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Volume 4(2): 231–256
[DOI: 10.1177/1749975510368474]
Michael Baxandall and the Sociological
Interpretation of Art
■
Jeremy Tanner
University College London, UK
A B S T R AC T
Art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings have played a key role in defining the
major paradigms in the sociology of art: the production of culture perspective,
Bourdieu’s critical sociology of art, Hennion and DeNora’s ‘new sociology of art’.
Although making fruitful use of Baxandall’s focus on markets, material visual practices and the concept of the period eye, these appropriations have overlooked the
centrality to Baxandall’s work of the concept of art as an institution. This institutional focus permits Baxandall to integrate social, cultural and visual analysis in a
way which shows not only how visual art is socially constructed, but also how it
plays an active role in the construction of social orders on a variety of levels of
emergence, from the interaction order to larger social structures.
K E Y WO R D S
aesthetics / art history / Pierre Bourdieu / Michael Baxandall / cultural production
/ new sociology of art / sociology of culture
[T]he style of pictures is a proper material of social history. Social facts ... lead to
the development of distinctive skills and habits: and these visual skills and habits
become identifiable elements in the painter’s style … A fifteenth century painting is
the deposit of a social relationship. (Baxandall, 1972: x, 1)
There are a whole lot of things the book is not about and one of these is the sociology
of art … let me say now that when I am told the book is inadequate as a sociology of
art I shall be unmoved. (Baxandall, 1985a: viii)
231
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Introduction
The death of Michael Baxandall in 2008 certainly represented a significant loss
for the community of art historians. As a pupil of Ernst Gombrich, and a former student of the Warburg School, Baxandall was perhaps the last great
representative of the intellectual spirit represented by the Warburg tradition.
But Baxandall’s legacy is one which is of equal importance to the sociology
of art, and, at the close of an extraordinarily fruitful career, it is perhaps now
an appropriate moment to reflect on and assess the character of that legacy. No
art historian has exercised so much influence on the development of the sociology of art in the last 30 years as Baxandall. His interest in markets and patronage made him a natural point of reference for work in the production of culture
perspective, such as Howard Becker’s (1982) Art Worlds. His efforts to formulate a general theoretical model for the ‘historical explanation of pictures’ have
been a major influence on a number of attempts to construct systematic
methodologies in the sociology of culture, and indeed beyond, from Wendy
Griswold’s classic ‘A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture’
(1987a) to Richard Biernacki’s (2005) more recent attempt to formulate a problemsolving model of social action to replace the means-end model characteristic
of most work in historical sociology.1 Baxandall’s ‘period eye’ concept has
spawned notions of the ‘gendered eye’ and the ‘contextual eye’, among others,
informing sociological studies of literature (Griswold, 1987b), public art
(Babon, 2006) and interaction in art museums (Heath and Vom Lehn, 2004).
Painting and Experience impressed Pierre Bourdieu sufficiently to be the focus
of a special issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Bourdieu and
Desault, 1981a, 1981b) and Bourdieu returned to Baxandall in his last great
study in the sociology of art, The Rules of Art (1996). More recently, Antoine
Hennion has invoked Baxandall as a theoretical model, and guiding spirit, in
what has been called ‘the new sociology of art’, characterized by a focus on the
materiality of art works themselves and their specifically aesthetic properties
and effects (De La Fuente, 2007).
But behind this almost universal approval lie several major paradoxes. First,
as the quotations at the head of this article suggest, Baxandall himself manifests
a very high level of ambivalence about the social, and its place in the understanding of art. On the one hand we have the Durkheimian rhetoric of the
introductory statements in Painting and Experience; on the other, the almost
complete disavowal of sociological pretensions in Patterns of Intention. Second,
Baxandall’s work serves as a model for approaches to the sociology of art that
are, on the face of it, incompatible. Bourdieu (1996: 204–5), for example, explicitly takes issue with the work of Howard Becker and his followers in the production of culture paradigm. In turn, Hennion’s ‘art-sociology’ is openly
formulated as an attack on Bourdieu’s ‘critical’ sociology of art (Hennion, 1995;
Hennion and Grennier, 2001). Third, within the field of art history, Baxandall is
not regarded as a social historian of art at all, but rather as the founder of the
‘visual culture’ paradigm, which has facilitated the integration of art history into
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Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art Tanner
the larger field of cultural studies (Clunas, 2003; Jay, 2002: 271); not, one might
have thought, a path which the sociology of art would wish to follow.
This article seeks to assess the legacy of Michael Baxandall to the sociology
of art against this apparently contradictory background. The first part sketches
an outline of Baxandall’s main arguments in Painting and Experience. My intention, however, is not to offer an ‘orthodox’ account of the ‘real’ Michael Baxandall,
but rather to establish a base line against which to explore the radically divergent appropriations of Baxandall’s work made by different schools within the
sociology of art, and indeed art history. Reading Baxandall through these
refracting lenses brings out in a more analytically explicit manner certain strands
of theoretical argumentation which often remain implicit in Baxandall’s own
work, embedded in his detailed analysis of specific historical cases. Further, placing
each of these frameworks – in particular Bourdieu’s critical sociology and the
new sociology of art of Hennion and DeNora – in close comparison with
Baxandall’s studies illustrates certain respects in which his work, far from having been simply absorbed and superseded, still has lessons to offer us today. The
final section of the article draws on Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors of
Renaissance Germany (1980) – a work surprisingly overlooked by most sociologists of art – to argue that Baxandall develops an ‘institutional’ approach which
has the potential coherently to integrate dimensions of analysis currently split
across competing paradigms into a fully historical sociology of art.
Painting and Social Experience: Art and Society in the Work of
Michael Baxandall
In three brief chapters, Painting and Experience (1972) seeks to demonstrate
Baxandall’s claim that ‘the style of pictures is a proper material of social history’.
The first chapter, ‘Conditions of Trade’, shows how the social and economic
organization of artistic production, evidenced by contracts, is manifested in the
visual character of quattrocento art and painting. Some patrons chose to pay by
the foot, others according to the time spent by the painter, and the materials he
used; the character and quality of the paintings they received match their implicit
assumptions about the character of the work that painting entailed (1972: 1).
Different types of commission entailed different types of control, from the relatively direct control and detailed supervision manifested in the contracts between
painters and individual private clients – princes, priors, ordinary citizens – to the
rather incomplete lay control exercised on the employees of ‘large communal
enterprises’, sculptors like Donatello working on the Cathedral in Florence, under
the administrative control of the Wool Guild (1972: 5). Conspicuous material
consumption could be harmonized with the ostensibly religious motivations of
most commissions through the use of specific materials. For example, the importance of the Virgin Mary in a painting, and the donor’s piety, might be registered
through the use of costly ultramarine to give her cloak a striking blue immediately recognizable to contemporary viewers (1972: 11). Status distinction shaped
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the ways in which patrons chose to display their munificence, shifting from an
emphasis on pure materiality to one on skill. Carefully depicted landscapes
replaced gold as the preferred backdrop to figure paintings when members of the
established elite sought to distance themselves from the newly wealthy by adopting more cultivated, less flashy, modes of display, informed by humanist thought
and ascetic strands of contemporary religious culture (1972: 14–15). As Baxandall
emphasizes, these relationships, and the choices made by both patrons and
painters, all operated ‘within institutions and conventions’, which helped to
articulate the patron’s demands – for an altarpiece, frescoes for a family chapel,
a Madonna for the bedroom – and to formulate briefs for the artist in highly
routinized ways (1972: 1–3).
