Forty Caravaggios Fell Apart, So Art History Forgot Why
A red chalk drawing of a crouching child, authenticated as an Édouard Manet, has materialized in a private Italian collection. No documentation, no provenance trail, no signature, just a connoisseur's eye recognizing consistency in form and treatment.
This is now a discredited method masquerading as scholarship. In the decades after World War II, connoisseurs attributed over forty paintings to Caravaggio the same way. Visual consistency became evidence of authorship, and the art-historical establishment accepted the claim.
By the 1990s, forensic analysis and archival work dismantled most of those attributions. X-rays revealed paintings beneath paintings, pigment analysis showed materials unavailable in Caravaggio's lifetime. The stylistic resemblance that had seemed so convincing turned out to mean almost nothing.
What changed between then and now is not method but institutional memory. The Caravaggio debacle should have ended stylistic attribution as a validation tool, yet art history has cycled back to it because the alternative is unsettling. Documentation is scarce, provenance is opaque, and the only remaining path to canon expansion is the one that failed before. The Manet drawing will enter the catalogue, other institutions will cite it. It will shape how scholars discuss the artist's interest in marginalised subjects.
A connoisseur's eye trained to recognize a master's hand had instead recognized paintings made by people trained to paint like that master.
None of this depends on whether the attribution holds. It depends on whether enough people are willing to call something scholarship when it consists of comparison shopping between undocumented objects. In your own field, watch for the moment someone solves an intractable problem by retreating to a method already known to fail. That's not a fresh start, it's bureaucratic exhaustion wearing the mask of rigor.
