How did A Burial at Ornans depart from traditional paintings of funerals?

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Painting by Gustave Courbet showing the artist at his easel in a crowded studio, surrounded by figures including a nude model, onlookers, and a child with a white dog. — Realism *The Painter's Studio*, showing Gustave Courbet at the easel, oil on canvas by Courbet, 1854–55; in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Gustave Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans departed from traditional funeral paintings by rejecting the era's conventions regarding scale, subject matter, and spiritual idealization.

Scale and Subject: Traditionally, massive canvases were reserved for heroic, religious, or allegorical themes. Courbet challenged this by using a monumental scale to depict an ordinary, contemporary funeral of an unnamed person, thereby ennobling the lives of the rural bourgeoisie rather than historical figures.1
Lack of Idealization: Unlike works such as El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which depicted the soul’s ascent to heaven, Courbet’s painting offered no spiritual transcendence. There were no angels or divine elements—only a grave and an overcast sky.1
Technique: Courbet rejected the polished illusionism expected by 19th-century audiences. By using rough, impastoed brushstrokes, he emphasized the physical reality of the paint on the canvas, signaling a shift toward Realism and away from the idea of a painting as a window into an idealized world.1