Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend

by Ernest Samuels, Jayne Newcomer Samuels (Contribution by)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674432482
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	02/05/1987
Edition description:	Reprint 2014
Pages:	699
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 1.56(d)

About the Author

Samuels Ernest :

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

Table of Contents

• Preface


• Acknowledgments


• Prologue

1. The Missionaries' Return


2. A Man of the World


3. Throes of the North Italians


4. Pathway to Duveen


5. The "Fourth Gospel"


6. A Home in Exile


7. Matisse and the Highroad of Art


8. America the Plutocratic


9. The Pursuit of Life Enhancement


10. The Red Robe


11. The Ixion Wheel of Business


12. Idyll with Belle da Costa Greene


13. A Marital Truce


14. "The Flavor of Dust and Ashes"


15. The "Merchants" and the "Expert"


16. Last Season of the Belle Epoque


17. America Revisited


18. The Darkening of Europe


19. A Time for Writing


20. Paris in Wartime


21. Venetians Restudied and Leonardo Dethroned


22. From Art Expert to Military Adviser


23. Domestic Crisis


24. "The Dragon's Eggs"


25. Spoils of War and Art


26. An "American Bacchus"


27. An Island of Relative Solitude


28. Suspect in the Promised Land


29. Early Art and the Land of the Pharaohs


30. Germany and the Stelloni d'Italia


31. The Case of La Belle Ferronière


32. The Archaeology of Art


33. On the Way to Truth


34. The "Two Sposini"


35. The End of Profit Sharing


36. Afloat on a Golden Flood


37. "Prince of Art Critics"


38. A New DisNativity


39. The Drawings Revisited


40. Toward the Abyss


41. Travels into Self


42. The Peace of Le Fontanelle


43. Patriarch of Florence


44. At Home in the House of Life


45. Paradoxical Talmudist


46. Master of the Inn


47. Garnering the Past


48. "The Last Aesthete"


49. Doctor of Letters and Philosophy


50. Toward a "Humanistic Priesthood"


51. "A Scene from Rembrandt"

• Selected Bibliography


• Notes


• Index

What People are Saying About This

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.

R.W.B. Lewis

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.

Editorial 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.

From the Publisher

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

Saturday Review

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.

New York Times Book Review

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.

Choice

Impelled by the vastness of his chief source (letters, diaries, personal and business items of the Berenson Archive at I Tatti) the author has provided a fitting companion to his Bernard Berenson: the making of a connoisseur ( LJ 6/1/79). He has also set the record straight, making it clear that both the legend and the private reality are true. In this he has been ably assisted by his wife, co-editor of Mary Berenson: a self-portrait from her diaries and letters . The present volume, starting with 1904, depicts the latter 55 years of the life of ``B.B.'' Already a Pulitzer Prize winner for his biography on Henry Adams, Samuels devoted over 20 years to exploring every facet of the well-documented existence of ``the world's foremost connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art.'' Libraries owning the first volume will decidedly want to acquire the concluding oneas exceptional writing and definitive biography of a world-class figure.Gloria K. Rensch, formerly with Vigo Cty. P.L., Terre Haute, Ind.

Library Journal

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 even-handedness and a fine sense of proportion. It is a remarkable achievement.

R. W. B. Lewis

Painstakingly researched and beautifully written.

London Review of Books

Samuels’s chronicle of this long career happily abounds in both personal and ‘anecdotic’ detail—about Berenson’s often stormy marriage, his love affairs…his quarrels and prejudices, his friendships with figures as far apart as Edith Wharton and Ray Bradbury… At the same time the gossip is never allowed to drown out a serious assessment of Berenson’s intellectual and scholarly significance.

New York Times