Baxandall's Painting and Experience in 15th-Century Italy

Introduction to Baxandall's Thesis

Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy by Michael Baxandall is a classic of art history that serves a dual purpose: it provides an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and offers a powerful discourse on how to interpret social history through the paintings of a particular era. The book's central thesis is that the style of paintings in any given era reflects the social life of that time. Baxandall argues that life is lent to the paintings by the assimilation of contemporary daily habits and fashions by their creators.

Social Context and the Rise of Renaissance Painting

Baxandall argues, for example, that Renaissance painting became so vibrant during the fifteenth century partly due to the concurrent expansion of other branches of the arts — dance, literature, theatre, and opera among them. This expansion inspired painters to take their art further by introducing new techniques and new ways of representing life, through developments in the use of perspective, relief, and foreshortening.

He further argues that artists were inspired not only by their social surroundings but also by their patrons, who wished to record their wealth and prosperity. In this environment, artists flourished, producing new styles of representation. Much as neighbors might compete to display newer and better possessions, artists and their patrons competed with one another to develop the most technically innovative paintings. This competitive energy, Baxandall suggests, was a driving force behind the greatest movement art has known: the Renaissance.

He uses detailed analyses of individual artists to reinforce these arguments, among them Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Stefano di Giovanni, Luca Signorelli, Botticelli, and Boccaccio. His "contemporary view" readings of example paintings illuminate the path through which we can better appreciate the work of these masters. It is also worth noting that Baxandall's recommendations for analyzing paintings were applied to art history relatively late; similar methods of cultural and historical empathy had been used by social historians for decades before art history caught up.

The Problem of Modern Perception

A central and provocative argument in the book is that modern viewers, shaped by their own perceptions, historical experience, and social circumstances, cannot truly comprehend fifteenth-century paintings. We no longer have ready conceptual access to them. When we bring our own frameworks to the viewing and analysis of these works, we fail to see their true historical messages, and we miss a great deal of the information embedded within them.

By using a modern conceptual lens to look at these masterpieces, we fail to appreciate them as a contemporary would have done. We lose sight of their social context and, with it, much of their significance. The book is, in this sense, a call to develop a more encompassing eye — to pursue what Baxandall terms a period eye, a way of seeing that reconstructs the visual habits and assumptions of the original audience.

Baxandall argues that only by attempting to re-establish a contemporary sense of social situation when viewing a fifteenth-century painting can that art be truly appreciated. Only then is the work placed in its correct historical and cultural framework, and only then can its true significance and beauty be fully understood.