Giovanni Morelli

The Morellian method is based on clues offered by trifling details rather than identities of composition and subject matter or other broad treatments that are more likely to be seized upon by students, copyists and imitators. Instead, as Carlo Ginzburg analysed the Morellian method,[2] the art historian operates in the manner of a detective, "each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting". These unconscious traces — in the shorthand for rendering the folds of an ear in secondary figures of a composition, for example — are unlikely to be imitated and, once deciphered, serve as fingerprints do at the scene of the crime. The identity of the artist is expressed most reliably in the details that are least attended to.[3] The Morellian method has its nearest roots in Morelli's own discipline of medicine, with its identification of disease through numerous symptoms, each of which may be apparently trivial in itself.[4] "Anatomical details were also important... in determining authorship. For instance, with Titian the thumb is given a high rating, because Morelli identifies fifty works by that artist in which the base of a man's thumb is abnormally developed." Morelli developed his method studying the works of Botticelli, and then applied it to attribute works to Botticelli's pupil, Filippino Lippi.[5] His fully developed technique was published as Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin (Italian Masters in German Galleries: A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich, Dresden, Berlin) in 1880; it appeared under the anagrammatic pseudonym "Ivan Lermolieff".[6] Morelli's "great antagonist, the art historian Wilhelm von Bode, even spoke of the spread of an epidemic of 'Lermolieffmania', after the mysterious Russian scholar 'Ivan Lermolieff'..., in the German translation by an equally non-existent Johannes Schwarze,[7] a resident of the imaginary Gorlaw, which is to say Gorle, near Bergamo". Today, the Morellian method extends to cognate disciplines, including literary studies.[8] Morelli's connoisseurship was developed to a high degree by Bernard Berenson, who met Morelli in 1890. The first generation of Morellian scholars also included Gustavo Frizzoni, Jean Paul Richter, Adolfo Venturi and Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes.

Morellian scholarship penetrated the English field from 1893, with the translation of his master work. The Morellian technique of connoisseurship was extended to the study of Attic vase-painters by J. D. Beazley[9] and by Michael Roaf to the study of the Persepolis reliefs, with results that further confirmed its validity. Morellian recognition of "handling" in undocumented fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sculpture, in the hands of scholars like John Pope-Hennessy, has resulted in a broad corpus of securely attributed work. At the same time, modern examination of Classical Greek sculpture, in the wake of pioneering reassessments by Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, has also turned away from attributions based on broad aspects of subject and style that are reflected in copies and later Roman classicizing pastiche. "Morelli's volume on German galleries contains an overview of Giorgione's oeuvre.... It is here that he proposes that the Venus in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie is by Giorgione—his most famous attribution." Jaynie Anderson wrote: The complementary field of document-supported art history traces its origins to the somewhat earlier work of Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle. Richard Wollheim wrote that Morelli contrasted The Morellian method of finding essence and hidden meaning in details has had a wide cultural influence. "A number of authors believe that Morelli actually inspired Freud's psychoanalytic method".[10] In Freud's 1914 essay "The Moses of Michelangelo", Freud "interpreted the Morellian method as predictive of psychoanalysis". Freud wrote that Morelli had overturned — The Morellian method was re-examined by Richard Wollheim in "Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship". Jaynie Anderson wrote, "Today connoisseurship matters as a fundamental skill in art history, and it is due to Morelli that it became scientific.... As art historians, we are all now Morellians to some degree."