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