From Period Eye to Niche Eye: Re-situating Renaissance Painting in a Landscape of Affordances

Abstract In this article, I use current theorizsation in philosophy of mind to reappraise art historian Michael Baxandall’s account of the ‘period eye’. Baxandall coined this term to capture the culturally distinctive ways in which paintings were produced and perceived in fifteenth-century Renaissance Italy. Based on a critical reading of his cognitive-–perceptual account of pictorial apprehension, I argue that the period eye is essentially relational and therefore irreducible to the exercise of any capacity bound solely to the mind of an individual beholder. More specifically, I re-conceptualize the period eye as a set of affordances, or a niche, which comprises the possibilities for skilled action in the beholder’s material and socio-cultural environment. I also suggest that the term ‘niche eye’ better captures the phenomenon at stake and accommodates the possible co-existence of various equally appropriate ways of apprehending pictures during any given historical period.