Giovanni Morelli

[1] 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 Morellian method is based on clues offered by trifling details rather than identities of composition and subject matter or other broad treatments that are more likely to be seized upon by students, copyists and imitators.

Instead, as Carlo Ginzburg analysed the Morellian method,[2] the art historian operates in the manner of a detective, "each discovering, from clues unnoticed by others, the author in one case of a crime, in the other of a painting".

At the same time, modern examination of Classical Greek sculpture, in the wake of pioneering reassessments by Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, has also turned away from attributions based on broad aspects of subject and style that are reflected in copies and later Roman classicising pastiche.

"[5] Morelli acquired works "from Florence, Siena, and Umbria [...] from ancient Tuscan families, and paintings from Emilia and Ferrara came from the sale of the prestigious Costabili Collection" - including "real gems" such as "The Young Smoker by Molenaer, Botticelli’s The Stories of Virginia, both of which were purchased at the Monte di Pietà auction in Rome, and Pisanello’s Portrait of Leonello d’Este, bought in London.

In 1892, Gustavo Frizzoni, a friend and faithful follower of Morelli and his method, arranged the 117 paintings and 3 sculptures in two galleries of the museum named after the senator, which later appeared in a printed catalogue.