# "Goût de Comparaison"

## Practices of Comparative Viewing in Eighteenth-Century Connoisseurship

Joris Corin Heyder

### Abstract

In 1719, Jean-Baptiste Dubos described the connoisseurial judgement as a veritable “goût de comparaison,” literally, a taste of comparison. This early reflection on the importance of practices of comparing is surprising, and can serve as the starting point for investigating its fundamental role in art connoisseurship. What kind of preconditions, merits, implications, and limits can be connected to comparative arrangements in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Is it even possible to ascertain a change of comparative practices within the history of connoisseurship? Connoisseurs—so the argument—expanded specific skills by means of increasingly efficient comparisons that enabled them to systematize and categorize the vast heritage of artistic artifacts.

### Introduction

"Connoisseurship can [...] be presented quite differently in terms of a range of visual skills that are cultivated with a high level of self-awareness. Frequently these are put to commercial ends, which does not render the skills themselves any less valuable. Because connoisseurship is fundamentally comparative, it provides a possible model for historians who seek to develop their ability to make precise discriminations based on close visual inspection."<fnref n="1" />

<footnote n="1">1 Ludmilla J. Jordanova, *The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice*, Cambridge 2012, 212.</footnote>
By linking practices of connoisseurship<fnref n="2" /> to both reflective visual skills and a necessarily comparative approach, Ludmilla Jordanova has accentuated two aspects whose relationship has so far remained largely unconsidered. Certainly, in accordance with the powerful modernism narrative, many studies have been written on a new organization of the visual in the nineteenth century.<fnref n="3" /> This applies equally for the importance of the comparative stimulus in art history at the latest when the double slide projection<fnref n="4" /> gained significant importance in academic lecture halls.<fnref n="5" /> However, the shift to an entirely new visuality as well as its interrelation with doing comparisons did not come out of nowhere. On the contrary, already in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, in a time when objectivity was emerging more and more as a scientific ideal and practice,<fnref n="6" /> the connoisseurs' discourses and evolving working routines indicated an increasing sensitivity toward visual phenomena in general, and toward the treatment of a growing number of images in particular. "Seeing as a way of knowing," to borrow the words of Lorraine Daston in her explanation of the "epistemic image," is a skill required explicitly in scientific circles from the mid-sixteenth century onward.<fnref n="7" /> Whereas the use of images in scientific illustrations often obeys the premise of offering the reader/observer an idealized "stand-in for the too plentiful and too various objects,"<fnref n="8" /> art connois-

<footnote n="2">2 In this contribution, “practices” are principally understood from the perspective of recent practice theories as “a routinized way in which bodies are moved, objects are handled, subjects are treated, things are described and the world is understood.” See Andreas Reckwitz, Toward a Theory of Social Practices. A Development in Culturalist Theorizing, in: *European Journal of Social Theory* 5 (2/2002), 243–263, see 250, URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310222225432 [last accessed: August 12, 2018]. A concise and recent summary on the use of practice theory in art historical research subjects can be found in Johannes Grave et. al. (eds.), *The Agency of Display. Objects, Framings and Parerga—Introductory Thoughts, in: The Agency of Display. Objects, Framings and Parerga, Parerga and Paratexts. How Things Enter Language. Practices and Forms of Representation in Goethe’s Collections*, Dresden 2018, 7–19, see 10–11.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 A brief and succinct criticism of this master narrative has been formulated in, for instance: Jonathan Crary, *Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century* (An October Book), Cambridge 1991, 3–4.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 For a short insight into the conditions and problems of art historical slide lectures, see Robert S. Nelson, The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art ‘History’ in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in: *Critical Inquiry* 26 (3/2000), 414–434.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 It is only very recently that art history and cultural studies have rediscovered their familiar interest in phenomena of comparison, see Matthias Bruhn/Gerhard Scholtz (eds.), *Der vergleichende Blick: Formanalyse in Natur- und Kulturwissenschaften*, Berlin 2017; Jaś Elsner (ed.), *Comparativism in Art History*, London 2017.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 On objectivity in the history of science, see Lorraine Daston/Peter Galison, *Objectivity*, New York 2010.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Lorraine Daston, Epistemic Images, in: Alina A. Payne (ed.), *Vision and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe*, University Park, Penn. 2015, 13–35, see 17.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">8 Daston, Epistemic Images, 18.</footnote>
seurship, in contrast, had to circle around every single image and could not simply merge results in an idealized illustration.<fnref n="9" /> Consequently, other strategies were indispensable for achieving knowledge on art objects, and comparative viewing occurred as one of the most important, but hitherto neglected approaches. This is all the more astonishing when looking at the three central domains of connoisseurship formulated by Roger de Piles (1635–1709) as early as 1677 in his *Conversations sur la Connoissance*,<fnref n="10" /> that have been regarded as valid ever since. These domains are, first, the judgment of quality; second, the attribution of the art work; and, third, the differentiation between original and copy.<fnref n="11" /> All three domains are undoubtedly based on doing comparisons.

The main objective of this chapter is, first, to show that comparative viewing became a significant characteristic in the judgment of art long before the institutionalization of academic art history; second, to exemplify different levels of practices of the “comparative imperative” in connoisseurship; and, third, to ask whether those practices themselves were distinct from earlier habits of comparative viewing. De Piles’ three domains serve here as a point of departure for structuring the following considerations.

# 1. The judgment of quality or the “Taste of comparison”

Eighteenth-century scholarship on art and literature circled to a great extent around the question of taste.<fnref n="12" /> Treatises on aesthetic phenomena had already been

<footnote n="9">9 It is doubtful whether the manipulation of an art object ranges on the same level as idealizing an illustration as proposed by Kristel Smentek with reference to practices of mounting and changing drawings known from the connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774). See Kristel Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in the Eighteenth-Century Europe*, Farnham et al. 2014, 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Roger de Piles, *Conversations sur la connaissance de la peinture, et sur le jugement qu'on doit faire des tableaux*. Où par occasion il est parlé de la vie de Rubens, & de quelques-uns de ses plus beaux ouvrages, Paris 1677.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 De Piles, *Conversations*, 3–4, 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 The literature on the "era of taste"—"Zeitalter des Geschmacks"—is so vast that I shall mention only those titles that are useful for the following reasoning: Raymond Keller, 'à la mode française': Geschmack und ästhetische Urteile als Grundlage für Kennerschaft, in: Stephan Brakensiek/Anne-Katrin Sors (eds.), *Copy Right Adam von Bartsch. Kunst, Kommerz, Kenner-schaft*, Petersberg 2016, 20–29; Susan Bracken, Collectors in England: Evolutions in Taste 1580–1630, in: Tarnya Cooper/Aviva Burnstock/Maurice Howard (eds.), *Painting in Britain, Ox-ford 2015, 384–391; Aaron Meskin/Jon Robson, Taste and Acquaintance*, in: *The Journal of Aes-theotics and Art Criticism* (2015), 127–139; Johannes Grave, Das Jahrhundert des Geschmacks. Zur Kultur des Sinnlichen im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, in: Monika Bachtler (ed.), *Wie es uns gefällt. Kostbarkeiten aus der Sammlung Rudolf-August Oetker*, München 2014, 15–29; Charlotte Guichard, *Taste Communities: The Rise of the Amateur in Eighteenth-Century Paris*, in:</footnote>
grappling with this central philosophical concept decades before Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's (1714–1762) *Aesthetica*¹³ was published in 1750/58; and in Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) *Critique of Judgment* from 1790,¹⁴ taste still played a central role as the “sensus communis”¹⁵ for the conceptualization of two subjective universal judgments: the beautiful and the sublime. Almost seventy years earlier, in 1719, the Abbé Jean-Bapiste Dubos (1670–1742) had put forward a popular eighteenth-century treatise on art called *Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture*.¹⁶ In this programmatic work, Dubos is particularly interested in two main concepts: the sentiment (“sentiment”) and the taste (“goût”). Human intellectual formation should always pursue good taste, and even though sentiment is explicitly subjective, the author argues for the possibility of an agreement on a common taste. This raises the question of how such common taste can be acquired. Following Dubos's ideal-typical program, circles of “curieux” or amateurs—the public—are able to value and judge a poem or a picture ‘correctly’ in terms of its quality, if those circles are:

> “limited to persons that read, and have a knowledge of theatrical entertainments, who see or hear people talk of pictures, and who have acquired by some means or other, that discernment which is called the *Taste of Comparison* [...]”.¹⁷

Dubos's "public" is what Charlotte Guichard has characterized as a taste community, as "small societies, structured by interpersonal relationships, civility,

13

Eighteenth-Century Studies (2012), 519–547; Patrick Michel, *Peinture et plaisir: les goûts picturaux des collectionneurs parisiens au XVIIIe siècle*, Rennes 2010; Maurice Rheims, *Les collectionneurs: de la curiosité, de la beauté, du goût, de la mode et de la spéculation*, Paris 2002; Hans-Joachim Pieper, *Geschmacksurteil und ästhetische Einstellung: eine Untersuchung zur Grundlegung transzendental-philosophischer Ästhetik bei Kant und ein Entwurf zur Phänomenologie der ästhetischen Erfahrung*, Würzburg 2001; Fabienne Brugère, *Le goût: art, passions et société*, (Philosophies, 130), Paris 2000; Yves Michaud, *Critères esthétiques et jugement de goût*, Nîmes 1999; Luc Ferry, *Homo aes-theticus: l'invention du goût à l'âge démocratique* (Le collège de philosophie), Paris 1990; Rémy G. Saisselin, *Taste in Eighteenth Century France: Critical Reflections on the Origins of Aesthetics or an Apology for Amateurs*, Syracuse 1965; Samuel-Élie Rocheblave, *L'art et le goût en France de 1600 à 1900* (Nouvelle édition), Paris 1923.

