The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti - rassegna stampa

The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti

a cura di Carl Brandon Strehlke, Machtelt Brüggen Israëls RASSEGNA STAMPA

«Nova Izdanja» • 3 aprile 2015

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nova izdanja

Ljerka Dulibić

Katalog umjetničke zbirke kao žanr povijesnoumjetničke literature

carl brandon strehlke –machtelt brüggen israëls, The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti, Villa i Tatti u suradnji s Officina Libraria, Firenze, 2015., 825 str. isbn 9788897757656

/

Ponajbolje svjedočanstvo složenosti određenih zadataka koje nam nameće naša struka rezultati su koji pomiču granice dotad učinjenog. Nedavno objavljen katalog zbirke europskog slikarstva koju su prikupili Bernard i Mary Berenson u svojoj rezidenciji I Tatti pokraj Firence upravo je takav iskorak koji zadivljuje svojim postignućima, istodobno potičući na promišljanje o katalogu umjetničke zbirke kao zasebnom žanru povijesnoumjetničke literature.

Cijelim nizom izdanja kojima su u posljednjih desetak godina obuhvatno prezentirane zbirke velikih svjetskih muzeja, katalog zbirnoga fonda normiran je najvišim stručnim i znanstvenim standardima, kako se to da naslutiti već i samo letimičnim prelistavanjem prije svega nove serije kataloga National Gallery u Londonu (do sada je objavljeno osam svezaka, čiji su autori Dillian Gordon, Nicholas Penny, Lorne Campbell, Judy Egerton, Humphrey Wine) i, primjerice, nove serije kataloga Städel Museuma u Frankfurtu (objavljeno deset svezaka, čiji su autori Jochen Sander, Bodo Brinkmann i Stephan Kemperdick, Rudolf Hiller von Gaertringen, Agnes Tieze, Mirjam Neumeister, León Krempel), ili pak kataloga talijanskog slikarstva 15. stoljeća iz National Gallery of Art u Washingtonu, Miklósa Boskovitsa i Davida Alana Browna te onoga zbirke Johna G. Johnsona u Philadelphia Museum of Art, Carla

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Brandona Strehlkea, kojima se u najnovije vrijeme pridružuje i katalog Dóre Sallay sijenskoga slikarstva u Mađarskoj – sve uz napomenu kako je u ovoj prigodi moguće spomenuti tek nekolicinu najistaknutijih primjera. Kataloške jedinice u tim katalozima nove generacije iscrpne su monografske studije koje ne samo da sabiru sva stečena znanja o svim aspektima pojedinoga djela, već neizostavno donose rezultate novih ciljanih istraživanja kojima se verificiraju, korigiraju ili ispravljaju dosada poznati podaci te dosadašnje pretpostavke potkrijepljuju novim arhivskim i inim svjedočanstvima.

Temeljem takve obrade donosi se nova

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◎ Bernard Berenson i interijer vile i Tatti (Ljubaznošću Villa i Tatti - The Harvard University Center for italian Renaissance Studies)

interpretacija i kontekstualizacija pojedinih umjetnina, čime se revalorizira njihovo značenje i mjesto u povijesti umjetničkoga stvaralaštva, ali i u zbirci kojoj danas pripadaju, a time posredno i značenje određene zbirke u kontekstu srodnih institucija. Valja također istaknuti značajno mjesto koje u takvoj obuhvatnoj i dubinskoj analizi imaju i rezultati konzervatorsko-restauratorskih istraživanja kojima se ne samo utvrđuje stanje umjetnine, već i definiraju smjernice za postupke koji tek predstoje, pri čemu je velika važnost pridana i povijesnom istraživanju te boljem razumijevanju svih ranijih intervencija na umjetnini. Sve to u konačnici omogućuje iznalaženje novih mogućnosti prezentiranja pojedinih umjetnina unutar zbirnoga fonda te fundusa u cjelini.

Svakoj od 110 slika europskih starih majstora iz Berensonove zbirke u katalogu The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti posvećena je upravo takva obuhvatna i iscrpna kataloška

jedinica: Catalogue of Old Masters, u izradu kojega je uz glavne autore i urednike izdanja, Carla Brandona Strehlkea i Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, bilo uključeno još čak 37 povjesničara umjetnosti, redom uglednih poznavatelja i stručnjaka, okosnica je ovoga izdanja, a slijedi mu vrlo zanimljiv dodatak Counterfeits koji uključuje studiju The Berensons and the Sienese Forger Icilio Federico Joni Giannija Mazzonija, uz još 7 kataloških jedinica u kojima su obrađena djela imitatora ranijih razdoblja.

Kataloškom dijelu međutim ne prethodi tek prikladan uvod u kojem bi se na jednome mjestu ukratko iznio historijat zbirke, kao što je to bilo uobičajeno u prethodno spomenutim izdanjima muzejskih kataloga. Berensonova zbirka, odnosno – točnije rečeno – zbirka Berensonovih, nametnula je ponešto drugačiji, razvedeniji i kompleksniji pristup.

Nakon uvodne riječi Lina Pertillea, direktora Villa I Tatti u razdoblju od 2010. do 2015. godine, za čijega je mandata

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17 intenziviran i dovršen ovaj projekt, začet odnosno naručen u vrijeme njegova prethodnika Josepha Connorsa (direktor Ville I Tatti od 2002. do 2010. godine), slijedi zahvala glavnih autora i urednika izdanja, upute za uporabu kataloga uz popis kratica te kazalo osoba iz Berensonova kruga.

Prva velika cjelina, pod nazivom Collecting Old Masters, objedinjuje nekoliko studija. Carl Brandon Strehlke u prilogu naslovljenom Bernard and Mary Collect: Pictures Come to I Tatti prožimlje osobne (pri)povijesti ovoga slavnoga para, opis njihovih imanja, predmete koje su sakupljali i s kojima su živjeli te ljude koje su okupljali i s kojima su se družili, na što se nadovezuje kratki, ali iscrpno kritički obrađen dokumentarni dodatak Offner, Meiss, and Zeri in Bernard Berenson’s Diary. U svojoj studiji The Berensons “Connosh” and Collect Sienese Painting Machtelt Brüggen Israëls razlaže “connoisseurship as a relentless but enjoyable pursuit” kao osobnu strast koja je Bernarda i njegovu suprugu Mary povezivala desetljećima, zaključujući kako “connoisseurship with an eye for the life-enhancing power of art” nije samo intelektualna ostavština ovog slavnog povjesničara umjetnosti, već i raison d’être zbirke. Slijedi studija Giovannija Pagliarula Passions Intertwined: Art and Photography at I Tatti u kojoj kustos zbirke i fototeke u Villa i Tatti ocrtava

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nova izdanja svu složenu isprepletenost povijesti umjetnosti i fotografije, prvenstveno kroz prizmu Berensonove zbirke, ali potom neodvojivo i u kontekstu njegove profesionalne djelatnosti kao stvaratelja, uz suprugu Mary i njihovu tajnicu i dugogodišnju suputnicu Nicky Mariano, fotografskoga arhiva koji je do danas jedan od specifičnih resursa Ville I Tatti u kojem se ogleda povijest uloge medija fotografije kao neprikosnovenoga instrumenta za prakticiranje povijesti umjetnosti u Berensonovo doba.

Slijede kataloške jedinice slika koje su Bernard i Mary prikupili krajem 19. i početkom 20. stoljeća, kako bi opremili prostore Villa I Tatti, svoga doma na jednom od slikovitih brežuljaka između Firence, Fiesolea i Settignana. Villu I Tatti Bernard Berenson kupio je kao već formiran konoser i povjesničar umjetnosti, oko čije se osobnosti već tada razvio čitav jedan kult. Nakon studija u Bostonu, jednim dijelom i na Harvardu, gdje se njegova obitelj preselila iz Litve, mladi Bernard Berenson (1865. – 1959.) proputovao je Europu, potpomognut sredstvima koje je u tu svrhu osigurala Isabella Stewart Gardner, bostonska kolekcionarka i njegova dugogodišnja pokroviteljica, prijateljica i suradnica. Umjetnine je Bernard započeo sakupljati zajedno sa Mary Costelloe (1864.

– 1944.), s kojom se oženio 1900. godine te

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su zajedno opremali Villu I Tatti, koja nije bila samo njihov privatni dom već mjesto okupljanja mnogih intelektualaca onoga vremena s kojima su dijelili zajedničke interese. Danas je Villa I Tatti prestižni Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Harvardskoga sveučilišta, u kojem i dalje, na temelju Berensonove idejne potke i daljnjega razvoja arhivskih, bibliotečnih i inih istraživačkih resursa, u poticajnom okruženju zajednički egzistiraju međusobno se prožimljući ideje, ljudi i predmeti njihova bavljenja.

Nakon središnjega dijela ove opsežne publikacije koja ukupno broji čak 824 stranice slijedi cjelina nazvana Berensoniana koja sadrži nekoliko specifičnih studija: Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson Caroline Elam, A Failure: René Piot and the Berensons Claudija Pizzorussa, uz pripadajući kataloški dodatak, čime se ukupan broj kataloški obrađenih umjetnina penje na 149. Slijedi Appendix. Paintings Formerly Owned by the Berensons u kojem je osnovim podacima, a često i fotografijom, dokumentirana još 101 umjetnina. Nakon popisa bibliografije (koji zauzima gotovo 50 gusto tiskanih

stranica) slijedi vrlo korisni Provenance Index i kazalo imena. Već je i iz šturog tehničkog opisa ove publikacije jasno o koliko je golemom i gotovo beskompromisnom poduhvatu riječ.

Pravi je užitak listati ovaj katalog, uživati u kvalitetnim reprodukcijama bilo recentnih snimaka slika iz zbirke ili pak arhivskih fotografija, podsjetiti se na poznata i slavna djela u Berensonovoj zbirci (npr. Domenico Veneziano, Bogorodica s Djetetom, Giambono, Sveti Mihovil, Giotto, Sveti Antun Padovanski, Lorenzo Lotto, Raspeće te Sassetta, tri polja oltara iz Borgo San Sepolcro), ili pak otkrivati neke vlastite nove drage slike na temelju posve osobnih preferenci (takva je primjerice malena Bogorodica Ponizna Bartolomea Bulgarinija ili njegove radionice). Čitati pak kataloške jedinice poticajno je otkrivanje cijelih spletova saznanja, istraživačkih problema i novih interpretacija, sve to potkrijepljeno uvidom u okolnosti slijedom kojih su slike dospjele u Villu I Tatti, kroz koje se provlači cijela galerija osoba koje su obilježile čitavo jedno razdoblje u povijesti naše discipline.

