturalist" style of the Caravaggisti, or followers of Caravaggio, who painted religious scenes as though set in the back streets of contemporary Italian cities and used "naturalist" as a self-description. Bellori, writing some decades after Caravaggio's early death and no supporter of his style, refers to "Those who glory in the name of naturalists".
During the 19th century, naturalism developed as a broadly defined movement in European art, though it lacked the political underpinnings that motivated realist artists. The originator of the term was the French art critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary, who in 1863 announced: "The naturalist school declares that art is the expression of life under all phases and on all levels, and that its sole aim is to reproduce nature by carrying it to its maximum power and intensity: it is truth balanced with science". Émile Zola adopted the term with a similar scientific emphasis for his aims in the novel. Many Naturalist paintings covered a similar range of subject matter as that of Impressionism, but using tighter, more traditional brushwork styles.
The term "continued to be used indiscriminately for various kinds of realism" for several decades, often as a catch-all term for art that was outside Impressionism and later movements of Modernism and also was not academic art. The later periods of the French Barbizon School and the Düsseldorf School of painting, with its students from many countries, and 20th-century American Regionalism are movements that are often also described as "naturalist", although the term is rarely used in British painting. Some recent art historians claimed either Courbet or the Impressionists for the label.
Illusionism
The development of increasingly accurate representations of the visual appearances of things has a long history in art. It includes elements such as the accurate depiction of the anatomy of humans and animals, the perspective and effects of distance, and the detailed effects of light and color. The art of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe achieved remarkably lifelike depictions of animals. Ancient Egyptian art developed conventions involving both stylization and idealization. Ancient Greek art is commonly recognized as having made great progress in the representation of anatomy. No original works on panels or walls by the great Greek painters survive, but from literary accounts and the surviving corpus of derivative works, illusionism seems to be highly valued in painting. Pliny the Elder's famous story of birds pecking at grapes painted by Zeuxis in the 5th century BC may well be a legend.As well as accuracy in shape, light, and color, Roman paintings show an unscientific but effective knowledge of representing distant objects smaller than closer ones and representing regular geometric forms such as the roof and walls of a room with perspective. This progress in illusionistic effects in no way meant a rejection of idealism; statues of Greek gods and heroes attempt to represent with accuracy idealized and beautiful forms, though other works, such as heads of the famously ugly Socrates, were allowed to fall below these ideal standards of beauty. Roman portraiture, when not under too much Greek influence, shows a greater commitment to a truthful depiction of its subjects, called verism.
File:Eyckbaptism.png|thumb|Bas-de-page of the Baptism of Christ, "Hand G", Turin–Milan Hours. An illusionistic work for 1425, with the dove of the Holy Ghost in the sky.
The art of Late Antiquity famously rejected illusionism for expressive force, a change already well underway by the time Christianity began to affect the art of the elite. In the West, classical standards of illusionism did not begin to be reached again until the Late medieval and Early Renaissance periods and were helped first in the Netherlands in the early 15th century, and around the 1470s in Italy by the development of new techniques of oil painting which allowed very subtle and precise effects of light to be painted using several layers of paint and glaze. Scientific methods of representing perspective were developed in Italy in the early 15th century and gradually spread across Europe, with accuracy in anatomy rediscovered under the influence of classical art. As in classical times, idealism remained the norm.
The accurate depiction of landscape in painting had also been developing in Early Netherlandish/Early Northern Renaissance and Italian Renaissance painting and was then brought to a very high level in 17th-century Dutch Golden Age painting, with very subtle techniques for depicting a range of weather conditions and degrees of natural light. After being another development of Early Netherlandish painting, 1600 European portraiture subjects were often idealized by smoothing features or giving them an artificial pose. Still life paintings and still life elements in other works played a considerable role in developing illusionistic painting, though in the Netherlandish tradition of flower painting they long lacked "realism", in that flowers from all seasons were typically used, either from the habit of assembling compositions from individual drawings or as a deliberate convention; the large displays of bouquets in vases were atypical of 17th-century habits; the flowers were displayed one at a time.