Bredius Writes to Morelli

Bredius Writes to Morelli or A Tale of Two Traditions

When 52year old Giovanni Morelli travelled to England for the very first time in 1868, his English friends welcomed the cheerful connoisseur of Italian painting, but did also notice that Morelli’s interest was not limited to the art of his own country nor actually blinded by his passionate patriotism. His own collection of paintings, of which he have assembled some examples here, bears testimony still today of his deep interest and love for Dutch painting, next to his love for the Italian masters. And one room of his Milan flat was, in his lifetimes and as visitors knew, entirely dedicated to this segment of his collection.
When coming back from England in 1868 he did pass through Flemish and Dutch cities, and it might be a recollection of this whole trip, that Morelli later named Paulus Potter as the master that captured the Dutch landscape, as he thought, and as he had experienced it himself, best. And although Morelli was very fond of animals, it is remarkable that he named Potter as a landscape painter and not as the painter merely of animals (which is why he have chosen to show the very painting by Potter below).
It was also in England, in London of 1882, that Morelli met young Abraham Bredius (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Bredius), probably for the very first time, and for some days they shared the experience of studying the London galleries together. Two years later, in 1884, 29year old Bredius wrote a letter to 68year old Morelli, whose content is not of a spectacular bearing (Bredius did mainly ask for a Milan auction catalogue), but we find that this document, kept among the Jean Paul Richter Papers by the archive of the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome, is of a symbolical bearing, because it does inspire us to think more about the intertwinings of the Dutch and the Italian tradition of connoisseurship, and also about the European perspective that most Fin de siècle connoisseurs were committed to at all (Bredius was also, as he told Morelli, envisioning a trip to St. Petersburg for the year of 1885).

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Abraham Bredius (1855-1946)

(All pictures except the Paulus Potter and the portraits of Bredius and Morelli: Lombardiabeniculturali.it; Fondo Morelli)

Unfortunately and up to the present day little research has been undertaken to highlight these intertwinings of two (or more) European traditions of connoisseurship. And if Morelli seems to be all-known (if more like a symbolical figure), one of his Dutch »heirs« seems to be more or less forgotten. Not Bredius of course (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Museum_Bredius), but Maurits M. van Dantzig (1903-1960), whom we call here one of Morelli’s heirs, although we dont’t know how Van Dantzig himself saw the relation between the Morellian (or Berensonian) tradition and his own approach to connoisseurship, which he called »Pictology«.
While the Pictology-approach is not at all forgotten in the Netherlands, it had been, for example, a surprise for Alexander Perrig, after having been developing his own approach to the studying of old master drawings (»Strichbildanalyse«), to realize all of a sudden that Van Dantzig had, much earlier, developed something comparable with the Pictology concept, of whose existence Perrig, however, got to know only when he was about to finish his first important contribution to the study of Michelangelo drawings in 1976 (Michelangelo Studien I).

It is to be hoped that the 2014 congress on authentication in art (http://www.authenticationinart.org), held at The Hague this very May, does inspire further investigations into the history of method in a field of practice that does not only suffer of a notorious intransparency, but also of a lack of interest for its historical dimension. In sum: Like every human activity the practice of connoisseurship does need a memory. It may have one already, but it is still a rather fragmentary one; and not even the picture of various mainstream traditions can be called a complete one, not to mention the intertwinings of traditions or the picture as a whole.


Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891)

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