Connoisseurship / Diagnostics / Forensics: Looking and Knowing in the Arts and in the Sciences

The conference 'Connoisseurship / Diagnostics / Forensics: Looking and Knowing in the Arts and in the Sciences' starts from the known, 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 a famous article Carlo Ginzburg 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 discuss the ways 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 write an email to cdfyork.ac.uk or book via Eventbrite (link in the website).

Programme

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