14

Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, *Ästhetik. Übersetzt, mit einer Einführung, Anmerkungen und Registern von der Herausgeberin*, ed. by Dagmar Mirbach, Hamburg 2007.

15

Immanuel Kant, *Critique of Judgement*, ed. by Nicholas Walker, trans. by James Creed Meredith, Oxford 1989 [1952]. See also the rich commentary by Manfred Frank and Véronique Zanetti: Immanuel Kant, *Schriften zur Ästhetik und Naturphilosophie, Text und Kommentar*, ed. by Manfred Frank/Véronique Zanetti, 2 vols., Frankfurt a. M. 2001.

16

Kant, *Critique of Judgement*, part 1, §20, 92–93 and part 1, §40, 169–173.

17

Jean-Baptiste Dubos, *Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture*, 2 vols., Paris 1719. All following text passages are cited according to the translation by Thomas Nugent: Jean-Baptiste Dubos, *Critical reflections on poetry, painting, and music*, trans. by Thomas Nugent, 3 vols., London 1748.

Dubos, *Critical reflections*, vol. 2, chap. XXII, 245 [my italics].
and forms of sociability, within which artistic and erudite judgments could be
exchanged and discussed."<fnref n="18" /> A few chapters after first mentioning the "taste of
comparison," Dubos at last explains both the meaning of this utterance as well as
how taste communities achieve good taste:

"but to acquire this comparative taste, which inables [sic] us to judge of a present
by an absent picture, a person must have been in the very center of painting. He
must have frequent opportunities, especially in his younger days, of beholding
several excellent pictures in perfect ease and tranquility. Liberty of mind is as nec-
essary, in order to be sensible of the intire beauty of a work, as to compose it. To
be a good spectator, one must have that peace of soul, which rises not from the
exhausting, but from the serenity of the imagination."<fnref n="19" />

On the one hand, these passages are valuable because they describe contemporary
practices or at least instructions for such practices that should enable the reader to
acquire a good taste, too. On the other hand, we can learn from them that, in Dubos'
explanation, at least two steps are necessary to arrive at the "comparative taste" that
is required for every judgment: first, the repeated contemplation of excellent pic-
tures; second, a certain degree of knowledge as well as a performative participation
in discussions about and in the physical presence of art. Those who shaped public
opinion the most were the "connoisseurs" who, according to Dubos: "have studied
painting as much as the artists themselves."<fnref n="20" /> In a drawing (Fig. 1)<fnref n="21" /> by Gabriel
Jacques de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780)<fnref n="22" />—an obsessive observer and draftsman in the
times of Louis XV who seismographically sketched public life—two connoisseurs
are immersed in conversation in front of a wall full of paintings and sculptures.

The subjects of the sketched pictures are executed only in part, but we can say
with some certainty that the bulk of them represent history paintings, regarded as

<footnote n="18">18 Guichard, Taste Communities, 532.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Dubos, *Critical reflections*. vol. 2, chap. XXIX, 293.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 Dubos, *Critical reflections*, vol. 2, chap. XXII, 249.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Carnet Groult, Sketch page for the Salon of 1765, Paris, Musée du Louvre, département des arts graphiques, fol. 43v.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Cf. Xavier Salmon, *Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Le Livre de croquis de Gabriel Saint-Aubin* (Carnets et albums), Paris 2017; Kim de Beaumont, Les Salons de Gabriel de Saint-Aubin (1724–1780), in: *Le Salon de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture*, ed. by Isabelle Pichet, Paris 2014, 9–32. Pierre Rosenberg/Sue Welsh Reed/François Basan (eds.), *La vente Mariette: le catalogue illustré par Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Catalogue raisonné des différens objets de curiosités dans les sciences et arts, qui composoient le cabinet de feu Mr Mariette, controleur général de la Grande Chancelerie de France, honoraire amateur de l’Académie Rle. de Peinture, et de celle de Florence*, Milan 2011; Pierre Rosenberg, Quelques bien modestes observations sur les estampes de la collection Mariette et sur leurs catalogues de vente illustrés par Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, in: *Nouvelles de l’estampe*, 230 (2010), 8–15. Pierre Rosenberg/Colin B. Bailey (eds.), *Gabriel de Saint-Aubin 1724–1780*, Paris 2007.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_1.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1: Sketch page for the Salon of 1765, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Carnet Groult, Paris, Musée du Louvre, département des arts graphiques, fol. 43v</figcaption></figure>

the highest form of painting since Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472)<fnref n="23" /> and hanging closely next to each other, as was fashionable at the time.<fnref n="24" /> It is not without

<footnote n="23">23 See Anthony Blunt, *Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1660*, Oxford 1985, 11–12.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 In the German-speaking context, this form of gallery presentation is known as the 'Petersburger Hängung' or the 'pendant principle.' In our subproject C 01, "Comparative Viewing. Forms, Functions and Limits of Comparing Images", Robert Eberhardt works on a doctoral thesis that focuses particularly on practices of comparing image pairs. See also: Ganz, David/Thürlemann, Felix (eds.), *Das Bild im Plural. Mehrteilige Bildformen zwischen Mittelalter*</footnote>
irony that de Saint-Aubin shows us both men absorbed by the conversation without paying any attention to the paintings, although one of them even points in their direction. However, the sketch demonstrates a culture of discussion in the presence of artworks that was propagated by Dubos and others; and the venue for this practice is a room full of art that invites the spectator to at least compare those pictures that are hanging in close proximity to each other.²⁵

Why could this kind of presentation be important for an understanding of the connoisseurs' work, and what does the tiny sketch tell us about their habits? The draftsman is certainly referring to a complex system of images of different sizes and various degrees of legibility, and even different genres; he is presenting not only a fashionable eighteenth-century salon situation, but also two people entangled in a plurality of images. The contrast between clearly distinct pictures and those that have been reduced to their mere outlines could be regarded as an imitation of the blurring effect that results from the searching of the eyes in such a setting. The beholder's eyes cannot focus on the entire wall at once, but only on individual pictures one at a time; and, moreover, not even the entire picture, but actually only certain parts of these pictures. Just how much the drawing is evidence of a veritable "taste of comparison" becomes clearer when we remember de Piles's three central domains of connoisseurship: the judgment of quality, the attribution of the art work, and the distinction between original and copy.²⁶ The two connoisseurs are immersed in a discussion; they are judging or maybe even attributing the picture(s) to which they are pointing. It is one characteristic way to represent connoisseurs; the other would have been to show them—as many caricatures did—with magnifiers standing closely in front of a painting or a print while studying details.²⁷

und Gegenwart, Berlin 2010; Gerd Blum et al. (eds.), *Pendant plus. Praktiken der Bildkombinatorik*, Berlin 2012.

25 Since the growing interest in phenomena of reception aesthetics, the 'public' has constantly attracted the attention of the scholarly debate. Two positions with a particular interest in the eighteenth-century connoisseurial 'public' have been submitted by: Eva Kernbauer, *Der Platz des Publikums: Modelle für Kunstöffentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert* (Studien zur Kunst, 19), Köln 2011; Anja-Isabelle Weisenseel, *Bildbetrachtung in Bewegung: der Rezipient in Texten und Bildern zur Pariser Salonausstellung des 18. Jahrhunderts* (Ars et Scientia, 14), Berlin 2017. See also the reviews on Weisenseel's book by: Britta Hochkirchen, Rev. of: *Bildbetrachtung in Bewegung*. Der Rezipient in Texten und Bildern zur Pariser Salonausstellung des 18. Jahrhunderts (Ars et Scientia, 14), by Anja Weisenseel, in: *Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte* 82 (2019), 138–143; Valérie Kobi, Rev. of: *Bildbetrachtung in Bewegung*. Der Rezipient in Texten und Bildern zur Pariser Salonausstellung des 18. Jahrhunderts, by Anja Weisenseel, in: *Regards croisés. Deutsch-französisches Rezensionsjournal zur Kunstgeschichte und Ästhetik* 8 (2019), 150–152.

26 De Piles, *Conversations*, 3–4, 7.

27 Some rough caricatures have been published in an article by: Nina Christine Dusartz de Vogneulle, Das Sehende Auge. Die Kunstkennerschaft seit dem 18. Jahrhundert, in: Stephan Brakensiek/Anne-Katrin Sors (eds.), *Copy Right Adam von Bartsch. Kunst, Kommerz, Kenner-schaft*, Petersberg 2016, 305–319.
Obviously, there are different kinds of looking at a picture. Every reader will con-
firm that it makes a difference to see a painting on a wall or to study it from a close
distance. De Saint-Aubin's drawing seems to invite the beholder to reflect on the
viewing experience of the two connoisseurs. How does it differ from our own way
of approaching an art work? How meaningful is it to believe that connoisseurs had
a particular way of looking at a painting? Anja Weisenseel seeks to describe the act
of seeing in the eighteenth century as a perceptive movement between near and far.
Pursuant to that, it is particularly the performative quality of the *visus* that appears
to be characteristic for an eighteenth-century approach. Additionally, the author
underlines the fact that *visus* also had a connotation of *tactus*.<fnref n="28" /> As a matter of fact,
from Roger de Piles's time onward, the reception process between artwork and
beholder has been described and conceptualized repeatedly as an act of penetra-
tion ("pénétration").<fnref n="29" /> Studying auction catalogues from that time shows that it was
common to outline seeing as a visual touch ("toucher").<fnref n="30" /> Therefore, the question
stands whether the work of the connoisseur has to be understood as being much
more corporal than the work of an art historian today. Not much is known about
the relevance of involving the artwork's material quality in processes of judging. In
a time when a living presence was attributed to sculptures, and, as Caroline van Eck
could demonstrate,<fnref n="31" /> the practice of touching objects was quite common. It can-
not be ruled out that connoisseurs would have touched, for instance, the painting's
surfaces not only with their eyes, but also with their hands to compare qualities.
At least, it is known that such tactile-based comparisons played a crucial role in
the judgment of prints in order, for example, to be able to differentiate between
various paper qualities.

