"Italian Masters In German Galleries: A Critical Essay On The Italian Pictures In The Galleries Of Munich, Dresden, Berlin" by Giovanni Morelli, Translated from the German by Louise Marie Richter. Published by George Bell and Sons, London, 1883. First Edition of English Translation.

Hard boards, original maroon cloth with gold lettering on spine; embossed black decorations on front board and blind embossed decorations on back board; [some shelf wear]; 5.1/4" x 8"; dark green endpapers; 449 pages including Index, interior and binding are fine, overall very good condition.

Morelli's "Italian Masters in German Galleries" (1880; Eng. trans., 1883) marks an epoch in 19th-century art criticism. The so-called Morellian method was presented for the first time in this book.

Giovanni Morelli (1816-1891) was an Italian art critic and political figure. As an art historian, he developed the "Morellian" technique of scholarship, identifying the characteristic "hands" of painters through scrutiny of diagnostic minor details that revealed artists' scarcely conscious shorthand and conventions for portraying, for example, ears. The crux of the method is that all painters, however great, tend to fall back on a formula for rendering such details as the ear or the fingernails, and that these minor details are therefore the most characteristic parts of a picture and the surest guide to attribution. Both Morelli himself and his principal follower, Bernard Berenson, corrected hundreds of false attribution.

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