Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style

Rating:
Summary: terrible!!
Review: ... this book was tedious. there are very few books that make me say, "i'd rather be working!"
you have to have a really high tolerance for italian art, or even art in general. a passing interest simply will not allow for an enjoyable read.
...

Rating:
Summary: terrible!!
Review: I find it strange that many people find it strange that one might read a book like this one for fun. Twice in one day I had people approach me and ask me for what class I was reading this, as if there are books one reads only in school and books one reads in real life.

I did read this in real life, and I read it for three reasons: 1) I knew this is a highly regarded book in art criticism, 2) it deals with a period of art history about which I wanted to know more, and 3) it looked like it would be a fun read.

My primary reaction to the book upon reading it was: how did the author fit such a huge book into so few pages? There are books that cannot be measured by page count. PAINTING AND EXPERIENCE IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY contains 153 pages of text, with illustrations taking up around a third of those. Despite that, Baxandall is able to pack an amazing amount of information in a very small number of pages. Yet, as dense as this book is, it never becomes anything less than completely readable. It is a very fast read, and not merely because of the small number of pages. Baxandall's contention is that the visual experience of a Quattrocento person (or what he eventually comes to self-mockingly comes to call "a church-going business man, with a taste for dancing") is not one to which we any longer have conceptual access. He laments that we too often approach these paintings with our own conceptual categories in the forefront, and impose these upon the paintings, instead of judging them and perceiving them, as a contemporary would have. His goal in this slender volume is to attempt to reestablish some sense of the pictorial concepts with which a Quattrocento person approaches a painting. In this I believe he succeeds admirably. While visiting one of my local book superstores, I spent some time glancing through a number of books on Renaissance art, especially Hartt's well-known tome. I found that I was indeed responding differently to the paintings than I had before I read Baxandall. This is a book that capacitates its reader to enjoy a fuller participation in the appreciation of the visual world.

On a completely nonliterary note, I want to add that this is an extraordinarily attractive book. I am sure that no publisher ever decides to make an ugly, unpleasant book, but Oxford University Press with this one certainly managed to make a gorgeous one. The book is far more attractive than the price of the book would seem to support (good paper, pseudo-signature binding, high-quality four-color cover), which leads me to believe that this must get a great deal of adoption as a college text.

Rating:
Summary: A classic study of the vocabulary of Renaissance painting
Review: I find it strange that many people find it strange that one might read a book like this one for fun. Twice in one day I had people approach me and ask me for what class I was reading this, as if there are books one reads only in school and books one reads in real life.

I did read this in real life, and I read it for three reasons: 1) I knew this is a highly regarded book in art criticism, 2) it deals with a period of art history about which I wanted to know more, and 3) it looked like it would be a fun read.

My primary reaction to the book upon reading it was: how did the author fit such a huge book into so few pages? There are books that cannot be measured by page count. PAINTING AND EXPERIENCE IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY ITALY contains 153 pages of text, with illustrations taking up around a third of those. Despite that, Baxandall is able to pack an amazing amount of information in a very small number of pages. Yet, as dense as this book is, it never becomes anything less than completely readable. It is a very fast read, and not merely because of the small number of pages. Baxandall's contention is that the visual experience of a Quattrocento person (or what he eventually comes to self-mockingly comes to call "a church-going business man, with a taste for dancing") is not one to which we any longer have conceptual access. He laments that we too often approach these paintings with our own conceptual categories in the forefront, and impose these upon the paintings, instead of judging them and perceiving them, as a contemporary would have. His goal in this slender volume is to attempt to reestablish some sense of the pictorial concepts with which a Quattrocento person approaches a painting. In this I believe he succeeds admirably. While visiting one of my local book superstores, I spent some time glancing through a number of books on Renaissance art, especially Hartt's well-known tome. I found that I was indeed responding differently to the paintings than I had before I read Baxandall. This is a book that capacitates its reader to enjoy a fuller participation in the appreciation of the visual world.

On a completely nonliterary note, I want to add that this is an extraordinarily attractive book. I am sure that no publisher ever decides to make an ugly, unpleasant book, but Oxford University Press with this one certainly managed to make a gorgeous one. The book is far more attractive than the price of the book would seem to support (good paper, pseudo-signature binding, high-quality four-color cover), which leads me to believe that this must get a great deal of adoption as a college text.

Rating:
Summary: Not A good Read!!!
Review: This book is what I would call hard to read, unless of course you already have a masters degree in Florentine art. As a student in an art history class that required this as one of our reads, I can say this book is crap, yes I mean crap. I have read many more well written books covering this subject in an easier to read format. I would defiantly not recommend this overpriced piece of firewood.

Rating:
Summary: Splitting Attractive Hairs
Review: This is the kind of book that History of Art departments throw at you early on in their courses to instil the right respect and awe for the whole academic ritual. When I first saw this book I was duly impressed and intimidated into thinking this was somehow a classic. In this work Baxandall is the exemplary academic, slowly building up a case from painstaking research and cleverly interpreted trivia. This approach is fine and dandy until you reflect that at the end of it the conclusions Baxandall has laboured so hard to arrive at are perhaps a little banal -- i.e. Renaissance painting was influenced by such contemporary phenomenon as religious practices, dancing, and (oddly) the ability to judge quantities by eye. The reason this book works is that the Renaissance is such an attractive period that Baxandall's painstakingly dull technique receives a charming counterpoint in the endearing trivia of the period. Unfortunately this effect is not replicated in other works by Baxandall that I have looked at. To college students getting a dose of this, I would say, 'Enjoy the period, but think about how relevant this kind of hairsplitting really is.'