This lecture was originally delivered on Tuesday, September 10, 2013 as part of the Seminar Series, Conservation Conversations.
In the above video David Bomford and Carlo Ginzburg discuss “Connoisseurship: The Rembrandt Paradigm,” and Carlo Ginzburg speaks on “Small Differences: Ekphrasis and
Connoisseurship.”
Conservation Conversations are public research
dialogues pairing a conservator and a professor and exemplifying the goal of
“Cultures of Conservation,” a five-year curricular initiative funded by the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
- 0:23—Lecture with David Bomford
- 11:21—Discussion of Technical Formal Analysis
- 15:45-57—Discussion of varied iterations of Rembrandt catalogue raisonné publications
- 15:57—Questions of attribution
- 16:00—Rembrandt Research Community
- 22:26—Conservation and scientific analysis becoming accepted as standard in identifying Rembrandt
- 27:11—New types of connoisseurship: interpretation of x-rays and infrared reflectography
- 32:14—Importance of technical connoisseurship in reevaluating attributions of Rembrandt paintings
- 35:16—Lecture with Carlo Ginzburg
- 35:12—“Small Differences: Ekphrasis and Connoisseurship”
- 36:39—Philip Ponce - Models for Connoisseur practice re. Italian drawings
- 43:30—Use of x-ray technology by Pouncey
- 1:11:09—Panel Discussion and Audience Q&A
- 1:15:00—Remarks from David Bomford
- 1:43:00—History of Connoisseurship
- 1:13:36—Connoisseurship and the art market
- 1:14:33—Ekphrasis and issue of translation of connoisseurial skill
- 1:16:57—Remarks from Carlo Ginzburg
- 1:17:00—Connoisseurship as social activity
- 1:20:10—Connoisseurship can be treated as historical evidence
- 1:23:12—Technical study, conservation, x-ray images can be considered another type of ekphrasis of the work of art
David Bomford is Director of Conservation at
the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He
received his B.Sc. in Pure Chemistry and his M.Sc. in Organometallic Chemistry
from the University of Sussex, UK. Prior
to his current position, Bomford was Consultant to the Director of The
Metropolitan Museum of Art; Acting Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum; and
Assistant Restorer, Senior Restorer, and Head of the Registrar’s Office and Art
Handling Department at the National Gallery, London. His numerous curatorial and publication
projects include the following exhibits and associated catalogues for the
National Gallery, London: Art in the
Making: Degas (2004); Art in the
Making: Underdrawings in Renaissance Paintings (2002); Art in the Making: Impressionism (1990); Art in the Making: Italian Painting before 1400 (1989); and Art in the Making: Rembrandt (1988).
Bomford was Slade Professor at Oxford in 1996-7, the first conservator to hold
this appointment.
The long history of fluctuating Rembrandt
attributions seems to represent old-style classic connoisseurship at work;
however, Rembrandt scholarship has also produced one of the most sustained
exercises in new-style technical art history yet undertaken, and this has led
to a whole new evaluation of the territory in which connoisseurship is
conducted. Moreover, fresh thinking
about the nature of workshop practice in the 17th century has widened the terms
of the discussion to include speculation on the fundamental nature of authorship.
Carlo Ginzburg is Franklin D. Murphy Professor
of Italian Renaissance Studies at UCLA.
He received his Dottore in Lettere from the University of Pisa in
1961. Ginzburg’s primary area of
research is the history of the Italian Renaissance and Early Modern
Europe. He is most famous for The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a
Sixteenth-Century Miller (1976).
Recent publications include No
Island is an Island: Four Glances at English Literature in a World Perspective
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) and Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (Berkeley, CA: The
University of California Press, 2012).
Ginzburg received the Aby Warburg Prize for achievement in the
Humanities (1992), the Humboldt-Forschungs Prize (2007), and the Balzan Prize
for the History of Europe, 1400-1700 (2010).
Ekphraseis – descriptions of real
or imaginary works of art – inspired a well-known rhetorical genre that is part
of Greek antiquity’s legacy to European culture. In his talk, which will present two case
studies, the first dealing with a short article by Philip Pouncey and the
second with a longer essay by Roberto Longhi, Ginzburg will explore the
potential impact of ekphraseis on
connoisseurship. Additionally, Ginzburg
will discuss the relationship between words and images, as well as the extent
to which a verbal description can pave the way to the attribution of a visual
artifact (a drawing, a painting, a sculpture).
