Giovanni Morelli

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Giovanni Morelli (1816 - 1891) was an Italian art critic and political figure. As an art historian, he developed the "Morellian" technique of scholarship, identifying the characteristic "hands" of painters through scrutiny of diagnostic minor details that revealed artists' scarcely conscious shorthand and conventions for portraying, for example, ears. Morelli's connoisseurship was developed to a high degree by Bernard Berenson, who met Morelli in 1890. The first generation of Morellian scholars also included Gustavo Frizzoni, Jean Paul Richter, Adolfo Venturi and Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes. Morellian scholarship penetrated the English field from 1893, with the translation of his master work. The Morellian technique of connoisseurship was extended to the study of Attic vase-painters by J.D. Beazley and by Michael Roaf to the study of the Persepolis reliefs, with results that further confirmed its validity.

Morelli was trained as a doctor. With his return to Italy he acted as a conduit for intellectual life of the North. His fully-developed technique was published as Die Werke Italienischer Meister, ("The work of the Italian masters"); it appeared under the anagrammatic pseudonym "Ivan Lermolieff".

The complementary field of document-supported art history traces its origins to the somewhat earlier work of Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle.