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2010 4: 231Cultural SociologyJeremy Tanner

Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art

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Michael Baxandall and the SociologicalInterpretation of Art

�� Jeremy TannerUniversity College London, UK

ABSTRACT

Art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings have played a key role in defining themajor 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 prac-tices and the concept of the period eye, these appropriations have overlooked thecentrality to Baxandall’s work of the concept of art as an institution. This institu-tional focus permits Baxandall to integrate social, cultural and visual analysis in away which shows not only how visual art is socially constructed, but also how itplays an active role in the construction of social orders on a variety of levels ofemergence, from the interaction order to larger social structures.

KEY WORDS

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 tothe development of distinctive skills and habits: and these visual skills and habitsbecome identifiable elements in the painter’s style … A fifteenth century painting isthe 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 sociologyof art … let me say now that when I am told the book is inadequate as a sociology ofart I shall be unmoved. (Baxandall, 1985a: viii)

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[DOI: 10.1177/1749975510368474]



Introduction

The death of Michael Baxandall in 2008 certainly represented a significant lossfor the community of art historians. As a pupil of Ernst Gombrich, and a for-mer student of the Warburg School, Baxandall was perhaps the last greatrepresentative of the intellectual spirit represented by the Warburg tradition.But Baxandall’s legacy is one which is of equal importance to the sociologyof art, and, at the close of an extraordinarily fruitful career, it is perhaps nowan appropriate moment to reflect on and assess the character of that legacy. Noart historian has exercised so much influence on the development of the sociol-ogy of art in the last 30 years as Baxandall. His interest in markets and patron-age made him a natural point of reference for work in the production of cultureperspective, such as Howard Becker’s (1982) Art Worlds. His efforts to formu-late a general theoretical model for the ‘historical explanation of pictures’ havebeen a major influence on a number of attempts to construct systematicmethodologies in the sociology of culture, and indeed beyond, from WendyGriswold’s classic ‘A Methodological Framework for the Sociology of Culture’(1987a) to Richard Biernacki’s (2005) more recent attempt to formulate a problem-solving model of social action to replace the means-end model characteristicof most work in historical sociology.1 Baxandall’s ‘period eye’ concept hasspawned 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 focusof a special issue of Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales (Bourdieu andDesault, 1981a, 1981b) and Bourdieu returned to Baxandall in his last greatstudy in the sociology of art, The Rules of Art (1996). More recently, AntoineHennion has invoked Baxandall as a theoretical model, and guiding spirit, inwhat has been called ‘the new sociology of art’, characterized by a focus on themateriality of art works themselves and their specifically aesthetic propertiesand 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 manifestsa very high level of ambivalence about the social, and its place in the under-standing of art. On the one hand we have the Durkheimian rhetoric of theintroductory statements in Painting and Experience; on the other, the almostcomplete disavowal of sociological pretensions in Patterns of Intention. Second,Baxandall’s work serves as a model for approaches to the sociology of art thatare, on the face of it, incompatible. Bourdieu (1996: 204–5), for example, explic-itly takes issue with the work of Howard Becker and his followers in the pro-duction of culture paradigm. In turn, Hennion’s ‘art-sociology’ is openlyformulated as an attack on Bourdieu’s ‘critical’ sociology of art (Hennion, 1995;Hennion and Grennier, 2001). Third, within the field of art history, Baxandall isnot 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

232 Cultural Sociology Volume 4 � Number 2 � July 2010



the larger field of cultural studies (Clunas, 2003; Jay, 2002: 271); not, one mighthave thought, a path which the sociology of art would wish to follow.

This article seeks to assess the legacy of Michael Baxandall to the sociologyof art against this apparently contradictory background. The first part sketchesan outline of Baxandall’s main arguments in Painting and Experience. My inten-tion, 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 diver-gent appropriations of Baxandall’s work made by different schools within thesociology of art, and indeed art history. Reading Baxandall through theserefracting lenses brings out in a more analytically explicit manner certain strandsof theoretical argumentation which often remain implicit in Baxandall’s ownwork, embedded in his detailed analysis of specific historical cases. Further, placingeach of these frameworks – in particular Bourdieu’s critical sociology and thenew sociology of art of Hennion and DeNora – in close comparison withBaxandall’s studies illustrates certain respects in which his work, far from hav-ing been simply absorbed and superseded, still has lessons to offer us today. Thefinal section of the article draws on Baxandall’s Limewood Sculptors ofRenaissance Germany (1980) – a work surprisingly overlooked by most sociol-ogists of art – to argue that Baxandall develops an ‘institutional’ approach whichhas the potential coherently to integrate dimensions of analysis currently splitacross competing paradigms into a fully historical sociology of art.

Painting and Social Experience: Art and Society in the Work ofMichael Baxandall

In three brief chapters, Painting and Experience (1972) seeks to demonstrateBaxandall’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 economicorganization of artistic production, evidenced by contracts, is manifested in thevisual character of quattrocento art and painting. Some patrons chose to pay bythe foot, others according to the time spent by the painter, and the materials heused; the character and quality of the paintings they received match their implicitassumptions about the character of the work that painting entailed (1972: 1).Different types of commission entailed different types of control, from the rela-tively direct control and detailed supervision manifested in the contracts betweenpainters and individual private clients – princes, priors, ordinary citizens – to therather incomplete lay control exercised on the employees of ‘large communalenterprises’, sculptors like Donatello working on the Cathedral in Florence, underthe administrative control of the Wool Guild (1972: 5). Conspicuous materialconsumption could be harmonized with the ostensibly religious motivations ofmost commissions through the use of specific materials. For example, the impor-tance of the Virgin Mary in a painting, and the donor’s piety, might be registeredthrough the use of costly ultramarine to give her cloak a striking blue immedi-ately recognizable to contemporary viewers (1972: 11). Status distinction shaped

233Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art Tanner



the ways in which patrons chose to display their munificence, shifting from anemphasis on pure materiality to one on skill. Carefully depicted landscapesreplaced gold as the preferred backdrop to figure paintings when members of theestablished elite sought to distance themselves from the newly wealthy by adopt-ing more cultivated, less flashy, modes of display, informed by humanist thoughtand ascetic strands of contemporary religious culture (1972: 14–15). As Baxandallemphasizes, these relationships, and the choices made by both patrons andpainters, all operated ‘within institutions and conventions’, which helped toarticulate 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 highlyroutinized ways (1972: 1–3).

