Art Historian Michael Baxandall Dead at 74

In case you missed the sad news widely released last week, art historian Michael Baxandall passed away on August 12 from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 74. Baxandall’s tremendous influence on how art history is written, understood, and made is difficult to convey, but writer Tim Martin does a nice job in his recent piece in the Telegraph, “Michael Baxandall changed my life,” in which he discusses the historian’s talent for bringing centuries-old artworks to life with vibrant descriptions of the cultural and social contexts in which they were created:

One famous example is that of blue pigments: those striking indigo robes and night skies in Quattrocento painting are often the result of high prices in the market for the lapis lazuli from which the pigment was ground.

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