Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674432499, 9780674432482

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BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

ERNARD

ERENSON

The Jvlaking of a Legend

ERNEST

SAMUELS

with the collaboration of Jayne Newcomer

Samuels

T H E B E L K N A P P R E S S OF H A R V A R D U N I V E R S I T Y C A M B R I D G E , M A S S A C H U S E T T S , AND L O N D O N , 1987

PRESS

ENGLAND

Copyright © 1987 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 10

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1

This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials have been chosen for strength and durability. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Samuels, Ernest, 1903Bernard Berenson, the making of a legend. Bibliography: p. Includes index. I. Berenson, Bernard, 1865-1959. 2. Art critics— United States—Biography. I. Samuels, Jayne. II. Title. N7483.B47S36 1987 709'.2'4 [B] 86-26447 ISBN 0-674-06779-7 (alk. paper)

To Benjamin, Jacob, and Michael

Contents Preface

xiii

Acknowledgments

xvii

Prologue

ι

ι

The Missionaries'

Return

ii

A Man of the World

HI Throes of the North

5 13

Italians

23

iv

Pathway to Duveen

31

ν

The "Fourth

41

vi

A Home in Exile

49

vii

Matisse and the Highroad of Art

59

viii

America the Plutocratic

69

ix

The Pursuit of Life Enhancement

80

χ

The Red Robe

88

xi

The Ixion Wheel of Business

99

xii

Idyll with Belle da Costa Greene

109

XIII

A Marital Truce

119

xiv

"The

127

Gospel"

Flavor of Dust and Ashes" [vii]

CONTENTS

xv

The "Merchants" and the "Expert"

139

xvi

Last Season of the Belle Epoque

152

xvii

America Revisited

167

xvin

The Darkening of Europe

177

xix

A Time for Writing

191

xx

Paris in Wartime

202

xxi

Venetians Restudied and Leonardo Dethroned

212

xxii

From Art Expert to Military Adviser

219

xxiii

Domestic Crisis

229

xxiv

"The Dragon's Eggs"

239

xxv

Spoils of War and Art

249

xxvi

An "American Bacchus"

260

xxvii

An Island of Relative Solitude

268

xxvin

Suspect in the Promised Land

280

Early Art and the Land of the Pharaohs

290

xxx

Germany and the Stelloni d'ltalia

301

xxxi

The Case of La. Belle Ferroniere

311

xxxii

The Archaeology of Art

321

xxxiii

On the Way to Truth

331

xxxiv

The "Two

339

xxxv

The End of Profit Sharing

352

xxxvi

Afloat on a Golden Flood

362

xxxvii

"Prince of Art Critics"

374

xxxviii

A New Disciple

384

The "Book of Revelation"

395

xxix

xxxix

Sposini"

[viii]

CONTENTS

XL The Role of Art History

401

xli

Life in "Mussolinia"

411

xLii

The Allendale Nativity

428

xLiii The Drawings Revisited

440

Toward the Abyss

451

xliv

xlν xlvi

Travels into Self

465

The Peace of Le Fontanelle

478

xLvii Patriarch of Florence xlvm

xnx l

491

At Home in the House of Life

503

Paradoxical Talmudist

516

Master of the Inn

526

Li Garnering the Past

539

Lii "The Last Aesthete"

550

Lin Doctor of Letters and Philosophy

560

liv

Toward a "Humanistic Priesthood"

571

lv

"A Scene fiom Rembrandt"

581

Selected Bibliography

597

Notes

611

Index

661

[ix]

Illustrations Following page 1.

Lady Aline Sassoon, 1903

118

2.

Belle da Costa Greene, about 1909

3.

Berenson, 1909

4.

Henry Adams, crayon sketch by John Briggs Potter, 1914

5.

Geoffrey Scott

6.

Elsie de Wolfe

7.

Nicky and the Anrep family: Alda, Bertie, and Cecil, 1920

8.

Mary Berenson and her great-grandson, Roger, 1935

9.

Elisabetta (Nicky) Mariano, 1918

10.

T w o of the four Rene Piot frescoes at I Tatti

11.

Corner of main library, built 1909

12.

Last addition to library (second-floor stacks), about 1950

13.

Salon with Sassetta panels from St. Francis polytych

14.

Reception salon

15.

Berenson with Barbara and Ursula Strachey, 1919

16.

Nicky on donkey in Greece, 1923

17.

Berenson on donkey in Greece, 1923

18.

Domenico Veneziano, Saint John in the Desert, gift to Carl Hamilton

19.

Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods

20.

Kenneth Clark, 1926 [xi]

238

330

I L L U S T R A T I O N S

21.

Don Guido Cagnola, editor of Rassegna d'Arte

22.

Joseph Duveen, Baron Millbank

23.

Rachel Berenson (Mrs. Ralph Barton Perry)

24.

Abraham Berenson, Bernard's brother

25.

Judith Berenson, Bernard's mother

26.

Elizabeth ("Bessie") Berenson

27.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, portrait by John Singer Sargent, ι922-ι923 Following page

28.

Edith Wharton, 1925

490

29.

Edith Wharton's estate at Hyeres

30.

Clotilde Marghieri

31.

Giorgione, The Adoration of the Shepherds (Allendale Nativity)

32.

Berenson, 1948

33.

Nicky, Berenson, Carlo Placci, and Walter Lippmann

34.

Berenson and John Walker, 1945

35.

Berenson and Katherine Dunham

36.

Berenson and Harry Truman, 1956

37.

Berenson at Venice exhibition, 1953

38.

Ilex w o o d below I Tatti

39.

Faqade of I Tatti today

Credits Special

thanks

are

extended

to

the

following

for

providing

photo-

graphs and for granting permission to reproduce them: Harvard University (for the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 1 1 , 12, 13, 14, 2 1 , 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 27. Beinecke Library, Yale University, 28, 29. Massachusetts Historical Society, 4. National Gallery of Art, 18, 19, 3 1 . Smith papers, 7, 15, 16, 17, 20.

[xii]

Treface

I

T IS N O W more than a quarter century since the death o f Bernard Berenson and one hundred and twenty-one years since his birth in the Pale o f Settlement at Butrimonys in Lithuania, ample time for legend and m y t h to flourish unhampered by sober fact. In his eightythird year Berenson w r o t e that he had become the subject not o f one m y t h but o f t w o , " a kindly flattering o n e " and one that was "hostile" and " d a m a g i n g . " It was the kindly myth w h i c h chiefly colored his late years. T h e w o r l d w i d e adulation that marked his ninetieth birthday in 1955 was indeed astonishing, and, though he tried to enjoy it, it wearied even his resilient nature. T o d a y the reaction o f a more cynical age has brought to the fore iconoclasts w h o have promoted the hostile m y t h amid a cloud o f rumors and conjectures. It is the aim o f this v o l u m e to cut through accumulated myths and legends to reach the truth w h i c h they have obscured. W e have not attempted a systematic refutation o f the accusations that have recently been made against Berenson; their falsity in key episodes is revealed in the documented narrative w e tell. A w o r d , however, is in order about the assertion that Berenson on occasion changed the attributions o f paintings to facilitate their sale. These charges do not stand up under dispassionate scrutiny, for they are made in ignorance o f the nature and history o f connoisseurship or in willful perversion o f the truth. Art-historical k n o w l e d g e about the Italian painters steadily advanced during the years in w h i c h Berenson w o r k e d , in part through his o w n researches. M o r e over, scientific techniques that were developed during and since his lifetime have advanced the degree o f accuracy with which attributions can be made. Berenson himself repeatedly emphasized in his writings the tentative nature o f all attributions. In the preface to the 1932 edition o f Italian Pictures of the Renaissance he wrote: " E v e n unquestioned attribu[xiii]

PREFACE tions are not trademarks, although collectors and dealers would like them to be. They are stepping-stones rather than goals." The truth of that statement is fully exhibited in the growing number of museum catalogues that record the successive changes of attributions of many Old Masters. Although Berenson often overpraised pictures, he steadfastly refused to approve attributions he could not honestly accept. As the art historian David Alan B r o w n wrote in his handbook to the 1979 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Berenson and the Connoisseurship of Italian Painting, "There is no evidence that Berenson ever made an attribution he did not genuinely believe at the time it was made." T o the readers of the first volume of this biography who have patiently awaited this one I owe a word of explanation. The materials at the Villa I Tatti and elsewhere proved so extensive that a substantial volume was clearly needed for the remaining fifty-five years of Berenson's extraordinary career. I immediately began work on it with the collaboration of Jayne Samuels. Because of a long-standing commitment we spent the succeeding summers at the University of Virginia helping prepare a multivolume edition of the letters of Henry Adams and subsequently edited the Library of America collection of the writings of Henry Adams. Jayne Samuels, intrigued by her reading of Mary Berenson's letters, took time out to publish a selection of Mary Berenson's letters and diaries in collaboration with her British colleague Barbara Strachey Halpern, Mary Berenson's granddaughter. M y initial interest in Berenson was inspired by the reading of his correspondence with Henry Adams in connection with the last volume of my life of Adams. Early in 1956 I visited him in Florence at his invitation to talk about Adams. Berenson was then in his ninety-first year. Ten years later I embarked on his biography at the suggestion of his literary executor, Nicky Mariano. Though the documentary materials on Bernard Berenson outran all calculation, they made it possible to write of his life in all its complicated variety. That his way was strewn with many contradictions and inconsistencies, that his ideal of life-enhancing experience was often frustrated, that making a living as an art expert often seemed degrading to him, that his sensual and cerebral natures were often at war with each other, all these challenged objective scrutiny. M y collaborator and I have at best hewn a path, w e hope a meaningful one, through the difficult and wonderful terrain of his life. High-strung and passionate in his likes and dislikes, egocentric and impatient of contradiction yet insatiable for friendship and affection, Berenson thrust his way toward what he called "the humanist ideal of the good life." He wanted, he said, to "get out" of himself "all that goes to [xiv]

PREFACE turn the animal into a human being, a work of art." His overriding passion for books and reading, for building a great library, became a tyrannizing obsession, and almost from the beginning he saw his library as the center of an institute of humanistic study to be presided over by the university to which he was fiercely loyal. At his death his collection would number fifty thousand volumes. Under the aegis of Harvard University that number has more than doubled. From his earliest years Berenson was art-intoxicated, intensely absorbed in the process of empathic seeing, of absorbing into himself not only the manmade art of painters and sculptors but the art of visible nature as well. It was this extraordinary passion for seeing that led to his becoming the world's foremost connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. Italian Renaissance painting early became his special province, and his writing about it gave a permanent impetus to its study and enjoyment in Europe and America. He became its chief proselytizer. In his old age he wrote in his diary, " A s I look on life the only satisfactory part of it is my perfect loyalty to my job. It was to send all the fine pictures that came my way to America, and to see to it that they went there as by the painters who (to the utmost of my ability to find out) had painted them." H o w much more Berenson achieved in the passage of these fifty-five years is a main subject of this volume. Ernest Samuels Northwestern University October 1986

[xv]

Acknowledgments

T

HE chief documentary source for this second volume of the biography of Bernard Berenson has continued to be the voluminous archives of the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at the Villa I Tatti in Florence, Italy, the depository of the Berensons' letters to and from some fourteen hundred correspondents, of some six thousand letters the Berensons wrote to each other, of their diaries and manuscripts, and of their miscellaneous personal and business records. The correspondence includes nearly two thousand letters and telegrams from members of the firm of Duveen Brothers and copies of many of the letters from the Berensons and Nicky Mariano to the firm. I am indebted to Harvard University for permission to quote from this material and to publish photographs from the archives. I am grateful to the I Tatti staff for their unstinted and cordial help. My special thanks go to Neida Ferace, Assistant Director for Administration; to Fiorella Superbi, Curator of Collections and Archives; and to Anna Terni, Librarian. We have appreciated also the interest and hospitality of Professor Craig Smyth, Director at the Center at the Villa I Tatti during the times we were at work there in recent years. Many individuals have aided in this enterprise, sharing their knowledge of the Berensons and making available letters and manuscripts. It is a pleasure to acknowledge their invaluable help. Foremost among these persons was Elisabetta (Nicky) Mariano, Berenson's literary executor, who first opened the I Tatti archives to me in 1965 and gave me every assistance and encouragement up to the time of her death in 1968. Professor Myron Gilmore, while he was the director of the Harvard Center, kindly suggested valuable avenues of research. Lawrence Berenson, Bernard's cousin and American executor, supplied many letters and elucidated them with racy vigor. Richard Berenson, Giles Constable, [xvii]

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

Professor Michael Fixier, Jean Gimpel, Bernard B . Perry, Ralph Barton Perry, Jr., Peter Viereck, and John Walker, former director o f the N a tional Gallery of Art, have generously made letters available. Rollin van N . Hadley, Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, provided microfilms of the Berenson letters to Mrs. Gardner, granted permission to quote from them and from Mrs. Gardner's letters to the Berensons, and helped in our researches. Barbara Strachey Halpern, a granddaughter of Mary Berenson, opened her extensive collection of the Smith family papers for my use. I am grateful for interviews with Harold Acton, Sidney Alexander, Baronessa Alda Anrep, Elisabeth Berenson, Eve Borsook, David Alan Brown of the National Gallery of Art, Henry and Byba Coster, Marchesa Gilberta Serlupi Crescenzi, Mrs. J . Reed Dickerson, Professor Edgar Ewing, Edward and Jean Fowles, Barbara Strachey Halpern, Mason Hammond, Derek Hill, Professor Leon Katz, Hanna Kiel, Rensselaer Lee, Leon Loucks, with whom I talked about the Hahn painting, Agnes Mongan of the Fogg Museum, Count Umberto Morra, Mrs. Kenneth Murdoch, Bernard B. Perry, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, Fern Shapley, Fiorella Superbi and her father, Geremia Geoffredi, and Daniel Wildenstein. I wish to thank especially Luisa Vertova Nicolson, who assisted Berenson in his work in the years following World War II, for her memories of those years and for much valuable documentation. I am indebted to the following for their courteous replies to my inquiries: Dr. Cecil Anrep, Peter Arnold of the Museums and Galleries Commission, E. A. Bayne, Richard Bretell, David Carritt, Professor John Coolidge, Lavinia Davies of F. D. Colnaghi & C o . , Alan Fern, Dr. Louis Freedman, Philip Hofer, Mrs. Leonard Kaplan, Garnett M c C o y , Dr. Gerda Panofsky, Mrs. John S. Panofsky, Professor Terisio Pignatti, Wesley Polling, Richard H. Randall, attorney Don Reuben, John Rewald, Joseph Rishel, Charles H. Ryskamp, Louis U . Rubenstein, Mrs. David O. Sargent, Sarah Sherman, Margaret Smith, Norman Spector, Daniel V. Thompson, William Royall Tyler, Hugo Vickers, Gore Vidal, Durrett Wagner, Janet Watts, Stanley Weintraub, and David W. Wright. For their cooperation and for granting me permission to quote from materials under their care I owe much to the directors, curators, and staffs of the following institutions: The Art Institute of Chicago, The Ashmolean Museum, Fogg Art Museum, Freer Gallery of Art, The Dayton Art Institute, Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University Archives, The Houghton Library of Harvard University, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, John Graver Johnson Collection in Philadelphia, The Library of Congress, Massachusetts Historical Society, The Metropolitan [xviii]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, Montreal Gallery o f Art, The National Archives, The Pierpont Morgan Library, Sterling and Francine Art Institute, University o f Virginia Manuscript Division, Walters Art Gallery, Yale University libraries. I am indebted also to the National Gallery o f Art for permission to use photographs from its collection of Italian paintings. I wish especially to express my appreciation to the many members o f the staff o f the Northwestern University Library who patiently responded to our frequent calls upon them and to the library for making a study available to me before and after my retirement as a professor of English at Northwestern University. For permission to quote from letters in their care or written by them I thank the following: Lennart Ahren, First Marshal o f the Court, Royal Palace, Stockholm; Cecil Anrep; Alan Kenneth Clark; Martha Gellhorn; Mary McCarthy; Luisa Vertova Nicolson; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; Adlai Stevenson; Louis L. Tucker o f the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Estate o f Edith Wharton; and Benedict K. Zobrist of the Harry S. Truman Library. T o the generous and expert research o f Katharine Baetjer, Administrator o f the Department o f European Paintings o f the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we are indebted for confirmation from the Duveen papers deposited at the museum o f crucial episodes in the relations between Berenson and the firm of Duveen Brothers. Professor Sidney Freedberg, Curator at the National Gallery o f Art, provided expert commentary on Berenson's attributions of Italian Renaissance paintings, and his colleague David Alan Brown has kindly reviewed the entire text. Professor R. W. B. Lewis read the volume in manuscript. For his corrections and suggestions I am deeply appreciative. My wife and I are also grateful to Maud Wilcox, editor-in-chief, and her associates of Harvard University Press for their perceptive and sympathetic oversight. E.S.

