Michael_Baxandall

Michael Baxandall
Michael David Kighley Baxandall, FBA (18 August 1933 – 12 August 2008) was a British art historian
and a professor emeritus of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the
Warburg Institute, University of London, and worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His
book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy was profoundly influential in the social history
of art, and is (2018) widely used as a textbook in college courses.[1]
Career
Baxandall was born in Cardiff, the only son of David Baxandall, a curator who was at one time director
of the National Gallery of Scotland. He went to Manchester Grammar School and studied English at
Downing College, Cambridge, where he was taught by F. R. Leavis. In 1955 he departed for the
Continent. He spent a year at Pavia University (1955–56), then taught at an international school in St.
Gallen in Switzerland (1956–57), and finally went to Munich to hear the art historian Hans Sedlmayr and
where he worked with Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich on the court of Urbino at the Zentralinstitut für
Kunstgeschichte. On his return to London in 1958 he began a long association with the Warburg Institute,
initially working in the photographic collection, where he met Kay Simon, whom he married in 1963.
From 1959 to 1961 he was a junior fellow, working on his never-completed PhD, Restraint in
Renaissance behaviour, under Ernst Gombrich.
From 1961, he was Assistant Keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and
Albert Museum, returning to the Warburg Institute in 1965 as lecturer in Renaissance Studies. He was
appointed to a chair by the University of London in 1981, but increasingly spent his time in the United
States. He was A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University and became a half-time Professor of
the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1987. He was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991.[2] He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University
of Oxford for 1974–75.[3]
Books
His book Giotto and the Orators was published in 1971. This was followed in 1972 by Painting and
Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, now considered a classic of art history, in which he developed the
influential concept of the period eye. These were followed by The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance
Germany (1980), Patterns of Intention (1985), Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994, with Svetlana
Alpers), Shadows and Enlightenment (1994) and Words for Pictures (2003). In all his work, Baxandall
was concerned to illuminate artworks by a thorough exploration of the conditions of their production –
intellectual, social, and physical. In Limewood Sculptors this took the form of using "carvings as lenses
bearing on their own circumstances".
Despite his impact in "social" art history, Baxandall often retreated from Marxist or overly "contextual"
approaches.[4] At one point, he declared that he was just "trying to do Roger Fry...in a different way," and
he often cited the impact of Heinrich Wölfflin's book Classic Art.[5]
Publications
Giotto and the Orators. Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial
composition 1350-1450, Oxford University Press, 1971
Painting and Experience in 15th century Italy, Oxford UP, 1972
The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, Yale University Press, 1980
Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures, Yale UP, 1985
with Svetlana Alpers: Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, Yale UP, 1994
Shadows and Enlightenment, Yale UP, 1995
Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism, Yale UP, 2003
Episodes: a Memory Book, with an introduction by Carlo Ginzburg, Frances Lincoln, 2010
A Grasp of Kaspar, Frances Lincoln, 2010
On Baxandall
Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words, ed. by Peter Mack & Robert Williams,
Farnham, 2015
See also
Period eye
References
1. Shone, Richard and Stonard, John-Paul, eds.. The Books That Shaped Art History: From
Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.
2. "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter B" (http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMe
mbers/ChapterB.pdf) (PDF). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 28 May
2011.
3. "Oxford Slade Professors, 1870–present" (https://web.archive.org/web/20150213123228/htt
p://www.hoa.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/hoa/documents/pdf/Oxford_Slade_Professors.pdf) (PDF).
University of Oxford. 2012. Archived from the original (http://www.hoa.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/ho
a/documents/pdf/Oxford_Slade_Professors.pdf) (PDF) on 13 February 2015. Retrieved
27 January 2015.
4. Baxandall, Michael. "The Language of Art History." New Literary History 10, no. 3 (1979):
453-65.
5. Shone, Richard and Stonard, John-Paul, eds.. The Books That Shaped Art History: From
Gombrich and Greenberg to Alpers and Krauss. London: Thames & Hudson, 2013.
External links
The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/arts/design/31baxandall.html)
"Obituary" (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2575466/Michael-Baxandall.html),
Daily Telegraph, 17 August 2008
Elizabeth McGrath "Obituary: Michael Baxandall" (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesig
n/2008/aug/26/historyandhistoryofart), The Guardian 26 August 2008
Charles Saumarez Smith "Obituary: Michael Baxandall" (https://www.independent.co.uk/ne
ws/obituaries/professor-michael-baxandall-influential-art-historian-with-a-rigorously-cerebral-
approach-to-the-study-of-painting-and-sculpture-901782.html), The Independent, 19 August
2008
"Obituary" (https://web.archive.org/web/20100523083917/http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/c
omment/obituaries/article4613783.ece), The Times, 27 August 2008
Allan Langdale, ‘Interviews with Michael Baxandall, 3 and 4 February 1994, Berkeley, CA’ (h
ttp://arthistoriography.wordpress.com/number-1-december-2009/) Journal of Art
Historiography Number 1 December 2009
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