Baxandall M. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style

Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. — 183 p.This essay grew out of some lectures given in the history school or the University or London. The lectures were meant to show how the style of pictures is a proper material of social history. Social fact lead to the development of distinctive visual skills and habits: and these visual skills and habits become identifiable clements in the painter's style. With some complications the same argument underlies Ihis book. It is therefore addressed to people with a general historical ruriosity ahont the Renaissance rather than to people interested just in Renaissance painting, who might well find it insensitive and flighty by turns. This is not a way of saying I think it vacuous as art history.
The first chapter looks at the structure of the fifteenth-century picture trade — through contracts, letters and accounts — to find an economic basis for the cult of pictorial skill. The second chapter explains how the visual skills evolved in the daily life of a society become a determining part in the painter's style, and it finds examples of these vernacular visual skills uniting the pictures and the social, religious and commercial life of the time. This involves relating the style of painting to experience of such activities as preaching, dancing and gauging barrels. The third chapter assembles a basic fifteenth-century equipment for looking at fifteenth-century pictures: it examines and illustrates sixteen concepts used by the best lay critic of painting in the period, Cristoforo Landino, in his description of Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Andrea del Castagno and Fra Angelico.
The book ends by pointing out that social hislory and art history are continuous, each offering necessary insights into the other.