Key Takeaways
1. 15th-Century Paintings Were Bespoke Products of Client-Painter Deals.
The better sort of fifteenth-century painting was made on a bespoke basis, the client asking for a manufacture after his own specifications.
Client-driven creation. Unlike today's art market where painters create and then seek buyers, 15th-century Italian painting, especially significant works like altarpieces and frescoes, was primarily commissioned. Clients were active participants, initiating the work, choosing the artist, defining the purpose, and often specifying details through legal agreements. This made the painting a "deposit of a social relationship."
Contracts defined terms. Formal documents like contracts and memoranda outlined the obligations of both painter and client. These agreements typically covered:
- Subject matter (often referencing a drawing)
- Payment schedule and amount
- Quality of materials (especially expensive pigments like ultramarine)
- Delivery timeline and penalties
Beyond mere decoration. Clients' motives for commissioning art were complex, including piety, civic pride, self-commemoration, the pleasure of spending wealth well (especially for those like usurers), and personal enjoyment. These institutional forms implicitly rationalized their motives and guided the painter on what was needed, ensuring the picture served its primary use: being looked at for pleasing, memorable, and profitable stimulation.
2. Clients Increasingly Paid for Skill ("Brush") Over Precious Materials.
While precious pigments become less prominent, a demand for pictorial skill becomes more so.
Shift in conspicuous consumption. Over the 15th century, there was a noticeable trend in contracts away from emphasizing expensive materials like gold and ultramarine. This mirrored a broader social shift towards more restrained forms of display, seen even in clothing fashions moving towards black instead of gilt fabrics. The focus of opulence shifted from the cost of materials to the cost of the painter's skill.
Skill as a valuable commodity. The value of the master painter's time and skill was significantly higher than that of his assistants. Clients could conspicuously spend money on skill by demanding a higher proportion of the work be done by the master's own hand ("pel suo pennello"). Contracts began to include clauses specifying that the master, particularly, should paint the figures or mix the colors.
Skill vs. material value. The distinction between the value of material and the value of skilled labor was central to costing any manufacture, including painting. This economic reality reinforced the intellectual concept, articulated by figures like Alberti, that representing effects like gold with paint and skill was more admirable than simply applying the material itself. The client became a discerning buyer of this expensive, visible skill.
3. The "Period Eye" Interpreted Art Through Daily Visual Experiences.
Everyone, in fact, processes the data from the eye with different equipment.
Experience shapes perception. Visual perception is not uniform; the brain interprets raw visual data using learned skills, categories, and habits of inference developed from experience. This "cognitive style" varies from person to person and, significantly, from culture to culture. A 15th-century Italian saw things differently than a modern viewer or a contemporary Chinese person.
Applying daily skills to art. Looking at paintings was an "institution" in the Quattrocento, where cultivated viewers were expected to make discriminations about skill. The visual skills used were often not unique to painting but derived from daily life. A person's capacity to analyze forms, judge proportions, or interpret gestures, honed by activities like commerce, religious practice, or social interaction, directly influenced how they perceived and appreciated a painting.
Taste reflects skill alignment. Enjoyment of a painting often stemmed from the alignment between the discriminations demanded by the artwork and the visual skills possessed by the beholder. Paintings that offered opportunities to exercise valued skills, like analyzing geometric forms or interpreting figure groupings, were particularly appreciated. The painter responded to this, sharing and catering to the visual habits of their public.
4. Religious Images Functioned as Tools for Instruction, Memory, and Devotion.
Know that there were three reasons for the institution of images in churches. First, for the instruction of simple people... Second, so that the mystery... may be the more active in our memory... Third, to excite feelings of devotion...
Church's purpose for images. According to ecclesiastical theory, images in churches served clear functions:
- Instruction: Teaching illiterate people biblical stories and the lives of saints, acting as "books."
- Memory: Helping viewers remember key religious events and figures by presenting them visually.
- Devotion: Arousing pious feelings more effectively through sight than through hearing.
