Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method  

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"Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method"[1] (1980) is a paper by Carlo Ginzburg first published in "History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist Historians", vol. 9, 1980, pp. 5–36. It was reprinted in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce (1984) by Umberto Eco and Thomas Sebeok.

The paper was the basis of Ginzburg's book Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (1986).

Excerpt:

'The Moses of Michelangelo' (1914). At the beginning of the second section Freud writes:

Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis, I learnt that a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff had caused a revolution in the art galleries of Europe by questioning the authorship of many pictures, showing how to distinguish copies from originals with certainty, and constructing hypothetical artists for those works of art whose former authorship had been discredited. He achieved this by insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and by laying stress on the significance of minor details, of things like the drawing of the fingernails, of the lobe of an ear, of halos and such unconsidered trifles which the copyist neglects to imitate and yet which every artist executes in his own characteristic way. I was then greatly interested to learn that the Russian pseudonym concealed the identity of an Italian physician called Morelli, who died in 1891. It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations.'

See also

• Giovanni Morelli
• Sigmund Freud
• Sherlock Holmes