Passage
For most of the last century, attributing an unsigned panel painting was the business of connoisseurship. The trained eye, comparing the handling of a hand or an ear, was taken to identify an artist as reliably as a signature. Its defenders did not claim that it was infallible; they claimed that it was irreplaceable, since the documents that could settle authorship — contracts, inventories, payment records — survive for few pictures. Where the archive is silent, they argued, the eye's judgment is the only judgment available.
That claim has since been narrowed rather than refuted. What the eye registers, critics observe, is a manner of working — exactly what a well-run workshop existed to transmit. Apprentices copied the master's drawings for years before they were allowed near a commission, and the uniformity was not incidental but the workshop's principal asset, the thing a client was paying for. A group of panels assembled on stylistic grounds is therefore a group produced under one set of instructions; whether one pair of hands produced them is a further question, and not one that style can reach.
From this some draw a stronger conclusion: attribution should be suspended until documents appear, the workshop being the only unit the evidence supports. The proposal is tidier than the material it has to handle. A contract names the master who undertook the commission; an inventory names whoever the compiler believed had made the object. Neither records who stood at the panel. Archives of this kind measure legal responsibility and later reputation, not execution. A scholar who defers to them has not escaped the problem of authorship but has exchanged it for a different proxy, one whose distortions are the less well understood for having been the less often tested.
The two methods, then, answer different questions, and neither answers the one the museum label asks. Style identifies a practice; documents identify an obligation. That a picture must still be given a name owes less to the state of the evidence than to a trade in which anonymity depresses value and an audience that prefers an individual to a workshop. The honest caption would name the practice and leave the hand open: the demand connoisseurship was devised to satisfy was never a scholarly one.
