Giovanni Morelli (25 February 1816 – 28 February 1891) was an Italian art critic and political figure. 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. He was born in Verona and died in Milan. Early life and training Morelli studied medicine in Switzerland and Germany, where he taught anatomy at the University of Munich. During this time he also studied Goethe's morphology, Lavater's physiognomy, F. Schelling's natural philosophy and befriended Bettina von Arnim. With his return to Italy he acted as a conduit for intellectual life of the North. Art historian The Morellian method 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, 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". These unconscious traces — in the shorthand for rendering the folds of an ear in secondary figures of a composition, for example — are unlikely to be imitated and, once deciphered, serve as fingerprints do at the scene of the crime. The identity of the artist is expressed most reliably in the details that are least attended to. The Morellian method has its nearest roots in Morelli's own discipline of medicine, with its identification of disease through numerous symptoms, each of which may be apparently trivial in itself. Morelli developed his method studying the works of Botticelli, and then applied it to attribute works to Botticelli's pupil, Filippino Lippi. His fully developed technique was published as Die Werke Italienischer Meister, ("The work of the Italian masters") in 1880; it appeared under the anagrammatic pseudonym "Ivan Lermolieff". Morelli's "great antagonist, the art historian Wilhelm von Bode, even spoke of the spread of an epidemic of “Lermolieffmania”, after the mysterious Russian scholar “Ivan Lermolieff”, the pseudonym under which Morelli published his writings, in the German translation by an equally non-existent Johannes Schwarze, a resident of the imaginary Gorlaw, which is to say Gorle, near Bergamo." Morelli's connoisseurship was developed to a high degree by Bernard