Previous Posts: August 2012

Isn't there a marked difference between "knowing who painted something" & "connoisseurship"?

As a medievalist I'm frequently confronted by works which have no clearly attributed artist. Some artists are distinctive by particular stylistic traits and can be termed "the master of such and such", but many remain anonymous. Although this restricts our knowledge of artistic development, it does not diminish our appreciation of the works that have been produced.

If anything, might it liberate our perception of each work in its own right, rather than as part of an overall body of work related so significantly to personality? Surely the world would breathe a sigh of relief if we could remove the attribution from Damien Hirst's dot paintings?

Just a passing thought!

From about the late 1970s onwards, art history as a discipline saw a considerable reaction against connoisseurship, and by extension the whole question of making attributions based on visual evidence. In essence, the study of the object, be it a painting or a sculpture, became less important than the study of its context. Some art historians went so far as to declare the very notion of authorship irrelevant, their thesis chiming with the growing trend amongst historians to turn away from the study of the individual (not to mention the rise of literary criticism). As a result, both art history and history as disciplines increasingly focused on identifying other elements that determined historical and art historical ‘outcomes’, be they economic, social, or gender based, in a headlong quest for generalisation. And since connoisseurship inevitably involves a detailed biographical study of an individual artist, connoisseurship as a skill became less valued. The shift of emphasis in both history and art history is best reflected in their respective historiographies – modern historians wrote fewer biographies, and art historians wrote fewer catalogue raisonnés.

As a lifelong  art “appreciator” but no connoisseur, my favourite game is to go into a gallery and see what I can recognise – and then of course read up on the info to learn from my mistakes: I have to know who created everything.  And yes Gombrich has helped to educate me.  

Also having fun with a book I ordered accidentally on Amazon (trying to find another by same author) “Masterpiece” by Thomas Hoving where the curators of the Met. have shared their game of bringing along a small detail of a painting and making others in the team work out where it is from (and improve their connoisseurship).  Beautifully printed too with nice scholarly essays at the end of the book, on each of the paintings from which the details are derived. 

Yes please go into lit. crit. and history teaching – I was so badly taught that it has taken me until (almost) retirement to start reading it for pleasure – shocking really.

Interesting debate and I have a partial answer to your question. As an artist I'm a big fan of Constable's sketches and the insight they give into his approach to the more 'finished' studio work. If no one knew who painted either then I for one would be the poorer for it, so in that sense I appreciate the connoisseurship behind the attributions...

There has been a  recent flurry of posts on various websites focusing on the state of “connoisseurship” today.  I have been reading them with a mixture of frustration and nostalgia: Frustration at the generally overwrought tone of  the discourse;  Nostalgia because “connoisseurship vs. the new art  history” brings back so many memories.  

When I returned to the States in 1980, after finishing a D.Phil. at Oxford with Francis Haskell on Medici art patronage and collecting, I took up my first (and presumably last) university post—in the Fine Arts Department (as it was then known) at Harvard University.  And I tumbled head over heels into a raging controversy—one that I never even knew existed.

There was a fight to the death between the old-line “object-oriented” art historians (a.k.a. “connoisseurs”) and the younger  “contextual”  art historians (like myself).  It was one of the most poisonous academic environments that I have ever seen outside of Italy and there were many external agitators stirring up trouble.  (I even  received an “anonymous”  threatening  phone call  at two in the morning from a distinguished member of the Departmental Visiting Committee!)

By the time I left Harvard in 1987, however,  the “discourse” had shifted and I was dodging the political correctness commissars,  not the connoisseurs, in American academe.  “History of patronage and collecting” had been  reclassified as elitist and insufficently theoretical.  The  defining moment came when The Art Bulletin sent back a proposed article accompanied by a bizarre ideological diatribe.  What gave me the right to discern “quality” in art, thereby implying that some objects—and by implication, some people—were “better”  than others?  Etc. Etc. Etc.  (I published the article elsewhere, by the way.)  It seemed a good time for me to go back to Florence and back to the archives—where I have been ever since.

