Synopses & Reviews
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.
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 Trade1. 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