Michael Baxandall Research Articles

Simulacra and historical fidelity in digital recreation of lost cultural heritage: Reconstituting period materialities for the period eye

The advancement of digital technologies in art history has opened avenues for reconstructing lost or damaged cultural heritage, a need highlighted by the deteriorated state of many artworks from the 1785 Salon. Grounded in the concept of the “Period Eye” by art historian Michael Baxandall, which emphasizes understanding artworks within their original historical and cultural contexts, this study proposes a subfield focused on Reconstituting Period Materialities for the Period Eye. This methodology bridges comprehensive historical research with generative visual artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, facilitating the creation and immersive virtual reality viewing of artworks. Beyond mere visual replication, the approach aims to recreate the material and textural realities of the period, thereby enabling contemporary audiences to experience these works as they were originally perceived. The process includes replicating building materials using Quixel Megascans, employing AI for generating images of lost artworks, and utilizing normal maps for simulating painting textures, all contributing to an authentic reconstruction of the Salon’s ambiance and materiality. This approach, met with some skepticism from traditional historians and archeologists, asserts that such digital reconstitution, backed by rigorous empirical research and detailed period-specific datasets, yields reconstructions of greater historical accuracy and contextual richness. This mirrors strides in sound archeology, endorsing a similar empirical approach in visual material recreation. The significance of this study is underscored by its potential to enrich our comprehension of historical artworks through a “Period Eye,” blending historical insights with modern technological innovation for a deeper understanding and appreciation of cultural heritage.

Harriman-Smith, James. Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Transition

Harriman-Smith, James. <i>Criticism, Performance, and the Passions in the Eighteenth Century: The Art of Transition</i>

Changing perspective: An “optical” approach to creativity

The paper proposes an “optical” approach to creativity, involving a modification of the way reality is viewed. Perception is notably absent from sociological accounts of creativity, examining practices of recombination embedded in social relations. Drawing on the work of Michael Baxandall, I propose a framework where creativity emanates from the disruption of “structures of attention”, allowing to see common elements in uncommon ways. The mechanism of disruption transpires on the billiard table, when contact between two balls provokes the repositioning of other balls, modifying distances and angles of visibility. Creativity results when actors use someone else's solution to think through their own problems, provoking reinterpretation of established ways of doing. The mechanism is illustrated with discussions of El Greco and Paul Cézanne. The framework builds on the growing sociological interest in social optics, indirect influence, reverse causality and endogeneity. It provides opportunities for meaningful interaction between art history, network research, neuroscience and the sociology of creativity.

Representação do Ócio no Brasil no Início do Século XIX a Partir da Obra de Debret

O presente artigo traz uma reflexão teórica realizada por meio de análise de três obras produzidas pelo artista francês Jean-Baptiste Debret durante o período em que esteve no Brasil, no início do século XIX. As obras selecionadas foram analisadas com base na teoria e conceitos propostos pelo historiador da arte Michael Baxandall. Assim, o objetivo foi destacar obras de Debret que representassem cenas de gênero mostrando momentos de ócio e lazer para, a partir delas, aplicar a metodologia de observação de obras de arte proposta por Baxandall. O método empregado foi de abordagem qualitativa com enfoque indutivo na análise dos dados coletados, bem como a pesquisa é bibliográfica e empreendida pelo uso de fontes secundárias. Por fim, considerou-se que as obras de Debret retratam muito mais do que cenas de gênero, sendo também testemunhos históricos no tocante a hábitos e costumes marcantes de uma sociedade de época.