Iz vlastitog iskustva znamo kako umjetnine izlučene iz svog primarnog konteksta nisu samo znakovita svjedočanstva razvoja odnosno povijesti umjetničkoga stvaralaštva u svoj njegovoj raznolikosti, već i središte prožimanja kompleksne mreže uzajamnih dinamičnih odnosa umjetničkih djela i silnica koje su obilježile fenomen razvoja kolekcionarstva i tržišta umjetninama, procese migracije umjetničkih djela i njihove muzealizacije te povijest discipline povijesti umjetnosti i njenih različitih metoda. No ovo nas izdanje, u svoj svojoj kompleksnosti, vrlo zorno podsjeća na ono najvažnije, a to je podosta jednostavna činjenica: kada je riječ o umjetninama uvijek je riječ i o (njihovim) ljudima. ×

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«Alias, supplemento settimanale de «Il Manifesto» • 8 novembre 2015

Giapponesi insaccati

Poco conosciuto in Occidente, lo Hojojutsu, o «arte della corda da cattura», è una complessa disciplina evolutasi in G biente militare sin dal 1400 e successivamente adottata dalla polizia del periodo Edo (1600-1868). Per mezzo di co lo Hojojutsu insegnava a soldati e agenti di polizia a trattenere i prigionieri per l’arresto, il trasporto, la detenzione torio. In un Giappone arcaico, ove la corda era considerata un tramite fra il mondo materiale e quello spirituale, venn centinaia di intricate tecniche di legatura esteticamente raffinate e anche un po’ perverse. Lo Hojojutsu è scompars nizzazione del Paese e sopravvive solo in poche Scuole di arti marziali tradizionali. Il libro ne illustra in maniera detta la filosofia, gli strumenti e la pratica, gli sviluppi tecnici, metodologici, gli strumenti utilizzati, i contatti con l’esoterism l’arte; numerose le immagini di grande interesse artistico. q Franco Monetti

«Il Giornale dell’Arte» • 1 gennaio 2016

Hojojutsu. L’Arte Guerriera della Corda, di Christian Russo 240 pp., 250 ill., Yoshin Ryu, Torino, 2015, €

Biografi

Una vita inimitabile

il sat a cola

by permission Harvard College. Photo Paolo De Rocco, Centrica srl, Firenze

Saggi

Un mirabile volume ricorda Bernard Berenson, le sue collezioni d’arte, la leggendaria villa dei Tatti

Carlo Scarpa ovvero

dove ha abitato e che l’università americana ancora usa, hanno mantenuto l’esprit della loro antica vita. I quadri, i libri e le opere collezionate sprigionano ancora l’essenza di un vivere inimitabile che accomuna Berenson a tutta una serie di grandi esteti che popolarono l’Europa della fine dell’Ottocento e la prima metà del Novecento e che si spensero, o meglio, si infransero, con l’avvento delle tecnologie moderne. Berenson è stato uno degli ultimi rappresentanti di una stirpe di storici dell’arte che furono (o cercarono di essere) al contempo eleganti uomini di mondo e fini studiosi, uno degli ultimi di una razza di intellettuali sofisticati (o verniciati per sembrare tali) che oggi sta per disperdersi definitivamente.

Per celebrare Mary e Bernard Berenson, a 150 anni dalla nascita di quest’ultimo, è uscito recentemente il suntuoso e importante volume The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti: un’ iniziativa necessaria poiché il primo catalogo, edito nel 1962, era ormai da molto tempo introvabile e comunque superato.

A cura di Carl Brandon Strehlke e Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, il volume, di ben 823 pagine magnificamente illustrate, raccoglie e studia in modo esemplare i 149 dipinti collezionati dai Berenson tra la fine del 1890 e i primi decenni del XX secolo, quando Berenson si stava avviando a divenire una autorità internazionale nel settore dell’arte rinascimentale italiana. Il catalogo permette per la prima volta di cogliere a fondo gli interessi intellettuali e il gusto collezionistico dei Berenson e appare come un’opera di grande interesse per la storia dell’arte, uno di quei libri che solo ogni tanto possono essere editi grazie ad un felice incontro fra potenti mezzi economici e qualità di studio. Scritto da un team internazionale che comprende alcuni fra i più importanti storici dell’arte del mondo, è stato favorito nella sua realizzazione dal vasto epistolario di Berenson, dai diari della coppia, dalle loro notazioni presenti nella vastissima fototeca, da inedite fotografie di

anche un libro che, nel raccontare l’esperienza di Scarpa, ci regala una

Pietro Annigoni, «Bernard Berenson a letto», 1956, Firenze, Villa I Tatti famiglia. Tutte le schede dei dipinti sono illustrate e corredate da approfonditi studi scientifici e tecnici. Il catalogo comprende saggi sull’evoluzione collezionistica di Berenson, sul suo specifico interesse per la pittura senese, sull’inquietante rapporto con il geniale falsario senese Icilio Federico Joni, sui rapporti di Berenson con il critico Roger Fry, sui murales di René Piot per I Tatti.

Completa il volume una serie di 94 schede di dipinti che anticamente erano a I Tatti e che comprende anche le donazioni fatte a musei europei e americani.

Fra le molte interessanti e spesso inedite foto che il volume pubblica ne segnaliamo due in particolare: una, del 1956, ritrae Roberto Longhi in visita ai Tatti, in piedi, in atto di deferente inchino verso BB seduto: «due potestà, due canizie, due esperienze consumate», per dirla con Alessandro Manzoni, si fronteggiano, ma Berenson appare distaccato, altero e con un filo d’ironia nello sguardo. La seconda immagine, sempre del 1956, è un disegno squisito di Pietro Annigoni, che rappresenta Berenson a letto. Del disegno, poco noto, si conoscono tutte le circostanze della realizzazione. Il critico vi appare anziano e fragile, ma vigile e vivo di pensiero, illuminato da una luce quasi ultraterrena: prossimo ormai alla morte e pronto per essere consegnato al mito. q Arabella Cifani The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti a cura di Carl Brandon Strehlke con Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, 804 pp., 180 ill. a colori 40 b/n, Officina Libraria, Milano 2015, $ 145,00.

affianca ai soggetti di natura morta e ritratti (mai abbandonati neppure in

© Riproduzione riservata

A chi si reca a visitare villa I Tatti alta sui colli tra Fiesole e Settignano, cinta dalla grazia dei sui giardini all’italiana, perennemente verdeggianti di cipressi e bussi, operosa di studi di arte, pare di entrare in una sorta di paradiso terrestre. Un luogo ove la cultura costituisce l’essenza stessa di un vivere superiore.

La casa e le collezioni di Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) che costruì la villa e fece progettare i giardini, vi abitò e vi è sepolto, costituiscono il perfetto teatro in cui il celebre conoscitore d’arte si mosse e si esibì per i suoi numerosi visitatori, clienti ed estimatori, per oltre cinquanta anni. L’edificio rustico dei Tatti fu abitato da lui e dalla moglie Mary fin dall’anno 1900 e acquistato nel 1907. Berenson chiamò a progettare la nuova villa gli architetti Geoffrey Scott e Cecil Pinsent, commissionò una grande biblioteca e un giardino all’italiana situato all’interno di una tenuta agricola. Nel tempo i Tatti divennero una casa confortevole, un centro intellettuale di vita cosmopolita, e sulle sue pareti si allinearono collezioni sempre più ricche e selezionate di dipinti italiani rinascimentali. I Berenson vissero ai Tatti fino alla loro morte: nel 1945 Mary, nel 1959 Bernard.

Con un pensiero illuminato Bernard Berenson fin dal 1936 decise di donare la villa, e le sue collezioni di opere d’arte, la biblioteca e la fototeca alla Harvard University. Dopo la sua morte la villa è diventata un attivo centro di ricerca sul Rinascimento Italiano, gestito come un ambitissimo campus estero per gli studenti in visita dagli Stati Uniti. Nell’artificio dei Tatti BB (come lo chiamavano gli amici) mise tutto di sé: le sue corpose sostanze economiche, ottenute vendendo opere italiane ai musei americani, ma soprattutto il suo spirito; al punto che in quello spazio incantato rimase preso dal cerchio magico del suo stesso incantesimo, fino a confondersi e divenire nelle cronache e nei ricordi integrante parte decorativa del luogo. Le eleganti stanze

Un ritra di Lucia

Il tasso di goss è proporziona Ecco perché re quella dedicat Freud (Berlino di davvero ine blico parlava p fatto che a scr e non un critic turisce quindi Freud pittore, ne di vicende ceva parte del cizie. Poco im a forza di ins ammesso nell partecipare all consumava da te in Kensing Qui l’artista, p ro in studio, sv simo assistent varie attività, ciai, galleristi riopinte figure che emerge do ta dell’artista) e biografo è qu

«Antiquariato» • gennaio 2016

«NRC Handelsblad» • 12 febbraio 2016

«Corriere fiorentino» • 14 febbraio 2016

«Corriere fiorentino» • 18 febbraio 2016

«I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance» autunno 2016

The Berenson Collection: A Guide Joseph Connors, Harvard University

A D ECADE IN T HE MAKIN G ,

ten pounds in weight, and eight hundred pages in length, The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti, edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls (Florence, 2015) is finally out. That this is an exceptionally beautiful book with superb color illustrations and elegant layout and typography will be evident to anyone who takes it in hand. Forty-five authors, from the senior statesmen of Renaissance art to a new generation of scholars, wrote entries on 110 older paintings in addition to thirty-nine works by the Berensons’ contemporaries and related material, both real and fake.1 A bibliography of three thousand items is joined with research in the archives of dozens of museums, collectors, and dealers, not least those at I Tatti. Erudition on this scale in a single tome is rare. The book is an alp.

The downside of weightiness is that the catalog risks sitting on the shelf, admired by all but consulted only by specialists. This would be sad since it is surprisingly readable and has exciting material. My aim here is to offer a guide for the curious. The book took me a month to read, but it can be delved into with profit even for a spare half hour here and there or a summer’s afternoon. Visitors who are impressed with the general atmosphere of the house but confused by the dozens of unfamiliar artists’ names can use it to put order into their impressions.

In particular, I want to show fellows at the Harvard Center who will be living with the collection for an extended period how to use the book. It does not have Contact Joseph Connors at Harvard University (connors2@fas.harvard.edu).

1. The two author/editors came to the task with pertinent qualifications. One is the author of what is recognized as the finest catalog of a permanent collection in an American museum: Carl Brandon Strehlke, Italian Paintings, 1250–1450 in the John G. Johnson Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, 2004). The Johnson catalog is the template on which the I Tatti catalog is based and also includes information on condition and a short biography for each artist. The other is the author/organizer of an international research project on the Sassetta panels at I Tatti and around the world: Machtelt Israëls, Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, 2 vols. (Florence, 2009). Each wrote somewhat more than a third of the present catalog, with the final third the work of invited experts. Page citations from the catalog are made parenthetically in the text throughout this article.

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 19, number 2. © 2016 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2016/1902-0001$10.00 235

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to be read cover to cover, but it is habit forming once you get into it. If rightly handled it offers pathways into early Renaissance art, the history of connoisseurship, and the formation of the collection that no amount of clicking could ever afford.

The book is easy to navigate, and for that reason I refrain from all but a minimum of footnotes to it. The entries on the artists take up the central five hundred pages. They are in alphabetical order (often by first name), and it will not be hard to locate the quotations and facts I mention below. Although I will treat them last, the catalog opens with three general essays: one by Carl Strehlke on the formation of the collection, a second by Machtelt Brüggen Israëls on the role of Siena, and a third by Giovanni Pagliarulo on photography at I Tatti. After the catalog entries come sections on the counterfeits and on art by the Berensons’ friends and contemporaries. At the end there is an appendix on 101 paintings that are known to have passed through I Tatti to other owners.

Before getting to the masterpieces, let me mention two features of the catalog that the general reader should know about even if they are meant for the specialist. First, there is condition. Each painting was taken down and examined intensely by eye followed by technical examinations with equipment loaned by the laboratories of the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. One of the photographs brings back a vivid memory of the day when cushions from the living room couch were laid on the floor in case a tall panel under examination should fall over. Most of the paintings are on panel, and these sections offer a succinct, high-level course on wood and tempera technique in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Such analysis can be crucial in decisions about the placement of a panel in a larger polyptych. Scholars can tell whether a panel has been cut down or inserted into a foreign context.

Technique sometimes arrives on a white charger to put an end to debate, as in the case of the severe St. Anthony Abbot who scolds otherwise happy visitors descending the staircase. It had been bounced from the oeuvre of Orcagna (Mary Berenson), but a scientific analysis of the punchmarks in the gold ground finally brought it firmly into the camp of an obscure painter, Giovanni di Bartolomeo Cristiani.