Looking at paintings was also ‘a fifteenth century Italian institution and
involved in the institution were certain expectations’ (1972: 33), not least that
the viewer be able to appreciate the character and level of the increasingly
highly valued skill manifested by an artist in a painting. The social and institutional character of viewing, and its impact on pictorial practice, is the focus of
Baxandall’s famous chapter on ‘The Period Eye’. Baxandall starts from the simple point that the kinds of cognitive skills with which viewers are endowed will
significantly inflect the ways they attend to a picture. A viewer ‘skilled in noting proportional relationships’ or ‘practised in reducing complex forms to compounds of simple forms’ may ‘order his experience’ of Domenico Veneziano’s
Annunciation ‘differently from people without those skills’, and perhaps to
greater effect than, for example, a contemporary German viewer, richly endowed
with very different sets of perceptual skills, for classifying the modulating width
of lines characteristic of the penmanship of the Modists, the writing teachers
who played such a significant role in 15th-century German education. ‘Much
of what we call “taste” lies in this, the conformity between discriminations
demanded by a painting and skills of discrimination possessed by the beholder’
(1972: 34).
A large part of the chapter is given over to identifying exactly which skills
informed the viewing and making of paintings and why. Particularly important
from a sociological point of view is Baxandall’s emphasis on the different social
factors which acted as a filter on the vast range of perceptual skills which could
potentially have been relevant to painting. They tend to be skills which have
been taught in a formal educational setting of one kind or another, and as such
are ‘skills which can be talked about’. Such skills are valued by those who have
learned them both for their practical value and as markers of their bearers’
social status; and, of course, they characterized the ‘patronizing classes’. Of
these skills, unlike skills absorbed early in childhood, their bearers are relatively
self-conscious and self-aware, making ‘such skills particularly susceptible to
transfer in situations such as that of a man in front of a picture’ (1972: 37–8).
Further, the skills selected are – or can be made – relevant to pictorial organization, and thus a means by which the painter can display skill and the viewer
appreciate it. Among the skills which Baxandall identifies as relevant are
those derived from gauging and from dancing. In a world before standardized
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Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art Tanner
containers, the flow of commerce was heavily dependent on the ability of
parties to a transaction swiftly and reliably to calculate the volumes contained
in particular containers. This they achieved through the skills they had acquired
in breaking down complex shapes into combinations of more simple geometrical forms, reliably estimating the ratios of their proportions, and on that basis
establishing the quantity of a material being offered for exchange. The same
skills were of use to painters in composing paintings, whether designing complex pictorial figures, or creating a coherent perspectival space, preserving the
proper ratios between the volumes of comparable bodies depicted at different
virtual depths in the pictorial field. The mathematics and geometry which
underpinned these skills were learned by both painters and commodity traders
in the secondary school or ‘abbaco’ (1972: 86–101).
Dance in Renaissance Italy was highly formalized. Like visual art, dance
was the subject of theoretical reflection and literary codification. Different
aspects of dance were categorized in terms of a vocabulary – aere, manieria,
misura – which was also relevant to painting. Treatises described the movements
of participants in dance as figure patterns which expressed the relationships
articulated between the dance partners, as ‘Jealousy’ or ‘Desire’ for instance.
This manner of conceptualizing and visualizing dance patterns offered a means
to painters seeking to depict the interrelationship between figures in a narrative
painting, in such a way that the tone of the interaction would be legible to viewers, even if they were unfamiliar with the specific narrative. Practical familiarity
with such figural patterns and their classification, whether as participants or
spectators at dances, offered a basis on which viewers could both comment on
and bodily feel themselves into such depicted interactions (1972: 77–81).
The transfer of these cultural schemes from their primary institutional settings into the institution of art was facilitated by the shared social and educational culture of artists and patrons, and also by the relatively low level of
differentiation, and high degree of interpenetration, between such institutional
domains as painting and commodity trading. The painter Piero della Francesca,
for example, was also the author of a treatise, De Abaco, in which the same
analytical skills which he might use in composing paintings structured in terms
of appropriately proportioned volumes were retailed to businessmen to help
them in their practice of gauging (1972: 87).
The activity of looking at pictures was also institutional in a second and
deeper sense. ‘Pictures existed to meet institutional ends’ and in Renaissance
Italy those ends were primarily religious (1972: 40–43). An established tradition
of ecclesiastical theory defined the ends of painting as the instruction of the people; making the story of the incarnation and the examples of the saints’ lives
active in believers’ memories, through daily encounters; and, as expressed in one
standard contemporary tract, ‘to excite feelings of devotion, these being aroused
more effectively by things seen than by things heard’ (1972: 41). Painters were
thus understood to be ‘professional visualizers’ of the stories of the Bible and the
saints, and both painters and viewers were rehearsed in the appropriate emotional categorization of particular stories by sermons, which instructed their
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hearers in the appropriate ‘sensations of piety’ for specific stories: humility and
joy in the Nativity, benignity and maternity for the Visitation. Viewers’ responsiveness was further shaped and intensified by what Baxandall calls ‘an active
institution of interior visualization’ (1972: 45). The ‘Garden of Prayer’, a devotional tract for young girls, encourages its readers to prepare themselves for
prayer by trying to visualize the story of the Passion: their own city can serve as
a model for Jerusalem, and places they know within it for the room where the
Last Supper was held, or the palace of Pilate. Similarly, they should people this
setting with the dramatis personae of the biblical narrative, each visualized after
personal acquaintances. With their mind well stocked with images, readers of
‘The Garden’ might retire to their bedroom and start meditating on the Passion,
‘starting with how Jesus entered Jerusalem on the ass. Moving slowly from
episode to episode, meditate on each one, dwelling on each single stage and step
of the story. And if at any point you feel a sensation of piety, stop: do not pass
on as long as that sweet and devout sentiment lasts.’ Such devotional practices
reciprocally informed the viewing of paintings, allowing the viewer to fill in
sometimes sketchy and generalized depictions of place and people offered by
painters with concrete images drawn from the viewer’s own life (1972: 46–8).
Viewing, it follows, was not a simple decoding of a meaning intrinsic to a
painting – the iconographic approach which is repeatedly the object of
Baxandall’s criticism. Nor were the visual features of paintings the expression
of class ideologies, as ‘facile equations between “burgess” or “aristocratic”
milieux on the one side and “realist” or “idealizing” styles on the other’ might
suggest (1972: 152 – a dig at the social histories of art of Frederik Antal and
Arnold Hauser, of course). Rather, paintings offered viewers visual affordances
which geared with the sets of practical dispositions, described by Baxandall,
with which Renaissance viewers were endowed. The interaction between viewing practices and pictorial affordances permitted viewers to generate and reinforce the sentiments and attachments which informed the many areas of social
life which religion (and religious art) penetrated.
As my brief summary suggests, Baxandall’s Painting and Experience is
about as sociological as one might wish. Particularly striking, in addition to his
concern for social practice, is the emphasis on the concept of ‘institution’,
among his key concepts probably second in frequency of use only to ‘style’. We
turn now to look at how far, and in what ways, Baxandall’s framework for
articulating the relationship between art and its social contexts has been appropriated in subsequent scholarship.
