The Reformation of the Image (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- The Reformation of the Image
Most art-historical writing is framed either as interpretation, in search of meanings, or as explanation, in search of causes and conditions. The choice can be a temperamental one or it can follow from the material or issue in hand. Koerner's strong book on Lutheran reform of images is remarkable for using the interpretive mood for a case that might seem to invite explanation. And the outcome is resonant. In particular, he relates two grand developments to the Lutheran insistence on the word (which appears programmatically in the form of actual writing within pictures, on exegetical scrolls and such). One development is removal from post-Reformation art of much of the earlier visual image's potentiality for unparaphrasable meaning—almost a pictorial dissociation of sensibility. The other development is the emergence of interpretive art history itself. The status of these relationships is unresolved but this does not really matter: the implications are good to think about.
Michael Baxandall is emeritus professor of art history at the University of California, Berkeley, and emeritus professor of the history of the classical tradition at the Warburg Institute, University of London. His book The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany received the Mitchell Prize for the History of Art. His other books include Words for Pictures, Patterns of Intention, Shadows and Enlightenment, Giotto and the Orators, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence, and Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy.
