Background
Berenson was born in Butremanz, Lithuania, June 26, 1865. His family settled in Boston, Mass., ten years later. His father changed his name from Valvrojenski to Berenson when he emigrated to Boston in 1875.
Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson
Berenson was born in Butremanz, Lithuania, June 26, 1865. His family settled in Boston, Mass., ten years later. His father changed his name from Valvrojenski to Berenson when he emigrated to Boston in 1875.
Bernard received his earliest education in the school of the local synagogue, where he learned Hebrew. He was ten years old when the family moved to Boston, Massachussets, where his father became a dealer in scrap metal. In the new environment the attachment to Jewish orthodoxy weakened; the children remembered that their father used to read Voltaire to them, and he evidently inculcated a broadly tolerant religous view. Berenson is said to have taught himself Greek, and his parents encouraged his omnivorous reading. He attended the local public school in South Boston and the celebrated Boston Latin School before entering Boston University in 1883. During his first year there, he heard the lectures of Charles Eliot Norton of Harvard University on the building of medieval churches in Italy. Norton was much impressed with Berenson's intellectual promise and arranged for his transfer to Harvard. There he received the B. A. in June 1887. At Harvard Berenson studied languages and literatures, including Sanskrit, Arabic, and Medieval German. In a fellowship application at the end of his senior year he declared that he wished to devote every spare moment to literature and comparative religion. He hoped to find some place in the program for French and Italian art and architecture. Although he failed to win the scholarship, a group of friends, among whom was Isabella Stewart Gardner, decided to support his studies abroad.
Berenson spent the autumn and winter of 1887-1888 in Paris and London and also at Oxford University, where he absorbed particularly the aesthetics of Walter Pater and John Ruskin. In the spring of 1888 he made his first trip to Italy and immediately felt that he had discovered his vocation in the study of Italian art. Accurately attributing medieval and Renaissance painting was then in its infancy, and as early as 1890 he described his determination to devote himself to connoisseurship. The methods adopted by Berenson in proceeding with this task owed a good deal to the Italian art historian Giovanni Morelli, who had formulated what he called scientific criteria for determining attributions by the study of morphological detail.
Berenson developed Morelli's principles in an essay, "The Rudiments of Connoisseurship" (1902). He cautioned against relying too much on documents, which could be forged. Even where signatures were genuine, a master might have signed a work painted by his pupils. Berenson emphasized the importance of concentrated observation to determine those characteristics that made the style of a given painter unique. In portraits details like the ear or fingernails might be unconsciously repeated time after time and thus become a guide to an artist's style. In The Study and Criticism of Italian Art (1902), Berenson proposed the general principle that "details determine characteristics in proportion (a) as they are not vehicles of expression, (b) as they do not attract attention, (c) as they are not controlled by fashion, (d) as they allow the formation of habit in their execution. "
In 1890 Berenson was in London studying Italian pictures in English collections; there he met a young Anglo-Irish lawyer, Frank Costelloe, and his wife, the former Mary Logan Smith. After Berenson had become acquainted with the Costelloes, and had spent some time at the Smiths' country house, Friday's Hill, Mary became captivated by his enthusiasm for Italian Renaissance art, and presently fell in love with the man as well as with the subject. In 1891 she left Costelloe and moved to Fiesole - Berenson maintained a separate establishment in Florence - where she remained for most of the decade. With her encouragement and collaboration Berenson brought out his Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), followed soon after by Lorenzo Lotto; An Essay in Art Criticism. In 1896 came Florentine Painters of the Renaissance and in 1897 Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance. The attributions made in these lists established Berenson's authority as a connoisseur, and in 1897 he began work on his greatest scholarly enterprise, Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903).
At the turn of the century international dealers found among American millionaires an ever rising market for Italian medieval and Renaissance painting, and their clients increasingly depended on Berenson's authentication of a picture. In view of his belief that he should work "with no thought of reward, " it is ironic that his connoisseurship had striking economic consequences. Berenson began by acquiring pictures for such collectors as Mrs. Gardner in Boston and Benjamin Altman in New York, receiving a substantial commission on each purchase. Soon, however, he found it more convenient to serve as consultant, for an annual retainer, to such international dealers as Martin H. Colnaghi and the Duveen brothers.
From 1905 to 1939 he was under contract to the Duveen firm, and received fees that sometimes amounted to $100, 000 a year. Thus he acquired the fortune that enabled him first to rent and then to buy Villa I Tatti near Florence, to create his own collection and library, and to carry on his work at leisure. Frank Costelloe died in 1899, and on Christmas day, 1900, Mary Costelloe and Berenson were married in a Catholic service in the chapel of Villa I Tatti. Berenson had left the Jewish faith and adopted Episcopalianism while in Boston. In 1895 he had converted to Roman Catholicism at the monastery of Monte Oliveto near Siena, but it is clear that his commitment to Rome was based more on the aesthetic appeal of the liturgy than on the authority of the dogma. His religious interests were directed more to art than to theology. The villa was enlarged at intervals during the succeeding decades, chiefly to accommodate Berenson's ever-growing library. In this setting he organized for over fifty years a life that combined scholarship in art history with an elegant and discriminating hospitality. Among his notable friends who were frequent guests were Edith Wharton, Learned Hand, Henry Adams, Walter Lippmann, and Kenneth Clark.
During World War II, Berenson remained at the villa except when he went into hiding for the period of the German occupation after the fall of Mussolini. Mary Berenson, who had long been an invalid, died shortly after the war. In his remaining years, Berenson had the constant support of his devoted secretary and companion, Nicky Mariano, the daughter of a church historian who had entered his household as librarian in 1918. He worked on the last of the many editions of the lists of Italian Renaissance painters, lavishly illustrated and published by Phaidon. There was also a series of critical essays and autobiographical works: Aesthetics and History (1948); Sketch for a Self-Portrait (1949); Rumour and Reflection (1952); and The Arch of Constantine or The Decline of Form (1954). He died at I Tatti in his ninety-fifth year. He bequeathed to Harvard the villa with its library and collections and his residuary estate. With this generous legacy, the university established the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence.
(Bernard Berenson was one of the greatest living authoriti...)
1965Although as a youth he had become an Episcopalian and later a Catholic, Berenson felt that he owed to his early studies of Hebrew scriptures and literature his intense interest in origins and his quick indignation at injustice. A section of his Aesthetics and History is devoted to refuting the antihumanist and racist theories of Strzygowski, whose doctrines spread throughout Europe and America long before the appearance of Nazism.
Berenson listed the sources of art connoisseurship as documents, tradition, and the works of art themselves, but warned that documents must be evaluated carefully in the context of the customs and economics of the period, and the personality and the financial situation of the artists. Tradition, he warns, has a habit of turning into myth as time passes, and must be, if not taken with a grain of salt, at least carefully checked. An art that exists only as tradition, with no examples or masterpieces still existing, is dead art. The works of art themselves arc the only reliable materials for the art historian, but even then, “connoisseurship is a guess.”
Bernard Berenson was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the academies of Belgium and Norway. The city of Florence made him an honorary citizen.
Bernard Berenson was married to Mary Logan Costelloe.