Josef Strzygowski (1861–1942), Dmitry Ainalov (1862–1939) and the Question of Geographical Borders in the Theory of Art: The Possibility of a “Geographic Eye”

Cyril Mango in his book “Byzantium. The Empire of New Rome” (1980), wrote that Byzantineart, along with Byzantine studies, flourished as a prolific ally more in Russia than anywhere else in the world. In contrast, the theory of art in Western European countries branded as derogatory for many centuries the typical iconographical and stylistic features of Byzantine art with the geographically-based stigma “maniera greca” (Greek Manner). This definition often compromised, with some rare exceptions, a correct appreciation of Byzantine and Eastern art in Europe, minimizing the contribution of the East to the development of art in western civilizations. An exception, and a break with this misconception of the Byzantine component of western art, is the controversial essay by the Austrian art historian Josef Strzygowski “Orient oder Rom”(1901). In his study, Strzygowski radically opposes the Rome-based aesthetical theories, such as the widely accepted ideas of Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl, surprisingly finding the roots of German and Slavic art in Iran, Armenia and Egypt. The theories of Strzygowski, although connoted from anti-Roman resentment and strong German nationalism, gave a fundamental impulse to the revaluation of Eastern art in Europe. Indeed the ideas of Strzygowski are not very new. In 1890, during a sort of Eastern Grand Tour, he attended the Russian Archeological Congress where he met the Russian scholar Dmitry Ainalov. In 1900 (one year before “Orient oder Rom”), Ainalov published the essay “The Hellenistic Origins of Byzantine Art”, in which he emphasizes the originality of Byzantine art as a Hellenistic product and claims its independency from Roman art. These ideas, which were shared by the Russian scholarship and tended to see patriotically Byzantine art in its uniqueness, helped paradoxically through the mediation of the radical ideas of Strzygowski European scholars to be able to “break down the borders” and develop a better comprehension of the importance of the East. The case of Strzygowski–Ainalov is an example of a typical attempt by the History of Art to evaluate an art object as a pure expression of the spirit of a population and of a particular geographical area. From this initial situation, the paper intends to examine the fundamental contribution of the geography of art to the formation of art theories. To paraphrase Michael Baxandall and his famous “Period Eye”, can we speak of a “Geographic Eye” when we try to comprehend an art period? To what extent is a Geography of Artpossible today? What are the roles of geographical features and borders in the analysis of an art work? What is meant with the geographical definitions (such as “German”, “Italian”, Russian”, or “Western” and “Eastern”) once they are applied to art? In the light of the recent debates on the possibility of a global art history, as well as the developing of new geopolitical horizons, do we have the same conception of the Geography of Art today as the scholars of the past? What are the advantages and the risks of a methodology based on a geographic parameter in considering an art object or an art period?

Ian Verstegen. Review of "Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words" by Peter Mack and Robert Williams.

Ian Verstegen. Review of "Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words" by Peter Mack and Robert Williams.

Historians and friends: reflections on some contemporary historians

ABSTRACTThis article is based on the text of a talk at the University of Athens in October 2018, in which I drew brief cameo portraits of five historians who inspired me and whose lives I admire: David Herlihy (1930–1991), Michael Baxandall (1933–2008), Marino Berengo (1928–2000), Hans Baron (1901–1988), and Marvin Becker (1922–2004). It is difficult to find strong common methodological or ideological ground shared by all five. Their priorities were different, their guiding lights in each case came from an internal dialogue between their own passions and the inspiration they received from teachers and readings, not by the methodological preferences that dominated the profession in their lives. What, in the end, left a deep imprint on me was their character. Their commitment was to ideas and to dialogue. National, religious, ideological, or methodological differences did not cloud their judgment of others, especially of young scholars. All five, growing up in the Fascist era, were portents of the more level tones of the liberal democracy that slowly, amid myriad obstacles, set root in the decades following 1945.

Punishment in the frame: Rethinking the history and sociology of art

Images of punishment have featured prominently in Western art and this article explores what might be learnt from studying such pictures of suffering. It seeks to develop an approach to the visual that avoids both the essentialism of art history and the reductionism of sociology by offering a rethinking of the relationships between the two. It begins by setting out the current state of the sociology of art, before discussing ‘new’ art histories that are inspired by social analysis. It then concentrates on how images of punishment have featured in Western art. This substantive material provides a rich resource to understand the force of representation and offers an opportunity to develop an aesthetic sociology that avoids some of the problems identified in the article. The approach developed in the second part is one that seeks to elaborate an aesthetic sociology that combines a historical sensitivity to images with the analytical concerns of social science. It strives to extend the art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings toward more sociological interpretations of visual analysis.

