Michael Baxandall and the Shadows in Plato’s Cave

Abstract

Shadows usually lie on the periphery of our visual awareness and yet they constitute visual appearances. Starting from Michael Baxandall’s discussion of this paradox in his recent work on painting and visual cognition in the Enlightenment, this article explores the kinds of shadowing that occur in eighteenth‐century art and also the ambiguous status of shadow effects in contemporary art. It argues that Baxandall’s concerns have significant affinities with those of one of the more important Minimalist artists, Donald Judd. The way Baxandall in his study of shadows seems to abandon the social and cultural historical ambitions of his earlier analysis of Renaissance art, and to adopt a more phenomenological approach, focusing on a viewer's immediate visual engagement with a work, is seen here as symptomatic of a larger shift in the discipline – namely the demise of the systematically historicising imperatives previously more or less taken for granted in serious art historical scholarship.