Abstract
This essay reads the collected works of Michael Baxandall as an exercise in the melancholy of art history writing. His fascination with the gap between words and images, historical scholarship and early modern works of art has implications for a general postmodern malaise: why do those of us who write about the past still cling to the hope that historical meaning can be discovered, even as we recognize the absolute futility of finding out where? The elegiac paradox of having to write about an absent past through the enduring material presence of works of art has engendered Baxandall’s very distinctive historiographic approach. The visual arts demand different modes of attention (a key concept in each of his texts) than other historical artefacts. This awareness, I argue, has provided the rationale for Baxandall’s unique focus on the variety of contexts that shadow works of art.
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