Connoisseurship / Diagnostics / Forensics: looking and knowing in the Arts and in the Sciences

The conference starts from the established, but under-researched fact, that art connoisseurship—the practice of identifying, attributing and ascertaining the value of artworks, as well as differentiating originals, copies and‌‌‌ fakes—stems from the practice of medicine.

Many of art history’s most significant connoisseurs (Giulio Mancini, Theodore de Mayerne, Giovanni Morelli, even Sigmund Freud) were doctors and many doctors were entrusted by patrons with the task of buying art (as in the case of King James I and William Harvey). In 1980, Carlo Ginzburg famously argued that the relationship was not casual, demonstrating that the intellectual stages of medical practice and the connoisseurial paradigm were closely related. Thus, as doctors increasingly diagnosed patients on the basis of their external, phenotypical symptoms, so connoisseurs gradually developed a method to diagnose signs that works were fakes or copies.

Whilst addressing the reciprocal influences of connoisseurship and medical practice, this conference expands on their relationship by looking at other related disciplines, such as forensics and natural history. Six scholars, working in fields as diverse as philosophy, art historiography, and botany, will explore the ways that looking shapes knowledge and, in return, is shaped by ideas about beauty, identity, and truth.

The conference is part of ‘The Intellectual History of Connoisseurship’ project, sponsored by the British Academy-Leverhulme Trust.

Admission is free, but seats are limited. To reserve a place please email cdf@york.ac.uk or book via Eventbrite.

Program:

10.00 Emanuele Lugli (York)
Beauty Draws us with a Single Hair: Connoisseurs’ Manes and Scientists’ Strings

10.30 Katherine Watson (Oxford Brookes)
The Impact of Medical Evidence on Criminal Process in England and Wales, 1730-1914

11.00-11.30 Tea/Coffee/Cakes

12.00 Alexander Wragge-Morley (NYU)
The Purpose of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Practices of Natural History in England, 1650-1720

12.30 Valérie Kobi (Bielefeld)
Into a Connoisseur’s Eye: Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) and the Construction of Art History Knowledge

13.00-14.30 Lunch Break

14.30 Alberto Frigo (Reims)
The Mind of the Connoisseur

15.00 Emma Spary (Cambridge)
Boundary Objects and Expertise in the Late Eighteenth-Century French Natural History Cabinet

15.30-16.00 Tea/Coffee/Cakes

16.00-17.00 Roundtable discussion