Just recently I spent an evening reading Michael Baxandall's seminal book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy, a truly fascinating book about social, material, and stylistic conditions that comprised the rapport between patrons, artists, and paintings in the era. For instance, he looks at something like art criticism written by contemporary clients (recall that Vasari, "father of art history," was a sixteenth century man), and examines the uses of words used in evaluating different painters for different projects; similarly, he goes into detail about things like volumetrics and proportion, very important parts of the education and daily life of the moneyed class that would have comprised the patrons of all our great quattrocento masters.
But what's additionally laudable is the very subdued presentation of Baxandall's prose--he's a very dry wit, with a certain modesty about any generalized claims he makes (even as he ceaselessly heaps interesting facts into the reader's lap). And the conceptualization of the project is inspiring. To me this is a great example of a consideration of form, the history of style, and even a little aesthetic philosophy considered within both materialist and a historicist contexts--teasing out concrete origins and corrolaries of the social history in which our forms are forged.
I know that I must have read Baxandall in college--very likely his work on Tilman Riemenschneider (example below)--but I can't remember for sure ...
For some recent words by a fellow film blogger on the same era (but not Italy), go here.
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