Weisenseel's description of a movement between near and far also becomes
another facet with regard to the working routines of connoisseurs. It could be said
that the 'connoisseurial vista' should be understood not only corporally but also, fig-
uratively speaking, as a movement between 'completeness' (the far) and 'fragmen-
tation' (the near).<fnref n="32" /> The epistemological impact of such a description is twofold: By
collecting and ordering artifacts, connoisseurs aim at a certain completeness. This
process of assembling a high number of artifacts is accompanied by practices such
as comparing, classifying, or judging. Close observations, on the other hand, were

<footnote n="28">28 Weisenseel, *Bildbetrachtung*, 93–212.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 Weisenseel, *Bildbetrachtung*, 253–258.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 Jérôme Delaplanche, *Un tableau n'est pas qu'une image* (Collection "Art & société"), Rennes 2016, 154–158.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 Caroline Van Eck (ed.), Introduction, in: *Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object* (Studien aus dem Warburg-Haus), Boston 2015, 11–28.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 I first conceptualized this auxiliary dichotomy in the context of the conference "Vistas" organized by the Nineteenth Century Studies Association (NCSA), Philadelphia, in March 2018.</footnote>
as important as gaining an overview over a broad stock of art objects. By analyzing the details of single art works, the connoisseur was pretending to make their inner structure 'legible.' The 'secret science' of 'reading' the fragment claims to decipher meaning by pure sight penetration of the painting's surface. This sorcery might have provoked representations of connoisseurs as donkeys or apes armed with magnifiers in the first place. But how did they actually 'read' single artworks? They were thrown back upon appearances such as hatches, light, the structure of a brush stroke, the material quality of the surface, and so forth. De Piles had already emphasized that 'reading' meant 'comparing' the findings with those in other art in 1708: "All objects that enter a painting, all lines, & all colors, all lights & all the shadows are not big or small, strong or faint, other than by comparison." <fnref n="33" /> Such routinely implemented, unuttered comparative practices, however, usually remain in a prediscursive midpoint. The connoisseur<fnref n="34" /> is studying details, and, for instance, is looking for a treatment that is characteristic for a particular painter. But to be able to judge about certain characteristics and qualities, he is forced to know enough other relevant comparative material in which these specific features are present as well. Therefore, I would argue that connoisseurial practices cannot escape a 'comparative imperative,' given that these practices typically also comprise operations such as balancing and/or subsuming.

The question stands whether or not a 'comparative imperative' in de Piles's sense of the perception of a picture as set out above is what Dubos had in mind by introducing the "goût de comparaison." At least, de Piles's and Dubos's utterances seem to reflect an awareness of the fact that practices of comparing on different levels determine the work of a connoisseur in manifold ways. That, in the age of enlightenment, comparisons generally could enfold a dynamizing potential in the emerging sciences—including natural sciences as well as the humanities—becomes a more and more probable assumption; corresponding arguments can be found in different disciplines such as the history of science or in historiographical approaches in history, literature, and philosophy.<fnref n="35" /> It is astonishing to realize that in the eighteenth century, sometimes one person was involved in both natural history

<footnote n="33">33 [My translation and emphasis]. Original quote: "Tous les objets qui entrent dans le Tableau, toutes les lignes & toutes les couleurs, toutes les lumières & toutes les ombres ne sont grandes ou petites, fortes ou foibles que par comparaison." See Roger De Piles, *Cours de peinture par principes*, Paris 1708, 105.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 The masculine form used in this text for 'connoisseur' reflects the fact that hardly any female connoisseurs are known. However, the masculine form is meant to include all possible gender and sexual identities.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 I refer only to the most recent positions: Michael Eggers, *Vergleichendes Erkennen: zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie des Vergleichs und zur Genealogie der Komparatistik* (Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrift), Heidelberg 2016; Epple, *Angelika/Walter Erhard, Die Welt beobachten. Praktiken des Vergleichens*, in: Angelika Epple/Walter Erhard (eds.), *Die Welt beobachten. Praktiken des Vergleichens*, Frankfurt a. M./New York 2015, 7–31; Andreas</footnote>
and art connoisseurship at the same time.<fnref n="36" /> In both fields, scholars proceeded in a very similar manner, namely, by collecting objects and/or artifacts and by trying to categorize these items taxonomically. However, what distinguished both worlds, the natural science and art connoisseurship, is beyond others the ‘aesthetic surplus’ of art works. Whereas it was a relevant category in the judgment of art, it soon lost its significance for the natural sciences. The judgment of art cannot be limited to the morphological formalism alone present in taxonomic methods; it goes far beyond such practices.<fnref n="37" /> I shall come back to the question of the ‘aesthetic surplus’ in the final part of this chapter.

Other practices of comparing within art connoisseurship were perhaps as important as the comparative viewing itself, but they concerned different types of comparisons. Early art connoisseurship was not limited to methodological instruments such as classification and/or visual juxtaposition alone: In 1708, de Piles, who so precisely defined the connoisseur's endeavors, invented one of the first known ratings. This special type of comparison was quickly assimilated and evolved in, for example, the fields of sports and economics.<fnref n="38" /> A closer look at the phenomenon

Mauz/Hartmut von Sass (eds.), *Hermeneutik des Vergleichs: Strukturen, Anwendungen und Grenzen komparativer Verfahren* (Interpretation interdisziplinär), Würzburg 2011.

<footnote n="36">36 It would be worth also examining the juxtapositions to morphological approaches in the history of art. Starting from the collection and the illustrious life of the erudite Antoiné-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville (1680-1765), Daniela Bleichmar argues toward an inextricable entanglement of natural science and connoisseurship in art in early and mid-eighteenth-century France, including the level of the actors as well as the level of collecting and exhibiting objects. In her argument, the connoisseur's eyes even become a "taxonomical instrument" (p. 89). See Daniela Bleichmar, *Learning to Look: Visual Expertise across Art and Science in Eighteenth-Century France, in: *Eighteenth-Century Studies* 46 (1/2012), 85-111, https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2012.0084 [last accessed April 19, 2018]. In a historical overview, Karin Leonhard demonstrates the interfaces between art production, social networks, and collecting shells: Karin Leonhard, *Shell Collecting: On 17th-Century Conchology, Curiosity Cabinets and Still Life Painting, in: Karl A. E. Enenkel/Paul J. Smith (eds.), *Early Modern Zoology* (Intersections, 7), Leiden 2007, 177-214. It is also remarkable to note the common disinterest in the reasons why the once shared way went on to develop in distinct directions.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 Insight into the relationship between a taxonomic natural history and practices of comparing can be found in, for instance: Thomas Stach, *Anmerkungen zur Rolle des Vergleichs in der Morphologie, in: Matthias Bruhn/Gerhard Scholtz (eds.), *Der vergleichende Blick. Formanalyse in Natur- und Kulturwissenschaft*, Berlin 2017, 41-53.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 De Piles's contribution has been emphasized as one of the first Western rankings/ratings by: Victor Ginsburgh/Sheila Weyers, *On the contemporaneity of Roger de Piles' Balance des peintres*, in: Jack Amariglio (ed.), *Sublime economy: on the intersection of art and economics*, London, 2009, 112-123; Kathryn Graddy, *Taste Endures! The Rankings of Roger de Piles* (1709) and Three Centuries of Art Prices, in: *The Journal of Economic History* 73 (3/2013), 766-791, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0022050713000600 [last accessed May 23, 2018]; Carlos Spoerhase, *Das Maß der Potsdamer Garde: die ästhetische Vorgeschichte des Rankings in der europäischen Literatur- und Kunstkritik des 18. Jahrhunderts*, in: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft (ed.),</footnote>
of art criticism, however, reveals that it was perhaps particularly the difficult-to-
describe stubbornness of art that predestinated the aesthetic field to be the birth-
place of systematic ratings/rankings. With the help of ratings, authors such as de
Piles were able to clarify their judgments in terms of an ideal-typical system of
values. De Piles analyzed art by referring to the categories composition ("composi-
tion"), drawing ("dessein"), coloring ("coloris") and expression ("expression").<fnref n="39" /> These
categories were extracted from earlier art theory treatises and had to persist in a
field in which normative rules tended every now and then to be thrown overboard.
The invention of the "balance of painters" is a new way to offer not only complex
comparisons but also concrete visualizations of the author's 'taste of comparing.' Of
course, the complexity is accessible only to those who are familiar with the kind of
values, ideas, preliminary decisions, and—most important for this context—chains
of comparisons hidden behind certain numeral values. De Piles uses numbers be-
tween zero and twenty to evaluate the performance of the artists in each category.
Sometimes, he even turns entire scholarly disputes into good or bad notes, as in
for instance, the famous "querelle du coloris."<fnref n="40" /> This becomes obvious by considering
names such as "Rubens" and "Poussin" (Fig. 2).<fnref n="41" />