Old photographs are essential in documenting condition, and the Berensons turned themselves into assiduous collectors of photographs, as anyone who has used the Fototeca knows. The essay by Giovanni Pagliarulo traces the photographers working for the Berensons as of 1910, especially Harry Burton, who would achieve world fame in 1922 when he photographed the tomb of King Tutankhamen for Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. The essay traces the history of photographic technique through prints and negatives in the collection: early al-

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bumen, carbon and gelatin silver prints, even the fascinating interlude (1907–35) of autochromes by the Lumière brothers that presaged color photography. A poetic final paragraph links changing techniques in photography to a succession of movements in twentieth-century art.2 Second, there is biography. Each artist is given a compact biography based on new research. For the famous painters, this is likely to be the best short biography available, and for many lesser artists, it is likely to be the only biography in English. The bonus of the way the catalog is planned is that even minor works in the collection trigger substantial biographies, useful far beyond the scope of the book.

For example, while Perugino is represented in the house by two small embroideries, the biography includes not only the known facts of his life, clearly and succinctly presented, but the historiography of his reputation. The Sano di Pietro biography is the first to synthesize the new consensus, developing since documentary finds of 2012, that the famous Osservanza master, whose oeuvre was assembled over the past sixty years, is really the young Sano. To go with a small doublesided Madonna by the famous Pietro Lorenzetti we are given a life that charts the art and movements of this complex painter. And the Madonna, whose “calm expression and majesty do not exclude tenderness,” is traced back to its original home in the Augustinian monastery of Lecceto near Siena (377).

Biography is one thing for Vasari-level artists but another for late medieval and early Renaissance painters about whom we have scant dates and little personal information. Such artists become their oeuvres. It often takes generations of scholarship to construct a personality in these conditions. In the vita of the Sienese trecento painter Bartolomeo Bulgarini, for example, the catalog takes us on a historiographical journey that begins in the early twentieth century with a construct called “Ugolino Lorenzetti” because the oeuvre smacked of both Ugolino di Nerio and Pietro Lorenzetti, through a phase when the painter was called the Master of Ovile, to the 1930s when the real name emerged from the archives.

Such is the origin story of one of the few Sienese artists to come from the nobility. The biography of Bernardo Daddi has to cope with the whole spectrum of response to this most prolific of painters, from Berenson’s charge of mere prettiness through Longhi’s “most delightful yet mediocre mechanical songbird” (223) to Offner’s “pushing refinement to Keatsian limits” (230). This is followed by a daring reconstruction of the altarpiece from which the Berenson Daddi came.

2. The past five years have seen a movement to reevaluate the role of photographic archives such as I Tatti’s. See Costanza Caraffa, ed., Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History (Berlin, 2011); and Costanza Caraffa and Tiziana Serena, eds., Photo Archives and the Idea of Nation (Berlin, 2015).

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Never lone geniuses in this period, artists came out of workshops with complex hierarchies and specializations. The biography of the trecento Cione family is a lens onto a type of organization that takes giant strides with this family and will have far-reaching consequences into the fifteenth century. The collection has works attributed to both Gentile and Giovanni Bellini, and the pair of vite in the catalog make it easy to jump into the extensive literature on the most important artistic family of Renaissance Venice. Giovanni’s Madonna, thought to be a fake by its first restorer, then glorified by Berenson only to be ruined in the war, has now found a peaceful resting place as workshop of Bellini, possibly the young Marco Basaiti. In other words, one wouldn’t make a pilgrimage to Fiesole just for it. But the catalog restores to Gentile the lovely Madonna and Child (with the charming bird on a string) in the small dining room and charts in a new way the relationship of early Gentile to his brother-in-law Mantegna.

In short, if you need the biography of any of the Italian primitives or early Renaissance masters, cross your fingers and hope that at least a fragment of his oeuvre is represented in the Berenson collection. The accompanying biography will not disappoint.

MASTERPIECES

Most readers familiar with the house will turn to the entries on Giotto, Domenico Veneziano, Lorenzo Lotto, and Luca Signorelli. The research here is entirely new, and the finds can be stunning. Previous owners had strong feelings about these works, and the entries include a history of ownership and of appreciation in the midst of fluctuating attributions. These entries are compressed masterpieces of modern scholarship that one wants to recommend to art historians of any period and humanists in any field.

The living room on the piano nobile, once Berenson’s study, has two Giottos.

Carl Strehlke explains why the panel with a Franciscan saint, here identified as St. Anthony of Padua, must come early in the master’s career, why he is halo-less, and how the panel fit into a larger construction, possibly a triptych with lost panels showing St. Francis and the Virgin. The other Giotto in the room, the small Entombment hanging against the window wall, is placed later, about 1320 (fig. 1). I found it fascinating to follow the clue-gathering process that resulted in a reconstruction and a history. The original altarpiece may have been as big as seven panels in a row with five more on top. Painted in Florence by the workshop with final touches by the master, it was sent abroad, possibly to Rimini. There the cramped and halo-less figure of Nicodemus would have been added on arrival at the behest of the patron, a surprising deduction that makes us take a hard second look. The

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Figure 1. Giotto di Bondone and Workshop, Entombment of Christ (panel of an altarpiece), ca. 1320. Egg tempera and tooled gold on poplar panel; 45.3 × 43.9 cm (cat. pl. 44). (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti—the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; photo, Paolo De Rocco, Centrica, Florence.)

entry is especially poignant for anyone who has felt the magic radiated by the picture in the evening with the gold ground glowing while the figures slip into the penumbra. It is the entry to carry with one (how nice a web version would be) when one sees the other panels from this famous altarpiece in the Metropolitan Museum, the Gardner, the National Gallery in London, and the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.

The Giotto biography accompanying the two entries is the best short account one can find of the life and reputation of this peripatetic master. It puts the great tropes (like Dante’s “Ora ha Giotto il grido”) into context and gives the historiography of the Giotto/non-Giotto question for the frescoes at Assisi. The conclusion that Giotto was like a master designer who sets up workshops and returns

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from time to time to oversee huge decorative projects puts questions of attribution into a new light.

The Domenico Veneziano Virgin and Child has always hung in the study/living room (fig. 2). This great painter, who signs himself elsewhere “da Venesia” although we really know nothing about his origins, emerged in Perugia around 1438. After he arrived in Florence he was somehow a formative influence on the young Piero della Francesca. Together they participated in one of the most important decorative enterprises of the Florentine Renaissance, the Portinari Chapel in Sant’Egidio at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, now sadly lost. The Berensons acquired the painting in 1900 from the Marchesa Marianna Paulucci Panciatichi Ximenes d’Aragona, a distinguished naturalist whose famous orientalist father had rebuilt the family castle at Sammezzano in rural Tuscany into a gigantic example of the Moorish revival with different orientalizing decor in each of the 365 rooms. When word of the sale (as a Piero della Francesca) got out, officials at the Uffizi tried to block it but had to settle for a deal that gave the family half of the profit should the painting ever be sold. Once they got it to their new home, the Berensons resisted attributions both to Piero and to Domenico Veneziano and for decades stuck with a lesser light, Baldovinetti. Finally around 1930 Domenico’s great St. Lucy altarpiece in the Uffizi was united with its predella panels, and the artist’s elusive personality began to come into focus. By 1932 Berenson had come round to the attribution.

In post-Berenson scholarship, the problem moved from attribution to date: early, with all that gilt and brocade, or late, with that perfection of form and subtle play on natural and divine light? The weight of opinion is now with late. The authors, Caroline Elam with Carl Strehlke, offer two tempting suggestions for patronage: Marco Parenti, with his taste for fine silk, or someone in the Peruzzi clan who would have liked the little pears the Madonna holds. It is nice to know about both pears and silk, but on the deepest level this unforgettable painting holds us riveted by the simultaneously perfect and warmhearted protagonists, the Madonna and her child, “a human relationship conscious of divine responsibility” (242).

Lorenzo Lotto was the subject of Berenson’s first book, but the small Lotto Crucifixion resting on the bookshelves of the Signorelli corridor was the last painting to enter the house as a gift from the dealer Alessandro Contini Bonacossi in 1953 (fig. 3). A note on the back by Lotto’s friend Giovanni del Coro tells us that the artist painted it at Loreto in Holy Week of 1544, timing his work to finish at 3:00 p.m. on Good Friday, the moment of Christ’s expiration. Technical examination helps us understand the magic by which Lotto made the arma Christi emerge from the blackness swirling around the crucified Christ. Lotto had a copper case

Figure 2. Domenico Veneziano, Virgin and Child, ca. 1450. Egg tempera, oil(?), and tooled gold on poplar panel; 88.0 × 63.0 cm (cat. pl. 31). (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti—the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; photo, Paolo De Rocco, Centrica, Florence.)

Color version available as an online enhancement.

Figure 3. Lorenzo Lotto, Crucifixion with the Arma Christi, April 11, 1544. Oil on poplar panel; 25.5. × 16.8 cm (cat. pl. 57). (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti—the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; photo, Paolo De Rocco, Centrica, Florence.) Color version available as an online enhancement.

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made for the painting perhaps to protect it during travel. The entry by Charles Dempsey with Carl Strehlke probes the liturgy of the Good Friday mass and the iconography of the vision of St. Gregory to show how Lotto appropriates elements of the papal vision “per sua devotione” (395).

The Signorelli corridor was built to connect the house with the library. The library door is usually closed, and the dead-end gallery has become a place for displaying Berenson’s collection of oriental art plus a few Renaissance paintings, including the Lotto, the repainted wreck of a Giovanni Bellini studio Madonna, and the portraits by Luca Signorelli that give it its name. The latter occasion a fine biography of one of the most important painters of the Renaissance. In the accompanying entry on the portraits of the brothers Vitellozzo and Camillo Vitelli by the coeditors, we learn much about this ill-starred military family from Città di Castello, whose violent deaths stain the pages of Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Paolo Giovio. Commissioned as posthumous commemorations, the portraits came from the Giovio collection, possibly painted when Giovio was still amassing his collection in Florence. Certainly they were jewels among the 394 portraits assembled in Giovio’s famous museum on the Lake of Como, copies of which now line the ceilings of the Uffizi. Since the portraits were bought in London, Bernard and Mary fumed when a law of 1909 threatened to notify the paintings, thus precluding export. A third Vitelli portrait stayed in England and is now in Birmingham.

All three are compared in the catalog with the woodcuts made after them for Giovio’s Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium of 1575. One of my most vivid memories from I Tatti is of the Berenson copy of this book being brought from the vault into the Signorelli corridor and opened to the Vitelli woodcuts, proving the identity of the sitters and the provenance at the same time.

RECONSTRUCTION OF ALTARPIECES

Many of the paintings are fragments of altarpieces dismembered in the century of depredation between Napoleon and the arrival of the mogul collectors. The Sassetta panels are the prime example, but there are dozens of smaller paintings that offer the opportunity to reunite panels scattered all over Europe and America, reinsert them in their original context, and occasionally suggest a patron. When companion panels in other museums are known, they are given short entries of their own, a most helpful convention. This is where technical investigation is essential. The sawn edge of a panel, sometimes even a crack or a wormhole, can clinch a reconstruction of panels scattered over many museums. Often the Berenson collection will have a small fragment of a larger altarpiece; the catalog takes the opportunity to study all the disiecta membra wherever they have landed.

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For example, a small and not very eye-catching painting by Botticini, Marriage of the Virgin, becomes far more interesting once it is identified as part of the predella of the large altarpiece once in San Felice in Piazza, the church opposite and slightly south of Palazzo Pitti. This feat of sleuthing then leads to the assembly of the oeuvre of an artist who started at age fourteen and whose early work until now had been hard to discern. Another example is afforded by the two Gentile da Fabriano panels that sit on the cupboard under the Domenico Veneziano in the Berenson study/living room. Close examination of these very small paintings produced large results. On the back of one is a seventeenth-century copy of a 1408 inscription. First noticed in 1993 and here deciphered in full with the help of ultraviolet light, the inscription leads to Santa Sofia in Venice and the Sandei altar that once graced the church. Reconstruction is helped by the hypothesis that Pandolfo III Malatesta of Brescia commissioned it for Martin V to bring to Rome. The entry on the other Gentile painting, the much damaged but still exquisite Madonna and Child that hangs in the corridor outside the director’s office, is not a reconstruction, but it beautifully illumines one of Berenson’s least expensive but choicest acquisitions.