[xix]

I end as a myth whose saga I can hardly recognize. Bernard Berenson Diary, February 2, 1958

Trologue

S

E V E N T E E N years had run their course since young Bernhard Berenson arrived in Europe fresh from Harvard, avid to immerse himself in its cultural riches as a prelude to the literary career to which he aspired. N o w in the spring of 1904 he was returning to Europe after a triumphal tour of the United States, not as a litterateur but as a world-famous critic and connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. Pacing the deck of the Kaiser Wilhelm, he could lose himself in wonder at the chain of circumstances, of chance and design, that had marked his extraordinary rise in the world. H o w remote had been his humble beginnings in the Lithuanian village of Butrimonys, where as a precocious Jewish boy he had pored over the Hebrew Hexateuch. What an odyssey his life had been. At the age of ten, with his mother and a younger sister and brother, he had left the pious household of his grandfather to follow his free-thinking father to Boston. In Boston he had haunted the public library, been nurtured by the Boston Latin School, and with the help of benevolent Bostonians had moved on from a year at Boston University to Harvard. Recognized at Harvard as a brilliant student, he found an outlet for his literary ambition as a prized contributor to the Harvard Monthly and rose in his senior year to the position of editor-in-chief. A romantic and sensitive aesthete, he sought inspiration in the spiritualized hedonism of Walter Pater's Studies in the History of the Renaissance and resolved to follow his injunction to fill his life with the contemplation of beauty and exquisite sensation. For him as for Pater, success in life would be " t o burn always with the hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy." A fund provided by Isabella Stewart Gardner and other Bostonians sent him on from Harvard to Europe for the traditional Grand Tour. In Paris, London, and Berlin he fell headlong under the spell of the visual

[i]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

arts, and with the help of friends he lingered in Europe far beyond the sponsored year. Inoculated with the virus of art appreciation, he feasted on the treasures of Venice, and, launched on his lifelong role as a "passionate sightseer," went on to hellenize in Greece and Sicily. On his return to Italy he gravitated to Florence and there became a disciple of Giovanni Morelli. In opposition to the German academicians, Morelli aimed to establish the connoisseurship of Italian art as an objective science. Inspired by his method, Berenson roamed the art cities of Italy and formed the resolve to know and identify the work of every Italian master. When his pursuit of Italian paintings led him to England, he met and fell in love with Mary Costelloe, the talented wife of a Catholic barrister and the mother of two young daughters. Her Philadelphia family had followed her to England—her parents, Hannah and Robert Smith, Quakers who had turned evangelists; her sister, Alys, who married Bertrand Russell; and her brother, Logan'Pearsall Smith, whose Trivia and other writings were to make him a figure in the literary world. Mary, romantic, restless, disenchanted with her marriage, and entranced by Berenson's eloquence, followed him to Florence as his pupil and lover. In 1900, a year after the death of her husband, she became his wife. She proved an apt pupil. Berenson's constant companion in the museums and churches of Italy, she became his collaborator and a connoisseur in her own right. Urged on by her, Berenson produced an array of books and articles that set a new fashion in England and America in the appreciation of Italian Renaissance art and that established him as a highly knowledgeable connoisseur whose expertise was sought by collectors of Italian art. The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance of 1894 was followed by the scholarly monograph Lorenzo Lotto in 1895. In 1896 The Florentine Painters introduced art students to "tactile values" and the "lifeenhancing" function of art. The Central Italian Painters followed in the next year. In 1901 and 1902 collections of his articles were issued in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, First and Second Series, and in 1903 he published his monumental work The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, issued in two sumptuous volumes. The London Annual Register called it a "work which surpasses in value for the student and the collector any previous attempt in the same line and in other schools." By happy chance the imperious Isabella Stewart Gardner was beginning to turn her energies from collecting rare books and antiques to collecting Old Masters at the time Berenson's first book appeared. Between 1894 and 1903 he helped her spend more than a million dollars on upwards of forty paintings. The famous Egyptologist Theodore M. Davis, a multimillionaire collector of art, also sought his services, as did

[2]

PROLOGUE

other collectors. By 1899 he could boast to his sister Senda that he had been earning the fabulous sum of at least $15,000 a year in fees and commissions. Berenson's successes were indeed cause for wonder, and the warmth of the reception in the United States had been a dramatic confirmation of them. But his life did not lack dissatisfactions, and these must also have occupied his thoughts as he neared England, his first stop on his way back to Florence. Strong among these dissatisfactions were his relations with his wife. Their passionate liaison had been gradually transformed in the years before their marriage by her several love affairs and her fierce attachment to her children and family, which kept her in England for months of each year. Increasingly independent and self-assertive, she could no longer give him the selfless devotion he demanded. Yet a measure of affection and a common self-interest held the two of them together. They had become an efficient—and sometimes quarrelsome— team of art experts and critics. At the time of their marriage the separate households they had maintained on the slopes of Fiesole, near Florence, had become one at the Villa I Tatti, lower down on a Tuscan hillside close to the tumbling waters of the Mensola and below the village of Settignano. It was a luxurious home that was becoming a cultural crossroads to an international elite. There the scale of living and entertaining they had adopted was proving increasingly expensive. Moreover, the recent visit to America made plain to Berenson that as eldest son he must become the chief support of his family in Boston. In addition Mary's daughters were making a substantial call upon his resources. And his passion to augment his library and to travel about Europe in quest of Italian art must not be denied. The years he had counseled Mrs. Gardner had made him prosperous, and his investments in American securities had grown; but now Mrs. Gardner, her collection largely completed, was becoming increasingly cautious in her buying, and the new clients he had hoped to acquire in the United States were as yet only promising prospects. It was reassuring that he had, while in New York, effected a connection with the prestigious art dealer Eugene Glaenzer, whose firm had an establishment on Fifth Avenue and headquarters on the rue Scribe in Paris. Already there was promise of reward from this quarter. But as much as Berenson sought and welcomed new commissions, he found his involvement in the art trade a source of anguished dissatisfaction. As an idealistic aesthete he had quickly learned that the ethics of the world of art dealing were not those of Epicurus: to buy low and sell high was an imperative that could not be avoided, and conflicts of interest, dissimulation, and lavish puffery were an inevitable accompaniment. [3]

BERNARD

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

Commerce in art was, in the term he and Mary used to describe it, the "pig trade," and he felt himself an unwilling captive and a victim of its devious ways. Though he attracted many warm partisans, his too-ready scorn of dealers and rival connoisseurs earned their dislike. As a result of his recent quarrel with the publishers of the Burlington Magazine, he could not expect in London the warm welcome the United States had extended him. THE ACCOUNT of Berenson's life up through the six months he spent in the United States in 1903-04 is the story told in Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur. Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend resumes the record of his much-accidented life, taking him through the years of his long association with the firm of Duveen Brothers, the leading international art dealers; through his experiences in the First World War, when he changed his name from the Teutonic Bernhard to Bernard; through the turmoil of the Second World War and its aftermath; and into his ninety-fifth and last year, during which, still active, he continued to compose his newspaper column for the Milan Coniere della Sera almost with his last breath. The influence of Walter Pater had stayed with him until the end of his life. T o the very last he strove "to maintain this ecstasy." He was determined to be, as he wrote in his late diaries, a "Goethean gebildeter Mensch [man of culture]" and to get from himself "all that goes to turn an animal into a humanized being." Life, as Emerson taught him, was a process of becoming, and his ambition was " t o become and be . . . a work of art" himself. His Sketch for a Self Portrait and the many entries in the diaries of his last years record his attempt to achieve that ideal. In that long and varied enterprise Berenson found every aspect of his life engrossing. As he grew older, he preserved the record of it with extraordinary care. His countless letters and those from his friends and acquaintances in Europe and America, from scores of scholars, art historians, political and literary figures, art dealers, collectors, lovers, and socialites, were a kind of treasury to be saved for posterity. However self-serving or obscure they may sometimes be, they arrest in their pages the peculiar savor of the passing moment before memory and reminiscence can edit the living experience. Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend attempts to capture these many voices of the past, these selfcommunings, and to exhibit Bernard Berenson the man in the full range of his personality and experience in the hope that a truer estimate of his character and achievement may emerge.

[4]

I

The Missionaries' Return

T

H E tour of the United States in the winter of 1903-04 taught Bernhard Berenson and his wife that their professional ministrations were urgently needed. American collectors had been gulled wholesale by unscrupulous dealers, their tastes in art were generally deplorable, and their conspicuous wealth cried out for more intelligent employment. Englishmen might stubbornly cling to the famous aliases which disguised their family heirlooms, but none would be as graceless as the American senator w h o invited his visitors to "come see my $40,000 Degas." N e w money bereft of taste and discrimination populated American collections with what Mary Berenson regularly dismissed as "horrors." Christian missionaries to darkest Africa bringing the true religion to the benighted heathen could not have found a better field for their services than these two emissaries to the N e w World. The women—and m e n — w h o flocked to Mary's lectures on art or deferentially buttonholed Bernhard for his opinion of their paintings could only have intensified the pair's sense of infallibility and self-importance. Berenson, not yet thirty-nine, had savored to the full the kind of deference that Americans gratefully lavished on visiting nobility. The adulation and glittering entertainment the Berensons had received in America showed that the rich American collectors were more than ready for the services of an adviser whose innovative writings on art had set a new fashion in the appreciation of Italian Renaissance painting. In the world of art collecting a revolution was already under way in which Berenson was a principal actor: the pendulum of taste was beginning to swing away from the long-popular Dutch masters toward the early Italians. In N e w Y o r k the art dealer Eugene Glaenzer, with w h o m Berenson had concluded an alliance, had recently introduced into an exhibition of Old Masters an almost-unknown contemporary of Titian, Jacopo da [5]

BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

Ponte, and b y the time Berenson landed in England the New York Times reported w i t h " s u r p r i s e " that the Ehrich Galleries had opened an exhibition " e x c l u s i v e l y confined to early Italians." T h e writer declared that " a g o o d m a n y A m e r i c a n s besides M r . Bernhard Berenson are studying abroad the primitive art o f painters before R a p h a e l . " S o o n afterward the newspaper said that m a n y fine examples o f O l d Italians had already c o m e into private collections, and it predicted that museums and public galleries w o u l d soon f o l l o w . C o l l e c t o r s w o u l d therefore be w e l l advised to seek the help o f expert connoisseurs, for " y o u r average T u s c a n l o o k s u p o n the forestiere [foreigner] as a b o r n f o o l if he makes any inquiry for antiques for sale." Leading the A m e r i c a n " b o o m " w e r e John Pierpont M o r g a n , Isabella Stewart Gardner, John G r a v e r Johnson, P. A . B . Widener, and H e n r y Walters. T h e y w e r e s o o n to be j o i n e d b y m a n y others. Berenson's preemptive forays o n M r s . Gardner's behalf had already "created a n e w scale o f v a l u e s . " W h e n L o r d Darnley, instructed b y Berenson's sale o f the Titian Europa to M r s . Gardner for $100,000, put his Titian Ariosto (Gentleman in Blue) o n the market, $150,000 w a s raised b y public subscription to save it f r o m A m e r i c a n predators. W i t h Italian art in fashion and prices o n the rise, Bernhard and M a r y could end their U n i t e d States adventure optimistic that their services w o u l d be sought and appropriately rewarded. O n M a r c h 21, 1904, the Berensons disembarked at P l y m o u t h after a six-day passage o n the luxurious Kaiser Wilhelm and w e n t immediately up to L o n d o n for a w e e k ' s stay. It w a s not a w e e k that Berenson could l o o k f o r w a r d to w i t h any pleasure, for his star, w h i c h had risen brightly there a year ago, had almost immediately been eclipsed b y the hostile luminaries o f the reorganized Burlington Magazine. H e had been c r o w d e d out o f a share in the direction o f the magazine and his name had been dropped f r o m the masthead list o f eminent international sponsors as if to mark his expulsion f r o m the British Establishment. H e returned to L o n d o n to find himself "surrounded b y an atmosphere o f s t o r m , " according to C l a u d e Phillips, curator o f the Wallace C o l l e c tion. A r t circles w e r e abuzz w i t h a recently published attack on M a r y Berenson, and u p o n Bernhard as her alter e g o , b y W i l h e l m v o n B o d e , director o f the Kaiser Friedrich M u s e u m . Berenson had incurred B o d e ' s w r a t h nine years earlier b y ridiculing his critical methods and had thereafter c o m p o u n d e d the offense b y outmaneuvering h i m in the acquisition o f paintings. M o r e recently M a r y , under the pen name o f M a r y L o g a n , had disparaged a G e r m a n b i o g r a p h y o f Andrea M a n t e g n a as a w o r k " b e f o g g e d b y that G e r m a n obscurity w h i c h the English language is incapable o f c l a r i f y i n g . " B o d e ' s article in the w i d e l y circulated Kunstchronik [6]

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defended the b o o k , w h i c h had n o w come out in an English translation by Standford Arthur Strong. " O f course," B o d e wrote, "Berenson is fully responsible for what M a r y Logan says." With his o w n brand o f scorn he declared that picture dealing like Berenson's might certainly be useful to the critic, but the manners o f the art trade should not be carried into criticism. A s for Berenson's animus toward German scholarship, it was "probably due to the circumstance that M r . Berenson is o f RussianGerman ancestry and . . . believes he must disown this among his present A n g l o - A m e r i c a n compatriots." D u r i n g his w e e k in London Berenson met with Carl Snyder, an English editor in the employ o f the American publisher August Jaccaci, and once again there was brought h o m e to him the rivalries that plagued the art world. Jaccaci, a venturesome character w h o had become widely k n o w n as the art editor o f Scribner's and McClure's magazines, had conceived a plan for a series o f ultradeluxe volumes to be titled Noteworthy Paintings in American Collections and sold at $1,000 a volume. He proposed to reproduce the paintings and accompany each with a f e w brief essays by leading art critics. While Berenson was in the United States Jaccaci had tried to interest him in becoming a principal contributor: he wined and dined him in N e w Y o r k with influential people w h o might become subscribers, and he gave him letters o f introduction to important collectors in Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington. Berenson saw the project as a source o f unpleasant controversy over attributions and refused to j o i n the enterprise. Controversy o f course was precisely what Jaccaci the journalist desired. " T h e r e is a big thing behind that," he wrote to Snyder o f Mrs. Gardner's Giorgione Head of Christ. " W e want a full discussion o f this picture, the pros and cons as to its being a Bellini or G i o r g i o n e . " Snyder, w h o had been commissioned to solicit essays from art critics in England and on the Continent, soon began to have misgivings about the scheme. " W h a t will Mrs. Gardner s a y , " he protested, " w h e n y o u have four explicit essays detailing w h y a painting cannot possibly be a Tintoretto or a Titian and y o u can only get M r . Berenson to back y o u up?" A s he plunged deeper into the jungle o f the European trade in O l d Masters, Snyder's reports to Jaccaci grew increasingly vivid. M o v i n g f r o m art capital to art capital, he found himself in an unsavory world o f rumor, deception, double-dealing, multiple conspiracies among dealers, and cutthroat rivalries among the critic-experts, many o f w h o m were k n o w n to indulge in occasional dealing themselves. In Berlin he broke out, " H o w absurd it all is to talk o f ' e x p e r t s ' — w h a t one praises to the skies, another sneers at as 'a palpable forgery.' . . . A n d the stories they tell about each other. B o d e on Berenson, D e G r o o t on Fairfax Murray, [7]

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Rjemadyck on DeGroot and so on ad infinitum—if I care to listen—all crooks." He reported that experts like Justi, Hymans, and Frimmel studied documents, whereas Ricci, Frizzoni, and Cavenaghi "study the pictures," and the "contempt of the one type for the other is perfectly equal and very deep." Still all acknowledged Berenson's preeminence in his field. " T o make a book beyond criticism Berenson must be included." His standing among professionals was " o f the very highest." Since the Gardner collection was to be the " k e y " to the first volume, it was important to have Berenson back up his attributions. Snyder's j o b at the London meeting with Berenson was to persuade him to take a leading role in the project. The interview lasted an entire morning. Berenson stuck to his resolve. " H e was most charming," Snyder wrote Jaccaci, "although he was very straightforward and flatfooted about what he had to say. . . . I have not met his like in all my rounds of Europe. . . . The supreme type of the breed. He disliked the scheme of the book and would 'never mix with the mob.' " He detested Jaccaci's "mania for 'provenance,' " and as for attributions, he haughtily announced that other critics stood in the same relation to him "as say the astrologers of the days of Copernicus did to the true system of the heavens." As a result of the multiplying complications of the project and the bankruptcy of the initial publisher, the first volume οΐ Noteworthy Paintings, largely shorn of controversy, did not appear until 1907, the year of the financial panic. N o further volumes were attempted, and the way remained open for an even more comprehensive volume about which Berenson had begun to dream. He had in fact broached the subject in the company ofJohn Graver Johnson when surveying his collection in Philadelphia. " Y o u r collection would form a good part" of it, he said. In it he would treat the Italian paintings in American collections "irrespective of ownership in some historic or artistic order." He begged Johnson for photographs of his collection and promised to keep him informed " o f what is worth buying at a given moment." The project was to hang fire for a dozen years, emerging finally as Venetian Painting in America: The Fifteenth Century. There was little to detain Berenson in London beyond the planned week, and it was undoubtedly with considerable relief that he crossed to Paris, where he was always warmly welcomed. Mary, who had suffered from lingering seasickness during the days in London, hurried on to I Tatti ahead of Bernhard, the villa made more attractive to her by the presence of her two daughters, Ray and Karin, aged seventeen and fifteen. She was disappointed, however, when they showed little enthusiasm for her proffered guidance in Italian Renaissance art. Bored [8]

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with the array of household chores and the temperamental behavior of the Italian servants, she soon felt herself again vaguely ill in "eyes and legs." Fortunately a new project promised diversion. Bernhard, she informed Mrs. Gardner, "talks . . . of leaving his library to Harvard, and I want to get it, little by little, thoroughly well catalogued." In Paris Bernhard was in his element. Thanks to his cultivated friend the art historian Salomon Reinach, he had gained entree to the palatial residence of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, a residence filled with "treasures untold in the way of engravings, drawings and books." He made a stunning impression on his hosts, he reported to Mary, when he was asked to identify the author of a particular head. " I said unhesitatingly David Ghirlandaio. Lo and behold on turning it over they found written in an old hand 'David Ghirlandaio.' Great impression! Pure luck, for I know but one or two drawings on which David's name occurred." On Easter Sunday, again in the company of Salomon Reinach, he visited the equally palatial residence of Baron Gustave de Rothschild, the seventyfive-year-old head of the Paris branch of the great banking family, whose magnificent house at 23, avenue de Marigny was one of the showplaces in the aristocratic locale near the Elysee Palace. Here he admired a "marvellous" Van Eyck and a "sublime" cameo of Theodora. A more important object of admiration, as it subsequently developed, was the baron's daughter Aline, Lady Sassoon, the elegantly beautiful and sophisticated wife of Sir Edward Sassoon, still youthful in her midthirties. Quite possibly he had already encountered her among the St. Moritz society crowd, for on this occasion she asked to be remembered to his acquaintances the Rasponis. This meeting with her initiated another fateful turn in Berenson's life, for Lady Sassoon was not only an artist but also, like her father, a collector, and like him she was acquainted with the extraordinary salesman of art young Joseph Duveen. A popular member of Paris and London high society, Lady Sassoon also had a place in French literary and artistic circles. In England she moved gracefully among the salons of Belgravia and Mayfair and was a member of the choice coterie of " T h e Souls," where wits and statesmen displayed their breeding and "discrimination of mind." Sargent's portrait of her, bejeweled and clasping the fold of an opera cloak to herself momentarily arrested on her way to her carriage, has a hint of sadness about her luminous eyes as though she already sensed that she had few years left before her. Edward, Prince of Wales, had been so charmed by her that after a visit to the avenue Marigny he named his yacht in her honor. Increasingly susceptible to beautiful women as though they were incarnations of a newly discovered Raphael or Titian, Berenson was [9]

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fascinated b y her and she b y him. T h e intimacy that began at that time did not end until her untimely death five years later. B e f o r e leaving Paris Bernhard dined w i t h a friend at the M o u l i n R o u g e , a fleshpot l o n g familiar to A m e r i c a n tourists. T h e dinner w a s p o o r and " m o n s t r o u s l y e x p e n s i v e , " he w r o t e M a r y , the play w a s dull, and the f a m o u s courtesan D i a n e de P o u g y appeared " t o n o a d v a n t a g e , " t h o u g h she w a s evidently popular w i t h m e n " w h o have not been able to possess h e r . " W h e n b e t w e e n the acts the chorus displayed its garters in the cancan, he had been obliged to retire because " s o m a n y elderly females offered their attentions and one gentleman w a n t e d to s h o w m e all that w a s hot and h e a v y g o i n g on about t o w n . " H e found the " w h o l e monstrously dull and . . . sad. Such sights always have made m e sad. I daresay it is because I think o f them placed against the b a c k g r o u n d o f e t e r n i t y . " O n the receipt o f t w o letters f r o m M a r y , his spirits rebounded. " T h e y almost o v e r c a m e m y feelings o f reluctance about Flore n c e , " he w r o t e her. " I doubtless will be as enthusiastic as y o u w h e n I a r r i v e . " W a r m i n g to the t h o u g h t he w e n t on, " Y o u are a great dear and I do most tenderly l o v e y o u . O u r A m e r i c a n trip has had this for its best result that it has made us better friends than e v e r . " For proper emphasis he appended f o u r x's at the b o t t o m . WHEN BERNHARD g o t back to I Tatti o n A p r i l 13, he w a s o v e r c o m e for the m o m e n t " w i t h the luxuriance o f this Tuscan paradise" w h e r e he heard the " c u c k o o call b y day and the nightingale's throb in the d a r k . " B u t s o o n the dealers and picture touts f o u n d him and the chaffering for bargains resumed. " W i t h a perfect dread o f attempting w o r k . . . and yet a bad conscience about d o i n g nothing at a l l , " he restlessly i m m e r s e d himself in the improprieties o f Casanova's Memoirs, w h i c h he and M a r y read aloud, and in the solemnities o f M o r l e y ' s Gladstone. A $3,000 advance p a y m e n t f r o m E u g e n e Glaenzer for his help w i t h the sale o f the D e g a s portrait o f M a d a m e Gaujelin to M r s . Gardner p r o v e d a " l u c k y w i n d f a l l , " for it w o u l d c o v e r their overdrafts o f $2,500. His g o o d friend the irrepressible C a r l o Placci, a favorite o f Florence society, came for talk and music, and the beautiful Countess Serristori shared his meditative w a l k s in the w o o d s . T h e p l a y w r i g h t C l y d e Fitch, even m o r e prosperous f r o m his recent B r o a d w a y successes, came up for lunch like " S o l o m o n in all his g l o r y , " a vision bedecked w i t h " t u r quoises and diamonds and w h i t e kid g l o v e s . " O n another day the n o v e l ist Maurice H e w l e t t and his w i f e b r o u g h t diversion but also the discouraging revelation that their motorcar cost them $2,500 a year to operate. " S o it is w e l l out o f our r e a c h , " M a r y sadly reflected.