Looking at paintings was also ‘a fifteenth century Italian institution andinvolved in the institution were certain expectations’ (1972: 33), not least thatthe viewer be able to appreciate the character and level of the increasinglyhighly valued skill manifested by an artist in a painting. The social and institu-tional character of viewing, and its impact on pictorial practice, is the focus ofBaxandall’s famous chapter on ‘The Period Eye’. Baxandall starts from the sim-ple point that the kinds of cognitive skills with which viewers are endowed willsignificantly inflect the ways they attend to a picture. A viewer ‘skilled in not-ing proportional relationships’ or ‘practised in reducing complex forms to com-pounds of simple forms’ may ‘order his experience’ of Domenico Veneziano’sAnnunciation ‘differently from people without those skills’, and perhaps togreater effect than, for example, a contemporary German viewer, richly endowedwith very different sets of perceptual skills, for classifying the modulating widthof lines characteristic of the penmanship of the Modists, the writing teacherswho played such a significant role in 15th-century German education. ‘Muchof what we call “taste” lies in this, the conformity between discriminationsdemanded 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 skillsinformed the viewing and making of paintings and why. Particularly importantfrom a sociological point of view is Baxandall’s emphasis on the different socialfactors which acted as a filter on the vast range of perceptual skills which couldpotentially have been relevant to painting. They tend to be skills which havebeen taught in a formal educational setting of one kind or another, and as suchare ‘skills which can be talked about’. Such skills are valued by those who havelearned them both for their practical value and as markers of their bearers’social status; and, of course, they characterized the ‘patronizing classes’. Ofthese skills, unlike skills absorbed early in childhood, their bearers are relativelyself-conscious and self-aware, making ‘such skills particularly susceptible totransfer 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 organi-zation, and thus a means by which the painter can display skill and the viewerappreciate it. Among the skills which Baxandall identifies as relevant arethose derived from gauging and from dancing. In a world before standardized




containers, the flow of commerce was heavily dependent on the ability ofparties to a transaction swiftly and reliably to calculate the volumes containedin particular containers. This they achieved through the skills they had acquiredin breaking down complex shapes into combinations of more simple geometri-cal forms, reliably estimating the ratios of their proportions, and on that basisestablishing the quantity of a material being offered for exchange. The sameskills were of use to painters in composing paintings, whether designing com-plex pictorial figures, or creating a coherent perspectival space, preserving theproper ratios between the volumes of comparable bodies depicted at differentvirtual depths in the pictorial field. The mathematics and geometry whichunderpinned these skills were learned by both painters and commodity tradersin the secondary school or ‘abbaco’ (1972: 86–101).

Dance in Renaissance Italy was highly formalized. Like visual art, dancewas the subject of theoretical reflection and literary codification. Differentaspects of dance were categorized in terms of a vocabulary – aere, manieria,misura – which was also relevant to painting. Treatises described the movementsof participants in dance as figure patterns which expressed the relationshipsarticulated between the dance partners, as ‘Jealousy’ or ‘Desire’ for instance.This manner of conceptualizing and visualizing dance patterns offered a meansto painters seeking to depict the interrelationship between figures in a narrativepainting, in such a way that the tone of the interaction would be legible to view-ers, even if they were unfamiliar with the specific narrative. Practical familiaritywith such figural patterns and their classification, whether as participants orspectators at dances, offered a basis on which viewers could both comment onand bodily feel themselves into such depicted interactions (1972: 77–81).

The transfer of these cultural schemes from their primary institutional set-tings into the institution of art was facilitated by the shared social and educa-tional culture of artists and patrons, and also by the relatively low level ofdifferentiation, and high degree of interpenetration, between such institutionaldomains as painting and commodity trading. The painter Piero della Francesca,for example, was also the author of a treatise, De Abaco, in which the sameanalytical skills which he might use in composing paintings structured in termsof appropriately proportioned volumes were retailed to businessmen to helpthem in their practice of gauging (1972: 87).

The activity of looking at pictures was also institutional in a second anddeeper sense. ‘Pictures existed to meet institutional ends’ and in RenaissanceItaly those ends were primarily religious (1972: 40–43). An established traditionof ecclesiastical theory defined the ends of painting as the instruction of the peo-ple; making the story of the incarnation and the examples of the saints’ livesactive in believers’ memories, through daily encounters; and, as expressed in onestandard contemporary tract, ‘to excite feelings of devotion, these being arousedmore effectively by things seen than by things heard’ (1972: 41). Painters werethus understood to be ‘professional visualizers’ of the stories of the Bible and thesaints, and both painters and viewers were rehearsed in the appropriate emo-tional categorization of particular stories by sermons, which instructed their




hearers in the appropriate ‘sensations of piety’ for specific stories: humility andjoy in the Nativity, benignity and maternity for the Visitation. Viewers’ respon-siveness was further shaped and intensified by what Baxandall calls ‘an activeinstitution of interior visualization’ (1972: 45). The ‘Garden of Prayer’, a devo-tional tract for young girls, encourages its readers to prepare themselves forprayer by trying to visualize the story of the Passion: their own city can serve asa model for Jerusalem, and places they know within it for the room where theLast Supper was held, or the palace of Pilate. Similarly, they should people thissetting with the dramatis personae of the biblical narrative, each visualized afterpersonal 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 fromepisode to episode, meditate on each one, dwelling on each single stage and stepof the story. And if at any point you feel a sensation of piety, stop: do not passon as long as that sweet and devout sentiment lasts.’ Such devotional practicesreciprocally informed the viewing of paintings, allowing the viewer to fill insometimes sketchy and generalized depictions of place and people offered bypainters 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 apainting – the iconographic approach which is repeatedly the object ofBaxandall’s criticism. Nor were the visual features of paintings the expressionof class ideologies, as ‘facile equations between “burgess” or “aristocratic”milieux on the one side and “realist” or “idealizing” styles on the other’ mightsuggest (1972: 152 – a dig at the social histories of art of Frederik Antal andArnold Hauser, of course). Rather, paintings offered viewers visual affordanceswhich geared with the sets of practical dispositions, described by Baxandall,with which Renaissance viewers were endowed. The interaction between view-ing practices and pictorial affordances permitted viewers to generate and rein-force the sentiments and attachments which informed the many areas of sociallife which religion (and religious art) penetrated.

As my brief summary suggests, Baxandall’s Painting and Experience isabout as sociological as one might wish. Particularly striking, in addition to hisconcern for social practice, is the emphasis on the concept of ‘institution’,among his key concepts probably second in frequency of use only to ‘style’. Weturn now to look at how far, and in what ways, Baxandall’s framework forarticulating the relationship between art and its social contexts has been appro-priated 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 ‘socialpractice’ in his work, it may come as something of a surprise to sociologists to




discover that, as far as art historians are concerned, Baxandall is not particularlyclosely associated with the social history of art (Clunas, 2003). Painting andExperience was not well received by social historians of art – mainly Marxistsof one shade or another – who complained that it ignored issues of class, ideol-ogy and power (Langdale, 1999: 28–31). T. J. Clark, for example, dismissedBaxandall’s use of the category of ‘experience’ as ‘the code word for a kind ofart history which feels the need to refer to those historical realities with whichartist and patron are constantly in contact, but which dares not name thosestructures which mediate and determine the nature of that contact – ideology,class, the conflict between classes, the contradictions within any ideological viewof the world’ (Clark, 1976, quoted in Langdale, 1999: 29).

