The Invention of Connoisseurship
A lecture by Peter Burke

Connoisseurship—a bundle of practices combining a sense of the quality of works of art, the ability to attribute them to their makers, and to discriminate between originals, copies, and forgeries—is a contested term with a contested history. In this lecture, Peter Burke argues that the “invention” of connoisseurship happened gradually rather than suddenly and took place in the West neither, as has sometimes been argued, in the nineteenth century, nor—perhaps surprisingly—in the Renaissance, but in the seventeenth century when treatises on the subject begin to appear.

Wednesday, September 6, 6 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people with a college or university affiliation or museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members