I have always been committed to the essential role of  “connoisseurship” in art history, but without silliness and mystification, of which there is far too much.  (For the record, I prefer “visual analysis”,  but the “c-word” doesn’t drive me crazy.)  For those of us who wish to rehabilitate this body of skills and practices, it seems a mistake (strategic and otherwise) to put so much emphasis on one-off identifications—attributional magic tricks, so to speak. When  someone states, point  blank, “This is Raphael because this is Raphael  (full stop).”, it trivializes a complex and subtle process –and it doesn’t do nearly enough to help us understand the work of art.

I find it far more interesting when a  “connoisseur”  says something like, “I saw your picture. It looks like Bergamo or Brescia to me, not Venice, probably a little later than your are thinking. Have you considered those two altarpieces in San Giovanni in Alto and Santa Maria in Basso? Why don’t you put your picture in the middle and see what you can do with them?”  

I personally see “connoisseurship”  (or “ trained visual analysis” ) as the engine that powers art historical research of many kinds (needless to say, I am thinking primarily of Western Art from the 13th through the 19th centuries).  It puts us on the ground in a particular place and time;  it starts us thinking about the terms of the commission and the use and meaning of the object;  it tell us where we should start looking for documentation. And so on…

...'connoisseurs' (and I am unashamedly one, trained at the last, or until very recently, unashamedly connoisseurial art history department in the country ie. Cambridge) have always come in for a bit of stick. Hogarth famously blasted them (‘those who go to France or Italy for studies…talk of antiques in a kind of cant in half or whole Italian…and bring wonderfull copies of bad originals Ador’d for their names only…’) and rather touchingly told Hester Thrale to meet Dr Johnson: ‘whose civilization [he said] was to other men’s like Titian’s painting compared to Hudson’s: but don’t you tell them now that I say so for the connoisseurs and I are at war you know, and because I hate them, they think I hate Titian, let them!’

I particularly love this cartoon, showing the embodiment of the unmentionable c-word.

I am a little lost in all this "art historians vs. connoisseurs" discussion...  I am not an expert, but most of the essays by art historians I read seem to be written by people  (such as Federico Zeri, Gombrich, Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi) pretty knowledgeable of matters of style, and often discussing attributions....

My reply to [Prof. Dana Arnold] would be to sidestep apologias which pay lip service to the squeamishness of those who feel uncomfortable when confronting the limits of their knowledge. Nothing is more exciting than to be pushing the boundaries of one’s ignorance by making discoveries. Enquiry and curiosity bridge the gulf of exclusion and launch one on an adventure of learning. Those who want to know will make it their business. So give them something to work on, like the excellent book by Mary Acton, Learning to Look at Paintings.

I can't help feeling you've called this one slightly wrong. I can't see that much to object to in the offending paragraphs by Dana Arnold [...]

Each of her paragraphs introduces a distinct usage of 'connoisseurship.' In the first, it's connoisseurship as you set it out in your blog post about the newly attributed Ramsay picture. That connoisseurship such as this is elitist is beyond doubt; like any specialist expertise, it is attained by only a talented few, after years of study. What is debatable is whether elitism per se is a good or bad thing. I suspect you read her comments as implying that it was unattractive, that 'elitist' is not merely a descriptive but a value-laden word & perhaps this is how she meant it too (if so, that is unfortunate). Elitism has certainly gained a bad press in recent years.

In her second paragraph, she introduces the other historical usage of the word 'connoisseur', meaning someone who has a certain taste in works of art. Her comment that notions of taste are bound up with ideas of social class, among other social and cultural factors, is surely uncontroversial. The idea that taste can be used as a weapon of social exclusion is also surely right. For example, through history the newlly-rich have used art as a passport to social acceptance. Even today, I wonder how many have walked past your shop window and thought, wow, if I had some of that on my walls then I'd really have arrived? When mega-rich businessmen & oil-rich Arab states build huge collections of contemporary art, they are really building their social & cultural identities. This, too, is why well-brought up young men and women throw themselves at the art trade: so that they can learn - if not real expertise, then at least some of the language of 'exquisiteness', because they know that some social value attaches to the possession of knowledge of art. And quite right too: if art did not have this power, it would not... have any power!

