Shadows and Enlightenment, and: Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France, and: Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (review)

Three recent monographs by Michael Baxandall, Thomas Crow, and Alex Potts, all published by Yale University Press, share in common an unexpected format in the organization of material and a specialized focus on specific issues and problems in eighteenth-century art and culture. These contributions demonstrate the exciting diversity of methodological and intellectual approaches that characterize recent art historical studies of the eighteenth century.

One of the most important contributions of Michael Baxandall’s sharply focused and fascinating meditations on the nature and qualities of shadows in Shadows and Enlightenment is to redirect our attention to the phenomenon of shadow in visual experience, in scientific and aesthetic theory, and in art. The book consists of five meditative essays in which Baxandall interweaves and juxtaposes discussions of theory and belief about the nature and perception of shadows from twentieth-century cognitive science and eighteenth-century scientific theory and practice, with extraordinary scrutiny of a handful of eighteenth-century pictures and descriptions of his personal experiences of attending to and contemplating shadows. An appendix on Leonardo da Vinci and early Renaissance shadow theory should be read first since, as Baxandall points out throughout the text, so much of the substance of eighteenth-century discussions was influenced by Leonardo’s analyses of light and shadow in his Treatise on Painting.

Although Baxandall devotes a portion of the book to twentieth-century cognitive research on shadow perception, including contributions of computer technology, most of which is fascinating and highly technical; he is truly in his element when discussing eighteenth-century discourses and practice. Baxandall cannily revives the eighteenth-century philosophical and scientific debates (in which Locke played a paramount role) on the function of shadow in the perception and interpretation of three-dimensional objects, particularly those debates that intensified in France from the 1740s to the 1760s, and that are paralleled in art theory and doctrine found in manuals and treatises on art and perspective of the same period. He does so by posing some of the same questions that fascinated the philosophes and their artist friends about the nature of perception and the role of shadows in viewing and perceiving, a fascination that was epitomized by Condillac’s great example of the Pygmalionesque statue that comes to life in his influential Traité des sensations of 1754. Baxandall might well be describing himself when he characterizes the academic art critic and theorist, C.-N. Cochin, one of the major figures of his book, as an “obsessional observer of shadow” (this is borne out by the personal anecdotes of the author’s “shadow watching” that he intersperses throughout the text). Not only does Baxandall cite Cochin’s published lecture of 1753 on shadows, he also convincingly attributes to him a lengthy footnote on shadows found in C.-A. Jombert’s 1755 Méthode pour apprendre le dessein (Jombert and Cochin were close friends). Baxandall explores at some length many of Cochin’s principal preoccupations in this footnote (which is nothing less than a summary treatise on shadows), including the “relative darkness or intensity of differently situated shadows,” the “colour both of shadow and in shadow,” “internal variation or structure of shadows,” the “subject of visual phenomena deriving from diffraction of light,” “necessary or permissible adjustments of natural shadow in painting.”

The main players of the eighteenth-century “Rococo-Empiricist shadow watchers” identified by Baxandall include Cochin, Jombert, Diderot, Condillac, Buffon, Montesquieu, Formey (who wrote the entry “Ombre” in the Encyclopédie) and Lambert. Two of the principal artists he singles out for special attention as shadow watchers and makers are Oudry and Chardin. Baxandall’s artful analysis of the various types of shadow and reflected, refracted, and diffracted light in Oudry’s Hare, Sheldrake, Bottles, Bread...