Feedback Section to The Giovanni Morelli Monograph

Call for Feedback:

I would like to encourage readers of The Giovanni Morelli Monograph, if feeling stimulated, to get back to me. Simple errors (may there be as few as possible) I am going to correct immediately (online publishing, in my opinion, includes the permanent improving and revising – it’s all less finalized than a book, but it is also an open, and flexible, that is: inviting process). And I am also willing – and I would be delighted – to post essays, review essays, or reviews of any kind. Here. Only and single condition: Discussion should be fostered (contributions should be aiming to stimulate further discussion constructively).

Christopher Brown (picture: vimeo.com)

Current Morelliana

2015/2016: Christopher J. Nygren of University of Pittsburgh thinks about ›Giovanni Morelli, Or How to See a Renaissance Painting Computationally‹, which does show that questions, some of which are also raised in our chapter ›Digital Lermolieff‹ (Cabinet V), are in the air;

2016: Morelli’s 200th birthday (25 February) passes rather unnoticed; Bendor Grosvenor, taking notice (on 21 February) that scholars of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project (BRCP) seem to refer to Morelli, declares the Morellian method to be »redundant for about a century now«; what definition of the method is presupposed here (compare our Cabinet II) remains uncertain, since it seems hard to make a case for connoisseurship while at the same time dismissing the testing for characteristic properties altogether…

Also February: In an online article on Digital Humanities and Visual Studies in the ZfdG – Zeitschrift für digitale Geisteswissenschaften (originally published in 2015) Katja Kwastek reminds that already at the end of the 1980s a software tool named ›Morelli‹ had been developed…

April: Charles Hope, who is among the few art historians willing to question the authority of connoisseurs like Giovanni Morelli (and also Roberto Longhi!), repeats some of his views (compare also our Cabinet II) on occasion of the Royal Academy of London’s Giorgione exhibition (which has probably not yet taken into account the very dubious history of the so-called ›Giustiniani portrait’s‹ attributional history (for the latter see my monograph on Jean Paul Richter who, backed by Morelli, was the one to claim responsibility for the attribution to Giorgione); see also my paper on Louise M. Richter, newly deposited on this website; for the most extensive discussion available on how Morelli addressed the problem of Giorgione (vs. Titian) attribution see here;

May/June: Everyone interested in the worlds of the art connoisseurs should welcome the new biography of Max J. Friedländer by Simon Elson. We get to know that young Friedländer studied with Anton Springer (who was probably responsible to transmit a rather simplified version of Morellianism, stripped of all nuances and ambiguities, a version that translated into the nice, but all too simple formula ›Ohr stets so‹ [›ear always like that‹]; compare p. 101, and compare also what we said in our Cabinet IV) on Morelli as seen by Friedländer (and Bode). In fact: it rather seems that the connoisseurial practices of Friedländer and Morelli, the practices of two equally sensitive, but also very different men, had much more in common than one would at first glance assume. While the sources as to Friedländer do not seem to really allow to observe Friedländer’s practices (in the case of Morelli we do see more; and Friedländer’s brilliant laconic miniature portrait of Berenson on p. 107 ([…] »Begann in London von Schönheit des Sonnenuntergangs zu sprechen – dies bei Duveens, die leicht lächelnd vorbeihörten.« […]) reminds us of what we are missing, if missing actual 5-pages expertises by Friedländer that would allow us to actually see what he did see (in a particular case, in a particular picture). We will come back to that in our Book of Expertises). In the meantime we recommend to do what Simon Elson does recommend at the end of his very readable book: to consider every section of this biography as a sort of architectural construction that welcomes any visitor/reader to go further into the very section and to investigate yet deeper.