Instead, art historians normally place Baxandall within what has come tobe known as the ‘visual culture’ paradigm. Baxandall used the term in LimewoodSculptors (1980: 145), and it was taken up by Svetlana Alpers to describe herown account of the visual practices – cartography, optical science and so on –which informed 17th-century Dutch painting (Alpers, 1983). The term res-onated well with the ‘cultural turn’ which informed the humanities, like thesocial sciences, in the 1980s and 1990s (Sewell, 2005: 22–80), and has crystal-lized as a major paradigm in contemporary art history. The visual cultureapproach 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 socialhistory of art. Second, the social, far from being a central analytical category,increasingly becomes somewhat marginal, displaced by or dissolved into lin-guistic concepts and styles of analysis drawn from French post-structuralistthought (Bryson et al., 1994; Jay, 2002). As John Tagg (1994: 96), once a ratherstraightforwardly Marxist social historian of art, has put it in one of the keyvisual culture manifestos: if the social exists, it is only as ‘a temporary andunstable domination of the field of discursivity’ – the social is culture and cultureis language or language-like all the way down.

Within recent art history, Baxandall’s work has been read through this post-structuralist lens. Such a reading emphasizes that from his earliest studies Baxandallwas interested above all in the relationship between language and the visual. Hisfirst book, Giotto and the Orators (1971), for example, had looked at the human-ist invention of art criticism in early Renaissance Italy, drawing on the modelsderived from ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric, and it explored how such criticaldiscourse informed contemporary artistic practice. Baxandall, we are told, ‘hasbeen as sensitive as Derrida to the incapacity of language to make contact with itsreferent’ (Holly, 1999: 6). This sensitivity is particularly manifest in later contribu-tions like Patterns of Intention, where Baxandall argues that art history does notexplain 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 doesnot mention them, Adrian Rifkin argues (1999: 1–2), Baxandall should be seen asbelonging to the same ‘period discursivity’ as Derrida and Foucault.




Michael Baxandall and the Production of Culture

Sociological readings of Baxandall have, of course, had a radically differentcharacter. But the range of different positions his approach has been drawnupon to articulate indicates something of the richness, or arguably the ambigu-ity, of his analytical framework. It is perhaps unsurprising that both ofBaxandall’s major empirical case studies, Painting and Experience and TheLimewood Sculptors, should have loaned themselves so well to the intellectualproject of the production of culture perspective. But Baxandall is more a sourceof examples than a theoretical influence, and in certain respects the productionof 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 toillustrate his thesis that art is not the special creation of individual geniuses, butthe mundane product of networks of cooperation. A contract betweenGhirlandaio and a client, specifying the quality of ultramarine pigment at fourflorins per ounce (Baxandall, 1972: 6), Becker comments (1982: 15), ‘resemblesthe contract one might make with a builder, specifying the quality of steel andconcrete to be used’. Baxandall also provides Becker with material to articulatehis ideas about the role of ‘conventions’ in mediating the interactions betweenparticipants in art worlds, and in marking their boundaries: the place of geom-etry in Renaissance painting, for example, or the painters’ and viewers’ knowl-edge 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 criti-cize his approach because ‘the art works under consideration remain central’,rather than the ‘social context’, which is held to be the proper object of anal-ysis for sociologists (Zolberg, 1990: 55). Victoria Alexander, in her recenttextbook, offers Baxandall as an exemplar of the quintessentially art historical‘formalist’ approach (2003: 252–5, 273–7), using Baxandall’s account of theperiod eye as an example. The kind of formal analysis entailed in the recon-struction of the period eye may, Alexander suggests, ‘allow us more fully toappreciate’ the paintings or sculptures of a particular period, but in focussingon works, rather than examining ‘people, the ultimate meaning makers,directly’, it lacks the methodological rigour and explanatory value character-istic of more properly sociological studies (2003: 252, 274).2 Such a readingof Baxandall is by no means entirely without basis. Even in Painting andExperience, he oscillates between a more thoroughgoing sociological concep-tion of art as a social fact and a weaker one, in which the social functions asa background or context whereby ‘noticing bits of social practice or conven-tion ... may sharpen our perception of pictures’ (1972: 151), not a very struc-tural conception of the social to say the least. This tendency to disengage fromany systematic concern with the social structuring of art becomes particularlymarked in Patterns of Intention, perhaps in part as a response to the criticismsof social historians of art.




In the first chapter of Patterns of Intention (1985a), Baxandall describesthe ‘heterogeneous circumstances’ which informed the ‘brief’ for the design ofthe Forth Rail Bridge by Benjamin Baker – from the Tay Bridge disaster, to side-winds, the tensile strength of Siemens open hearth steel, the demands of the rail-way companies, and the Victorian money markets. Where the bridge-builder’srole is clear – ‘span!’ – that of the painter is less well-defined, and Baxandall ini-tially stipulates the rather general notion of making ‘marks on a surface in sucha way that their visual interest is directed towards an end’ (1985a: 43). Baxandallrecognizes that exactly how ‘visual interest is directed towards an end’ mayvary, according to the social and cultural setting – invoking the kind of religiousart he had discussed in Painting and Experience as an instance (1985a: 43–4).But he chooses to formulate the relationship between painters and their largerenvironment 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 ofart and sociology – or as Baxandall puts it, ‘offered by various versions ofIdeology’ (1985a: viii) – offer nothing to his project. If one is addressing ‘pic-tures’, not ‘social history’, and if one is ‘doing inferential criticism from otherthan economic determinist convictions’, there is little ‘critical yield’ to be derivedfrom exploring the broader social contexts of production of, say, Picasso’sPortrait of Kahnweiler or Braque’s The Portuguese, whether the ‘class socialdifferences between Picasso and Braque’, the institutional isomorphismsbetween 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 sum-mary, Painting and Experience offers good grounds for challenging the ‘art andsociety’ polarity which Baxandall reverts to in this later work – a polarityshared, from the other side of the fence as it were, by reductionist critical soci-ologies of art, like the production of culture perspective, which seek to replacethe aesthetic by the social (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 341–4). As we shallsee in some detail below, Baxandall’s early work has been a major source inchallenging this dualism in recent sociologies of art influenced by the sociologyof 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 Baxandallthan studies in the production of culture perspective. Where Becker drew inspi-ration primarily from chapter 1 of Painting and Experience (‘Conditions ofTrade’), for Bourdieu it was the third chapter, ‘The Period Eye’, which becamethe object of sustained theoretical reflection. Bourdieu was already well readin the history of art when he came across Baxandall. In particular a close engage-ment with the classic studies of Erwin Panofsky in iconography and iconologywere of fundamental importance to the development of Bourdieu’s sociology of




