ABSTRACT
Despite all the scholarship on shifting classifications of the arts in western discourse from antiquity to the present, it still comes as a surprise to many that the grouping of painting, sculpture, and architecture (a convention, for example, of standard books on art history and the teaching of art history in higher education) belongs to a relatively recent ordering.1 Indeed, this ordering can be traced back only as far as 1563, when Cosimo I de' Medici incorporated a moribund confraternity for painters (the Compagnia di San Luca) with an unprecedented school for the so-called arts of'design' (disegno), thereby establishing the first discursive and institutional tie among Florentine painters, sculptors, and architects - men who lived and worked in different parts of the city and whose professional activities were deemed so disparate that they matriculated in separate guilds, as had their predecessors for over two hundred years.2 Based on the materials with which they worked, painters belonged to the Guild of the Doctors and Apothecaries, while sculptors and architects joined the Guild of the Masters of Stone and Wood or, after the reforms of 1534, the conglomerate Guild of the Builders.3
