attribution

attribution. A term in art history and criticism for the assignment to an artist of a work of uncertain authorship. Attributions are sometimes made on the evidence of documents. A painting of unknown authorship may, for example, be found to accord with a description in an inventory where the artist is named, and depending on how closely particularized the description is, it may be a likely assumption that the two are one and the same. More usually, however, attribution depends on stylistic evidence, and is based on the notion that an artist, consciously or unconsciously, expresses his individuality through his work to such an extent that, to the expert eye, not even his closest contemporary or most talented imitator will be indistinguishable from him. Given a work that is authenticated beyond reasonable doubt by external evidence such as signatures, contracts, or contemporary accounts, we can therefore proceed to group around it works of a similar character and attribute them to the same master.

In the 19th century an attempt was made to put attribution on a scientific footing by closely studying small points of detail such as the way a painter represents fingernails, but although this kind of system (advocated particularly by Giovanni Morelli) has its uses, it is now felt that we recognize the work of individual artists more by the general effect than by details, and that the details rather than the general effect are what an imitator will be able to reproduce most closely. Attribution, then, is necessarily a highly subjective business, which explains why experts so often disagree and not infrequently change their minds ( Bernard Berenson, the most famous of all connoisseurs, often changed his attributions in the course of his long career). The uncertainty of attribution can have important financial as well as scholarly consequences, even now that the days are gone when the certificate of authenticity of a man such as Berenson could add several noughts to the price of a painting. Moreover, disputes over the authenticity of prominent (which usually means expensive) works of art are one of the few ways in which art becomes a public issue. George de La Tour's Fortune-Teller (which some people consider to be a fake) has been the subject of television documentaries on both sides of the Atlantic, and in 1982 its publicity-conscious owner (the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) billed it as ‘the world's most controversial painting’.

Various terms are used in connection with attribution, rarely with any precision. ‘Ascription’ is sometimes used as a synonym for attribution, but some writers prefer to use it to imply a greater degree of doubt (it is often found in the expression ‘tentatively ascribed to’) or to indicate an old but not firmly accepted attribution. When a work is described as ‘autograph’ it is thought to be entirely the work of the artist named. The terms ‘studio (or workshop) of’, ‘school of’, and ‘circle of’ all imply that the work was done in more or less close contact with the artist named, but ‘follower of’ and ‘imitator of’ may be much later in date; ‘manner of’ implies only a general stylistic relationship. Auction rooms and dealers have for about 200 years used a system to catalogue works whereby the use of an artist's full name indicates that the work in question is ‘in our opinion a work by the artist’, the use of his surname and initials indicates that the work is from the artist's period and ‘may be in whole or part the work of the artist’, and the use of his surname alone may imply no more than that the work is in the style of the artist. Thus a painting catalogued simply ‘Rubens’ may be no more than a modern pastiche. In saleroom and other contexts, the term ‘after’ indicates a copy of a known work of the artist in question.