The imposing altarpiece that hangs at the bottom of the stairs close to the small dining room is so large that Mary wondered whether her architect, Cecil Pinsent, would find a place to put it. It was formerly attributed to the Master of Palazzo Venezia or to Lippo Memmi but is here given to the brothers Lippo and Tederigo Memmi. Since the Master of Palazzo Venezia has sometimes been identified in the past with Tederigo, the joint attribution to both brothers cuts the knot in a convincing way. The reconstruction takes us rather far from Tuscany. Machtelt Brüggen Israëls has rediscovered a key passage in Suarès’s seventeenth-century history of Avignon that allows a hypothesis to be framed, tentative at first but more and more convincing as the evidence piles up. We move to Avignon where the altarpiece would have been painted in the 1340s by the Memmi brothers on commission for the chapel of Napoleone Orsini in the church of the Cordeliers. A print is found that shows the prerevolutionary state of this church. A reconstruction is offered, showing how the painting would have handled predella, piers, and pinnacles, and the iconography is discussed in the context of the debates on evangelical poverty and the beatific vision swirling around figures like Ubertino da Casale. The excitement of discovery transpires in every line of this scintillating entry.

The most notable of the altarpiece reconstructions involves the three famous Sassetta panels. This is of course the subject of a vast, multiauthored research project published by I Tatti in 2009. Those results are re-presented in miniature, so to speak, by Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, the editor of the earlier book. The sixty or so

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panels of this huge altarpiece are put in their proper places on the basis of extensive physical and scientific examination, making it possible to deduce narrative strategy and aesthetic effect from the scientifically reconstructed painting rather than the other way around, as was done in previous interpretations.

The entry clearly spells out precedents for the unusual Franciscan iconography in an altarpiece by Taddeo di Bartolo, now in Perugia, and in a Spinello Aretino altarpiece, now lost but, amazingly, reflected in an intarsia panel in a choir stall still in the church. The analysis is subtle: the Vices that frightened Dante at the opening of the Inferno are knocked flat by Franciscan Virtues, especially Lady Poverty and Obedience, so dear to the Osservanti patrons. The saint himself, Alter Angelicus and Alter Christus, made unearthly by a gilt mandorla of great pictorial delicacy, is illuminated by Franciscan writings. The acquisition and display of the paintings is put in the context of Berenson’s appreciation of Buddhist spirituality. The subtile ingenium that the Franciscan patrons saw in Sassetta is matched by the subtlety and elegance of both entry and biography.

Visitors might remember a pair of worn-out-looking panels near the head of the stairs showing the martyrdom of Sant’Apollonia (patron of dentists and toothaches) by Francesco Granacci, the artist who taught the young Michelangelo to paint. The catalog traces them to the Florentine convent of that saint, for which Michelangelo did the front door. Interestingly, the scenes are based on a fifteenthcentury Florentine legendary on female martyrs rather than the more famous Golden Legend. This entry is one of several that rehabilitates paintings that suffered severe damage when the apartment of Alda von Anrep, Nicky Mariano’s sister, was destroyed in the mining of houses along the Arno during the German retreat in August 1944.

Amid the many reconstructions there is a surprising deconstruction as well.

Most visitors to the house will remember the large pentaptych of four scowling saints and a Madonna that sits on the bookshelves near the top of the staircase.

More than any other work it is the one that most makes the house feel like a sacristy. Berenson acquired it from the Toscanelli collection circa 1908. The catalog takes the whole thing apart and gives the panels to three separate painters: Bulgarini for the four saints at the sides, Niccolò di Segna for the central Virgin, and Pietro Lorenzetti for the small pinnacle over the Virgin. They were assembled circa 1883 from unrelated altarpieces by the restorer and furniture designer Gaetano Bianchi to enhance the sale of the Toscanelli collection. The figure in the pinnacle is now Christ, who holds a scroll that reads “Ego Sum Via Ver[it]as.”

But in an earlier life this was a mere saint. If you look closely at the scroll with a flashlight, the original identity can just be made out: “S. Marci.” The restorer-

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fabricators of the polyptych felt that a more august personage was needed to preside over their magnificent contraption.

FURNITURE

Among the little-noticed treasures of the house are some unusual pieces of furniture with art on them. More than painting, antique furniture went through the restoration studios in the nineteenth century and came out enhanced. Until preparation of the catalog, no one paid much attention to the cassone that stands under the Cima St. Sebastian near the director’s office. It always seemed just an old wooden box enlivened by a talented restorer. A fascinating entry by Mattia Vinco shows that the roundels on the front were painted by Liberale da Verona.

Aged and covered with grime, the scenes seem illegible at first, but in the entry they are coaxed out of the darkness into wonderful depictions of Apollo’s Pursuit of Daphne and the Marriage of Apollo and Daphne. That marriage should be the outcome of this notorious chase might seem strange, although Ovid intimates marriage (“Phoebus . . . cupit conubia”; Metamorphoses I.490), and the verses called La Complainte del amant from Jean Froissart’s L’Espinette amoreuse of circa 1370 provide a source close to home. Here we have not only a new work by Liberale but also the only cassone by his hand to survive intact: a complete surprise and a real discovery. It goes together beautifully with the entry by Keith Christiansen that shows that the other Liberale in the house, a small scene of young men looking at some unseen event, is also part of a cassone. When the pieces are put together, it emerges that the men are looking at one of their number playing chess with a beautiful blond lady.

The entry on Francesco di Giorgio reunites fragments of a broken-up spalliera of exceptional importance, now split between the Berenson and the Stibbert collections (fig. 4). The Francesco di Giorgio hangs outside the director’s office, and I deeply loved it as the work of an architect/painter. I remember going to the Museo Stibbert with photographs to test the connection but coming away discouraged. The panels did not seem to fit together well, and the figures seemed to be on an entirely different scale. What I did not realize is that the lower part of the Berenson panel had been cut away so that we are really seeing mid- or background figures, necessarily on a smaller scale than the protagonists in the Stibbert panel who occupy the foreground. And in the end the wood grain of the two panels lines up perfectly. A single panel had been sawn in two to increase its market value. But what had it originally shown? Marilena Caciorgna’s fascinating entry shows that the subject had been the Rape of Helen, taken not from Homer but from a trecento epic on the fall of Troy by Domenico da Monticchiello and

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Figure 4. Francesco di Giorgio Martini, The Flight of Helen’s Attendants (spalliera fragment), ca. 1470–75. Egg tempera, silver, and tooled gold on poplar panel; 41.7 × 53.1 cm (cat. pl. 36). After restoration (2016). (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti—the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; photo, Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence.)

Binduccio dello Scelto. She ties the panel to the opposite of a classical rape, a Renaissance wedding, specifically the Ugurgieri-Ugolini wedding in 1491, a date concordant with Francesco di Giorgio’s stylistic evolution. Humanistic culture, including knowledge of the medieval transmission of Homer and Homeric tales, and expert sleuthing come together in this fascinating piece.

CONNOISSEURSHIP

The catalog does not set out to prove that Berenson was always or even often right.3 Indeed, to read the entries is to learn that attribution is seldom a one-time lampo di genio by an all-knowing hierophant but rather a multigenerational affair, imprecise at first but gaining exactitude as the artistic personalities assume clear contours. Of course, the Berensons were both good at it from the start, and even3. In an interesting review, Gary Schwartz gives Berenson a decidedly low score, although on the premise that a connoisseur should be right on the first try: “The Transparent Connoisseur 4: A Berenson Scorecard,” the Schwartzlist 345, https://garyschwartzarthistorian.com/2016/03/28/345-the -transparent-connoisseur-4-a-berenson-scorecard.

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tually Bernard’s name became obligatory on authentication certificates in the international art market. But for his own paintings he allowed himself many changes of mind. In the case of a Virgin of the Pomegranate with Four Angels, for example, Berenson started out with Sassetta and then moved down on the prestige charts to Pietro di Giovanni d’Ambrogio. Of another work by this artist, Berenson claimed that it had taken him fifteen years to arrive at the final attribution. (Scholarship took many more to arrive at the current attribution to the next-to-unknown Jacopo Zabolino.) A Face of Christ that everyone agrees derives from Fra Angelico’s Man of Sorrows has an interesting attributional journey from Andrea del Castagno to the obscure Biagio d’Antonio. The painting on the dust jacket of the catalog, the St. Michael the Archangel Enthroned, made its way from the Dondi dell’Orologio collection in Padua through Jean Paul Richter in London to I Tatti, where it was the Berensons’ first purchase for their new home. On the way it changed from a Crivelli to a Giambono.

Attribution is often an agonistic pursuit. Berenson’s worthiest rival in the field was Roberto Longhi, who appears often in the catalog. He mapped out the still uncharted field of the Renaissance in Ferrara, and the catalog offers a vivid account of the splash his Officina ferrarese made when it appeared in 1934 (212).

The entries on a pair of small panels now flanking the Cima da Conegliano St. Sebastian let us see how Longhi went about fashioning a new personality in the 1930s, Vicino (i.e., close to Ercole De Roberti) da Ferrara. Thrusts and parries between rivals pepper many entries, and Longhi never seems so happy as when he can subvert Berenson’s attribution of an I Tatti painting. Berenson’s treasured Ercole De Roberti Crucifixion was assigned to the lesser Lorenzo Costa by Longhi, and the attribution has stuck (fig. 5). No wonder that Longhi and Berenson stopped writing to each other after 1917. Still, it is touching to read the dedication Longhi wrote in the relevant volume of his complete works that he offered to Berenson in 1956: “A Bernardo Berenson—‘tanto nomini’—in segno di antica riconoscenza e di irrequieta ma continua fedeltà, Roberto Longhi.”4 The dark doppelgänger of connoisseurship is forgery. There is an illuminating section on counterfeits and catalog entries for all that passed through Berenson’s hands. It is interesting to read that the best of the fakes in the villa, the Madonna with Holy Innocents, was done by the subtle Giuseppe Catani Chiti. Berenson admitted than he had been fooled, saying that “in his youth the phantasm of a 4. “To Bernard Berenson—‘the much celebrated’—in commemoration of long-held gratitude and of restless but continual faithfulness. Roberto Longhi.” Roberto Longhi, Edizione delle opere complete, 14 vols. (Florence, 1956–2000), 5:212. Wikipedia reminds us that “Tanto nomini nullum par elogium” is the epitaph on the monument erected to Niccolò Machiavelli in Santa Croce in 1787.

Figure 5. Lorenzo Costa, Crucifixion, ca. 1490. Egg tempera and oil on poplar panel; 32.9 × 20.6 cm.

Formerly attributed to Ercole De Roberti (cat. pl. 25). (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti—the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; photo, Paolo De Rocco, Centrica, Florence.)

Color version available as an online enhancement.

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Botticelli entrapped him” (652). Now it is seen by few since it hangs in the private suite that used to be Nicky Mariano’s room. In a more public place it would easily deceive the unwary.

A notorious forger tested the Berensons’ mettle for years and often found it wanting. Icilio Federico Joni, the Spider of Siena, set up an operation that was organized like a Renaissance family shop. Early in their careers as connoisseurs, the Berensons were tricked by dealers offering these specious paintings. Mary put their suspicions in a nutshell: “As to beauty—they are lovely! But there are too many of them” (25). They finally confronted the forger-dealer-restorer in person.

Distasteful as it was to be duped, their connoisseurship emerged stronger from the experience. Berenson considered such people “gifted antisocial offenders” (639) but kept a Joni Madonna in his study to remind him of how fallible he had been.

