Giovanni Morelli

Who was Giovanni Morelli?

Giovanni Morelli 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 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,; it appeared under the anagrammatic pseudonym "Ivan Lermolieff".

The Morellian method is based on clues offered by trifling details rather than identities of composition and subject matter or other broad treatments that are more likely to be seized upon by students, copyists and imitators. Instead, as Carlo Ginzburg analysed the Morellian method, the art historian operates in the manner of a detective, "each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting".