4. Academicians and Bohemians. The sixteenth
century has been called the century of the academies
and, indeed, before the end of the century some acade-
mies of art were founded. Appropriately, the first one
came to life in Florence in 1563 (Accademia del Di-
segno) with Vasari as its initiator and organizer. The
new type of gentleman-artist would be unthinkable
without the rising social and educational institutions
of the art academies which saw their heyday between
the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries. Looking
back from the position of the academic artist, the plight
of his pre-academic colleague can be more easily un-
derstood. Not unlike the medieval artist, the acade-
mician enjoyed the benefit of a professional orga-
nization, a center toward which his life gravitated. The
Renaissance artist, by contrast, partaking no longer in
the old and not yet in the new social structure, had
to fend for himself. The Renaissance artist's fight for
liberation from the encumbrances of the guilds was
reenacted in the romantic artist's fight for liberation
from the ties of the academy. Just as the individualism
of the Renaissance artist put an end to the sheltered
position of the late medieval craftsman, so the new
romantic vocabulary—enthusiasm, naïveté, spontane-
ity, feeling, autonomy of artistic creation, intuition,
totality of vision, and so forth—reversed many basic
tenets of the academic artist. The specter arose of the
artist as a kind of being elevated above the rest of
mankind, alienated from the world and answerable in
thought and deed only to his own genius: the image
of the Bohemian took shape, fostered as much by the
ideology 
and conduct of the artist as by the reaction
of the society on the fringe of which he lived. Thus
we see toward the end of the eighteenth century and
at the beginning of the nineteenth problems of person-
ality in the making, which, under kindred circum-
stances, had beset the artists of the Florentine Renais-
sance. With good reason, therefore, one may talk of
a proto-Bohemian period around and after 1500 sepa-
rated from the Bohemian era proper by the centuries
of the conforming artist.
