Digital images and art historical knowledge: Connoisseurship today between “top-down design” and “bottom-up’ capabilities

It is yet unknown if, in the foreseeable future, thanks to rapid increases in artificial intelligence capabilities, databases will take over standard tasks of art historians, such as the stylistic classification of drawings into centuries and schools and the attribution of works to specific artists. However, the digital availability of an almost unimaginably huge volume of pictorial material has already led to major changes in art historical work with Old Master drawings. In an initial step, this paper proposes using the terms ‘top-down design’ and ‘bottom-up processes’, borrowed from the book The Evolution of Minds by American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, to describe the re-positioning of the concept of connoisseurship in light of the digitisation of nearly all collections of drawings in the world. A second step highlights the particular insights that a digital approach to the object can generate in terms of the materiality of the drawing, which will make it necessary to modify the traditional concept of connoisseurship and art historical expertise