Not the Social History of Art: Michael Baxandall and
Visual Culture
Against the background of the role played by concepts of ‘institution’ and ‘social
practice’ in his work, it may come as something of a surprise to sociologists to
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Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art Tanner
discover that, as far as art historians are concerned, Baxandall is not particularly
closely associated with the social history of art (Clunas, 2003). Painting and
Experience was not well received by social historians of art – mainly Marxists
of one shade or another – who complained that it ignored issues of class, ideology and power (Langdale, 1999: 28–31). T. J. Clark, for example, dismissed
Baxandall’s use of the category of ‘experience’ as ‘the code word for a kind of
art history which feels the need to refer to those historical realities with which
artist and patron are constantly in contact, but which dares not name those
structures which mediate and determine the nature of that contact – ideology,
class, the conflict between classes, the contradictions within any ideological view
of the world’ (Clark, 1976, quoted in Langdale, 1999: 29).
Instead, art historians normally place Baxandall within what has come to
be known as the ‘visual culture’ paradigm. Baxandall used the term in Limewood
Sculptors (1980: 145), and it was taken up by Svetlana Alpers to describe her
own account of the visual practices – cartography, optical science and so on –
which informed 17th-century Dutch painting (Alpers, 1983). The term resonated well with the ‘cultural turn’ which informed the humanities, like the
social sciences, in the 1980s and 1990s (Sewell, 2005: 22–80), and has crystallized as a major paradigm in contemporary art history. The visual culture
approach defines itself very much against the social history of art (Clunas, 2003),
and differs from it in two key respects. First, its remit includes all visual images,
not just the canonical great works of art which have been the focus of the social
history of art. Second, the social, far from being a central analytical category,
increasingly becomes somewhat marginal, displaced by or dissolved into linguistic concepts and styles of analysis drawn from French post-structuralist
thought (Bryson et al., 1994; Jay, 2002). As John Tagg (1994: 96), once a rather
straightforwardly Marxist social historian of art, has put it in one of the key
visual culture manifestos: if the social exists, it is only as ‘a temporary and
unstable domination of the field of discursivity’ – the social is culture and culture
is language or language-like all the way down.
Within recent art history, Baxandall’s work has been read through this poststructuralist lens. Such a reading emphasizes that from his earliest studies Baxandall
was interested above all in the relationship between language and the visual. His
first book, Giotto and the Orators (1971), for example, had looked at the humanist invention of art criticism in early Renaissance Italy, drawing on the models
derived from ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric, and it explored how such critical
discourse informed contemporary artistic practice. Baxandall, we are told, ‘has
been as sensitive as Derrida to the incapacity of language to make contact with its
referent’ (Holly, 1999: 6). This sensitivity is particularly manifest in later contributions like Patterns of Intention, where Baxandall argues that art history does not
explain pictures as such but ‘remarks about pictures’, which are ‘representations of
[the art historian’s] thought about having seen pictures’ (1985a: 1). Even if he does
not mention them, Adrian Rifkin argues (1999: 1–2), Baxandall should be seen as
belonging to the same ‘period discursivity’ as Derrida and Foucault.
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Michael Baxandall and the Production of Culture
Sociological readings of Baxandall have, of course, had a radically different
character. But the range of different positions his approach has been drawn
upon to articulate indicates something of the richness, or arguably the ambiguity, of his analytical framework. It is perhaps unsurprising that both of
Baxandall’s major empirical case studies, Painting and Experience and The
Limewood Sculptors, should have loaned themselves so well to the intellectual
project of the production of culture perspective. But Baxandall is more a source
of examples than a theoretical influence, and in certain respects the production
of culture reading of Baxandall as a model for the sociology of art is rather thin.
In Art Worlds (1982), Howard Becker repeatedly draws on Baxandall’s work to
illustrate his thesis that art is not the special creation of individual geniuses, but
the mundane product of networks of cooperation. A contract between
Ghirlandaio and a client, specifying the quality of ultramarine pigment at four
florins per ounce (Baxandall, 1972: 6), Becker comments (1982: 15), ‘resembles
the contract one might make with a builder, specifying the quality of steel and
concrete to be used’. Baxandall also provides Becker with material to articulate
his ideas about the role of ‘conventions’ in mediating the interactions between
participants in art worlds, and in marking their boundaries: the place of geometry in Renaissance painting, for example, or the painters’ and viewers’ knowledge of the emotional significance of the different phases of the Annunciation,
mediated through priests’ sermons (Becker, 1982: 46–50).
Notwithstanding the use they make of these aspects of Baxandall’s work,
authors from within the production of culture perspective consistently criticize his approach because ‘the art works under consideration remain central’,
rather than the ‘social context’, which is held to be the proper object of analysis for sociologists (Zolberg, 1990: 55). Victoria Alexander, in her recent
textbook, offers Baxandall as an exemplar of the quintessentially art historical
‘formalist’ approach (2003: 252–5, 273–7), using Baxandall’s account of the
period eye as an example. The kind of formal analysis entailed in the reconstruction of the period eye may, Alexander suggests, ‘allow us more fully to
appreciate’ the paintings or sculptures of a particular period, but in focussing
on works, rather than examining ‘people, the ultimate meaning makers,
directly’, it lacks the methodological rigour and explanatory value characteristic of more properly sociological studies (2003: 252, 274).2 Such a reading
of Baxandall is by no means entirely without basis. Even in Painting and
Experience, he oscillates between a more thoroughgoing sociological conception of art as a social fact and a weaker one, in which the social functions as
a background or context whereby ‘noticing bits of social practice or convention ... may sharpen our perception of pictures’ (1972: 151), not a very structural conception of the social to say the least. This tendency to disengage from
any systematic concern with the social structuring of art becomes particularly
marked in Patterns of Intention, perhaps in part as a response to the criticisms
of social historians of art.
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In the first chapter of Patterns of Intention (1985a), Baxandall describes
the ‘heterogeneous circumstances’ which informed the ‘brief’ for the design of
the Forth Rail Bridge by Benjamin Baker – from the Tay Bridge disaster, to sidewinds, the tensile strength of Siemens open hearth steel, the demands of the railway companies, and the Victorian money markets. Where the bridge-builder’s
role is clear – ‘span!’ – that of the painter is less well-defined, and Baxandall initially stipulates the rather general notion of making ‘marks on a surface in such
a way that their visual interest is directed towards an end’ (1985a: 43). Baxandall
recognizes that exactly how ‘visual interest is directed towards an end’ may
vary, according to the social and cultural setting – invoking the kind of religious
art he had discussed in Painting and Experience as an instance (1985a: 43–4).
But he chooses to formulate the relationship between painters and their larger
environment in terms of ‘troc’, ‘a barter primarily of mental goods’ in a ‘market’
(1985a: 47–9). The ‘more structured models’, offered by the social history of
art and sociology – or as Baxandall puts it, ‘offered by various versions of
Ideology’ (1985a: viii) – offer nothing to his project. If one is addressing ‘pictures’, not ‘social history’, and if one is ‘doing inferential criticism from other
than economic determinist convictions’, there is little ‘critical yield’ to be derived
from exploring the broader social contexts of production of, say, Picasso’s
Portrait of Kahnweiler or Braque’s The Portuguese, whether the ‘class social
differences between Picasso and Braque’, the institutional isomorphisms
between art galleries and other retail organizations in early 20th-century Paris,
‘or the socio-economic base of Gertrude Stein’ (1985a: 57).