art and indeed his social theory more generally (Tanner, 2003: 20–21). Panofsky’saccount of the iconographic methodology for decoding the meaning of worksof art formed a crucial starting point for the development of Bourdieu’s accountof the ways in which knowledge of artistic codes could function as a form ofcultural capital, offering privileged social groups an emblem of cultural distinc-tion and a tool in strategies of class reproduction (Bourdieu, 1968). Still moresignificantly, the concept of habitus, which plays a central role in Bourdieu’sattempt to transcend the intentionalism of action theories and the objectivismof structuralisms, was taken from Panofsky’s classic Gothic Architecture andScholasticism, where it described the intellectual habit, inculcated in schools,which shaped practices from philosophical argumentation and musical notationsystems to the design of Gothic vaulting (Bourdieu, 1967; Panofsky, 1951).

Against this background, reading Baxandall represented something of anepiphany for Bourdieu. With Yves Deslaut he translated the ‘Period Eye’chapter of Painting and Experience for a special issue of Actes de laRecherche en Sciences Sociales on the social history and sociology of art, pref-aced with a substantial commentary (Bourdieu and Deslaut, 1981). The ongo-ing importance of Baxandall’s model to Bourdieu is well indicated by the factthat he included a slightly revised version of this essay as one of the chap-ters 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 mightexorcize the ‘traces of intellectualism’ characteristic of his theory of practiceas it stood in the late 1970s, partly shaped by Panofsky’s ideas (1996: 313–14). Baxandall’s study demonstrated to Bourdieu that engagement with artentailed not the kind of self-conscious decoding described by Panofsky, but a‘practical sense’ according to which social experience and social action werelargely mediated through a body trained in ‘the system of schemas of percep-tion and appreciation, of judgement and pleasure, which were acquiredthrough the practices of daily life’, listening to sermons, gauging bolts of clothor sacks of grain, participating in dances (1996: 318). The work of art oper-ates not so much through encoding ideas which the informed viewer candecode as through its ‘power to call up experiences buried in the folds of thebody’ (1996: 320). Bourdieu draws particular attention to the devastatingimplications of Baxandall’s work for traditional conceptions of art as akind of embodiment of Weltanschauung, implicit in Panofsky’s iconologicalmethodology and characteristic of hermeneutic approaches in the humanitiesmore widely. But the implications of Baxandall’s work went deeper thanthe history and sociology of art. Painting and Experience, Bourdieu argued,offered an exemplary instance of the reconstruction of the ‘specific logic ofpractical sense, of which aesthetic sense is a particular case’ (1996: 315).Bourdieu had been exploring this logic of ‘sensory knowledge’ since his earlystudies of Kabyle society. Such sensory knowledge, he argues, is mediatedthrough embodied practical schemas which involve no detour through consciousconceptual thought, as they are invested directly by actors in the material world




of objects. Due to the intellectualist blinkers of traditional social theory andcontemporary semiology, Bourdieu felt he had been unable fully to transposethese insights gained from his Kabyle studies into the context of the culturalproduction of a complex capitalist society until he encountered the work ofBaxandall (1996: 314–15).

Bourdieu offers a succinct and generally very acute account of many ofBaxandall’s key ideas. He draws particular attention to the ways in which what wemight think of as being radically discrepant dimensions of pictorial perception– the privileging of Mary as the mother of Christ and recognition of the vary-ing cost of different qualities of ultramarine blue pigment – ‘are intimatelylinked in the unity of a habitus’ in which the religious dispositions of thechurchgoer ‘are completely merged with the dispositions of a businessmanaccustomed 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 conceptualscheme.3 ‘To love a painting’, for an Italian Renaissance viewer, Bourdieuargues (1996: 319–20; emphases in original), ‘is to find a dividend there, torecover an outlay, getting something for one’s money, in the form of the richestcolours, the most obviously costly … pictorial technique’. There is also a ‘sup-plementary satisfaction’ in the artwork, ‘finding oneself in it entirely, recogniz-ing oneself, finding in the painting one’s world and one’s relationship with theworld’. Aesthetic pleasure, in short, is a kind of social narcissism, an ‘illusion’produced by the free play of the habitus, temporarily disengaged from the realsocial world. The kinds of practical schemas which have their real roots, andafford their real profits, in more fundamental institutional fields freewheel in akind of magical but socially meaningless harmony, incited by the objectifiedforms of the artwork perfectly adapted to the formal logic of those schemas.Aesthetic pleasure is an epiphenomenon of social structure, rather than consti-tutive of it; it leaves the world as it is.

This is a drastically reduced account of the concepts of an institution of artand of aesthetic pleasure found in Baxandall, collapsing the institutional embed-ding of quattrocento art in the religious field into rather narrowly material inter-ests of key patronizing classes. More specifically it ignores the refraction of thesocial interests of patrons and viewers through the religious institutions in whichRenaissance art patronage and consumption were embedded, and in particular‘the active institution of interior visualization’ through which the aesthetic formsof art works exercised their specific material agency, acting as affordances in thecreation of the affect proper to devotional viewing (Baxandall, 1972: 40–48). Itis precisely this value-added character of the aesthetic mediation of social prac-tices, the material agency of art in constituting social order rather than merelyreproducing it, that has been the focus of some of the most stimulating work inthe ‘new sociology of art’. Once again it is Baxandall, read very differently thanby Bourdieu, who has provided a key point of reference in formulating the newparadigm.




