michael baxandall painting and experience

In studying them, we often gain little sense of shadows as information-bearing components of ordinary experience. Close attention to them causes them to recede from view. What fascinates Baxandall in this study is the delicate fact that shadows are-to employ a term he doesn’t use- apophatic. What thinkers focus on is the potential that shadows hold. 119-145, 17%).īaxandall concludes from this tour of available science, philosophy, and aesthetics that we know very little about how shadows actually work in perception. 76-117, 28%), and finally painters of the same era, taken here, as Tiepolo had been in Baxandall’s previous work, as pictorial intellectuals (Chapter V, pp. 32-75, 30%), French Rococo-Empiricist theorists who had close contact with painters and painting (Chapter IV, pp. It moves on to contemporary cognitive scientists (Chapter III, pp. It first turns to the insights on visual perception offered by 18 th century philosophers of empiricist, “nativist,” and associationist persuasions (Chapter II, pp. The book’s search for answers is relentlessly systematic. Michael Baxandall’s Shadows and Enlightenment (1995). Shadows are examined as objective facts and subjective perceptions, and Baxandall ponders whether on either front they constitute knowledge in our experience of the world and of pictures.įigure 1. It is also a study in epistemology–in how we know what we know.

1) is about shadows or “holes in light” (p. Below, I set my sights on perhaps his most challenging book, Shadows and Enlightenment (199 5), published 25 years ago.Ĭlearly Shadows and Enlightenment (1995) (fig. But I also felt that since his writing is so rich and even difficult that it deserved extended comment, not just periodic citation or review. His work has had a sustained impact on my research–into artistic influence in transnational film practice, the relationship between theoretical ideas and experimental filmmaking, visual analysis and the perception of images, and the cultural market for auteur cinema in midcentury France. The others are here: part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.

This, for the time being, is my final entry in a series on art historian Michael Baxandall (1933–2008).

Michael baxandall painting and experience