So much for sociology. But as I have already implied in my earlier summary, Painting and Experience offers good grounds for challenging the ‘art and
society’ polarity which Baxandall reverts to in this later work – a polarity
shared, from the other side of the fence as it were, by reductionist critical sociologies of art, like the production of culture perspective, which seek to replace
the aesthetic by the social (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 341–4). As we shall
see in some detail below, Baxandall’s early work has been a major source in
challenging this dualism in recent sociologies of art influenced by the sociology
of science and actor network theory (ANT).
From Painting and Experience to the Theory of Practice:
Bourdieu on Baxandall
The work of Pierre Bourdieu evinces a more profound dialogue with Baxandall
than studies in the production of culture perspective. Where Becker drew inspiration primarily from chapter 1 of Painting and Experience (‘Conditions of
Trade’), for Bourdieu it was the third chapter, ‘The Period Eye’, which became
the object of sustained theoretical reflection. Bourdieu was already well read
in the history of art when he came across Baxandall. In particular a close engagement with the classic studies of Erwin Panofsky in iconography and iconology
were of fundamental importance to the development of Bourdieu’s sociology of
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art and indeed his social theory more generally (Tanner, 2003: 20–21). Panofsky’s
account of the iconographic methodology for decoding the meaning of works
of art formed a crucial starting point for the development of Bourdieu’s account
of the ways in which knowledge of artistic codes could function as a form of
cultural capital, offering privileged social groups an emblem of cultural distinction and a tool in strategies of class reproduction (Bourdieu, 1968). Still more
significantly, the concept of habitus, which plays a central role in Bourdieu’s
attempt to transcend the intentionalism of action theories and the objectivism
of structuralisms, was taken from Panofsky’s classic Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism, where it described the intellectual habit, inculcated in schools,
which shaped practices from philosophical argumentation and musical notation
systems to the design of Gothic vaulting (Bourdieu, 1967; Panofsky, 1951).
Against this background, reading Baxandall represented something of an
epiphany for Bourdieu. With Yves Deslaut he translated the ‘Period Eye’
chapter of Painting and Experience for a special issue of Actes de la
Recherche en Sciences Sociales on the social history and sociology of art, prefaced with a substantial commentary (Bourdieu and Deslaut, 1981). The ongoing importance of Baxandall’s model to Bourdieu is well indicated by the fact
that he included a slightly revised version of this essay as one of the chapters of his major study in the sociology of art, The Rules of Art (1996: 313–
21). Bourdieu saw Baxandall’s perspective as a means by which he might
exorcize the ‘traces of intellectualism’ characteristic of his theory of practice
as it stood in the late 1970s, partly shaped by Panofsky’s ideas (1996: 313–
14). Baxandall’s study demonstrated to Bourdieu that engagement with art
entailed not the kind of self-conscious decoding described by Panofsky, but a
‘practical sense’ according to which social experience and social action were
largely mediated through a body trained in ‘the system of schemas of perception and appreciation, of judgement and pleasure, which were acquired
through the practices of daily life’, listening to sermons, gauging bolts of cloth
or sacks of grain, participating in dances (1996: 318). The work of art operates not so much through encoding ideas which the informed viewer can
decode as through its ‘power to call up experiences buried in the folds of the
body’ (1996: 320). Bourdieu draws particular attention to the devastating
implications of Baxandall’s work for traditional conceptions of art as a
kind of embodiment of Weltanschauung, implicit in Panofsky’s iconological
methodology and characteristic of hermeneutic approaches in the humanities
more widely. But the implications of Baxandall’s work went deeper than
the history and sociology of art. Painting and Experience, Bourdieu argued,
offered an exemplary instance of the reconstruction of the ‘specific logic of
practical sense, of which aesthetic sense is a particular case’ (1996: 315).
Bourdieu had been exploring this logic of ‘sensory knowledge’ since his early
studies of Kabyle society. Such sensory knowledge, he argues, is mediated
through embodied practical schemas which involve no detour through conscious
conceptual thought, as they are invested directly by actors in the material world
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Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art Tanner
of objects. Due to the intellectualist blinkers of traditional social theory and
contemporary semiology, Bourdieu felt he had been unable fully to transpose
these insights gained from his Kabyle studies into the context of the cultural
production of a complex capitalist society until he encountered the work of
Baxandall (1996: 314–15).
Bourdieu offers a succinct and generally very acute account of many of
Baxandall’s key ideas. He draws particular attention to the ways in which what we
might think of as being radically discrepant dimensions of pictorial perception
– the privileging of Mary as the mother of Christ and recognition of the varying cost of different qualities of ultramarine blue pigment – ‘are intimately
linked in the unity of a habitus’ in which the religious dispositions of the
churchgoer ‘are completely merged with the dispositions of a businessman
accustomed to the immediate calculation of quantities and prices’ (1996: 319).
But even in summarizing Baxandall’s account of quattrocento painting,
Bourdieu transforms it within the reductionist logic of his own conceptual
scheme.3 ‘To love a painting’, for an Italian Renaissance viewer, Bourdieu
argues (1996: 319–20; emphases in original), ‘is to find a dividend there, to
recover an outlay, getting something for one’s money, in the form of the richest
colours, the most obviously costly … pictorial technique’. There is also a ‘supplementary satisfaction’ in the artwork, ‘finding oneself in it entirely, recognizing oneself, finding in the painting one’s world and one’s relationship with the
world’. Aesthetic pleasure, in short, is a kind of social narcissism, an ‘illusion’
produced by the free play of the habitus, temporarily disengaged from the real
social world. The kinds of practical schemas which have their real roots, and
afford their real profits, in more fundamental institutional fields freewheel in a
kind of magical but socially meaningless harmony, incited by the objectified
forms of the artwork perfectly adapted to the formal logic of those schemas.
Aesthetic pleasure is an epiphenomenon of social structure, rather than constitutive of it; it leaves the world as it is.
This is a drastically reduced account of the concepts of an institution of art
and of aesthetic pleasure found in Baxandall, collapsing the institutional embedding of quattrocento art in the religious field into rather narrowly material interests of key patronizing classes. More specifically it ignores the refraction of the
social interests of patrons and viewers through the religious institutions in which
Renaissance art patronage and consumption were embedded, and in particular
‘the active institution of interior visualization’ through which the aesthetic forms
of art works exercised their specific material agency, acting as affordances in the
creation of the affect proper to devotional viewing (Baxandall, 1972: 40–48). It
is precisely this value-added character of the aesthetic mediation of social practices, the material agency of art in constituting social order rather than merely
reproducing it, that has been the focus of some of the most stimulating work in
the ‘new sociology of art’. Once again it is Baxandall, read very differently than
by Bourdieu, who has provided a key point of reference in formulating the new
paradigm.
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Michael Baxandall and Aesthetic Agency: Constructing the
‘New Sociology of Art’
The most recent turn in the sociology of art, christened ‘the new sociology of
art’ by Eduardo De La Fuente (2007), has defined itself very much in opposition to Bourdieu’s critical sociology of art. This new direction of research
focusses less on the social background and determinations of art works and aesthetic practices and more on the specifically aesthetic constitutive work which
such objects and practices perform when contextualized in artistic and other
social fields. Baxandall’s Painting and Experience has offered an important
model in the development of this new approach, as indicated by one of its foremost advocates, Antoine Hennion. Hennion (1995, 2007) sees Baxandall’s
work as representing the culmination of a trend within the social history of art
initiated by Wackernagel (1981 [1938]) and continued most notably in the
work of Francis Haskell (Haskell, 1980 [1965]; Haskell and Penny, 1981).
