Dietrich / TheGiovanniMorelliMonograph

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH BY DIETRICH SEYBOLD

Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891), the Italian art connoisseur of Swiss descent is, by name, known to almost every art history student in the world. He ranks among the classics of the field, indeed as a classic that even had some impact beyond the field of mere art historical studies, for example on Sigmund Freud, ranking also as a kind of art historical ›Sherlock Holmes‹.
Nonetheless: Giovanni Morelli, whom contemporaries used to see not only as a connoisseur of art, but also as a ›Welt- und Menschenkenner‹ (as a ›man of the world‹ and as a ›connoisseur of human nature‹) is rather little known, and not only as a person who, among his contemporaries, and due to his very aimable nature, and due to his distinctly waggish sense of humour very in particular, enjoyed a tremendous popularity among his large circle of friends.
The present volume attempts to portrait Giovanni Morelli in a new way, and this in a double sense: In that it attempts to offer a visual biography, a biography of the eye of Giovanni Morelli, following his visual experiences, in a word: his life-long visual apprenticeship.
And in that it aims, in its second part, to study the connoisseurial practices of Giovanni Morelli, beyond a cliché-laden image of the Morellian method, in depth, thus becoming also a working tool, offering also working materials for everyone interested in connoisseurial practices and in the culture of connoisseurship in general.

This monograph is to be considered as a contribution to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Giovanni Morelli in 2016 (February 25) (I am going to finish the book, also my contribution to the history of the e-Art book, to this date); picture above (portrait of Giovanni Morelli): detail of photograph after reproduction of a portrait by the Prussian Crown Princess Victoria, later called Empress Frederick/Kaiserin Friedrich, in: Bora (ed.) 1994, p. 267; original in private collection; small picture on top on the left: op. cit., p. 91 (detail from original photograph being used here); small portrait on the left: DS; after a photo print, kept by the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome; detail; pictures from Giovanni Morelli’s collection: lombardiabeniculturali.it; orthography of German 19th century sources: slightly modernized throughout (except quotes from important published monographs).

I recommend to quote The Giovanni Morelli Monograph, for those interested, as follows: Dietrich Seybold, The Giovanni Morelli Monograph, Basel 2016, [with the address of the page with the quoted section following, or with the main address following; a pagination is not necessary, since searching tools can be applied on every section].
As to my general policies in using images: no source indicated means that an image is public domain and taken from Wikipedia; pictures with limited licences on Wikipedia are quoted according to that licences; yet published other pictures are quoted here, according to Swiss law, and with sources indicated; and unpublished materials are only being made public here, if a permission has explicitly been granted.

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH TABLE OF CONTENTS:

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

(Picture: villacarlotta.it)
Spending a September with Morelli at Lake Como Read more

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | A Biographical Sketch
A Biographical Sketch

A Biographical Sketch Read more

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

(Picture: verdi.passioneperlacultura.it)
Visual Apprenticeship: The Giovanni Morelli Visual Biography Read more

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

(Picture: youtube.com/swissinfo.ch/hand of Alexander Perrig)
Connoisseurial Practices: The Giovanni Morelli Study Read more

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | The Giovanni Morelli Bibliography Raisonné
The Giovanni Morelli Bibliography Raisonné

The Giovanni Morelli Bibliography Raisonné Read more

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH | General Bibliography
General Bibliography

(Picture: exurbe.com)
The Giovanni Morelli Monograph General Bibliography Read more

This Giovanni Morelli monograph is based on a full study of Morelli’s correspondence with Munich-based artist Bonaventura Genelli (the most important biographical source as to Giovanni Morelli’s younger years; and also on a full study of Morelli’s correspondence with his pupil and apprentice Jean Paul Richter (the most important source as to the Morellians’ connoisseurial practices).
Both correspondences are written in German and have never been used to full extent in Giovanni Morelli studies.

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I am putting The Giovanni Morelli Monograph online, confident as to the new possibilities of online publishing, and especially the new possibilities of building and structuring a visual biography online, making use of the various tools of flexible interlinking and flexible visualizing.
It goes without saying that this Giovanni Morelli monograph, a full monograph, dedicated to the founding father of ›scientific connoisseurship‹, a book that encompasses a biographical part (Visual Apprenticeship) and a part dedicated exclusively to connoisseurial practices (The Giovanni Morelli Study), is/will be written based on and according to scientific (academic) principles.

