ABSTRACT
In his brilliant “Critique of Connoisseurship,” the third of his 1960 lectures on “Art and Anarchy,” Edgar Wind lamented the prejudices associated with modern methods of attributing Old Master paintings. Giovanni Morelli had influentially proposed that in order to distinguish the hand of the master from that of the copyist, the connoisseur had to focus precisely on the things that the copyist would not have learned: the most seemingly minor, marginal, unintended, and inexpressive parts of the painting, the passages where “the artist himself, no less than his imitator, is likely to relax in their execution.” While not denying the effectiveness of the method-he conceded that Morelli’s attributions were “spectacular” and that Morelli’s principles provided the foundations for practices that effectively sorted out the authorship of a wide range of works-Wind found it “disconcerting” to locate art entirely in the hand, the touch. Morelli’s approach to painting required adherents to mask out every feature of the work that might seem reflective, since these were precisely the things onto which copyists were likely to have fastened. To Wind, Morelli looked not like an art historical Sherlock Holmes or a pioneer of modern scientific method, but rather like an old Romantic:
Whatever smacked of academic rule or aesthetic commonplace he dismissed as deceptive, hackneyed and unrewarding, and withdrew from it to those minute and intimate perceptions which he felt to be the only safeguard of pure sensibility. Clear-sighted about the logic of his method, he came to regard the study of drawings as more fundamental than that of paintings. The spontaneous sketch retained in its freshness what the labours of execution tended to stale.1
