Academic Session 17: Reading 2013
39th Annual Conference and Bookfair
University of Reading
11-13 April 2013
The Knowing Gaze: The shifting role of the connoisseur and connoisseurship in art and its histories
Session Convenors
Jordan Mearns, University of Edinburgh, Jordan.mearns@gmail.com
Tom Denman, University of Reading, t.h.e.denman@pgr.reading.ac.uk
Although increasingly viewed as a retrograde and deeply conservative art historical methodology, notable by its absence from many recent art historical ‘readers’ and ‘critical terms’ texts, connoisseurship has indisputably played a formative role in the development of the discipline of Art History. While connoisseurship is traditionally defined as the rigorous formal and visual analysis of art works, since the 1970s the ‘new art histories’ have levelled accusations of myopia, the employment of loaded value judgments and the creation of an impermeable canon, thus casting the practice as an anachronism. The figure of the connoisseur has long been a trope visualised in ‘high art’ and satirical renderings, which often point to the slippage between connoisseurial scrutiny and scopophilia, suggesting the exercise of an aestheticising gaze over both art and femininity, a concern central to feminist critiques of traditional connoisseurship. The increasing material focus in art historical writing, influenced by the ascendancy of material culture studies, however, engenders the need to reassess the role and legacy of connoisseurship and its relevance and potential function in progressive scholarship.
This two-day panel will include case studies of key figures in connoisseurship, as well as contributions which consider connoisseurial methodologies as both historic and ongoing phenomena. The panel will include speakers from university departments, cultural institutions and museums – highlighting the importance of connoisseurship as a field of inquiry, considering its place within the discipline and emphasising its contested legacy from a broad range of viewpoints.
Papers
Thomas Denman (University of Reading) Issues of Connoisseurship: Longhi, Venturi and the Caravaggio Exhibition of 1951
Paul Tucker (University of Florence) ‘This Question of Eyesight’: Charles Fairfax Murray on the Morellian School of Art Criticism
Luke Uglow (University of York) A Biography of ‘The Connoisseur’, 1901–92
Barbara Pezzini (The Burlington Magazine) Connoisseurship and the Art Market at the Turn of the 20th Century: The Connoisseur and The Burlington Magazine, 1900–10
Susanna Avery-Quash (The National Gallery, London) Connoisseurship at the National Gallery: The Impact of Sir Charles Eastlake as first director
Juan Luis González García (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) ‘Motoring all over Spain’: Bernard Berenson on Hispanic art and historiography
Jordan Mearns (University of Edinburgh) The Wandering Gaze: Perception, prurience and the practice of connoisseurship in late 18th-century Britain
Elsje van Kessel (University of St Andrews) Der Sammler und die Seinigen and Goethe’s Biographical Approach to Connoisseurship
Stephanie S. Dickey (Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada) Daulby, Wilson, and Rembrandt: The role of British amateurs in the cataloguing of prints
Koen Bulckens (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp) A Comparative Analysis of Attributions in the ‘Corpus Rubenianum’ and the ‘Rembrandt Research Project’
Matthew C. Potter (Northumbria University) A New ‘Hans’-eatic League: Holbein and Anglo-German relations in connoisseurship and art history, c.1870–1939
Karen L. Georgi (John Cabot University, Rome) The Connoisseur in 19th-Century America: A historical view of his timeless certainties
Alison Harpur (National Trust) Connoisseurship and the Written Word: Giorgio Vasari and the attribution of the Kingston Lacy Judgement of Solomon