Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy Michael Baxandall (Oxford University Press, 1988) Painting and Experience in 15th

Century Italy Summary & Analysis Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style shows how the commercial and legal relationship between patrons and painters evolved in the course of a century. It is an overview of both the methods of looking and the understanding of how fifteenth century audience may have viewed their contemporary artworks. This book provides a condensed introduction to Renaissance art and representation with illustrations throughout. By examining the available written evidenceformalized contracts, letters of artists, and mathematical treatiseson which the history of Renaissance painting rests, and specific paintings, Baxandall explained how the visual skills and habits prevailed in Italian society influenced its painters. As Giles Robertson nicely put, The object of this excellent and refreshing little book is to consider the work of painters in Italy in the fifteenth century in the context of the daily life of the time and to show how the particular skills, interests and insights of patrons and public may have affected the style of the paintings produced for them. (Robertson, 1975) The first chapter, Conditions of Trade, opens with A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship, pointing directly to Baxandalls culture sociological analysis on the context under which the paintings were conceived. He depicted a client-patron relationship in great details and scrutinized different motivations of patrons in early fifteenth century. The Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai, noted he had in his house works by...the best masters there have been for a long time no t only in Florence but in Italy. His satisfaction about personally owning what is good is obvious...three things give him the greatest contentment and the greatest pleasure because they serve the glory of god, the honor of the city, and the commemoration of myself.... and then Rucellai introduces a fifth motive: buying such things is an outlet for the pleasure and virtue of spending money well, a pleasure greater than the admittedly substantial one of making money. (2) Baxandall also discussed the employer-employee mentality . The primary use of art is for looking at: they were designed for the client and people he esteemed to look at, with a view to receiving pleasing and memorable and even profitable stimulations. (5) He then considered a few contemporary contracts that were representative of that time, providing three common components of them: ...it specifies what to paint, how and when the client is to pay, when the painting is delivered, and insists on painter using a good quality of colors, specially gold and ultramarine (8)

The first chapter concludes with the question of contrasting views on artistic style. As century progressed, patrons increasingly turned to displaying the painters skill, rather than gold and precious pigments, to represent their wealth and taste, and increasingly valued individuality as a crucial part of the artists skill. (Larson, 1996) A dichotomy between quality of material and quality of skill (16) was then established, and there was the very great relative difference, in any manufacture, in the value of the masters and the assistants time within each workshop. (19) The second and lengthy chapter, The Periods Eye deals with the social-aesthetic interactions between painting and contemporary convention and practices such as preaching, dancing, and gauging of barrels. (Robertson, 1975) Braxandall emphasized that the forms and styles of painting respond to social circumstances, and explored sermons, dancing manuals, and mathematical education of the Italian Renaissance. He first identified three things the mind brings to interpret patterns in a painting: a stock of patterns, categories, methods of inference, training in a range of representational conventions..., and experience, drawn from the environment, in what are plausible ways of visualizing what we have incomplete information about. (32), and how they may apply to the Quattrocento cognitive style. Later into the chapter, Braxandall made a bold and significant account of the sermon by Fra Roberto Caracciolo on the Annunciation. He took Caracciolos five Laudable Conditions of the Blessed Virgin as principal interpretations of all Renaissance paintings. Fra Roberto analyses the account of St. Luke (I: 26-38) and lays out a series of five successive spiritual and mental conditions or states attributable to Mary: The third mystery of the Annunciation is called Angelic Colloquy; it compresses five Laudable Conditions of the Blessed Virgin: 1. Conturbatio Disquiet 2. Cogitatio Reflection 3. Interrogatio Inquiry 4. Humiliatio Submission 5. Meritatio Merit, ...most fifteenth-century Annunciations are identifiably Annunciation that very exactly fit the painted representations. Most fifteenth-century Annunciations are identifiably Annunciations of Disquiet, or of Submissions, orthese being less clearly distinguished from each otherof Reflection and/or Inquiry. (55) Baxandall also paid considerable attention to the illuminating subject of gestures (Shapley, 1976). He stressed the importance of reading gestural expressions and representations in religious and secular contexts. The effective unit of the stories was the human figure. The figures individual character depended less on its physiognomya private matter largely left for

the beholder to supply, as we have seenthan on the way it moved. (57) On Botticellis Primavera, he commented that here the central figures of Venus is not beating into to the dance of the Graces but inviting us with hand and glance into her kingdom. We miss the point of the picture if we mistake the gesture. (70) He also discussed about the relationship among figures. A figure played its part in the stories by interacting with other figures, in the groupings and attitudes the painter used to suggest relationships and actions. The painter was not the only practitioner of this art of grouping: in particular, the same subjects were often represented in sacred drama of one kind or another. (71) The last section of The Periods Eye puts an emphasis on the impact that the civil education in geometry and arithmetic has on Quattrocento paintings. The reader is surely tempted at first to judge as excessive Baxandalls claim of the influence of gauging barrels and other containers on clients susceptibility to represented volumes in paintings...it does seem that the particular stress on practical mathematics in lay secondary schools during the Renaissance could well have made their former pupils very inclined to see pictured objects in quasi-geometrical terms. (Shapley, 1976) Immersed in knowledge of mathematics, contemporary painters recognized the importance of shapes and proportions, and incorporated pictorial skills with possible mathematical applications. Renaissance painting, therefore, are visual meditations proposed primarily to the eye of church-going dancing traders (Larson, 1996)the average Quattrocento men. In the third and last chapter, Pictures and Categories, Baxandall bridged the link between Quattrocento painting style and Italian terms, quoting from Giovanni Santi and Cristoforo Landino. These terms, critical terms...were applied to art and artists in the 15th century. (Shapley, 1976) In the closing section, Baxandall asked whether the use of form and style in paintings are ideal documentation for social historian. He challenged that main materials of social history are very restricted in their medium...much of the most important experience cannot conveniently be encoded into words or numbers, as we all know, and therefore does not appear in the documents that exist. Besides this, many of the Renaissance words we must rely on are now almost completely worn out: it is difficult to close with Machiavellis words about what was important in the Renaissance becauseso many other words, comment and reformulation, have since got in the way. It is very difficult to get a notion of what it was to be a person of a certain kind at a certain time and place. (152) It is considered Baxandalls underlying argument that art is a subtle product of mental, nonartistic processes and habits. The style of pictures...emphasized those social actions that one might not automatically associate with paintings from the same time...He (Baxandall) was the first to adduce habits of barrel gauging by merchants in the analysis of shape and form in Quattrocento painting. (Manca 2005) Looking from the "periods eye, this book provides insightful building blocks for the understanding of Renaissance Italy and Renaissance painting. References:

1. Larson, Magali Sarfatti, Book Review, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Jul 1996), p. 454 2. Manca, Joseph, On Michael Baxandalls Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, Aurora, The Journal of the History of Art, Jan 1 2005 3. Robertson, Giles, Book Review, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 117, No. 870 (Sep 1975), p. 619 4. Shapley, John, Book Review, Art Journal, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Spring 1976), pp. 294-296