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Gladys Deacon, who had infatuated Bernhard at St. Moritz in 1901, arrived, and the tall young enchantress engulfed them in her gamine charm. Bernhard found her "mentally and morally . . . greatly improved." Their friend Don Guido Cagnola came down from Milan expressly to see her and vowed she was "the eighth wonder of the w o r l d . " Gladys' mother, Mrs. Baldwin, talked "appalling gossip" of Italian high society while her second daughter, Audrey, lay fatally ill in a Florence hospital. The girl died late in May, and Bernhard deliberated carefully about his funeral attire. After consultation with Placci he donned gray trousers, a short black coat, a black tie, gloves, and a hat for the Protestant service. One notable encounter that season proved something of a fiasco. The most famous American personality to visit Florence in many years, Samuel Clemens, had come with his beloved wife, " L i v y , " to spend the winter in the hope that she might regain her health. Her condition had worsened during the cold and rainy winter months in the cavernous and oppressive Villa Quarto owned by the Countess Massiglia, whom Clemens, litigious as always, was suing for failure to maintain the premises. There had already been a luncheon for Clemens at their neighbor Janet Ross's Villa Poggio Gherardo on May 13, where he regaled the Englishspeaking company with elaborate and droll stories "and quite lived up to his character" as Mark Twain. The Countess Serristori, wishing to divert him from his anxieties about his desperately ill wife, arranged an afternoon party for May 28. When Bernhard and Mary arrived, Placci was already there, and Bernhard's writer friend Marchesa Laura Gropallo with another marchesa and a contessa were discoursing loudly in Italian to an uncomprehending Clemens. "In despair at getting no one to listen to h i m , " he turned to Mary, pulled out a manuscript, and began to read. It was evidently a portion of his autobiography which he had begun dictating to his secretary. "It was not very funny, and it was blatantly anti-religious," Mary explained to her mother, so that the devout Placci, " w h o was the only Italian who really understood it," was "furious." Whatever discomfiture Clemens experienced was to be completely overshadowed by his grief on June 5 when Livy died. The doldrums of early summer were broken by a visit from Dan Fellows Piatt, a N e w Y o r k stockbroker, who knew Berenson's books well-nigh by heart. Already a considerable collector, he had a talent for connoisseurship and, put to the usual test by his host, "conoshed" most of the Berenson pictures correctly. He had studied art and archaeology at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome and was a man of strong aesthetic convictions: he had personally chopped down an offend-

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ing utility pole in front of his place in Englewood, N e w Jersey. Piatt shared with Berenson a passion for collecting photographs of paintings, and the two men frequently added to each other's collections. In spite of their frequent visitors Berenson chafed against his isolation, against not being part of an intellectual community. Florentine society was curious about the pair at the foot of Settignano, but, according to Placci, hesitated to make advances because of their "bearish reputation." This bearishness had grown out of their fear of being deluged with the local gossip for which Florentines were notorious. They managed to escape from their provincial confinement for ten days when their English Florentine friend Edmund Houghton took them on a motor tour in the vicinity of Siena, during which they unearthed "a few precious works of art," including two fine Sassettas. Bernhard carefully noted them for articles in his friend Don Guido's journal, Rassegna d'Arte. Mary, for her part, studied an extraordinary "pele-mele" of good and bad paintings in the communal palace, drawn from village and private collections, for an article in the September 1904 Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The tour further whetted their appetite for the marvelous new form of transport. " I no longer dare rough it as I used t o , " Bernhard confessed to Mrs. Gardner. " O u r great desire now is to own a machine that will enable us to explore much farther . . . [and] to return to possible food and lodging for the night." Since his return to Florence Berenson had again suffered from the bouts of ill health from which he had been relatively free during his travels. He ascribed them to "nerves," but Mary surmised that chronic dyspepsia was the more likely cause. She thought his shirking work was perhaps excusable "when you think that his early years were nourished on some black bread and vodka." That legendary experience now had the authority of fact in their household. There was, in any event, no escaping the pressures put upon him. Despite his promises to his publisher and Mary's prodding, he had yet to get on with the fourth volume in the series on the Italian painters, the North Italians. T o urge him on Mary had prudently begun compiling the essential lists and photographs. Whatever the cause of Bernhard's malaise, it became sufficiently conspicuous for his doctor, Yule Giglioli, to prescribe the air of St. Moritz. That therapy had to be postponed until August: he was expected in Paris to meet a delegation from the Metropolitan Museum and could not afford to excuse himself. Thus in late June Mary put away all their silver and their most precious paintings into their iron vault, and they set off for Paris again to challenge the future.

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I

N Paris Berenson piloted Frederick Rhinelander, president of the Metropolitan Museum board of directors, among the dealers. Bernhard and Mary lunched with him, dined with Vice-President Rutherford Stuyvesant, and " w e r e engaged on the m o r r o w " to dine with the "deus ex machina, a wicked old boy named [William] Laffan," a member of the board. In Mary's eyes they all treated Bernhard as if it were certain he would be the new director of the Metropolitan. She breathed a prayer, "Would that something might come of it! let some droppings fall on m e . " She wrote her mother that they had an alternative in mind: "We are putting it into their heads that he will be much more useful over here." The thought of cutting themselves off from the life they had established at Settignano and their connections on the Continent and in England seemed much too hard to face. Filled with visions of affluence, Mary hurried over to her family in England, abandoning Bernhard to several weeks of his usual round of business and pleasure in Paris. Acting as Stuyvesant's guide, Berenson took him about to see the dealers' offerings. They inspected the wonderful eighteenth-century things at Wildenstein's, moved on to Jacques Seligmann's, and wound up at Sedelmeyer's. They looked in at Knoedler's and then went to Glaenzer's to see an El Greco, "an astounding fantasia" which he was offering for $40,000. It was the Adoration of the Shepherds, for which Berenson's impecunious painter friend James KerrLawson had been the intermediary. Berenson had been secretly promised a commission on the sale. Much as Stuyvesant would have liked to acquire the El Greco for the Metropolitan, he did not have a free hand, and Berenson therefore offered it to Mrs. Gardner. Anxious about her finances, she held off. A few weeks later the Metropolitan people confronted the El Greco for an hour [13]

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at Glaenzer's, but still there was no decision. Impatient at the delays, Berenson again pressed Mrs. Gardner to act quickly. She dashed his expectation of a much-needed " w i n d f a l l " with a plea of hopeless p o v erty. N o t h i n g remained for Berenson but to await the pleasure of the Metropolitan committee w i t h whatever grace he could s u m m o n . Eager to i m p r o v e his acquaintance with the actress Elsie de Wolfe, w h o m he had m e t in N e w York, Berenson rode out to Versailles early in July to spend a few days at her exquisite Villa Trianon, w h e r e with Bessie M a r b u r y , her agent and inseparable companion, she presided over a fashionable salon. O n e day he drove with Bessie to the m u s e u m at St. Germain-en-Laye; joined b y the archaeologist Henri Hubert, they explored the " w h o l e place" before proceeding to Marly to call on the noted dramatist Victorien Sardou, whose plays had been a staple of the Paris theater for m o r e than a generation. Berenson saw "a short thick-set man with a s m o o t h shaven p o w e r f u l face" w h o "talked charmingly of his trees and plants." O n e evening w h e n Berenson and Sardou were the only guests at an intimate dinner party, Sardou dazzled h i m with his " p r o d i gious m e m o r y " and "great gift of w o r d s . " "So you see h o w I pass m y t i m e , " he reported to M a r y . As for her, she was always "a sweet accomp a n i m e n t " far in the back of his mind. At the Villa T r i a n o n he encountered also H e n r y Adams, w h o came in "burbero [ g r u f f ] as ever but as ever dying to be approached and listened to. . . . His discourse was on the necessity of providing amusement to the w o r l d as its supreme need. H e was brilliant, paradoxical and suggestive. . . . I daresay he was serving a cold sermon. Still I like him and feel d r a w n to h i m . " S o m e days later, dropped off at A d a m s ' address in the avenue du Bois de Boulogne, he climbed to the apartment on the top floor decorated with eighteenth-century pieces and listened to A d a m s discourse on Chinese civilization. But A d a m s was not yet ready to lower his guard. H e confided to his friend Elizabeth C a m e r o n , the estranged wife of Senator James D o n a l d C a m e r o n , that "Berenson has been slobbering you with praise to Miss D e Wolfe. Apparently he is m u c h of his race, and thinks flattery at second-hand infallible." After his call on Adams, Berenson visited the salon of M a d a m e E p h russi, a Rothschild daughter and wife of the editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Hers was one of the "salons de la haute finance j u i v e , " as anti-Semitic French journalists were w o n t to speak of them. Charles D u Bos, an Anglo-French writer, and Salomon Reinach were already present. C o u n t Rembelinski, an old friend of Countess Serristori and a frequent visitor at I Tatti, came in and sought to shine, Berenson said, by "retailing in encyclopedic fashion all m y cast off ideas with talk of evolu-

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tion and progress. H o w beauty w a s a subjective term, etc., etc. It w a s in vain that I j e e r e d at h i m and E p h r u s s i politely p r o t e s t e d . " T h e r o u n d o f g l a m o r o u s visits in Paris w a s interrupted w h e n B e r e n s o n w e n t o v e r to E n g l a n d to spend a f e w days w i t h M a r y at F r i d a y ' s Hill, the S m i t h f a m i l y s u m m e r h o m e near Fernhurst, to l o u n g e on the seashore w i t h his b r o t h e r - i n - l a w , B e r t r a n d Russell, and to tour the country houses o f Gloucestershire w i t h the art collector Herbert C o o k to f i x their collections in m i n d . R e t u r n i n g to the Continent, he touched d o w n long e n o u g h in Paris to e n c o u r a g e Glaenzer in the becalmed E l G r e c o negotiation. E a r l y in A u g u s t 1904 he departed f o r the therapeutic distractions o f St. M o r i t z , leaving M a r y in E n g l a n d to e n j o y her f a m i l y and to agonize o v e r finances. " I should l o v e to h a v e y o u w i t h m e , " he had written. " J o i n m e t o m o r r o w . . . . O n c e w e are separated I can p r o b a b l y stand separation as w e l l till O c t o b e r 1 as till S e p t e m b e r 2 0 . " A s one o f the regulars at the H o t e l C a s p a r B a d r u t t , B e r e n s o n picked up the pattern o f carefree existence at St. M o r i t z w i t h life-enhancing zest. H e r e w a s the true habitat o f a m a n o f the w o r l d . T h e bustle o f progress had c o m e to the popular r e f u g e o n " t h e r o o f o f E u r o p e . " T h e r a i l w a y n o w reached all the w a y up, and E d i s o n ' s n e w electric lights g l o w e d in the night. N e w hotels w e r e under construction, and there w a s " a c o n stant blasting and a perpetual clatter o f b u i l d i n g . " M a n y n e w c o m e r s had j o i n e d w h a t B e r e n s o n called an " a v i a r y " filled w i t h " b i r d s o f paradise . . . a great n u m b e r o f them h o o k n o s e d . " In the first days there he complained in m o c k seriousness to M r s . G a r d n e r that he had no intimates, " n o one to be in l o v e w i t h , no one even to m a k e l o v e t o , " and that in her absence he had to put up w i t h apis aller like L a d y Sassoon. S o o n , h o w e v e r , he w a s in the full s w i m and fascinated once m o r e b y the " P r i n c e o f A e s t h e t e s , " the French w r i t e r C o u n t R o b e r t de M o n t e s q u i o u , w i t h w h o m he spent one w h o l e day alone listening to his p y r o t e c h n i c talk on e v e r y t h i n g except politics and p h i l o s o p h y . M o n t e s q u i o u ' s recitations w e r e " n e a r the best epigrams o f Martial and J u v e n a l . . . . H e embodies a t y p e o f talent that m u s t h a v e been c o m m o n in the middle ages . . . a talent w h o is both poet and actor, and gentleman, in other w o r d s a bard, but o f course in m o s t subtly c o n t e m p o r a r y f o r m . " T h e r e w a s talk also w i t h Percival L o w e l l , the B o s t o n a s t r o n o m e r and sinologist, and w i t h the expatriate A m e r i c a n painter R a l p h C u r t i s , w h o " g r o w s m o r e c h a r m i n g but not m o r e intere s t i n g . " A m y s t e r i o u s f i g u r e veiled in w h i t e turned out to be a w o m a n w h o w a s said to be " i n training to be D ' A n n u n z i o ' s next m i s t r e s s . " M r s . C a m e r o n , the center o f H e n r y A d a m s ' set, he f o u n d a " c h a r m e r " rather than " c h a r m i n g , " w i t h the " m o s t exquisite art o f caressing y o u into

[IS]

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· THE

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LEGEND

perfect ease and making you talk." At their next encounter, however, she seemed distant, and he wondered whether Henry Adams, out of dislike for him or jealousy, had "commanded her not to see me." The coolness soon evaporated. For the moment her habitual anti-Semitism had perhaps obscured her desire for cultural improvement. H o w close to the surface that anti-Semitism lurked is revealed in one of her letters to Adams. While she was visiting Palermo with her daughter Martha, she wrote that Martha had become friendly with young Lionel Rothschild, "the veriest little sheeny you ever saw but bright as can be and strangely enough, very sympathetic and simple. He talks to Martha—heaven save the mark! But would you believe it? I like the boy. A Jew too!" It was ironically true that her ambivalence was matched in its way by Berenson's own feelings. Writing of a song recital at the hotel, he remarked to Mary that "the whole crowd of Jews were shedding streams of tears." To him it was not music that could possibly have provoked tears. " T h e most offensive thing about Jews," he concluded, "is their aesthetic insincerity." N o anti-Semitic feelings dimmed the attraction he felt for the Rothschild men and women that August at St. Moritz. They reminded him of America, "the women so anxious for all the literary and artistic gossip which they flatter themselves is culture and the men impervious to nonsense and intent on affairs." The Rothschild women "have scarcely any trace of the ordinary Jewish vices." As for Lady Sassoon, she was not only agreeable but undeniably attractive. Taking tea with him one day, she told him "a great deal about her world, all of the Rothschilds of course—Rosebery, the Balfours, the Asquiths, etc. . . . She paints, plays, she sculpts, she has read everything. . . . Her curiosity is quite genuine but she has all her life been so overstuffed with golden opportunities that she has profited by none, at least nothing like one expects." St. Moritz in August had become the most famous spa in Europe, and Berenson's extraordinary appetite for social intercourse was more than satisfied. He might turn f r o m talk with Samuel Untermeyer, the famous N e w York lawyer, to an afternoon with the renowned young violinist Fritz Kreisler, whose jealous wife "launched into a ferocious tirade against Montesquiou," who, she believed, had "made eyes at her husband." Montesquiou's somewhat epicene tastes increasingly disturbed Berenson as their intimacy grew. Montesquiou sent an "impertinent letter yesterday," he wrote Mary, "which I answered in execrable French written at one a.m. and telling him with perfect simplicity and sincerity just what our relation should be. . . . O f course he knuckled under." There were the usual fancy-dress balls and the always diverting tableaux vivants with their delectable suggestion of nudity. The resourceful [16]

A MAN

OF

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M o n t e s q u i o u w a s a l w a y s a center o f interest, and his declamations and racy anecdotes held his listeners spellbound. O n e anecdote told o f the D u c h e s s e de la F o u c a u l d ' s r e m a r k a b l e a p l o m b . A s k e d w h e t h e r she w a s not j e a l o u s o f her h u s b a n d ' s mistresses, she replied w i t h due hauteur, " p a s plus de s o n p o t de c h a m b r e . " W h i l e B e r n h a r d flourished at St. M o r i t z in obedience to D r . Giglioli's prescription, M a r y tended to m o r e prosaic matters. A s still another printing o f the Venetian Painters had been called for, she and her m o t h e r had " s p e n t m o s t o f the t i m e p u t t i n g in corrections and additions in the Lists [the a p p e n d i x w h i c h listed paintings, authors, and l o c a t i o n s ] . " " B u t , " M a r y p o i n t e d o u t to B e r n h a r d , " t h e y w i l l all h a v e to be carefully g o n e o v e r b y t h e e . " A s the funds that B e r n h a r d had sent her w e r e r u n n i n g out, their h o p e m u s t n o w be " t h a t the N e w Y o r k people w i l l take the G r e c o . O t h e r w i s e , I k n o w not w h a t w e are to do. B u t w e shall pull t h r o u g h s o m e h o w , and w e can e c o n o m i z e . " T h e royalties o n the Drawings of the Florentine Painters had been disappointing. T h e publisher had sent a check f o r £54, " w h i c h o f course is better than n o t h i n g . . . b u t it w a s m u c h less really than I e x p e c t e d . " She could j u s t g e t b y , she declared, i f she " l e f t the dentist's bill o f £15 u n p a i d . " B e r n h a r d u r g e d her to inquire about their M a r c o n i shares. " H o w m a n y A m e r i c a n shares h a v e w e ? W e m i g h t possibly dispose o f t h e m . " It w a s n o w o b v i o u s that their c h i e f reliance w o u l d h a v e t o be o n the connection w i t h Glaenzer. W i t h the end o f A u g u s t the birds o f paradise t o o k flight to the cities o f the plain, leaving B e r e n s o n and his Florentine intimate C a r l o Placci to recover " t h e m o o d o f q u i e t " after the w e e k s o f f r i v o l i t y . T h e f e w surv i v o r s at the H o t e l C a s p a r B a d r u t t relaxed at b r i d g e and strolled a b o u t the lake. T h e r e w a s leisure n o w to think a b o u t The North Italian Painters and the researches for it that lay ahead. Fortunately Placci's Paris n e p h e w L u c i e n H e n r a u x w o u l d be available w i t h his " s p l e n d i d " m o t o r for a f o r t n i g h t ' s touring o f the b y w a y s o f the T y r o l , the D o l o m i t e s , and the t o w n s o f the Friuli to the east o f V e n i c e . B e f o r e l e a v i n g E n g l a n d M a r y supervised a " h o u s e a u c t i o n " in G r o s v e n o r R o a d for her m o t h e r ' s " t h i n g s , " A l y s m e a n w h i l e h a v i n g emptied Friday's Hill o f its furnishings. H e r m o t h e r , crippled w i t h arthritis, w a s cheerfully a w a i t i n g her h e a v e n l y r e w a r d . " R e m e m b e r , i f I d i e , " she told A l y s , " t h e f i r e w o r k s are o n the t o p s h e l f " f o r the celebration. O n the t w e n t y - s i x t h o f S e p t e m b e r , h a v i n g settled her m o t h e r in a L o n d o n flat, M a r y j o i n e d B e r n h a r d at Bassano, a pretty little t o w n at the e d g e o f the V e n e t i a n plain, and they p r o m p t l y set to w o r k to continue the exhilarating hunt for u n r e c o r d e d paintings. " W e h a v e discovered a T i t i a n and a G i o v a n n i Bellini, b o t h absolutely u n k n o w n , " she s o o n boasted to her mother.

