Peter Mack is Professor of English at the University of Warwick and a Fellow of the British Academy, UK. Robert Williams is Professor of the History of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

• Contents: Introduction: Of tact and moral urgency; The visual conditions of pictorial meaning, Alex Potts; ‘To do a Leavis on visual art:’ the place of F.R. Leavis in Michael Baxandall’s intellectual formation, Jules Lubbock; Baxandall and Gramsci: pictorial intelligence and organic intellectuals, Alberto Frigo; Art history, re-enactment, and the idiographic stance, Whitney Davis; Inferential criticism and Kunstwissenschaft, Robert Williams; The presence of light, Paul Hills; Printing and experience in 18th-century Italy, Evelyn Lincoln; Pattern and individual: Limewood Sculptors and A Grasp Of Kaspar, Peter Mack; Michael Baxandall’s ‘stationing’, Elizabeth Cook; Index.

'The book is a palpable record of a powerful mind.'--CAA Reviews'Adopting a range of approaches, the contributors to this volume make a compelling case for the ongoing importance of Baxandall's art historical writing. Revealing the succession of intellectual identities that constituted his extraordinary career, we re-discover the Leavis disciple and "Burkhardtian" Renaissance historian of the 1950s; the philological student of humanist writing on art that emerged in the following decade; the social historian of the 1970s; and the "inferential critic" of the 80s and 90s together with the late return to the Renaissance in Words for Pictures. Anyone who cares about the role of history and criticism in writing about art will want to read this book.' --Stephen Campbell, Johns Hopkins University, USA