Michael Baxandall and Aesthetic Agency: Constructing the‘New Sociology of Art’

The most recent turn in the sociology of art, christened ‘the new sociology ofart’ by Eduardo De La Fuente (2007), has defined itself very much in opposi-tion to Bourdieu’s critical sociology of art. This new direction of researchfocusses less on the social background and determinations of art works and aes-thetic practices and more on the specifically aesthetic constitutive work whichsuch objects and practices perform when contextualized in artistic and othersocial fields. Baxandall’s Painting and Experience has offered an importantmodel in the development of this new approach, as indicated by one of its fore-most advocates, Antoine Hennion. Hennion (1995, 2007) sees Baxandall’swork as representing the culmination of a trend within the social history of artinitiated by Wackernagel (1981 [1938]) and continued most notably in thework of Francis Haskell (Haskell, 1980 [1965]; Haskell and Penny, 1981).Hennion argues that this approach is based on a double refusal. First, it refusesthe opposition between internalist history of art (focussing on the autonomousevolution of style) and externalist history of art (focussing on patronage and theart market as a kind of background to the history of style – an approach veryclose to what was to be developed as the production of culture perspective insociology). Second, it refuses the dualistic conception of ‘art and society’.4

Instead, it investigates all the ‘intermediaries’ between the work of art and thebroader context subsumed under the concept ‘society’: patrons, collectors, deal-ers, critics, guilds, studios, artistic techniques and technologies, ‘the heteroge-neous, partial and encased assemblage of humans, relationships, associationsand institutions’ (Hennion, 1995: 242).

By drawing on this tradition, Baxandall was able, Hennion argues, toreplace the grand but largely intuitive parallelisms drawn between artistic formsand cultural mentalities (exemplified by Dvorak’s art history as the history ofideas, or Panofsky’s classic iconological study of perspective), or between style andsocial structure (exemplified by the work of Arnold Hauser and FrederickAntal), with a micro-sociology of cultural practices. In particular he is able toanalyse how practices grounded in radically ‘heterogeneous’ social ordersinform 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 theantithesis of Bourdieu’s critical sociology, in which art, the artist and the art-lover are merely passive intermediaries for larger social determinationswhich have their raison d’etre elsewhere. The mediations brought to light byBaxandall’s analysis reveal the ‘moment of the work of art in its … performa-tive character’ (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 346). That is to say, the art workis not merely the end product of a series of causal determinations but itself hasan active character, ‘coproducing’ aesthetic pleasure and the formation of specificsensibilities in cooperation with the interpretive practices of viewers and listeners.The focus of analysis is on precisely these mediatory devices and practices by




means of which aesthetic logics (material properties of visual or musical stylefor example) are transposed into logics characteristic of other forms of socialorder and vice versa (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 350). In place of the ‘stableand necessary relationship between self-enclosed works’ and pre-existing socialorders characteristic of critical sociologies of art, Hennion calls for an ‘ethnog-raphy’ 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). Aesthetictaste, and the pleasure entailed in appreciating a work of art, is not the by-product of an extrinsic social determination but the result ‘of a corporealpractice, collective and instrumented’, through which the distinctive propertiesof repertoires of objects, from wine to oil-paintings, are made intensely presentto ‘sensibilities … train[ed] to perceive them’ (Hennion, 2007: 98, 108), exactlythe kinds of practice exemplified by Baxandall’s ‘period eye’ concept.

In the work of Hennion and DeNora, this approach derived fromBaxandall’s social history of art is elaborated and given in certain respects amore sharply sociological focus by drawing on theoretical perspectives derivedfrom ethnomethodology and the sociology of science, in particular the actornetwork theory associated with Bruno Latour.5 DeNora’s recent work in music-sociology (not sociology of music), alongside that of Hennion and his col-leagues, represents the most sustained exemplification of how this researchprogramme works in practice.6 Rather than locating meaning in the objectitself, as semiotic analysis has done, DeNora places the emphasis on the formalproperties of music becoming effective through processes of interaction bymeans of which the social is ‘inscribed’ into music and reciprocally musicbecomes an active agent in the ordering of social life, not merely a social prod-uct as the production of culture perspective would have it (Acord and DeNora,2008; DeNora, 2000). Eschewing broad parallelisms between musical struc-tures and social structures (‘reflection theories’), DeNora analyses in minuteethnographic detail how the musical ‘affordances’ of specific pieces are flexiblyinterpreted and put to work in different everyday-life contexts. DeNoradescribes how in a women’s clothing shop, the music of Enya, ‘slow paced andsomewhat languorous’, quite literally ‘recalibrates’ the embodied subjectivity ofshoppers, ‘seen to lengthen their necks and move in an almost balletic style’,tuning shoppers into the image of ‘hegemonic femininity’ that can be realizedby purchasing the styles of clothing this particular store sells (2005: 154–6).Music acts on and shapes social actors and their sensibilities, but that shapingis also in part the deliberate reflexive accomplishment of those actors, who‘prime themselves’ to be affected by the music through their configuration ofthe ‘listening situation’, and the specific practices through which they engagethe music (Acord and DeNora, 2008: 234; DeNora, 2005: 151–3). Back at theflat, curtains drawn, low lights and scented candles may facilitate the inscrip-tion of the same music into a different, though not unrelated, social scenario: agirl configures an evening with her partner as a time for slowing down at theend of a hectic day, soft, sensual and romantic; or a boy ‘enrols’ Enya as an




‘ally’ (in the ANT vocabulary), ‘chick music’, to progress a relationship towardshis 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 music-sociology are, perhaps unsurprisingly, anticipated for the sociology of visual artin Baxandall’s studies of Renaissance painting and sculpture. We can see this mostclearly in Baxandall’s The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980).The opening chapters of this study follow a familiar theoretical trail: the char-acter of limewood; the institutional functions performed by limewood sculpturesin the context of the church and its liturgies; the ways in which guild organizationregulated craft production, and how the material interests entailed by such astructuring of the market were registered in the specific character of altarpieces;the period eye of the patronizing classes in 15th-century German cities, shapedby an education in extraordinarily elaborate systems of handwriting, taught bythe so-called Modists, systems which inculcated a heightened sensitivity to line,its varying breadth and turnings, the character of its edges, the possibilities offlourishes. The last chapter, with the title ‘Individuals’ and subheadings simplylisting the names of four great limewood sculptors, does not look like obviouslypromising territory for sociologists. But it draws together the results of the ear-lier chapters in an analysis of a selection of major sculptures which demon-strates the same intimate commingling of the social and the artistic which is atthe core of the new sociology of art.

Particularly striking, in this chapter, are Baxandall’s accounts of the copro-duction of forms of subjectivity through the mutual entwinement of the specificartistic forms of sculptures and the constitutive interpretive practices of viewersin the larger institutional context of devotional viewing. It was this institutionalcontext, with the ‘urgent and complicated kinds of expectation and desire’(1980: 153) which it involved, that facilitated the inscription of what on onelevel are purely calligraphic flourishes into the social interaction between viewerand object of devotion. Baxandall compares two statues by the Nurembergsculptor 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 bypatient and submissive suffering. Andrew (Greek andreios ‘manly’) by contrastdid not submit to death even on the cross. In addition to being manifested intheir body-postures and attributes, this characterological contrast is echoed intheir drapery: the gravity-defying s-shaped flourishes of Andrew’s cloak mani-fest an independent energy, while their counterparts on Roche, a series of arc-ing edges and half-circles, framing the sore on Roche’s leg, droop sadly towardsthe ground (1980: 200–203). At the same time as making a display of theartist’s mastery of the specific material potentialities of limewood, these flour-ishes ‘profile’ – to use DeNora’s term (2000: 107) – states of body and mindwhich mediate the devotee’s interaction with the saints and give it in each casea distinctive mood, appropriate to the saint in question and his modalities ofaction. Art and society are not in the kind of zero-sum relationship characteristicof ‘critical’ sociologies of art. Richer formal analysis brings with it richer socio-logical analysis as part of the same analytical move.