[17]

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LEGEND

M o t o r i n g in Italy again p r o v e d " t h e j o y o f j o y s " ; and M a r y began to " h o p e it m a y b e c o m e the 'chic' thing to take the B e r e n s o n s m o t o r i n g , since it has b e c o m e la m o d e ä Paris to be 'intellectual,' and B . B . is certainly the m o s t intellectual guide to Italy they could easily f i n d ! " T h e m o d e o f operation o f the car w a s s o m e w h a t singular. Placci's n e p h e w d r o v e and his c h a u f f e u r sat beside h i m as a l o o k o u t as they delightedly flew along at fifteen miles an hour. O n a d a y ' s outing f r o m V e n i c e in the car o f the D u c h e s s Grazioli, h o w e v e r , the t w e n t y - f o u r - h o r s e p o w e r v e h i cle " w e n t easily at 50 miles an h o u r , " a thrilling experience on the roads o f the time. M a n y f r i e n d l y acquaintances w e r e to be f o u n d in the vicinity o f Venice, so that art and society became inextricably m i x e d . B e r e n s o n basked in the attention o f the Princess C o n d r i a n o and her cousin, visited the art collection o f the H u m p h r e y J o h n s t o n e s in Venice, lunched w i t h Princess H o h e n l o h e and w i t h Princess M a r y o f T h u m and T a x i s , and stopped at C o u n t P a p a f a v a ' s villa and at the castle o f C o u n t e s s C o l l e o n i . It w a s all v e r y seductive, and his determination to w o r k w a v e r e d . H e announced, w r o t e M a r y , that he w a s done w i t h K u n s t f u s s i n g f o r e v e r and that henceforth he meant to devote h i m s e l f to the E n j o y m e n t o f A r t . B u t it w a s o n l y a m o m e n t a r y resolve. A s soon as he f o u n d h i m s e l f " i n front o f no matter h o w dull a p i c t u r e , " he " f u s s e d w i t h tremendous interest." H e protested he did so " i n the w a y a p i g e o n w h o s e brain has been r e m o v e d w i l l yet pick up a grain o f corn held b e f o r e its b e a k . " B e r n h a r d and M a r y w o u n d up as they often had in the past at D o n G u i d o C a g n o l a ' s great estate near the V a r e s e lakes, the Villa Gazzada, w h i c h w a s filled as usual w i t h talkative guests. Despite the beautiful setting, B e r e n s o n felt revulsion. T h e fashionable glitter o f the society at the villa, o f people w h o all talked at once and k n e w nothing o f the art o f intellectual conversation, s o o n palled o n h i m and on M a r y , and sleeplessness and dyspepsia returned to plague h i m . It w a s o b v i o u s , M a r y thought, that he needed a m o t o r to liberate h i m f r o m the t o o - g l a m o r o u s guests. In despair he v o w e d he w o u l d not return to Gazzada unless D o n G u i d o acquired an automobile. N o t that their relations w o u l d be any less cordial, f o r D o n G u i d o w a s a f a v o r i t e visitor at I Tatti and his Rassegna d'Arte w a s a hospitable m e d i u m f o r both B e r n h a r d ' s and M a r y ' s articles. H a v i n g recently caught the " c o n n o i s s e u r f e v e r " and b e g u n his " b a b y " collection, he asked to b u y one o f the B e r e n s o n s ' paintings, f o r w h i c h they had paid 850 francs ($170). Bernhard and M a r y decided to let it g o for only 2,000 francs ($400), less than its market value, though they were short of cash, for, as M a r y w r o t e to her m o t h e r , " O n e does not like to m a k e too m u c h m o n e y out o f a f r i e n d , " h o w e v e r rich he m i g h t be. [18]

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O n his return to I Tatti at the end o f O c t o b e r , B e r e n s o n , still f u m i n g o v e r the e m p t y h i g h society o f Gazzada, declared h i m s e l f " a convinced socialist." M o n e y w a s in the hands o f an " i d l e , brainless Italian aristocr a c y . " F o r one w h o had a l w a y s been " a defender o f privilege and cust o m " it w a s certainly a change o f heart, but like m a n y another passionate burst o f feeling it s o o n subsided in the c o m f o r t a b l e and tranquil a t m o sphere o f I Tatti. T r a n q u i l l i t y , h o w e v e r , had not long to last. B e r n h a r d ' s sister Senda, w h o had s u f f e r e d s o m e sort o f n e r v o u s b r e a k d o w n at S m i t h C o l l e g e , w h e r e she w a s a physical education instructor, had taken a leave o f absence f r o m her w o r k and spent several m o n t h s in a sanatorium. Still u n w e l l , she n o w came, at B e r n h a r d ' s invitation, to spend the w i n t e r recuperating at I Tatti. F r o m her he learned the disturbing n e w s that the business venture o f their brother A b i e , f o r w h o m B e r n h a r d had b o r r o w e d $ 1 0 , 0 0 0 f r o m his E n g l i s h bankers B a r i n g B r o t h e r s , w a s f o u n d e r ing and his f u t u r e w a s again in doubt. Five hundred dollars must be sent o f f i m m e d i a t e l y to the f a m i l y in addition to the $200 w h i c h Senda had b o r r o w e d f o r travel. M o n e y w a s also needed f o r his y o u n g e r sister Rachel, w h o had received her master's degree in classical a r c h a e o l o g y at R a d c l i f f e in J u n e and had c o m e o v e r to E n g l a n d to study at N e w n h a m C o l l e g e , C a m b r i d g e , during the s u m m e r . N o w she had g o n e o f f f o r a holiday in Greece b e f o r e entering the A m e r i c a n S c h o o l o f Classical S t u d ies at A t h e n s . B e r n h a r d had l o n g regarded his subsidy o f her education and travels as an i n v e s t m e n t in her future as a teacher. H e n o w learned that she w a s e n g a g e d to m a r r y R a l p h B a r t o n P e r r y , p r o f e s s o r o f philosop h y at H a r v a r d . H o w e v e r , as she w a s e n j o y i n g her j o u r n e y , neither B e r n h a r d n o r M a r y " b e g r u d g e d " it to her. With his o w n affairs so plagued b y uncertainties, B e r n h a r d felt tormented b y the claims u p o n h i m . " I t is a w f u l , M a r y , " he exclaimed, " t o be the mainstay o f a large b r o k e n - d o w n f a m i l y . B u t there it i s — w h a t can I d o ? " M a i n t a i n i n g the f a m i l y cost h i m about $4,000 a year. If Rachel married, M a r y f i g u r e d , that w o u l d reduce the annual subsidy b y $ 1 , 2 0 0 . It w a s o b v i o u s , nonetheless, that there w a s to be no escape f r o m the " p i g t r a d e . " M a r y ' s articles p r o v i d e d a v e r y m o d e s t supplement to her small annuity. B e r n h a r d ' s investments helped to close the gap, and his shares o f g o l d - m i n i n g stock had soared f r o m $ 1 , 0 0 0 to $ 1 , 8 0 0 and f o r a time paid a quarterly dividend o f $ 1 0 0 . T h e royalties f r o m the m a n y reprintings o f his b o o k s also helped. B u t w h a t e v e r the i n c o m e , their expenses w e r e a bottomless pit and o n l y the h o p e d - f o r c o m m i s s i o n f r o m Glaenzer f r o m the sale o f the E l G r e c o could rescue them. A n y prospect o f a connection w i t h the M e t r o p o l i t a n ended in O c t o b e r w i t h the death o f Rhinelander, president o f the board. T h a t c i r c u m [19]

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stance, Berenson wrote Johnson, "undoes what hopes I had of doing something at the Metropolitan," for it was Rhinelander who had assured him he would use his influence to have him "appointed buyer for the museum" of all Italian pictures. A month later Di Cesnola, the director, died, and Mary, optimistic as always, wondered whether that post might yet be offered to Bernhard. She thought it might be ruin for him but "she would rather enjoy having a big museum to manage." Still she could not dream of going to live in New York. "Italy is too far away from you as it is," she told her mother. Mrs. Gardner's purchase of the Degas had provided a much-needed "windfall," but it was obvious to Berenson that he could no longer count on her as a financial mainstay. Since the death of her husband in 1898 her advisers had succeeded to some extent in bridling her extravagance; besides, the construction of her "palace" on the Fenway, in Boston, had made great inroads upon her resources. Then in January 1904 she was obliged to pay $200,000 to the Treasury in duties on $1,000,000 worth of art objects which she had imported in 1898, claiming exemption under the "public exhibition and museum law." According to the United States Custom Service, the severe restrictions she had placed upon admission—open only four days a month to a limited number of ticket holders—removed her museum from the "public" category. Later in the year he tried to interest her in a Moro, an effigy of Mary of Guise, at the "singularly reasonable" price of £2,000. She protested, "What seems to you very cheap seems to me frightfully dear. I can't afford it." Still, when F. Mason Perkins, a former protege of Berenson, wrote that a rare Lorenzetti was available for a "very possible sum," she asked Berenson, "Can it be bought?" He cautioned her that the painting was "in horrible condition and frightfully repainted." He dared not degrade her collection "with such a ruin." Sales or no sales, there was one pursuit the Berensons would not give up, the hunt for additions to their sacred "Lists." It was a never-ending sport. Mary's notebook accompanied them everywhere for the purpose of enlarging the indexes of artists and locations in each reprinting of Bernhard's books. So while Lucien Henraux was still in Florence, off they went with him on a hunting expedition in which they turned up a Neri di Bicci in a little church. The frequent breakdowns and mirings added a certain zest to their expeditions. On one journey that autumn with their expatriate English friend Edmund Houghton, the car gave out in the foothills. They hailed a peasant's cart, passed San Giovanni, the birthplace of Masaccio, and ascending through a region of fantastic eroded sandstone along the ridge back of Vallombrosa, emerged on a fertile plateau. At the top of a steep stony path stood a delicate Renais[20]

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sance church amid its cypresses, and in a little chapel within they f o u n d their reward, a Fra A n g e l i c o and a Masaccio. T h e necessity to begin preparing the manuscript o f The North Italian Painters g r e w m o r e onerous the closer Berenson approached the task. H e had " b a d m o m e n t s o f self-reproach" for not w o r k i n g . A n d w h e n his English poet friend " T r e v y , " Robert T r e v e l y a n , came o n a visit, " w o n derfully gentle and suave in a r g u m e n t , " he seemed to have matured so gracefully that Berenson felt himself b y contrast to be simply stagnating. " A l l is o v e r , " he lamented. T o M a r y his despair was merely " t h e painful but necessary preliminary to his taking a fresh start, either in w o r k or t h o u g h t . " A w e e k - l o n g visit b y his old college mate G e o r g e Santayana, w h o w a s about to set o f f o n a pleasurable j u n k e t to Sicily and E g y p t , did not raise his spirits. " L u c k y m a n , " Berenson observed, " h e feels perfect f r e e d o m and enjoys loafing. . . . T h e most self-contained, contented person I have ever k n o w n . . . therefore the most unintelligible o f all m y friendly acquaintances. H e is t o o remote f r o m m e . " Bernhard's n e r v o u s irritability had no d o u b t been aggravated also b y seeing R o g e r Fry's belated r e v i e w o f The Florentine Drawings, for he w a s still suspicious o f Fry's role in the Burlington reorganization. T h e t w o part r e v i e w had appeared in the N o v e m b e r and D e c e m b e r 1904 issues o f the Athenaeum w i t h the explanation that the great size and scope o f the w o r k had been an impediment to r e v i e w i n g it. Fry called the t w o hands o m e folio v o l u m e s a " m o n u m e n t " to the "mental energy displayed b y the a u t h o r , " the " m e r e conception o f the t a s k " evidence o f "a certain greatness." But, he protested, Berenson's "intense l o v e o f o r d e r " s o m e times led h i m to "pressing to a conclusion even w h e r e no final and decisive c o n c l u s i o n " was possible. H e noted his agreements and disagreements w i t h Berenson's attributions w i t h the confident assurance o f an equal. O f the treatment o f V e r r o c c h i o he w r o t e , " W e find ourselves so m u c h at variance w i t h M r . Berenson's v i e w s that it w o u l d take us far too long to discuss t h e m at l e n g t h . " H e regretted the "threat o f aesthetic e x c o m m u n i c a t i o n " b y w h i c h Berenson required "submissive agreem e n t " f r o m the reader. His conclusion w a s sufficiently ambivalent: " O n e is charmed, amazed, indignant, irritated b y turns, but b o r e d o m or a mere sleepy acquiescence is out o f the q u e s t i o n . " It w a s o b v i o u s that Fry, w h o m Berenson had regarded as one o f his " p u p i l s " and w h o in 1899 had h u m b l y dedicated his b o o k o n G i o v a n n i Bellini to him, n o w felt he w a s w e l l out o f leading strings. Berenson's personal situation had changed greatly since he published The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance in 1897 as the third o f the projected f o u r v o l u m e s o f the series. H e w a s n o w shouldered w i t h a large establishment at I Tatti and an e v e r - g r o w i n g — a n d d e m a n d i n g — [21]

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circle of acquaintances. His wife, t h o u g h still an indispensable helpmate, had become also a kind of rival, and her ready pen affronted h i m even as he urged her on. H e listened to one of her articles for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, she reported, "as if I were holding a basin under his head on a channel crossing, groaning and showing signs of horrible disgust. This was very mortifying to m y vanity as a w r i t e r . " H e exclaimed that " w r i t ing about such a deadly thing as attributions" was "nauseating." Soon after this outburst, he penitently remarked that he must " p u t u p a m o n u ment sometime to the m a n w h o first invented marriage," and urged her to finish the offending article. H e hoped, however, it w o u l d be the last of its kind. As for his o w n writing, Bernhard felt he dared not procrastinate any longer, and w h e n in m i d - D e c e m b e r M a r y left to spend the Christmas holidays with her children, he at last set to w o r k . In a burst of optimism he sat d o w n at his desk and h a m m e r e d out a preface. "I see n o w the general lines of the b o o k , " he assured M a r y . "I have small expectations but at all events it will be in the dolce stile nuouo." It was a brave beginning, but neither he nor M a r y could have foreseen the obstacles that w o u l d delay its completion.

[22]

I II

Throes of the North Italians

H

A V I N G temporarily quieted his absent taskmaster with the news that he had made a beginning on the North Italians, Bernhard promptly decamped with his sister Senda to spend a few days with a diverting new neighbor, Henry Labouchere, the seventy-four-year-old British statesman who "pampered the palates of [his] guests as lavishly" at his Villa Cristina as Janet Ross did at Poggio Gherardo. Berenson obviously relished his mordantly masculine wit. It was still told of him that once at a London club an elderly member, annoyed at his unconventional conduct, had admonished him, " Y o u n g man, I knew your grandmother." Labouchere irreverently retorted, "Perhaps, sir, I have the honour of addressing my grandfather." From the Villa Cristina Bernhard and Senda went their separate ways, she to visit Don Guido's sister in Bologna and he to take his ease at the palatial villa La Floridiana in Naples. His dashing hostess, Mrs. Harrison, was in town with her steam yacht and her stable of horses. When on one occasion Berenson was nearly catapulted out of her carriage, he consoled himself with the reflection, "Fast horses are more life-communicating than motors." A Naples newspaper reported that the "sympathetic and intelligent Mrs. Harrison had as her guest a writer of highest distinction, a critic of art whose taste is austere and rigid, called Berenson." While in Naples Bernhard heard from Mary that Roger Fry had been offered the post of assistant director of the Metropolitan. "I wish Roger well," Bernhard replied, "and I shall do my best to remain fair-minded and unembittered even if he does reap all that I have sown in fifteen years of writing and six months in America." But it irked him that his friendly help in selling two of Fry's Italian pictures for $2,500, twice what Fry had paid for them, was being rewarded by a kind of disloyalty and even— remembering Fry's review and his equivocal role in the Burlington Maga[23]

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zine controversy—by actual "hostility." Fry, it developed, balked at the modest salary and even more at the despotism o f j . P. Morgan, who had succeeded Rhinelander as president of the board. "He's too much of a God Almighty," Fry wrote his wife, and he rejected the offer. In the midst of Bernhard's self-pitying reflections, exciting news came from Glaenzer. "Hurrah, this instant received a cable from N e w Y o r k , " he wrote Mary early in January 1905, " 'Greco sold, 35,' . . . This means I hope about a thousand pounds for u s . " Ten days later he learned that his share would actually be £1,700. In his expressions of gratitude Glaenzer so emphasized Berenson's help in the negotiation that the hard-pressed Berenson now asked that the net profit of £5,000 be shared equally. Glaenzer, who thought he had been uncommonly generous in increasing Berenson's share to one-third, declined to increase the fee. The difficulties with the El Greco transaction were, unfortunately, not quite over. Rumors had circulated in London that Berenson had a financial interest in the El Greco sale, and when these rumors reached N e w York, Morgan's opponents on the board persuaded him to look into the circumstances of the acquisition. Morgan pressured Laffan to question Glaenzer about the deal. Apparently nothing came of the inquiry, but the attention that Morgan focused on Berenson lingered on to his disadvantage. Berenson went from Naples to Rome to reconnoiter private collections. There at the "fabulous" palace of Prince Brancacci, the princess, a former American, a Miss King, showed him a number of paintings. One she identified as a portrait of Pope Innocent X by Velasquez. Berenson was dazzled. " A l l my youthful courage has left m e , " he wrote Mary. " I could not absolutely swear to it that the Velasquez Pope was genuine but it is stupendous and can scarcely be anything else." The princess, he observed, was " a yellow, funny thing, honey-sweet words and endless smiles, and evidently hard as nails." They offered him 10 percent if he found a buyer. He dropped a mention of the painting to Mrs. Gardner in the course of one of his sociable reports. "I wish you had heaps of money and I would urge you to buy it. But I understand they will yield only to irresistible temptation." The seed of Mrs. Gardner's temptation was to germinate slowly for nearly two years and burst into the light at last in the presence of a replenished bank account. THE PREFACE TO The North Italian Painters proved an illusory flourish to be discarded once the small volume was under way. Similarly jettisoned was the draft of an epilogue which Berenson, impatient to see the end of his labors, wrote a few months later. He found that the first steps were the most costly in effort, the ideas coming in such pell-mell confusion