His association with Joni lasted a surprisingly long time. In 1909, to clear the air, seemingly at Berenson’s urging, Joni put on a one-man exhibition with fakes and genuine primitives in his collection side by side. It did not reform Joni, who went on forging. Berenson remained in contact with this “restorer” up to 1932, when Joni accused him in his autobiography of unsavory dealings. At least thirteen Joni’s passed through Berenson’s hands, and two are still in the house.

In 2004 there was a grand Joni exhibition in Siena, curated by Gianni Mazzoni, the author of the section on Joni in the catalog.5 Those of us who visited it were tempted to congratulate ourselves by denying, thanks to hindsight, that the forgeries of the great masters would have taken us in. But when it came to the primitives, like a Margaritone d’Arezzo, I had to admit that I would have fallen into the trap. The show was popular on the principle that everyone loves a forger except for his customers, and Joni’s stock has accordingly risen. Shortly after the exhibition, on visiting a patrician villa in the Senese, I glimpsed what seemed like a grand Renaissance painting on a distant wall. I asked my hostess what it was.

She replied, “Grandfather thought it was Botticelli. Father suspected it was a fake.

Now we’re hoping it’s Joni.” In case readers of this piece want to test their acumen, they might pay special attention to the Madonna and Child that hangs on the landing of the staircase. It is a very pretty thing, but it must have been a sad fragment until it came out of Joni’s shop with sparkling new clothes, a halo and a headpiece in a pharaonic style.

The first catalog of the collection, commissioned by Berenson himself from Franco Russoli and published in 1962, three years after his death, was overliberal with Berenson quotations. Sprinkled throughout the text, they were meant as 5. Gianni Mazzoni, Falsi d’autore: Icilio Federico Joni e la cultura del falso tra Otto e Novecento, exhib. cat., Santa Maria della Scala, Siena (Siena, 2004).

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homage to the master, but at times it was difficult to understand the relevance to the painting at hand. For example, in the entry on the Cima St. Sebastian, which is of course a male nude, this is the quotation from Berenson: “His [Cima’s] figures are severe and chaste but seldom morose, and occasionally they have quivering nostrils and mouths of surprising sensitiveness. I seem to recognize in his women a kinship to certain of ours, produced by generations of puritanic repression and selection and rebellion.”6 The current work, scientific in tone, has fewer quotations but chooses them well. Of Bacchiacca we read, unforgettably, that he “never knows how to assimilate his thefts, but makes a parade of his thefts, like a Fiji islander” (112). Boccati’s angels “will never grow up—they remain children” (152). In the Lorenzo Monaco Virgin of Humility “the ecstasy of the Orcagnas had flowered from half-hidden shoots into a rapture that surpassed theirs” (384). Signorelli’s late style shows “masses in movement, conjoined, and rippling like chain mail” (572). Neroccio di Bartolomeo de’ Landi was a painter of “subtle linearity and dream-like aestheticism . . . a Simone come to life again . . . with a quicker suggestion of freshness and joy” (496).

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ARTISTS

Particularly in the first decade of the twentieth century Berenson felt the need to engage with the art of his own time. He bought a painting from Matisse but later gave it as a gift to Paul Karađorđević when the prince was forming a national museum in Belgrade; later he bought a Picasso ceramic plate. Although he mentioned Cézanne in one of his early books, he missed the chance to collect him and so cannot compare with two other American expatriates living in Florence, Charles Loeser and Egisto Fabbri, who built up significant collections of the postimpressionist master in the first decade of the twentieth century.7 Caroline Elam’s essay on Roger Fry, complemented by her entry on the desco da sposalizio painted by Fry as a belated wedding present for the Berensons in 1901, provides the opportunity for a sensitive reevaluation of the major British critic of the early twentieth century (fig. 6). Fry is essential to understanding the modern reception of post-Impressionism in general and Cézanne in particular.

He began as a welcome guest of the Berensons, especially Mary. We learn much 6. Franco Russoli, La raccolta Berenson, with a preface by Nicky Mariano (Milan, 1962), and The Berenson Collection, trans. Frances Alexander and Sidney Alexander (Milan, 1964), 76. This too is a weighty book. In fact, the combined weight of the Russoli catalog, the current catalog, and the Sassetta volumes is thirty-five pounds.

7. Francesca Bardazzi, ed., Cézanne a Firenze: Due collezionisti e la mostra dell’Impressionismo del 1910, exhib. cat., Palazzo Strozzi, Florence (Milan, 2007).

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Figure 6. Roger Eliot Fry, Boccaccio’s Garden of Love (desco da sposalizio [marriage tray]), 1901.

Oil and tempera(?) on pine panel; diameter 45.0 cm (cat. pl. 122). (Berenson Collection, Villa I Tatti— the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence; photo, Paolo De Rocco, Centrica, Florence.) Color version available as an online enhancement.

about a friendship turned to rivalry and soured by Bernard Berenson’s irrational sense of ongoing grievance. The key to the development of Fry’s thought, we discover, lies in his reviews of Berenson’s books, which are explored here in detail.

They let us see Fry’s growing reluctance to exclude emotional impact and “intensified sensation” in the exercise of connoisseurship. At the end, Fry turns away from his youthful conviction about the interweaving of dramatic subject and form to embrace a purer strain of formalism. Earlier he had taken his distance from Berenson, while later he sought “to disentangle our reaction to pure form from our reaction to its implied associated ideas” (674). I cannot think of any catalog that has such a penetrating essay on the historiography of twentieth-century criticism.

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The essay by Claudio Pizzorusso on the frescoes of René Piot in the library explores the special moment of 1909–11 when Berenson began to turn eastward, acquiring the Javanese Buddha head and visiting the great exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910. “The tide of my interests is flowing fast and strong eastward. . . . The Renaissance is no longer my north star” (687). At the same time he was exploring the Parisian art scene, particularly the work of Matisse and the decorations in Gide’s house at Auteuil. Piot seemed to Berenson to be the rejuvenator of Florentine fresco technique, the modern painter who could rival Baldovinetti and capture the Virgilian rhythms of the farms and vineyards around I Tatti. The essay offers a fascinating new key to Berenson’s turn to the exotic at just this time: the passionate affair with “Malayan” Belle da Costa Greene. When Berenson was with her at I Tatti he approved of Piot’s frescoes even though Mary hated them (“awful,” “revolting,” “ghastly”); after the break with Belle he came back to Mary in heart and taste. The essay is a subtle analysis of the complex strands interweaving in French modernism around 1910 and its reception, then rejection, by a great critic.

GENERAL ESSAYS ON THE BERENSONS AND THE COLLECTION

I have saved the best for the end, namely, the essays by the two author-editors on the Berensons themselves and the formation of the collection. Anyone who wants to know I Tatti in depth should read them. Carl Strehlke brings up many unknown details from the couple’s first decade of companionship in the 1890s: the importance of Milan as the center of Italian connoisseurship, the hunt for Lotto in the Lombard valleys and the Marches, even the role of Venice in a brief period of infatuation with the eighteenth century, which left its mark on two pockets of rococo taste in the house, the Ritz and the small dining room. The signature hang of the I Tatti pictures against backdrops of precious fabrics is traced to this early period in an informative section on fabric collecting in modern Italy. It is quite amazing to watch Strehlke tease the names and styles of the brocades out of an 1898 photo of Berenson seated on an old armchair.

When the couple first met and fell in love, neither was a collector. A few small finds in the 1890s and Berenson’s role as intermediary in purchases for Isabella Stewart Gardner helped lay the groundwork. But it was the move into I Tatti at the time of their marriage in 1900 that turned the Berensons into a collecting couple. The passion for ownership lasted over two decades. It got off to a resounding start when the Domenico Veneziano Virgin (as Baldovinetti), the Giambono St. Michael, and the Sassettas entered their new home at almost the same time. The sums spent on art in the early 1900s are astounding, often amounting to many

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times the rent of I Tatti (2,000 lire a year between 1901 and 1907) on a single purchase. For example, the marble Bindo Altoviti now hidden in the ivy over a fountain on the azalea terrace, which is somehow a version of the famous bronze bust in the Gardner Museum, cost over fifteen times the annual rent. An arrangement with the dealer Duveen (a 10 percent commission in 1908, raised to 25 percent in 1912) allowed an expansion and redecoration of the house and layout of the formal garden. This is also the period of Berenson’s purchase of Chinese and southeast Asian art, usually from Paris dealers. For Bernard, the link between Buddhist and Franciscan spirituality seen especially in Sassetta and the Sienese school was deeply meaningful.8 The First World War brought collecting on a grand scale to a halt. The last purchase was the Ercole De Roberti (now Costa) Crucifixion in 1922.

Strehlke follows the fortunes of the house through the Fascist period and the Second World War when it was expropriated but the collection not removed, the Nazi period in 1943–44 when Berenson was in hiding, and the postwar boom when Berenson became an international celebrity. It is fascinating to see Berenson envying revival styles of interior decoration but then resisting them. I Tatti was, on the contrary, the essence of the unfashionable. But it expressed the sense of adventure of an aesthetically minded couple in the springtime of connoisseurship when giving names to masters gave them as much pleasure as Adam and Eve had naming the animals in Paradise.

Machtelt Brüggen Israëls’s essay explores the role of Siena in the connoisseurship and collecting of the couple. In the 1890s Siena and the Senese were essential to their worldview, although it was Bernard at first who moved about the rural countryside on donkeys and in horse-drawn carts and later by slow train. Siena when he first saw it was a town that closed its gates at night. He saw landscape through the eyes of the Sienese painters (to which Mary would add Monet). A visit to the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore in 1891 led to a conversion to Catholicism—temporary, of course. The Sienese school would become the largest of the Italian schools in the house, furnishing a third of the pictures.

The essay explores the bumpy, rivalry-ridden rediscovery of an art as unknown, they felt, as the cave paintings of Altamira. In the couple’s endless “connoshing” in the towns and countryside of the Senese, there were friends who opened doors and 8. Carl Brandon Strehlke pursues the role of Asian art at I Tatti further in a pair of key articles: “Berenson, Sassetta, and Asian Art,” in Israëls, Sassetta, 37–49, and “Bernard Berenson and Asian Art,” in Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, ed. Joseph Connors and Louis Waldman (Florence, 2014), 207–29. An overview of Berenson scholarship since his death in 1959 can be found in this volume.

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shared documents, like Frederick Mason Perkins; enemies, like Robert Langton Douglas, who tried to claim priority in the rediscovery of Sassetta; and forgers like Joni. Berenson was worried about the fate of Siena during World War II, although it was in fact Florence that suffered more. Berenson disapproved of what we now think of as forward-looking art history, especially Millard Meiss’s book on painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. Instead it was “then as always, ‘soft Siena,’ . . . sorceress and queen among Italian cities” (49) that created the life-enhancing art for which I Tatti was meant to be the ideal home.

Both these essays and many of the entries restore the role that Mary Berenson had in the formation of the collection. She is justly remembered in the title. In their last decades, the couple had drifted apart. Nicky Mariano made a more congenial companion and eventually a sympathetic biographer. She and Mary would team up when a more dangerous rival appeared on the scene, like the exotic Belle da Costa Greene, but Mary was left in the villa as an invalid when Nicky and Bernard went into hiding in 1943. When Mary died in March 1945, after the liberation of Florence and the return of many of the hidden paintings to I Tatti, Bernard could not bring himself to mourn her deeply. In his opinion she cared overmuch for her family and resisted his plans to make I Tatti into an institute under the aegis of Harvard. Yet, in moments of reflection in old age, he admitted that whatever they had accomplished it had been as a couple: “She and I were pioneers, and our attributions have become part of art-historical pooled capital. Our followers can only glean after us, or borrow under, metaphycize, iconograflate, rhetoricize the material, but we were among the very few who fished the murex up” (35). The catalog is a mare magnum, but it is my hope that with a portolan in hand readers who have been moved by I Tatti or are interested in early Renaissance art or the history of art history might be tempted into navigating it.