Constraints between picture and painting: Some considerations at a distance

Abstract This article considers a series of constraints active in the abrasive interface between picture and painting. The term constraint is used in reference to Margaret Boden’s research into the computational mechanisms underlying creativity, constraints understood as productive limits that test a given field or convention. The space between picture and painting is full of strongly defended divisions, and inevitable overlaps, and it can be a cluttered and contentious field for a practitioner to negotiate. The aim is in part to bypass an oppositional mindset that cuts off descriptive and imitative impulses for painting and picture from abstract positions and to access the constructed forms of pictorial convention by a different route. In order to avoid a dead-end opposition, a distance from painting and picture is established through a close examination of an early artefact of mark making and counting in the form of a small clay ball called a bulla. Dating from around 3500 bce, the bulla reference depends on the archaeological research of Denise Schmandt-Besserat and on a description by Georges Ifrah as a key example in the development of numeration. The bulla is identified as a point where distinctions between number, word, object and picture are not fixed and their interdependencies are clear and productive. In this article the particular qualities of the bulla facilitates thoughts about three interlocking terms: likeness, representation and depiction. Each term is addressed in turn, framed as ‘testing likeness’, ‘retaining representation’ and ‘the material requirements of depiction’, and each is considered through processes of recognition and resemblance. This is informed by writing on painting’s mimetic and materially specific art history, including James Elkins, Michael Podro, Georges Didi-Huberman, W. J. T. Mitchell, Michael Baxandall and Jacques Rancière. Likeness is rephrased by a consideration of analogy, and the conceptual testing involved, opening a space between the notion of likeness and visual resemblance. Representation is thought through the processes of correspondence and reiteration, and the associations of both presence and displacement. Depiction is embedded into its material conditions and the circumstances of recognition that evokes. All three terms are considered as key to the constraints between painting and picture, even when functioning as exclusions.

Peter Mack and Robert Williams eds., Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words. Studies in Art Historiography. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. 204. US$104.95 (cloth).

Peter Mack and Robert Williams eds., <i>Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words</i>. Studies in Art Historiography. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pp. 204. US$104.95 (cloth).

Renaissance Dress, Cultures of Making, and the Period Eye

This article argues that fashion was at the forefront of Renaissance visual styles. This makes it as important as paintings for understanding the Renaissance as an aesthetic movement. An understanding of fashion follows from a knowledge of how things were made and what visual skills were involved in the making processes. I propose that we see tailoring as akin to a process of polychrome sculpting and investigate the significance of color making. The article explores the political and emotional meanings of color in the early sixteenth century and demonstrates how remaking can be part of a heuristic process for academics. Building on Michael Baxandall, the article concludes that dress needs to become firmly embedded in our conception of the period eye.

Explaining Varda’s Lions Love: a European director responds to an American cultural marketplace

From 1955 to 1966, Agnès Varda’s French-language feature film output, entailing four films, was characterized by formal control and cool elegance. After her relocation to Los Angeles in 1968, however, Varda’s work took a sharp turn, as evidenced in 1969’s Lions Love – a bricolage of forms and themes, including Warholian long takes, documentary segments, surreal interludes and re-photographed new reports, all swirling around the ideas of celebrity, performance and self-reflexivity. This article explains this drastic formal and narrative departure as a result of Varda’s response to a new taste culture, specifically, that of American underground cinema and experimental theatre. Using art historian Michael Baxandall’s approach to discussing artistic influence and cultural marketplaces, the article traces a few key important aesthetic trends and concerns that Varda likely drew upon when crafting her first English-language film. Additionally, the article argues that Varda adapted the precedents established by filmmakers like Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke and William Greaves to her own ends, injecting levity and playfulness into a relatively cynical cultural milieu.

Surplus, Authorial Intentions, and Hypothetical Intentionalism

I begin in the first section of this essay by restating and defending an old objection against actual intentionalism, the view that the historical author or artist’s actual intentions, when embodied or realized successfully in the artwork, determine or fix the work’s meaning, which in turn is known through tracking those intentions. The objection I defend shows that authorial intentions are surplus or otiose. In the second section of the essay, I state one moderate version of an alternate view about interpretation known as hypothetical intentionalism, which has been advanced in different versions for almost forty years now by writers as varied as Michael Baxandall, Wayne Booth, Gregory Currie, Jerrold Levinson, Alexander Nehamas, and William Tolhurst, amongst others. I conclude by defending hypothetical intentionalism from some recent criticisms raised by Noël Carroll, Stephen Davies, and Robert Stecker.

