Overview
Critic, arbiter of taste, renowned authority on Renaissance painting, and oracle to millionaire art collectors, Bernard Berenson was the most formidable presence in the Anglo-American art world for more than thirty years. His Villa I Tatti near Florence was a magnet for European and American intellectuals; he was able to say, late in life, that most of the Italian paintings that had come to the United States had ""my visa on their passport."" Twenty years after his death he remains a paradoxical figure-fit challenge for a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The story of the making of the connoisseur spans four decades, from Berenson's childhood in Lithuania and in an immigrant enclave in Boston to the triumphant tour of the United States that confirmed his international reputation. Ernest Samuels interweaves with great skill the many threads of the narrative. No less fascinating than Berenson's own development, and the accidents that shaped his career, are his relations with an extraordinary cast of characters whose lives impinged on his-among them George Santayana, William James, Bertrand Russell, Logan Pearsall Smith, Norman and Hutchins Hapgood, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, the Michael Fields, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Roger Fry, and, most notably, the fabled Mrs. Jack Gardner. His relationship with Mary Smith Costelloe, who left her husband and children for him and eventually became his wife, was so close that the book is almost as much her story as his. Drawing on the thousands of letters B.B. and Mary wrote and the diaries she kept, Samuels is able to convey Berenson's thoughts and impressions as well as the outward events of these crucial years of his life. He blends sympathy and irony in his many-faceted portrayal of a complex man and a remarkable career. It is a compelling book.
Full Product Details
Author: Ernest Samuels
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Imprint: Harvard University Press
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Width: 15.90cm
, Height: 3.00cm
, Length: 23.30cm
Weight: 0.680kg
ISBN: 9780674067776
ISBN 10: 0674067770
Pages: 516
Publication Date: 01 January 1979
Audience:
General/trade
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College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
General
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Out of stock
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Reviews
A remarkably absorbing and lucid biography of Berenson's early career. The book does full justice to the verve and excitement of Berenson's connoisseurship. Saturday Review A portrait replete with the complex ironies created in the conflicts between vaulting idealism and the harsh necessities of living well...[It] makes clear the tortuous conflicts of his life, and stands as a splendid monument to its author's understanding of the human quandaries of his extraordinary subject and his equally extraordinary wife. Chronicle Review Berenson has an ideal biographer in Samuels. Impeccable in method, strong in narrative skill, Samuels scants nothing as to place, period or person, and is no less remarkable for inwardness, depth and charity of feeling. Nation This is a life filled with extraordinary people...Collectively they made the 1890s outrageously exciting, and the Berensons, in their relentless quest for recognition and security, serve as the perfect mirror. Samuels turns the mirror deftly, through Boston, London, Florence, Oxford, Vienna, and Chicago, pausing briefly in the boudoir, lingering in the golden hills of Tuscany, relentlessly reflecting the social scene...Samuels brilliantly captures it all. Christian Science Monitor
The second in a two-volume biography (the first installment published in 1979) of the man who was for nearly three-quarters of a century the world's most revered (and reviled) art expert. Painstakingly researched and competently if not particularly stylishly written, this largely uncritical portrait attempts to counteract the less-than-flattering depictions of Berenson that have appeared recently, notably in Colin Simpson's Artful Partners (p. 118). Even during his lifetime, Berenson was a highly controversial figure. There were those who regarded the diminutive Bostonian as a kind of humanist saint. For others, he was little more than a hired gun for Joseph Duveen, turning out attributions in exchange for a percentage of the millions such insecure parvenu Croesuses as Kress, Mellon and Gardner were unpocketing for dubious Donatellos and pinchbeck Peruginos. Having been commissioned to tell Berenson's story by Nicky Mariano, the last of the expert's devoted assistants (and the executor of his will), Samuels predictably falls into the former category. For the most part, the author does a fairly respectable job of preserving the legend.' He manages to distance Berenson from many of Duveen's shadier dealings, though some readers may be more than a bit suspicious of Berenson's admittedly all-consuming interest in the good life. For an admirer of St. Francis of Assisi, the servant of the poor, Berenson displayed rather expensive tastes - his villa I Tatti cresting the hills above Florence was not exactly ascetic. A less serious problem, but a problem nonetheless, is Samuels' apparent inability to recapture the quality of Berenson's conversations. The reader is told repeatedly that his talk was scintillating, subtle, epigrammatic. No doubt it was, How else to explain the fascination Berenson exercised over the likes of Edith Wharton, Henry Adams and Gertrude and Leo Stein? But from the evidence here, there was little that was memorable or worth reporting, It's a strange gap in a work that seems to have been almost obsessively researched. For a standard interpretation of the life of one of the century's most provocative figures, this is a worthwhile introduction, especially if read in conjunction with Simpson's far livelier expose. (Kirkus Reviews)
A portrait replete with the complex ironies created in the conflicts between vaulting idealism and the harsh necessities of living well...[It] makes clear the tortuous conflicts of his life, and stands as a splendid monument to its author's understanding of the human quandaries of his extraordinary subject and his equally extraordinary wife.
Author Information
Ernest Samuels is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English, Emeritus, at Northwestern University and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
