L'attribuzione dell'opera d'arte. Itinerari di ricerca fra dubbi e certezze

Attribution, the identification of the master or the mastery behind a work of art, is certainly a determining component of historical artistic studies, and is also a kingpin for research, around which long, animated discussions took place in the past and still do today. Nonetheless every creation, from cathedral to micro-sculpture, from an altar to a portrait, presupposes a complex historical situation, and the analysis of the work itself cannot be removed from the variable roles of other factors: the mentality and agendas of the person who commissioned the work, the events that have brought the work from its original location into today's world, the peculiarities of the materials that it is made from and the techniques used to produce it. The author has set herself the task of drawing the attention of both students and those who are simply interested and attracted by the world of images and the relationship between art and history, to the risks of a priority consideration of the problem of attribution: when we set the exclusive and pre-eminent objective of recognising the author, we may not sufficiently consider some other essential trait of the work, overestimating all the points that lead to the identification of a "name". In this way, the affinity linked to the physiognomy of a face, or the attitude of a figure becomes a clue to identifying the hand of the artist, while more detailed research reveals that such formulas belong to a widespread, though today somewhat lacking, network, within which schemes and models are affirmed and then migrate along paths that are not always easy to reconstruct; only the overall consideration of the work, and the context within which it is rooted, can confirm any hypothesis of attribution. And to support these thoughts, a case survey is presented that highlights debated questions within artistic literature, with the hope that it can contribute to protecting the intimate reason and affirmative value of a work of art, and the vitality of historical and critical exploration.