On the Art Historian Bernard Berenson's Life and Influence

An amusing story used to circulate in Florence in the late summer of 1944, a few months before the Allied armies of General Clark pushed the Germans northwards to ultimate defeat. Bernard Berenson, who had been in hiding for over a year, was finally able to walk again along the picturesque country lanes of Settignano that he knew and loved so well. On the first day out, a United States Army vehicle stopped alongside the diminutive, bearded, and impeccably attired gentleman. A G.I. leaned out and, in dreadful pidgin Italian, asked for directions. Mr. Berenson obliged, but naturally in the subtly nuanced and inflected phrases for which his English was famous. Stunned, the G.I. asked: “Hey, buddy, are you American?” When Berenson politely confirmed that he was, the soldier could hardly believe it—“Then what’ you doin’ in a dump like this?”

Whether apocryphal or not, the vignette perfectly captures the sense of the jarring encounter between the supremely cultivated Jamesian savant—then almost eighty years old—and a visitor appearing, as if from a distant planet. By the end of the war, the world with which Bernard Berenson identified was rapidly disappearing. By the time he died in 1959, at the age of ninety-four, he was regarded as a precious relic, a surviving curiosity. Such a vivid sense of temporal dislocation is not uncommon to people whom providence allows a life that extends two decades beyond the average; an “epilogue” that encompasses almost an entire generation. In Berenson’s case, the time warp was enhanced by the transformations and calamities that the world experienced during his lifespan: two World Wars that deprived Europe of its central cultural and political roles. These traumas were accompanied by technological leaps that fundamentally changed how people moved, communicated, and acquired information—also, and equally important, how goods and wealth were created and distributed. What continues to fascinate about Berenson’s long life, even more than fifty years after his death, is that throughout it all he was ever the perceptive observer and thoughtful commentator. Moreover, as a much younger man, he had not only observed but also actively participated in and contributed to the intellectual debates that accompanied the early development of art history, a discipline that he helped to define and on which his fame rests.

When the irrepressible and wealthy Isabella Stewart Gardner (“Mrs. Jack”) first crossed paths with the young Berenson at a Harvard lecture, their backgrounds could not have been more different: She was, by the mid-1880s, the undisputed doyenne of Boston society despite lingering resistance from some Back Bay–grandees. Berenson was the son of impoverished Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and was, at the time, applying his fierce powers of concentration to “Talmudo-Rabbinical Eschatology,” an unlikely subject to attract the grand lady’s attention. Coupled to Berenson’s intelligence, however, was a very pleasing appearance, a gift for brilliant conversation, an insatiable literary appetite, and a dose of robust ambition, just what Mrs. Jack looked for in the youths, mostly men, who were invited to the charmed circle of her salon. Bernhard (the “h” was to disappear some years later) eventually received from Mrs. Gardner a one-year European traveling grant to which the Boston aesthete and collector Edward Warren also contributed. Berenson’s subsequent travels were to be life-changing: Now it would be art rather than literature to which his talents would be devoted; and the young scholar, under the spell of Charles Eliot Norton’s Harvard lectures and Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, became singularily interested in Italy.

What followed in remarkably rapid succession was the publication by Berenson of several books that were to shape his legacy and fame: the “triptych” of Venetian, Florentine, and Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance that appeared between 1894 and 1897; the innovative monograph Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Criticism of 1895; and, in 1903, the monumental three-volume Drawings of the Florentine Painters that has always been considered a milestone and masterwork since its appearance. What sets these studies apart from every other prior endeavor in the field of art criticism was that Berenson, perhaps in an echo of his youthful Talmudic studies, directed attention to the myriad visible details of the images he was describing. These he methodically, almost obsessively, classified, compared, and memorized. It was akin to building the precursor of a visual database, with the aid of which he would then patiently sift through the work of a given artist, slowly dissecting and refining. The distillate of this analytic process would then constitute the core of that artist’s essential qualities—his style. Berenson’s predecessor and mentor, the Bergamasque connoisseur Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891), had first understood the value of this method, but never extended its application in a systematic way.