The painters indicate opposite poles of the famous “querelle”: Whereas Rubens stood for a preference for ‘color,’ Poussin, on the other hand, exemplified a preference for ‘drawing.’ De Piles’s leading role in the debate and his positioning for the colorists has been made available in a painstakingly rich volume by Bernard Teyssèdre,<fnref n="42" /> so that it comes as no surprise to find again the author’s predilection for the colorists in his table. With the exception of the category drawing (13), Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) reaches high numbers only in composition (18), coloring (17), and expression (17), whereas de Piles conceded Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665)

<footnote>Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft, internationales Organ für neuere deutsche Literatur 58
(2014), 90–126.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">39 See De Piles, *Cours de peinture*, 489–498. Instead of the “balance of painters,” the English translation offers at the end of the volume a brief summary of the then famous British artists, see Roger de Piles, *The art of painting, with the lives and characters of above 300 of the most eminent painters: containing a complete treatise of painting, designing, and the use of prints* [...]. London 1754.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">40 On the "Querelle de coloris," see Daniel Dauvois, Les armes de la philosophie dans la Querelle du coloris, in: Frédéric Cousinié (ed.), *L'artiste et le philosophe* (Aesthetica), Rennes 2011, 303–320; Emmanuelle Delapierre, *Rubens contre Poussin: la querelle du coloris dans la peinture française à la fin du XVIIe siècle; Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Arras, 6 mars au 14 juin 2004*, Amsterdam 2004; Jacqueline Lichtenstein, *La Couleur éloquente: rhétorique et peinture à l'âge classique*, Paris 1989; Thomas Puttfarken, *Roger de Piles' Theory of Art*, New Haven 1985; Bernard Teyssèdre, *Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV* (Bibliothèque des Arts, 13), Paris 1965.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41 Page from Roger de Piles's "Balance of painters" in: De Piles, *Cours de peinture*, without page number.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42 Teyssèdre, *Roger de Piles*.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2: Page from Roger de Piles's "Balance of painters", in: *Cours de peinture par principes*. Paris 1708, without page number.</figcaption></figure>
certainly high numbers in the first two categories composition (15) and drawing (17), but gave him poor marks for color (6) and expression (5). De Piles's evaluation diverges enormously from the high esteem that Poussin enjoyed at that time in the vicinity of the French royal academy that was still influenced by the classist position of Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), André Félibien (1619–1695), and others. However, as Victor Ginsburg and Sheila Weyers have pointed out, de Piles was careful enough to not define the weight of each category so that it remains unclear if one has to compute all scores equally or if certain categories are, for example, three times as important as others.<fnref n="43" /> This can lead to concurring readings and it may well explain why de Piles thought about the "balance of painters" rather as a game than as a helpful working tool.<fnref n="44" /> However, in the most obvious calculation that sums up all four categories with a similar value of twenty—which means eighty all together—de Piles's most important artists would have been Raphael and Rubens (65), the Carraci (58), as well as Domenichino and Le Brun (56), whereas Michelangelo (37), for example, ranks toward the bottom of the field.<fnref n="45" />

## 2. The Attribution of the art work or practices of connoisseurial comparative viewing

Numbers are one way of comparing things with each other, but as de Piles's evaluations have shown, they are already the result of prior comparative operations. Analytically speaking, they represent complex forms of clustered comparisons that were used quantitatively in the evaluation of art. However, as results of previous qualitative judgments, it could be said that they can always be traced back to de Piles's second domain, the attribution of art works that was itself the result of practices of comparative vision. In fact, neither collecting art nor the practice of arranging images next to each other were eighteenth-century innovations. We can find, for instance, countless examples of juxtaposed images in the typological arrangements of medieval altarpieces or reliquary caskets.<fnref n="46" /> What, then, makes comparative viewing in art connoisseurship most remarkable? Put in a nutshell, connoisseurs developed a particular interest in a plurality of images neither because

<footnote n="43">43 Ginsburgh/Weyers, On the contemporaneity, 116.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">44 "J'ay fait cet essai plutôt pour me divertir que pour attirer les autres dans mon sentiment", see De Piles, *Cours de peinture*, 489 [my italics].</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45 See Nikolaus Pevsner, *Die Geschichte der Kunstakademien*, München 1986, 103, 336, note 111.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">46 For the biblical 'typology' as a visual system founded in comparisons, see, for instance: Arwed Arnulf, *Studien zum Klostereuburger Ambo und den theologischen Quellen bildlicher Typologien von der Spätantike bis 1200*, in: *Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte*, vol. 48, 1995, 19–23; Marek T. Kretschmer, *La typologie biblique comme forme de pensée dans l'historiographie médiévale* (Textes et études du Moyen Âge), Turnhout 2014.</footnote>
of certain religious, political, or aesthetical functions, nor because of an artistic interest in specific techniques, motifs, and so forth. Rather, it allowed them to systematize artifacts taxonomically, and, as a consequence, to (re-)construct their position within an art historical narrative of whatsoever nature. Even if many of the first art connoisseurs were artists themselves,<fnref n="47" /> their interests shifted little by little toward the relevance, the history, and the intellectual contexts of the art works, their provenance, and their artistic origin. In the beginning, such a curiosity may have been driven by the wish to formulate a normative canon in art schools providing an orientation for younger art students. But later, the intellectualization and assimilation of connoisseurial knowledge would become a main strategy within an institutionalizing academic art history. At the moment, it can be nothing other than a hypothesis that refunctionalized comparative viewing made a major contribution in the process of this 'scientification' process. While comparative viewing always formed part of the reception of artifacts, it first became an explicit methodical analyzing tool in the eighteenth century.

Such an analyzing way of comparative viewing in connoisseurship could profit from different impulses. Those worth mentioning are circles of early experts such as the one around Pierre Crozat (1661/1665–1740),<fnref n="48" /> in which knowledge was accumulated and discussed starting from a magnificent private collection. Another, but overlapping field in which comparative viewing played a crucial role was the blossoming art market. Particularly the market for prints offered connoisseurs such as Michel de Marolles (1600–1681), Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774), or Edme-François Gersaint (1694–1750) opportunities to try out and establish different practices of comparative viewing. Personal overlaps to the French *Académie* existed, where comparative approaches to images, as well, played a predominant role. In lectures, better known as the *conférences*,<fnref n="49" /> the members of the *Académie* sought to theorize and systemize artistic and aesthetic rules.<fnref n="50" /> When analyzing those lectures, it is not

<footnote n="47">47 Johannes Rößler has emphasized that until the 1870s, key positions in German museums remained in the hands of trained artists, see Johannes Rößler, *Das Notizbuch als Werkzeug des Kunsthistorikers: Schrift und Zeichnung in den Forschungen von Wilhelm Bode und Carl Justi*, in: Christoph Hoffmann (ed.), *Daten sichern. Schreiben und Zeichnen als Verfahren der Aufzeichnung*, Zürich 2008, 73–102, see 75, note 10.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">48 See for instance: Cordélia Hattori, *The Drawings Collection of Pierre Crozat (1665–1740)*, in: *Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750*, Farnham et al. 2003, 173–181.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49 For the edited volumes of the conferences of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture held between 1648–1793, see https://www.perspectivia.net/publikationen/conference [last accessed May 16, 2018].</footnote>

<footnote n="50">50 A good example for the rule-and-canon-oriented approach has been brought together by the secretary of the Royal Academy in a volume demonstrating all contemporary academic rules in texts and tables, see Henri Testelin, *Sentimens des plus habiles peintres du tems, sur la pratique de la peinture et sculpture: recueillis & mis en tables de preceptes, avec six discours academiques, extraits des conférences tenuës en l'Académie Royale desdits arts ... par Henry Testelin, peintre du roi,*</footnote>
difficult to see that many of them cannot be imagined without prior practices of comparisons. It is, moreover, important to emphasize that judging the quality between two artworks/artists, attributing the responsible masters, or distinguishing between the original work and the copies were also crucial for the academical discourse. The everyday connoisseurial practices entered the academic efforts from its very beginnings.

To become more concrete and to distinguish between the different practices of comparing, connoisseurs, first and foremost, experimented with different systems of ordering art in albums. They arranged prints and drawings according to a relative subject (e.g., jesters), a certain narrative (e.g., a passion sequence), the alphabetic order of the artist's names, the artist's reputation, the affiliation to an artistic profession (e.g., painters, engravers, etc.), according to chronological or topographical aspects, or even artistic techniques (e.g., engravings, colored woodcuts).<fnref n="51" /> Those and other criteria are present in the structure of all broader eighteenth-century collections of engravings. It is important to emphasize that different principles of ordering were sometimes used synchronically by one and the same connoisseur. It would, therefore, be reductive to imagine a straightforward development of certain ordering principles in a connoisseur's collection. The famous art collector Michel de Marolles<fnref n="52" /> offers a good example for someone who is analogously realizing different structures in his collection(s). Not only did he hold the largest collection of prints in France at the time of Louis XIV (1638–1715), but he also sold it to the king in 1667, and—in a very short span of time—was able to bring together a second print collection of fairly the same extent of circa one hundred and twenty thousand leaves.<fnref n="53" /> His methods of collecting exemplify an early degree of professionalized connoisseurship that found its successors with a particular interest in those albums that were arranged according to artists, schools, regions, and fame. Two-