See by the way also my The Carl Adolph Mende Study.

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PREFACE

A single molecule could be fit, the German chemist Justus von Liebig said once to the Italian Risorgimento politician Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, to throw inert materia into a dither. This was pointed, of course, to Risorgimento politics, the metaphor was taken from chemistry, and it was said in the early 1850s when such a word could be meant (and was also fit) to encourage a Risorgimento politician (see Stadler 2001, p. 103).
But throwing inert materia into a dither – this was exactly the effect Giovanni Morelli had, a single cheerful and generally good-humoured molecule, when entering the stage of European art connoisseurship in the late 19th century, Giovanni Morelli, who was, which is often rather forgotten, also a politician, and the one cheerful molecule with a distinctly waggish sense of humour, here, was also an Italian senator, wearing, at times, a silk hat.
Giovanni Morelli was a human individual who does present a historian, a biographer with many difficulties – not the least because he was tremendously popular among his friends. In other words: while it is easy to understand why he was popular, it is also about not to loose one’s critical stance. And we will not spare to say for example that Giovanni Morelli cherished many preconceptions; but neither we will spare to say that, on a human level, he was also inclined, when becoming passionately attached to people, to easily forget about his general preconceptions. A warm-hearted individual he was, without any doubt, loyal as to friends (and also, not to forget, passionately loyal also as to his enemies). And if one smaller weakness had to be named, one might say that he was lacking patience and that he could easily get bored.

But it is not about assessing strengths and weaknesses of a tremendously interesting individual in the first place, it is about what makes this individual tremendously interesting. And we will portrait Giovanni Morelli mainly from two different sides: For one we will take him seriously as a connoisseur of art whose impact has been wide-ranging for what he did say, for what he didn’t say, and for what he preferred to leave in equivocalness. And secondly we will take him seriously as a visual person and as a not-only visual person.
Taking him seriously as a connoisseur of art means here: to be more rigid, more severe than tradition has generously been with him, and also more favourable, more generous. Because we will dedicate the second part of this monograph exclusively to an in-depth study of his connoisseurial working practices. Practices that tradition, all too often, has, while preferring to discuss the notoriously famous Morellian method on a mere theoretical level, neglected to discuss.
But times have changed, an interest in scientific standards in attributional studies might raise again, and our tools how to organize and how to make complex processes of comparative looking transparent, comprehensible and replicable have improved. In a word: style criticism (which is what we mean here when using the term of ›connoisseurship‹) could be improved, because improved tools of visual management would allow it to be improved.
We actually do dispose of tools to visualize the working with formal analogies, tools that the 19th century could only dream of. But while these tools, and many other scientific aids have developed throughout the 20th century, scientific connoisseurship has rather stagnated, to put it mildly. And the wide-spread cliché-laden image of the Morellian method speaks volumes as to the having fallen into half-oblivion of once much discussed claims and ambitions as to scientific standards.
If connoisseurship does mean the mystification of the mere eye, the mystification of the mere looking, contemporary culture has already fallen much behind Morellian ideas, because, unlike the cliché-laden image of Morelli – this connoisseur of art did fully respect the intuitive eye, but only to the degree that he expected the results gained by the mere looking to be challenged by what he called the rigid study of form, supposed to control what intuition felt (or knew without thinking); and the obligation to bring forward good and solid arguments, to back up or to refute certain attributions of works of art, reasons meant to challenge, to verify and, if possible, to harden the mere hypothesis, won by intuition, does mean, on a most fundamental level, an obligation to the logic of the good reason. And this, on a most basic level, is what science is all about (beyond the mere claim, beyond the mere name-giving, based on split-second intuitions; and there is no single reason why connoisseurship should not take into consideration split-second intuitions, but neither is there a good reason why one should leave it with this).
But this monograph is not exclusively dedicated to Giovanni Morelli, the connoisseur of art and his attributional expertise, methodological ideas and practices. The first part of this monograph, is dedicated to the visual experiences that he did accumulate throughout his life – until finally, only in the second half of his life, actively aspiring to become a connoisseur of art at all.
In that we are working with visual materials here as much as possible, and in that we also do think about how to use these materials best, we follow the aim to become better acquainted with a visual, and with a not-only visual, but without any doubt highly sensitive person. With someone whose visual sense was acute, but who also was a literary person, a very educated person, and not only a contemplative person, but also, at times, a person active in the picture trade, in politics (and in war times being active also as a freedom fighter and as a political lobbyist).
This book is about the visual education of a not only visual person, about the visual experiences, but also about the insights that, in various fields of life, he was able to accumulate. And although Giovanni Morelli did not exactly leave us with memoirs of his visual experiences – we follow his visual apprenticeship, his visual education, and in providing a visual biography of a connoisseur of art, we stick to this guiding idea: what if Giovanni Morelli had provided us with visual memoirs? What would he have provided us with – he whom some who knew him at the end of his live called also a connoisseur of human nature and a man of the world (compare Münz 1898, p. 87; Seidlitz 1891, p. 350; Conway 1914, p. 8, p. 42), he who preferred to remain rather secretive and not to disclose his complicated identity to the crowd –, what would Giovanni Morelli have provided us with, if he had provided us with memoirs of his life as a (not only) visual person? And what could there be for us to learn from it?