From his earliest time in Italy, Berenson realized that the ability to distinguish one artist’s style from another’s and the possibility of arranging such observations into a coherent chronological pattern was of significant potential value—monetary value. Indeed, it was just in these waning years of the nineteenth century that wealthy American collectors were beginning to turn away from the Barbizon and French Salon works that were the stock-in-trade of well-established firms such as Knoedler in New York and Goupil in Paris. Their new interest was the Italian Renaissance. Mrs. Gardner was one of the first to cast an acquisitive eye in this direction and so . . . Who better than Berenson, the bright, discerning observer on the scene, to provide information and advice? Besides, she had helped to pay the fare and continued an intense correspondence with him (also regarding his commission structure). Edward Warren, Berenson’s other patron, also sought advice from him, but he eventually delved into classical art. After Mrs. Gardner’s first tentative nibbles, Italian Renaissance art became her all-consuming passion. She acquired voraciously with an insatiable passion, aiming higher and higher. In 1896, on Berenson’s advice, Mrs. Jack purchased Titian’s great Rape of Europe from the London dealer Gutekunst. It was to be the crown jewel of her dream museum/residence, a mock-Venetian palazzo, completed in 1903.

That same year, Berenson was photographed posing in a jaunty double-breasted suit below the masterpiece he had just acquired—the magnificent Virgin and Child by Domenico Veneziano. Standing in the large drawing room overlooking the gardens of Villa I Tatti in Settignano, above Florence, the young scholar was beginning to reap the rewards of his genius for identifying and classifying works of art. Isabella Gardner was to continue her acquisitions through Berenson until the values of important available paintings outstripped even her considerable purse. In 1912 she was obliged to plead lack of funds on an offer from Berenson to acquire another of Titian’s masterpieces, the earlier Sacred and Profane Love. A princely bankruptcy obliged the Borghese family to sell, but, fortunately for Italy, a deal was eventually struck with the state and the painting stayed put in what is now the Villa Borghese Gallery. By fortuitious coincidence, just as Mrs. Jack was abandoning the field, Joseph Duveen began calling on Berenson to aid him in servicing an ever-expanding base of American clients for whom Italian Renaissance art became an ultimate badge of distinction. Duveen, of course, was the flamboyant and extravagantly successful English art dealer with whom Berenson was to establish a close professional—indeed, contractual—relationship. This ended in 1937 with their famous quarrel over the attribution of the so-called Allendale Adoration of the Shepherds. It was an emblematic event that reveals the exalted level of regard to which an opinion by Berenson had risen—indeed, to the point that Duveen found it impossible to convince Andrew Mellon to purchase the splendid panel. The dealer had recently bought it from Lord Allendale, but Berenson refused to underwrite an attribution to Giorgione.

Authority of such persuasive power was accumulated and nurtured by Berenson over decades of intense study and observation. What is often overlooked is that, by the time he undertook his researches, not only had photography evolved sufficiently to become a practical and accurate recording tool but also, by the turn of the last century, two Italian firms, Anderson and Alinari, were building impressive image inventories of paintings, sculptures, and architecture. The capital role that photography played in Berenson’s career cannot be overemphasized: His appetite for images was insatiable. They arrived at I Tatti by the hundreds, solicited and un-solicited, from all over the world. The fototeca—really the first of its kind in the world—eventually grew to thousands of items, each carefully examined, annotated, and classified in a vast array of files that to this day continue to yield precious information on attribution, provenance, and condition. This is the resource that allowed Berenson to draw up the famous “lists” that are an integral part of his publications on Venetian, Florentine, and Central Italian paintings and that were revised over several successive editions. They constitute “art history” of a very peculiar variety, certainly far more compelling than the airy aestheticizing musings of many of Berenson’s predecessors and contemporaries—and yet, quite different from the rigorously documented and historically contextual accounts given to works of art by later scholars. The academic Roberto Longhi, possibly the last century’s most brilliant and prolific writer in this, more “modern,” vein referred with unforgiving humor to Berenson’s “lists” as the “railroad schedules of Italian art.” He also tauntingly refered to “Professor” Berenson—a title Berenson abhorred. The environment at I Tatti was decidedly un-academic. Rather, life and work there were as if in a grand Edwardian country-house, presided over by a munificent, cultured dilettante.