Qualities for religious function. This meant painters were expected to create pictures that were lucid (clear for the simple), vividly memorable (eye-catching for the forgetful), and emotionally stirring (using the power of sight). While abuses like idolatry or painting apocryphal/frivolous content existed, the core expectation was that images should effectively serve these three purposes.
Preachers and painters as partners. Preachers often discoursed on the same stories depicted by painters, providing emotional categorization and physical details tied to the mysteries. Sermons drilled congregations in interpreting these narratives, making the public well-prepared to engage with the visual representations in paintings. The preacher and the painter acted as mutual "repetiteurs" for the holy stories.
5. Painters Complemented the Public's Personal Visual Meditations.
The public mind was not a blank tablet on which the painters' representations of a story or person could impress themselves; it was an active institution of interior visualization with which every painter had to get along.
Interior visualization practice. Pious individuals were often amateur visualizers of holy stories, practicing spiritual exercises that involved vividly imagining scenes from the lives of Christ and Mary, sometimes even setting them in familiar locations and casting them with known people. Handbooks like the Giardino de Oration guided this detailed, personal imaginative activity.
Painter's role: Structure and concreteness. Painters could not compete with the specific, personal detail of these private visualizations. Instead, they offered something complementary: generalized, unparticularized figures and places that were nonetheless massively concrete and arranged in patterns of strong narrative suggestion. These qualities—concreteness and structure—were difficult to achieve in mental images but were powerfully delivered by the physical painting.
A cooperative experience. The 15th-century experience of a painting was thus an interaction between the physical artwork and the beholder's pre-existing interior visualizations. The painting provided a firm, structured base upon which the viewer could impose their own personal details. This cooperative dynamic explains why painters popular in pious circles, like Perugino, often depicted general types rather than highly individualized figures.
6. Figure Movement and Gesture Formed a Key Narrative Language.
We may miss very much more by not sharing these people's sense of close relation between movement of the body and movement of the soul and mind.
Body reflects soul. Renaissance culture deeply believed in a close connection between physical movement and internal states of mind or soul. This was reflected in treatises on painting and dancing, and in everyday judgments of people's character based on their bearing and actions. Painters used this understanding to convey narrative and emotion through the poses and gestures of their figures.
Gesture as codified language. Gesture was a particularly conventionalized form of physical expression. While secular gestures changed with fashion, pious gestures were more stable and sometimes codified, for example, in Benedictine sign language or preachers' manuals. These sources offer clues to interpreting gestures in paintings, such as:
- Hand on breast for grief or meditation
- Hands raised for joy or devotion
- Extended hand with slightly fanned fingers for invitation
Beyond simple actions. Painters worked with nuances, using subtle groupings and attitudes to suggest complex intellectual or emotional relationships (hostility, love, communication) rather than just depicting overt actions like fighting or embracing. This muted mode of physical relationship drew on a vernacular understanding of expressive grouping, seen in humbler media like woodcuts, but refined it into a sophisticated pictorial art.
7. Commercial Skills (Gauging, Proportion) Shaped Visual Analysis of Form.
The skills that Piero or any painter used to analyse the forms he painted were the same as Piero or any commercial person used for surveying quantities.
Mathematics of the marketplace. Commercial mathematics, particularly gauging (calculating volume) and the Rule of Three (geometric proportion), was a central part of middle-class education in 15th-century Italy. Merchants were adept at reducing complex, irregular objects (barrels, bales, piles of grain) to combinations of simple geometric forms for calculation.
Shared analytical habits. This habit of geometrical analysis was directly relevant to how painters analyzed and represented forms. Painters like Piero della Francesca, who wrote a mathematical handbook for merchants, shared these skills. They would analyze figures and objects as compounds of cylinders, cones, and cubes, and their public was equipped to recognize this underlying structure.
