Scholar of renaissance Italian art. A friend and disciple of Giovanni Morelli, he edited the final volume of Morelli's collected works and wrote a brief biography of him in 1893.

Italian patriot and art historian; developer of a method of connoisseurship which identified attribution via minute characteristics of artists. Morelli was born to a protestant family, a minority in Italy (originally of French Huguenot decent). Raised in Bergamo, he attended the (Swiss) Kantonschule at Aarau between 1826 and 1832. From 1833-1838 he studied medicine at the universities of Munich and Erlangen because of the Italian proscription against protestants in universities.