michael baxandall painting and experience

This quote is the opening sentence of the first chapter in Painting and Experience ‘Conditions of Trade’.īaxandall’s first chapter in Painting and Experience on the ‘Conditions of Trade’ seeks to explain that the change in style within paintings seen over the course of the fifteenth century is identified in the content of contracts and letters between patron and painter. For Baxandall ‘a fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship’.

The patron’s view is culturally constructed. Baxandall’s approach focuses on how the style of paintings is influenced by patrons who commission and view paintings. Baxandall spent time with anthropologists and their exploration into culture, particularly that of Herskovits’ and his ideas on cognitive style. Baxandall does describe chapter two of Painting and Experience as ‘Gombrichian’. Lacan created the concept of the ‘gaze’ and Gombrich the idea of ‘the beholder’s share’ before Baxandall published Painting and Experience. He is not the first to discuss patronage either given Haskell published his Patrons and Painters in 1963. Baxandall is certainly not the first to consider how an audience views a painting. The pioneer of this was Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). As the history of art was emerging discipline Art came to be seen as the embodiment of a distinctive expression of particular societies and civilisations. In reality it is three books in one.īaxandall brings together many strands of previous art historical methodology and moves them forward in Painting and Experience. It may have been published as a book with three chapters. Since publication it has been described in such favourable terms as being ‘intelligent, persuasive, interesting, and lucidly argued’ to ‘concise and tightly written, and being found to ‘present new and important material’. Although relatively short it has subsequently been published in numerous languages, most recently Chinese, with a second edition published in 1988. Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style was first published in 1972.

Michael baxandall painting and experience