Proportion and harmony. The Rule of Three, used for commercial problems like currency exchange and partnership profit sharing, was a method for understanding ratios and geometric proportion. This skill connected directly to the study of harmonic proportion, used in music, architecture, and sometimes painting. The sequence 6:8:9:12, fundamental to the Pythagorean harmonic scale, was also a standard Rule of Three problem, making harmonic relationships accessible to the commercially educated eye.
8. Painters Asserted Conspicuous Skill, Often Through Playful Virtuosity.
It was for conspicuous skill his patron paid him.
Skill as a form of display. As clients shifted from demanding expensive materials to demanding expensive skill, painters were encouraged to make their skill visible and perceptible to the beholder. This led to a focus on techniques that showcased the artist's virtuosity.
Playful application of skills. Painters often asserted their skills playfully, using techniques derived from daily life in unexpected or exaggerated ways. For example, Uccello's treatment of Niccolo da Tolentino's hat in the Battle of San Romano can be seen as a "serial geometrical joke," demanding the viewer apply their gauging skills to a seemingly simple form. Piero della Francesca's use of a pavilion, a common gauging exercise object, invited his public to engage their commercial-mathematical skills.
Rewarding the beholder's effort. These displays of skill were not just for the painter; they demanded and rewarded the beholder's own visual and intellectual effort. Recognizing the geometric analysis in a figure or the proportional relationships in a composition provided a satisfying sense of insight and mastery for the viewer, making the painting more engaging and appreciated.
9. Critics Used Workshop Terms and Social Metaphors to Describe Style.
Like Pliny he used metaphors, whether of his own coinage or of his own culture, referring aspects of the pictorial style of his time to the social or literary style of his time... Like Pliny too he uses terms from the artists' workshop...
Landino's critical approach. Cristoforo Landino, a humanist and rhetorician, provided a key example of Quattrocento art criticism accessible to a general educated public. He described painters' styles using a blend of language:
- Workshop terms: Technical concepts familiar in the painter's studio (e.g., rilievo, prospettiva, disegno).
- Social/Literary metaphors: Words borrowed from other cultural domains (e.g., puro, gratioso, prompto, vezzoso, devoto).
Bridging art and life. This dual approach allowed Landino to connect pictorial qualities to broader cultural values and experiences. Terms like "virile air" (Botticelli) or "sweet air" (Filippino Lippi) linked artistic style to social characterizations. "Pure" (Masaccio) borrowed from literary criticism's concept of unadorned style, while "devout" (Fra Angelico) drew from the classification of sermon styles.
A structured vocabulary. Landino's analysis of painters like Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Castagno, and Fra Angelico provided a basic conceptual framework for discussing pictorial quality. His terms, often opposed, allied, or overlapping, reflected the specific ways the Quattrocento "period eye" was equipped to perceive and articulate the differences between artists and their works.
10. "Relief" and "Design" Were Fundamental Concepts for Perceiving Form.
The foundations of the art of painting and the starting point for all these works of the hand are disegno and colorire.
Two pillars of painting. According to contemporary handbooks like Cennino Cennini's, the art of painting rested on two fundamental concepts:
- Disegno: Associated with line, contour, and the representation of edges, often achieved through drawing with a pencil or stylus. Castagno was praised as a great disegnatore.
- Colorire: Associated with the application of pigment, tones, and the representation of surfaces and how they receive light. Filippo Lippi was noted for his colorire.
Line vs. tone. This created a dichotomy between linear and tonal approaches to representing form. Disegno emphasized the outline and structure, while colorire focused on modeling form through light and shadow (rilievo). While related, these were seen as distinct skills, and painters might be stronger in one than the other.
Rilievo: The appearance of depth. Rilievo (relief) was the quality of forms appearing three-dimensional, achieved through the skillful manipulation of light and dark tones. Masaccio was considered the master of rilievo, making figures appear solid and projecting. This technique was directly linked to colorire, as it involved applying pigments to model surfaces based on a consistent light source.
11. "Variety" and "Composition" Structured the Arrangement of Figures.
