The Thinking Eye, the Mind That Sees: The Art Historian as Connoisseur

Abstract

Recent years have seen much vocal skepticism about the validity of connoisseurship. This is, at least in part, the legacy of Erwin Panofsky, some of whose opinions seem to demand the exclusion of the act of viewing from the interpretive task. Less noticed, however, has been the widespread reaffirmation during these same years of the centrality of connoisseurship within the discipline of art history. As exemplified by the integrative approach of Ernst Gombrich, the work of art consists precisely in an equilibrium between our sensate and conceptual experiences of it. Connoisseurship, a specialized way of knowing, is associated with other forms of knowledge in an interconnected web of understanding-the whole cloth of the history of art. Connoisseurship, as in the French tradition chosen here as an example, brings one from the physical properties of the work itself to the delectation of the senses and of the mind.