And if it’s moved to a palace it’s read in a different way. We can look at the way that a painting from a church in southern Italy has been moved to a palace in northern Europe. Baxandall’s work alerted us to the fact that we can say something similar about paintings. When we talk about the biography of a life, we start at birth and we end at death. They still have an powerful afterlife.īaxandall has a huge influence on a tradition over the last thirty years that talks about the biography of a painting. He doesn’t just want to reduce them to ossified objects from the 15th century. Again, you could ask, ‘why is that? Why has that painting survived and why are we still sustained by it?’ Baxandall is a shrewd enough historian to understand that these paintings still speak to us. We just see it cold and seek to impose our own values upon it. We ignore and diminish a lot of the paintings’ significance. So it almost serves a didactic purpose: a reminder to the faithful of their religious commitment?Įxactly, yes. That’s the mental apparatus that they used to transform a certain biblical story and inject it with contemporary significance. That’s also part of what the painter is drawing on. He’ll ask, ‘What is the meaning of a painting by Pinturicchio where the figure of Christ is holding his finger up?’ To answer that, he suggests we go and read contemporary sermons, and other texts from the time which talk about gesture, and the importance of the body. In the later sections of his book, he talks about gesture.
Today when we look at Giotto or Giorgione we’re more interested in the psychology: we diminish the religious aspect the painting had, while Baxandall wants to put it at the centre of its creation. He’s interested in the way the power of the painting has a religious influence and impact. Once you start to understand that, you start to see the social dimension of the painting, and how it functions, and in particular, its connection to religion. They are not necessarily valuing the touch of the artist’s paintbrush. We forget, when we look at some of these paintings, that contracts agreed by the patron state, ‘it has to use so much ultramarine, this much lapis lazuli, and it needs to have gold ’ - because that is what people value in this period. “It’s only really towards the end of this period-the late 15th and early 16th century-with Michelangelo and Leonardo that we start to see the name of the painter becoming important”īaxandall is also interested in other material issues. Why did the Medici want to commission a painting for a certain chapel or a certain political building? If we understand that, we get a heightened sense of what the painting is about.
The painter is just an artisan, or a craftsperson. Baxandall says wryly that paintings in the 15th century were too important to leave to the painters. It’s only really towards the end of this period-the late 15th and early 16th century-with Michelangelo and Leonardo that we start to see the name of the painter becoming important. One of the things reminds us is that the painter in this period is relatively secondary to the art object. So I think Baxandall’s work was fantastic for really taking on that High Renaissance moment- particularly the 15th to early 16th century, predominantly Italian, art-and asking readers to start by thinking about the significance of paintings in that culture.
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If you lose that, then you lose a crucial dimension of how to understand that picture. But if we understand how that painting was commissioned and where it actually was-where people saw it and how they interacted with it-that that would inform our understanding of what that painting meant. For instance, you could go to the Royal Academy and you see a painting by Giorgione. And also, where the painting was originally located. You need to go back to look at questions like patronage. You need to understand the rhetoric of humanist thought and humanist writing in this period. You need to look at the worldview: the intellectual, commercial, even the political and imperial issues that surround it. You need to excavate everything that surrounds it. What Baxandall argues, in his book, is that a work of art is like an archaeological object. You would look at Leonardo and, through your innate connoisseurship, you would somehow have a connection to the painting. Baxandall’s work was incredibly important in the 1970s, because he developed our understanding of Renaissance art from simply connoisseurship. This is Michael Baxandall’s Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy? Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy