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Rasanen Craft of the Connoisseur 2013 THE CRAFT OF THE CONNOISSEUR BERNT NOTKE, SAINT ANNE AND THE WORK OF HANDS ELINA RÄSÄNEN Je ne crois pas voir ce que je vois, mais ce qui correspond aux réactions de mon corps. Simone Weil INTRODUCTION1 The corpus of the works of Bernt Notke (c. 1440–1509) is a subject of continu- ous lively discussions within the community of art historians who specialise in late medieval art. Many polychrome wood sculptures in the Baltic region have at some point in history been attributed to him, his workshop or his appren- tices, but most of these attributions have subsequently been rejected.2 A wood sculpture in the Turku (Åbo) Cathedral, in Finland, depicting St. Anne with the Virgin and Child, called Anna Selbdritt,3 was first attributed to Bernt Notke’s workshop by Runar Strandberg in 1936.4 It is one of those lesser known, or mar- ginal, works discussed in connection with Notke but, as an exception within this group of sculptures, it has not explicitly been discarded as part of his oeuvre. Instead, it has been somewhat ignored by most scholars for forty years. The sculpture in question represents a fairly standard composition for the motif: St. Anne is sitting and holding the Virgin Mary on her lap. The adolescent Mary, in turn, supports the naked Christ Child, who is reaching for something St. Anne is holding in her right hand, now lost (Fig. 1).5 The sculpture is 115 cm high, made of oak, and dates from the 1480s, according to its stylistic and icono- graphic features.6 No medieval documentation of this sculpture survives, which is the case with practically all of the medieval art extant in Finland. The purpose of this article is two-fold. It will, first of all, investigate the above-described polychrome sculpture in Turku and its suggested connection to the production of the workshop of Bernt Notke. I will analyse the research history of this sculpture and explain how external circumstances influenced its scholarly examination. The other, equal aim of this article is to discuss the practise of connoisseurship, particularly pertaining to the study of medieval sculptures. This will be done according to approaches in art historical thinking ELINA RÄSÄNEN 26 Fig. 1. Saint Anne with the Virgin and Child (Anna Selbdritt), polychrome wood sculpture, c. 1480. Cathedral Museum, Turku (Finland). Photo: Timo Syrjänen 1982 / The Archives for Prints and Photographs, National Board of Antiquities, Finland that stress materiality, accentuating objects themselves as well as recognising materiality as a portentous factor in the research process between the object and the researcher. During the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly with the rise of the ‘new art history’ of the 1980s, the meaningfulness of attribu- tion and its methods was widely questioned. This article wishes to reconsider the role of empirical research, necessary for any attribution, and proposes that, through perceiving connoisseurship as ‘academic craftsmanship’ that deals with fragile objects, this skill, or sensory act, can perhaps be relieved of its more or less infamous reputation. THE CRAFT OF THE CONNOISSEUR 27 SEARCH FOR A CONNOISSEUR, FOR THE REAL OBJECT AND THE ARTIST Erwin Panofsky, in his classic introduction to iconological analysis, separated the connoisseur from the art historian and portrayed the former as a ‘collector, museum curator or expert who deliberately limits his contribution to scholarship to identifying works of art with respect to date, provenance and authorship, and to evaluating them with respect to quality and condition. The difference between the connoisseur and the art historian is not so much a matter of principle as a matter of emphasis and explicitness, comparable to the difference between a diagnosti- cian and a researcher in medicine.’7 Panofsky’s choice of a professional title for the connoisseur was likely influenced by the fact that Giovanni Morelli, the archetypal connoisseur of the late nineteenth century, was actually a doctor of medicine. Panofsky had many predecessors and followers, in various art historical sub- fields, who have expressed criticism of connoisseurship. Some reasons for this are, as aptly listed by Hayden B. J. Maginnis, the mystified or ex cathedra pro- nouncements of the connoisseurs, their associations with the art market result- ing in judgments deriving from financial expectations, the paradigmatic change from the individual to groups and movements and, finally, documented errors on the part of connoisseurs.8 In addition, feminist criticism has opposed the built-in idea of scientific, objective truth and has focused on the a priori male gender of the connoisseur. The iconic, often reproduced photograph of Bernard Berenson, a follower of Morelli, in inspecting the antique female nudes literally pictures the connoisseur’s ‘male gaze’. In recent decades, poststructuralist approaches that concentrate on text and discourse instead of the object have challenged the prac- tices of connoisseurship. For instance, Mieke Bal, a cultural critic and theorist of visual studies, has described the connoisseur as a mere judge