MICHAEL BAXANDALL (1933–2008)

Michael Baxandall, one of the most influential art historians of the second half of the twentieth century, has passed away, according to Charles Saumarez Smith in The Independent. Baxandall studied in Italy at the University of Pavia and in Germany at the University of Munich. His book The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany, published to great acclaim in 1980, was said to have originated in his time as a lonely postgraduate student seeking consolation in the museums of mid-1950s Munich. Baxandall was appointed assistant keeper in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where he worked for four years on German sculpture. A university lectureship at the Warburg Institute in 1965 enabled him to devote himself to research that led to the publication of his first book, Giotto and the Orators, after which Baxandall was invited to be a professor of fine art at Oxford.

The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany won the Mitchell Prize for art history. Baxandall was awarded a chair by London University in 1981 and was made a fellow of the British Academy in 1982 but was increasingly lured away to the United States, where he was appointed professor at large at Cornell University, was given a MacArthur Foundation award, and became a half-time professor of the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1987.