Preface

Baxandall, Michael

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Preface

Michael Baxandall

Shadows and Enlightenment

This book is a discussion of shadows and their part in our visual experience. More particularly, it juxtaposes modern with eighteenth-century notions about shadows with a view to benefiting from a tension between them. Some other historical periods have also had interesting ideas about shadows, of course, but the book is not about these. …

Author

Michael Baxandall

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00111.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-13756

Preface

This book is a discussion of shadows and their part in our visual experience. More particularly, it juxtaposes modern with eighteenth-century notions about shadows with a view to benefiting from a tension between them. Some other historical periods have also had interesting ideas about shadows, of course, but the book is not about these.

Chapter I is a short introduction on the physical constitution of shadows, and a preliminary differentiation of the physical types.

Chapter II sketches the eighteenth-century empiricist/nativist issue of the role of shadow in perception of shape. The story has already been well told by others, particularly Jean-Bernard Mérian [1770–80] and Michael J. Morgan (1977), but it is a base-line for the next three centuries’ thought and must briefly be established here.

Chapter III looks at what seem to me the more interesting results of late twentieth-century research on shadow perception by cognitive scientists and machine vision workers. Its materials are rather discrete because shadow perception as such is not really an isolable functional domain in cognitive science.

Chapter IV deals in some detail with a previously neglected episode, the mid-eighteenth-century shadow observations of what I refer to (mainly for the convenience of a label) as Rococo Empiricism – some of the observers being artists, some scientists: these observations are quite different in their thrust from both the previously described bodies of thought, and I believe they are still interesting and valuable. The terms Rococo and Empiricism are used in the broadest sense.

Chapter V tries to set these three shadow universes in some relation to each other, partly by touching tangentially on the issue of visual attention to shadow through the special issue of the status of shadows in painting. It is inconclusive, but the topic is shadow, and this chapter is not offered as art criticism.

An Appendix situates and summarises the shadow theory of Leonardo da Vinci, which had a strong though partly underground influence in the eighteenth century, as it still does.

The book was written out of an interest in looking at shadows and any reader will need the same, but it is coloured by being an offshoot of work-in-progress on problems of visual attention in eighteenth-century thought, in modern thought and in the art of painting. Attention is such a diffuse or tentacled concept that it touches most areas of visual perception, and shadow is certainly one of those areas: so much so that one may question whether attended and unattended shadows are the same thing; or (to put it another way) whether shadows survive attention.

A word about the Bibliography. Since the book involves itself with three distinct fields, the works cited are heterogeneous and must be highly selective. Books recommended for specific topics may be located by referring to the Notes by sections: sections may be located, if that is necessary, by referring to the Contents.

In the case of the cognitive science I obviously know that no items are included too technical for an art historian (say) to profit from. Most of the references are to handbooks, chosen partly for their good bibliographies, with further titles. For articles I have worked a great deal from such book-form collections as those of Horn and Brooks (1989) and Rock (1990). Not being a regular reader of the journals, I have gone to them only for specific items when pressed by special relevance, learned of through recommendation or citation in the other literature. This means two things: if a reference is to an article in a journal, as Lehky and Sejnowski (1988), it is essential; and secondly, given the nature of scientific publication, I am not up to date.

In the case of eighteenth-century books I have tried to use readily available modern editions, preferably in print, when adequate ones exist. These have references in which the date of original publication is given in square brackets – as Condillac [1754]: this means a modern edition is being used and cited. The original chapter and section numbers are then also often cited, for those using other editions. Modern facsimile reprints (cited as ‘repr.’) of books not available in modern editions are mentioned when known; anyone working in such a field is much obliged to such reprint firms as Minkoff of Geneva and Olms of Hildesheim, to name only two.

In the case of the art history the referencing is deliberately minimal. In a field so choked with repetitious bibliographies, it seemed better to cite just the works with the specific material or ideas in hand – as Hills (1987) – and the works where the best general information and further bibliography is found – as, Subleyras (1987) – and leave it at that.

The draft of the book was written in summer and autumn 1991 in London, Sainte-Cécile-les-Vignes (Vaucluse), Vowchurch Common (Herefordshire) and Paris, localities and seasons named because in one way or another specific shadow landscapes from them enter the argument. During and for some time before this period I had the benefit of support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, to which I am much indebted; in particular, I should certainly not otherwise have had time for the dispersed kinds of reading involved in the book. The draft was revised in autumn 1992 at the start of a year at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, to which I am also indebted, and I am particularly grateful to the librarians of this institution for their skill and determination in finding some previously elusive books. I am also grateful to James Griesemer and Eörs Szathmáry, colleagues in Berlin, for referring me to literature I had not known.

Before this, a graduate seminar on Rococo-Empiricist shadow theory, HA 262, in the spring of 1991 at the University of California, Berkeley, had turned out to have been a preparation for pulling a book together. I mention here those at Berkeley who responded most at that time: Svetlana Alpers, Harry Berger (at Santa Cruz), Evelyn Lincoln, Nina Lübbren, William MacGregor, Michael Podro, Patricia Reilly, Elizabeth Schott, Frances and Randolph Starn. And I am grateful to Tom Baxandall for the photograph reproduced as figure 11.

Finally, I owe a great deal to Gillian Malpass and John Nicoll of the Yale University Press in London for the good will, care and skill with which they took on and realized an awkward book.

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