[24]

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OF T H E NORTH

ITALIANS

that they defied coherent expression. Compiling and revising the Lists was, by contrast, a recollection in tranquillity of all his and Mary's adventures and discoveries. But recapturing in prose what the eye had discriminated, applying criteria like tactile values, space composition, movement, and all the refinements of subtle perception, proved a baffling task, especially since the roster of painters in this final volume of the series comprised lesser talents who failed in one way or another to meet the crucial tests for great art. Berenson's progress on the work would be anguishingly slow as he took up in turn one painter after another whose merits, however great, were always outweighed by the shortcomings that denied him genius, so that even Correggio had to stand well below "Raphael and Michelangelo, Giorgione and Titian." In February 1905 he was grappling with Mantegna, one of the earliest figures in the book. Physical weakness returned, as well as uncooperative digestion. "Travailling over the b o o k " seemed to him a cruel destiny. " W h y , why, w h y does one publish?" he lamented to Mrs. Gardner. If books "give fame it is contemptible and if they are stillborn it is despairi n g . " After "groaning under the incubus of scribbling," with the manuscript one-third done, he escaped to Rome with Mary to hear Joseph Joachim play the Beethoven Quartets and to visit with Gladys Deacon, the young beauty who had earlier bewitched him, and then to motor through the Abruzzi with Carlo Placci and his nephew, "making endless discoveries" in wayside churches. He returned to his desk at I Tatti in late March, hating the subject and feeling "tired and unfit, and yet," Mary reported, "he cannot be at peace until it is done." He might have protested that Mary would give him no peace until the book was done. Each day he immured himself in his study doing penance with the script for some hours and then descending to talk with the succession of visitors who enlivened the season. A species of encouragement came from Hannah, Mary's mother, who had been kept informed of his neurasthenic outbursts. " B o o k s , " she assured him, "can be successful even if they are ground out with groans and curses." Her "most successful book [The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life] had been written so to speak at the point of a bayonet without a ray of enthusiasm and hating it all the time." She counseled Mary: " Y o u need not feel the slightest delicacy about always telling me how B . B . feels. M y experience of life has taught me to look upon the vagaries of the male portion of our race as one looks upon avalanches or earthquakes. They cannot be stopped or altered," but "must simply have way made for them with as little personal inconvenience to oneself as possible." In spite of interruptions the manuscript progressed so that by midApril a preliminary draft of the book was finished. He turned it over to [25]

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T r e v y , w h o s e advice he o f t e n asked, saying, " I suppose I shall scarcely begin to r e w r i t e m y b o o k 'till a u t u m n so if y o u h a v e y o u r corrections ready b y N o v e m b e r say, it w i l l do. I count on t h e m . " With the m a n u script set aside, the jaunts into the countryside redoubled. H o u g h t o n acquired a n e w m o t o r and o f f they all w e n t again on excursions that seemed pure " b l i s s " and that a l l o w e d them to see " t e n times as m u c h " as formerly. A s spring m e r g e d into s u m m e r , I Tatti buzzed w i t h activity. Rachel came on f r o m Greece, and f o r a f e w days, w i t h Senda still at hand, B e r e n s o n seemed in the midst o f a f a m i l y party. M a r y ' s daughter R a y , w h o had j u s t passed her entrance examinations at C a m b r i d g e , b r o u g h t w i t h her a n o v e l she w a s w o r k i n g on, the setting a thinly disguised I Tatti w i t h a principal f i g u r e inspired b y " U n c l e B e r n h a r d . " S o o n Rachel departed f o r E n g l a n d to meet her fiance, R a l p h B a r t o n P e r r y , and Senda w a s packed o f f to B a g n i di Lucca f o r its restorative waters. T h e sixteeny e a r - o l d R a y received instruction f r o m H o u g h t o n in driving his m o t o r , and t h o u g h she did back the thing into a ditch, her mother w a s gaily confident that " s h e f u l l y understands the machine and drives really better than H o u g h t o n ! " H o u g h t o n d r o v e them all up to V e n i c e and there lent them the m o t o r f o r ten days, w h e r e u p o n M a r y , w i t h tyro R a y at the w h e e l , took B e r n hard h a l f w a y f r o m V e n i c e to D u i n o , w h e r e he w a s entertained in a castle o v e r l o o k i n g the A d r i a t i c b y the " h i g h l y cultivated" Princess H o h e n l o h e . T h e princess t o o k h i m about in her m o t o r c a r w h i l e he expatiated on the intoxicating scenery. F r o m V e n i c e he had to entrain to Paris to r e v i e w arrangements w i t h Glaenzer, w h o counted o n h i m f o r leads to m a r k e t a b l e — a n d e x p o r t a b l e — O l d Masters. M a r y j o i n e d h i m in Paris, and as soon as Lucien H e n r a u x ' s n e w m o t o r c a r could be m a d e to function, they all set out f o r a tour o f central France and the coast o f Brittany, a tour marred only b y the inevitable burst tires. M a r y dreamed o f " a little a u t o m o b i l e " f o r £ 1 0 0 f o r R a y that they c o u l d all use in E n g l a n d . She could raise £50, she told her mother, " i f thee could lend m e the r e s t . " T h e project had to be deferred, but once admitted a m o n g M a r y ' s desires, its fulfillment could not be l o n g delayed. W h e n M a r y w e n t to E n g l a n d to spend A u g u s t w i t h the f a m i l y , B e r n hard proceeded to St. M o r i t z w h e r e , a m o n g his socialite acquaintances, he could again bask in the attentions of princesses, countesses, and marchese. His daily letters to M a r y told o f w a l k s and teas, o f tableaux vivants, o f f a n c y - d r e s s balls, and o f uplifting conversation about culture and religion. Y e t his tete-a-tetes w i t h the C o u n t e s s Serristori s o m e t i m e s bored h i m w h e n she came out " v e h e m e n t l y w i t h s o m e idea o r f o r m u l a [26]

THROES

OF

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ITALIANS

o f m i n e to w h i c h I n o l o n g e r attach great i m p o r t a n c e , if ever I did. I m e a n so little o f w h a t I say . . . because saying for m e is at best an aphasic a t t e m p t at e x p r e s s i o n . " C a r l o Placci was o f course a m o n g the regulars a n d so t o o was the flamboyant C o u n t R o b e r t de M o n t e s q u i o u . B e r e n son d r e w closer to L a d y Sassoon, w h o h u n g o n his conversation like a disciple. While still at St. M o r i t z B e r e n s o n learned that the marriage of his sister Rachel, then t w e n t y - f i v e , to the t w e n t y - n i n e - y e a r - o l d Ralph B a r t o n Perry w a s s o o n to take place in L o n d o n . H e did n o t regard the m a t c h as a brilliant one, t h o u g h he did concede that " a t w o r s t the life of a professor at H a r v a r d is a life o f dignity a n d interest for t h e m that w a n t n o b e t t e r . " M a r y assured h i m that Ralph had " w o n all their hearts. . . . E v e n m o t h e r likes h i m . " B e r e n s o n evidently pleaded ill health for n o t attending the w e d d i n g , t h o u g h to his w i f e he offered a less acceptable reason, if o n e m a y j u d g e b y her response: "I like thy patronizing t o n e a b o u t Rachel and her ' h o a r y a n t h r o p o l o g i c a l r i t e s ' — p r a y w e r e n ' t t h y o w n m u c h m o r e hoary?!" For all his success as an art critic and connoisseur and his obvious relish of h i g h life in Paris, L o n d o n , and St. M o r i t z , Berenson felt a g n a w i n g sense of discontent, a feeling o f ideals unrealized and of spiritual homelessness. F r o m St. M o r i t z he p o u r e d o u t the litany of his defeated aspirations to his old English friends Katherine Bradley and E d i t h C o o p e r , the poetizing aunt and niece w h o published their effusions u n d e r the p s e u d o n y m Michael Field. M a r y w r o t e of their distress that " t h e e is m o r e dissatisfied w i t h thyself each year that passes. 'It is not right,' Michael [Katherine Bradley] kept saying, w h e r e i n she is right. D o try, dearest B e r n h a r d , to think o u t a scheme of life that will satisfy thee. I will aid thee in anything thee u n d e r t a k e s . " T h e t w o w o m e n held a special place in his affections. H e once c o n fessed to M a r y that " t h e i r conversation is to m e the dearest o n e a r t h . " T h e y f o r their part piously treasured u p his talk in their diary. N o w in the m i d s t o f the distractions of St. M o r i t z , he told t h e m that " a l o n g w i t h M a r y and in s o m e respects m o r e than she, y o u t w o are m y only soul mates. I live so m u c h m o r e intensely w i t h y o u and m y m i n d flowers strangely and beautifully in y o u r presence. . . . So in a sense I shall never be k n o w n except to y o u . " THE ONE MOST unsettling element in his life was M a r y ' s long absences in E n g l a n d every year w i t h her family. T h e y left h i m periodically at loose ends and rudderless, for w i t h o u t her collaboration and m a n a g e m e n t he seemed unable to w o r k . His r e s e n t m e n t of this aspect of their marriage was n e v e r m u c h b e l o w the surface. In that A u g u s t w h e n M a r y w r o t e to [27]

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him at St. Moritz that she had been seriously ill, he admonished her, "It is odd how regularly you do fall ill in England and especially in the country. Don't you think there may be a reason for it which once engraved with a needle in the corner of the eye might serve as a lasting reminder to do otherwise?" After his four weeks at St. Moritz Berenson entrained with Placci for Paris to resume his place in the strenuous activities of the idle rich. Lady Sassoon invited him to a gala house party at Gustave Rothschild's Chateau Laversine, whose luxury surpassed anything Berenson had previously encountered. Israel Zangwill, the prominent Jewish novelist and playwright, was also among the guests, looking very much the "boulevardier." At the Rothschilds' the "patriarchal system was in full force," with "all sorts of incongruous Semitic descendants," as Bernhard reported to Mary, "gathered together under the grandparental roof." Mary mourned, "They have a score of motors, and Ray hasn't even a runabout!" Berenson dined with Elsie de Wolfe and Bessie Marbury at Versailles and again saw much of Sardou, whose brilliant anecdotes he urged upon Sardou's son-in-law as material for an autobiography. Bernhard met "Madame Lucille," the Paris dressmaker, and immediately proposed that Mary, who had returned from England, put herself in the woman's hands, for he thought her present styles—including her "beloved Burberry suit—too horrible." "What a pity," she reflected. "It will be trying to resuscitate the 'restes de beaute' in a fat middle-aged, red-faced lady!" With Mary and Placci in tow Bernhard went on to Chambery in French Savoy to rendezvous with Placci's nephew for a drive to Aosta and the Piedmont. As the Great St. Bernard Pass was closed to automobile traffic, they crossed to Courmayeur in Italy over the Little St. Bernard and then drove south from church to church hunting for more examples of North Italian paintings. Mary's notebook was always at hand for Bernhard's commentary and attributions, and her hopes were high that they would finish the "Lists" and "pay adieu to all this part of the world and devote ourselves to Tuscany and Umbria." Early in October they reached Don Guido's Villa Gazzada, lured there by the promise of a two-day motor tour. Their host was distracted by the usual crowd of noisy guests, and they had to settle for a short ride to Lecco on Lake Como. O n the way back to Milan they hiked up a rocky mule path for three miles to Ardenno in pursuit of a Luini but found no Luini to reward the ascent. In Milan they dined with Lady Sassoon's sister and her husband. Unlike the exquisite Lady Sassoon, the Baronne Lambert was a "florid type ofjewish beauty" dripping with jewels, frills, and laces. Mary, quick to denigrate a rival, thought her "appalling"; [28]

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B e r n h a r d , w h o w a s f o n d o f the w o m a n , excused her s h o r t c o m i n g s o n the g r o u n d that she w a s o n the v e r g e o f a n e r v o u s b r e a k d o w n . H o m e at last, after a three-month absence, B e r e n s o n turned to the rewriting o f the North Italians, determined to free h i m s e l f f r o m w h a t had b e c o m e an incubus. Fits o f " g l o o m and d e s p a i r " alternated w i t h spurts o f creativity. T y p i n g the section on prettiness and beauty, M a r y felt the " n e w b o o k is in s o m e w a y s his best w o r k " but, she told her mother, " s o v e r y c r y p t i c " that she could not " i m a g i n e a n y o n e p r o p e r l y understanding it but me! . . . Y e s t e r d a y w e had tea alone together and he couldn't d o anything but groan over the problem staring him in the face, the problem o f h o w to treat the painter Luini, his o w n and e v e r y b o d y else's first l o v e in Italian art, w h o m he n o w abhors. Ί shall never do it, M a r y , ' he kept saying, and I had to e n c o u r a g e h i m by l a u g h i n g at h i m and p r o p h e s y i n g that w h e n w e next met f o r dinner it w o u l d be done. Sure e n o u g h about seven he came running into m y r o o m w i t h a face o f delight and handed m e a half dozen pages o f manuscript, and then lay d o w n on the sofa to w a t c h m e read them. A n d he had written a rather charming thing ending w i t h these w o r d s : ' H o w they enhanced one's d r e a m o f fair w o m e n , these painters so distasteful n o w ; h o w they guided desire and flattered hope! Y o u t h still l o o k s at them w i t h the same eyes, and f r o m their E l y s i a n seats they smile d o w n at m e w i t h the w o r d s — " I t is f o r the y o u n g that w e worked; what do you here?" ' " M a r y w a s delighted to t y p e the manuscript, " c h a n g e d a lot here and there, little things, w h i c h nevertheless m a k e a difference in the ease and clearness and then s o m e serious things, too, about w h i c h w e grappled f o r half an h o u r w h e n I had f i n i s h e d . " " T h e preliminary stages o f all his best t h i n g s , " M a r y explained to M r s . Gardner, " a r e doleful litanies about being ' f i n i s h e d , ' about h a v i n g no ideas, about h a v i n g lost his grasp and so o n . " O n D e c e m b e r 1 2 M a r y w r o t e that the b o o k " i s f i n i s h e d " but, " m i s e r able m a n , instead o f feeling elated, he feels . . . u n e m p l o y e d . . . w i t h nothing particular to live f o r . " T w o days later she set out f o r E n g l a n d , leaving h i m in the care o f a n e p h e w o f H e n r y Labouchere, A l g a r T h o r o l d , an author and journalist. B e r e n s o n continued to tinker w i t h the manuscript f o r another w e e k , so that it w a s not until D e c e m b e r 23 that M a r y c o u l d applaud: " H i p hip hurray!!! . . . I feel thee has endless possibilities s t i l l . " T o M r s . G a r d n e r B e r e n s o n declared, " I t w a s a b o o k I hated to w r i t e and should not h a v e written except f o r m u c h u r g i n g and f o r its being a d u t y to do so. . . . I h a v e j u s t finished and instead o f feeling any j o y on a task done, I feel merely out o f a j o b . " H e w a s not out o f a j o b f o r l o n g . While awaiting M a r y ' s return he learned that C h a r l e s T y s o n Y e r k e s , the N e w Y o r k street-railway m a g [29]

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nate, had died, b e q u e a t h i n g his collection o f paintings to the city. B e r e n son t o o k up his notes on the collection, w h i c h he had inspected in N e w Y o r k , and w r o t e a critical estimate o f the Italian paintings w i t h the necessary rebaptisms. It w a s sent o f f to D o n G u i d o to be translated into Italian for the Rassegna d'Arte and w a s published in M a r c h 1906 under the title " L e Pitture Italiane N e l l a Raccolta Y e r k e s . . . al M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m . " Y e r k e s ' financial sins p r o v e d t o o h e a v y a b u r d e n for his estate, and in c o n s e q u e n c e the art collection w a s dispersed at auction in 1910 f o r o v e r t w o million dollars. In the article B e r e n s o n corrected the attributions w i t h categorical severity. A "rather crude but p l e a s i n g " picture catalogued as Portrait of Ghirlandaio's

Wife w a s n o t h i n g m o r e than " a falsification executed in

these last ten y e a r s , " a " f a l s e c o p y " o f a painting w h i c h w a s n o w in the hands o f Francis L a t h r o p o f N e w Y o r k . A painting ascribed to C o r d e gliaghi struck h i m as being a l m o s t a replica o f a Previtali o w n e d b y D r . Frizzoni. T h e t w o artists, he observed, w e r e in reality a single person. " H o w e v e r m u c h it distresses m e to differ o n this question f r o m M o r e l l i , master o f us a l l , " he w r o t e , "I a m n o l o n g e r able to share his theory as to distinct personalities for C o r d e g l i a g h i and P r e v i t a l i . " A s for a t o n d o (a circular painting) " w h i c h bears the n a m e o f Sandro [Botticelli]," he dismissed it as " a pallid and w o o d e n c o p y o f that noted painting in the N a t i o n a l Gallery o f L o n d o n , itself not e v e n surely b y B o t t i c e l l i . " T h e lavishly illustrated article w a s a v i r t u o s o p e r f o r m a n c e and once again exhibited B e r e n s o n ' s p r o d i g i o u s k n o w l e d g e o f his field. W h i l e B e r n h a r d w a s o c c u p i e d at I T a t t i w i t h his dissection o f the Y e r k e s C o l l e c t i o n , M a r y , in E n g l a n d , presided at a f a m i l y inquest o v e r the North Italians. H e r brother, L o g a n , w h o had g o n e o v e r it " t w i c e w i t h great c a r e , " u r g e d B e r n h a r d to prepare " a sort o f introduction . . .

to

f o r e s h a d o w the w h o l e . " O t h e r w i s e he w a s " f u l l o f admiration for i t . " D u r i n g the f o l l o w i n g e v e n i n g ' s session, h o w e v e r , he balked at B e r n hard's use o f the t e r m "spiritual s i g n i f i c a n c e , " suspecting "all sorts o f heresies." B e r e n s o n stood his g r o u n d , trusting to the reader's " i n t u i t i v e r e c o g n i t i o n . " H e also rejected the idea o f a f o r m a l introduction, perhaps m o r e f r o m dislike o f returning to an u n g r a t e f u l task than f r o m any d o u b t o f its desirability. O n M a r y ' s return B e r e n s o n again tackled the much-scrutinized m a n u script, and until m i d - M a r c h 1906, w i t h the usual a c c o m p a n i m e n t o f curses, w o r k e d his w a y t h r o u g h the criticisms o f his private " b o a r d o f e d i t o r s " until the season's influx o f visitors and house guests o b l i g e d h i m to set the manuscript aside for m o r e sober reflection.

