Baxandall’s method of art history reconstructs the socio-economic, political and cultural environment within which the artwork was made, reflecting the lives of the people who made, commissioned, and saw it. It is a method that employs a representation of the protocols and attitudes of the age by using literary and contractual evidence - offering clues about the society that produced the art. It is in contrast to earlier art historical techniques in that it does not seek to construct history to explain works of art, indeed Baxandall is deeply suspicious of such determinist systems and avoids concrete and absolute explanations of any sort, preferring to observe similarities between contemporary cultural phenomena. This position is evident in the preface to The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, ‘The suggestion is not that one must know about Renaissance Germany to enjoy the sculpture, but that the sculpture can offer a fresh focus on the cultural history of Renaissance Germany.’
In his earlier Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy Baxandall quotes contemporary literature in a bid to gauge the mentality of the age towards art. He quotes Fra Michele da Carcano’s explanation of the function of artwork in churches:
Know that there were three reasons for institution of images in churches. First, for the instruction of simple people, for they are instructed by them as if by books. Second, so that the mystery of the incarnation and the examples of the saints may be more active in our memory through being presented daily to our eyes. Third, to excite feelings of devotion, these being aroused more effectively by things seen than by things heard.
Baxandall discusses the text, summarising its content and then exposing potential problems of idolatry that accompany the inclusion of images in churches. He enlists further texts from eminent clergymen of the time on this matter before taking the essential question ‘what was the function of painting in churches?’ and reformulating it into the more focussed ‘what sort of painting would the religious public have found lucid, vividly memorable, and emotionally moving?’ This provides the impetus for the rest of the book.
The controversy surrounding Idolatry was far more vehement and consequential in Germany around the turn of the sixteenth century. Baxandall recreates the volatile atmosphere using contemporary literature of the time from reformers, clergy and guilds to provide samples of the confusion and political opinion, before going on to explore its impact upon art. Michael Hirst’s article Michelangelo in Florence: ‘David’ in 1503 and ‘Hercules’ in 1506 is a prime example of how twenty first century art historians have utilised this approach. Hirst builds a chronology of this part of Michelangelo’s career based on a rigorous investigation of surviving contracts, describing such details as deadlines and purchase of materials. This leads Hirst into a discussion concerning the placement of David, public acclaim and its never realised companion statue of Hercules.
The genre of the winged retable, such as the one in the Benedictine Abbey Church by Michael Erhart in Blaubereun, is prominent in the High alters of churches in southern Germany and constitutes the main focus of Limewood Sculptors. Baxandall shows that they were commissioned and paid for by a collective public effort and therefore represent a collective expression of the community. He identifies the importance of ‘the cult of municipal patron saints’ as establishing ‘a sense of unity, of common goals and the need to stand and work together, was something that every city needed if it was to survive’. This religious fervour sometimes became more than the church could control, as in the cult of St Sebald in Nuremburg which had gained a massive following but was however, utterly ‘vulgar’. The church felt obliged to commission Sigismund Meisterlin to write a history for him more in line with the decorum befitting a saint. Baxandall also recounts an episode where the iconography of the church was employed for more sinister ends. He tells of a story about how the people of Regensburg, jealous of their financial success, expelled all Jews from their town. They razed the synagogue to the ground, during which one of the workers hired for the demolition was seriously injured but miraculously recovered. A church was subsequently built which housed a painting of the virgin accompanied by a statue of her outside. More miracles followed, apparently performed by the images, consequently attracting thousands of pilgrims. For Baxandall this story is one of bigotry and manipulation but is provided as a kind of darkly twisted example of how artwork can operate under certain circumstances.
This line of enquiry was treated with suspicion by Ernst Gombrich who felt that Baxandall’s method seemed like a re-presentation of Zeitgeist and the Hegelian Metaphysics that it implied. Gombrich suspected that Baxandall was trying to conjure a ‘spirit of the age’ explanation in his work, relying on vague notions of how groups of people can share a collective spiritual harmony. This attack would seem erroneous and unwarranted when we consider Baxandall’s meticulous collection of facts and empirical evidence. However a further rift may be evident in Gombrich’s interest in scientific methods. His use of the Ockham’s razor principle would have been at odds with Baxandall’s method of collecting an abundance of material but drawing no definite conclusions from it.
