Committee:

Anthony Grafton, adviser
Jennifer Rampling
Graham Burnett
Amanda Wunder, City University of New York

Abstract:

Modern methodologies of economic and aesthetic judgment developed in tandem. Their histories are entwined, born out of the mercantile culture of the late medieval and early renaissance eras. The language of commerce’s intellectual apparatus–the language of economic evaluation and judgment—was first forged in the context of medieval and late Renaissance mercantile practice. Economic and ‘aesthetic’ knowledge were, in mercantile society, two sides of the same coin. The methods and processes of knowledge making that form the foundation for these judgments are inseparable from the body — in the late medieval and early renaissance periods, merchants and other agents of economic judgment believed that the foundations of these judgments were grounded in the body, in its sensations and experiences. Good judgment arose out of a combination of the general and the particular, out of the generalized concepts that the embodied subject generates out of a combination of education and experience. The knowledge necessary to make successful judgments on the marketplace derived from both the experiences of the self and intersubjective negotiation and consensus. We have come to know this intellectual formation as the practice of connoisseurship. Connoisseurship provided a means of translating aesthetic judgments into action on the market, by pairing those judgments with judgments of value. Questions of price and value lie at the heart of any economic exchange whether the objects of exchange are turnips or paintings. Mercantile approaches to judgment and evaluation paired the aesthetic with the quantitative. This way of knowing, evaluating, and appraising the world–what one might call mercantile connoisseurship–became the foundation of early modern artistic connoisseurship.

Modern practices of artistic connoisseurship developed out of this broader mercantile culture of evaluation and judgment that emerged in late medieval Europe. Art history’s object-centered methodology shares a genealogy with other branches of knowledge founded on evidential paradigms. From medicine to economic analysis to art history, all of these forms of knowledge begin in the same place, in sensory encounters with material objects, and follow the same pathway, forging abstractions from particulars.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.