Interview with Michael Baxandall February 3rd, 1994, Berkeley, CA

Abstract

The following interviews with Michael Baxandall were conducted in Berkeley on February 3rd and 4th of 1994. The content of these interviews include general responses about developments in art history in the years between 1960 and 1985, a period of dramatic modifications in the discipline. Among the issues are the rise of the social history of art and the sources from anthropology that informed Baxandall’s concept of the ‘Period Eye’. Baxandall talks about his own work, his personal intellectual history, and the scholars of past and current generations who influenced him. Other topics include Baxandall’s professional trajectory, the Warburg Library, and aspects of cultural history having to do with Renaissance Humanism. These interviews first appeared as an appendix to the PhD dissertation by Allan Langdale, Art History and Intellectual History: Michael Baxandall’s Work between 1963 and 1985, U. C. Santa Barbara, 1995.