A postgraduate seminar in connoisseurship: using six centuries of disputed, copied and forged paintings attributed to the Ming master Tang Yin to teach how attribution actually gets decided, and how rarely it gets settled for good.
What you will do
Most of what survives from the Ming painter Tang Yin is not by Tang Yin. Workshops in his own city were forging his signature within his lifetime, and the copies never stopped: seals were carved to match, colophons were written in borrowed hands, and by the time modern museums started buying, nobody --- not the dealers, not the collectors, not always the museums --- could fully untangle the pile. This course teaches you to untangle it anyway. Each week hands you one more instrument --- paper and ink chemistry, brushwork, seals, colophons, the market that made forgery profitable, and finally what a trained statistical model can and can't add --- and you spend the semester turning those instruments on real, still-disputed paintings. You leave with an attribution note, a full dossier, and a defended verdict on one painting's authorship, argued the way the field actually argues it.
Who it is for
Built for graduate students in art history or a related humanities discipline who can already read a scholarly argument and want to build one of their own, evidence class by evidence class. No Chinese language background is assumed --- primary sources are supplied in translation --- but you should arrive comfortable with close visual reading and prepared to defend a specific, falsifiable claim rather than a general impression. If "I think it's probably genuine" is as far as your reasoning usually goes, week 2 is built to push past it.