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Acknowledgements

Index

Miscellaneous

Feedback

Go To:

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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Thematic Features – an Index:


(direct links; a few seconds loading time is due to the necessary loading of the whole section with the respective feature)

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Art Connoisseurship – Interim Report I (1833-1840)

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Art Connoisseurship – Interim Report II (1840-1856)

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Art Connoisseurship – Interim Report III (1857-1873)

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and the German Literary Scene of the Pre-March Era

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli Experiencing Nature

FEATURE | Visiting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli in 1848/49

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Jacob Burckhardt

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and the Cholera

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli Assisting Other Collectors

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle

FEATURE | Interiors of Connoisseurship

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and the Caricature

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Russia

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Raffaello Sanzio

FEATURE | A Virtual Guestroom

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Crown Princess Victoria

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and the Connoisseurial Tradition I: Antecendents

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and the Connoisseurial Tradition II: Followers and Heirs

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Sherlock Holmes

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Wilhelm Bode

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli and Vienna

FEATURE | Giovanni Morelli on Time, Progress and the Future of Science

FEATURE (outside The Giovanni Morelli Monograph) | Giovanni Morelli and Leonardo da Vinci

FEATURE (outside The Giovanni Morelli Monograph) | How to Tell Titian from Giorgione

A VIRTUAL GUESTROOM

›I am awaiting you for the first days of the coming month here in 14, Via Pontaccio, and your companions in sleeping, the Ferrarese Grandi, Garofalo, Panetti as well as the Tuscans Pesellino, Matteo di Giovanni and Neroccio, in days to come are very impatient to make your personal acquaintance. I should hope that, under the custody of Madonnas and Saints, you are going to sleep gently and sweetly – which, as I do think, will be a reassurance to your spouse.‹
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»Ich erwarte Sie für die ersten Tage des kommenden Monats hier in Via Pontaccio Nr. 14, und Ihre künftigen Schlafgefährten, sowohl die Ferraresen Grandi, Garofalo, Panetti als die Toskaner Pesellino, Matteo di Giovanni und Neroccio sind sehr ungeduldig, Ihre persönliche Bekanntschaft zu machen. Ich will hoffen, dass Sie da, unter der Obhut von Madonnen und Heiligen, sanft und süss schlafen werden – was, wie ich denke, Ihrer Frau Gemahlin zur Beruhigung gereichen dürfte.«

GM to Jean Paul Richter, 22 September 1880 (M/R, p. 128f.; all pictures: lombardiabeniculturali.it)

ONE) My book on Morelli’s apprentice Jean Paul Richter
can be ordered here (picture: amazon.de)

AND TWO SUPPLEMENTS
TO
THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH:

TWO) Read online here

THE GIOVANNI MORELLI MONOGRAPH BY DIETRICH SEYBOLD

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
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