The period eye is an analytical method used by art historians. The concept was devised by Michael Baxandall

Michael Baxandall

Michael David Kighley Baxandall, FBA was a British-born art historian and a professor emeritus of Art History at University of California, Berkeley...

 and described in his innovative Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style where he used it to describe the cultural conditions under which art in the Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 was created, viewed, and understood.

The concept

Baxandall argued that everyone processes visual information in the brain in a different way, using a combination of innate skills and skills based on experience, which are often culturally determined. He suggested that cultural factors influence the visual characteristics that are attractive at any particular time. The period eye examines how artists and their works functioned in their original social, commercial and religious context and has been called an "...anthropological analysis of a society’s visual culture." that "...emphasizes the cultural constructedness of vision...". The concept attempts to reconstruct the mental and visual equipment brought to bear on works of art in a particular place and time and "...the social acts and cultural practices that shape attention to visual form within a given culture."

Baxandall developed the concept in greater detail in the case-studies in The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980) and Patterns of Intention (1985).

Further reading

• Baxandall, M. (1980) The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. New Haven: Yale University Press
  Yale University Press
  Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....
  
  . ISBN 0300024231
• Baxandall, M. (1985) Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300034652
• Baxandall, M. (1988) Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192821447
• Rifkin, A. (ed.) (1999) About Michael Baxandall. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 0631211918

External links

• Art History Looks At Clifford Geertz by Dr. Jeanne S.M. Willette