Daniel Arasse

Microstory of Art X –
Daniel Arasse


(Picture: clioweb.free.fr)

(Picture: museodelprado.es)

»Therefore it cannot be a picture by Fra Angelico, since it does not make sense on a theological level.« This sentence by Daniel Arasse (Meine Begegnungen mit Leonardo, Raffael und Co., p. 62; my translation from the German translation), if it had been taken seriously, would have long shaken the culture of connoisseurship. – If it had been taken seriously.

Daniel Arasse is said to have been under the spell of Giovanni Morelli in his youth. Long before graduating and before becoming a specialist for the Italian Renaissance, he is said to have invented a detective named Jean Morelli that would probably have solved cases using the method of… Well, we don’t have to proceed. And the life of Daniel Arasse, of course, did take a different turn.
Art historians have not made much of this early commitment to connoisseurship of Daniel Arasse; and even little to the above-quoted, better hidden, as it were, later commitment, that we consider as dynamite, if it had been taken seriously, or if it ever would.
Because this is one of this brief hints that point to the fact that connoisseurs have always tended to a wanting to solve attributional questions on a level of formal detail (if they did not turn to questions of quality, considering themselves as fine-tuned instruments, responsive to the specific tunes of works of art belonging to a particular class of objects – the one particular, now identified artist’s oeuvre).
And this brief hint here is not meant to dismiss all these possibilities how one might address questions of attributions. Not at all. There are various tribes in connoisseurship, and they all may have their customs and practices (and trade secrets).
But taken seriously what Arasse says here – we call him as a witness, as we might have called, or we will later call Erwin Panofsky with a similar statement –, taken seriously without even asking why the picture shown above does not make sense on a theological level (and, according to Arasse, contains theological absurdities, non consistent with the personality of Fra Angelico), means shifting the question of attribution to intellectual questions, to the intellectual interpretation of formal designs, to the belonging of an artist to one intellectual culture or to another, to the responding of an artist to specified commissions that, along with the artist’s formal ideas and decisions (the way he solves a given problem), all might help to situate a picture within one intellectual context or another. And this, in sum, refers to what we have called the other, shamefully underdeveloped side of connoisseurship, the seeing of form as something carrying meaning, in one word, as the expression of something. And the looking at this dimension of form, in sum, requires the informed looking, the knowing of what an artist is getting at (and not only the knowing of how he does that, without taking notice of the why, directed by an ideology of »mere looking«). Thus background knowledge, invisible things, are indispensable. But I don’t see any reason why these clues as for the attributions of artworks shouldn’t be taken as seriously as mere formal analogies and material equivalences. Amen.

PS: We cannot do justice to the work of Daniel Arasse here, who we, all the same, do consider as one of the godfathers of our Online Journal Microstory of Art. Because of his attention for the microstorical dimensions and structures of art history, the detail, the small thing, that might – might – offer important insights into larger things. Or barbs as to false certainties on what artworks are or might be about. Or only be about.
The above said is not meant that we would like to make Daniel Arasse an Morellian, nor an Anti-Morellian. I believe it is the quality and the charm of Daniel Arasse’s work that sets him high above such rather primitive oppositions of factions (or, if one likes, of tribes of connoisseurship).

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