I have just encountered, for the first time, this letter from Sydney Cockerell [Wikipedia] to the Editor of the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 30 no. 169 (April 1917), p. 154 [click the images to enlarge them]:
This received a tart response from the Magazine's anonymous reviewer, suggesting that most provenance is "irrelevant detail"!:
And while I of course do not agree with him, it is nonetheless interesting to read what he originally wrote in his review (The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 30 no. 168 (March, 1917), pp. 119-21 at 120):
Connoisseurs of that era often did not value or practice modern standards of academic rigour. Their opinions and even their publications can seem amateurish today, but their passion for learning and discovery paved the way for future scholars.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, many past scholars worked tirelessly and with ingenious, detective-like rigour to unearth any available stone for information, and they did so with none of the easy research tools now at our fingertips (and so often relied upon as the final word in any conversation). Many held critically-engaged and fastidiously-moulded opinions, theories and hypotheses that have since been borne out (sometimes many decades later) by evidence completely unavailable to them at the time. We owe them a huge debt!
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