[…]
Giovanni Morelli hoped that his method of examining the minor and subsidiary parts of old paintings and drawings for characteristically idiosyncratic ways of handling would put connoisseurship (the art of attributing paintings to their correct author) on a more scientific basis. Although his approach has undoubtedly made a contribution to this aspect of art history, it has not been as overwhelmingly successful as he hoped it would be. In fact Morelli recognized the principal difficulty, even if he underestimated it. The problem is that a fairly large run of known examples of a particular artist’s work is needed to establish for certain just what is the habitual way he draws or paints ears, or just how long and thin he habitually draws fingers, and so on.
Curiously enough, (and this is also the case for other methods of stylistic analysis), Morelli’s approach works much better with some forms of Twentieth century popular art than with the high art of the Renaissance for which it was invented. This is because in such things as comic strip art the large numbers of drawings by the one hand, necessary to the method, are readily available, and so it is easy to recognize when a continuing comic strip is taken over by another artist.
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