“A fifteenth-century painting is the deposit of a social relationship”: so begins an epoch-making book by Michael Baxandall. 1 In other words, the work of art is to be understood as the consequence, the remains, the residue from a set of practices within society, especially the power exercised by patrons, institutions, and finances. It is a brilliant, but disturbing, metaphor that seems to diminish agency and turn art objects into pieces of automatic writing dictated by one particular strand of public culture. Now, this very compelling account of art has been extraordinarily fruitful, notably by providing a vital corrective on the methodological lamenesses of connoisseurship, formalism, and the cult of personal interpretation — not to mention the fact that great scholars like Baxandall have always succeeded in bringing their awareness of social relationships into a dialogue with other factors. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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