He suggested that cultural factors influence the visual characteristics that are attractive at any particular time. The immediate and enduring popularity of the book, progenitor of the notion of visual culture, makes it a significant marker in the anthropological turn art history took in the 1970s and 1980s.The period eye is a concept that was devised by Michael Baxandall and described in his innovative Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, where he used it to describe the cultural conditions under which art in the Italian Renaissance was created, viewed, and understood.īaxandall argued that everyone processes visual information in the brain in a different way, using a combination of innate skills and skills based on experience, which are often culturally determined.
While Gombrich and Marxist art historians were suspicious of the Period Eye, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz thought Baxandall’s elaboration exemplary, as did the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The article takes the Period Eye as a case through which to explore how different art‐historical camps evaluated the concept in the 1970s, crucial as it was as a novel approach to the idea of a social history of art.
This article firstly traces a range of critical reception to Michael Baxandall’s concept of the Period Eye, which he articulated in his 1972 book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth‐Century Italy secondly, the piece examines various aspects of the intellectual history of the concept through consideration of some of Baxandall’s sources and comparisons with other art‐historical works which test similar methodological terrain, such as Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism and the ‘Beholder's Share’ section of Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye
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