[30]

Iν

Vathway to TDuveen

E

A R L Y in 1906, while Berenson was still bogged down in the revision of the North Italians, the dismaying news reached him that Roger Fry was to become curator of paintings at the Metropolitan. It was a severe blow to his pride. However unlikely it was that he would have accepted the post, the offer would at least have assured him that he was desired and appreciated by his "homeland." One of his correspondents, the literary critic John J a y Chapman, gave a further turn to the screw by subsequently writing that the Metropolitan was " b o o m ing with Fry as curator" and that Berenson would be wise to "make another pilgrimage" to the United States. Further embarrassment struck closer home. The prefetura (magistrate) of Florence summoned him to appear at a hearing concerning the Loschi "Giorgione" (Christ Bearing the Cross), which Mrs. Gardner had acquired through him in 1898. The townspeople of Vicenza, who had been promised the painting as a legacy, had discovered that it had been sold abroad and that a copy had been secretly substituted. Since the painting was part of Italy's artistic patrimony, the authorities were now seeking to know who had smuggled it out of the country. Berenson was able to extricate himself by explaining, what was in fact true, that the picture had been sold to an Italian agent who had himself exported it. In any case, as it turned out, the statute of limitations had safely run its course. In the midst of these annoyances came the welcome news that Glaenzer had disposed of a Lotto which the Berensons owned to an American dealer for $9,000, double what it had cost them. Ironically, Berenson learned that he owed a "vote of thanks" to Roger Fry for having urged the purchase of the painting upon the dealer. Excited by the "windfall," Mary was all for buying a motorcar, but Bernhard more prudently decided to apply the profit to reducing his debt at Baring Brothers for the [31]

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$10,000 with which he had tried to set up his brother in business. Berenson's relations with Glaenzer were now very close, and Glaenzer pressed him to get "some more good pictures," the kind "not too difficult" for the average buyer to understand. He could have sold a half dozen, he said, " o f the pleasing quality of the Lotto." The latest fad in America, he pointed out, "is the primitives. . . . Yesterday Corots, etc., etc., the day before Bougereau, etc., etc., today primitives! Y e gods what a farce!" One of their negotiations concerned an important Van Dyck on which Berenson had a lead. Glaenzer authorized Berenson to offer up to 150,000 lire ($30,000) and proposed paying him a commission of either 10 percent of the purchase price or 25 percent of the net profit. Berenson evidently chose the latter, for Glaenzer wrote, " Y o u may be quite sure I will not give it a w a y . " He also appreciated learning of "another great find," two Canalettos, and promptly sent on the funds to close the deal for them. Social life in Florence may frequently have seemed dull to Berenson after the glittering capitals of the world, but there were providential exceptions that spring of 1906. A high point of the season was a formal dinner party at the magnificent Villa La Doccia of Henry White Cannon, president of the Chase National Bank. There Berenson, elegant in white tie and tails, met John D. Rockefeller's partner James Stillman, who, he learned, traveled in a caravan of two automobiles, the second one loaded with spare tires. The Easter holidays filled I Tatti with gaiety when youngjohn Maynard Keynes and Geoffrey Scott came down from Cambridge and Oxford and " r o m p e d " with Mary's daughters. Even "Uncle Bernhard" took to the young collegians. Scott, intellectual and asceticlooking, made a particularly strong impression on Mary, which was to linger on with ultimately devastating results. Throughout the season the bustle of entertaining and impromptu musicales filled the parlors. Tall, unconventional, and uncouth, Trevy put in an appearance with his agreeably cultivated Dutch wife, whose violin playing stirred her hearers. Mary's brother, Logan, was again quietly established as a house guest among his books on the top floor. Leo Stein, full of psychoanalytic chatter, was a frequent visitor and would often come over for lunch with his monumental sister Gertrude and be joined by Hutchins Hapgood, a radical journalist, and his novelist wife, Neith. The Steins made themselves at home in the library where, squatting upon the floor, they calmly smoked their cigars. Bernhard and Mary found this curious group of originals strangely pleasant. T o Bernhard's relief, however, the improvident Hapgoods, who had camped untidily at I Tatti, finally retreated to the nearby Villa Linda. Lunching at Gabriele D'Annunzio's villa one day, Bernhard met the poet's new mistress, Marchesa Carlotta Pasolini, who devoted herself to [32]

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B e r e n s o n to such g o o d effect that he c a m e a w a y " l i k e a m a n in a d r e a m , " able o n l y to gasp, " O h M a r y , w h a t a w o n d e r f u l w o m a n ! W h a t a sublime creature! T h e r e is no one like h e r ! " T h e marchesa, a m o d e l o f frank speaking, had talked as critically o f her l o v e r as had Bernhard, d e p l o r i n g " h i s v u l g a r i t y , his sordid, u n w o r t h y ambition, his lack o f artistic res t r a i n t . " O n l y B e r n h a r d , she v o w e d , " c o u l d help h i m see s t r a i g h t . " In A p r i l L a d y Sassoon's g r o w i n g attachment for B e r e n s o n b r o u g h t her to Florence w i t h her y o u n g son Philip, and B e r e n s o n a c c o m p a n i e d t h e m in her m o t o r c a r to A r e z z o and to an exhibition at Perugia. N o sooner had L a d y Sassoon departed than M r s . Peter C o o p e r H e w i t t and her party arrived to take h i m o f f o n a t h r e e - w e e k t o u r o f the art cities b e t w e e n V e n i c e and M i l a n in her l u x u r i o u s a u t o m o b i l e , w h i c h ran as " s m o o t h l y and quietly as a y a c h t . " T o o b l i g e h i m she detoured to m a n y r e m o t e localities w h i c h he needed t o visit for the North Italian Lists. H e g o t back f r o m M i l a n in early M a y to find the villa in an uproar. A fire had b r o k e n o u t the e v e n i n g b e f o r e in an upstairs r o o m w h e r e servants had been b o i l i n g the l a u n d r y . Fortunately b o o k s , notes, paintings, and p h o t o g r a p h s had been hurried o u t o n the terrace b y the servants and n e i g h b o r s alerted b y the tolling o f the San M a r t i n o bell. T h e fire b r i g a d e s u m m o n e d b y telephone f r o m Florence had m a n a g e d to confine the blaze to the o n e r o o m , so that o n l y the linen w a s lost, t h o u g h the r o o m and the r o o f a b o v e it w e r e ruined. B e r e n s o n , m o m e n t a r i l y in an ascetic m o o d , t o o k the m i s a d v e n t u r e w i t h u n w o n t e d calm. T h e first thing he said w a s , "Oh

Mary,

i f o n l y it had all been burnt up, h o w free w e

should

h a v e b e e n . " L i k e M a r y w h e n she had had to auction her m o t h e r ' s surplus b e l o n g i n g s , he t o o had his m o m e n t s o f being oppressed

by

"things." T h e arrival o f L u c i e n H e n r a u x and his b r o t h e r A l b e r t in late M a y w i t h a " s p l e n d i d n e w 50 h o r s e p o w e r m o t o r " for a tour o f the A b r u z z i p r o m ised heavenly delight, t h o u g h u n f o r t u n a t e l y the chauffeur b r o u g h t o n l y f o u r spare tires. T h e travel in the c o u n t r y b e y o n d the s n o w c a p p e d G r a n Sasso t o o k t h e m into scenery that surpassed all expectation,

leading

B e r n h a r d to r e m a r k that they w e r e e n d i n g w h e r e m o s t p e o p l e begin, " t r a v e l l i n g for s c e n e r y . " E a c h r e m o t e hilltop had its picturesque fortress, and in one village beside a m o u n t a i n stream fifty miles f r o m the nearest railroad, they discovered a signed Florentine picture that they t h o u g h t justified B e r n h a r d ' s " m o s t disputed a t t r i b u t i o n s , " his assignment o f a w h o l e series to Pier Francesco Fiorentino. T h e r o u g h m o u n t a i n roads exacted their tribute, and as one p u n c t u r e f o l l o w e d another they invented an appropriate saint for their p r a y e r s — S a n t a C a u c c i u (of rubber), her e m b l e m , a p a l m in her hand and a w h e e l and a pair o f g o g g l e s ; her litany, " S a n t a C a u c c i u ora p r o r o t i s " (Saint o f R u b b e r pray for the w h e e l rims). A n o t h e r saint h a d to be i n v e n t e d w h e n entrance w a s balked at churches

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and provincial galleries because the keys had been carried off, Santa Clavina (of the keys), but she proved "less propitious." Placci added a saint for the inaccessible waterclosets, Santa Acquaclocina. But in the end all saints failed them. The "splendid motor" expired fifty miles south of the Gran Sasso, and they made their way cross-country by rail through Aquila and Terni, where, always on the hunt, they found an unknown Antoniazzo Romano. Back at I Tatti again with the full summer of 1906 upon them, the time had come to revisit the galleries of Germany in order to check the Lists for the North Italians. Mary insisted it was their duty, but Bernhard resisted, declaring he hated the work and hated Germany, and that he wished the materials had been burned in the fire. T o test the genuineness of his protests, Mary said that they had been—whereupon he promptly announced he would go to Germany by himself. The subterfuge convinced Mary that he was really keen to finish the book in spite of his "year-long protestations," though she suspected he was clever enough to have seen through her ruse. Underneath his moods there seemed to lurk some inexplicable malady. Dr. Giglioli could only diagnose his trouble as anxiety and prescribe getting the book " o f f his mind." Travel, as always, revived him. Everywhere they went they were welcome guests. At Cracow the leader of the Galician parliament entertained them at his palace, where they "conoshed" his collection of paintings for three exhausting hours. They pressed on to Vienna and then to Budapest, where the director of the gallery had put Berenson's attributions under all the pictures, attributions which, in many cases, he had long since abandoned. Earlier at their castle near Nimburg the prince and princess of T h u m and Taxis had lavished attention upon them for a few luxury-filled days. In spite of fervent resolves not to do so, Bernhard was unable to resist the temptation to expertize for them the obscure paintings on the walls. In the Berlin galleries the pair worked "like slaves," five solid exhausting hours a day. Then with all their notes in hand Mary departed for England near the end of July and Bernhard proceeded to St. Moritz. While still in Germany he received birthday greetings from Abie, who lamented that he might be happy if he were able to pay the interest on Bernhard's generous loan. T o this Bernhard remonstrated, " I f only I could see you well, fairly prosperous and happy, I would be more than delighted never to see a cent of the money I lent you. . . . D o not bother about paying the interest until you can perfectly well spare it. . . . Remember, I am first and last your brother, and not your creditor." When in the following year "disaster" overtook the Cohn brothers in the Springfield business in which Abie had put the money, Bernhard urged him to salvage what he could of it. He was directing Baring Brothers, he [34]

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wrote, to send a draft to cover the family needs, and would continue to do so if Abie's situation did not mend. There was no more talk of the loan. Again at St. Moritz life fell into its customary pattern. Mary, pleasantly occupied at Friday's Hill with a contingent of young college men, read with complacence of Bernhard's forays into the mountains with friends like the Baronne Lambert and her husband and Edmond Rothschild. Madame Lambert is "some inches taller than I am and much bigger round," he acknowledged, but "divertingly flirtatious." Mrs. Potter Palmer made a striking appearance, but he found her conversation boring when she talked about "culture and taste." Yet she was interesting when she spoke of "Chicago and business and politics, for all of which she has a good head." There was the usual festival dance and the usual scandal. One tidbit was that Enrico Caruso beat out Umberto Serristori for the Villa Campi, having bought it for his mistress. Mary laced her daily chronicles with her own budget of gossip. One of the most piquant items came from Geoffrey Scott, who was visiting her with Maynard Keynes. He told her that all the N e w College men at Oxford are "dreaming of each other and failing to pass their examinations." He confessed that he liked girls in pictures but they seemed to him "to be lacking in promise." This was one of the first of his many intimate confessions to which she was to listen with increasing sympathy. Though St. Moritz provided an agreeable change for Bernhard with " n o picture seeing" and " n o gallery directors" camped on his doorstep, business nevertheless pursued him to the mountain paradise. It was while he was at St. Moritz that he negotiated the first purchase of a painting for John Graver Johnson, the Philadelphia collector who became his most important American client after Mrs. Gardner. Bernhard wrote Mary that Johnson had bought "a deliciously colored" St. Jerome from a Viennese dealer for a few hundred dollars which he had recommended to him as a possible Spanzotti. Johnson, a self-made aristocrat, represented the innermost circle of economic power in America, and at their meeting in Philadelphia in 1904 Berenson had been deeply impressed by his sophisticated taste. When Berenson began to recommend pictures to him, he envisaged him as a kind of benefactor. He assured him that he "had no pecuniary interest whatever in the pictures I urge upon you, nor do I hanker after any reward. But if without putting yourself out you let me know occasionally of a 'good thing' in the way of investments I should be grateful." Berenson had had a very gratifying experience with a "good thing" when, early in 1906, he sold the Tonopah gold-mining stock that the financier Gayley had suggested he buy during his visit to N e w York. The stock, which had cost S700, sold for $7,600. At first when Berenson suggested pictures to Johnson, he directed him [35]

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straight to the owners. Highly appreciative of his help, Johnson insisted on sending a liberal "honorarium." The "embarrassed" Berenson replied that when he asked for "tips" on the market, he had "meant that and nothing else." " O n the other hand," he continued, "after the way you put it in your last letter, it would be churlish of me to refuse your money." Thereafter Johnson regularly sent "honoraria" and Berenson regularly accepted them, though as time went on, despite his assurances, Berenson came to have a pecuniary interest in some of the pictures he recommended. Close as were Johnson's relations with Berenson, he was far too resourceful a collector to rely on only one agent. Herbert Home also scouted for him and may well have procured even more paintings for him than did Berenson. Roger Fry acted for him as early as 1905 and was paid fees and reimbursed for expenses. Professor Langton Douglas, who was an avowed dealer, regularly took from him a 10 percent profit. Berenson's initial relation with the Agnew firm of London illustrates the temptations inherent in the art trade. After Berenson became acquainted in 1906 with David Croal Thomson, a junior partner in the Agnew firm, he recommended their Piero di Cosimo to Johnson. Thomson thereafter wrote Berenson, " M y senior partner is very firmly of the opinion that a proper honorarium must be paid you, simply by way of acknowledging the service you have done the f i r m . " Soon afterward, Lockett Agnew, the senior partner, wrote to Berenson, "This should be looked on by us all as a first swallow in the coming summer making business with you which w e shall welcome heartily." The firm proposed another expedient the next year when Johnson acquired a Callisto Piazza on Berenson's recommendation: Agnew's notified him that they were assigning him a "confidential credit" of $375. B y the first of September 1906 the chic hotels of the Upper Engadine in the Swiss Alps were largely deserted, and Berenson, restless to be on the move again, proceeded south to Nervi to make his peace with the faithful Donna Laura Gropallo, who was annoyed that her recent laudatory article on his career had failed to please him. Though unsuccessful as a playwright, she had great personal charm and her lovely estate above the sea delighted the nature lover in Berenson. The reconciliation effected, he stopped briefly in nearby Genoa to check his ever-lengthening Lists before going on to Venice for a much-delayed rendezvous with Mrs. Gardner. Her bank account revitalized, she demanded to be shown "a few things." Though she was sixty-six, Mrs. Gardner's driving energy was too much for him, and the week's activities left him worn out by her "egotism, her monstrous vanity, her utter lack of consideration." The "secret of her perpetual youth," he theorized, "is that she is a vampire and feeds on one young person after another." Yet, when shortly afterward she joined Bernhard and Mary at I Tatti for a few days, they [36]

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g a v e w a y to her c h a r m . " S h e m a k e s m e feel she adores m e , "

Mary

confessed, " t h e w i l y old C i r c e ! W e sat o u t in the m o o n l i g h t till nearly m i d n i g h t , s i m p l y revelling in her s o c i e t y . " T h e Baronne Lambert arrived o n this scene o f felicity "as jealous as a w i l d c a t " to find M r s . G a r d n e r m o n o p o l i z i n g Bernhard's

attentions.

M r s . G a r d n e r held the field w i t h " h e r v e r y s w e e t v o i c e and e x t r e m e l y w a r m and s y m p a t h e t i c e y e s , " b u t M a r y felt that B e r n h a r d w a s far f o n der o f M m e . L a m b e r t , w h o s e affection seemed m o r e genuine than that o f the self-absorbed mistress o f F e n w a y C o u r t . It w a s n o t a m o m e n t , h o w ever, f o r h i m t o assert a preference.

M a r y reflected, " W e o w e

so

m u c h to Mrs. Gardner really w e can never think o f her w i t h o u t gratitude." T h e i r f e u d i n g guests h a v i n g left, B e r n h a r d and M a r y set o f f for Paris early in O c t o b e r , she to " b a p t i z e " a collection o f " h o r r i b l e " p h o t o g r a p h s for S a l o m o n Reinach b e f o r e j o i n i n g her d a u g h t e r Karin, w h o required an operation o n her ear, B e r n h a r d to tackle the Brancaccis about the V e l a s quez w i t h w h i c h he had t e m p t e d M r s . G a r d n e r nearly t w o years before. She w a s n o w eager to m a k e the acquisition. T h e hard-featured princess, he w r o t e , d e m a n d e d a m i l l i o n francs ($200,000), but her husband, " w h o still has his w i t s a b o u t h i m , " agreed to take 500,000. R o g e r F r y , he told her, w a s said to w a n t the painting for the M e t r o p o l i t a n and M r s . Potter P a l m e r w a s another c o m p e t i t o r . T h e n , w i t h a p r e m o n i t i o n perhaps o f the vulnerable nature o f the attribution, he uttered the caution,

"Of

course, I m a y c o n c l u d e that the picture t h o u g h w o n d e r f u l is not V e l a s q u e z . " B u t M r s . G a r d n e r ' s m i n d w a s already m a d e u p and she w a s in n o m o o d for d o u b t s . T h e w e l c o m e w o r d came, " T h e picture is y o u r s . " L o n g accepted as an a u t o g r a p h portrait, Pope Innocent X in recent years has been ascribed b y Philip H e n d y as m o r e p r o b a b l y b e l o n g i n g to the "school o f Velasquez." H a v i n g secured the V e l a s q u e z o f f e r , B e r e n s o n left for M a d r i d as cicerone to L a d y Sassoon and her c o m p a n i o n M r s . Leslie, a w i d o w w h o w a s a m e m b e r o f the international set and the reputed mistress o f the d u k e o f C o n n a u g h t . T h e w a y they " c o d d l e m e is a l m o s t l a u g h a b l e , " he reported. Spain b r o u g h t r e w a r d s , h o w e v e r , b e y o n d the g r a t i f y i n g attentions o f his t w o l o v e l y charges. T h e cathedral at T o l e d o surprised h i m w i t h its b e a u t y : " T h e light plays u p o n the w a r m stone . . . and a b o v e all [on] the l o n g spacious side aisles and suspends one's breath in e c s t a s y . " In his hypersensitive state even the familiar P r a d o astonished h i m , t h o u g h the light

was

bad

"and

most

o f the

pictures

looked

chilled

and

shivering." A f t e r he finished taking his notes, he g a v e h i m s e l f up to pure e n j o y ment. " I revelled again as in m y earliest d a y s o v e r the early Titian ' B a c chanal.' " T h e y loitered l o n g b e f o r e V e l a s q u e z ' dramatic Surrender of Breda, and e v e n L a d y Sassoon, w h o used to gallop t h r o u g h the galleries, s l o w e d her pace. " P o o r dear, she is so h u m b l e , so t o u c h i n g , " he c o n f i d e d [37]

