HName: Baxandall, Michael [David Kighley]  

DateBorn: 1933

Placeborn: Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom (?)

Datedied:

Placedied:

HDescrip: Scholar of Italian renaissance art employing postmodernist and social history methods.  Baxandall's parents were the museum director David Baxandall (q.v.) and Isobel Thomas (Baxandall).  He attended Manchester Grammar School, Manchester, England, and then Downing College, Cambridge University where he received an A. M.  He continued study at the University in Pavia and Munich. Baxandall was a Fellow at the Warburg Institute between 1959 and 1961, studying along with Michael Podro (q.v.) under Ernst Gomrich (q.v.).  In 1961 he joined the Victoria and Albert Museum's department of Architecture and Sculpture, then under the direction of Sir John Pope-Hennessey (q.v.).  The following year Terence Hodgkinson (q.v.) returned to the department from an assistant director position at the museum, and the Baxandall and Hodgkinson worked together.  He married Katharina Simon in 1963. In 1965 Baxandall left the V&A to be a lecturer at the Warburg Institute of the University of London. His pamphlet, German Wood Statuettes 1500-1800, dates from this period.  In 1972 he published a book which established his reputation as one of the emerging art historians of the "new art history," Paintings and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy.  In 1973 he was advanced to a Reader position at the Warburg.  Baxandall was Slade professor of Art at Oxford University for the 1974-1975 year.  In 1980, he published  The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, a topic suggested to him by Hodgkinson.  He was named Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition of the Warburg the following year.  Baxandall was appointed A. D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University in 1982, which he held until 1988. His methodological book,  Patterns of Intention: on the Historical Explanation of Pictures was published to acclaim in 1985. In 1987 he became Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley.  He remained there until an emeritus status in 1996.  In 1999, Blackwell publishers issued a series of essays by other art historians on Baxandall's methodology, About Michael Baxandall.  His Warburg-era students include Charles Saumarez Smith, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Paintings and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), was one of the first books to example Italian renaissance art as social history, and the first to address an undergraduate audience.  Baxandall argued for a "visual anthropology," i.e., a way to look at art through the experiences of the viewers of the period.  The book immediately became a staple of university course curricula and Baxandall issued a second edition in 1988. Michael Ann Holly who studied under Baxandall at the Warburg Institute, characterized his work as "fundamentally a postmodernist point of view."  He is considered one of the founders of what came to be known as "visual literacy studies" some twenty-five years later.

HCountry: United Kingdom/United States

HBiography: Kleinbauer, W. Eugene.  Research Guide to the History of Western Art.  Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2.  Chicago:  American Library Association, 1982, p. 118; [transcript] Michael Baxandall. Interviews with Art Historians, 1991-2002. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA;  Who's Who 2004: an Annual Biographical Dictionary.  London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 136; [regarding methodologies:] Rifkin, Adrian. About Michael Baxandall. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, specifically, Holly, Michael Ann.  "Patterns in the Shadows: Attention in/to the Writings of Michael Baxandall." pp. 5-15 and Potts, Alex.  "Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato's Cave." pp. 69-83.

HBibliography: Paintings and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972; The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980; Shadows and Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995; Patterns of Intention: on the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985; German Wood Statuettes 1500-1800. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1967.