How Formalism and Connoisseurship Shaped the Aesthetic of the Sketch*
The ‘value of drawing’ and the ‘method of vision’. How formalism and connoisseurship shaped the aesthetic of the sketch* Elvira Bojilova What is the most genuine quality of drawing? In accordance with his profession, connoisseur Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville offered a clear answer about an admittedly problematic question that is even nowadays, although not rendered obsolete, at its core predominantly confined to his area of expertise – judging an artwork’s quality (‘le bon & le mauvais d’un ouvrage’).1 Despite connoisseurship being ‘superseded by iconographical studies’ in the second half of the twentieth century, it was ‘the exclusive analytical tool in the study of Italian drawings [even two decades ago]’,2 and the judgment of artistic quality, however undefined the term may be, remained a vital part. Dezallier d’Argenville’s definition of such artistic qualities, for instance, extended well beyond whether a work of art was ‘good’ or ‘bad’,3 and was largely dependent on what he quite simply referred to as a ‘tasteful’ drawing. According to him, these drawings consist of ‘[invention], correctness, good taste, grand judgment, expression of emotions, higher thoughts, a spiritual touch, & a free hand […]’.4 His assessment certainly mirrored certain ideas of Giorgio Vasari’s concept of disegno as an immediate manifestation of intellectual * Transcriptions and translations are mine unless stated otherwise. – I would like to thank Hubert Locher for his close reading of the text. 1 Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, Abregé De La Vie Des Plus Fameux Peintre, Paris: De Bure [1745] 1755, vol. 1, xxij. – However, there are even scholars who claim that connoisseurship follows no goal at all: Hal Opperman, ‘The Thinking Eye, the Mind That Sees: The Art Historian as Connoisseur’, Artibus et Historiae, 11:21, 1990, 10.
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