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to M a r y , " o n e can't help l o v i n g h e r . " H e got permission to return after closing time to lose h i m s e l f f o r hours in contemplation o f the Surrender of Breda, perhaps the m o s t f a m o u s representation o f a historical scene. A dozen feet in breadth, the painting o f the opposed ranks and serried lances e v o k e s all the d r a m a and pathos o f that episode o f 1 6 2 5 w h e n the brother o f the prince o f O r a n g e b o w e d in defeat b e f o r e the Spanish general. " M y eyes sank deeper into the c a n v a s , " B e r e n s o n w r o t e . " A l m o s t I disappeared into it as the sage in the C h i n e s e story. It is as a specific painting the greatest picture I have ever seen; f o r all that I mean b y tactile values I have n e v e r seen the equal t h e r e o f . " M r s . G a r d n e r w a s w a i t i n g f o r h i m w h e n he returned to Paris early in N o v e m b e r , eager to take possession o f the Velasquez f o r w h i c h , as she w r o t e M a r y , she had put $ 1 0 0 , 0 0 0 , " m y life's b l o o d , " to B e m h a r d ' s account at B a r i n g B r o t h e r s . T h e painting w a s s o o n " s n u g g l y tucked a w a y in a b o x in her hotel r o o m , " she told " D e a r B i b i , " pending arrangements to spirit it out o f the country. T h e V e l a s q u e z " P o p e " n o w safely M r s . G a r d n e r ' s , B e r e n s o n crossed to E n g l a n d to rejoin M a r y . Fortunately one o f the B e r e n s o n s ' L o n d o n friends had m a d e her c o m f o r t a b l e house at 36 K e n s i n g t o n Square available to them f o r a fortnight, but the place w a s hardly m o r e than an elegant b i v o u a c , f o r they p r o m p t l y ran up to O x f o r d , B e r n h a r d to visit Gilbert M u r r a y and Bertie Russell and M a r y to d e v o t e herself to G e o f f r e y Scott. B a c k in L o n d o n they dined w i t h L a d y Sassoon and M r s . Leslie to " m e e t all the nice people . . . that could be r a i s e d " — f r o m f o r m e r p r i m e minister A r t h u r B a l f o u r and V i s c o u n t M o r l e y to art critic Sir L i o n e l C u s t and E d g a r Vincent. Since B e r n h a r d w a s " v e r y t h i c k " w i t h L a d y Sassoon, M a r y had r o s y visions o f her b u y i n g pictures, but the r o m a n t i c B e r n h a r d w a s content to put business aside and surrender h i m s e l f to the pleasures o f the passing m o m e n t . M a r y professed little taste f o r the L o n d o n " s o c i a l w h i r l , " w h i c h , as she w r o t e Senda, " y o u r butterfly brother d r e w m e into. H e w a n t e d m e to like it, but I can't, t h o u g h I daresay I should if I had as m a n y m e n in l o v e w i t h m e as he has ladies!! T h e y h a v e christened h i m 'la seduction de la Cinquantaine' [the f i f t y - y e a r - o l d s ] as m o s t o f his victims are getting o n in y e a r s . " H o w m u c h B e r e n s o n c h a r m e d L a d y S a s s o o n — a n d she h i m — i s the e n g a g i n g burden o f the m a n y letters she w r o t e h i m in the f e w short years o f their intimacy. " T h a n k s to y o u , " she confided, " I believe I do e n j o y beautiful things and k n o w them w h e n I see t h e m . " A f t e r a passing misunderstanding she w r o t e , " Y o u are quite right, our friendship is too precious and w e m u s t not q u a r r e l . " W h e n she read in the Paris Herald that he w a s o f M o n t e s q u i o u ' s circle, she enjoined him, " P l e a s e don't take Y t u r r i ' s [the C o u n t ' s reputed lover] p l a c e ! " H e r thoughts ran out to h i m , affectionate, inconsequential, " B . B . M i o , I a m a w a k e since early d a w n [38]

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and you have been so near me—did you feel it? . . . I think of you in the past, present, and future." Lady Sassoon was not Berenson's client when in the autumn of 1906 she shepherded Bernhard and Mary about Paris in her luxurious carriage to call on art dealers like Spiridon, Brauer, and Sedelmeyer. She appears to have performed a more consequential service, however, by introducing him to the masterful art dealer the thirty-seven-year-old Joseph Duveen, who had achieved a commanding position in the international art-dealing world. Cherubic-looking, smartly tailored, and almost clownishly affable, Duveen had become the first great supersalesman of art. Already tending toward a sleek stoutness, he contrasted sharply with the slimly elegant Berenson. He was four years younger than Berenson, and his brash ebullience made him seem even more youthful. Joseph Duveen was one of twelve children of Joel Joseph Duveen, the head of the firm, which had been founded in the middle of the nineteenth century. Joel, who had recently been knighted, was not a well man; he was to die in 1909 at the age of sixty-six. He had rather favored his enterprising son Joseph above his other seven sons, and Joe had shouldered his way to a dominant position in the firm. In June 1906 he had actually outmaneuvered Morgan by purchasing the Hainauer Collection for $1,250,000, a collection formed under Dr. Bode's guidance. Then, in concert with his uncle Henry, who ran the N e w York branch, he aimed at the equally fabulous Rodolphe Kann Collection. Impatient with the unwieldy size of the firm, in which younger sons swarmed, he and Henry decided to set up in business by themselves. His father, apprised of their schemes, at first threatened to eject his presumptuous eldest son from the firm. This, at least, is how Edward Fowles, who began to work for the firm in 1899 as a junior clerk, recalled the violent controversy. When the dust of the tremendous family quarrel settled, Joe emerged as the victor. He and his uncle secured the exclusive use of the firm's name, "Duveen Brothers," and he quelled sibling rivalry by keeping on three of the younger brothers as well-paid employees. His brother Charles gave up all interest in the firm for a handsome settlement, and the remaining brothers were quieted with regular allowances. If J o e Duveen was ruthless in his methods within the family circle, he was even more ruthless in dealing with competitors in the art trade. Otto Gutekunst wrote to Berenson in 1909, " H o w can we stop the disastrous work of the 'Anti-Christ' Octopus and wrecker Duveen, I don't k n o w . " B y that time J o e Duveen had enlisted Berenson in his campaign to corner the market in Italian Renaissance art, and Berenson's hands were tied. Sam Behrman's account of the first meeting of Berenson and Duveen in his book Duveen reflects the dramatist's flair for a good story, which Berenson in old age may have helped improve. Behrman reports that [39]

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BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

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L a d y Sassoon t o o k B e r e n s o n to the D u v e e n Gallery in B o n d Street to look at the Hainauer Collection. H e had agreed to a c c o m p a n y her on condition that his identity be kept secret. O n e painting so impressed h i m that he e x c l a i m e d to D u v e e n , " I ' l l pay y o u £30,000 f o r i t , " thinking to get it f o r M r s . Gardner. D u v e e n turned to L a d y Sassoon, " T h i s f e l l o w k n o w s too m u c h . " N o t long a f t e r w a r d , h a v i n g guessed B e r e n s o n ' s identity, according to B e h r m a n , D u v e e n invited h i m to b e c o m e his adviser. E d w a r d F o w l e s , in his Memories of Duveen Brothers, tells a m o r e prosaic tale. D u v e e n k n e w that B e r e n s o n had challenged s o m e o f B o d e ' s attributions o f the Hainauer C o l l e c t i o n and he tried to hire the art historian Langton Douglas to check the Italian paintings. When Douglas had to beg o f f because he w a s currently w o r k i n g as an adviser to J . P. M o r g a n , D u v e e n s o u g h t out B e r e n s o n and paid h i m a f i x e d consultancy fee to inspect the paintings. B e r e n s o n " s p e n t three afternoons in the upstairs galleries" and challenged a n u m b e r o f B o d e ' s attributions. Whatever the precise circumstances o f their first meeting, D u v e e n , doubtless a w a r e o f B e r e n s o n ' s international reputation as a connoisseur o f art, proceeded w i t h his c u s t o m a r y dispatch to establish an i n f o r m a l w o r k i n g arrangement w i t h h i m . His first letter to B e r e n s o n , dated f r o m L o n d o n , D e c e m b e r 18, 1906, w a r m l y thanked h i m f o r introducing h i m to M r s . G a r d n e r . " I a m s u r e , " he w r o t e , " i t w i l l lead at s o m e f u t u r e time to pleasant business relations. She is indeed a v e r y charming l a d y . " E a g e r to establish h i m s e l f w i t h her, D u v e e n had an agent bring her " V e l a s q u e z " to L o n d o n f r o m Paris. H e a n n o y e d her, h o w e v e r , w h e n he delayed sending it on to B o s t o n in order to display it to his clientele. Shortly b e f o r e receiving D u v e e n ' s letter, B e r e n s o n m a d e his first reco m m e n d a t i o n o f a painting f o r his consideration. D u v e e n p r o m i s e d to l o o k at it o n his next visit to Paris and then added, " I hope if there is anything y o u at any time w i s h m e to d o f o r y o u in L o n d o n y o u w i l l not f o r g e t that I a m entirely at y o u r d i s p o s i t i o n . " In this cordial fashion an association began that w o u l d endure f o r thirty tension-filled years, during w h i c h D u v e e n ' s aggressive enthusiasms w o u l d frequently grate on B e r e n s o n ' s nerves at least as sharply as M r s . G a r d n e r ' s demands w e r e w o n t to do. T w o years w e r e to g o b y b e f o r e J o e D u v e e n ' s projects w o u l d engross the greater part o f B e r e n son's services as an art expert, and it w a s not until 1 9 1 2 that an elaborate contract spelled out the a m b i g u o u s terms o f their collaboration. U n t i l that date B e r e n s o n dealt w i t h D u v e e n m u c h as he did w i t h the m e m b e r s o f other Paris and L o n d o n f i r m s . N e g o t i a t i o n s w e r e carried on m o r e frequently b y w o r d o f m o u t h than b y letter or cable. O f t e n a transaction w o u l d be so confidential that, to prevent its possible d i s c o v e r y b y a rival dealer, it w o u l d h a v e to be deferred to a private face-to-face meeting. [40]

ν

The "Tourth gospel"

W

I T H the Berensons' return to I Tatti from London in December 1906 it became clear that The North Italian Painters required further tinkering. The manuscript had lain unregarded since Bernhard had put it aside as completed the preceding spring. Reading it together, Mary and Bernhard fell to arguing over its shortcomings, both of them "discouraged and disgusted" with it. Bernhard declared that "if it is really as bad as [your] revolting way of reading makes it sound, [I] certainly won't publish it or anything else about Italian art." They would, Mary reported, "wrangle over it and then laugh, and then pick it to pieces and end by lunch time in collapse from ennui and fatigue." Finally they agreed to work on it separately, Mary making her suggestions in the margin "in the solitude" of her study and he considering them "without heat or passion in the solitude of his." The arrangement worked. They got on "splendidly" with the book, and Mary believed they could finish the revision in a week unless Bernhard " u p and casts it into the fire." He had, she thought, "taken a nervous hatred, owing to his earlier breakdown, to writing about pictures," and she vowed, " I shall never urge him to do it again, once the book is off our hands." That "breakdown" had followed his longsustained labor on the Florentine Drawings. Berenson's mother-in-law agreed with her that she had been too demanding and warned, " I f thee spur him on too far all his machinery may give out and thee will have him a helpless invalid on thy hands." The tidying-up process of the new book continued to nearly the end of December 1906, and then the two collaborators began on the Lists. The "niggling work of verifying all the numbers and references" continued into January. A letter from Putnam complaining of the cost of setting up the Lists so angered Berenson that he vowed he would give the book to [41]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

Bell, and he wrote to Putnam offering to buy back the entire series. The tactic worked. Putnam withdrew his objections. Nothing remained but the writing of the brief preface. That final chore Berenson dated "Settignano, February 1907." Completion of The North Italian Painters brought a return of intellectual panic. Work on the book had quieted for a time Berenson's inordinate desire for some Goethe-like achievement, for some literary work that would dazzle his contemporaries. N o w he resolved he would take time by the forelock, time that seemed to be racing by while inspiration dallied. He would at once begin a new book. He desperately sat at his desk trying to remember what he had meant by "imaginative design," a topic that Mary and Placci had urged as the subject of the new book. Soon he wailed, " A l l is over. What will become of me?" T o quiet the inner turmoil he took a walk in the neighboring woods, from which he returned to say he had crossed the bridge into middle age, though he thought it should be called "Muddle A g e , " for, as Mary noted, "he can't find a single clear idea in his brain." When he went out, she jested, "he was a decrepit moribund young man, but he came back a vigorous infantile Middle-ager." Days passed at I Tatti with a few sentences "squeezed out." Soon these grew to paragraphs and Berenson felt surer of the direction of the new book. He discussed what he was attempting with his former collegemate Professor George Carpenter. In it, he said, he would "explain the thing in pictures that is equivalent to poetry in verse." " 'For heaven's sake,' Carpenter cried, 'stick to pictures and don't touch poetry. N o one would read a word you wrote on anything but pictures.' " As Bernhard flattered himself that he had more to say about literature than about painting, Mary advised him to "bring out the book under another name. It would be great sport." The pair had "very interesting discussions" over the book that reminded Mary " o f earlier days when we were keen and curious," but progress was slow and he was unable to insulate himself from the incessant distractions of their half-nomadic existence. The writing gradually ground to a halt. Whether they were at work at I Tatti, traveling together, or united only through their daily letters, the tensions between Bernhard and Mary erupted at frequent intervals in flashes of recrimination, for each was an extraordinary bundle of suppressed desires for self-fulfillment and neither much given to compromise. His resentments seemed always near the surface and in explosion would ignite her own, though she usually managed to have the last infuriating word. What he found hardest to bear was her grudging and patronizing submission. A typical outburst followed when, some months after the fire, Mary finally settled the claim [42]

THE

" F O U R T H

GOSPEL'

against the insurance company for £100, much of it to go for the lawyer's fee. When Bernhard flew into a rage at the meagerness of the settlement, Mary took refuge in the woods, and on her return at lunch she read him a lecture on his ingratitude. He was making it "extremely unpleasant" for her to "take the practical burdens off his shoulders." It made her "loathe that sort of w o r k . " He angrily pushed away his plate and fumed, "Well, go on loathing i t . " The storm passed as always, the frequent quarrels followed as frequently by affectionate armistices. It was mainly the disappearance of romance in their union that Mary regretted. It seemed so flat to be "merely friendly and devoted" and going on "with unsaid dissatisfactions and grievances." Bernhard required more devotion than she could give, she said, and yet she insisted she was fond of him and prized his conversation above that of any other person. His feeling for her was even more difficult to gauge, mixed as it was with his dependence on her as secretary and assistant. The differences between them were perhaps unbridgeable. Mary yearned always to "escape into new lands of youth," which—Friday's Hill having been given u p — n o w centered in Logan's home at Iffley near Oxford. Deprived of part of her loyalty, Bernhard resented having to share her with her family and her university proteges. At St. Moritz, even in the midst of idle flirtations, he would reassert his claims by ending his daily chronicle, " M o r e and more thine." As for unfulfilled Mary, at forty-two she could tell her mother, " I think if I had another child I should be quite happy, but nothing could induce Bernhard to have one!" IN FEBRUARY Bernhard had to go to Rome on business, as upset about it "as if he were starting for the North Pole." He dared not delay, for his expensive household and circle of dependents strained all calculation. The annual statement from his London banker, Baring Brothers, showed an alarming drain of funds, and husband and wife anxiously reviewed the past year's expenses. Somehow more than $17,000 had slipped through their fingers. O f that total $2,000 had gone to Bemhard's family and a like sum to Mary's children. This left "some £2700 [$13,500] which went for ourselves, books, pictures, traveling, charities, household, personal expenses," about £1,200 more than their investment income. This season they were being bailed out by Mrs. Gardner's purchase of the Velasquez, which would yield $10,000 from the seller alone, 10 percent of the purchase price. T r y as she might, Mary had no aptitude for retrenchment, and as for Bernhard, the love of luxury had become second nature. In Paris he now regularly took lodging at the Ritz. Expenses seemed always to outrun income. Mary would tell him that she knew they were spending too [43]

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· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

much. "Can't we arrange a better scheme? . . . Thee has brains, do think it out." Think as hard as he could, he had but one resource, the art market. Soon he was to lament to Mrs. Gardner, "I have become a society lounger and money grubber and God knows what. It brings one in contact with the most distressingly odious people in the whole world, the dealers." Mrs. Gardner was all sympathy. She was disturbed that he must "make money. . . . Y o u are not that kind and should always be under a shower of gold." The shower would come, but with it inescapable bondage. The Berensons' addiction to automobiling became even more fixed when Placci's affluent nephew joined them in the spring of 1907 to hunt for more paintings and picturesque scenery. In May they roamed about Apulia to the very tip of the heel of Italy, Berenson bursting with nervous energy as always when on the trail of paintings and wearing out his companions in the process. Mary, who had already spent a month with Karin in England at Eastertime to oversee two more operations on her ear, had to leave the party to receive her and her doctor at I Tatti.· Once again Bernhard was left without her indispensable help and with only the comfort of her apology for not being able to attend to "all thy business letters and affairs." Vehement as Bernhard's frequent outbursts against mere connoisseurship may have been, his desire to expand and revise his Lists remained an obsession that was to stay with him to the end of his life. In July he motored about England in further search of unrecorded Italian paintings "in great houses." Much as he delighted in the beauty of the country estates, he felt the landed gentry of England still clung to feudal ideas which would take a lot öf dynamite to stir. " I f intellect were all," he declared to Mary, " I should apply the dynamite myself. But is it all?" It was gratifying nonetheless to come upon a Pordenone, a Masaccio, and a Pesellino predella treasured by these feudal relics. In August, as he wrote Senda, he plunged into "the same old ridiculous life" at the Hotel Caspar Badrutt in St. Moritz. " I am getting too old to enjoy this spectacle of perpetual romping," he told her, "and that is about all the smart young people seem up t o . " There was no mention of Montesquiou, w h o remained in France this season, evidently occupied with his newest exotic book, Le Chancelier des Fleurs, Douze Stations d'Amitie. The copy he gave Berenson would be inscribed: " A Bernhard Berenson, en souvenir et en remerciement d'une bonne parole dans une mauvaise heure: une mauvaise heure qui ne passera point; une bonne parole qui durera [in remembrance and gratitude of a good word in an evil hour: an evil hour which will not pass; a kind word which will endure]." Berenson missed his company. One summer after his depar[44]