The ‘interpretive flexibility’ (DeNora, 2000: 33, 43) of such sculpturalaffordances is well illustrated by the changing responses to the lavish and richlypainted drapery used for images of Mary and other female saints. This wasmodelled after the costly clothes worn by elite women at prestigious socialoccasions like dancing parties, and thus presumptively suitable to the Queen ofHeaven and her entourage. But, exploiting the potential tension between richparty dress and church decorum, reforming iconoclasts like Luther and Zwingliwere later to complain that such images were more like high class prostitutes,likely to corrupt their viewers’ morals, ‘represented so whorish, insinuating andgroomed, you would think they are placed there to arouse one to voluptuousness’(Baxandall, 1980: 88–92, quoting Zwingli). In practice such interpretive flexi-bility was limited by the visual set-up which framed viewers’ encounters withimages, and the interpretive techniques which they assimilated through partici-pation in religious services or as members of lay brotherhoods. The brother-hoods were a conspicuous feature of 15th-century piety and also often thesponsors of limewood sculptures. Baxandall (1980: 208–14) takes the exampleof a statue of the Virgin and Child, originally the centrepiece of a rosary whichwould 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 fiveroundels, depicting the Five Joys of the Virgin. These corresponded to the 50Aves and five Pater Nosters which were supposed to be recited as a componentof devotional viewing, three times over for members of the Brotherhood of theRosary, interspersing their 150 Aves and 15 Pater Nosters with lines from Latinhymns. As the viewer approached and circled the rosary, the statue was viewedfrom a range of different angles, each affording variant views of the Virgin andChild and facilitating the elicitation of a range of emotions matching the com-plexity of the Christian mysteries afforded for meditation by the sculpture, therosary and the prayers. Once again, the focus is very much not on what thework of art means (some kind of fixed immanent signification), but how itmeans, as one component in a network of mediations, from the framing of thestatue and its placement hanging at the end of the nave, to the behaviours andinterpretive practices through which viewers activate the sculpture’s affordancesand thus work upon the formation of their own subjectivity.

After Baxandall or back to Baxandall? The New Sociology ofArt and Beyond

The conceptual language of ethnomethodology and actor network theory usedby Hennion, De Nora and some other new sociologists of art, like Yaneva(2003) and Heath and Vom Lehn (2004), certainly helps to render moreexplicit, and transferable, some of the key features of Baxandall’s approach,and has resulted in an extremely fruitful programme of research. But against thebackground of these marked similarities, it is also important to draw attentionto aspects of Baxandall’s analysis which differ significantly from the approachof the new sociology of art, and may indicate in certain respects a more cogent




and powerful theoretical framework, if one which is perhaps too implicit andrequires some drawing out.

Consistent with their grounding in ethnomethodology and actor networktheory, Hennion, DeNora et al. emphasize the local, interactive and contingentcharacter of aesthetic agency. ‘The links between works and tastes are conjunc-tural and hence changing’ (Hennion and Grennier, 2001: 351). Articulation betweenartistic forms and socio-cultural action is ‘a process that is interactive, mutuallyconstitutive, but always locally produced’ (Acord and DeNora, 2008: 228).‘Culture is not a set of a priori categories that act on people and determine theircognitive processing in given situations. Rather, actors’ embodied and emo-tional reactions may play a leading role in determining how and even if cultureis integrated into action trajectories’ (2008: 234). It is easy to have some sym-pathy with these claims, which are perhaps a reaction against the structuraldeterminism of critical sociologies of art, and the work of Pierre Bourdieu inparticular. But such statements run the risk of fallacies of misplaced concrete-ness, that is to say formulating as concrete and mutually exclusive alternativeswhat should in fact be seen as analytical dimensions. The concept of ‘contingency’only makes sense in relation to a complementary concept of duration. The basicstructures of capitalism (the institutions of money and private property, and themoney-commodity-money circuit) are on one level contingent – they have notcharacterized all known societies in human history – but they are more enduring,less contingent, than, for example, the Italian lira proved to be. Without referenceto frames of duration (structures), invocation of ‘change’ and ‘contingency’ hasmore rhetorical than analytical value.7

It is equally a fallacy of misplaced concreteness to see ‘structure’ (whethercultural or social) as constraining in contrast to local and ‘contingent’ interac-tions as the site of choice and free agency. Wishing to highlight ‘local and hap-hazard sense-making practice rather than tacit mastery of a normative culturalcode’, 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 repertoiresof action grow out of these tactics in and through their observance, as cultural pat-terns of meaning making in response to particular situational and material affor-dances. (2008: 234)

Indexing an object or action under a particular context, however, presup-poses 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 orsituation. Such typifications and definitions of the situation, although oftenquite abstract, have culturally specific patterning and are characterized by vary-ing durations, but necessarily pre-exist the specific object they typify or the par-ticular situation they define. If we are to believe Garfinkel (1967: 1–34), theyare undergirded by socio-cultural a prioris with a durée of scope comparableto the Kantian categories, that is to say anthropological universals, the ‘etc.




principle’, ‘ad hocing’ and so on. It is only by virtue of such enduring culturalstructures, 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 pri-ori structures, typifications and definitions of the situation, as much as to local‘situational and material affordances’. The exact balance of the role of localinteraction and the a priori structures in the formulation and transmission ofnew cultural patterns will of course vary, and is an empirical question, notsomething 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 theirimmediate interactive environment.8 This creates a temporally very foreshort-ened view of the character of the agencies (and structures) at work. ChristianHeath and Dirk vom Lehn (2004) describe how, in the context of an exhibitionon Caravaggio, visitors actively make sense of the paintings they encounter. Theydescribe a young man and his parents looking at the Flagellation of Christ, andhow the son positions his body and moves his arms in such a way as to see, andmake visible to his parents, incisions on the canvass which indicate Caravaggio’sdesign process. ‘It would seem inappropriate’, the authors argue:

to suggest that abstract perceptual principles, cognitive models or socially structureddispositions predetermine the perception and experience of the picture. Rather, itemerges progressively through a complex configuration of action, bodily and spo-ken, through which the participants discover, see and experience the painting in par-ticular ways … The talk and bodily conduct of the participants, their gestures andthe like, do not stand independently of the objects and artefacts themselves; they areintelligible by virtue of the particular exhibit, just as the particular artefact or objectreflexively informs how the participants organize their conduct and make sense ofthe exhibit. (Heath and Vom Lehn, 2004: 52, 60)