Hennion argues that this approach is based on a double refusal. First, it refuses
the opposition between internalist history of art (focussing on the autonomous
evolution of style) and externalist history of art (focussing on patronage and the
art market as a kind of background to the history of style – an approach very
close to what was to be developed as the production of culture perspective in
sociology). Second, it refuses the dualistic conception of ‘art and society’.4
Instead, it investigates all the ‘intermediaries’ between the work of art and the
broader context subsumed under the concept ‘society’: patrons, collectors, dealers, critics, guilds, studios, artistic techniques and technologies, ‘the heterogeneous, partial and encased assemblage of humans, relationships, associations
and institutions’ (Hennion, 1995: 242).
By drawing on this tradition, Baxandall was able, Hennion argues, to
replace the grand but largely intuitive parallelisms drawn between artistic forms
and cultural mentalities (exemplified by Dvorak’s art history as the history of
ideas, or Panofsky’s classic iconological study of perspective), or between style and
social structure (exemplified by the work of Arnold Hauser and Frederick
Antal), with a micro-sociology of cultural practices. In particular he is able to
analyse how practices grounded in radically ‘heterogeneous’ social orders
inform the visual dispositions which viewers bring to works of art, and how,
reciprocally, such dispositions are ‘translated’ into artistic styles (Hennion,
1995: 247–8). Baxandall’s approach, Hennion suggests, is in many respects the
antithesis of Bourdieu’s critical sociology, in which art, the artist and the artlover are merely passive intermediaries for larger social determinations
which have their raison d’etre elsewhere. The mediations brought to light by
Baxandall’s analysis reveal the ‘moment of the work of art in its … performative character’ (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 346). That is to say, the art work
is not merely the end product of a series of causal determinations but itself has
an active character, ‘coproducing’ aesthetic pleasure and the formation of specific
sensibilities in cooperation with the interpretive practices of viewers and listeners.
The focus of analysis is on precisely these mediatory devices and practices by
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means of which aesthetic logics (material properties of visual or musical style
for example) are transposed into logics characteristic of other forms of social
order and vice versa (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 350). In place of the ‘stable
and necessary relationship between self-enclosed works’ and pre-existing social
orders characteristic of critical sociologies of art, Hennion calls for an ‘ethnography’ of practices of taste, in which ‘objects, subjects and social groupings …
are coproduced’ as ‘conjunctural and hence changing’ socio-cultural formations
(Gomart and Hennion, 1999; Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 350–51). Aesthetic
taste, and the pleasure entailed in appreciating a work of art, is not the byproduct of an extrinsic social determination but the result ‘of a corporeal
practice, collective and instrumented’, through which the distinctive properties
of repertoires of objects, from wine to oil-paintings, are made intensely present
to ‘sensibilities … train[ed] to perceive them’ (Hennion, 2007: 98, 108), exactly
the kinds of practice exemplified by Baxandall’s ‘period eye’ concept.
In the work of Hennion and DeNora, this approach derived from
Baxandall’s social history of art is elaborated and given in certain respects a
more sharply sociological focus by drawing on theoretical perspectives derived
from ethnomethodology and the sociology of science, in particular the actor
network theory associated with Bruno Latour.5 DeNora’s recent work in musicsociology (not sociology of music), alongside that of Hennion and his colleagues, represents the most sustained exemplification of how this research
programme works in practice.6 Rather than locating meaning in the object
itself, as semiotic analysis has done, DeNora places the emphasis on the formal
properties of music becoming effective through processes of interaction by
means of which the social is ‘inscribed’ into music and reciprocally music
becomes an active agent in the ordering of social life, not merely a social product as the production of culture perspective would have it (Acord and DeNora,
2008; DeNora, 2000). Eschewing broad parallelisms between musical structures and social structures (‘reflection theories’), DeNora analyses in minute
ethnographic detail how the musical ‘affordances’ of specific pieces are flexibly
interpreted and put to work in different everyday-life contexts. DeNora
describes how in a women’s clothing shop, the music of Enya, ‘slow paced and
somewhat languorous’, quite literally ‘recalibrates’ the embodied subjectivity of
shoppers, ‘seen to lengthen their necks and move in an almost balletic style’,
tuning shoppers into the image of ‘hegemonic femininity’ that can be realized
by purchasing the styles of clothing this particular store sells (2005: 154–6).
Music acts on and shapes social actors and their sensibilities, but that shaping
is also in part the deliberate reflexive accomplishment of those actors, who
‘prime themselves’ to be affected by the music through their configuration of
the ‘listening situation’, and the specific practices through which they engage
the music (Acord and DeNora, 2008: 234; DeNora, 2005: 151–3). Back at the
flat, curtains drawn, low lights and scented candles may facilitate the inscription of the same music into a different, though not unrelated, social scenario: a
girl configures an evening with her partner as a time for slowing down at the
end of a hectic day, soft, sensual and romantic; or a boy ‘enrols’ Enya as an
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‘ally’ (in the ANT vocabulary), ‘chick music’, to progress a relationship towards
his desired goal by musically configuring the space to afford seduction (cf.
DeNora, 2000, especially 43–5, 50, 113).
A number of the most innovative moves which DeNora makes in musicsociology are, perhaps unsurprisingly, anticipated for the sociology of visual art
in Baxandall’s studies of Renaissance painting and sculpture. We can see this most
clearly in Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980).
The opening chapters of this study follow a familiar theoretical trail: the character of limewood; the institutional functions performed by limewood sculptures
in the context of the church and its liturgies; the ways in which guild organization
regulated craft production, and how the material interests entailed by such a
structuring of the market were registered in the specific character of altarpieces;
the period eye of the patronizing classes in 15th-century German cities, shaped
by an education in extraordinarily elaborate systems of handwriting, taught by
the so-called Modists, systems which inculcated a heightened sensitivity to line,
its varying breadth and turnings, the character of its edges, the possibilities of
flourishes. The last chapter, with the title ‘Individuals’ and subheadings simply
listing the names of four great limewood sculptors, does not look like obviously
promising territory for sociologists. But it draws together the results of the earlier chapters in an analysis of a selection of major sculptures which demonstrates the same intimate commingling of the social and the artistic which is at
the core of the new sociology of art.
Particularly striking, in this chapter, are Baxandall’s accounts of the coproduction of forms of subjectivity through the mutual entwinement of the specific
artistic forms of sculptures and the constitutive interpretive practices of viewers
in the larger institutional context of devotional viewing. It was this institutional
context, with the ‘urgent and complicated kinds of expectation and desire’
(1980: 153) which it involved, that facilitated the inscription of what on one
level are purely calligraphic flourishes into the social interaction between viewer
and object of devotion. Baxandall compares two statues by the Nuremberg
sculptor Veit Stoss, a St Andrew and a St Roche (1980: 191–202: figure 122,
figures 126–8, figures 132–3). Roche’s saintliness had been manifested by
patient and submissive suffering. Andrew (Greek andreios ‘manly’) by contrast
did not submit to death even on the cross. In addition to being manifested in
their body-postures and attributes, this characterological contrast is echoed in
their drapery: the gravity-defying s-shaped flourishes of Andrew’s cloak manifest an independent energy, while their counterparts on Roche, a series of arcing edges and half-circles, framing the sore on Roche’s leg, droop sadly towards
the ground (1980: 200–203). At the same time as making a display of the
artist’s mastery of the specific material potentialities of limewood, these flourishes ‘profile’ – to use DeNora’s term (2000: 107) – states of body and mind
which mediate the devotee’s interaction with the saints and give it in each case
a distinctive mood, appropriate to the saint in question and his modalities of
action. Art and society are not in the kind of zero-sum relationship characteristic
of ‘critical’ sociologies of art. Richer formal analysis brings with it richer sociological analysis as part of the same analytical move.