«The Burlington Magazine» • 1 maggio 2017

BOOKS

The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti. Edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls. 824 pp. incl.

180 col. and 40 b. & w. ills. (Officina Libraria, Milan, for the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2015), €100. ISBN 978–88–97737–63–6.

Reviewed by FRANK DABELL

1913, DISCUSSING a secondary quattrocento painting in the Johnson Collection, Philadelphia, Bernard Berenson wrote that ‘few pictures have resisted satisfactory attribution more bravely than this Madonna’, sounding like a naturalist naming (or indeed taming) a living species. In his 1901 preface to The Study and Criticism of Italian Art he had cherished the ‘conviction that the world’s art can be, nay, should be, studied as independently of all documents as is the world’s fauna or the world’s flora’; and Mary Berenson later remembered that they ‘used to wonder if Adam had half as much fun naming the animals, as we were having renaming those ancient paintings!’. The first and third of these passages are cited by Carl Strehlke (p.619, in one of the 111 multiauthored entries, covering 149 works) and his co-editor, Machtelt Israëls (p.47, in one of the illuminating essays accompanying the catalogue). Clearly, today’s approach is less intuitive, but it is to the credit of the editors that the book under review upholds the validity of the trained eye alongside what can be discovered through archives and technology. Connoisseurship lies at its heart, and connoisseurship was of course one of the guiding principles of this Magazine on its foundation in 1903, in which Berenson played a propulsive though short-lived role.

IN

46. Lumière Auto-chrome of St Sebastian, by Cima de Conegliano. c.1911. Glass plate, 12 by 8.9 cm.

(Bernard and Mary Berenson Papers, Villa I Tatti, Harvard Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies).

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He would have given an approving (and no doubt carefully crafted) smile at the conquests in taxonomy and authorship achieved here by the editors and their thirty-seven international colleagues, but he might also have been startled to learn that authorship itself has become a more fluid term, given our expanded knowledge of collaborative work in Early Renaissance studios.

The reader is provided with all that current knowledge can tell us about an extraordinary collection of Italian Gothic and Renaissance paintings, mostly religious in subject and wide-ranging in authorship, quality and condition; were they in a public collection today, many might be relegated to a storage room, some categorised under the ominous ‘three Rs’, to use Berenson’s terminology – ruined, repainted or restored – to which we may now add ‘reassessed’, with some remaining prudently anonymous. The fresh examination of every item, with some new attributions, is exemplary, leading as much beyond a painting as into it, with the right amount of conjecture (so natural to our discipline, yet seldom used plausibly), and with some of the biographies preceding each technical and historical analysis amounting to stand-alone miniature monographs.

A valuable status quæstionis is thus provided for a number of artists: Bergognone (his œuvre reshaped by Agosti and Stoppa); Botticini (Kanter’s convincing new assemblage of a Neri di Bicci altarpiece); Domenico Veneziano (putatively painted for the Peruzzi family; authorship initially misidentified

by Berenson, though already recognised by Cavalcaselle, a crucial early acquaintance of his); Lorenzo Costa (Strehlke on attributional oscillation with Ercole de’ Roberti, and on the Berenson–Longhi and AngloItalian divides); Fei (Fattorini’s re-evaluation of a painter not loved by Berenson); the Master of the Spinola Annunciation (the late Luciano Bellosi and Strehlke with a new assemblage of the folding triptych); Girolamo di Benvenuto (Israëls’s reconstruction of the Sozzini altarpiece from S. Domenico, Siena); Granacci (reconstruction of the St Apollonia altarpiece); Antonio da Crevalcore (Tanzi on the stunning Severed head of St Catherine, building on Zeri’s attribution); Niccolò di Segna (Israëls on the altarpiece from S. Maurizio, Siena); Sano di Pietro (now recognised as the Osservanza Master); Vecchietta (Fattorini’s publication of a new work in the Museo Stibbert); ‘Vicino da Ferrara’ (Benati, authoritative but open-minded); Ugolino (Israëls, scrupulous and cautious); and the last entry of all, two intriguing Venetian domestic panels of the early 1500s, their subjects and authorship unknown.

What is so engaging is that we learn a good deal on the way, sometimes anecdotal but never distracting, about the Berensons’ friends and colleagues (the Perkinses, Carlo Placci, Don Guido Cagnola), friends who became enemies (Roger Fry – a complex story brilliantly explored by Caroline Elam in a separate essay and pl.122), those from whom they bought

(the forger Icilio Joni, the music critic Aldo Noseda) or received gifts (Alessandro Contini Bonacossi), restorers (Luigi Cavenaghi), and acidic scholarly rivals (Roberto Longhi). This is good not only for knowing how the collection grew, but as context for understanding the most peculiar and formidable artefact of the lot – Berenson himself.

The achievement of Bernard and Mary Berenson was striking for a world in which systematic methods had only recently been launched, and the emphasis on them as a couple in the volume’s title is laudable, as it is time we learned more of the extent of Mary’s expertise, insights and ideas, beyond the ties she had with Bloomsbury, interesting as they may be (her sister Alys was married to Bertrand Russell and her daughter Karin to Adrian Stephen, brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell). As Mary Logan, she was the author of an 1894 guide to Italian pictures at Hampton Court Palace, and was just as active as Berenson in reconnoitring for potential purchases. Essays

by Strehlke and Israëls, ‘Bernard and Mary Collect: Pictures Come to I Tatti’ and ‘The Berensons “Connosh” and Collect Sienese Painting’, are erudite and entertaining, evoking the couple’s pioneering trail, year by year. 1900, for example, was an annus mirabilis: Mary was now free to marry again, the Villa I Tatti came up for rent, and she and her new husband acquired the radiant Domenico Veneziano (pl.31), the great Sassetta Saints (pl.94) and Giambono’s St Michael (pl.41), an ideal emblem of that world of faith and certainty and technical brilliance they so coveted. There follows Giovanni Pagliarulo’s ‘Passions Intertwined: Art and Photography at I Tatti’, which includes some remarkable early colour photographs of both individuals and paintings made with the Lumière Auto-chrome process (Fig.46). The volume contains further essays, including Gianni Mazzoni on counterfeits, each instructively catalogued (among them Joni’s Virgin and Child forgery, c.1897, pl.113, perhaps the first picture Berenson bought, which was never removed from display so as to remind him of his youthful error); and Claudio Pizzorusso on the René Piot saga (a hiatus in the interior decoration of the villa). Finally, a catalogue of Berensoniana, with pictures and objects relating to the couple’s circle, and an appendix with a succinct listing of the 101 pictures formerly owned by them and now in museums, privately owned or untraced. The full index is only available online. Throughout the volume the authors benefited from unpublished archives and personal correspondence, and from material recollected by the late William Mostyn-Owen, one of the last links with Berenson and his stellar, cross-culturally curious universe.

This reviewer has very few criticisms of substance: p.15 (glossary of people in the Berenson circle): Luisa Vertova’s husband was Benedict Nicolson, a former editor of this Magazine, not Nicholson (a perennial error).

the burlington magazine

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BOOKS

The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism 1850–1939.

By Matthew C. Potter. 336 pp. incl. 50 b. & w. ills. (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2016), £21.99 (PB). ISBN 978–1–7849–9375–7.

Reviewed by CHRISTIAN WEIKOP

47. Albrecht Dürer on the balcony of his house, by William Bell Scott. 1854. Canvas, 60 by 73 cm. (Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh). p.24 (fig.I.9): the ‘29’ in Jean-Paul Richter’s notebook is an item number, not a quantity, referring to Volumnia (as in the putative ancient subject of pl.110), not volumina. pl.15, Bonfigli: The correct arrangement of the frame’s four inscribed sections indicates it once contained a picture of St Thomas Aquinas: ‘El Angelico D[octor] Santo Toma[so] de Aquino’. pl.43, Giotto: Height–width dimensions are reversed. pl.64, Master of the Spinola Annunciation, biography: Giotto’s contemporary was Puccio Capanna, not Campana. pl.69, Memmi: Further context is provided by E. Capron in the January 2017 issue of this Magazine, p.9. pl.76, Neri di Bicci: The two companions of this Adoration were auctioned in Paris by Ader, Picard & Tajan on 14th December 1979, lot 19, and measure 25.4 by 132.08 cm. Could these three panels not have formed the predella of Neri’s Crucifixion and saints altarpiece of 1464, painted for the Squarcialupi in S. Salvatore in Monte and now in S. Francesco, Fiesole? pl.87, Perugino: The panel in Rome (fig.87.1) represents St Filippo Benizzi, not Nicholas of Tolentino, and the figure in Altenburg is the Blessed Francesco of Siena.

The online index raises the question of swiftly changing modes of scholarship. While basic indices of provenance and names are provided (pp.810–24), the reader must go to www.itatti.harvard.edu or www.officinalibraria.com for the full 74-page index.

One wishes this could have been printed, though its presence online should allow for corrections, as it is riddled with errors: a frescoed St Lawrence by Fra Angelico is not in the Sistine Chapel but in that of Nicholas V (elsewhere ‘Cappella Nicolina’ misspelt with only one C), and his predella panels from Perugia are listed twice as if the S. Domenico and Guidalotti altarpieces were different; Carpaccio’s altarpiece is of the Martyrs of Mount Ararat, not Arafat; Cossa’s St Peter is in the Brera Gallery, Milan, and not in London, where the companion panel is

of St Vincent Ferrer, not Ferrara. Under Barcelona, five of the six items listed as in the Museu Frederic Marès are actually in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya, mostly from the collection of Francesc Cambó (who was the owner, not painter, of a Ferrarese Madonna); under Washington, the indexing of Desiderio and Domenico is sorely confused.

We find Castelnuovo Verardenga for Berardenga, Conigliano for Conegliano, Giole for Gaiole, Kreuzlinger for Kreuzlingen, ‘Mdimna (Valletta)’ for Mdina (distinct from Valletta), Miglionco for Miglionico; Siena’s landmarks are the Cappella di Piazza, not Piazzo, and Torre del Mangia, not Manga, Spartanburg should be Greenville, and Ucclé Uccle.

Elizabeth II is reduced to ‘Queen of England’, we read of ‘Craigh’ Hugh Smyth (late Director of I Tatti; thus too in the printed index), the ‘Palla di Nofri family’ as opposed to Strozzi, ‘Tauzia, Both de’ for ‘Both de Tauzia’ (as in the printed index), Bruno Toscani for Toscano (also in printed text, bibliography and index), Angiola for Angiolo Tricca, Civelli instead of Crivelli, ‘Giovani’ Francesco da Rimini, Giovanni Francesco (but elsewhere Giovanfrancesco) da Tomezo for Tolmezzo, Maestro del Cespo di Garafano for Garofano/Garofani, Williard for Willard B. Golovin, Junstgewerbe for Kunstgewerbe, Lardarel for Larderel, Tosi for Tosio Martinengo, and the ‘Camadolese abey’ in Sansepolcro.

On the other hand, we are granted further images (‘one cannot have enough photographs!’, Berenson would have enthused) through Harvard’s Visual Information Access (www.via.lib.harvard.edu), a zoomable resource that takes us to individual photos and annotations in the Fototeca Berenson as well as views of backs of panels. The recent appearance online of Miklós Boskovits’s magisterial Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (catalogue of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2016), anticipated by Laurence Kanter in the Berenson catalogue, will certainly enrich our knowledge of the period, and Kanter’s In Memoriam for the late Hungarian scholar distinguishes current, more evolved methods of art history from Berenson’s often brilliant but selective and instinctive approach.

