Shadows and Enlightenment

Rating:
Summary: not a lunar eclipse
Review: the review by Liddell is barking at the wrong satellite: the book on the shadow that he does recommend IS by an art historian as well--one who has profited from Baxandall's learned engagement with Renaissance art theory. Baxandall is one of the most important (and self-deprecatingly modest) figures in Renaissance art history, but Shadows and Enlightment is more of an hors d'oeuvre than a full-course banquet (or, to change metaphors, more of a 5-finger exercise than a sonata). Baxandall has long been concerned with the relationship between perception and representation. As a historian, he is sensitive to the dramatic changes that our ideas about perception and representation have undergone in the past 6 centuries, and he brings a great skill with ancient and modern languages to the interpretation of texts written by artists and amateurs (which might include philosophers) in the several periods covered by his expertise in art history. He is not attempting to write "bad physics" but to shed light on approaches to pictorial representation in an era (the 18th century) when the modern physics of light was about to be developed, and the modern depiction of luminous effects (i.e., Impressionism) was being prepared. Science and philosophy were far closer in the 18th century than they are today, so Baxandall's brief book concerns itself with ideas about perception as much as it deals with the science of optics, as they related to the practice of painting. This is art history. Liddell doen not know what s/he's talking about.

Rating:
Summary: Total Eclipse of the Moon
Review: Those readers who enjoyed Baxandall's excellent "Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy" wil be disappointed by this book. Whereas "Painting and Experience" successfully evoked the society of the time and illuminated its connection with the art produced, "Shadows and Enlightment" is a cold, drab, would-be technical book with lots of little diagrams, apparently showing that light moves in a straight line - golly!

Art historians often suffer from an inferiority complex about their subject because it seems so subjective and unscientific. It's almost as if they are aware that they are looking at the past in the reflected light of the Moon rather than in the clear, relatively objective sunshine of verifiable scientific truth. Baxandall clearly seems to have been beset by feelings like this and has reacted by writing what is in effect a very bad physics book.

But instead of the sunshine of truly scientific insights, all we get is a lunar eclipse. Art historians should stick to art history and that means using a little more imagination to delineate the shapes and truths in the twilight world in which they exist. Switching on a high-powered searchlight just dazzles and blinds.

For those interested in shadows as an aspect of art, I recommend Victor I. Stoichita's "A Short History of the Shadow" which ties in the phenomena of shadow in art to a rich spectrum of historical, social, religious, and cultural issues.

Rating:
Summary: Total Eclipse of the Moon
Review: Those readers who enjoyed Baxandall's excellent "Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy" wil be disappointed by this book. Whereas "Painting and Experience" successfully evoked the society of the time and illuminated its connection with the art produced, "Shadows and Enlightment" is a cold, drab, would-be technical book with lots of little diagrams, apparently showing that light moves in a straight line - golly!

Art historians often suffer from an inferiority complex about their subject because it seems so subjective and unscientific. It's almost as if they are aware that they are looking at the past in the reflected light of the Moon rather than in the clear, relatively objective sunshine of verifiable scientific truth. Baxandall clearly seems to have been beset by feelings like this and has reacted by writing what is in effect a very bad physics book.

But instead of the sunshine of truly scientific insights, all we get is a lunar eclipse. Art historians should stick to art history and that means using a little more imagination to delineate the shapes and truths in the twilight world in which they exist. Switching on a high-powered searchlight just dazzles and blinds.

For those interested in shadows as an aspect of art, I recommend Victor I. Stoichita's "A Short History of the Shadow" which ties in the phenomena of shadow in art to a rich spectrum of historical, social, religious, and cultural issues.