<P> He who produces perfect landscapes is above another who only produces fruit, flowers or seashells . He who paints living animals is more estimable than those who only represent dead things without movement, and as man is the most perfect work of God on the earth, it is also certain that he who becomes an imitator of God in representing human figures, is much more excellent than all the others...a painter who only does portraits still does not have the highest perfection of his art, and cannot expect the honour due to the most skilled . For that he must pass from representing a single figure to several together; history and myth must be depicted; great events must be represented as by historians, or like the poets, subjects that will please, and climbing still higher, he must have the skill to cover under the veil of myth the virtues of great men in allegories, and the mysteries they reveal ". </P> <P> Allegorical painting was raised above other types of history painting; together they were the grand genre, including paintings with religious, mythological, historical, literary, or allegorical subjects--they embodied some interpretation of life or conveyed a moral or intellectual message . The gods and goddesses from the ancient mythologies represented different aspects of the human psyche, figures from religions represented different ideas, and history, like the other sources, represented a dialectic or play of ideas . Subjects with several figures ranked higher than single figures . For a long time, especially during the French Revolution, history painting often focused on depiction of the heroic male nude; though this waned in the 19th century . </P> <P> After history painting came, in order of decreasing worth: portraits, scenes of everyday life (called scènes de genre, or "genre painting", and also petit genre to contrast it with the grande genre), landscapes, animal painting, and finally still lifes . In his formulation, such paintings were inferior because they were merely reportorial pictures without moral force or artistic imagination . Genre paintings--neither ideal in style, nor elevated in subject--were admired for their skill, ingenuity, and even humour, but never confused with high art . </P> <P> The hierarchy of genres also had a corresponding hierarchy of formats: large format for history paintings, small format for still lifes . This had occasionally been breached in the past, especially in large Flemish works, and the monumental The Young Bull of the Dutch artist Paulus Potter, as well as the larger of the two Butchers' Shop canvases of Annibale Carracci . But for the most part the relative prices obtainable for the different genres ensured the hierarchy of size also; it would not have been economic to paint a very large subject from the lower genres, except for commissioned group portraits . Rubens' largest landscapes were painted for his own houses . </P>

The lowest type of painting according to the hierarchy of genres is