This thesis concerns a shift in the historiography of the Venetian painter Giorgione (c1477-
1510). In important ways, this change was caused by Joseph Archer Crowe (1825-1896) and
Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1819-1897) in their A History of Painting in North Italy
(1871). This text met seminal reactions from Walter Pater (1839-1894) in his essay “The
School of Giorgione” (1877) and from Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891) in his Die Werke
italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin (1880). Following a
method of close reading, the analysis will concentrate on the intertextual relationship between
these three works.
This thesis contends that Crowe and Cavalcaselle comprehensively problematised scholarship
on the artist, creating a “new” Giorgione; that Pater responded dialectally to scientific
connoisseurship with aesthetic criticism, intellectually justifying and morally absolving his
interpretation; that Morelli responded by offering a noticeably different catalogue of
paintings, and by making Giorgione function within his anti-authoritarian rhetoric as a
validation for his method; however, in so doing, Morelli was conducting an ironic
problematisation of connoisseurship in general. The thesis begins with an introduction to the
“old” Giorgione, before discussing the concepts of aestheticism and connoisseurship. It is
then divided into three studies and a conclusion.
The first part considers how the artist was understood in the nineteenth century prior to
Crowe and Cavalcaselle’s research, before discussing the nature of the two connoisseurs’
enquiry. The second part focuses on Pater and his relationship with Giorgione, placing his
essay in the context of The Renaissance (1873); after this the study follows Pater as he
defines his theory of aesthetic criticism and responds to what he understands as scientific
history, before analysing his interpretation of Giorgione. The third and final part of this thesis
will seek to understand Morelli’s ambiguous text and the function of the artist within it;
examining his method, rhetoric, and polemic with Crowe and Cavalcaselle, it will conclude
by arguing that irony was an active concept in Morelli’s thinking. By attending to a specific
artist’s historiography at a particular time, this thesis indirectly reveals the way art history on
Italian painting operated in this period, when the discipline was undergoing the processes of
professionalisation and institutionalisation