Incorporating the Period Eye

ABSTRACTIn recent years, museums have staged a number of “exhibitions of exhibitions.” These experiments in institutional, curatorial, and artistic revivalism have ranged from allusions to and quotations from past installations to full-scale re-enactments and reconstructions. The motivations of the curators and artists responsible for these diverse projects have included the desire to recuperate both famous and forgotten shows and also to reproduce past modalities of display and spectatorship, and thus build an archive of the immaterial through retrospective and performance practices. Some of the most interesting “exhibitions of exhibitions” have focused on the historical conditions and institutional conventions of spectatorship, with the objective of alerting the contemporary viewer to differences in the performativity of spectatorship, past and present. By evoking former practices of looking, walking, and touching, these exhibitions also remind us that techniques of the museum visitor are both embodied and acquired. They require the contemporary viewer to recalibrate their choreography of their looking and moving; put another way, they activate what Michael Baxandall termed the “period eye” in order to decode the visual effects of the exhibition and to relocate oneself in the position of the historical spectator. This article explores how a number of recent exhibitions have redrawn attention to the corporeality of museum visiting and viewing, as well as to the historical acquisition of competences and attitudes that we take for granted today.

Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’s Imagines

sed quemadmodum si litteras pulchras alicubi inspiceremus, non nobis sufficeret laudare scriptoris articulum, quoniam eas pariles, aequales decorasque fecit, nisi etiam legeremus quid nobis per illas indicaverit: ita factum hoc qui tantum inspicit, delectatur pulchritudine facti ut admiretur artificem; qui autem intellegit, quasi legit, aliter enim videtur pictura, aliter videntur litterae. picturam cum videris, hoc est totum vidisse, laudasse: litteras cum videris, non hoc est totum; quoniam commoneris et legere. But if we were looking at beautifully written letters somewhere, it would not suffice for us to praise the hand of the writer--the fact that he has made them uniform, symmetrical, and elegant--unless we were also reading what, through them, he has conveyed to us. In the same way, the person who views this deed [Christ's miracle of the loaves and fishes] might be so pleased with the deed's beauty as to admire the person performing it. Yet the person who understands it is, as it were, the person who reads. For a picture is looked at in one way, and letters are looked at in another. When you have seen a picture, the activity is complete: to have seen is to have praised. When you have seen letters, the thing is not complete, for you are reminded also to read. Augustine, In Evang. Iohan. (Tractatus 24), 2 This volume investigates the many ways in which modes and practices of viewing were conceptualized in the ancient Greek world. The contributors have turned to both archaeological and literary products, and have used these various 'traces' to excavate a lost discourse of seeing, while formulating (according to the conventions of twenty-first-century academic prose) the social, political, and intellectual parameters of viewing in cultural historical perspective. But ancient Greek authors were themselves acutely sensitive to the stakes of theorizing sight in language--of translating visual stimuli, and the act of critically responding to them into spoken or written discourse. How, if at all, can words mediate sight? In what ways do texts function like images, and images like texts? And which medium better represents the hermeneutics of perception: pictures for viewing, or words for reading? Such questions stretch back to the very beginnings of the Greek literary tradition. Indeed, they might be said to have their conceptual origins in the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Book 18 of the Iliad). To my mind, Homer was the first to probe, and indeed contest, the respective limits of words and pictures. At the same time, Homers description of Achilles' shield also laid the ground for critical conventions of analogizing visual and verbal modes of representation: by orally invoking pictures that paradoxically talk, sound, and sing, the shield forged by the Homeric Hephaestus itself forged a tradition of theorizing vision in terms of voice, and vice versa. (1) According to Plutarch, it was Simonides who coined the subsequent aphorism that painting is silent poetry and poetry is talking painting. (2) But this framework for coming to terms with vision remained a literary critical mainstay. If, as Michael Baxandall (1985, 107) diagnosed, viewing is always a theory-laden activity, Greek discourses of vision were loaded with an associated ideology of voice: in the Greek cultural imaginary, and across a remarkably long timespan, theorizing viewing meant relating it to the parallel processes of hearing and reading. (3) While this tradition of conceptualizing sight stretches back to the beginnings of Greek literature, it also stretches forwards to the murky transition from late antique to early medieval intellectual thinking. As the opening epigraph wonderfully attests, Augustine (writing between the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE) also theorized the act of seeing in terms of reading. Where classical forebears tended to champion the parallels between words and pictures, however, Augustine exploited the analogy in order to champion the supremacy of language. …