IN THIS RICH scholarly monograph, Matthew C. Potter does justice to an enterprise first embarked on by his mentor, the distinguished expert on German Romanticism, William Vaughan, in exploring the complex networks of Anglo-German artistic connections in the nineteenth century.1 Potter moves beyond the Romantic period, however, and considers the impact of German art and ideas on key artists and critics whose work both revealed and strengthened AngloGerman associations between the mid-nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Second World War, individuals such as Ford Madox Brown, Francis Hueffer, William Bell Scott, Joseph Beavington Atkinson, Frederic Leighton, Hubert Herkomer, G.F. Watts, Walter Crane, Edward Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis, Herbert Read and others.

In this process, Potter’s work identifies and addresses critical gaps in the existing scholarship on the British reception of German art, in particular with respect to the period 1850 to 1900.2 The earlier chapters on the lesser-known figures Herkomer and Atkinson are especially good, helpfully demonstrating the importance of Atkinson’s attempts to widen British engagement with German art through his many biographical essays on nineteenth-century artists between 1865 and 1885, including several on the Nazarenes, in both the Art Journal and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.

Furthermore, Herkomer, who according to Potter represented the ‘ultimate personification of late nineteenth-century AngloGerman artistic relationships’, raised awareness of artists such as Wilhelm Leibl, Franz von Lenbach, and Adolph Menzel. Herkomer was also instrumental in emphasising the Germanic roots of wood-engraving, helping to foster British enthusiasm for the expressivity of German graphic art in The Graphic and elsewhere. During this period, the British critical recognition of the pre-eminence of German printmaking was in contrast to far more mixed attitudes regarding the worth of German painting. The prevalent belief that the golden age of German art was that of the Northern Renaissance, of Holbein and Dürer, comes through in Potter’s fascinating discussion of Bell Scott’s nostalgic ‘strategies for the visualisation of the past’, particularly with regards to his painterly evocation of Dürer at home in Nuremberg (Fig.47), and provides us with new perspectives on the reception of Dürer during this period. But Bell Scott was also a writer with an appreciation of more contemporary German art, and Potter underscores the significance of his

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Il Sole 24 Ore

DOMENICA - 14 MAGGIO 2017

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Bernard & Kenneth alla lettera

Domenica 6 settembre 2015, Alvar González-Palacios ha recensito l’epistolario da Bernard Berenson e Kenneth Clark. Le missive - scambiate dal 1925 al 1959 documentano un’amicizia intellettuale che trasforma il rapporto tra maestro e allievo in quello tra padre e figlio www.archiviodomenica.ilsole24ore.com

calendart a cura di Marina Mojana

_ Bologna

Fino al 25 giugno a Palazzo Fava (Via Manzoni 2; www.genusbononiae.it) è in corso Costruire il Novecento; in quattro sezioni sono esposti i capolavori della straordinaria collezione Giovanardi con opere di Osvaldo Licini e Giorgio Morandi; di Campigli, Carrà e Sironi; di Tosi, Rosai, Mafai, De Pisis, Pio Semeghini. L’ultima sezione è dedicata alla scultura di Martini, Melotti e Manzù.

_ Londra

Fino al 12 novembre alla Queen’s Gallery (Buckingham Palace; www.royalcollections.org.uk) è in corso Canaletto e l’arte veneziana; esposta al pubblico la grande raccolta di dipinti dei principali vedutisti veneziani di proprietà della corona britannica fin dal 1762.

_ Palermo

In Palazzo Reale o dei Normanni - Sala Duca di Montalto (Piazza Indipendenza 1; www.provincia.palermo.it) fino al 31 agosto Novecento italiano. Una storia; esposte circa 70 opere tra dipinti e sculture di grandi maestri del secolo

scorso, da De Chirico a Boccioni, da Campigli a Boetti, da Schifano e molti altri.

_ Venezia

Fino al 4 giugno in Palazzo Ducale, Appartamento del Doge (Piazza San Marco; www.palazzoducale.visitmuve.it) è in corso Jheronimus Bosch e Venezia; esposto il Trittico di Santa Liberata, il Trittico dei Tre santi eremiti e le quattro tavole delle Visioni dell’Aldilà del grande pittore fiammingo (1450 - 1516), accanto a 50 opere fra dipinti, disegni e manoscritti di autori a lui coevi. © RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA

Arte incanti&gallerie a cura di Marina Mojana

_ Genova

Da Cambi Aste (Mura San Bartolomeo 16; www.cambiaste.com) il 17 maggio alle ore 10 asta di Disegni antichi; circa 200 fogli provenienti da una collezione privata bolognese. Le stime vanno da € 300 a € 6.000 a opera.

Da Wannenes (Piazza Campetto 2; www.wannenesgroup.com) il 15 maggio alle ore 15 e alle ore 21 asta di Argenti, Avori, Icone e Oggetti d’arte russa; tra gli oltre 300 lotti si segnala una caffettiera in argento dorato con punzone G. Bessi

per la famiglia Chigi Zondadari, quotata € 12-16.000.

_ Lisbona

Dal 18 al 21 maggio, nell’ex Cordoaria Nacional (Rua Da Junqueira 342; www.ifema.es), seconda edizione di ARCO - fiera internazionale dell'arte contemporanea con circa 50 gallerie provenienti da una decina di paesi.

_ Londra

Da Sotheby’s (34-35 New Bond St; www.sothebys.com) il 16 maggio asta di Modern and Contemporary African Art, in vendita opere di noti artisti contemporanei

come El Anatsui, Yinka Shonibare, Romuald Hazoumè e dei moderni Uche Okeke, Irma Stern e altri.

_ Milano

Cortesi Gallery inaugura la sede milanese (Corso di Porta Nuova 46/B; www.cortesigallery.com) con Nicola De Maria. From Venice Biennale 1990 in corso fino al 21 luglio.

Galleria Bolzani (via Morone 2, www,galleria bolzani.it) inaugura il 16 maggio la mostra Il mistero degli Ometti di pietra dell’artista Riccardo Noterbartolo di Villarosa, classe 1950. © RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA

personaggi del novecento

la spezia

Tutte le donne di Berenson

Omaggiare Amedeo Lia

bernard & paolina | Il conoscitore Bernard Berenson ammira il gruppo statuario di Antonio Canova «Paolina Borghese come Venere vincitrice» conservato nella Galleria Borghese di Roma

Una nuova biografia dello storico dell’arte affronta la vita e le imprese professionali del conoscitore mettendo in luce anche i suoi rapporti con l’universo femminile di Marco Carminati

R

oberto Longhi (1890- 1970) e Federico Zeri (1921-1998) sono stati due celebri storici dell’arte del Novecento, ma nonostante la loro chiara fama un singolare destino li accumuna: nessun biografo italiano o straniero s’è sentito in obbligo di tratteggiare in un libro a tutto tondo la vita e la professione di questi due rilevanti personaggi. Eppure i tempi “tecnici” ci sarebbero stati: Longhi è passato a miglior vita da quasi cinquant’anni, Zeri da quasi venti.

Un fenomeno diametralmente opposto ha interessato invece il terzo mastodonte della storia dell’arte italiana del Novecento, il lituano-americano Bernard Berenson (1865-1959). Attorno a lui, al contrario, si sono assiepati numerosi biografi, da Sylvia Sprigge (1960) a Nicky Mariano (1966), da Meryle Secrest (1979) a Ernest Samuels (1979 e 1989). Cinque biografie sono davvero un bel traguardo, ma evidentemente non sono bastate. Di recente se n’è aggiunta una sesta, scritta nel 2013 da Rachel Cohen per la Yale University Press e recensita su queste pagine da Alvar González-Palacios.

Dal 18 maggio la biografia della Cohen sarà disponibile anche in italiano, edita da Adelphi nella collana «I Casi» e tradotta di Mariagrazia Cini.

La novità di questo piacevolissimo profilo biografico sta nell’originalità del taglio: la vita di Berenson viene ripercorsa in ogni dettaglio, dall’oscura nascita in Lituania alla formazione americana, dai viaggi di studio alle pubblicazioni, dalle lucrose attività commerciali legate all’attribuzionismo alla fastosa residenza in Italia. Ma vengono messi in luce anche aspetti particolari: a suo tempo, Alvar González-Palacios rilevò il rapporto dello studioso con ebraismo d’origine. Ma è possibile anche osservare un ulteriore filone: ad esempio, il serrato (e spesso complesso) rapporto che lo studioso ebbe con le donne.

L’esistenza di Berenson è stata effettivamente costellata di presenza femminili, dalle sorelle Senda e Bessie alla mecenate Isabella Stewart Gardner, dalla compagna

e moglie Mary Smith Costelloe all’amante Belle de Costa Greene (la bibliotecaria di J. P. Morgan), dall’amica scrittrice Edith Wharton alla collaboratrice e ultima compagna Nicky Mariano (bibliotecaria e angelo custode negli ultimi anni di vita). Le donne di Berenson hanno lasciato molte testimonianze sulla vita quotidiana dello studioso in grado di comporre un ritratto forse più completo e certamente più sincero del grande e complicato personaggio.

Sappiamo che Berenson fece di tutto per nascondere le sue umili origini. Il suo vero nome era Bernhard Valvrojenski ed era nato in Lituania nel 1865 da una famiglia ebrea gremita di donne: oltre alla madre Judith, c’erano le sorelle Senda, Bessie e

Un’esistenza segnata dalla sorella Senda e dalla moglie Mary, dalla mecenate Isabella e dalle amanti. Fino a Nicky Mariano, ultimo angelo custode Rachel. Il fratello Abie, e soprattutto il padre Albert, giocarono ruoli meno determinanti. Anzi, il giovane Berenson fece subito intendere di non volere diventare come il padre, un intellettuale frustrato che – una volta trasferitosi a Boston con tutta la famiglia e mutato il cognome in Berenson - per campare s’era messo a vendere pentole a domicilio. Bernard adorava in particolare la sorella Senda perché si dimostrò capace di raggiungere il successo: fu la prima donna a organizzare partite di pallacanestro femminili negli Stati Uniti e fu paladina della diffusione dello sport e dell’attività fisica tra le donne nel suo Paese.

Berenson - spesso fortemente competitivo e diffidente nei confronti degli uomini - si protese con slancio verso l’universo femminile: «Le donne – scrisse –, specialmente certe donne dell’alta società, sono più ricettive, più sensibili e, di conseguenza, più stimolanti». Detto fatto.

Appena iscrittosi all’Università di Har-

vard si accompagnò con una certa Elizabeth dotata «di patrimonio e di cultura» (ebbe a specificare), e con lei visitò romanticamente il Museum of Fine Arts di Boston allora appena aperto.

Anche sul proprio futuro Berenson dimostrò presto di avere le idee chiare. Tre gli obiettivi da perseguire: passare la vita a osservare dipinti, diventare ricco, diventare uno scrittore. Due cose gli riuscirono benissimo: passò l’esistenza a esaminare quadri e, grazie a redditizie consulenze, divenne ricchissimo. Ma non riuscì a diventare un grande e celebrato scrittore(e la cosa gli pesò moltissimo).

Nei primi due campi, tuttavia, ebbe di che consolarsi. Ostacolato all’università dal professore di storia dell’arte Charles Eliot Norton - che tramò perché non gli venisse assegnata una borsa di studio -, il giovane Berenson ebbe la fortuna di incontrare due donne decisive: la collezionista e mecenate Isabella Stewart Gardner e la scrittrice e storica dell’arte Mary Smith Costelloe. Queste due donne giganteggiano nel terzo capitolo del libro di Rachel Cohen.

Isabella Stewart Gardner era ricchissima, curiosa e decisamente fuori dalle righe: indossava abiti spaventosamente costosi e girava con diademi di diamanti in testa a forma d’antenna tendendo cuccioli di leone al guinzaglio. Inoltre, adorava essere circondata da una piccola corte di pupilli, possibilmente giovani e talentuosi. Berenson entrò a far parte del suo salotto esclusivo e ottenne da lei i finanziamenti per un lungo viaggio di studio nei musei d’Europa.

