Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style

by Michael Baxandall

Overview

Serving as both an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and as a text on how to interpret social history from the style of pictures in a given historical period, this new edition to Baxandall's pre-eminent scholarly volume examines early Renaissance painting, and explains how the style of painting in any society reflects the visual skills and habits that evolve out of daily life. Renaissance painting, for example, mirrors the experience of such activities as preaching, dancing, and gauging barrels. The volume includes discussions of a wide variety of painters, including Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Stefano di Giovanni, Sandro Botticelli, Masaccio, Luca Signorelli, Boccaccio, and countless others. Baxandall also defines and illustrates sixteen concepts used by a contemporary critic of painting, thereby assembling the basic equipment needed to explore fifteenth-century art.
This new second edition includes an appendix that lists the original Latin and Italian texts referred to throughout the book, providing the reader with all the relevant, authentic sources. It also contains an updated bibliography and a new reproduction of a recently restored painting which replaces the original.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192821447
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/28/1988
Series:	Oxford Paperbacks Series
Edition description:	REV
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	571,179
Product dimensions:	8.06(w) x 5.38(h) x 0.21(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Michael Baxandall, Reader of Renaissance Studies at the Warburg Institute, University of London, is also the author of Giotto and the Orators.

Table of Contents

I. Conditions of Trade
1. Introduction
2. Contracts and the client's control
3. Art and matter
4. The value of skill
5. Perception of skill

II. The Period Eye
1. Relative perception
2. Pictures and knowledge
3. The cognitive style
4. The function of images
5. Istoria
6. The body and its language
7. Figure patterns
8. The value of clours
9. Volumes
10. Intervals and proportions
11. The moral eye

III. Pictures and Categories
1. Words and pictures
2. Giovanni Santi's twenty-five painters
3. Cristoforo Landino
4. Categories
(a) nature
(b) relief
(c) purity
(d) ease
(f) perspective
(g) ornateness
(h) variety
(i) composition
(j) colouring
(k) design
(l) difficulty
(m) Foreshortening
(n) promptness
(o) blitheness
(p) devotion
5. Conclusion

Text and References
Index