<footnote>professeur & secretaire en ladite Academie, ed. by Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, La Hague 1680.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51 A meticulous analysis of the different order structures of Michel de Marolles's albums has been presented by Brakensiek, Stephan, Vom 'Theatrum mundi' zum 'Cabinet des Estampes': das Sammeln von Druckgraphik in Deutschland 1565–1821 (Studien zur Kunstgeschichte, 150), Hildesheim 2003, 17–39.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">52 Cf. Jean Jouberton, Une relecture du Livre des peintres et graveurs de Michel de Marolles, in: Nouvelles de l'estampe 249 (2014), 4–15; Véronique Meyer, Marolles illustré: Chauveau, Mellan, Nanteuil et les autres, in: Peter Fuhring/Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée/Marianne Grivel (eds.), L'estampe au grand siècle, Paris 2010, 277–291; Stephan Brakensiek, Sammeln, Ordnen und Erkennen: frühneuzeitliche Druckgraphiksammlungen und ihre Funktion als Studien- und Erkenntnisorte; das Beispiel der Sammlung Michel de Marolles' (1600–1681), in: Robert Felfe/Angelika Lozar (eds.), Frühneuzeitliche Sammlungspraxis und Literatur, Berlin 2006, 130–162.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53 Brakensiek, *Theatrum mundi*, 18, 22–23.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 3: Album double page from the Michel de Marolles print collection, Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Estampes et photographie, Reserve EC-37-Boite Fol 1, fol. 82v-83.</figcaption></figure>

thirds of his collection, however, were systematized according to an older principle that is reminiscent of Samuel Quicchelberg's (1529-1567) universal approach
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

of gathering all phenomena known to humankind.<fnref n="54" /> In altogether seventy categories

<footnote n="54">54 Cf. Brakensiek, Sammeln, Ordnen und Erkennen, 136. This claim is already present in Quicchelberg's title "rerum universitatis singulas materias et imagines": Samuel Quicchelberg, *Inscriptiones vel tituli Theatri amplissimi, complectentis rerum universitatis singulas ma-*</footnote>
gories, Marolles organized prints with respect to the *Artes liberales*,<fnref n="55" /> conceding that one of the main objectives of his albums was educational.<fnref n="56" /> However, the question arises how well Marolles’s albums satisfy the demand to acquire universal knowledge from the gathered engravings, given that not only the different order structures within his collection but also the side-by-side confrontations of engravings point to very different levels of comparisons. Stephan Brakensiek has underlined how difficult it sometimes is to ascertain the underlying order principle of an album double page. In Brakensiek’s opinion, Marolles sticks with the principles of *curiositas* and *varietas*<fnref n="57" /> that were central epistemic strategies in early modern curiosity cabinets. Yet, the different levels of comparison also result, amongst others, from particular conditions of visual comparisons themselves—that is, for instance, the almost endless possibilities of identifying *tertia comparationis* and assumptions of comparability (“*Gleichartigkeitsannahmen*”). What is meant by that? Analytically speaking, by doing comparisons, one is juxtaposing at least two *comparata* and is relating both to one or more *tertia comparationis*. It is useful to understand comparisons as practices that are performed by at least one actor and are always situated in a particular context. Moreover, one could say that every comparison is based on an implicit or explicit assumption of comparability.

How crucial is it to know more about the 'intended' *tertium comparationis*, if any? It seems to be worth raising this question with regard to a characteristic relict of Marolles's connoisseurial activities: By applying the definition to the arrangement of a double page (Fig. 3)<fnref n="58" /> from one of Marolles's albums with prints by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), it rapidly comes to the point at which it is difficult to precisely specify the historical intention of the presented comparison of prints.

It is vital to note that the following considerations are not intended to describe a historical practice of comparing, but, first of all, the difficulties that generally accompany practices of comparing images. The two Goltzius albums form part of

<footnote>terias et imagines eximias etc, München 1565, URL: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/record-ABO/%2BZ178696704.html [last accessed July 16, 2018].</footnote>

<footnote n="55">55 Cf. Brakensiek, Sammeln, Ordnen und Erkennen, 135; Michel de Marolles, *Catalogue de livres d'estampes et de figures en taille douce: avec un dénombrement des pieces qui y sont contenuës; fait à Paris en l'année 1666*, Paris 1666, 9–14.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">56 Cf. Brakensiek, Sammeln, Ordnen und Erkennen, 144; Marolles, *Catalogue*, 9: "Cependant s'il faut parler de leur [i.e., prints] utilité pour l'instruction de ceux qui les aiment, ou pour former l'esprit d'un jeune Prince, il est certain que les Estampes bien choisies & bien disposées donnent agreablement la connaissance, non seulement de toutes les Sciences, & de tous les beaux Arts, mais encore de toutes les choses imaginables."</footnote>

<footnote n="57">57 Cf. Brakensiek, Sammeln, Ordnen und Erkennen, 139.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58 Album double page from the Michel de Marolles print collection, Paris, Bibliothèques nationale de France, Estampes et photographie, Reserve EC-37-Boite Fol 1, fol. 82v–83, URL: http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb43601416n [last accessed July 18, 2018].</footnote>
a comprehensive collection that was sold to King Louis XIV and rearranged completely by Marolles before it entered the royal collection.<fnref n="59" /> Hence, in all probability, the two albums represent a structure that had been set carefully. The double page<fnref n="60" /> shows on the left side the second state of the famous *Apollo Belvedere* executed by Goltzius,<fnref n="61" /> whereas on the right side, four leaves are placed next to each other, that is, first, the *Unequal couple* by Claes Jansz. Visscher (1587–1652), on which both Goltzius’s family armor and the monogram “HG” imply his authorship;<fnref n="62" /> second, the *Hercules Boarium* executed by an anonymous artist and signed on the pedestal with “HGoltzius fecit”;<fnref n="63" /> third, the engraving *Death surprising a young man* by Jan Saenredam (1565–1607) after a design by Goltzius;<fnref n="64" /> and fourth, *Judith with the head of Holofernes* by Goltzius after a design by Bartholomeus Spranger (1546–1611).<fnref n="65" /> This complex combination of engravings demonstrates the general ambiguity of images in accounting for a certain *tertium comparationis*; this is aggravated by the fact that the *comparata* as well as the assumption of comparability are not defined either. It is, thus, not perfectly clear whether the combination of engravings bears a deeper significance or not, because, thematically, they vary widely. The *Apollo Belvedere* is one of the most famous Roman sculptures that became a prototype for ‘perfect antiquity’ in neoclassical times. The engraving represents not only the Palatine sculpture but also the moment when young artist takes a sketch of it in chalk. Also, the *Hercules Boarium* represents a Roman sculpture, now, however, a sculpture that has been made in bronze and not in marble. Just like the *Apollo Belvedere*, the Roman demigod is executed in a sharp view from below. Therefore, the perspective on the sculpture could be the requested *tertium* that sets the comparison between the two prints. Another of the prints, *Judith with the head of Holofernes*, is also composed from a worm’s eye perspective that increases its dramatic effect. However,

<footnote n="59">59 Album double page from the Michel de Marolles print collection, Paris, Bibliothèques nationale de France, Estampes et photographie, Reserve EC-37-Boite Fol 1, fol. 82v–83.</footnote>

<footnote n="60">60 Album double page from the Michel de Marolles print collection, Paris, Bibliothèques nationales de France, Estampes et photographie, Reserve EC-37-Boite Fol 1, fol. 82v–83.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">61 Marjolein Leesberg/Huigen Leeflang (eds.), *The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts 1450-1700 – Hendrick Goltzius*, part ii, Amsterdam 2012, NH 380/II, 370.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">62 Leesberg/Leeflang, *New Hollstein Hendrick Goltzius*, part iv, NH D9, 253. The inscription is: “Decrepitus juvenem lepidamque movere Puellam /Conatur, turpi victus amore senex /Cascus ait, cascam: corpucula digna patula /Quaero: conjugii spes tibi nulla mei.” (Translation: “Taken by shameful love the decrepit old man tries to persuade the jolly girl. But she says: Old goes with old, I look for a lid that fits my jug. I think you do not match me”).</footnote>

<footnote n="63">63 Leesberg/Leeflang, *New Hollstein Hendrick Goltzius*, part iv, NH D9, 253.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">64 Leesberg/Leeflang, *New Hollstein Hendrick Goltzius*, part iii, NH 530, 222. The inscription is: “FVI, NON SVM. ES, NON ERIS” (Translation: “What I was, I am not; what you are, you will not be”).</footnote>

<footnote n="65">65 Leesberg/Leeflang, *New Hollstein Hendrick Goltzius*, part ii, NH 336/I, 298. The inscription is: “Nemo suis nimium confidat viribus, ausis Nemo suis temerê; Docet hoc Holophernis amarus Exitus [...].” A translation is given in the text.</footnote>
different kinds of heroism could also be the subject of the juxtaposition that link the three prints. Neither the one nor the other *tertium* appear to be addressed in the two prints hitherto not mentioned. Whereas the first one takes into consideration the inappropriate desire of an old man and a young woman's refusal, the second shows a young man strolling through a graveyard with an Egyptian pyramid in the background. He bumps into a skeleton that reminds him of his own mortal condition. Apparently, in this case, the experience of time or an idea of vanitas may have been the *tertium*, and one could ask whether or not this is also true for the other three prints. Given the inscription present in the Judith print that clearly points to the transience of forceful men ("No one should trust its own forces too much, nor its reckless boldness; this teaches the bitter end of Holofernes [...]"), the other two effigies of god and demigod are also no more than a distant echo of a time in which the histories and legends connected with the two protagonists were still commonly known. Finally, it is also conceivable that Marolles had just one detail in mind that serves him as *comparatum*, for example, the figures' hands. Consequently, the perspective changes once again because the *tertium* may now be a particular gesture of the hand.