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The ‘interpretive flexibility’ (DeNora, 2000: 33, 43) of such sculptural
affordances is well illustrated by the changing responses to the lavish and richly
painted drapery used for images of Mary and other female saints. This was
modelled after the costly clothes worn by elite women at prestigious social
occasions like dancing parties, and thus presumptively suitable to the Queen of
Heaven and her entourage. But, exploiting the potential tension between rich
party dress and church decorum, reforming iconoclasts like Luther and Zwingli
were later to complain that such images were more like high class prostitutes,
likely to corrupt their viewers’ morals, ‘represented so whorish, insinuating and
groomed, you would think they are placed there to arouse one to voluptuousness’
(Baxandall, 1980: 88–92, quoting Zwingli). In practice such interpretive flexibility was limited by the visual set-up which framed viewers’ encounters with
images, and the interpretive techniques which they assimilated through participation in religious services or as members of lay brotherhoods. The brotherhoods were a conspicuous feature of 15th-century piety and also often the
sponsors of limewood sculptures. Baxandall (1980: 208–14) takes the example
of a statue of the Virgin and Child, originally the centrepiece of a rosary which
would have been suspended from the roof of the church at the end of the nave.
Circular rosary frames were generally embellished with 50 rosettes and five
roundels, depicting the Five Joys of the Virgin. These corresponded to the 50
Aves and five Pater Nosters which were supposed to be recited as a component
of devotional viewing, three times over for members of the Brotherhood of the
Rosary, interspersing their 150 Aves and 15 Pater Nosters with lines from Latin
hymns. As the viewer approached and circled the rosary, the statue was viewed
from a range of different angles, each affording variant views of the Virgin and
Child and facilitating the elicitation of a range of emotions matching the complexity of the Christian mysteries afforded for meditation by the sculpture, the
rosary and the prayers. Once again, the focus is very much not on what the
work of art means (some kind of fixed immanent signification), but how it
means, as one component in a network of mediations, from the framing of the
statue and its placement hanging at the end of the nave, to the behaviours and
interpretive practices through which viewers activate the sculpture’s affordances
and thus work upon the formation of their own subjectivity.
After Baxandall or back to Baxandall? The New Sociology of
Art and Beyond
The conceptual language of ethnomethodology and actor network theory used
by Hennion, De Nora and some other new sociologists of art, like Yaneva
(2003) and Heath and Vom Lehn (2004), certainly helps to render more
explicit, and transferable, some of the key features of Baxandall’s approach,
and has resulted in an extremely fruitful programme of research. But against the
background of these marked similarities, it is also important to draw attention
to aspects of Baxandall’s analysis which differ significantly from the approach
of the new sociology of art, and may indicate in certain respects a more cogent
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and powerful theoretical framework, if one which is perhaps too implicit and
requires some drawing out.
Consistent with their grounding in ethnomethodology and actor network
theory, Hennion, DeNora et al. emphasize the local, interactive and contingent
character of aesthetic agency. ‘The links between works and tastes are conjunctural and hence changing’ (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 351). Articulation between
artistic forms and socio-cultural action is ‘a process that is interactive, mutually
constitutive, but always locally produced’ (Acord and DeNora, 2008: 228).
‘Culture is not a set of a priori categories that act on people and determine their
cognitive processing in given situations. Rather, actors’ embodied and emotional reactions may play a leading role in determining how and even if culture
is integrated into action trajectories’ (2008: 234). It is easy to have some sympathy with these claims, which are perhaps a reaction against the structural
determinism of critical sociologies of art, and the work of Pierre Bourdieu in
particular. But such statements run the risk of fallacies of misplaced concreteness, that is to say formulating as concrete and mutually exclusive alternatives
what should in fact be seen as analytical dimensions. The concept of ‘contingency’
only makes sense in relation to a complementary concept of duration. The basic
structures of capitalism (the institutions of money and private property, and the
money-commodity-money circuit) are on one level contingent – they have not
characterized all known societies in human history – but they are more enduring,
less contingent, than, for example, the Italian lira proved to be. Without reference
to frames of duration (structures), invocation of ‘change’ and ‘contingency’ has
more rhetorical than analytical value.7
It is equally a fallacy of misplaced concreteness to see ‘structure’ (whether
cultural or social) as constraining in contrast to local and ‘contingent’ interactions as the site of choice and free agency. Wishing to highlight ‘local and haphazard sense-making practice rather than tacit mastery of a normative cultural
code’, Acord and DeNora argue that:
individuals make sense of an object or action in regard to a particular context and
‘index’ it under those circumstances (Garfinkel, 1967). Norms, rules and repertoires
of action grow out of these tactics in and through their observance, as cultural patterns of meaning making in response to particular situational and material affordances. (2008: 234)
Indexing an object or action under a particular context, however, presupposes an already existing cultural ability to ‘typify’ (Schutz, 1962: index s.v.
typification) such an object, and to construct a ‘definition of the situation’
(Parsons and Platt, 1973: 267–72) as being such or another kind of context or
situation. Such typifications and definitions of the situation, although often
quite abstract, have culturally specific patterning and are characterized by varying durations, but necessarily pre-exist the specific object they typify or the particular situation they define. If we are to believe Garfinkel (1967: 1–34), they
are undergirded by socio-cultural a prioris with a durée of scope comparable
to the Kantian categories, that is to say anthropological universals, the ‘etc.
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Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art Tanner
principle’, ‘ad hocing’ and so on. It is only by virtue of such enduring cultural
structures, a priori to any specific interaction, that we are able to interact at all.
The genesis of new cultural forms always presupposes reference to such a priori structures, typifications and definitions of the situation, as much as to local
‘situational and material affordances’. The exact balance of the role of local
interaction and the a priori structures in the formulation and transmission of
new cultural patterns will of course vary, and is an empirical question, not
something to be determined by theoretical fiat.
How do these conceptual shortcomings manifest themselves in practice?
One entailment is an analysis focussed rather exclusively on objects and their
immediate interactive environment.8 This creates a temporally very foreshortened view of the character of the agencies (and structures) at work. Christian
Heath and Dirk vom Lehn (2004) describe how, in the context of an exhibition
on Caravaggio, visitors actively make sense of the paintings they encounter. They
describe a young man and his parents looking at the Flagellation of Christ, and
how the son positions his body and moves his arms in such a way as to see, and
make visible to his parents, incisions on the canvass which indicate Caravaggio’s
design process. ‘It would seem inappropriate’, the authors argue:
to suggest that abstract perceptual principles, cognitive models or socially structured
dispositions predetermine the perception and experience of the picture. Rather, it
emerges progressively through a complex configuration of action, bodily and spoken, through which the participants discover, see and experience the painting in particular ways … The talk and bodily conduct of the participants, their gestures and
the like, do not stand independently of the objects and artefacts themselves; they are
intelligible by virtue of the particular exhibit, just as the particular artefact or object
reflexively informs how the participants organize their conduct and make sense of
the exhibit. (Heath and Vom Lehn, 2004: 52, 60)
But the choice of the boy to focus on the incisions was itself cued by exhibition notes on an A4 card, themselves just one index of the larger institutional
setting in which the family encounter the painting. The relevance structure cued
by the notes, and enacted by the family, focuses on the designed form of the
painting as a manifestation of Caravaggio’s artistic genius, rather than, say,
emoting over the content of the representation – the suffering Christ – as a
member of Baxandall’s Brotherhood of the Rosary, viewing the painting in a
church, might have done. This relevance structure is mediated by and embedded in the larger and long established institutionalization of art as high culture.