acting in the modernist framework.9 Furthermore, the emphasis on medium/material and the connoisseurship related to these has been claimed to be ‘disciplinism’, a rem- nant of times past that has subdued current multidisciplinary efforts and has indeed lost its credibility.10 However, sometimes this shift away from objects to discourses, opening new perspectives, has been rendered at the cost of the pro- fessional skills of art historians and, even more so, at the cost of the object itself.11 Even those scholars who intensely focus on images and objects have not necessarily seen a reason to re-evaluate the concept of connoisseurship. Nota- bly, Hans Belting, who has explored how images have their own integrity, has articulated his distrust of connoisseurs. In his influential manifesto for the future of art history, written in the early 1980s, Belting offered his view of the role ELINA RÄSÄNEN 28 of connoisseurs in the future. According to Belting, a connoisseur is of no use when scholarship crosses the boundaries between art, culture and society: ‘[T]he connoisseur, although he retains his right to existence, can as little provide these answers as the positivist who trusts only in strictly factual information, or the specialist who jealously defends his field against dilettantes.’12 Belting’s influ- ence, particularly in the field of medieval studies, has been considerable and, by emphasizing the functions of images and disclaiming ‘art’, he has shifted the focus away from questions of authorship or ‘artistic’ production and towards anthropologically-oriented viewpoints.13 Some traditions and practices in art historical scholarship have, of course, stressed objects and their materials all along, quite specifically in medieval stud- ies. For instance, scholars specializing in sculptures have, from the viewpoints of conservation or museum studies, emphasized the knowledge provided by the object itself, as well as stressing how determining the details of its making offers valuable information.14 During the past fifteen years or so, however, the empha- sis on the materiality of the object, or the ‘thing’ and its affective potential, has entered into art historical discourse: a ‘material turn’ has followed the previous ‘turns’, such as the ‘pictorial turn’.15 For instance, in an anthology devoted to, and consequently named, ‘the lure of the object’, Karen Lang, while illuminat- ing Bernard Berenson’s questionable connections to the American money mag- nates and thus dismantling the all-embracing authority of the connoisseurs, has stressed the engagement that art requires.16 She has argued for the dialectical sense of objectivity: the interdependency of objectivity and subjectivity, the two modes of viewing, and maintaining the empirical approach.17 This does not mean returning to the previous empiricism, but, as I see it, looking towards a ‘second’ empiricism, which, to follow the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour, is ‘still real and objective, but it is livelier, more talkative, active, pluralistic, and more mediated than the other [first empiricism]’.18 The art historian David Summers, who in my opinion is a pioneer in the shift towards the material, has tried, in his ‘post-formalist art history’, to emphasize the material and spatial elements in art and its production.19 For instance, Sum- mers has widened the concept of ‘facture’ to cover more than the usual surface characteristics of a work of art, and has extended it to a wider range of factors that have enabled its making; according to Summers, ‘to consider an artifact in terms of its facture is to consider it as a record of its own having been made.’20 By calling his methodological approach post-formalist, he seems to be pointing to a re-interpretation of the formalist traditions in art history—this is also what underlies his synthesizing effort.21 THE CRAFT OF THE CONNOISSEUR 29 In fact, a descendant of the Vienna school, the medievalist Otto Pächt, dis- cussed connoisseurship in his lectures given in the early 1970s, but only pub- lished in English in 1999. He questioned the attitudes towards connoisseurship, asking if ‘this attribution mania’ had, after all, some higher or deeper meaning. In Pächt’s approach, connoisseurship is in a reciprocal relationship with ‘proper seeing’, which coincides with his overall idea of art history, which should ‘give an intellectual interpretation of a sensory perception.’22 Pächt, therefore, wished to offer something different from the traditional idea of judging connoisseurship as anti-intellectual because of its methods that compare hands, ear lobes or other such details. He stated: ‘attribution is not merely a matter of classification: ulti- mately, it is a matter of content.’23 Pächt’s approach was indebted to the traditions of the Vienna circles, which never fully abandoned Morellian ideas. Within the field of research on medieval wood sculptures, ‘attribution mania’, as Pächt put it, has been strongly connected to the practice of finding and naming the ‘master’, the author of the work, and the corpus of works con- nected to his workshop or to his assistants.
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