But in your initial response to Dana Arnold's paragraphs, it seemed like you had muddled up the two distinct usages of connoisseurship and, in particular, that you read her second paragraph as describing the connoisseurship she had defined in her first paragraph. As you identify yourself as a connoisseur in her first sense, naturally you took offence at being atttacked under the terms of the second sense. For example, you asked if seeing Leonardo's Salvator Mundi was not enjoyable because 'it was the result of elitist intimidation.' But Dana Arnold wrote of elitism in the 1st paragraph, in relation to connoisseurship as a specialist skill, and intimidation in her 2nd, in relation to connoisseurship as a social marker. You ask 'if a connoisseur is a specialist, then what has this got to do with taste... with social class?' Well, not much, as her paragraphs make clear: connoisseurship as a specialism is para 1, connoisseurship in relation to taste and social class is para 2. Your defence of connoisseurship ('just because connoisseurship is a long, foreign-sounding word...') defends the first definition of the term against the accusations of the second.  Dana Arnold says that the connoisseur's world 'does not belong to art history' - she is clearly talking about the second usage of the term, not the first and, in that, she is surely correct?

I'm enjoying the connoisseurship debate, and I agree with you. That said, I think your brief comments could be interpreted as bending the stick too far towards saying that attribution is everything. To take one example among many, Jules Lubbock is in my opinion a first-rate art historian. His book on Storytelling in Christian Art is an excellent piece of art-historical scholarship. But I wouldn't see him as a connoisseur - he relies substantially on others' judgments about attribution, and focuses on other aspects of art history.  Yes, attribution is an essential basis for saying anything sensible about art, but art history would be rather arid if that were all it were. Just to be clear, I'm not attributing that view to you, and I don't think that any of this is disagreeing with you.

There's much more to be said on this, I think, and some interesting parallels with other academic disciplines - especially literary criticism.

Part of the Academy's mission was to teach. It still should be. In that regard, the Academy has to be exemplary: not a kindergarten, but a place that upholds the primacy of difficult skills that leak from a culture and are lost unless they are incessantly taught to those who want to have them. And those people are always a minority. Necessarily. Exceptions have to be. 

In the 45 years that I've been writing criticism there has been a tragic depreciation in the traditional skills of painting and drawing, the nuts and bolts of the profession. In part it has been caused by the assumption that photography and its cognate media—film and TV—tell the most truth about the visual. It's not true. The camera, if it's lucky, may tell a different truth to drawing, but not a truer one. Drawing brings us into a different, a deeper and more fully experienced relation to to the object. A good drawing says “not so fast, buster”. We have had a gut full of fast art and fast food. What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water; art that grows out of modes of perception and making, whose skill and doggedness makes you think and feel; art that isn't merely sensational, that doesn't get its message across in seconds, that isn't falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our nature. In a word, art is the very opposite of mass media. For no spiritually authentic art can beat mass media at their own game.

It appears in that famous verse from Vergil's Georgics II. 490 Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas - 'happy the man who figures out the causes of stuff,' in the context - being a good farmer means understanding the land and the seasons.

It's taken up as a motto for deductive science, but it's equally applicable to connoisseurship. 

The only thing that stops art history from being as much as science as anything else worthy of the name is periodic outbursts of inverted snobbery like the one you quote from that appalling-sounding book. 

Parallel cases are a good test of absurdity. We could sideswipe the pretentious physicist with their elitist 'quarks' and 'neutrinos.'

I have a similar experience [to] today's contributor on connoisseurship/university. Having completed both a BA, MA and part of a Ph.D at Sussex, the only time any object handling/connoisseurship occurred was a lunch time optional course at the Barlow Collection (which is sadly no longer at Sussex) on Chinese ceramics. At that time Sussex arguably had the best Art History department in the country - Nigel Llewellyn, Evelyn Welch, Norbert Lynton, David Mellor, Craig Clunas, Maurice Howard etc. The course was heavily centered around philosophy/methods/approaches etc. Having attended fine art/antiques auctions since I was in nappies (at 32 I'm still the youngest person I ever see at auctions), I took my university friend who'd got a first (I'd got a 2:1) to Julian Dawson's saleroom in Lewes. Whilst I was busy rummaging and making notes, she asked me 'how can you tell what's a print and what's a painting?.' I expect her essays were brilliant though...

