[myegorov]

Painting and Experience in 15th Century Italy by Michael Baxandall

[profunctor]

This is unusual in these types of threads. Could you expand on this answer? Why and how did it change your life?

[myegorov]

I can trace some drastic changes in my own life's trajectory to this book. Baxandall treats a familiar subject in starkly unfamiliar terms. Putting it in context but not making it any more relatable as it would be in a work of fiction or scholarly microhistory. Rather he works out some fundamental relations, social networks, kin structures, schooling and tribal knowledge, higher cortical functions etc. from the basic principles. The canonical works of art (lesser known but no less striking when presented through this lens in his Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany) served me as a vehicle to self discovery.