Transnational auteurism and the cultural dynamics of influence: Mani Kaul's ‘Non-Representational’ cinema

ABSTRACTThis article makes two contributions to the study of transnational cinemas. First, it seeks to illuminate a common practice amongst those contemporary auteurs whose development depends on culturally eclectic sources; namely, the practice of positioning one's style and storytelling as attempts to reconcile a range of diverse influences. The ‘non-representational’ cinema of the Rajasthani auteur Mani Kaul stands as just such an effort, exploring the tensions between his two mentors and the aesthetic values they exhibit: Ritwik Ghatak (‘sensuousness’) and Robert Bresson (‘restraint’). Second, this article proposes that a nuanced understanding of the relation Kaul cultivated between these influences requires revising two of the historian's basic tools: the concepts of auteurism and influence. The concept of auteurism that best describes Kaul's film practice and approach to the domestic and international cultural marketplaces is not one of pure, isolated independence, but rather of individuality through transnational reference. Moreover, this article offers an approach to artistic influence, based on the writings of the cultural historian of art Michael Baxandall, that ‘reverses the relation’, as it were, situating the later artist, in this case Kaul, as the relevant active agent in the influence relation, elaborating upon, redirecting and re-reading Bresson as the innovator of a fragmentary and ‘non-representational’ alternative to the illusory and ideologically suspect ‘closure’ of storytelling paradigms indebted to the Renaissance.

Studying and Advocating

Studying and Advocating

SPEAKING OF LILLIPUT?

This essay, part of a special issue on the Warburg Institute and Library, offers personal recollections of scholars whom the author encountered there as a student in the early 1970s, including E. H. Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Michael Baxandall, Frances Yates, D. P. Walker, A. I. Sabra, Michael Podro, Michael Screech, Arnaldo Momigliano, and Nikolaus Pevsner. The author's focus is on differences between the milieu of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, as it had been in Hamburg, and the ethos of the Warburg Institute in London. The key document for establishing this contrast is an anonymous review — by Edgar Wind — attacking Gombrich's biography of Aby Warburg, which was published in 1970. Wind found the new Warburg circle “Lilliputian” in comparison with the old Hamburg circle, to which he had belonged. This essay disputes Wind's finding, based on its author's own experience, as well as on his sympathy with the reasoned empirical approach of Gombrich, Baxandall, and others at the London Warburg to issues that Aby Warburg had raised when the Library was in Germany.

Fallax Imago: Ovid's Narcissus and the seduction of mimesis in Roman wall painting

In the late first century CE, the myth of Narcissus became one of the most frequently represented subjects in Roman wall painting. The well-known, often reproduced images from the House of Octavius...

Three Returns to Rumohr

This article makes a fundamental contribution to the understanding of the development of art history as a discipline. Kroupa shows the genesis of the first “historics” of art by Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785-1843) and his influence on later, major figures in art history: first, Gottfried Semper and Moritz Thausing; second, Julius von Schlosser, Vincenc Kramář, and Václav Richter; and finally Michael Baxandall. Their return to Rumohr signals an interest in the authority of the pictorial, visually received order in works of art and the surrounding historical, social, and cultural circumstances. While Schlosser’s and Richter’s interest was motivated by a perceived crisis in historicism, contemporary thinking seeks to revise historicism via Enlightenment (and therefore pre-historicist) concepts.