But the choice of the boy to focus on the incisions was itself cued by exhi-bition notes on an A4 card, themselves just one index of the larger institutionalsetting in which the family encounter the painting. The relevance structure cuedby the notes, and enacted by the family, focuses on the designed form of thepainting as a manifestation of Caravaggio’s artistic genius, rather than, say,emoting over the content of the representation – the suffering Christ – as amember of Baxandall’s Brotherhood of the Rosary, viewing the painting in achurch, might have done. This relevance structure is mediated by and embed-ded in the larger and long established institutionalization of art as high culture.It draws on normative discourses of individual artistic creativity and practicesof connoisseurship which date back to the 18th century and are materiallyembodied in the design of the modern art museums: from their temple-like exte-riors, to the implicit narratives which determine the placement and ordering ofpictures, and the priorities implicit in the content and structure of labels(Duncan and Wallach, 1980). To be sure, the experience realized in the act ofviewing is certainly not wholly independent of the affordances of the paintingin question, but it is at least partially independent. It is only against the background




of this specific institutional structuring of art that one can make sense of thehighly generic dispositions which the young man and his parents bring to theCaravaggio exhibition and the particular painting, and how far and in whatspecific ways they differ from the performance and experience of viewing ofequivalent images which characterized the religious institutionalization of art inBaxandall’s 15th-century case studies.

These generic features of the mediation of art are of course well describedin Bourdieu’s The Love of Art (1969), and Paul DiMaggio’s (1982a, 1982b) finestudies of the institutionalization of high culture in 19th-century Boston havegiven us a good understanding of the historical process of the construction ofthe whole mediatory apparatus which still largely shapes our experience in artmuseums today. I do not mean to imply that both Bourdieu’s and DiMaggio’ssociologies 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 con-stitutive practices, at the expense of institutional analysis and the considerationof larger social structures, simply replaces one reductionism with another.Cultural codes and schemes exist and operate on many different layers and lev-els, of varying duration and spatial scope. The institutions and practices theyshape and afford also vary in their temporal and spatial scope, and we mustdevelop analytical frameworks adequate to that complexity (Sewell, 2005).

Baxandall’s historical monographs in fact show remarkable sensitivity toexactly these issues, and this represents perhaps the most marked differencebetween his work and that of the new sociology of art. It is also the dimension ofhis approach from which we still have most to learn today. As we have alreadyseen, Baxandall’s account of the workings of Veit Stoss’s rosary group of theVirgin and Child draws attention to the role of the Brotherhood of the Rosary inthe commissioning and consumption of such sculptures. On one level, the prac-tices of the lay brotherhoods are located by Baxandall in an institutional frame-work with a remarkably long durée and wide spatial reach. The institutionaldefinition of the role of images in the Christian church, as a means of instructionfor the people, dates back to late antiquity. The specific norms which defined theRenaissance institution of devotional art were codified certainly no later than the13th century (Baxandall, 1972: 41), remained valid in 15th-century Italy and15th-century Germany (Baxandall, 1980: 51–69), and were probably common tomost of western Europe before the Reformation (as indeed to much of CatholicEurope even today). On another level, however, Baxandall’s account of the broth-erhoods also points to the role of specific group figurations over shorter timescales, a changing balance of power in different groups’ control over that endur-ing institutional framework, and a sociologically significant inflection of the pos-sibilities for the shaping of religious and affective identities which it afforded. Thedevelopment of towns, and the intensification of craft production and exchange,afforded the increasingly wealthy lay members of the church greater influence inthe character of artistic elaboration of churches, mediated through their adminis-tration of the parish chest, at the expense of the clergy (Baxandall, 1980: 88). Itwas largely members of wealthy craft and manufacturing families who became




members of the brotherhoods and sponsored the limewood altarpieces withwhich Baxandall is concerned. Other changes Baxandall sees operating at differ-ent temporal scales, and involving social structures and social interactions of adiffering spatial scope. Long-term trends in the increasing interconnectedness ofthe southern and northern European economies led to leading families like theFuggers establishing branch offices in Italy. The Fuggers’ recourse to Italian artiststo decorate a chapel in Augsburg marked what Baxandall characterizes, echoingPinder (1926) and of course Mannheim’s (1993 [1927]) famous essay, as a gen-erational change, when Italianate style became an element of the cultural cir-cumstances within which limewood sculptors worked, and conversely a sense ofthe specifically German character of certain aspects the indigenous traditiondeveloped, fomenting the formation of a national style (Baxandall, 1980: 23,131–42). The Reformation, of course, represented a change of another order, aninstitutional transformation in the relationship between art and religion. It was inthis context that the potentially (and previously unnoticed) ‘whorish’ affordancesof some sculptures were drawn attention to by preachers like Zwingli and Luther,in widely distributed printed tracts which sought to transform the cultural frame-work with which viewers encountered such statues (Baxandall, 1980: 88–92).Iconoclasm, and the disarticulation of visual art from a reformed Christianitywhich privileged the word, spelled the end of the limewood altarpiece.9 A briefsummary is inadequate to bring out the analytical richness that characterizesBaxandall’s history of the limewood sculptures of Renaissance Germany, save tosay that it is throughout attentive to the hierarchical and layered properties ofsocial structures and cultural practices, characterized by distinctive temporal log-ics, whose conjunctural intersection explains the key transformations in thenature of the art, and the art institutions, with which Baxandall is concerned.

