Are we then to blame him for his rigid air of objectivity, his heavy reliance on source documents surrounding the commissioning and creation of particular works? If anything, Baxandall is generous in letting us form our own conclusions based on the gathered evidence. Let the past be the past, he seemed to be saying I’m just here to show you what I’ve found. In a work like Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, however, it becomes clear that, despite the complains of the Marxists, Baxandall was indeed concerned with the power structures inherent in Renaissance Italy. This made his work the subject of criticism by Marxist social historians of art, whose interpretation is naturally rooted in a class bias. As an art historian, he was responsible for engineering the idea of the “period eye,” in which one must take into consideration the social, cultural, and economic realities surrounding the creation of a work of art in order to “see” it in its original authorial and cultural context.Īt the same time, Baxandall broke with a tradition of social art history by largely omitting politics from his analysis. IN MEMORIAM: Michael Baxandall (1933-2008)
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