The Life of Giovanni Morelli in Risorgimento Italy

Abstract

What do the connoisseur, detective and psychoanalyst have in common? This serious riddle was inadvertently raised by the historian Carlo Ginzburg in a brilliant article published more than a generation ago. Ginzburg triangulated art connoisseur Giovanni Morelli with no less than Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud in order to characterise how their methods of direct observation are relevant to histories and theories of knowledge. If close looking, attention to detail, and comparative analyses matter to inquiry, then the question has lost none of its potency today (even if it ends with a disavowal). Pointing to the influence of the connoisseur on the very founding of psychoanalysis, as much as the art of the detective, Ginzburg even used the verb morellising to characterise the methods of all three. Yet of the three subjects featured—Morelli, Freud and Holmes—it is easily Morelli who would be deemed the more obscure. Why? Perhaps this is because Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891) is so closely identified with connoisseurship, his name now a method for attribution, above and beyond any of his other accomplishments. Today connoisseurship is often differentiated and even severed from art history as an outmoded or elitist approach that is endemic to old master paintings. Yet for better or worse, ascertaining authorship remains a current project, central not only to the Rembrandt Research Project, but also the Andy Warhol Foundation and authentications of Banksy’s work, to name but a few examples. From auction houses and the art market to the catalogue raisonn e, connoisseurs have long flexed their muscle and show no signs of abating. This was made abundantly clear in 2017 with the sale of a Salvator Mundi for US$450 million, a sale enabled by experts who declared the painting to be by the hand of Leonardo da Vinci. While connoisseurship may be rarely discussed and even derided in university classrooms, its methods and outcomes are clearly relevant to broader arts industries, as much as public perceptions of what the study of art entails and enables. Art historians are well positioned to critically evaluate such practices. Why has connoisseurship become synonymous with the art market and the commodification of art? When exactly did connoisseurship emerge as an established practice, and what role did Morelli play? And what exactly is the ‘Morellian method’? Professor Jaynie Anderson’s excellent and extensive biography of Morelli—the first—offers an opportunity to consider these questions through the lens of a