What becomes obvious from a brief analysis of the double page is that the historical practice of connoisseurial comparative viewing is far from being one that discloses its secrets unequivocally. On the contrary, more than in the polysemy of texts, images withdraw themselves from an unequivocal 'readability.' If, furthermore, a paratext on the image always creates a new visibility that stands against the visible as such—as can be argued with Michel Foucault (1926–1984)—then the ambiguity of the dispositive will increase even further.<fnref n="66" /> Connoisseurial practices of arranging images in albums are pre-textual, but they nevertheless might aim toward a certain goal. Insofar we have to assume that they are intentional to a certain degree. They create—so the hypothesis—a hiatus comparable to the one between the visible and the sayable. The medial and material quality of 'the things visible' are obvious focal points for this underestimated effect. For instance, by arranging prints with different paper qualities, by juxtaposing an original with a copy—both distinguishable only through minor differences between lines, hatches, shadows, and so forth—the connoisseur nails down a particular but unuttered relationship between the chosen prints. This parapractice that comprises, for instance, the selection process, the differentiation between material qualities, or the alignment of prints in the portfolio might enfold the same impact as a paratext.

<footnote n="66">66 Falk Wolf describes the gap between the visible and the sayable as one that has determined art historical writing from the beginning, see Falk Wolf, *Kunstgeschichte als Bild. Medien- und Wissenschaftstheoretische Positionen der Kunstgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert*, Doctoral dissertation, University of Basel, Switzerland, 2017, 4–7.</footnote>
It is important to emphasize that the connoisseurial arrangements must not always have pursued a specific meaning or goal. On the contrary, it appears probable that, for example, formalistic reasons could likewise have been decisive elements that dominated the everyday experience of the connoisseur. Certain aspects can be recognized in the blink of an eye or a 'coup d'œil.'<fnref n="67" /> Marolles might have chosen the five prints on the double page (Fig. 3) because all of them show freestanding figures. This formalistic similarity<fnref n="68" /> is perhaps trivial, but it brings to the fore a general phenomenon present in images: On the one hand, it is much easier to perceive the content of one or more images—as opposed to that of a text—in a very short span of time. In the case of the double page, this might be the topic 'freestanding figure.' In that sense, as some forms of comparisons—metaphors for instance—can be understood as a shorthand method, image arrangements could also present certain aspects instantly. On the other hand, a detailed picture analysis might require much more time and prerequisites than every thorough textual analysis, as has been shown by the arduous search for a *tertium* or the assumption of comparability on only one double page of Marolles' Goltzius album. Of course, comparing images can be a particularly effective way to grasp a certain topic, but it does not guarantee a mutual understanding of the intention of the comparative arrangement. Such arrangements may allow us to make an argument beyond any textual dimension, but that provides both clearly highlighted *tertia* and assumptions of comparability. For the moment, we have to assume that for Marolles, the initiator of the comparative arrangement, the latent openness of his 'composition' with respect to the *tertia* and the assumption of comparability poses no problem at all. The context—a portfolio with works by Goltzius—clarifies the most important task of such juxtapositions, namely the attribution to a particular artist. In the eyes of the author of the comparative arrangement, the decision for a topic such as 'freestanding figure' might have facilitated statements on how Goltzius solved certain artistic tasks. This raises, however, the question whether or not practices of comparing in the eighteenth century are in any way new or distinct from those already common two or more centuries earlier.

<footnote n="67">67 The term 'coup d'œil' is connected to the request of eighteenth-century theorists that a 'tableau' has to be apprehensible in a single glance of an eye, see Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur*, 149–151. How complex the interplay between contemplative and cursory sight can be has been discussed vividly by Norman Bryson who differentiates between the concepts "gaze" ("regard") and "glance" ("coup d'œil"), see Norman Bryson, *Vision and painting: the logic of the gaze* (Language, discourse, society), London 1988, 87–133.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">68 Dorothee Kimmich has emphasized the relationship between similarity as a theoretical paradigm and comparison in a lecture within the framework of the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing. Changing and Ordering the World", Bielefeld University, in July 2018. She stressed that—as with comparisons—similarities are always context-related. See also: Anil Bhatti/Dorothee Kimmich (eds.), *Similarities*, Tulika 2018.</footnote>
3. Differentiating between original and copy or distinct practices of comparing in connoisseurship

An early example of connoisseurship and art expertise is Giorgio Vasari's private
collection of drawings. Parallel to his famous *Lives of the most eminent painters, sculp-
tors and architects*,<fnref n="69" /> first published in 1550 and then in an expanded version in 1568,
the painter-author, sometimes called the 'father of art history', assembled a vast
collection of original drawings on approximately five hundred to seven hundred
sheets that he referred to as his "libro de' disegni"—his book of drawings.<fnref n="70" /> Unfor-
tunately, none of the ten to twelve original volumes has been preserved. However,
single sheets survived and their discovery, such as that of the one kept in the Na-
tional Gallery in Washington attracted the attention of art historians (Fig. 4).<fnref n="71" />

The album page represents a composition of four single metal point drawings on the recto from which—in reference to the large size of the album page of 56.7 x 45.7 cm—every drawing could have stood alone for itself. However, Vasari apparently invested much effort in pasting them together in one arrangement. He not only ordered them symmetrically, but also invented an architectural framework.<fnref n="72" /> The viewer is invited to perceive them as parts of a sixteenth-century palazzo wall decoration.<fnref n="73" /> One of the purposes of such an arrangement might have been the creation of a visual argument by comparing drawing styles with each other and establishing an artistic identity. This can be deduced from the two cartouches at the bottom of the two central drawings with the head of a young boy above and different body studies below. Whereas the sepia rendered drawing below has been attributed by Vasari to the artist Filippo Lippi (1406–1469), the cartouche of the head study remained empty. Today, both drawings have been reattributed, the different body studies to Filippo Lippi’s son Filippino (1457–1504), the young man’s head to Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510), but it is not clear whether or not Vasari knew that the head is not from Filippo Lippi’s hand. Whatever the reason, the author of the

<footnote n="69">69 Giorgio Vasari, *Le vite de' piovoccellenti pittori, scultori, et architettori*, 3 vols., 2nd & expanded ed., Fiorenza 1568.</footnote>

<footnote n="70">70 Cf. Anna Forlani Tempesti, Giorgio Vasari and the 'Libro de' Disegni: A Paper Museum or Portable Gallery, in: Maia Wellington Gahtan (ed.), *Giorgio Vasari and the Birth of the Museum*, Farnham et al. 2014, 31–52; Kimberly Schenck, A Page from Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Libro de’ Disegni’ as Composite Object, in: *Facture. National Gallery of Art* 1 (2013), 2–31.</footnote>

<footnote n="71">71 Album page from *Libro de' Disegni*; sheets probably 1480–1504; mounting and framework by Giorgio Vasari, after 1524; 56.7 x 45.7 cm, Washington, National Gallery of Art, Woodner Collection, Patrons' Permanent Fund 1991.190.1.</footnote>

<footnote n="72">72 As far as we can say, Giorgio Vasari was the first to introduce such architectural frames, see Catherine Monbeig-Goguel, Le dessin encadré, in: *Revue de l'art* 76 (1987), 25–31.</footnote>

<footnote n="73">73 Kimberly Schenck has further specified that the “wall” resembles the “frescoes in the Chamber of Fortune (1548) at his [Vasari’s] home (Casa Vasari) in Arrezo [...]”, see Schenck, A Page from Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Libro de’ Disegni’, 11.</footnote>
Fig. 4: Album page from "Libro de' Disegni"; sheets probably 1480-1504; mounting and framework by Giorgio Vasari, after 1524; Washington, National Gallery of Art, Woodner Collection, Patrons' Permanent Fund 1991.190.1.

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

album collage has worked toward a stylistic correspondence and interrelationship. He thereby involved himself artistically by creating an architectural frame. Such a supplementary structure should not be underestimated given that "parerga [...] can have a decisive impact on the question of which agency may be produced in a given situation,"<fnref n="74" /> and that "parerga may be understood as a hinge or a threshold between object und subject."<fnref n="75" /> Moreover, in this example, the parerga perform an obvious function because they bring together more than one ergon and, therefore, aim to represent an aesthetic unity. The empty cartouche under the study of a young man's head might epitomize Vasari's doubts about the attribution of this

<footnote n="74">74 Grave et al., Agency of Display, 11 [italics in original].</footnote>

<footnote n="75">75 Grave et al., Agency of Display, 14 [italics in original].</footnote>
very drawing, but the entire page enshrines Filippo Lippi's authorship or at least it insinuates the execution in the same workshop. Likewise, the verso of the album leaf with altogether six mounted drawings in different techniques appears to prove Vasari's intention to establish the full range of Filippo's drawing style: a rare colored drawing with *Saint Roch between Saints Anthony Abbot and Catherine of Alexandria* today attributed to Raffaellino del Garbo (1466–1527) is—once again—(erroneously) identified in the cartouche as a work by Filippo Lippi.<fnref n="76" /> As early as 1930, Erwin Panofsky stressed the didactic impact of Vasari's framings that provided initial evidence for the practice of evaluating objects from an indisputable art historical perspective.<fnref n="77" /> As Vasari understood the “*arte del disegno*” as the “*Urkunst*”<fnref n="78" /> (original art) for all three spatial arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the comparative arrangement of his *libro di disegni* might have had the aim to extract a certain *summa* of every master present in his collection. However, his treatment prevents beholders from reformulating any attribution. On the contrary, they are fixed in individual but normative solutions in which the drawings are often enough even trimmed to fit into a certain composition.