Baxandall paints a picture of the uncertainty of these years, the emergence of opposing blocs for iconoclasm and reform against the mercantile classes reluctant to break relations with Charles V. He alludes to the intricacies of the interest of relevant groups and fraternities but resists any determinate explanation saying ‘It is the kind of historical shift of mind least possible to reconstruct’. Baxandall prefers to present arguments made by the people involved. He draws our attention to ecclesiastical literature that explains the church’s view on why religious iconography does not contravene the second commandment, citing a document called Preceptorium of 1452:
If it is said under the Old Law God had no image and that this was a sign for the New Law, the answer is that, if God had not afterwards become Man, then indeed he should not have had images.
The crux of the problem lay within individual’s inability to distinguish between Christ and a statue of Christ. In praying to the statue they were committing the sin of idolatry. Sebastian Franck and Erasmus were amongst the intellectuals that ridiculed the church’s stance on this and demanded reform. The reformers openly mocked the icons and demanded their removal from churches across Germany. The reformation in southern Germany halted the commissioning of High Alter retables by the elite. However Baxandall points out that the market was practically exhausted anyway; there were only a finite number of churches to make retables for. Retables lasted a very long time if properly looked after and sculptors left very detailed and specific instructions for their maintenance. The sculptors were left redundant. Unable to earn a living as carpenters because of strong guild restrictions the sculptors were forced to eke out a living making secular objects. This was not entirely new, there had always been a market for secular art in southern Germany and Baxandall here identifies the emergence of three specific genres from what were previously artworks performing ‘minor, residual functions’. The fleshy cabinet piece, fountains and portraits became the sculptors’ stock in trade.
Mieke Bal discusses genre labels as mastercodes for reading artwork, ‘promoting distinct although interacting, modes of reading’. Bal’s method of reading art in identifies genre as an important component before testing it with a close reading of the semiotics of the work. For Baxandall genre is more problematic, the demise of the religious statue and the rise of these three new genres is seen as an added complication by Baxandall. He takes care to clarify his definition of ‘genre’ and ‘function’, also outlining the problematic relationship the two notions have. Baxandall describes how genre can consume artworks and leave individual qualities in each of them unnoticed because the viewer arbitrarily recognises the genre and associates all the characteristics of it to the work without looking to see the details specific to that work. In this respect genre can conventionalise artworks and subsume them into its own ‘local histories and internal dialogues’. Alternatively an artwork may become conspicuous because it works against the genre, amplifying its meaning and communication to the viewer. For Baxandall this makes it more difficult to recognise the difference between conscious motives and actual consequences, a dichotomy located within the function of artworks.
The role that strong patronage can play in the connection between genre and the function of a work of art is taken up by Sarah Blake McHam in her article Donatello’s ‘David’ and ‘Judith’ as Metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence, discussing how Medici patronage employed Donatello’s bronze sculptures David and Judith and Holofernes to exploit Florentine public opinion. Referring to the writings of John of Salisbury as a pervasive influence upon fifteenth-century Florence, she constructs a mental climate where the debate about the legitimacy of tyranicide engages peoples’ thoughts and public debates. The Medici commissioned the sculptures in order to convince the Florentine public that they were ‘celebrators, even preservers, of Florentine liberty against any threat.’ This façade of being actively democratic was essential for the Medici whilst they were covertly moving towards a tyrannical regime of their own, ‘taking harsh measures to suppress any opposition.’ McHam’s account of the ‘powerful’ Medici message informing Donatello’s work and its function resembles Baxandall’s work in its methodology, it extends beyond the cultural developments of Quattrocento Florence and seeks information from the social and political climate. However, McHam’s paper sets out to provide a determinist explanation, something that Baxandall was careful to avoid. She closes her argument by assigning a deterministic conception and function to the works of art, ‘The program discussed here provides another instance of the family’s carefully calculated and sophisticated use of artistic patronage to further its goal of maintaining power in Florence.’ The Medici plan was not entirely successful, Jacob Burckhart’s The Civilisation of the Renaissance tells us that after the Giuliano de Medici had been assassinated, public opinion had shifted:
Judith with the dead Holofernes – was taken from their [Medici] collection and placed in the Palazzo della Signoria…with the inscription ‘Exemplum salutis publicae cives posuere 1495’ (The citizens erected [this statue] as an example for the public good).
Despite the symbolic power of art in Italy, the Italians had none of the problems experienced in Germany in their handling of idolatry. In Painting and Experience Baxandall uses an idea similar to Gombrich’s ‘The Beholder’s share’, in an elegant explanation of how Italian Quattrocento painting avoided idolatry. Baxandall tells us that painters developed schemata of generalised images, the figures were not individuals but generic, formulaic representations. Therefore when people viewed them they were not confronted by, for instance, Christ and His disciples, as in Masaccio’s The Tribute Money, but by an image of a group of men that reminded them of the Christ and His disciples, engaged in an already known Biblical narrative. The viewer was required to see the specific face in their minds, suggested by the generic image on the canvas. This meant that people were not worshiping the image, but using the image to inform their inner concept of Christ, the Virgin or the Saints.
