A book that changed me: Charles Saumarez Smith
Michael Baxandall's 'Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy'
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Your support makes all the difference.When did you first read it? Scanning my bookshelves, which I sometimes feel represent the graveyard of a previous life, I can find plenty of books which have in one way or another deeply influenced my views of history and of art, but only this one qualifies in the literal sense as having changed my life. I must have read it in my first year of reading history of art.
Why did it strike you so much? It's short, quite dry and based on a series of undergraduate lectures which Baxandall gave to history students when he was a lecturer. It is impossible now to appreciate what a revolution it represented in the study of history - away from tracing the development of broad styles in art and reconstructing the work of individual artists, to a willingness to treat paintings as evidence (in a non-Marxist way) of much larger issues in economic and social life. He is especially attentive to the ways in which contemporaries thought about and described their art, relating it to other aspects of their lives such as theology, dance and mathematics.
Have you re-read it? I read it again recently and was impressed by how well it has survived and the extent to which it is still able to provoke fresh thought about the activity of painting. I particularly admire the way in which it pays almost no attention to modern writers on painting. As to the way that it has influenced my life, it was one of the reasons (the other was Ernst Gombrich's book on Aby Warburg) why I applied to do postgraduate research at the Warburg Institute, where Baxandall taught. He supervised my PhD thesis on Castle Howard, slightly unwillingly because 18th-century architectural history was outside his academic field, but I would like to think to its benefit by his tacit encouragement to break away from the standard conventions of architectural history and his tolerance of the length of time which such research requires.
Do you recommend it or is it a private passion? Yes, I'd recommend it. I still regard him as one of the great and slightly under-recognised heroes of British academic life and his book as a model of succinct intellectual analysis.
! Charles Saumarez Smith is the Director of the National Portrait Gallery. His book 'The Building of Castle Howard' has recently been published by Pimlico at pounds 15
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