One of the principal connoisseurs of the eighteenth century, Pierre-Jean Mariette,<fnref n="79" /> knew Vasari's individualizing approach because he could buy not just some sheets but a complete volume of Vasari's *libro de' disegni* on the French art market.<fnref n="80" /> This chance discovery prompted him to discuss the function of Vasari's collection of drawings for the conception of his *Vite*. Thus, in his posthumously published *Abcedario*, Mariette assumes that: “one would have no doubt that this discussion cannot be done but through *comparison*. Vasari’s album would have been a perpetual and unquestionable school of critique.”<fnref n="81" /> Mariette’s remarkable historicizing

<footnote n="76">76 Colored illustrations of the Washington recto and verso as well as many details are reproduced in Schenck, *A Page from Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Libro de’ Disegni*, 2–31.</footnote>

<footnote n="77">77 Cf. Erwin Panofsky, Das erste Blatt aus dem ‘Libro’ Giorgio Vasaris: eine Studie über die Beurteilung der Gotik in der italienischen Renaissance; mit einem Exkurs über zwei Fas-sadenprojekte Domenico Beccafumis, in: *Städel-Jahrbuch* 6, Frankfurt a. M. 1930, 25–72, see 63; see also Monbeig-Goguel, *Le dessin encadré*, 26.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">78 Panofsky, Das erste Blatt, 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">79 For the most recent monographic volumes on Pierre-Jean Mariette and his drawing collection, see Valérie Kobi, *Dans l'œil du connaisseur. Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774) et la construction des savoirs en histoire de l'art* (Collection “Art & société”), Rennes 2017; Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur*; Pierre Rosenberg/Laure Barthélemy-Labeeuw, *Les dessins de la collection Mariette: école française*, vol. 1 A–E, vol. 2 F–W, Milan 2011.</footnote>

<footnote n="80">80 The information is given in: Pierre-Jean Mariette, *Abecedario de P. J. Mariette et autres notes inédites de cet amateur sur les arts et les artistes*. Ouvrage publié d’après les manuscrits autographes conservés au cabinet des estampes de la Bibliothèque impériale, vol. 3, Paris 1851–1860, 160–161, note 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="81">81 [My translation and emphasis]. Original quote: “[...] on n'auroit eu aucun doute; cette discussion ne se pouvant bien faire que par comparaison, le recueil du Vasari auroit été une perpétuelle et une sûre école de critique.”, see Mariette, *Abecedario*, vol. 3, 160, note 1.</footnote>
classification should, however, be treated with some caution, because what he suggests for Vasari's practice describes rather his own "goût de comparaison." Without question, Mariette imitated some of Vasari's most obvious idiosyncrasies: A good example is Vasari's effort to painstakingly repair Botticelli's drawing with the head of a young man in the lower right corner by carefully using a wash of almost the same color. Mariette, too, executed innumerable repairs and also followed Vasari by integrating his drawings into illusionistic arrangements such as frames or reticent architectures as can be seen in the example with the drawing of a putto bending down that is now attributed to Giorgione (1477/78–1510) (Fig. 5).

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5: Giorgione (attributed), Putto bending down, mounting and framing by Pierre-Jean Mariette: New York, Metropolitan Museum, Rogers Fund, 1911, acc. no. 11.66.5.</figcaption></figure>
However, while Vasari took an artistic approach with individual solutions for his arrangements, Mariette established a rather systematic way to frame his drawings—and what is even more important—he preferred mats for every single drawing as far as they were medium sized. One could argue that Mariette was fully aware of the fact that “material and performative interventions of isolation, focusing, framing and staging make the object addressable as a single object.”<fnref n="82" /> Indeed, they underline the visual integrity of the drawing and force the viewer to examine it with the same attention as a framed painting. Appropriately, Mariette characterized his framings as a way of bringing drawings “back to life,”<fnref n="83" /> giving his framing practice a “museum effect.”<fnref n="84" /> It is true that the decision for more or less unified (characteristic blue) mats of medium size as well as the adoption of Vasari’s system of cartouches for the artists’ names are strategies still used today in drawing collections.<fnref n="85" /> With regard to conservation and presentation, the connoisseur anticipates museum principles that expose the particular quality of every single drawing.<fnref n="86" /> Consequently, in most cases, Mariette avoided doing precisely what this chapter is primarily about, namely a comparative arrangement of drawings. It would be premature to conclude that Mariette—similarly to the romantic tendency present, for example, in the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773–1798) and Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)—thought that “comparison is a serious impediment to any appreciation.”⁸⁷ On the contrary, as indicated in his writings, the advantage of his

<footnote n="82">82 Grave et al., Agency of Display, 13.</footnote>

<footnote n="83">83 Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur*, 145. French original: "les avois fait revivre les tira du rebut", see Pierre-Jean Mariette, Lettre sur Léonard de Vinci, Peintre Florentin. A Monsieur le C: de C., in: *Recueil de testes de caractère & de charges dessinées par Léonard de Vinci Florentin & gravées par M. le C de C*, Paris 1730, 19.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">84 However, he was not the first to use blue mats for framing his drawing collection: "Que penser en fin de compte de l'appellation 'Bleu Mariette'? Il faut observer que Mariette n'en fut pas l'inventeur et qu'il semble s'être inspire de ses prédécesseurs immédiats. On sait, par exemple. qu'un Antoine Coypel rhabilla de bandes bleues les dessins issus de la collection Jabach achetés par Louis XIV", see Dominique Le Marois, Les montages de dessins au XVIIIe siècle: l'exemple de Mariette, in: *Bulletin de la Société de l'Histoire de l'Art Français*, 1982, 87–96, see 90. Interestingly, Le Marois has differentiated between three categories of blue "Mariette mats" from which not all had a cartouche with the artist's name beneath the drawing; consequently, the author categorizes these mats as "Montages de 'recherche'", see Le Marois, Les montages, 94.</footnote>

<footnote n="85">85 Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur*, 149; see Svetlana Alpers, The Museum as a Way of Seeing, in: Ivan Karp/Steven D. Lavine, *Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display*, Washington D.C. 1991, 25–32, see 27.</footnote>

<footnote n="86">86 Romantic reasoning calls for an emotional rather than a rational approach, and in the case of Wackenroder and Tieck, it comes with a reevaluation of northern art and architecture. The full quote is: "But now I will turn my attention exclusively to you, my dear Albrecht [Dürer]. Comparison is a serious impediment to any appreciation, and even the most sublime beauty in art makes its full and proper impact on us only when our gaze is not distracted by other</footnote>
system lies in its high degree of flexibility: "je ne suis pas étonné que celui qui est parvenu au point de connaissance dont je parle, se voie le plus souvent obligé de quitter ses premiers sentimens, ou du moins de rectifier les idées qu'il avoit prises de certains Maistres."⁸⁸ Mounting the greater part of his collected drawings independently was the only way to ensure that all could be compared to each other at any given moment, and that attributions could be changed if necessary.⁸⁹ As has been shown by Kristel Smentek, Mariette himself, of course, also experimented with concrete juxtapositions in which the comparative quality is even reflected in captions such as "Achetypon [...] Apographum" or "juxta methodum."⁹⁰ Another *modus operandi* is present in an album without any mats that is preserved in the Metropolitan Museum, New York.⁹¹ Here, different stages and variants of prints were glued only selectively onto the support, so that Mariette and probably also his father Jean Mariette (1660–1742) would have the opportunity to rearrange the entire page if new findings were to require any corrections.⁹² It is no coincidence that the arrangement of the Metropolitan Mariette album is reminiscent of Marolles’s album pages discussed in the second section of this chapter. The Metropolitan album continues a systematic approach established between 1717 and 1719 by Mariette and his father Jean Mariette for the print collection of Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736).⁹³

beauties. Heaven has so distributed its gifts among the great artists of the world that we must pause before each one and pay to each his fair share of our respect. Genuine art may flourish not only under Italian skies or under majestic domes and Corinthian columns, but under pointed arches, fantastically ornamented buildings, and Gothic spires," see Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder/Ludwig Tieck, *Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar*, New York 1975, 58 [my italics].

88 Mariette, Lettre sur Léonard de Vinci, 2; see also: Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur*, 157.

89 This practice has been mentioned by De Piles already in 1699: "Ils en *jugeront* promptement par la facilité de feüilleter quelques papiers, & de *comparer* ainsi les Productions d'un Maître avec celles d'un autre [...]", see Roger de Piles, *Abregé de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un Traité du peintre parfait, de la connaissance des desseins, & de l'utilité des estampes*, Paris 1699, 83 [my italics], URL: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6568782t [last accessed August 27, 2018].

90 Smentek, *Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur*, 156–157.

91 Album Mariette, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1927, 27.78.2, URL: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/361938 [last accessed August 27, 2018].

92 To my knowledge, Michel de Marolles has first underlined that it is useful to fix prints and drawings only on the four, reinforced corners, see Marolles, *Catalogue*, 9: "Il n'est pourtant pas nécessaire de les y coller à plat, & sur tout, les pieces rares & precieuses des grands Maistres, qui se trouvent quelquesfois si malaisément, À quoy peu de colle de farine ou d'amidon, peut suffire aux quatre coins sur de beau papier, dont la dépence aussi bien que de la Relieure des Livres est assez considerable."