June: »Shades of Morelli here«, in Christopher Brown’s beautiful lecture at the Madrid Codart conference: which means, we may add critically, in a rather typically ambivalent reference to Morelli, that the Morellian argument is used if it does suit (the depictions of hands in the Johannes Wtenbogaert portrait, shown on the left), while a rather traditional approach to connoisseurship is recommended, and less a Morellian (by which, also typically falsely, is understood an isolated focussing on ›insignificant detail‹). – Is it indeed Morelli’s fate to end up as this false art historical textbook cliché? That totally does misunderstand the status and original context of the single Morellian argument, which was not meant to replace the traditional general assessment (of composition, of iconography, of style in general, etc. etc., but to be added to it; check, again, our Cabinet II, as well as our presentation of ›expertises by Morelli‹). And which ascribes a simplistic approach to Morelli which he did neither recommend nor practice. – Brown also does observe and describe, as to the history of the Rembrandt Research Project, a return to traditional connoisseurship, combined with a striving to scientific objectivity. And if this is indeed the case (we have our doubts, since traditional connoisseurs, often self-interested, often tend to be averse as well to scientific standards of full verifiability and transparence), if this is indeed the case, this would not be anything else than a return to Morelli (without those ›returning‹ obviously knowing it).

Also June: By accident I have discovered that the official Hermitage catalogue first made mentioning of Lermolief[f]/Morelli in the 1899 edition (see for example p. 82)…

October: No mentioning of Morelli in the new Sigmund Freud-biography by Peter-André Alt. Do we have to worry?
I don’t think so, and this for two reasons: firstly it is hardly a surprise that interest in the genealogy of psychoanalysis has languished, given that the predomimant question in this day and age is rather: ›what’s left of (Marx and) Freud?‹
Secondly: Giovanni Morelli is the kind of historic person that will appear, disappear and re-appear – like the hero of a picaresque novel – in the most divergent contexts: Morelli has not left the building, nor the Vienna of Sigmund Freud; but we see him appear today rather in the context of deep learning, of a rethinking of style criticism, and perhaps in the context of a general rethinking of positivistic classification systems.
Especially if the latter is in fact the case, we will see Morelli soon reappear, and perhaps also next to Sigmund Freud (who regarded him rather as an important influence, something that Freud yet only signalled marginally…).

November: One single mentioning of Morelli I found in Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Sigmund Freud en son temps et dans le nôtre of 2014 (this one mentioning, of course, indebted to Carlo Ginzburg). Future Freud-biographers might start from scratch: perhaps by thinking about the role of Moritz Thausing for Morelli (and perhaps for Freud as well). See here.

December: We hail the important contribution by Dorothea Peters on Morelli and photography (see: Dorothea Peters, Auf Spurensuche. Giovanni Morelli und die Fotografie, in: Herta Wolf (Ed.), Zeigen und/oder beweisen? Die Fotografie als Kulturtechnik und Medium des Wissens, Berlin 2016). On this occasion we’d like to add that Morelli, as a young student in Paris in 1839, witnessed the introduction of the Daguerreotype, as we already have pointed out in our monograph. But it is worth referring once more to the (not extant) letter Morelli wrote to his friend Genelli about all this, and to the – extant – letter by which Genelli, an artist, answered to an obviously enthusiastic Morelli (see here; and for the context see now the fine documentation by Steffen Siegel: Steffen Siegel (Ed.), Neues Licht. Daguerre, Talbot und die Veröffentlichung der Fotografie im Jahr 1839, Paderborn 2014). – For Morelli and his – often and very characteristically ambiguous – use of photography see also here.

(Picture: royalacademy.org.uk)

(Picture: exlibris.ch)

From the ›Morelli‹ software tool (picture: ZfdG.de)

(Picture: chbeck.de)

Please do contact me (Dietrich Seybold) via:

D.Seybold@bluewin.ch

Thank you, and enjoy The Giovanni Morelli Monograph!

Go To:

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | HOME

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | Spending a September with Morelli at Lake Como

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | A Biographical Sketch

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | Visual Apprenticeship: The Giovanni Morelli Visual Biography

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | Connoisseurial Practices: The Giovanni Morelli Study

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | The Giovanni Morelli Bibliography Raisonné

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | General Bibliography

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY:

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Visual Apprenticeship I

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Interlude I

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Visual Apprenticeship II

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Interlude II

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI VISUAL BIOGRAPHY | Visual Apprenticeship III

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY:

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet I: Introduction

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet II: Questions and Answers

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet III: Expertises by Morelli

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet IV: Mouse Mutants and Disney Cartoons

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI STUDY | Cabinet V: Digital Lermolieff

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