ASA News - January 2009.indd


5ASA  NEWS ~ January 2009

In Memoriam

Michael Baxandall, who has died aged 74, was 
an art historian of extraordinary perceptive and 
analytical powers whose writings on painting and 
sculpture are as important as they are original.

In 1958, Baxandall began formulating a thesis 
topic on concepts of decorum and restraint in 
the Italian Renaissance and, in 1959, he was 
awarded a two-year fellowship at the Warburg 
to work on this, under the direction of Ernst 
Gombrich. He began investigating how humanist 
literature on art was shaped by the traditions of 
classical rhetoric. Although this research never 
resulted in a PhD, it provided material for his 
acclaimed fi rst book, Giotto and the Orators 
(1971), which acutely highlighted the limitations 
as well as the achievements of Renaissance 
discourse on art. 

He returned to the Warburg in 1965, as a 
lecturer in renaissance studies. The course 
on the Renaissance which he taught to 
undergraduates exploited this experience 
and bore fruit in the bestselling Painting and 
Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972). 
Lucid and provocative, this “primer in the 
social history of pictorial style”, as he called 
it, continues to interest countless readers in 
early Renaissance pictures and the society in 
which they were created. It was this book that 
introduced the concept of “the period eye;” 
Baxandall’s idea was that at different times and 
places, certain features of the knowledge and 
culture of viewers attuned them to aspects of 
images which are not naturally picked up today, 
but which the historian, with the help of texts 
and contexts, can elucidate and recover. The 
notion was further refi ned in relation to sculpture 
in The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance 
Germany (1980), in which, for example, the 
scrolls of Nuremberg calligraphy were related 
to stylistic elements. This book, which evolved 
from the Slade lectures at Oxford in 1974, was 
awarded the Mitchell prize for the history of art. 

He came to refl ect more and more on the 
diffi culties of the historian’s task. These issues, 
articulated in Patterns of Intention (1986), 
were encouraged by his friendship and then 

collaboration and close association with Svetlana 
Alpers. Together they wrote Tiepolo and the 
Pictorial Intelligence (1994), an intriguing mix 
not only of art criticism and art history but of the 
styles of two contrasting personalities. 

By the time these latter works were published, 
Baxandall was an academic celebrity. He had 
been given a London University chair in 1981 and 
been elected to the British Academy in 1982; he 
had also held a visiting professorship at Cornell 
University in New York state and a fellowship in 
Berlin, and been awarded prizes by the University 
of Hamburg and the MacArthur Foundation (both 
1988). Since 1986 he had held a part-time post 
at the University of California, Berkeley, initially in 
combination with his job at the Warburg Institute. 
Thereafter, until his retirement in 1996, he spent 
part of the year in California. But he retained old 
habits of thought along with old ties and loyalties. 
The work of Gombrich on perception remained 
an important point of reference as he himself 
became increasingly interested in modern as 
well as historical theories about visual attention, 
especially primary focus and peripheral vision. 
The most important publication of his later years, 
however, was Shadows and the Enlightenment 
(1995), in its persuasive juxtaposition of scientifi c 
analyses of shadows with the pictorial practice 
of 18th-century artists, notably the quiet, but “in 
some ways slyly showy” Chardin. 

Baxandall’s last years were lived under the 
shadow of Parkinson’s disease. He had never 
relished large gatherings and with the progression 
of illness, he tended to avoid any encounters in 
public places. His last book, Words for Pictures 
(2003), a collection of essays that returned to the 
subject of art and humanism, also included a long 
piece on Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. 

He is survived by Kay Simon, daughter Lucy and 
son Tom.

Michael David Kighley Baxandall, art historian, 
born August 18 1933; died August 12 2008

Submitted by Michael Conner, September 7, 2008

Michael Baxandall

Christopher FyfeMichael Baxandall Youssef Chahine

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