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Area of FocusAbout Michael's Work
Michael Baxandall was a historian and critic of European art, who brought new life to familiar images, texts, and cultural artifacts of the past.
Baxandall worked in the areas of Renaissance art criticism, connoisseurship and the judgment of quality in art, the Enlightenment vision of the eighteenth century, Giambattista Tiepolo, and German Romantic painting. He investigated the relationship between the material and intellectual conditions of works of art, and the societies and artists that generate them. His books included Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (1972), The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980), Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985), Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (with Svetlana Alpers, 1994), and Shadows and Enlightenment (1995).
Biography
Baxandall was a curator in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1961-1965). He was later professor emeritus of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley, and professor emeritus of the History of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, the University of London, where he began as a lecturer in 1965.
Baxandall received a B.A. (1954) and an M.A. (1958) from the University of Cambridge, and studied at the University of Pavia, Italy (1955-56), and Munich University (1957-58).
Last updated January 1, 2005.
Published on August 1, 1988
