ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews major trends in the evolution of the model from Vasari to the nineteenth century, highlighting the monograph's analogical structure and its characteristic ascription of psychic properties to artworks. It proposes how Bernard Berenson's 1895 monograph on Lorenzo Lotto embodies both climax and swan song in the history of the model. The chapter suggests that the outlook of the artist's monograph is the bearer of a dangerous if compelling method that favours anarchy over art-historical protocol and the recognition of quality and uniqueness over computable data and genealogical assessment. The monograph's history suggests that the ongoing interchange between these parallel realms may provide the basis for a study that dialectically encompasses several polarities, ranging from author and work, biography and oeuvre to identity and difference, being and nonbeing. It is particularly tempting to imagine that the model may develop its noumenal implications, relinquishing any mandatory connection with empirical data or rigid conceptions of subjecthood and human identity.
