Майкл Баксандалл: Жизнь и творчество британского искусствоведа

British art historian

Michael David Kighley Baxandall, FBA (18 August 1933 – 12 August 2008) was a British art historian and a professor emeritus of Art History at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and worked as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His book Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy was profoundly influential in the social history of art, and is (2018) widely used as a textbook in college courses.

Baxandall was born in Cardiff, the only son of David Baxandall, a curator who was at one time director of the National Gallery of Scotland. He went to Manchester Grammar School and studied English at Downing College, Cambridge, where he was taught by F. R. Leavis. In 1955 he departed for the Continent. He spent a year at Pavia University (1955–56), then taught at an international school in St. Gallen in Switzerland (1956–57), and finally went to Munich to hear the art historian Hans Sedlmayr and where he worked with Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich on the court of Urbino at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. On his return to London in 1958 he began a long association with the Warburg Institute, initially working in the photographic collection, where he met Kay Simon, whom he married in 1963. From 1959 to 1961 he was a junior fellow, working on his never completed PhD, Restraint in Renaissance behaviour, under Ernst Gombrich. From 1961, he was Assistant Keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, returning to the Warburg Institute in 1965 as lecturer in Renaissance Studies. He was appointed to a chair by the University of London in 1981, but increasingly spent his time in the United States. He was A. D. White Professor at Large at Cornell University and became a half time Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1987. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1991. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford for 1974–75.

Baxandall died in London from pneumonia associated with Parkinson's Disease. His concept of the period eye has continued to gain in importance since his death.

Michael Baxandall, Vision and the Work of Words, ed. by Peter Mack & Robert Williams, Farnham, 2015