Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Michael Baxandall

John White called the study successful, and found few slips in the book. The first reviews of Painting and Experience, like later critical reception, were generally favorable. I wish to offer here not an assessment of the book's impact on the field, nor a study of Baxandall's other works: I want to focus attention on Painting and Experience and see whether its arguments, in addition to being thought-provoking and at times novel, are also plausible. Moreover, recent studies touching on Baxandall's work have paid scant attention to the faults of Painting and Experience, and a counterbalance to this neglect is desirable.

Now is an opportune moment to reassess the method expounded in Painting and Experience, as enough time has passed to allow us to judge its approach in art-historical perspective. (1) Baxandall did not invent the central methodological approach used in Painting and Experience, but he applied it in a sustained way, and emboldened others to find the aetiology of style in patterns of particular, non-artistic aspects of quotidian behavior. Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (1972) has been widely hailed as a major contribution to the field of Renaissance studies.

Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Michael Baxandall