It draws on normative discourses of individual artistic creativity and practices
of connoisseurship which date back to the 18th century and are materially
embodied in the design of the modern art museums: from their temple-like exteriors, to the implicit narratives which determine the placement and ordering of
pictures, and the priorities implicit in the content and structure of labels
(Duncan and Wallach, 1980). To be sure, the experience realized in the act of
viewing is certainly not wholly independent of the affordances of the painting
in question, but it is at least partially independent. It is only against the background
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of this specific institutional structuring of art that one can make sense of the
highly generic dispositions which the young man and his parents bring to the
Caravaggio exhibition and the particular painting, and how far and in what
specific ways they differ from the performance and experience of viewing of
equivalent images which characterized the religious institutionalization of art in
Baxandall’s 15th-century case studies.
These generic features of the mediation of art are of course well described
in Bourdieu’s The Love of Art (1969), and Paul DiMaggio’s (1982a, 1982b) fine
studies of the institutionalization of high culture in 19th-century Boston have
given us a good understanding of the historical process of the construction of
the whole mediatory apparatus which still largely shapes our experience in art
museums today. I do not mean to imply that both Bourdieu’s and DiMaggio’s
sociologies of high culture are not in certain respects quite reductive (cf. Tanner,
2005), only that a shift to a focus on momentary interactions and localized constitutive practices, at the expense of institutional analysis and the consideration
of larger social structures, simply replaces one reductionism with another.
Cultural codes and schemes exist and operate on many different layers and levels, of varying duration and spatial scope. The institutions and practices they
shape and afford also vary in their temporal and spatial scope, and we must
develop analytical frameworks adequate to that complexity (Sewell, 2005).
Baxandall’s historical monographs in fact show remarkable sensitivity to
exactly these issues, and this represents perhaps the most marked difference
between his work and that of the new sociology of art. It is also the dimension of
his approach from which we still have most to learn today. As we have already
seen, Baxandall’s account of the workings of Veit Stoss’s rosary group of the
Virgin and Child draws attention to the role of the Brotherhood of the Rosary in
the commissioning and consumption of such sculptures. On one level, the practices of the lay brotherhoods are located by Baxandall in an institutional framework with a remarkably long durée and wide spatial reach. The institutional
definition of the role of images in the Christian church, as a means of instruction
for the people, dates back to late antiquity. The specific norms which defined the
Renaissance institution of devotional art were codified certainly no later than the
13th century (Baxandall, 1972: 41), remained valid in 15th-century Italy and
15th-century Germany (Baxandall, 1980: 51–69), and were probably common to
most of western Europe before the Reformation (as indeed to much of Catholic
Europe even today). On another level, however, Baxandall’s account of the brotherhoods also points to the role of specific group figurations over shorter time
scales, a changing balance of power in different groups’ control over that enduring institutional framework, and a sociologically significant inflection of the possibilities for the shaping of religious and affective identities which it afforded. The
development of towns, and the intensification of craft production and exchange,
afforded the increasingly wealthy lay members of the church greater influence in
the character of artistic elaboration of churches, mediated through their administration of the parish chest, at the expense of the clergy (Baxandall, 1980: 88). It
was largely members of wealthy craft and manufacturing families who became
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members of the brotherhoods and sponsored the limewood altarpieces with
which Baxandall is concerned. Other changes Baxandall sees operating at different temporal scales, and involving social structures and social interactions of a
differing spatial scope. Long-term trends in the increasing interconnectedness of
the southern and northern European economies led to leading families like the
Fuggers establishing branch offices in Italy. The Fuggers’ recourse to Italian artists
to decorate a chapel in Augsburg marked what Baxandall characterizes, echoing
Pinder (1926) and of course Mannheim’s (1993 [1927]) famous essay, as a generational change, when Italianate style became an element of the cultural circumstances within which limewood sculptors worked, and conversely a sense of
the specifically German character of certain aspects the indigenous tradition
developed, fomenting the formation of a national style (Baxandall, 1980: 23,
131–42). The Reformation, of course, represented a change of another order, an
institutional transformation in the relationship between art and religion. It was in
this context that the potentially (and previously unnoticed) ‘whorish’ affordances
of some sculptures were drawn attention to by preachers like Zwingli and Luther,
in widely distributed printed tracts which sought to transform the cultural framework with which viewers encountered such statues (Baxandall, 1980: 88–92).
Iconoclasm, and the disarticulation of visual art from a reformed Christianity
which privileged the word, spelled the end of the limewood altarpiece.9 A brief
summary is inadequate to bring out the analytical richness that characterizes
Baxandall’s history of the limewood sculptures of Renaissance Germany, save to
say that it is throughout attentive to the hierarchical and layered properties of
social structures and cultural practices, characterized by distinctive temporal logics, whose conjunctural intersection explains the key transformations in the
nature of the art, and the art institutions, with which Baxandall is concerned.
Conclusion
Notwithstanding these signal virtues, by sociological standards the framework
employed by Baxandall in The Limewood Sculptors is often much too implicit,
as it is also in Baxandall’s other major works. So it is perhaps worth spelling
out again some of the key strengths of Baxandall’s approach as a model for the
sociology of art. First, it integrates social analysis and visual analysis into a single framework, rather than attributing one to the sociology of art, and the other
to art history. Second, while being centrally concerned with the social and economic bases of art, grounded in systems of patronage and the social organization of production, it does not reduce artistic action to such bases. On the
contrary, it emphasizes the historically variable social construction of artistic
agency, and in particular the role played by specifically material (aesthetic,
depictive, visual) practices in the construction of such agency. Third, the viewer
plays an active role in the social appropriation of art. Rather than simply
decoding works of art, as the approaches of linguistic structuralism or
hermeneutics might suggest, viewers engage the specific material and aesthetic
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affordances of works of art by deploying specific visual skills, of varying social
provenance. In doing so, viewers make use of the aesthetic features of works of
art in structuring specific social activities, in mediating social relationships, and
in shaping their own subjectivities. These different dimensions of analysis are
integrated through a focus on the institutional character of art, tacitly grounded in
the assumption that art is a functionally differentiated strand of culture, using
sensuous means to appropriate viewers’ perceptual responsiveness for the social
and cultural construction of affect for specific, institutionally defined, purposes.10
Far from leading to the kind of static or consensus oriented analysis that text
book critiques of functionalism might imply, Baxandall uses these assumptions
as an analytic framework for concrete historical analysis. This allows him to
explore how the different dimensions of the art situation which he identifies,
manifested in specific ways in specific social and historical situations, interact
over time in complex, variably conflictual processes of socio-cultural reproduction and change. The core concept of art as institution permits Baxandall’s analysis to reach from the micro level of specific engagements between viewers and
works of art, to the macro considerations of the relationship between art and
the broader social structures within which art is located. At each of these levels
art may potentially play a significant role in shaping processes of social and
cultural reproduction and change, and is in its turn potentially subject to diverse
levels and modes of social structuring.