The function of an artwork takes place as a dialogue between patron, artist and viewer, and so it is important to establish the position of the viewer - the public. Baxandall gives us an account of how most of the reformers are the urban poor. He describes the elusive and sinister organisation known as the Anabaptists, how they’re violent iconoclasm terrified the city. Although he also goes on to describe the power of the city councils, made up of merchants and the wealthy, he eschews the assignment of untangling the loyalties and motivations of the councils with the complexities and infinite permutations of allegiance. Baxandall’s aversion of a determinist explanation leads him to avoid a conclusion based on socio-economic circumstances. In stopping short of the ‘class war’ argument Baxandall has drawn criticism from T.J. Clark who sees Baxandall’s work as lacking the courage to make firm conclusions:
Experience being a code word for a kind of art history which feels the need to refer to those historical realities with which artist and patron are constantly in contact but which dare not name the nature of that contact – ideology, class…
Clark’s own methods require an economic explanation of social dynamics beyond the reductive Marxism of Antal and Hauser, but he rejects the possibility of writing social art history without a general theory of the structure of a capitalist economy. He sees Baxandall's work as a kind of cowardice, floating in an indeterminate hinterland. But Clark’s criticism is perhaps illustrative of a mentality based on him taking a position and then setting out to prove it. This method is problematic for art history. Walter Benjamin’s warning that all history is constructed by historians from an eclectic, even subjective selection of facts highlights the dangers of ideology. Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson have also argued that contexts are created and edited and cannot be taken as hard truth.
Baxandall’s commitment to authenticity is exemplified in his most acclaimed achievement, his concept of the ‘Period Eye’:
There is no question of fully possessing oneself of another culture’s cognitive style, but the profit is real: one tests and modifies one’s perception of the art, one enriches one’s general visual repertory, and one gets at least some intimation of another culture’s visual experience and disposition.
This is Michael Baxandall’s essential point. This realisation frees him of the obligation to discover the reasons why an artwork was made and allows him to investigate what may have contributed to its conception and fashioning. It is a process of discovery that does not need justification; it is passive and yet thought provoking, non-committal yet informative. Gombrich’s criticism of his method as approaching the metaphysical disregards Baxandall’s extraordinary research skills and deep commitment to finding empirical source material. Any ideas that lay outside material evidence are merely hinted at or suggested, never put forward as determinant. T.J. Clark’s attack is the reverse, that Baxandall is not confident enough in putting forward ideological hypotheses, having clearly amassed substantial evidence for doing so. But Baxandall does not need a cause, he simply seeks to explore areas of social history and its connection with the production of art, he does not wish to explain it emphatically.
For Baxandall, as well as Hirst, McHam and others who came after him, the function of an artwork is what brings together patrons and artists as makers of art, and the public as receivers of art. This is a massively important dynamic as it explains the motivations for how a work of art came to exist and operate in the world. It involves the attitudes of a cross section of society; religious orders and fraternities, laymen and merchants. The emergence of genres is intrinsically linked to function, the two affecting and modifying each other. Particular works of art will fall into, and be conventionalised by, a genre. In return the function of art gives genre its definition.
Bibliography
Mieke Bal, A Mieke Bal Reader, (University of Chicago Press lt., London, 2006) p 313.
Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson ‘Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders’ / from Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (Yale University
Press, New Haven and London, 1980)
Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford University Press, 1972)
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (Phaidon Press,1945, 1995) p41-42.
E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Phaidon Press ltd, fifth edition 1977) p168.
Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art Histroy A Critical Introduction to its Methods (Manchester University Press, 2006) p135.
Michael Hirst, ‘Michelangelo in Florence: ‘David’ in 1503 and ‘Hercules’ in 1506, The Burlington Magazine, Vol 142, No. 1169 (Aug., 2000)
Allan Langdale, ‘Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye’, Art History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 1998
Sarah Blake McHam, ‘Donatello’s “David” and “Judith” as metaphors of Medici Rule in Florence’, The Art Bulletin, Vol 83, No. 1 (Mar., 2001)
David Summers, ‘Form’, Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art Historical Description’, 1989 / from Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1998)