On the Value of the Determination of Authorship

If the determination of the authorship of an individual work of art most certainly is not the ultimate and highest task of artistic erudition; even if it were no path to the goal: nevertheless, without a doubt, it is a school for the eye, since there is no formulation of a question which forces us to penetrate so deeply into the essence of the individual work as that concerning the identity of the author. The individual work, rightly understood, teaches us what a comprehensive knowledge of universal artistic activity is incapable of teaching us.

Goethe’s works were published under his name; nothing is attributed to him or declared not to be by him. One might imagine that the understanding of Goethe’s language, spiritual nature and development would be greater than it is, if scribes would have had gradually to put together his œvre. They would scarcely have performed their task with complete success, but they would have learnt a a good deal as a result of their efforts.

Over long stretches of time the determination of authorship seems to be impossible. Many productions, notably of architecture, can be fixed in time — in the case of architecture the localization is always, and in the case of sculpture often, available — but they are not recognized as the expressions of individual talents. Anonymity is a symptom of deficient knowledge, even if the deficiency often is inevitable. Strictly speaking, every work of man is the product of a personality with qualities, existing once and unique. Whoever arrives in China, thinks at first that all Chinamen look alike; it is only gradually that he learns to distinguish individualities. A similar experience is that of the connoisseur who approaches the ‘dark’ periods. Admittedly a personality reveals itself according to the period more or less definitely in its activity. The ultimate, the most fruitful question, even if it cannot be answered, is and remains that which concerns personality.

Fairly frequently one hears the plausible-sounding objecting that we know that there were hundreds of painters, yet all the existing works are divided up amongst comparatively few names. A statistical computation may serve as a defence against these misgivings. It is chiefly the prominent works that have survived, and of the surviving ones it is against the best ones that are collected, exhibited in museums and accessible to art lovers. Finally, I possess hundreds and hundreds of photographs of Netherlandish pictures of the 15th and 16th centuries which I cannot attribute, of which scarcely two seem to be by the same hand. These nameless pieces mostly are valueless and devoid of character. From this I think one may conclude that the many painters who are unknown to us have mainly produced unimportant things; and that, on the other hand, the better works with which the determination of authorship concerns itself are due to relatively few artists. This calculation applies to Netherlandish and German painting of the 15th and 16th centuries; it may not be valid, or is perhaps valid in a lesser degree, for other countries and other periods.

Max J. Friendländer. On Art & Connoisseurship - Capítulo XXIII. Tancred Borenius (trans.) Bruno Cassirer (1942)