Critique of Michael Braxandall\'s Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy

¶ … Michael Baxandall's Painting & Experience in 15th Century Italy

In his work, Painting & Experience In 15th Century Italy, the art critic Michael Baxandall attempted not simply to discuss the art of this particular period in Italian history, but to relate it this period's art to the social context that spawned the greatness and the significance of what we now call early Renaissance painting. Baxandall's central thesis is that the style of painting in any society, from the Renaissance to our own, is reflective not simply of an artistic tradition, handed down from master to master in terms of technique, but is also reflective of the rhythms and habits of ordinary, daily life. Baxandall attempts a synchronic, or specific and contextually located study of this period of art, and the perspective of the art's gazers, rather than attempts to make an argument about the nature of art in general in an a historical fashion.

In the case of Renaissance-era painting, daily life in Italy revolved around God in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, the social rituals of visiting and courtship, and aristocratic pursuits such as hunting. Thus, Baxandall structures his book by discussing, not only the specific mannerisms of painting or plastic techniques used by artists, but how such active, daily life in the form of preaching, dancing, and gauging barrels created the specificity of technique of this period of Italian art. Baxandall argues that a particular kind of vision in the gazer as well as the artist was produced during this specific period and locus of time.

Baxandall does discuss the personas of painters as well as ordinary individuals. However, he does not discuss Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, Masaccio, Luca Signorelli, and Boccaccio, for instance, as inheritors of particular ideological or visual schools but as inhabitants of a particular worldview and social world that produced a kind of "eye." This is not to say as well that Baxandall does not eschew a discussion of painting techniques. However, he does not feel limited to only use the lens through which the artists would have seen their own work. Rather, he also uses contemporary definitions of art in the form of sixteen basic concepts of an art critic of his own era. As painting is a social and a historical production, as well as an artistic production, however, in Baxandall's view, he does so mainly to highlight the difference or "unknowable" quality of the Renaissance perspective vs. our own.

Baxandall's method of organization and interpretation of Italian art thus is not only dependent upon artistic concepts of historical knowledge. Key to his thesis is how the apparently unrelated Renaissance obsession with measuring things "by eye" affected the proportions and perspectives of the painter and the audience. The figures in the art were thus not only influenced by the significance of Biblical and mythological narrative, but the rendering of the human body was stretched and changed by such perceptions and reflected in the artistic renderings of the period.