I should wish this copiousness to be ornato with a certain varieta.
Beyond mere quantity. While copiousness (a large number of figures and objects) was appreciated, the true value lay in varieta (variety), a diversity and contrast of elements. Alberti emphasized variety in colors and, especially, in the attitudes and movements of figures, ensuring each figure had its own distinct pose and character.
Composition as organizing principle. Composizione was the systematic harmonization of all elements in a picture towards a desired effect. Borrowed from humanist literary criticism, this concept provided a framework for analyzing the structure of a painting, from the arrangement of bodies to the articulation of limbs and surfaces.
Variety and composition together. Landino praised artists like Filippo Lippi and Donatello
[ERROR: Incomplete response]
Last updated:
FAQ
1. What is "Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy" by Michael Baxandall about?
- Social history of art: The book explores how the style of fifteenth-century Italian painting is deeply connected to the social, economic, and cultural context of the time.
- Painter-client relationship: Baxandall examines the bespoke nature of art commissions, focusing on the interactions between painters and their clients, and how these shaped the resulting artworks.
- Visual skills and habits: The book argues that the visual skills developed in daily life—through activities like preaching, dancing, and commerce—became integral to the painter’s style.
- Interdisciplinary approach: It bridges art history and social history, showing how each discipline can inform and enrich the other.
2. Why should I read "Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy" by Michael Baxandall?
- Unique perspective: The book offers a groundbreaking approach to understanding Renaissance art, focusing on the social context rather than just the artworks themselves.
- Insight into patronage: It provides a detailed look at how art commissions worked, revealing the motivations and expectations of both patrons and artists.
- Understanding visual culture: Readers gain an appreciation for how everyday skills and experiences influenced the way people saw and valued paintings.
- Influential methodology: Baxandall’s method has become foundational in art history, making the book essential reading for anyone interested in the field.
3. What are the key takeaways from "Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy"?
- Art as social product: Paintings are not just aesthetic objects but deposits of social relationships and economic transactions.
- Shift from material to skill: Over the fifteenth century, the emphasis in art commissions moved from expensive materials (like gold and ultramarine) to the display of artistic skill.
- Cognitive style matters: The way people saw and interpreted paintings was shaped by their cultural and practical experiences, such as business mathematics and religious practices.
- Interconnected histories: Social history and art history are deeply intertwined, each offering insights into the other.
4. How does Michael Baxandall define the relationship between painters and clients in fifteenth-century Italy?
- Bespoke commissions: Most significant paintings were made to order, with clients specifying details and often entering into legal contracts with artists.
- Active client role: Clients were not passive; they influenced subject matter, materials, and even the execution of the work.
- Economic considerations: Payment structures, such as paying by the square foot or for specific materials, directly affected the style and content of paintings.
- Social motivations: Clients commissioned art for reasons including piety, civic pride, personal commemoration, and the pleasure of spending money well.
5. What is the significance of contracts and payment methods in shaping pictorial style, according to Baxandall?
- Material vs. skill: Early in the century, contracts emphasized costly materials like gold and ultramarine; later, they focused more on the artist’s skill and personal handiwork.
- Quality control: Contracts often specified the grade of pigments and the proportion of work to be done by the master versus assistants.
- Economic display: The conspicuous consumption of skill replaced the conspicuous consumption of materials as a marker of status.
- Changing values: These shifts reflect broader social changes, such as evolving attitudes toward display, wealth, and artistic individuality.
6. How does "Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy" explain the concept of "cognitive style"?
- Culturally shaped perception: Cognitive style refers to the culturally specific ways people interpret visual information, influenced by their experiences and skills.
- Practical skills transfer: Skills learned in daily life—like gauging barrels, understanding proportion, or following sermons—affected how people saw and valued paintings.
- Shared visual habits: The painter and his public shared a set of visual expectations and interpretive habits, which shaped both the making and viewing of art.
