Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Baxandall, Michael

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Description: Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

BOOKWords for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Michael Baxandall

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13444

The Italian Renaissance was a creative period for art criticism as well as for art itself. The early efforts to give verbal accounts of visual representations and their quality throw light not only on the art of the period but also on art criticism at any time. This collection of papers by art historian and critic Michael Baxandall represents his thinking over the past forty years on the relation between language and art. He offers seven thought-provoking pieces, three of which are new and written specifically for this book. Focusing on works of the fifteenth century, Baxandall shows with fresh insight how words match the experience of looking at paintings and sculptures.

The author introduces the basic Renaissance framework for art criticism and proceeds to explore various humanist critical writings of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. He concludes with a major new essay on Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection of Christ in which he probes the visual experience of a painting that criticism seeks to verbalize.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Print publication date July 2003 (in print)

Print ISBN 9780300097498

EISBN 9780300220506

Illustrations 41

Print Status in print

Publisher (in print)

WorldCat

Google Books

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Contents

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Table of Contents

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.001

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13445

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Preface

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

There is nothing to gain by making an argument here that modern art criticism begins in the Italian Renaissance. The issue would become too much a matter of quite what one chooses the properties of modern art criticism to be. Depending on this choice, equally strong or stronger cases could be made for, say, eighteenth-century or late nineteenth-century France. Yet no one who has thought about it at all would doubt that deep in modern ways of thinking about art, down in the intellectual substance …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13446

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1. Prolegomena: Values, Arguments, System

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

I. VALUES There is an initial set of thirty or forty words commonly used in the fifteenth century to distinguish kinds of interest in pictures. These words were deployed confidently and, though they do not always signal athletic thinking about pictures, they are a basis on which almost all discussion of art stood. It is useless to complain if they do not distinguish or even cover some quality in Renaissance art that now seems important. They are a fact of the culture. …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.1-26

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13447

Chapter subject tags:Description (Rhetoric) in artRhetoric, RenaissanceAgricola, Rodolphus, 1443?-1485Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472Art criticism--Italy--HistoryArt, Renaissance--Italy

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2. Alberti's Cast of Mind

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Leon Battista Alberti’s last book, De iciarchia of 1468, a dialogue treatise on the good citizen, begins with this scene: I was coming back down the hill from the church of S. Miniato at Florence, up to which I often used to go for exercise, partly to satisfy the requirements of religion, partly to fortify my health. On the way back, on the bridge over the River Arno … I met Niccolo Cerretani and Paolo Niccolini, prudent and moderate gentlemen, and well disposed towards myself.

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.27-38

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13448

Chapter subject tags:Alberti, Leon Battista, 1404-1472Description (Rhetoric) in artRhetoric, RenaissanceArtists' writings--ItalyItaly--Intellectual life--15th centuryHumanism--ItalyArt and philosophy--Italy--HistoryArt criticism--Italy--History

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3. Angelo Decembrio's De politia litteraria, Part LXVIII

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

At the beginning of his serial dialogue De politia litteraria, or On Literary Elegance, Angelo Decembrio remarks that his models are the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius and Quintilian’s Education of an Orator, but it is hard to see why he should think this. His matter is more varied and the form from which he sets out, at least, is the type of humanist dialogue derived from Cicero’s De oratore. The book is set up as a series of conversations in the circle of …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.39-67

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.005

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13449

Chapter subject tags:Decembrio, Angelo, approximately 1415-1462Description (Rhetoric) in artRhetoric, RenaissanceItaly--Intellectual life--15th centuryNude in art, RenaissanceArt, Renaissance--ItalyHumanism

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4. Rudolph Agricola on Art and on Patrons

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Rudolph Agricola (1444–1485) who was born Rolef Huysman in Friesland, has long been reckoned the first northern European humanist on the Italian pattern: ‘primus omnium aurulam quandam melioris litteraturae nobis invexit ex Italia’ (Erasmus). And it seems he was, among other accomplishments, an amateur painter. …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.69-82

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.006

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13450

Chapter subject tags:Agricola, Rodolphus, 1443?-1485Description (Rhetoric) in artRhetoric, RenaissanceItaly--Intellectual life--15th centuryArt and philosophy--Italy--History--15th centuryArt, Renaissance--ItalyHumanism

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5. English Disegno

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

A great deal has been made of the complexity of the Italian concept of disegno during the Renaissance, and certainly the term was very mobile. It was also powerful: the disegno episode is one of few in European art criticism when the relation between the artist’s mind and hand has been set up in a form that invites reflection. But the complexities of disegno really seem more lexical than theoretical, and the mobility is a matter of puns no articulate native Italian speaker …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.83-97

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.007

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13451

Chapter subject tags:Rhetoric, RenaissanceArt, Renaissance--ItalyArt criticism--Italy--HistoryArt theory--Italy--HistoryArt and philosophy--Italy--History--15th century

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6. Jacopo Sadoleto's Laocoon

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Behold! from deep mass of earth and from great ruins’
heart, long time has brought returned Laocoon again;
that Laocoon which once in princely halls
had place and dignified, O Titus, your own house …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.98-116

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.008

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13452

Chapter subject tags:Sadoleto, Jacopo, 1477-1547Laocoön (Legendary character)Description (Rhetoric) in artArt, Renaissance--ItalyArt, Renaissance--Classical influencesRhetoric, Renaissance

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7. Piero della Francesca's The Resurrection of Christ

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Looking at The Resurrection of Christ (figs 11–17) one soon meets a series of pictorial events, as I shall heavily call them sometimes – ‘pictorial’ in that they are proper not just to seeing but to seeing a depiction on a plane surface; and ‘events’ in the sense that one may be led to consider them as outcomes from conditions. These events must be part of a sense that the picture has a character beyond the sum of objects represented. …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.117-164

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.009

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13453

Chapter subject tags:Piero, della Francesca, 1416?-1492Bible--History of Biblical events--ArtRhetoric, RenaissancePainting, Renaissance--ItalyAltarpieces, Renaissance--Italy

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Index

Michael Baxandall

Words for Pictures: Seven Papers on Renaissance Art and Criticism

Index

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00179.010

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13455

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