The fact that the “lists” are still mined by scholars for useful information is a measure of their author’s often uncanny insight. One illuminating example is the exceptionally rare and fine tondo representing an Adoration of the Shepherds by the Florentine High Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo. The Roman dealer Sestieri had identified it in the home of an Italian nobleman in 1960. But there was a problem: Another, virtually identical version of the painting had hung in the Uffizi for decades. The collector Count Vittorio Cini, to whom the rediscovered work was offered, was understandably reluctant to purchase a painting that had every probability of being considered simply a later knock-off of a well-known prototype. Further research, however, revealed that Berenson had carefully (in 1915) annotated on the back of the Uffizi photograph his reasons to file it away: as a “copy after a lost original”! Even after he died, Berenson had the final word; the painting is now part of the Cini Foundation in Venice, and the other version in the Uffizi’s storage.

Another famous photograph of Berenson was taken in the early 1950s when he visited the Villa Borghese gallery in Rome; no, not the one where he gazes wistfully at Canova’s voluptuous nude Paolina, but the one where he leans forward toward a Cranach, peering at it through a fine, silver-rimmed looking glass held gracefully in his fragile yet nobly sculpted hand. It is the very image of worldly, refined connoisseurship: the scholar wearing a precious Panama, his handsome, aged features seen in lost-profile. It must have been a moment like so many others endlessly repeated throughout Berenson’s life; an intense, quiet pause as his companion Nicky Mariano, and possibly others accompanying, looked on in expectation for the sage to draw back slowly from the painting and pronounce an opinion of dense significance. Of course, the question has always hung in the air: What did he actually see through that elegant loupe? For paintings of certain schools and periods, the answer is: probably more than anyone alive, before or since. Something that he surely did not see was the state of conservation of many of those paintings. From the time, probably around 1915, when he fell for a Trecento concoction by the great Sienese forger Federico Ioni, Berenson nurtured a profound mistrust of skillful artisans and restorers; he simply felt uneasy about painted surfaces—as opposed to painted images—and when possible, he always sought the advice of the one conservator he trusted implicitly, the Florentine Giovanni Marchig.

Interpreting Berenson’s life and accomplishments in terms of art history is really the easy part. He came on the scene at a time when the criteria for judging paintings, especially Italian ones, were hopelessly confused, despite the early spadework done by Morelli and the combined efforts of Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe. The huge task of classifying and arranging these paintings by artists, schools, and periods must be his greatest contribution, equaled only by the criteria he developed for the understanding of earlier Florentine drawings. “Discovering” Lorenzo Lotto was also an innovative and valuable achievement but, like many of his other more extended texts on matters of style and content, the monograph is still replete with aesthetic musings that now have a very dated ring, not to mention the famous—but now virtually ignored—ruminations about “tactile values” and “life-enhancing” properties sprinkled throughout his other writings. There is really no need, at this late date, to wonder what to make of Berenson’s “place” in art history: Every time an Italian Renaissance work is analyzed or catalogued, his name invariably reappears. This, of itself, is remarkable enough in a discipline that is still rapidly evolving.

The many other facets of Berenson’s life and intellectual pursuits pose far more complex, and often fascinating, questions than the obvious art-historical ones. This is perhaps one reason that the subject continues to stimulate research and produce books; a seemingly endless stream of them. In 2004 there was even a play (The Old Masters by Simon Gray) that ran successfully in London and, for a time, a producer seriously considered a musical version of this biographical pastiche! Between 1979 and 1987, Ernest Samuels published a thorough and scholarly two-volume account of Berenson’s life, while, almost simultaneously, two further books appeared: the gossipy and lightweight Being Bernard Berenson by Meryle Secrest in 1979 and, in 1986, the scurrilous Artful Partners by Colin Simpson. The latter was justly savaged in these pages (March 1987) when reviewed by Michael Thomas. Berenson also plays a leading role in a vast range of articles, memoirs, and biographies such as his pupil Kenneth Clark’s Another Part of the Wood, S. N. Berman’s Duveen, and the story of Villa I Tatti as told by William Weaver in A Legacy of Excellence. It would seem legitimate, at this point, to ask: Does the world need another book on Bernard Berenson?