- Taste and discrimination: Enjoyment of art depended on the match between the discriminations demanded by a painting and the skills possessed by the viewer.
7. What role did religious practice and preaching play in shaping the visual culture of fifteenth-century Italy?
- Religious function of art: Most paintings were religious and intended to aid instruction, memory, and devotion.
- Preaching as training: Sermons taught people to visualize biblical stories and saints, providing categories and emotional cues that influenced both artists and viewers.
- Interior visualization: The public was accustomed to mentally picturing religious narratives, which shaped their expectations of painted representations.
- Mutual influence: Preachers and painters reinforced each other’s messages, creating a shared emotional and narrative vocabulary.
8. How did commercial mathematics and business practices influence the way people saw and made paintings, according to Baxandall?
- Mathematical education: Many patrons and artists were trained in practical mathematics, especially the Rule of Three and geometric proportion, for business purposes.
- Visual analysis: This training led to a habit of analyzing forms as combinations of regular geometric bodies, which influenced both the creation and appreciation of art.
- Proportion and perspective: Skills in gauging, measuring, and proportion were directly relevant to the development of perspective and compositional harmony in painting.
- Cultural disposition: The prevalence of these skills created a public particularly sensitive to certain visual qualities, such as clarity of structure and proportional relationships.
9. What are some of the key concepts and terms Baxandall uses to analyze pictorial style in "Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy"?
- Rilievo (relief): The illusion of three-dimensionality achieved through light and shadow.
- Ornato (ornateness): The richness and variety in a painting, including decorative elements and lively attitudes.
- Varietà (variety): Diversity in figures, poses, and colors, as opposed to mere quantity.
- Facilità (ease): The appearance of effortless execution, valued as a sign of mastery.
- Disegno (design): The importance of drawing and linear structure in defining forms.
10. How does Baxandall use the idea of "the period eye" in his analysis?
- Cultural conditioning: The "period eye" refers to the specific visual skills and interpretive habits developed by people in a particular time and place.
- Not universal: Baxandall argues that modern viewers may miss or misinterpret aspects of Renaissance art because they lack the same cognitive equipment.
- Examples from daily life: He illustrates how skills from business, religion, and social life shaped the way people saw paintings.
- Implications for art history: Understanding the "period eye" is essential for accurately interpreting historical artworks.
11. What is the importance of social history for understanding art, according to "Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy"?
- Art as social document: Paintings are records of social relationships, practices, and values, not just aesthetic objects.
- Mutual illumination: Social history and art history inform each other, offering insights that neither could provide alone.
- Beyond iconography: Baxandall moves beyond simply identifying subjects or symbols, focusing on how social context shapes style and meaning.
- Historical imagination: Engaging with the social context of art enriches our understanding of both the artworks and the societies that produced them.
12. What are some of the best quotes from "Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy" by Michael Baxandall, and what do they mean?
- "A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship." This highlights the idea that art is shaped by the interactions between artists and patrons, not created in isolation.
- "Money is very important in the history of art." Baxandall emphasizes the concrete impact of economic factors—how and what clients paid for—on the appearance of paintings.
- "An old picture is the record of visual activity." This suggests that paintings capture not just images, but the ways of seeing and thinking of their time.
- "The Eye is called the first of all the gates / Through which the Intellect may learn and taste." Quoting Feo Belcari, Baxandall underscores the primacy of vision in both art and knowledge during the Renaissance.
Review Summary
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy is widely praised as an insightful exploration of Renaissance art within its social context. Readers appreciate Baxandall's analysis of how economic, religious, and cultural factors shaped artistic production and reception. Many find the book's concepts, like the "period eye," illuminating for understanding historical perspectives on art. While some parts are considered dry or academic, most reviewers recommend it as an essential read for those interested in Renaissance art history. The book is lauded for its use of primary sources and clear explanations of complex ideas.
Similar Books
Download PDF
Download EPUB
.epub digital book format is ideal for reading ebooks on phones, tablets, and e-readers.
