thumb|giovanni morelli giovanni morelli (verona 25 february 1816 &nbsp;â 28 february 1891 milan) was an italian art critic and political figure.dictionary of art historians: giovanni morelli as an art historian, he developed the "morellian" technique of scholarship, identifying the characteristic "hands" of painters through scrutiny of diagnostic minor details that revealed artists' scarcely conscious shorthand and conventions for portraying, for example, ears. morelli studied medicine in switzerland and germany where he, although he never practiced, taught anatomy at the university of munich. during this time he also studied the goethe's morphology, lavater's physiognomy, f. schelling's natural philosophy and befriended bettina von arnim. with his return to italy he acted as a conduit for intellectual life of the north. his fully developed technique was published as die werke italienischer meister, ("the work of the italian masters"); it appeared under the anagrammatic pseudonym "ivan lermolieff". retraces the influence of german philosophy on morelli's thought and method. the morellian method is based on clues offered by trifling details rather than identities of composition and subject matter or other broad treatments that are more likely to be seized upon by students, copyists and imitators. instead, as carlo ginzburg analysed the morellian method, the art historian operates in the manner of a detective, "each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting". these unconscious tracesâ in the shorthand for rendering the folds of an ear in secondary figures of a composition, for exampleâ are unlikely to be imitated and, once deciphered, serve as fingerprints do at the scene of the crime. the identity of the artist is expressed most reliably in the details that are least attended to.patrick lawrence, "the morelli method and the conjectural paradigm as narrative semiotic" (on line text (pdf format)). the morellian method has its nearest roots in morelli's own discipline of medicine, with its identification of disease through numerous symptoms, each of which may be apparently trivial in itself. recognizes the paradigm of reading events of the past through their signs in the present as having far distant origins in the primeval practices. morelli's connoisseurship was developed to a high degree by bernard berenson, who met morelli in 1890. the first generation of morellian scholars also included [[gustavo f
1816_births 1891_deaths 19th-century_journalists Italian_Waldensians Italian_art_critics Italian_art_historians