This highly acclaimed volume examines the one firm bridge between the art of the humanists and the painters of the early Italian Renaissance: what Petrarch and other humanists wrote about painting. Baxandall surveys the main themes of their art criticism and describes how their language conditioned their insights into painting.

The Italian Renaissance was a creative period for art criticism as well as for art itself. The early efforts to give verbal accounts of visual representations and their quality throw light not only on art during the Renaissance but also on art criticism at any time. This collection of papers by the art historian and critic Michael Baxandall represents his thinking over the past forty years on the relation between language and art. He offers seven thought-provoking pieces, three of which are new and written specifically for this book. While Baxandall focuses on works of the fifteenth century,...

Baxandalls Blick auf die bekanntesten Fresken und Gemälde der italienischen Frührenaissance in ihrem sozialgeschichtlichen Spannungsfeld. Ein Standardwerk der Kunstgeschichte jetzt endlich wieder im Taschenbuch!