Conclusion

Notwithstanding these signal virtues, by sociological standards the frameworkemployed 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 spellingout again some of the key strengths of Baxandall’s approach as a model for thesociology of art. First, it integrates social analysis and visual analysis into a sin-gle framework, rather than attributing one to the sociology of art, and the otherto art history. Second, while being centrally concerned with the social and eco-nomic bases of art, grounded in systems of patronage and the social organiza-tion of production, it does not reduce artistic action to such bases. On thecontrary, it emphasizes the historically variable social construction of artisticagency, and in particular the role played by specifically material (aesthetic,depictive, visual) practices in the construction of such agency. Third, the viewerplays an active role in the social appropriation of art. Rather than simplydecoding works of art, as the approaches of linguistic structuralism orhermeneutics might suggest, viewers engage the specific material and aesthetic




affordances of works of art by deploying specific visual skills, of varying socialprovenance. In doing so, viewers make use of the aesthetic features of works ofart in structuring specific social activities, in mediating social relationships, andin shaping their own subjectivities. These different dimensions of analysis areintegrated through a focus on the institutional character of art, tacitly grounded inthe assumption that art is a functionally differentiated strand of culture, usingsensuous means to appropriate viewers’ perceptual responsiveness for the socialand cultural construction of affect for specific, institutionally defined, purposes.10

Far from leading to the kind of static or consensus oriented analysis that textbook critiques of functionalism might imply, Baxandall uses these assumptionsas an analytic framework for concrete historical analysis. This allows him toexplore how the different dimensions of the art situation which he identifies,manifested in specific ways in specific social and historical situations, interactover time in complex, variably conflictual processes of socio-cultural reproduc-tion and change. The core concept of art as institution permits Baxandall’s anal-ysis to reach from the micro level of specific engagements between viewers andworks of art, to the macro considerations of the relationship between art andthe broader social structures within which art is located. At each of these levelsart may potentially play a significant role in shaping processes of social andcultural reproduction and change, and is in its turn potentially subject to diverselevels and modes of social structuring.

If we can draw any conclusion from the uses made of Baxandall by differ-ent social theorists and cultural sociologists, it must be that any reading ofBaxandall is only one reading among a range of possible readings. These read-ings should be judged in terms of three criteria: their adequacy to Baxandall’swritings, their own internal theoretical coherence, and their fruitfulness in shap-ing future research in the sociology of art. My attempt to draw out the socio-logical dimensions of Baxandall’s approach has drawn its vocabulary fromNikos Mouzelis’s (1995) account of the complementary relationship betweeninstitutional analysis of sociocultural systems (along lines developed in thework of Talcott Parsons), and the figurational analysis of interactions betweengroups 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). Likeany reading of a classic text (cf. Alexander, 1987), my reading of Baxandall hasits own horizon, both intellectual and institutional, and functions as much asan argument in favour of a particular approach to the sociology of art as adescription of Baxandall’s work, namely a broadly neofunctionalist one.11 Butfor the purposes of this particular essay, perhaps more important than the com-petitive value of that research programme is my larger argument. Baxandall’sPainting and Experience and Limewood Sculptors should be considered as –and in fact in practice already are – classics in the sociology of art, texts whichwe can profitably reread and explore anew in the context of each paradigmaticchange in our discipline.




Notes

1 Note also Kenneth Dauber’s (1992) use of Baxandall as the basis of his use ofart (sculpture) to explore social contexts (the relationship between religion andsocial structure in Kamakura Japan).

2 To be fair, Alexander later (2003: 308) notes that Baxandall does also look atissues of production and reception, but she suggests that he is unable to inte-grate these different approaches, treating each in separate chapters, and thusseparating the sociological from the artistic. For my own part, I think Baxandalldoes see these three dimensions of analysis as integrated – through the conceptof institution which informs all three chapters – and as I will argue furtherbelow he in certain respects offers a theoretically more coherent approach thanthat 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’ssocial theory in general. For a good discussion, which I find largely persuasive,see Alexander (1995). For critical evaluations of the entailments of the logic ofBourdieu’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 verysimilar to Hennion’s, seeing art and society as ‘unhomologous systematic con-structions put upon interpenetrating subject matters’.

5 The affinity between Baxandall’s approach and ethnomethodology was firstdrawn attention to by Chandra Mukerji (1986), in a review of Baxandall’sPatterns of Intention, in the American Journal of Sociology. Actor network the-orists and Baxandall independently came up with similar analytical vocabulary,emphasizing the ‘heterogeneity’ of the practical networks which were the objectsof their analysis, and questions of ‘translation’ across such networks. LikeBaxandall and ANT, ethnomethodology has been very much concerned to con-test standard social scientific accounts of causality, emphasizing that society isnot so much the cause of actors’ behaviours as the accomplishment of theirconstitutive practices. For Baxandall’s most sustained reflection on the conceptof 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 astudy of artists ‘electing their own causes’ (1980: 164), with Hennion’s anal-ysis (2007: 102) of ‘making one’s determinations act’.

6 DeNora does not explicitly discuss Baxandall, but her work has been developedin ongoing dialogue with that of Antoine Hennion, through whom Baxandall’sinfluence is mediated. Another important study combining concepts from eth-nomethodology and the sociology of science with Baxandall’s period eye conceptis Chandra Mukerji’s wonderful study of the articulation of the formal design ofthe gardens of Versailles in the context of territorial practices of state-making in17th-century France (Mukerji, 1997). ‘The Pleasures of Military Culture’ (1997:82–97) is a superb analysis of the ideal viewer of classical French gardens. Thecounterpart to Baxandall’s churchgoing businessman with a taste for dancingwas a military man of noble background trained in visual skills of estimatingheights and distances, and mapping spaces in the contexts of siege warfare andthe design of military architecture, the bearer in short of a ‘surveying eye’ which




could enjoy the complex gradings and continually changing patterns of visibilitycharacteristic of the parterres and bosquets of Versailles.

7 Braudel’s classic essay (1980 [1958]) on the character of historical time inter-estingly discusses the work of the French art historian Pierre Francastel as anexemplary instance of an art historian who addresses the longue durée in thehistory of painting. Braudel’s insights are taken to a higher level of sophistica-tion in Sewell (2005).

8 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 showshow ‘the works through their mediums and restorations, and the way they havebeen gathered together, presented, commented upon and reproduced, havecontinuously reconfigured the frame of their own evaluation’; they ‘show usart gradually tracing the frame in which we ‘understand’ it … Just as music isa 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 thathuman agents, the institutional entrepreneurs of DiMaggio’s (1982a, 1982b)studies of the social construction of high culture, are downplayed to the pointof vanishing.

9 If ‘music is a history writing its own history, [and] a reality making its ownreality’, as Hennion asserts (2005: 135), we might suggest that during theiconoclasm of the Reformation, the limewood altarpieces were making theirown history, by being ‘whorish’, but making it in circumstances not of theirown choosing, to take up the echo of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.

10 The conceptual language I use here is of course that of Talcott Parsons’ accountof art as expressive symbolism (see Tanner, 2000), which seems to me whollyconsistent with Baxandall’s account of the ‘institutional ends’ of painting(1972: 40–48), though obviously more generalized, formulated on a level ofabstraction that does not presuppose the specific historical institutionalizationof art with which Baxandall is concerned in his Renaissance case studies.

11 The neofunctionalist research programme is perhaps best represented byAlexander 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 under-

stand 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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