It was in an attempt to delve more deeply and perceptively in those other facets of Berenson’s life and intellectual pursuits that the author Rachel Cohen returned to the subject in her new biography, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade.1 And, as to the question above, the answer is—yes; there is still much to learn and to savor about this remarkable man. Were it for the title alone, one would be hesitant to peer beyond the cover, fearing a re-digested version of Colin Simpson’s screed, a feeling reinforced in the in-leaf blurb by Cynthia Saltzman, the author of Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures. Her book is remembered, if at all, as a not very thoughtful indictment of the dealers, collectors, and experts who collaborated (she would say “conspired”) to fill America’s museums with the great European art that we now have the privilege to admire every day. The trope of American buccaneer millionaires and their cohort of plunderers is, of course, a horse that has been thoroughly well beaten over the years and will probably continue to suffer abuse well into the future. On the same cover (but not elsewhere in the volume), there is a subtle suggestion that Cohen’s book may be different; the publisher, Yale University Press, discreetly indicates that the volume is part of a series on “Jewish Lives.” This promise—and it is a promising start—is fulfilled in the first chapters as Cohen traces the migration of the Valvrojenskis from the Pale of Settlement to Boston. The family’s problematic adaptation, and eventual assimilation as “Berenson,” is a classic story of fortitude, endurance, and fierce intellectual engagement. As it concerns the young Bernard, it is a story with which we were heretofore unfamiliar and it is told in fascinating and moving detail.

As the brilliant young scholar progresses ever forward and upward, the ambiguities he experienced about his “Jewishness” surface again and again. While this is an aspect of his later life that is better known, it is fascinating to learn how it affected him in childhood and adolescence. Revealing as well is the author’s account of how Berenson survived the later years of the Fascist regime and, crucially, the year during which the Nazis occupied Northern Italy and he was obliged to live in hiding. There are other details that might have added depth and texture to the harrowing tale. One is the almost forgotten heroism of Gerhard Wolf, the German Consul General in Florence, a cultured and humane civil servant who attempted desperately to save the city’s bridges from the Wehrmacht’s dynamite and was a willing accomplice in “covering” Berenson, the Villa I Tatti, the art treasures and library it contained, as well as those who remained there. Another unsung hero is Ludwig Heinrich Heydenreich, the Director of the German-financed Kunsthistorisches Institut (Institute for Art History), a close friend of Berenson, who also protected him and was instrumental in preventing an even worse fate for Florence’s art treasures during the closing months of the war.

Perhaps the most illuminating passages of the Cohen biography are those that describe the long and colorful parade of exceptional women with whom Berenson shared some of the critical chapters of his life. The list begins within the family with his sisters, particularly Senda. Then, of course, there was Mrs. Jack who set the young scholar on his way, and Mary Smith Costelloe whom he married and to whom he remained intellectually—if not otherwise—close for the rest of her life. A great love blossomed, and was perhaps even consummated, with the beautiful and exotic Belle Da Costa Greene, guardian angel of J. P. Morgan’s great bibliographic undertaking. A surely chaste, but no less intellectually rewarding, relationship with Edith Wharton endured for years. There were others, of course: the writers Janet Ross and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), the socialites Lady Sybil Cutting and Baroness Alda Anrep; but it was the latter’s sister, Elizabeth “Nicky” Mariano, to whom Berenson became most attached and owed the most. Beginning as an assistant in the growing I Tatti library in 1919, Mariano gradually became the soul of the villa and remained so until Berenson’s death. She and Alda were of Baltic origin and spoke several languages fluently. Nicky’s perfect German literally saved Berenson’s life in the darkest hour of the Nazi occupation and, apart from her stalwart guardianship of the house in his absence, she assisted in all manner of logistical details including the management of the continuing and massive flow of correspondence. After Mary’s death in 1945, Nicky became Berenson’s constant companion in his studies, on his travels, and, finally, by his side when he died. She emerges from the pages of Cohen’s biography as a heroine and the scholar’s truest paladin.

Berenson’s life was a great deal more than one spent “in the picture trade.” Although this trade undoubtedly financed the quality and style of how the man lived, it also allowed him to make remarkable contributions to our culture; in his writings and vast correspondence, in his guidance to younger scholars, and, finally, in the unparalleled value of his bequest to Harvard University. The splendid Villa I Tatti with its gardens, its great art collection, and, above all, its library and archives is a resource that continues to further humanistic scholarship at the very highest level; it is a legacy worthy of the man.

Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade, by Rachel Cohen; Yale University Press, 328 page, $25.

Image: Art historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) at Villa I Tatti