Dates

• Existence: 1933 - 2008

Biography

Michael Baxandall was born on 18 August 1933 in Cardiff, the eldest child of David Kighley Baxandall (1905-1992), museum director, and his wife, (Sarah) Isobel Mary, née Thomas (1905-1990). His twin sisters, Edith and Jennifer (known as Mary and Jane), were born in 1938. Baxandall received a classical education at Manchester grammar school and went on to read English at Downing College, Cambridge (1951-54). In 1955 Baxandall enrolled as an External Student for B.A. in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and went to Italy for a year, staying at the Collegio Borromeo and studying in Pavia, and then proceeded to St Gallen, Switzerland, in 1956-57 for a year teaching English and studying German. In the following year (1957-58) he went to the University of Munich and sat in on classes with Hans Sedlmayr, a well-known and somewhat controversial figure who had published a popular book on art called Verlust der Mitte in 1948 (published in English as Art in Crisis: the Lost Centre, 1957). Michael did not take to Sedlmayr and after a time based himself at the Central Institute for Art History. The Director of the Institute, Ludwig Heydenreich, was an Italian Renaissance scholar whom Baxandall admired. Consequently Baxandall decided to attend Heydenreich's course on Urbino and write for him, rather than for Sedlmayr, the paper he felt he ought to produce. In the summer of 1958 Baxandall returned to London and was given a job in the photograph collection at the Warburg Institute. There he met Katharina Dorothea (Kay) Simon (b. 1926), who worked in the same department. She was the daughter of Francis Eugen Simon, professor of physics at Oxford. They married on 6 April 1963 and had a daughter, Lucy (b. 1963), and a son, Thomas (b. 1968). In 1959 Baxandall was awarded a two-year Warburg research fellowship. He studied with Ernst Gombrich, who became Baxandall's dissertation adviser on the topic of decorum and restraint in the Renaissance, a thesis that Baxandall never completed. In 1961 he took a job at the Victoria and Albert Museum where he was eventually given responsibility for cataloguing the collection of German sculpture. His work there, augmented by summer trips to Germany sponsored by the museum and discussions with his colleague Terence Hodgkinson, led to the research that resulted in his book 'The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany' (1980). Meanwhile, in 1965 Gombrich offered Baxandall a lectureship in Renaissance studies at the Warburg. He was promoted reader in 1973 and professor in 1981. In 1986 he was offered a chair in the history of art at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became a permanent member of the department the following year and stayed until his retirement in 1996. Baxandall's two-year Warburg fellowship in 1959-61 and his collaboration with Gombrich led to his first publication, a short entry co-authored with Gombrich, in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (Jan 1962). There followed, in quick succession, a series of three articles in the same journal over the next three years (1963-65). Each of these articles examined humanist texts that dealt with art and laid the foundations for his ground-breaking book 'Giotto and the Orators' (1971), in which not only the vocabulary of the humanists but the conventions and even the styles of humanist writing were correlated with aspects of pictorial culture. The book opened up an entirely new and expansive way of considering the relationship between writing and painting. In subsequent books Baxandall continued to expand the frontiers of the art history discipline, introducing new topics, new ways of writing, and new explanatory models. In addition to the award of the Mitchell Prize for the History of Art, the highest accolade for an art history book (for Limewood Sculptors in 1980), Baxandall was awarded the Edmund Gardner prize for his contribution to Italian studies in 1972, appointed Slade professor of fine art at Oxford in 1974 (his Slade lectures leading to Limewood Sculptors), and made a fellow of the British Academy in 1982. In the United States he was A. D. White professor-at-large at Cornell University from 1982 to 1988 and was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation award in 1988. Also in 1988 he was awarded the city of Hamburg's Aby M. Warburg prize. He was a Getty scholar in 1994-95. He died at the Royal Free Hospital, London, on 12 August 2008 of aspiration pneumonia, and was survived by his wife and his two children. Sources: Allan Langdale, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; private information

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