Question

Traditional art historical narratives frequently posit that the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth century liberated painting from its representational duties. According to this view, because the camera could perfectly capture objective reality, painters were suddenly free to explore subjective emotion and formal abstraction, culminating in movements like Impressionism. However, this triumphalist narrative obscures the profound epistemological crisis that photography actually provoked within the painting establishment. Rather than joyfully abandoning representation, painters found themselves forced into a defensive posture, compelled to actively justify the continued relevance of their medium in an era of mechanical reproduction. To achieve this, many academic painters did not retreat into abstraction; instead, they doubled down on the unique material qualities of paint—its texture, its capacity for rendering vibrant, non-naturalistic color, and its ability to convey the physical trace of the artist's hand—qualities that the monochromatic, long-exposure photographs of the era could not replicate. Thus, the shift in late nineteenth-century painting was less a spontaneous embrace of newfound freedom than a calculated, defensive redefinition of what constituted artistic truth, formulated in direct reaction to the existential threat posed by the camera.

Which one of the following most accurately expresses the main point of the passage?