Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy
Art HistoryBook · 1972

Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy

Michael Baxandall

Baxandall's period eye: fifteenth-century viewers read paintings using skills from gauging barrels, dancing and preaching.

Why you should read this

Baxandall's book introduced the idea of the period eye, arguing that Renaissance viewers brought skills from dance, cask-gauging, and preaching to how they read paintings, so style itself reflects the visual habits of its own time. Foundational in art history for treating perception as historically specific rather than universal.

Field
Art History
Form
Non-fiction
Published
1972
Themes
Art History