michael baxandall painting and experience in fifteenth century italy

Lucid and provocative, this 'primer in the social history of pictorial style', as he called it, continues to interest countless readers in early Renaissance pictures and the society in which they were created. The course on the Renaissance which he taught to undergraduates exploited this experience and bore fruit in the bestselling Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972). When he returned to the Warburg in 1965, as a lecturer in renaissance studies, he came with a new interest in the social and practical aspects of the production of art, and the evidence for this in documents of the period. There he worked closely with the then assistant to the director, Terence Hodgkinson, learning about materials and how they affect artists' possibilities, as well as the appearance of the works produced. In 1961 Baxandall was appointed to a post in the Victoria and Albert museum's sculpture department. Although this research never resulted in a PhD, it provided material for his acclaimed first book, Giotto and the Orators (1971), which acutely highlighted the limitations as well as the achievements of Renaissance discourse on art. He began investigating how humanist literature on art was shaped by the traditions of classical rhetoric. It was at the Institute too that he met Kay Simon whom he married in 1963.Īlready, in 1958, he began formulating a thesis topic on concepts of decorum and restraint in the Italian Renaissance and, in 1959, he was awarded a two-year fellowship at the Warburg to work on this, under the direction of Ernst Gombrich. The interdisciplinary atmosphere that characterised its community of cultural and intellectual historians suited his temperament - it was only grudgingly that he ever accepted the restrictive label of art historian.

On his return to England, in 1957, he was, to his delight, offered a job as assistant in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute at London University. It was only after leaving Cambridge that Baxandall decided to study art history, which he did largely in Italy and Germany.

Michael baxandall painting and experience in fifteenth century italy