According to the passage, Morelli's method held that the strongest evidence of an artist's hand is found in

documentary records of a work's early ownership.

the chemical composition of the pigments used.

minor details executed without deliberation, such as the drawing of an ear.

the resemblance of a work's composition to others of the same period.

The passage indicates that the findings of technical analysis are "overwhelmingly negative" in the sense that they

can exclude a work on grounds of date or material but cannot identify which eligible painter produced it.

depend on instruments that are not yet precise enough to be conclusive.

apply only to panels that have not been substantially restored.

have been resisted by art historians trained in the older tradition.

The example of the panel from a tree felled in 1600 functions primarily to

illustrate the precision that dendrochronology has attained.

suggest that most disputed attributions can now be settled decisively.

argue that panel dating is more dependable than pigment analysis.

make concrete the asymmetry between what such evidence rules out and what it can confirm.

It can be inferred from the discussion of workshop practice that

underdrawing is a less reliable guide to authorship than the painted surface is.

evidence of the master's hand in one layer of a work does not establish his hand in another.

paintings produced in a master's workshop are generally of inferior quality.

infrared reflectography is of little practical use in attribution.

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The Eye and the Instrument: Attribution in Old Master Studies

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

Attribution in Old Master painting was for a century the province of connoisseurship — the trained judgment of scholars who claimed to recognize an artist's hand as one recognizes a friend's handwriting. Giovanni Morelli gave the practice its method and something of its prestige by insisting that the diagnostic evidence lay not in a work's celebrated passages but in its unconsidered ones: the drawing of an ear, the articulation of a thumb, the details a painter executes without deliberation and therefore without disguise. The authority of the connoisseur rested on that premise. What an artist does when not thinking is what cannot be imitated. Technical analysis was widely expected to retire this tradition. Dendrochronology dates the panel a picture is painted on; pigment analysis catches materials unavailable in the purported year; infrared reflectography exposes the underdrawing beneath the paint. Each is an advance in rigour, and each has overturned attributions that had stood on judgment alone. Yet what these methods deliver is overwhelmingly negative. A panel from a tree felled in 1600 cannot carry a picture painted in 1550; it can carry a picture painted by anyone at work after 1600, which in a productive century is a great many people. Workshop practice frustrates the positive inference still further. In a busy studio the underdrawing may be the master's while the paint above it is an assistant's, so a technique that reaches beneath the surface may authenticate a layer rather than a painting. What has emerged is therefore not a replacement but a division of labour, and an uneasy one. Technical evidence establishes the outer bounds of possibility; inside those bounds the attribution is still made by eye. Meanwhile the consequences of that judgment have grown: the distance between "Rembrandt" and "studio of Rembrandt" is now measured in tens of millions of pounds, and the scholar who closes it does so on grounds no instrument can adjudicate. The discipline has become markedly more rigorous exactly where the stakes are lowest, and remains irreducibly interpretive exactly where they are highest.

The primary purpose of the passage is to