Review: Michael Baxandall, 'Painting and Experience in 15th century Italy' (OUP, 1972)

In this erudite monograph on the social history of Quattrocento pictorial style, richly furnished with eighty-one black and white illustrations and four colour plates, and supported by original Latin and Italian references, Michael Baxandall brilliantly explores how fifteenth century Italians experienced painting, revealing not only the creation and function of this art, but also the mentality of both the artists and the clients who were its commissioners and purchasers, and how what they appreciated in these works was specific to the society and culture of their time.

Baxandall's approach is refreshingly free of abstractions and theorisations, being instead rooted in the study of individual paintings, in isolation or in relation to others of the same genre, and in contemporary works written about these. Structurally, he divides his book into three distinct parts: firstly, the 'Conditions of Trade', relating to how paintings came to be created, how they were appreciated materially, and how the skills involved were quantified in fifteenth century, mercantile and urban society; secondly, 'The Period Eye', which examines how what Baxandall calls Quattrocento man saw and valued these paintings stylistically and aesthetically within the prevailing cultural paradigm; and, finally, in 'Pictures and Categories', he examines and evaluates the paintings of four master artists in relation to the categories of artistic value elucidated by the Florentine humanist Cristoforo Landino, revealing not only how specific technical and aesthetic linguistic terms were applied by contemporaries to painting, but also how by examining how those terms were understood in the fifteenth century we can better understand their meaning, and what they meant to and what they can reveal about the Quattrocento, mercantile, urban culture within which they were created.

To begin, Baxandall examines some of the contracts entered into by clients - preferring this word to that of patrons as more representative of the mutually rewarding relation between commissioning merchant or corporation and artist - and painters, focusing on the materials agreed upon and the, less definable, skill levels expected. Regarding materials, he shows how lapis lazuli was highly prized for its blue pigment, how it came in differing levels of quality, and how these qualities were differently applied to symbolise differing meanings. Baxandall asserts that this is not simply a materialist process, while recognising that the riches of the materials, and indeed the skill level of the artist were in part representations of the wealth of the client, but related to how the use of particular colours and the skills of the artist would have been understood by the Quattrocento viewer. In the case of the blues from lapis lazuli, he shows how the highest standard of dye was used for the Virgin Mary and her robes, as a distinguishing sign of her purity and sanctity, and how in Lippi's 1455 'Adoration with the Holy Family and Saints', the blue of her garments is intentionally a finer and more expensive hue than that used for the robes of St Joseph. Similarly, contracts might specify how much the artist must spend in time and materials on particular elements of the painting, especially on representations of Christ and the Virgin. The point is that these specifics are not just about a commercial transaction, but also about the religious sensibilities and devotion of the client, who expected higher quality and greater skill for the holy figures not only as a sign of his faith, but also because of the religious worth intrinsic to their originals within the orthodox belief system of the client, his society, and the painter, which was particularly the case when the artist himself, like the Carmelite Fra Lippi and the Dominican Fra Angelico was himself religious.

At the heart of the book is Baxandall's theory of the Period Eye, by which he means the concept that art, in this case paintings of the Quattrocento - but this can be applied generally to all art history - is specific in time and place to its creation, and must be approached, if any true understanding of its meaning is to be attained, only through understanding how both the artists and the art's receptors experienced it at that time, in this case the fifteenth century, and in that space, northern Italy, and primarily Florence. For Baxandall, a painting cannot be understood as a text upon which a modern observer can impose her own, contemporary and ahistorical viewpoint, but as a spacio-temporally unique and discrete work than must be understood only within the context of its social, cultural, and historical period.

The overwhelming majority of Baxandall's paintings are religious, and this is intentional, because the predominant art of the period was of religious subjects for the very reason that fifteenth century Italy was a religious society and the paintings we see today were originally commissioned and created within a Christian society for the benefit of both clients and other viewers who expected to see traditional, late medieval, and orthodox stories, symbols, and meanings in the art they saw and to which both individually and socially they had been acculturated. However, he also discusses how secular practices affected pictorial representations, for example through the way dancing, a popular pastime within the mercantile community, and dancing manuals helped to form depictions of movement, and how these normative representations acted as coding, transmitting meaning to the viewer that he would appreciate through his experiences of civil life. In this way, if we are to appreciate and understand these works as contemporaries did, we must do so as the religious works they were intended to be and as representations of a mentality and style different from our own modern and post-modern conceptualisations. And so, Baxandall, moving on from the material, and grounding himself in the specifics of each artwork, attempts to introduce us to the Italian Renaissance artistic mentality not just as a necessity of historical study but also so as to more fully understand the paintings for what they are and what contemporaries thought and expected them to be, requiring us to conceive these through means of the mental refraction of the Period Eye.

