Analysis of Baxandall’s “Painting and Experience in Fifteen Century Italy”

Analysis of Baxandall’s “Painting and Experience in Fifteen Century Italy”
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Analysis of Baxandall’s “Painting and Experience in Fifteen Century Italy”
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy by Baxandall provides a keen overview of Italian painting art in the Renaissance and its connection to social history. The book’s new edition has a remarkable impact on the global institutes of social and art studies. It is considered an essential means to realistically understand the social life and the artists’ agency in producing the paintings under particular circumstances defined by patrons and painters' roles. It is a persuasive demonstration of the argument with delicate pieces of evidence. The book has a few limitations, but Baxandall’s argument of providing an interconnection between life and art, with the reference of 15th-century Italian paintings, is a valuable asset for social scientists, historians, and art lovers.
Baxandall argues that the Italian paintings in the 15th century and social history are intertwined, besides the era's circumstances facilitated to infuse different features in the artist’s style. This argument serves as the thesis statement. The scholar, utilizing the perpetual link between 15th-century Italian painting style and social history, demonstrates how the painter’s style in any civilization and time reveals the visual arts and daily life activities. For instance, the underlined age and society paintings reflect their daily life experiences and habits like dancing, religious campaigning, and household activities (Baxandall, 1972). Baxandall’s book involves many renowned painters like Stefano di Giovanni, Filippo Lippi, Luca Signorelli, and many others.
Baxandall provides sufficient evidence to prove his claim. Mainly, he validates his argument by the variety of orders to the painters’ skills over the resources they used in producing the artworks as revealed by the conditional contracts between clients and painters. The scholar mainly explores this factor in contrast with the other researches. Also, he supports his claim by referring to a few terms between patrons and painters, which exhibit the dominance of patrons’ choice over the materials. For example, he includes the 1485 contract held between Giovanni Tornabuoni and Ghirlandaio. The terms and conditions in the contract include the choice of background as ‘figures, buildings, castles, cities’ (Baxandall, 1972, p. 19)...