ABSTRACT
Emulation within the classical language is a means by which that evolution in the arts can be made more deliberate, chosen rather than imposed or assumed, and open-ended and progressive. Emulation is a way out of cultural conflict, and a way into a more constructive engagement with the past. It is one of the great liabilities of artistic and architectural theory that the theoreticians rarely distinguish between how things were, how they are, and how they should be. Emulation does not explain every development in Renaissance and Baroque art. But it does defuse the common assumption that imitation, whether in drawing from life or appropriating motifs from other artists, was the operative mode for most artists before Modernism, or that it is all any modern artist working in a tradition is able to do. The Accademia di San Luca continued to advocate a fairly broad canon, and a diversity of its interpretation, well into the eighteenth century.