You've written two posts called "Why connoisseurship matters", but you haven't actually explained why it matters yet.

How about 'Vincent'  (as in 'Vincent Van Gogh, I'm off'...) - Vincent is also the name of a Classic Bike - but you probably knew that - & my Dad had one. Or

the 'Duc-arti'

Sorry! Terrible I know, but I'll keep thinking…

Shame you didn't buy a foot-powered boat; 'Tiziano Vecellio, pedalo'.

I always find that when it comes to naming automobiles, they should be as feminine as possible or at least masculine but very funny or very catchy. I don’t think ‘I’m off to ride Anthony’ sounds quite right. Perhaps you should have called it simply the Dyck Bike (removing the Van as it might mislead people who don’t catch the ‘Bike’ bit).

• Edward Hopper - chopper
• Antonio Pollaiuolo - motociclo
• Carlo Maratta - motocicletta

OK, last two a bit of a stretch!  I like the approach - I name my bicycles after Shakespearean characters, and my cats after communists (Lenin, Trotsky, Jessica Mitford - AKA Decca).

'Triumph of Venus?'

At least its gender is clear.

If you ever buy a "Piaggio" you can call it "Caravaggio".

'Triumph Bonnardville'

In the Museo del Prado Website you can find a High Quality Image of  17th Century copy of the picture by the spanish painter and son in law of Velázquez, Martínez del Mazo, possibly painted for Prince Baltasar Carlos chamber in Royal Alcazar of Madrid.

One wonders how much the artist responsible for the copy recreated what was missing already.

Perhaps not as much as Rubens, whose full size version I would love to see – it’s at Knowsley Hall and may one day come into public ownership.

Fascinated by the recent posts but still somewhat in the dark about the difference between connoisseurship, academic study, etc.  So I thought I would tell you a couple of stories.....

My first year of studying Art History in London was 1979-1980 and among the courses I opted for was one along the lines of an introduction to Baroque painting: the seminars taking place in front of actual paintings at the National Gallery.  The course was led by a distinguished art historian and eventually came around to dealing with Rembrandt.  There we all stood in front of a particular picture being instructed on the artist's style and approach when I ventured to suggest that, while a fine painting, this one was possibly not by Rembrandt himself. I pointed out what I thought were significant differences in style between it and other, undoubtedly authentic, pictures nearby - the technique especially seemed to me to be wholly different and inconsistent. Because the work in question was a celebrated example of Rembrandt's work, and I suppose it was not within the compass of the teaching, my views were summarily dismissed.  This was that picture [above].

Later that year I took another course on 18th C French painting, starting with Watteau and arrived at a seminar excited by something I had just seen.  I think I was almost certainly the only student who regularly went to previews of old master sales at auction houses and, having just been to Christies, I informed the group of the appearence of a version of Watteau's first Embarkation for Cythera - which was up for discussion.  Relaying details of the picture, I noted that, to me, the version generally accepted as the original at the time had major problems with it - frankly it always looked too weak even for an early Watteau and too fussy - while this new contender looked exactly like what one would expect Watteau to have painted.  Again, not a scintilla of interest even though a comparison between the two would have provided a fascinating discussion on what uniquely constituted Watteau's style of painting.  (The painting at Christies was estimated around £30K, sold for £100K more than that - [to a New York art dealer] - who sold [it] for around £500K to the Frankfurt gallery.  Last time I saw it was at the great Watteau exhibition in Paris in, I think, 1984; by which time it had been generally accepted as the original.)

I suppose what distinguished my approach from my peers was that I actually looked closely at works - and as many as possible, which was not acknowledged as an important part of the programme of study.  Detailed examination of works, and attributions, were for specialists and it was much more important for us students to concentrate on generalities - cultural contexts and so on.  Thing is though, useful generalities are based on details and without becoming as familiar as possible with those, conclusions can lie on potentially shaky ground.