Painting And Experience In Fifteenth Century Italy
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the gilded courts and sun-drenched piazzas of Quattrocento Italy, a quiet revolution in human vision was taking place — and Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy captures it with breathtaking precision. This landmark work of art history argues that Renaissance paintings cannot be understood in isolation from the social, economic, and cognitive world that produced them, presenting a richly detailed portrait of how merchants, clergy, and patrons literally shaped the visual language of masters such as Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, and Ghirlandaio. Baxandall uncovers the commercial contracts between painters and their patrons, the theological prescriptions governing religious imagery, and the very bodily habits — from dance to barrel-gauging — that trained the fifteenth-century eye to perceive pictorial space in distinctive ways. A foundational text in the discipline of social art history, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy illustrates how period perception, or what Baxandall famously terms the period eye, mediates between a society and its art with a sophistication that continues to challenge scholars decades after its first publication. His prose is precise yet evocative, straddling the boundary between rigorous academic argument and genuinely pleasurable reading, making the work as accessible to the curious general reader as it is indispensable to the specialist. For anyone who has ever stood before a Renaissance altarpiece and felt the pull of something not quite understood, Baxandall provides the key — and in doing so, transforms the act of looking forever.
Author: Michael Baxandall
Format: Paperback
Genre: History of arts
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: No dust jacket
Pages: Yellowed
Condition remarks: Condition as shown in image
In the gilded courts and sun-drenched piazzas of Quattrocento Italy, a quiet revolution in human vision was taking place — and Michael Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy captures it with breathtaking precision. This landmark work of art history argues that Renaissance paintings cannot be understood in isolation from the social, economic, and cognitive world that produced them, presenting a richly detailed portrait of how merchants, clergy, and patrons literally shaped the visual language of masters such as Botticelli, Piero della Francesca, and Ghirlandaio. Baxandall uncovers the commercial contracts between painters and their patrons, the theological prescriptions governing religious imagery, and the very bodily habits — from dance to barrel-gauging — that trained the fifteenth-century eye to perceive pictorial space in distinctive ways. A foundational text in the discipline of social art history, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy illustrates how period perception, or what Baxandall famously terms the period eye, mediates between a society and its art with a sophistication that continues to challenge scholars decades after its first publication. His prose is precise yet evocative, straddling the boundary between rigorous academic argument and genuinely pleasurable reading, making the work as accessible to the curious general reader as it is indispensable to the specialist. For anyone who has ever stood before a Renaissance altarpiece and felt the pull of something not quite understood, Baxandall provides the key — and in doing so, transforms the act of looking forever.