Week 2: Jianding: the discipline of deciding

The Chinese connoisseurship tradition, and James Cahill's split between its "verbal" method and a "visual" one.

1 March 2027

Chinese has its own name for this discipline: jianding (鉴定), authentication, one branch of a broader connoisseurship tradition running back through Ming critics like Dong Qichang. Their method leaned on documents — seals, inscriptions, colophons, catalogue entries — cross-checked against a connoisseur’s own accumulated memory of thousands of paintings actually seen in person. It is old, serious, and has settled more attributions than it has muddled.

The art historian James Cahill, writing decades later, drew a line through that tradition: a “verbal” method, built on documents and provenance, against a “visual” one, built on close stylistic reading of the painting itself. He did not dismiss the verbal method — he used it constantly — but insisted it was a supplement to visual analysis, never a substitute, because a document can be forged as easily as a signature, and often was. His own casework shows both failure modes: a colophon correctly confirming a genuine work, and a spurious inscription that fooled a later owner into misidentifying an anonymous scroll for two centuries.

This course teaches both halves, in the order Cahill implies: materials and style first, so you have an independent visual reading before you ever look at a seal or a colophon, and can notice when the two disagree.

Outline#

• jianding as a discipline: what a trained eye is actually claiming to know
• Cahill’s verbal/visual split, and why he ranked them the way he did
• a case where the two methods agreed, and one where they didn’t
• what this means for the semester’s order: build the visual toolkit weeks 3–4 before the documentary one, weeks 5–6