93 Chiara Gauna has highlighted the comparability of the Metropolitan Mariette album and the project executed for Prince Eugene, see Chiara Gauna, Pierre-Jean Mariette et le 'connoissances multipliées': classificazioni, gerarchie, valori, in: Chiara Gauna (ed.), *La sfida delle*
Of course, the value and uniqueness of prints is different from that of drawings, and here may lie a convincing explanation for the distinct organization of an album page with multiple prints on the one hand and the preference for single drawings under blue mats on the other. However, in both cases, it can be said that Mariette did not just continue Vasari’s practice of creating intentionally normative collages, but instead incorporated a skepticism into his system of attribution. Comparisons are crucial for every aesthetic judgment, but they are rather unable to yield normative results. Accordingly, the comparative quality in Vasari’s *libro de’ disegni* is not very pronounced—on the contrary, lots of his attributions could not withstand a refined connoisseurial practice. One could think of Charles Coypel’s critic of the “pêle-mêle dans de vieux portefeuilles,”<fnref n="94" /> where still at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a differentiation between original and copy existed only very rarely. But the differentiation between original and copy became the most important task of all for the decades to come.

A productive misreading of Coypel’s phrase “est sans nule comparaison” as “useless comparison”<fnref n="95" /> in Esther Bell’s article points to a remarkable question:<fnref n="96" /> Is the change of connoisseurial practices possibly present in the increasing efficiency of comparative doing itself? Mariette’s practice-oriented work stands as an example for the connoisseur’s specific skills that, besides the development of a particular vocabulary in the sense of the “sciences des mots,”<fnref n="97" /> enabled them to systematize and categorize the vast heritage of artistic artifacts. This also implied the exclusion of once admired art pieces and a strict culture of separating and dismissing even helpful copies. It “was inseparable from a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practices that modified in myriad ways the productive, cognitive, and desiring capacities of the human subject.”<fnref n="98" /> The reorganization of knowledge again, as has already been recognized critically by Antoine Quatremère de Quincy

<footnote>stampe. Parigi Torino 1650–1906, Torino 2017, 7–31, see 10. Consistent with this observation, Valérie Kobi enfolds the crucial formative impact of the Viennese project for the young Pierre-Jean Mariette, see Kobi, *Dans l’œil du connaisseur*, 61–94.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">94 "Les desseins du Roi sont aujourd'hui dans un ordre très different de celui où ils étoient lorsque ce dépôt fut reunis a la garde des mon Père ... Les desseins originaux et les copies étoient pêle-mêle dans de vieux portefeuilles et malheureusement le nombre des copies est sans nule comparaison plus considerable que celui des originaux.", Paris, Institut Custodia, inv. no. 9555, see Esther Bell, A Curator at the Louvre: Charles Coypel and the Royal Collections, in: *Journal 18: a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture* 2 (2016), 1–16 [13–14], URL: https://doi.org/10.30610/2.2016.6 [last accessed August 27, 2018].</footnote>

<footnote n="95">95 A more precise translation reads as following: "[...] the number of copies is without any comparison more considerable than [...]".</footnote>

<footnote n="96">96 Bell, Curator at the Louvre, 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="97">97 Marc-Antoine Laugier, *Maniere de bien juger des ouvrages de peinture*, Paris 1771, 8.</footnote>

<footnote n="98">98 Jonathan Crary, *Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century*, Cambridge 1991, 3.</footnote>
(1755-1849), is accompanied by some sort of manipulation: "You know that in every part of human knowledge there exists a sort of manipulation that makes every scientific department resemble a workshop ["espèce d'attélier"] in which every worker has his part and deals only with his part."<fnref n="99" /> And, truly, the new "Übersichtlichkeit' des Zuhandenseins,"<fnref n="100" /> the clarity of the present-to-hand, not only often upholds a surprising lack of systematization as Hans Christian Hönes has pointed out, but it is won at the price of an artificial, manipulating specialism. The connoisseur's visual experiences gained in life-long comparative practices are gained in the "espèce d'attélier," and, generally, they almost never find their way 'out' into the art discourse.

## A first outlook

Connoisseurial knowledge results more from the doing than from the application of contemporary theories. This is why a practice-theoretical approach is able to unfold in a particular way those types of questions that are focusing on, for example, the routinization of practices, the treatment of artifacts, and the interrelating of social networks. That the "taste of comparison," first described by Dubos, played a crucial role in the wide range of connoisseurial practices but also in further strategies of a developing academic art history becomes obvious in many of the examples discussed above. Two last cases may illustrate on very different levels why the 'aesthetic surplus'—namely the artwork's infinite and unclosed potential to create meaning<fnref n="101" />—is maybe the reason for comparative connoisseurial practices being discredited increasingly in the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In one plate from Jean Baptiste Seroux d'Agincourt's (1730-1814) *Histoire de l'art par monumens*<fnref n="102" /> (Fig. 6), the observer is invited to compare drawings by Raphael (1483-1520) with antique fragments of sarcophagi in order to understand in a glance the principles of the 'Re-naissance' of the Antique in sixteenth-century art.

<footnote n="99">99 [My translation]. Original quote: "Vous savez qu'il existe, dans chaque partie des connoissances humaines, une sorte de manipulation qui fait ressembler chaque département de la science, à une espèce d'attélier, dans lequel chaque ouvrier a sa partie, et ne s'occupe qu'elle.", see Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, *Lettres sur le préjudice qu'occasionnerait aux arts et à la science, le déplacement des monuments de lart de l'Italie*, Paris 1796, 27. See also: Pascal Griener, *La République de l'oeil: l'expérience de l'art au siècle des Lumières* (Collection du Collège de France), Paris 2010, 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="100">100 Hans C. Hönes, *Kunst am Ursprung: das Nachleben der Bilder und die Souveränität des Antiquars* (Image, 69), Bielefeld 2014, 236.</footnote>

<footnote n="101">101 This concept forms a crucial part of Gottfried Boehm's conceptualization of the 'iconic difference', see Gottfried Boehm, *Die Wiederkehr der Bilder, in: Gottfried Boehm (ed.), Was ist ein Bild? (Bild und Text)*, München 1994, 11-38.</footnote>

<footnote n="102">102 Jean Baptiste Seroux d'Agincourt, *Histoire de l'art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu'à son renouvellement au XVIIe: ouvrage enrichi de 325 pl., 6 vols.*, Paris 1823.</footnote>
Fig. 6: Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d'Agincourt, Histoire de l'art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu'à son renouvellement au XVIe: Planches. Peinture; deuxième et troisième parties. Tables générales des matières, vol. 6, Paris 1823, plate 183.

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

The book project concentrates on the illustrative power of hundreds of plates, but this example is particularly astonishing, because it nonverbally encapsulates a complex argument: Raphael's putti are oriented toward the representational mode of antique art (here: sculptural design), as can be said for Renaissance art in general. Not coincidentally, it seems to me, Seroux d'Agincourt chose drawings for this evocative comparison, because they can stand for the concept of Vasari's disegno
<figure><img src="image_8.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 7: Adam Bartsch, *Catalogue raisonné de toutes les estampes qui forment l'oeuvre de Rembrandt*, Vienna 1797, plate 1.</figcaption></figure>

that marks a genuine shift in sixteenth-century art theory to something entirely new. However, as convincing as the visual juxtaposition might be, if it is to become comprehensible, it not only needs the contextualizing caption "Esquisses et dessins de Raphael comparés avec l'Antique. XVIe. Siécle", but also presumes the Vasarian narrative of the decline of arts in the Middle Ages. Without text, the visual argument is at risk of ending up in a direction that is altogether different. This is also because of the 'aesthetic surplus' that offers more than one loose end to interpret the illustration's meaning. The visual argument together with its paratext, therefore, exposes itself to being highly manipulative and still allows enough room for just another 'reading.' In order to escape such an interpretative scope, connoisseurs such as Adam von Bartsch (1757-1821) started to fragment their examples in comparisons up to single lines (Fig. 7).

The aim of these 'micro-comparisons' was to differentiate very precisely between original and copy or first and second state of a print and so forth. However, von Bartsch's plate is far from being instantaneously legible. It remains abstract without textual description and without the background knowledge on what the prints in the comparison look like entirely. Long before Giovanni Morelli's (1816-1891) famous method of a quasimedical examination of art, von Bartsch's attempt fails to make things more objective. By reducing the artwork to pure formalistic details, he artificially ignores the 'aesthetic surplus' and initiates a tendency for the "taste of comparison," whose protagonists were later denigrated as 'Faltenzähler,' that is, counters of pleats or nitpickers. Both Seroux d'Agincourt and von Bartsch started to fix their comparative practice into illustrative juxtapositions, the one by propagating an epochal development, the other by pointing to
minimal morphological differences. These examples demonstrate the continuous
actualization of methods of comparing. They underline the different interests
that can be brought together from diverse visual types of juxtapositions. Most
and foremost, they mark a switch from an atelier practice of the visual "taste
of comparison" to a practice that more and more exhibits its institutionalized
research results.

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Photo Credits

Fig. 1: Xavier Salmon. *Gabriel de Saint-Aubin. Le "livre de croquis de Gabriel Saint-Aubin"*. Carnets et albums. Paris 2017.

Fig. 2: Roger de Piles *Cours de peinture par principes [...] without page number*.

Fig. 3: Author's photograph.

Fig. 4: National Gallery of Art.

Fig. 5: Kristel Smentek. *The Collector's Cut: Why Pierre-Jean Mariette Tore up His Drawings and Put Them Back Together Again*, in: *Master Drawings*, Vol. 46, No. 1, Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Draftsmen and Collectors (Spring, 2008), 36–60, see 46.

Fig. 6: Jean Baptiste Louis Georges Seroux d'Agincourt, *Histoire de l'art par les monumens [...]*, plate 183.

Fig. 7: Adam Bartsch, *Catalogue raisonné [...]*, plate 1.