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 Renassance 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.

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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. 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.

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)

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.

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