Accessibility statement

Giovanni Morelli and his friend Giorgione: Connoisseurship, Science and Irony

Monday 6 May 2013, 4.30PM to 6.00pm

Speaker(s): Luke Uglow

Giovanni Morelli has been vaunted as “the celebrated inventor of scientific connoisseurship”, a reputation that was seemingly validated by his 1880 attribution of the Sleeping Venus in Dresden to the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Giorgione. However, there have always been doubts. Although his writing inspired a fanatical school of disciples, others suspected Morelli’s Kunstwissenschaft was nothing more than a rhetorical strategy.

Morelli’s final contribution to the historiography of Giorgione was an 1890 attribution of the Portrait of a Lady in the Borghese Gallery. When passing this judgement, Morelli referred to Giorgione as “my friend”. All things being equal, this seems a strangely unscientific thing to do. The intention of this paper is to ask the question: why? The answer is that the concept of irony was fundamental to Morelli’s thinking. This does not mean that his connoisseurship was, or was not, scientific. Instead, irony allowed for the incongruous fusion of positivist and idealist methods, scientific and religious rhetoric, material and spiritual analysis, of objective and subjective. In Morelli’s writing, irony functions as a critical reflection on the relation between art and science.

Sleeping Venus, Giorgione c.1510

 

Location: The Bowland Auditorium, Berrick Saul

Admission: Admission is free, all are welcome