MICHAEL BAXANDALL, who died aged seventy-four on 12th August, is best known for his radically new approach to analysing the social and cultural significance of works of visual art. He sought out interconnections between specialised ways of looking and visual discriminations operating in artistic culture and more widely shared habits of viewing and visual expertises which were part of everyday experience and ritual practice within a society. He was attentive to nuances of meaning in the language used in artistic theory and criticism, and this, combined with his creative insight into cultural practices shaping the making and viewing works of art, gave real substance to the term the ‘period eye’ that he coined. One of the greatest minds to have worked in the field of the history of art over the past century, he deserves to be ranked alongside classic masters of the discipline such as Erwin Panofsky. He was, though, uneasy with the designation of art historian. In a typically self-depreciating gesture, he perversely listed his profession on his passport as that of ‘antiquary’. While very much a genuine intellectual, he was sharply sceptical about the displays of theoretical virtuosity that came to be expected of academics in the humanities. Characteristically he subtitled his most widely read book, Painting and Experience in Renaissance Italy (1972), ‘A Primer’. He was born on 18th August 1933 in Cardiff, where his father was Keeper at the National Museum, and attended Manchester Grammar School when his father was appointed director of the City Art Gallery. At Cambridge studying English as an undergraduate, he came under the influence of two key figures: William Empson, whose wry intelligence and subtle understanding of the operations of language and rhetoric were formative for his studies of the language of art criticism in Renaissance Italy, and, most importantly, F.R. Leavis. The sense of ethical purpose that Leavis brought to the analysis of literature proved crucially important for him, particularly the belief that a great deal was at stake in how one approached the interpretation of works of art. In 1959 he became a junior fellow at the Warburg Institute where he pursued the research that lead to his first book, Giotto and the Orators (1971). This played a key role in the linguistic turn taken by art history in the 1970s – directing attention to how the operations of language shape response to and interpretation of works of art. In relating the conventions of the art critical writing that emerged in the Renaissance period to those of the rhetoric central to education and literary culture in the early modern period, he offered a model for marrying technical understanding of language with sensitiv­ity to subtleties of visual effect that language can evoke indirectly – a virtuoso achievement. In 1961 he was appointed assistant keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum where he worked on late medieval and Renaissance German sculpture. This curatorial experience enabled him to move easily between the museum and academic worlds, and fostered his unusually creative but also down-to-earth interest in the materiality of works of art. In his article ‘The Language of Art History’, published in 1979 in New Literary History, he suggested that theoretical pontif­icating on art history made him want ‘to scuttle away and existentially measure a plinth or reattribute a statuette’. He returned to the Warburg Institute in 1965, eventu­­al­ly becoming Professor of the History of the Classical Tradition. At the time, the Warburg Institute stood for an art history conceived, not as a specialist study as it was then at the Courtauld Institute, but as part of a broader exploration of culture and society. Baxandall offered an unconventional class on Renaissance sculpture at the Courtauld Institute that went into technical details of workshop practice such as accounting. He was a powerful if somewhat elusive intellectual presence – engaging in informal conversation with people in the Warburg’s darkened corridors and library stacks. These conversations ranged from scholarly discussion to chat about the state of the field, and eccentric excurses into his extra-scholarly interests, such as the technicalities of apple growing. In his later years at the Warburg, he published two major studies. Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany (1980), his most ambitious book, relates complexities of form in German carved wood sculpture to distinctive ways of working made possible by the properties of limewood, as well as to the partly manual, partly intellectual forms of virtuosity cultivated in script writing and musical performance, and to changing attitudes to devotional imagery brought to a head by the Reformation in Germany. It remains an exemplar of how to write the social and cultural history of an artistic tradition, and it also revolutionised the study of sculpture. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (1985) was a complex and in some ways baffling intervention into the debate about the scope and limits of art-historical analysis, and marked the beginnings of his new interest in the art and thought of the Enlightenment. Baxandall took up a position as Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1987. A few years later he began to play a less active role in public intellectual life because of the onset of Parkinson’s disease. His talents as a thinker and writer, however, remained undiminished. His contribution to a volume honouring Gombrich, Sight and Insight (1994), carried off a peculiarly Baxandallian feat – teasing out from a close examination of a seemingly simple, possibly banal, but slightly disruptive detail in a painting by Georges Braque, the painted image of a nail with a realistic shadow, a fresh understanding of the complexities of visualising things that characterised early Cubism. The book, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence (1994) which he wrote with Svetlana Alpers, is much the most illuminating study of this widely admired but little understood eighteenth-century master. It bears testimony to a genuinely fruitful collaboration between two exceptional minds. Shadows and Enlightenment (1995) marks the beginnings of his ‘late’ style as creative thinker and scholar. It confronts issues that might seem tangential, but actually bring one to the very heart of an understanding of visual depiction. Baxandall was preoccupied by the paradoxical nature of visual attentiveness, exploring how one’s understanding and visual perception of things proceeds by way of an alternation between focusing on a phenomenon, and opening up to free-ranging, undirected, ‘peripheral’ engagement with it. If one fixates on a shadow, for example, without releasing one’s attention for time to scan it in a broader, less fine grained way, one loses a sense of its significance and it easily becomes a monstrous or indifferent blank. It is a tribute to Baxandall’s scholarship that he could integrate such basic questions about ways of seeing with exacting, technical discussion of eight­eenth-century optics and theories of perception and of modern scientific studies on the processing of visual input by the eye and brain. His last book, Words for Pictures (2003), includes a brilliant study on the The Resurrection of Christ by Piero della Francesca. This offers a compelling demonstration of how to draw out the larger significance of a work by attending to odd subtleties and aberrations of depiction, which might at first seem inexpressive and tangential to the drama depicted, but in the end are seen to embody the seriousness of purpose that animates the picture.