Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy

"Yes. Baxandall’s work was incredibly important in the 1970s, because he developed our understanding of Renaissance art from simply connoisseurship. You would look at Leonardo and, through your innate connoisseurship, you would somehow have a connection to the painting. What Baxandall argues, in his book, is that a work of art is like an archaeological object. You need to excavate everything that surrounds it. You need to look at the worldview: the intellectual, commercial, even the political and imperial issues that surround it. You need to understand the rhetoric of humanist thought and humanist writing in this period. You need to go back to look at questions like patronage. And also, where the painting was originally located. For instance, you could go to the Royal Academy and you see a painting by Giorgione. But if we understand how that painting was commissioned and where it actually was—where people saw it and how they interacted with it—that that would inform our understanding of what that painting meant. If you lose that, then you lose a crucial dimension of how to understand that picture. So I think Baxandall’s work was fantastic for really taking on that High Renaissance moment— particularly the 15th to early 16th century, predominantly Italian, art—and asking readers to start by thinking about the significance of paintings in that culture. One of the things reminds us is that the painter in this period is relatively secondary to the art object. It’s only really towards the end of this period—the late 15th and early 16th century—with Michelangelo and Leonardo that we start to see the name of the painter becoming important. Baxandall says wryly that paintings in the 15th century were too important to leave to the painters. The painter is just an artisan, or a craftsperson. It’s the patrons that are important. Why did the Medici want to commission a painting for a certain chapel or a certain political building? If we understand that, we get a heightened sense of what the painting is about. “It’s only really towards the end of this period—the late 15th and early 16th century—with Michelangelo and Leonardo that we start to see the name of the painter becoming important” Baxandall is also interested in other material issues. We forget, when we look at some of these paintings, that contracts agreed by the patron state, ‘it has to use so much ultramarine, this much lapis lazuli, and it needs to have gold ’ — because that is what people value in this period. They are not necessarily valuing the touch of the artist’s paintbrush. Once you start to understand that, you start to see the social dimension of the painting, and how it functions, and in particular, its connection to religion. He’s interested in the way the power of the painting has a religious influence and impact. Today when we look at Giotto or Giorgione we’re more interested in the psychology: we diminish the religious aspect the painting had, while Baxandall wants to put it at the centre of its creation. In the later sections of his book, he talks about gesture. He’ll ask, ‘What is the meaning of a painting by Pinturicchio where the figure of Christ is holding his finger up?’ To answer that, he suggests we go and read contemporary sermons, and other texts from the time which talk about gesture, and the importance of the body. That’s also part of what the painter is drawing on. That’s the mental apparatus that they used to transform a certain biblical story and inject it with contemporary significance. Exactly, yes. We ignore and diminish a lot of the paintings’ significance. We just see it cold and seek to impose our own values upon it. Again, you could ask, ‘why is that? Why has that painting survived and why are we still sustained by it?’ Baxandall is a shrewd enough historian to understand that these paintings still speak to us. He doesn’t just want to reduce them to ossified objects from the 15th century. They still have an powerful afterlife. Baxandall has a huge influence on a tradition over the last thirty years that talks about the biography of a painting. When we talk about the biography of a life, we start at birth and we end at death. Baxandall’s work alerted us to the fact that we can say something similar about paintings. We can look at the way that a painting from a church in southern Italy has been moved to a palace in northern Europe. And if it’s moved to a palace it’s read in a different way. Then it’s sold by somebody and it ends up in a public art gallery, and that changes its meaning again. “Jacob Burckhardt’s book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy , really starts the whole tradition” Baxandall’s work has been incredibly influential and most people who study 15th century Italian Renaissance art still have to—and should—engage with his work. I still teach it on my MA in Renaissance Studies. To me it remains very fresh and powerful. Students are fascinated by it and really engage with it. It also gives you fascinating ways to go and do further research into a picture because you can use Baxandall’s methodology. First, you can go and look for any remaining evidence about how it was commissioned and who commissioned it. Also, how did people talk about it in the period? If we look at the 15th century and what people said about that painting, one problem is that they don’t say much — which is interesting in itself (why is nobody interested in that picture, as opposed to another one?). But when people do say something, they might say, for example, that Botticelli’s work has ‘a virile air.’ What does that mean? You can then go and find out what virility means in this period. Baxandall is far more than just somebody interested in the social history of art. He takes you back to that moment and draws you into that world. Yes, Baxandall says that it’s not just about the celebration of genius. It’s not that people wake up in 1400 in the Italian peninsula and say, ‘We’re Renaissance people now!’ He wants to move away from the strictly elite way of thinking about how this culture develops. He is interested in understanding how trade influenced art. We see artists like Pisanello producing paintings, and others like Piero creating and fashioning—to use Stephen Greenblatt’s word—new ways of visualising stories. For instance, they use merchants’ methods of gauging. Look at the brilliance of the hat in Uccello’s painting: that’s actually drawn from merchants’ handbooks about how to gauge volume. People are looking at that picture and gaining not only aesthetic but also social satisfaction from it. They see the way he’s using a way of gauging volume that is new to that culture, and then transforming it into art. It’s not just drawn from elite ways of talking about ‘vanishing point perspective.’ This is something that in northern Italy, with its commercial dynamism, became increasingly important during this period."