In his final section, Baxandall examines the paintings within the linguistic terms contemporaries applied to them. What he seeks to do, using the introduction written by Cristoforo Landino (1424-1498) in his 1491 commentary on Dante's 'Comedia Divina' as his guide, is to determine what each term in its original Italian, often untranslatable into English, meant in the context to which it was applied, as understood by the literate, merchant class of the Quattrocento. By taking what Landino wrote about four artists - Masaccio (1401-1428), Fra Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), Andrea del Castagno (1411-1457), and Fra Angelico (13951455) - and the specific artistic meanings he applied to their work, Baxandall is able to distinguish what were the particular attributes of each painter that were appreciated by contemporaries, and thereby indirectly reveal the aesthetic sensibilities of the period. For Masaccio, Landino refers to his being an imitatore della natura (imitator of nature), expert in relievo (relief) and prospectivo (perspective), and having a puro (pure) style painted with facilita (ease), while for Lippi his attributes are the ornato (ornate), varieta (variety), and skill in compositione (composition) and colorire (colouring), and Castagno is appreciated as disegnatore (exponent of design) and amatore della difficulta (lover of difficulties) skilled in scorci (foreshortening) and prompto (the prompt), just as Fra Angelico is noted for vezzoso (the blithe) and devoto (the devout). However, as the difficulty of translating prompto and vezzoso reveals, these are period specific terms which the Quattrocento reader and observer would have understood in ways which we, with our different language and cultural norms are less capable, which is why to understand fifteenth century painting we must use the terms of the time, adopting the Period Eye as our means of interpretation. .

So, while this book is in its particulars a piece of art history written about a specific genre of the plastic arts in a defined time and place, it is also an invaluable historiographical study that explains how if we are to understand the past we must understand each period by the terms and through the values by which those who lived within and who formed the particular culture and society of the period under study understood it, and how we must not fall into the trap of assuming our linguistic formations and values can be ahistorically applied to an historical period which did not share these, for if we do, we are not so much describing or explaining objectively the period we are studying as subjectively formulating an ahistorical image of that period to suit our contemporary perceptions, thereby writing not about historical events and persons but about ourselves and our mental abstractions, constructing a discourse rather than a history.

Baxandall's book is not a work of art theory, seeking in the phenomenal a way to expose the essence of the noumenal, isolating a painting as an object from which a conception of the aesthetic can be abstracted, but instead an historical analysis of the practical experience engendered in fifteenth century viewers of paintings through their immediate perception and the concomitant cognition derived from their specific spacio-temporal environment, but without excessive historicising of either paintings or their creators and receptors. He is in effect attempting to objectify particular subjective experiences for their better historical understanding, but without imposing abstract value upon either the paintings or the experiences derived therefrom.

Equally, neither is this a history of the Italian Renaissance, or even of fifteenth Italian art - its object is intentionally more limited. It is instead a history of how one art form, painting, was experienced by the people who created, commissioned, and viewed pictures within their own historical period and cultural milieu, with the focus being upon the works themselves and what contemporaries thought about them. Baxandall does not examine the social, political, or intellectual history of the Quattrocento, and nor does he discuss the development of Italian thought during the century from Aristotlean late scholasticism, through the rediscovery of classical works in what George Holmes called the Florentine Enlightenment, and onto neo-Platonism and Greek metaphysics of the late century, because his purpose is to only focus upon the perception and cognition of these paintings as experienced by the educated, although not necessarily learned, men of the age, and he only references classical thought, primarily Pliny the Elder and Quintillian, where these writers informed that perception and the writings of commentators such as the artist Giovanni Santi (1435-1494) and Landino. The Renaissance was not merely a mimetic re-education in classical learning, but a fusion from the mentalités and sensibilities of the later medieval, religious, mercantile society, re-imagined through the reading of rediscovered classical texts in their original form. If Baxandall is unconcerned by the intellectual development and new ideas of the period that is not because they were not going on, but because they had not by 1500 permeated into popular modes of perception or writings of art appreciation, which as Landino shows, and Baxandall uses as the basis for his section on categorisation, remained primarily Aristotelean. This is not then a study of the Renaissance mind, but of one form of artistic experience as experienced by one sociocultural group of the Renaissance.

As an historiographical mini-masterpiece, 'Painting and Experience' serves today as an acute critique of (post)modern, formalist, and structuralist interpretations of historical artefacts, and a rejection of dialectical and teleological approaches to discrete historical events and the material goods that resulted therefrom, instead providing a perspicacious analysis of how the past must be understood in its own terms, and how the student cannot read the past as text, but instead must engage with the physical and documentary evidence through the eyes of contemporaries and within the context of the period in which they lived, and, as such, this slim volume provides an exemplar of what good history writing should be.