Resumen de Connoisseurship, Painting, and Personhood
This essay brings into focus the place of fiction-making in the 'scientific' connoisseurship of Giovanni Morelli and his most notorious follower, Bernard Berenson, in order to recover something of its critical potential. It centres on connoisseurship's dream of inventing what Berenson termed 'artistic personalities': a new kind of agent whose existence would depend on neither the narrative structures of Vasarian biography nor the truth-effect of historical documents, but rather on the evidence of the eye alone. Read one way, such inventions seem to mystify professional practice, conjuring spurious authority out of thin air. Yet read another, the very fragility of the circuit that runs between artist and author takes us to the paradoxical constructed nature of artistic personhood itself. Herein, it is argued, lies the value of Morellian connoisseurship. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