If we can draw any conclusion from the uses made of Baxandall by different social theorists and cultural sociologists, it must be that any reading of
Baxandall is only one reading among a range of possible readings. These readings should be judged in terms of three criteria: their adequacy to Baxandall’s
writings, their own internal theoretical coherence, and their fruitfulness in shaping future research in the sociology of art. My attempt to draw out the sociological dimensions of Baxandall’s approach has drawn its vocabulary from
Nikos Mouzelis’s (1995) account of the complementary relationship between
institutional analysis of sociocultural systems (along lines developed in the
work of Talcott Parsons), and the figurational analysis of interactions between
groups and individuals in the context of such systemic institutional frameworks
(based on the structural sociologies of Norbert Elias or Max Weber, for example),
and also from William Sewell’s account of the ‘logics of history’ (2005). Like
any reading of a classic text (cf. Alexander, 1987), my reading of Baxandall has
its own horizon, both intellectual and institutional, and functions as much as
an argument in favour of a particular approach to the sociology of art as a
description of Baxandall’s work, namely a broadly neofunctionalist one.11 But
for the purposes of this particular essay, perhaps more important than the competitive value of that research programme is my larger argument. Baxandall’s
Painting and Experience and Limewood Sculptors should be considered as –
and in fact in practice already are – classics in the sociology of art, texts which
we can profitably reread and explore anew in the context of each paradigmatic
change in our discipline.
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Notes
1 Note also Kenneth Dauber’s (1992) use of Baxandall as the basis of his use of
art (sculpture) to explore social contexts (the relationship between religion and
social structure in Kamakura Japan).
2 To be fair, Alexander later (2003: 308) notes that Baxandall does also look at
issues of production and reception, but she suggests that he is unable to integrate these different approaches, treating each in separate chapters, and thus
separating the sociological from the artistic. For my own part, I think Baxandall
does see these three dimensions of analysis as integrated – through the concept
of institution which informs all three chapters – and as I will argue further
below he in certain respects offers a theoretically more coherent approach than
that of DeNora and Hennion, which Alexander takes as her exemplar for the
‘constitutive’ approach, focussing on art’s role in society.
3 There is not space here to spell out the reductionist character of Bourdieu’s
social theory in general. For a good discussion, which I find largely persuasive,
see Alexander (1995). For critical evaluations of the entailments of the logic of
Bourdieu’s theory for the analysis of art, see: Hennion and Grennier (2001:
341–5); Tanner (2003: 20–22).
4 Cf. Baxandall (1985b: 40) for his most explicit formulation of a position very
similar to Hennion’s, seeing art and society as ‘unhomologous systematic constructions put upon interpenetrating subject matters’.
5 The affinity between Baxandall’s approach and ethnomethodology was first
drawn attention to by Chandra Mukerji (1986), in a review of Baxandall’s
Patterns of Intention, in the American Journal of Sociology. Actor network theorists and Baxandall independently came up with similar analytical vocabulary,
emphasizing the ‘heterogeneity’ of the practical networks which were the objects
of their analysis, and questions of ‘translation’ across such networks. Like
Baxandall and ANT, ethnomethodology has been very much concerned to contest standard social scientific accounts of causality, emphasizing that society is
not so much the cause of actors’ behaviours as the accomplishment of their
constitutive practices. For Baxandall’s most sustained reflection on the concept
of cause in relation to art history, see Baxandall (1985a: especially v–vii, 26–
32). Compare the last chapter of Baxandall (1980), which he conceptualizes as a
study of artists ‘electing their own causes’ (1980: 164), with Hennion’s analysis (2007: 102) of ‘making one’s determinations act’.
6 DeNora does not explicitly discuss Baxandall, but her work has been developed
in ongoing dialogue with that of Antoine Hennion, through whom Baxandall’s
influence is mediated. Another important study combining concepts from ethnomethodology and the sociology of science with Baxandall’s period eye concept
is Chandra Mukerji’s wonderful study of the articulation of the formal design of
the gardens of Versailles in the context of territorial practices of state-making in
17th-century France (Mukerji, 1997). ‘The Pleasures of Military Culture’ (1997:
82–97) is a superb analysis of the ideal viewer of classical French gardens. The
counterpart to Baxandall’s churchgoing businessman with a taste for dancing
was a military man of noble background trained in visual skills of estimating
heights and distances, and mapping spaces in the contexts of siege warfare and
the design of military architecture, the bearer in short of a ‘surveying eye’ which
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could enjoy the complex gradings and continually changing patterns of visibility
characteristic of the parterres and bosquets of Versailles.
Braudel’s classic essay (1980 [1958]) on the character of historical time interestingly discusses the work of the French art historian Pierre Francastel as an
exemplary instance of an art historian who addresses the longue durée in the
history of painting. Braudel’s insights are taken to a higher level of sophistication in Sewell (2005).
Manifested in a rather acute form by some of Hennion’s reifying formulations:
commenting (2005: 133–4) on the work of Baxandall and Haskell that shows
how ‘the works through their mediums and restorations, and the way they have
been gathered together, presented, commented upon and reproduced, have
continuously reconfigured the frame of their own evaluation’; they ‘show us
art gradually tracing the frame in which we ‘understand’ it … Just as music is
a history writing its own history, so it is also a reality, making its own reality’.
The material agency of the art works themselves is so much foregrounded that
human agents, the institutional entrepreneurs of DiMaggio’s (1982a, 1982b)
studies of the social construction of high culture, are downplayed to the point
of vanishing.
If ‘music is a history writing its own history, [and] a reality making its own
reality’, as Hennion asserts (2005: 135), we might suggest that during the
iconoclasm of the Reformation, the limewood altarpieces were making their
own history, by being ‘whorish’, but making it in circumstances not of their
own choosing, to take up the echo of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.
The conceptual language I use here is of course that of Talcott Parsons’ account
of art as expressive symbolism (see Tanner, 2000), which seems to me wholly
consistent with Baxandall’s account of the ‘institutional ends’ of painting
(1972: 40–48), though obviously more generalized, formulated on a level of
abstraction that does not presuppose the specific historical institutionalization
of art with which Baxandall is concerned in his Renaissance case studies.
The neofunctionalist research programme is perhaps best represented by
Alexander and Colomy (1990) and Alexander (1998). See Tanner (2005, 2006)
for my own efforts to develop this framework for the sociology of art.
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Jeremy Tanner
Jeremy Tanner is Reader in Classical and Comparative Art at the Institute of
Archaeology, University College London. Educated in classics at the University of
Cambridge and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, his research straddles the
disciplines of art history and sociology, with a particular interest in classical sociological
theory and the theory of action. Recent publications include The Sociology of Art: A
Reader (2003) and The Invention of Art History in Ancient Greece: Religion, Society and
Artistic Rationalisation (2006), a study which draws upon Talcott Parsons’s account of art
as expressive symbolism and Max Weber’s comparative sociology of religion to understand the history of art as an institution in classical antiquity. He is currently working on
a comparative sociological study of early Greek and early Chinese art.
Address: Institute of Archaeology, University College London, 31/34 Gordon Square,
London, WC1H 0PY, UK.
Email: [email protected]
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