Dopo un’iniziale difficoltà, Berenson si innamorò perdutamente dell’Europa e scrisse lettere e cartoline alla mecenate Isabella e alla sorella Senda (in questa corrispondenze cominciò a siglarsi «BB», iniziali che diventeranno il suo “marchio di fabbrica”.)

Sbarcò in Francia e visitò la Germania, Poi, nel 1888, giunse in Inghilterra. A Oxford avvenne il primo incontro con Mary Smith, allora sposata con Frank Costelloe e madre di due bambine. Dopo questo primo e breve abboccamento, Berenson riprese il viaggio per l’Europa, visitando Bruxelles, Amsterdam e Vienna. Nell’autunno 1888 valicò le Alpi e giunse in ltalia. Dal Bel Paese, il giovane viaggiatore continuò a inviare missive estasiate alla mecenate Isabella e alla sorella Senda. Ma aggiunse una terza destinataria: Mary Costelloe.

In Italia, Berenson incontrò anche Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle e Giovanni Morelli e, seduto in un caffè di Bergamo, enunciò a un amico la sua futura missione: «Non dobbiamo fermarci finché non saremo certi che ogni Lotto è un Lotto, ogni Cariani un Cariani, ogni Santacroce un Santacroce». Un enunciato che lo porterà a diventare non solo il più

grande esperto di old masters del suo tempo ma anche uno dei più remunerati consulenti d’arte attivi sul mercato internazionale.

Mentre il fatidico viaggio europeo continuava, Mary Costelloe cominciò a essere sepolta di lettere di «BB». Nella corrispondenza si fece avanti un tema ai nostri occhi singolare per due persone libere e disinibite come Bernard e Mary: la questione religiosa. Confidandosi con Mary, Berenson decise di farsi prima protestante e poi, nel 1891, cattolico. Lo studioso giustificava la sua conversione con singolari motivazioni “estetiche”: «La mia benedetta Italia adesso è più divina che mai. Non so dirvi quanto l’essere veramente cattolico mi metta en rapport con essa».

La «vaccinazione cattolica», in effetti, non servì ad altro. Berenson tornò in Inghilterra per diventare l’amante ufficiale di Mary e riprendere il Grand tour con lei. Abbandonati marito e figlie, Mary Costelloe andò a vivere con Berenson a Firenze. Furono anni d’amore e di studio, di viaggi e di celebri “liste” d’artisti, compilate praticamente a quattro mani.

Berenson s’avviò a diventare un pilastro del mercato artistico. Nel 1894, dopo sette anni di viaggio, tornò negli Stati Uniti e co-

cataloghi ragionati

Capolavori (e falsi) della Villa I Tatti

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ernard Berenson non è stato solo un importante storico dell’arte e un grandissimo conoscitore ma è stato anche (assieme alla moglie Mary) un notevole collezionista. Il volume a cura di Carl Brandon Strehlke e Machtelt Brüggen Israëls dal titolo «The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti» ( Officina Libraria, Milano, 2015 pagg 824, € 100, testo inglese) contiene il catalogo ragionato delle 149 opere d’arte raccolte dai coniugi Berenson nella loro villa fiorentina nei primi decenni del Novecento. Attraverso gli oggetti che gli appartennero, veniamo ad apprendere gli interessi intellettuali e artistici dei Berenson. Dai grandi capolavori della pittura fiorentina e senese tra Medioevo e Rinascimento agli “incidenti di percorso”, come gli insidiosi falsi di Icilio Federico Joni che anche Berenson prese per buoni. © RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA

minciò a procurare quadri per la sua mecenate Isabella attraverso la ditta Colnaghi (che gli assicurava, di nascosto, una percentuale su ogni quadro venduto alla miliardaria). L’intento nobile era quello di creare una raccolta d’arte degna del censo e del rango della collezionista. Di fatto, il comportamento verso la benefattrice non sarà mai del tutto specchiato, soprattutto in materia di prezzi dei dipinti, che pare venissero ritoccati (e gonfiati) appositamente per lei.

Neppure in amore «BB» si dimostrò un gran seguace della fedeltà. Quando Frank Costelloe morì, Mary fu libera di sposare Berenson. Le nozze vennero celebrate nel dicembre del 1900 nella cappella della Villa I Tatti, che la coppia aveva preso in affitto (e che poi acquisterà) a Settignano, nelle colline attorno a Firenze. Ma assieme al lavoro, i novelli sposi cominciarono fin da subito a condividere le reciproche infedeltà. Mary prese come amante l’elegante Arthur Jephson, mentre Bernard andava a rifugiarsi a St. Moritz con compagnie strettamente femminili.

Bernard e Mary tornarono in America in occasione dell’inagurazione della nuovo museo di Isabella Steward Gardner a Boston. La mecenate però - dopo essere rimasta vedova - aveva deciso di non acquistare più opere d’arte: i Berenson compresero che avrebbero dovuto guardare altrove, alla ricerca di nuove fonti di reddito. Così, nel 1904 tornarono in Europa. Mary andò dritta in Inghilterra dove abitavano le due figlie, mentre Bernard si fermò a Parigi dove allacciò un’infiammata relazione con Lady Aline Sassoon, esponente della famiglia Rothschild. Anche la Sassoon fu un personaggio fondamentale per la vita di Bernard, perché fu lei a fargli incontrare Joseph Duveen, il re degli antiquari.

«BB» iniziò a lavorare per Duveen dal 1907 e il loro sodalizio durerà per oltre vent’anni. Negli accordi (occulti) tra i due era previsto che Berenson segnalasse i quadri a Duveen certificandone la corretta paternità. Duveen li avrebbe venduti corrispondendo il 25 per cento dell’incasso a Berenson. Un fiume di danaro sarebbe progressivamente affluito verso I Tatti, permettendo ai Berenson non solo di acquisire la villa ma di farla sontuosamente ristrutturare. Nel 1908, tuttavia, questa prosperità non era ancora sopraggiunta, e fu necessario un nuovo viaggio negli Stati Uniti per allacciare ulteriori rapporti d’affari (ma anche per stemperare le tensioni che le reciproche infedeltà provocavano alla coppia). Il viaggio, però, ebbe l’effetto contrario. Appena sbarcati a New York, Berenson si innamorò pazzamente di Bella de Costa Greene, la giovane e affascinante bibliotecaria di J.P. Morgan. La relazione durò per qualche anno, e portò Bella a seguire Bernard in Europa. Mary – che era stata messa al corrente della love story direttamente dal marito – diede a Berenson “consigli” non esattamente benevoli: «Stai invecchiando, e probabilmente questa è l’ultima volta.

Traine il massimo, se riesci». Evidentemente ci “riuscì”, perché il sodalizio amoroso si ruppe traumaticamente a causa di una gravidanza indesiderata, risolta con uno scandalo e un aborto.

Giunto alla soglia dei cinquant’anni, Berenson conobbe Edith Wharton e con lei intrecciò un profondo sodalizio, però solo d’amicizia. Un ultimo legame sentimentale fu invece intessuto con Nicky Mariano, assunta a I Tatti come bibliotecaria nel 1919 e divenuta il vero angelo custode di Berenson per gli ultimi quarant’anni di vita. Mary Berenson - che sapeva del legame “particolare” tra il marito e Nicky - chiese a quest’ultima di sposare Bernard quando lei sarebbe venuta a mancare (il che accadde nel 1945).

Ma Nicky rimase devotamente accanto al «Bibi» fino alla fine, senza mai sposarlo.

Berenson spirò il 6 ottobre 1959 a I Tatti. Al momento del trapasso, manco a dirlo, era circondato da donne: c’erano la sorella Bessie, la fedele Nicky Mariano e Alda Anrep, sorella di Nicky. © RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA

Rachel Cohen, Bernard Berenson tra Boston e Firenze, Adelphi, Milano, pagg. 336, € 32

di Anna Orlando

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usto eclettico e ambizioni enciclopediche. Idee chiare come è tipico degli ingegneri. Amedeo Lia, cui è dedicato il museo di La Spezia (la città d’adozione dell’industriale di origini pugliesi che ne conserva la raccolta resa pubblica dal 1996), aveva inseguito qualche pittore per anni, senza riuscire ad aggiudicarsene uno. Dosso Dossi, El Greco, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, il Guercino: nomi nella lunga lista dei desiderata di un collezionista che non poneva limiti cronologici o geografici alle sue scelte, e che in parte sono risarcite dai prestiti temporanei per la bella mostra curata da Andrea Marmori e Francesca Giorgi in corso fino al 25 giugno. All’interno di un ricco calendario di iniziative che il Comune di La Spezia con la direzione di Marzia Ratti per il settore cultura sta conducendo a ritmo ammirevole, L’elogio della bellezza. 20 capolavori, 20 musei, per i 20 anni del Lia è dichiaratamente una mostra omaggio per l’importante compleanno dell’istituzione, voluta e studiata passo passo al momento della sua creazione dallo stesso Amedeo Lia. Un sogno che maturò tardi, non certo quando nell’immediato dopoguerra, non appena lasciata la Marina, iniziò a collezionare opere d’arte senza capirci granché, come ammetterà lui stesso: «Le compravo perché mi piacevano». Soffriva all’idea di dover dividere la sua raccolta tra i suoi tre figli, che gli regalarono la gioia di essere d’accordo con lui quando decise di donare alla città. Da sogno a progetto, nella primavera 1994. Seguirono mesi intensi per l’ingegnere che voleva per sé «un piccolo Louvre». Un viaggio a Parigi aveva preceduto l’inizio dei lavori: quello doveva essere il modello. E se il paragone oggi ci fa sorridere, non va dimenticata la svolta che il suo museo ha determinato per la cultura e l’immagine di una città storicamente ancorata a una vocazione militare e industriale.

Il consenso di venti musei italiani e stranieri a prestiti davvero importanti – il Cristo portacroce dal Thyssen Bornemisza di Madrid, la Natura morta di Chardin dal Jacquemart-André di Parigi, la Crocifissione dalla Gemäldegalerie di Berlino, Venere e Psiche di Dosso Dossi dalla Galleria Berghese - è testimonianza di una credibilità che il Lia ha saputo guadagnarsi negli anni, anche con una capillare schedatura scientifica del suo patrimonio, portata avanti sulla base delle prima imbeccate di Federico Zeri, constante consulente negli acquisti dell’ingegnere.

Il percorso della mostra si snoda all’interno delle sale del museo dove i venti “omaggi” sono evidenziati da pannelli colorati accanto alle opere della collezione permanente. I curatori hanno effettuato scelte molto stimolanti dal punto di vista dei contrappunti figurativi, dei dialoghi per assonanza o per contrasto. Di grande interesse, per esempio, poter vedere l’Autoritratto del Pontormo, uno splendido disegno a matita rossa dalla Fondazione Horne di Firenze, accanto all’Autoritratto dipinto curiosamente su un embrice di terracotta, che è l’immagine forse più celebra legata al museo spezzino. «Era stato il suo ultimo acquisto, a museo praticamente finito», come ricorda Marzia Ratti che ne aveva seguito la preistoria e la genesi.

Un’ultima follia, dopo quella forse più celebre, di quando acquistò una tavola di Pietro Lorenzetti su segnalazione di Zeri che, confessò più tardi, gli era costata più della sua stessa casa. Nella sala dei fondi oro al primo piano, da dove prende avvio la mostra, è ospitato lo scomparto laterale di un trittico di Neri di Bicci già nella Santissima Annunziata a Firenze, in prestito dalle Gallerie dell’Accademia di Firenze.

Seguono un Beato Angelico dal Museo di San Marco, un Bergognone dall’Accademia Carara di Bergamo e così fino al barocco di Giulio Cesare Procaccini, con anche qualche scultura o manufatto d’arte applicata, nel rispetto, anche in merito alla varietà, della rapsodica e spasmodica ricerca di bellezza del collezionista. © RIPRODUZIONE RISERVATA