It recalls the term connoisseur. In an art history context, the descriptor dates as far back as the eighteenth century, when connoisseurship referred to amateur collectors who could tell which artist painted a work based solely on looking at it. They sought out the artist’s signature gestures in a given work, which they had studied and cataloged. Connoisseurs developed expert knowledge, largely through the act of consumption. The German Johann Joachim Winckelmann was one such connoisseur; though he was not born into nobility and began his career as a schoolteacher, he became one of the
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