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Aspects of the Critical Reception and Intellectual History of Baxandall’s Concept of the Period Eye
Author(s) -
Langdale Allan
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8365.00126
Subject(s) - period (music) , intellectual history , painting , marxist philosophy , history of art , fifteenth , architecture , art history , popularity , art , contemporary art , visual arts , visual culture , aesthetics , history , politics , performance art , classics , psychology , law , political science , economic history , social psychology
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 . 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. 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 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.