ABSTRACT
The public appetite and admiration for 'scientific' connoisseurship grew as the art market expanded. Collecting old masters, in spite of the tricky problems of attribution, was eroding the trade in the work of contemporary academicians. The idea of the connoisseur, as someone with an eye, in possession of specialist knowledge, sorting the detritus of earlier ages, separating the true from the false, had captured the imagination. The iconography of the connoisseur’s cabinet of curiosities goes back to the sixteenth century and to the beginnings of private transactions around works of art and antiquities, the motif of Lotto's Portrait of Odoni. The relationship between the savant and the populaire was changing rapidly. Aristocratic taste, formerly concealed in the country house, newly popular as a result of the widespread dissemination of reproductions and cheap monographs, was everywhere.
