The self-aware image Book

Here, Baxandall attempts to make the study of painting legitimate by the standards of a historian, by attempting to deduce the cultural and historical reasons that a work of art looks a certain way (i.e. who commissioned the piece and for what purpose, how does a given piece fit into the oeuvre of its artist, with what other artists or theories of the time was the artist recorded as being in dialogue). He makes a thorough case for this approach, but he leaves no space for the meaning of a work to exceed the intention of its maker--in fact, he states explicitly that he's not at all interested in reading paintings as "texts" with symbolic or iconographic meaning. As such, he largely sidesteps the questions of interpretation in which I'm interested, and so, despite the clear style, this book bored me to tears. Likely a disciplinary issue: sorry, art historians.