Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend

Ernest Samuels

Published by Harvard University Press 1987

Bernard Berenson

The Making of a Legend

Ernest Samuels
In collaboration with: Jayne Newcomer Samuels

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674432499

Overview
Contents

About this book

Controversy swirls around Bernard Berenson today as it did in his middle years, before and between two world wars. Who was this man, this supreme connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting? How did he support his elegant estate near Florence, his Villa I Tatti? What exactly were his relations with the art dealer Joseph Duveen? What part did his wife, Mary, play in his scholarly work and professional career? The answers are to be found in the day-to-day record of his life as he lived it--as reported at first hand in his and Mary's letters and diaries and reflected in the countless personal and business letters they received. His is one of the most fully documented lives of this century. Ernest Samuels, having spent twenty years studying the thousands of letters and other manuscripts, presents his story in absorbing detail.

Berenson helped Isabella Stewart Gardner build her great collection and performed similar though lesser services for other wealthy Americans. It was merely an avocation and a useful source of income; his vocation was scholarship. But after 1904, when the book opens, his expertise was in ever-greater demand: a purchaser's only assurance of the authorship of an Italian painting was the opinion of an expert, and in this field Berenson was pre-eminent. Increasingly he was drawn into the lucrative world of the art dealers; inevitably Joseph Duveen found it essential to enlist his services, at first ad hoc, then by contractual agreement. Samuels charts the course of Berenson's long association with Duveen Brothers, detailing the financial arrangements, the humdrum chores and major contested attributions, the periodic clashes between the stubborn scholar and the arrogant entrepreneur.

The portrayal of Berenson's relationship with Mary is especially intriguing: a union of opposites in all but brains and wit, bonded--despite love affairs, jealousies, recriminations--no longer by passion but by shared concerns. Impinging on their lives are those of a huge circle of friends and acquaintances in America and the beau monde of Europe. Both as biography and as a chapter of social and cultural history, it is a compelling book.

Author / Editor information

Samuels Ernest :

Ernest Samuels is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English, Emeritus, Northwestern University and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

Reviews

Remarkably absorbing...Does full justice to the verve and excitement of Berenson's connoisseurship.

Painstakingly researched and beautifully written.

The depth in which this book explores the young connoisseur's life is quite extraordinary...Our understanding of Berenson's life and work is permanently changed.

A biographical narrative of vast scope and highest distinction. The human world that Samuels brings so richly and solidly into being, spanning five decades, is populated with an extraordinary cast of characters, none more fascinating than Berenson himself. The complex transactions of his public career and the intricacies of his private life are handled with equal skill and knowledge, with impressive evenhandedness and a fine sense of proportion. It is a remarkable achievement.

It is difficult to imagine a better biography or a better subject for one. Mr. Berenson wanted to improve the world, and he did. How he did it is a heroic and terribly human story...Everybody who was anybody in the art world at the time appears in Bernard Berenson...The killings in the art market, the quarrels among experts and the convoluted negotiations all make for even better reading than one might anticipate, for at the center of it all, beyond the story of our greatest art critic, is art itself.

An in-depth, sensitive, and total portrait of Bernard Berenson. [The] Making of a Connoisseur commences with B. B.'s childhood in Lithuania, his family's immigration to Boston, his education, travel, and development during the first four decades of his life...One eagerly anticipates the second volume that is to cover the last five and a half decades.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Illustrations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xvii
Prologue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. The Missionaries’ Return Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	5
II. A Man of the World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
III. Throes of the North Italians Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	23
IV. Pathway to Dwveen Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	31
V. The “Fourth Gospel” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
VI. A Home in Exile Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	49
VII. Matisse and the Highroad of Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	59
VIII. America the Plutocratic Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
IX. The Pursuit of Life Enhancement Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	80
X. The Red Robe Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
XI. The Ixion Wheel of Business Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
XII. Idyll with Belle da Costa Greene Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	109
XIII. A Marital Truce Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	119
ΧIV. “The Flavor of Dust and Ashes” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
XV. The “Merchants” and the “Expert” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	139
ΧVI. Last Season of the Belle Epoque Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
XVII. America Revisited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	167
XVIII. The Darkening of Europe Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	177
XIX. A Time for Writing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	191
XX. Paris in Wartime Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	202
XXI. Venetians Restudied and Leonardo Dethroned Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	212
XXII. From Art Expert to Military Adviser Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
XXIII. Domestic Crisis Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
XXIV. “The Dragon’s Eggs” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
XXV. Spoils of War and Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
XXVI. An “American Bacchus” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	260
XXVII. An Island of Relative Solitude Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	268
XXVIII. Suspect in the Tromised Land Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	280
XXX. Germany and the Stelloni d’Italia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301
XXXI. The Case of La Belle Ferronière Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	311
XXXII. The Archaeology of Art Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	321
XXXIII. On the Way toTruth Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	331
XXXIV. The “Two Sposini” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	339
XXXV. The End of Profit Sharing Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	352
XXXVI. Afloat on a Golden Flood Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	362
XXXVII. “Prince of Art Critics” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	374
XXXVIII. A New Disciple Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	384
XXXIX. The “Book of Revelation” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	395
XL. The Role of Art History Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	401
XLI. Life in “Mussolinia” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	411
XLII. The Allendale Nativity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	428
XLIII. The Drawings Revisited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	440
XLIV. Toward the Abyss Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	451
XLV. Travels into Self Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	465
XLVI. The Peace of Le Fontanelle Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	478
XLVII. Patriarch of Florence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	491
XLVIII. At Home in the House of Life Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	503
XLIΧ. Paradoxical Talmudist Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	516
L. Master of the Inn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	526
LI. Garnering the Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	539
LII. “The Last Aesthete” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	550
LIII. Doctor of Letters and Philosophy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	560
LIV. Toward a “Humanistic Priesthood” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	571
LV. “A Scene from Rembrandt” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	581
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY. NOTES. INDEX
Selected bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	597
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	611
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	661

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Reprint 2014
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Front matter: 19
- Main content: 680
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 39
Keywords: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Artists, Architects, Photographers; HISTORY / General; Visual arts -- Criticism -- Berenson, Bernard - Biographies; Berenson, Bernard, 1865-1959.

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780674432499

Hardcover

Published: February 5, 1987
ISBN: 9780674432482