Fine art genres
Hierarchy of genres, high and low types of painting - systematization of various genres of fine arts according to their significance.
Painting genres (French genre - genus, type) are historically established internal divisions in most types of art, specific to each of the areas of artistic culture. In the visual arts, the main genres are determined primarily by the subject of the image (portrait, landscape, interior, still life, as well as historical, battle, animalistic, everyday genres) or by the nature of the interpretation of this subject (caricature, cartoon, chamber portrait, historical and everyday genre, etc.).
If one were to begin with the most general characterization of a genre in art, we would define it as the selectivity of artistic creativity. There are two sides to the matter in this definition.
The first is that in the real creative process the artist always faces the need to more or less consciously choose a certain genre structure that seems to him optimal for solving a given creative task. And even in the case when none of the genre structures existing in his time suits the artist and he goes in search of a new one - either by modifying one of the existing ones, or by crossing two or three genres known to him, or by trying to construct something completely in in this respect is unprecedented - even in this case, he is forced to carry out a certain act of "genre self-determination".
"Subgenres" of the main genres can arise when the objects of the image themselves are crushed (sea view, marina - a special kind of landscape, "breakfasts" and "desserts" - varieties of still life). The main genres, like the concept of genre itself, have their own historical boundaries. The art of antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance did not know clear boundaries between genres, and only in the XVII-XVIII centuries. the aesthetics of classicism created a strict hierarchical genre system with the division of genres into "high" and "low". However, already in the XIX century. this hierarchy is destroyed, and the boundaries between genres are gradually erased, the process of their interweaving and complex interaction begins.