THE

"FOURTH

GOSPEL'

ture he had written him that he regretted his absence "as I have never regretted [that o f ] anyone else. I am y o u r devoted slave, the true disciple o f the parable." Fortunately, other friends w e r e nearby to divert him, the Serristoris, Placci, the Rudinis, G l a d y s D e a c o n — l o v e l i e r than ever and more " m a t u r e " — a n d the enigmatic Florence Blood, the inseparable c o m panion o f the Princess G h i k a at the Villa Gamberaia up in Settignano. T h e philosopher Charles Strong, his collegemate, w h o had married a Rockefeller daughter, s h o w e d up and he and Berenson " m e t a p h y s i c i s e d " together. B u t it was L a d y Sassoon, " h i s latest and m o s t ardent flame," w h o n o w mainly engrossed Bernhard's affections. A t Easter M a r y had written sympathetically to him, " I hope thee w i l l find her all thee could wish. I don't feel that anything w o u l d be taken a w a y f r o m me, even i f thee gave her a great deal o f thy l o v e . " She had assured h i m that if suffering came, " I shall sympathize w i t h thee dear for I begin to l o v e thee as thee, not o n l y thee as m y c o m r a d e . " His first letter to M a r y f r o m St. M o r i t z told o f his delight in Lady Sassoon. H e found her " a p o l o g e t i c " and " a f f e c t i o n a t e , " and yet he kept saying .to himself, " I a m w a s t i n g m y t i m e . " H e was also flattered, as always, b y the attentions o f G l a d y s D e a c o n , and he rehearsed her blandishments for M a r y : " S h e said I w a s always right, and I was so playful, so g a y , so w i t t y , in brief there w a s no one like m e . " While e n j o y i n g his holiday at St. M o r i t z , he was shocked to learn that under a n e w l a w passed in M a r c h 1907 an alien-born A m e r i c a n w h o absented himself f r o m the country for m o r e than five years w a s presumed to have lost his citizenship and his right to a passport. H e w r o t e in outrage to his sister Senda, " T h e w o r s t o f it is . . . that I, brought up in the most A m e r i c a n w a y , and considering m y s e l f an A m e r i c a n o f A m e r i cans, a m made to feel that because I a m alien born and residing abroad, A m e r i c a means to d i s o w n me. T h a t w o u l d be an irony o f fate, for repeatedly I m i g h t have profited b y b e c o m i n g a British subject, and repelled the idea as apostasy. I suppose it is v e r y old-fashioned to be sentimental about one's national allegiance, but it w i l l cost m e real pain to exchange m y A m e r i c a n for British citizenship." H e reluctantly asked M a r y to m a k e the necessary arrangements in L o n d o n . M a r y reported that although he w o u l d not have to appear in person to be naturalized, there w e r e various f o r m s w h i c h she w o u l d have to bring for h i m to execute. H e soon repented his indignant haste and decided to postpone further action until he should revisit the U n i t e d States in 1908 and attempt in person to rebut the humiliating " p r e s u m p t i o n " in W a s h i n g t o n itself. T h e British naturalization w a s therefore " a b o r t e d " but not w i t h o u t considerable expense. W h e n the bill came M a r y said, " I feel as i f drops o f b l o o d w e r e o o z i n g out o f m e . " [45]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

M A K I N G

OF

A

L E G E N D

THE PROOF sheets for the North Italians, which had begun pouring in from Putnam in June, pursued him to St. Moritz in August. The book, 159 pages of text and 182 pages listing the paintings, finally appeared late in November 1907, having gone through the most difficult gestation of the series. The elan which had accompanied the writing of the volumes on the Venetian, Florentine, and Central Italian painters had been missing, for the northern schools, with the exception perhaps of Mantegna and Correggio, had produced no one of really first rank, no one who met the high requirements of Berenson's theory of serious art. He recapitulated that theory in the final section of the new book. " A l l arts," he declared, "are compounded of ideated sensations, no matter through what medium conveyed, provided they are communicated in such wise as to produce a direct effect of life-enhancement. . . . In figure painting, the type of all painting, the principal if not sole sources of life-enhancement a r e TACTILE VALUES, MOVEMENT, a n d SPACE COMPOSITION, b y w h i c h I

mean ideated sensations of contact, of texture, of weight, of support, of energy, and of union with one's surroundings." The North Italian Painters, following the pattern set by the preceding books of the series, examined critically the work of the leading members of each of the northern schools. Berenson acknowledged that the North Italian artists had their particular excellences but pointed out that in every case these were overburdened by their faults. Altichieri of Verona's "gift of direct observation" was accompanied by an "exaggerated love of costume and finery." Pisanello observed details even more closely and subtly than Altichieri, but his talent was deflected by his admiration of the trappings of "the sunset of Chivalry." Like all their fellows of the northern schools, these two artists were "apt to be out of tone spiritually" with the vitalizing forces of the Renaissance which inspired the triumphs of Michelangelo, Raphael, Giorgione, and Titian. Andrea Mantegna's naive, romantic passion for antiquity, for example, led him to Romanize Christianity in his paintings to the delight of "an overLatinized Europe," whereas his Florentine contemporaries, unfettered by a desire to imitate antiquity, rendered its historical themes in a "pure Tuscan" idiom. Each of the remaining array of painters—Cosimo Tura, Cossa, Ercole Roberti, Moroni, Liberale, and their fellows—fell short in one respect or another of meeting the requirements of serious art. Thus the Milanese artists' besetting sin—"prettiness"—the source at once of their inferiority and their popularity, was the result of a failure to achieve that "perfect harmony between tactile values (form) and movement" from which beauty is born. "Prettiness," Berenson explained, "is all that remains of beauty when the permanent causes of the sensation are removed." [46]

THE

"FOURTH

GOSPEL'

O f the entire group o f the N o r t h Italians C o r r e g g i o came closest to genuine mastery. His m o s t distinguishing trait was " a sensitiveness to the charm o f f e m i n i n i t y . " H e surpassed Raphael as a "finer and subtler master o f m o v e m e n t , " and at his best " h i s contours [were] soft and flowing as only in the m o s t exquisite o f eighteenth century paintings." H e too, however, fell short o f greatness. H e lacked "self-restraint and e c o n o m y , " and the excess o f m o v e m e n t in his paintings often confused the eye. T h e shortcomings o f these m a n y artists foreshadowed the twilight o f Renaissance art. T h e final section o f the b o o k , " T h e Decline o f A r t , " sounded an elegiac note. " A r t f o r m is like a rolling p l a t f o r m , " bearing successively action and reaction. T h e golden age o f Italian painting recorded in the four volumes had passed. Great art could return only w h e n the entire g r a m m a r o f art should again be employed and artists should "again attain tactile values and m o v e m e n t b y observing the corporeal significance o f objects and not their ready-made aspects." In the three and a h a l f centuries that had passed since the flowering o f the Renaissance, Italy had " b r o u g h t forth thousands o f clever and even delightful painters" but had "failed to produce a single great artist." The North Italian Painters was widely and favorably reviewed. In N e w Y o r k the Independent applauded it as being part o f the " b e s t appraisement that has appeared in English o f Renaissance painting" and " t h e best o f antidotes for Ruskin's intoxicating rhapsodies," and the Outlook r e c o m mended it as containing "as m u c h value as may be found in any o f the season's p u b l i c a t i o n s . " T h e L o n d o n Spectator thought it " a pleasant relief f r o m the ordinary art criticism o f the day which has b e c o m e too m i c r o s c o p i c . " Franz W i c k h o f f in the Viennese art j o u r n a l Kunstgeschichtliche Anzeigen praised the b o o k ' s stimulating quality. T h e sections on M a n tegna and C o r r e g g i o , he wrote, "surpass thick volumes o f false scientificality [falscher Wissenschaftlichkeit] and o f banal t a s t e . " R o g e r Fry, at his first sight o f the b o o k , wrote to Berenson, " Y o u have surpassed y o u r s e l f . " R e v i e w i n g it in the Burlington Magazine, he praised the appended Lists as having " c o n f e r r e d a benefit upon students which it w o u l d be hard to e x a g g e r a t e . " His reservations about the essays on the individual artists are reminiscent, however, o f M a r y ' s strictures on the cryptic brevity o f much o f Bernhard's writings. It was a relief, Fry acknowledged, to be spared " l o n g w i n d e d and loosely written m o n o g r a p h s , " but B e r e n s o n ' s desire for "condensation and c o m p r e s s i o n " led h i m to apply t o o narrowly the criteria o f his theory, a proceeding that resulted in " a certain a m o u n t o f distortion and e x a g g e r a t i o n . " Although Fry t o o k issue with B e r e n s o n ' s too-reductive analysis, he had n o reservations about the " b r i l l i a n t " concluding essay, " T h e Decline o f A r t . " [47]

BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

W h a t e v e r one's agreement o r disagreement w i t h the results o f his approach, F r y stated, there w a s n o question o f " t h e absorbing interest" o f the b o o k . L i k e the other v o l u m e s in the series, The North Italian Painters w a s frequently r e p r i n t e d — e i g h t times in the f o l l o w i n g t w e n t y years. T h e E n g l i s h texts o f the f o u r b o o k s remained almost entirely unrevised. In later years B e r e n s o n quipped that one does not tamper w i t h a classic. In 1 9 3 0 the series w a s gathered into a single v o l u m e — T h e Italian Painters of the Renaissance—the E n g l i s h version o f w h i c h w a s republished ten times in various f o r m a t s , s o m e lavishly illustrated, the latest in 1968. Versions in translation appeared in Italian, G e r m a n , French, D u t c h and Flemish, S e r b o - C r o a t i a n , Russian, S w e d i s h , Japanese, Spanish, and m o s t recently, in 1 9 7 1 , in H u n g a r i a n . T h e f o u r b o o k s o f the series came to be spoken o f as " t h e F o u r G o s p e l s , " and their status as the bible o f Italian art w a s once satirized in s o m e verses the A m e r i c a n poet L e o n a r d B a c o n reported hearing in Florence: Down the Via Tornabuoni March the ranks of Scorpioni,* Reading swiftly as they run Works of Mr. Berenson, Who sits tight in Settignano On his cinquecento ano, Praying for more Scorpioni On the Via Tornabuoni. * Slang for tourist spinsters.

[48]

VI

JIHome

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O

N Saturday, September 14, 1907, Bernhard and Mary finally got together in Paris. Lucien Henraux lent them his motorcar and chauffeur, and in two days they already had six Loire chateaux "tucked under our jackets." Bernhard followed this expedition with a tour with Lady Sassoon in her motor, after which he felt inspired to lecture Mary on the nature of love: "Falling in love hasn't anything necessarily to do with the desire for physical intimacy—quite often that would never be thought of if there wasn't a convention to that effect. . . . But alas so few people have any other kind of intimacy to give but that. They are too self-absorbed, too dishonest, too unconscious of any real inner life. O f course, a spiritual, even intellectual intimacy is far more interesting but this requires character and brains." Bernhard still did not quite know what his feelings were toward Aline Sassoon. She did not "really count" in his life the way, for instance, the Countess Serristori did. He tried explaining to Mary that she was "a cipher which has gained value as ciphers do by numbers placed before it—her wealth, her training, her position—but she remains a cipher all the same, though the total comes to millions." Whatever he meant by the metaphor, he felt closely bound to her, and ardent letters streamed back and forth between them. T o Mary he tried to make light of the affair, but she grew uneasy when some months later she read an opened letter left on his desk addressed to Aline, "a wrong thing to do but I wanted to believe him and yet couldn't," she confessed to her diary. " H e said he had thought and dreamed of no one else while he was at Siena [with Mary] and she must never doubt him, that he was too, too solo. . . . I cannot truthfully say I could write like that to anyone because I am really fonder of Bernhard than anyone else, and Scott, the only male human being I feel much drawn to, is too young. The idea of love o f t h a t sort [49]

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with him is inconceivable but still I am awfully fond of him. . . . Literature has nothing but contempt and scorn for old women growing fond of boys and one reason I do not tell Bernard about it is because he at once uses those hackneyed forms upon me. I could quite as well make fun of his devotion to the brainless fashionable lady—but I don't." That Mary was infatuated with young Geoffrey Scott was quite apparent to Bernhard. When she proposed bringing Geoffrey out to I Tatti, he warned her he would be "extremely put out" if his presence interfered with their work. "Remember I do not enjoy the smashing up of the pleasing illusion that here at least in our home I am first in your heart." They quarreled and made up. He tried to assure her he had nearly forgotten Lady Sassoon, being too busy to dream of her. Mary reflected, "If he wants to keep that side quite sacred he is right to try to do it. I shall not interfere. . . . He is too conventional in certain ways and has too silly and stereotyped a view of women to realize that if he were frank and open I should cheerfully sympathize with him, and even envy h i m . " Her ability to "cheerfully sympathize" with his amorous sufferings, when he did subsequently turn to frankness, was to be severely tried when Lady Sassoon's successors entered his life. While in Paris Bernhard and Mary visited picture dealers and called on Glaenzer to talk affaires, especially concerning the sale of another one of their paintings, a Dosso. They dined with the Steins in their collective stronghold in the rue de Fleurus, where their hosts gave Berenson "a very unflattering portrait of his character." Sally Stein later explained that Leo's critical attitude was inspired by Gertrude and that until two years before he had "perfectly worshipped h i m . " Mary went on ahead to Florence, stopping off at Cavenaghi's in Milan to pick up their much-prized Baldovinetti Madonna and Child, which Cavenaghi had restored. Once settled at I Tatti, she arranged to have the painting put into an impressive frame for hanging in Bernhard's study. Berenson had acquired the picture at the time of the sale of the Panciatichi Collection, attracted to it because he had recently done a great deal of research on Baldovinetti and had published a long analytical article on him and his circle in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Many years later, when he reviewed the Florentine painters, he concluded that the painting was far more important than he had thought and was the work not of Baldovinetti but of his master, Domenico Veneziano. Bernhard's reception at the Villa Trianon was more cordial than ever. Elsie de Wolfe "hugged and kissed him in a way that was not exactly sisterly." She was inordinately happy with her interior-decorating business, had seven assistants, and was paying $3,000 for her office. Bessie Marbury was "more formless than ever," and the talk among the half[50]

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dozen guests was "very brilliant, very gossipy, and nearly w i t t y . " The next day Berenson had a glimpse among the array of guests of Henry Adams—"hard-shelled, soft-pulped, snappy and apologetic as usual." One evening he went off to dine with Senator Francis Warren of W y o ming, "an eponymous and real hero worth several million of us, his guests, but being [the] majority we imposed our values and he got no inning at all." From the Villa Trianon he told of reading the sex sensation of the season, Elinor Glynn's Three Weeks, and then dreaming: " M r s . Grundy is dead. Great Mrs. Grundy is dead." He reread also Anatole France's subtle and delicate Livre de Mon Ami and then glanced at a "far more fascinating" book, "though rude in style and ruder in contents," The Education of Henry Adams, which had been privately issued early in 1907. At the Villa Trianon he also examined a copy of the private first printing of Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres. One passage in that work carried a heavy freight of irony that could not have been lost on him. The precious objects which came from churches, Adams wrote, belonged "almost invariably, if not to the State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized the whole field of art which rests on their degradation." Gross as was the exaggeration, it had its grain of truth certainly in the great Rothschild collections. If Berenson, the apostate J e w , felt the irony of his own devotion to Christian religious painting, he gave no sign of it then or later. BERENSON'S first significant collaboration with Joseph Duveen took place during the summer and autumn of 1907. It unfortunately pitted Mrs. Gardner against J . P. Morgan and led her to so distrust the Duveens that she thereafter refused to do business with them. The previous year Duveen had taken her to see the remarkable Rodolphe Kann Collection in the mansion on the avenue d'lena, a collection which included among its dozen Rembrandts Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. She had been much taken by Castagno's Portrait of a Gentleman and been given oral assurance by Duveen that she should have it when the firm acquired the collection. Kann had died intestate in 1905, having fortunately—for American collectors—left unexecuted a will which would have prohibited the exportation of his collection of art. Morgan, it was reported in the press, had offered five and a half million to the heirs but had balked at having to buy the uncompleted private gallery. Duveen had promptly begun negotiations for the collection, minus the gallery, for Duveen Brothers, and these were concluded in August 1907. Duveen managed to have the price brought down to four and a half million dollars, of which Morgan [51]

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advanced two million dollars on condition that he be given first choice of "some thirty pictures," including the Castagno. Berenson, relying on Duveen's assurances that Morgan had in fact consented to the Castagno's being offered to Mrs. Gardner, proposed it to her for £12,500 along with The Profile of a Lady attributed to Antonio Pollaiuolo from the Hainauer Collection for £12,000. It has been " m y dream and hope," he romanticized of the latter painting, "that this grand work of art would enter your collection. . . . I cannot tell you how highly I prize this marvellous profile." When she hesitated at the double outlay, he urged, "Please be resolute and let no difficulty stop y o u . " When as a final inducement he reported that the Duveens would allow one, two, or more years for payment, she cabled her acceptance of both paintings. The Profile arrived promptly. "Delightfulissima," she exclaimed. " H o w about the Castagno?" Unfortunately, Morgan's release had not yet been obtained. Mrs. Gardner was annoyed that the Duveens had exposed her to "double dealing." She did not care for people " w h o sing differently different days," and, not one to pull someone else's chestnuts from the fire, she abandoned the Castagno—and the Duveens—to Morgan. The Profile of a Lady, which now carries the title A Woman in Green, remained attributed to Pollaiuolo at least until 1943. In Berenson's posthumous List of 1963 it became simply "Florentine." T o Mary the sharpfaced woman seemed "hideous." More charitably Philip Hendy later wrote that the subtly rendered character was "less homely than monumental." J o e Duveen had first urged his uncle Henry to sell the "Pollaiuolo" to Benjamin Altman. Henry declined. He conceded it was a great painting "but I cannot pronounce the name of the artist. . . . I would »» stutter and look foolish. . . . Let B . B . sell it to Mrs. Jack Gardner. Joe Duveen, immensely pleased to have drawn into his net the foremost connoisseur in Europe, courted Berenson's opinions with the greatest deference, but his assurances could not always be relied upon. Berenson had insisted that his name not be used by Duveen when negotiating for paintings, but that injunction was promptly disregarded. Before the end of 1907 Duveen asked him to pass on a reputed Botticelli, the photograph of which he was enclosing. " I have also taken the liberty," he wrote, " o f telling the intermediary . . . that if you like the photograph the picture will be submitted to you. I hope you will forgive me mentioning your name but I will never buy a Florentine School Picture without your advice." So flattered, Berenson made no protest. He advised against the purchase, explaining that the painting was only of the school of Botticelli. Duveen wrote, " I appreciate your kindness very [52]

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much indeed. . . . We have, as you know, the very best customers in the world and w e have to be very careful not to make any mistakes. . . . Therefore the assistance you are giving us in this manner is of enormous value." What cash value Duveen put upon this consultation was not indicated, and there was as yet no mention of a retainer. IF LIFE in Paris and London spun outward in ever-widening professional and social circles, that of I Tatti seemed to reverse the spin, drawing the circumambient world into itself. There on the vine-clad slope of Settignano the Villa I Tatti received under its hospitable roof a growing procession of Berenson's friends and acquaintances. Though still only tenants in their rural domain, the Berensons, after seven years, had made of the place a cosmopolitan crossroads, a center of culture and elegant refinement that seemed as firmly rooted in the Tuscan soil as the olive orchards and vineyards. One of the newer visitors, w h o was to play a major role in the transformation of the villa, was the young architect Cecil Pinsent. The adopted son of their amiable English neighbor, Edmund Houghton, the young man inspired the impressionable Mary to write in her diary: "Cecil Pinsent. Glorious." Otto Gutekunst, the dealer-connoisseur of Colnaghi and Company, came down, and his "bread-and-butter" letter gives an inviting aspect of his hosts. "There was a kind of blushful happiness over you both," he wrote, "and the whole of your castle and her majesty looked superb." Among the more notable callers early in 1907 had been Frank Jewett Mather, J r . , the popular American writer on art, w h o for a time thought to collaborate with Mary to publish her and Bernhard's notes on Italian art. Soon afterward, Bernhard's old friend Ned Warren showed up with his housemate John Marshall in the midst of their tour buying antiques for the Metropolitan. At the end of May J . P. Morgan arrived at Assisi in a motor caravan during a buying tour with Roger Fry. The monks, in something of a frenzy, "bowing and scraping," enveloped Morgan with solicitous attention with the obvious hope of having him buy back their convent. Rumor had it that Morgan had bought all of Prince Strozzi's "rags and tatters for $160,000." Soon after, Fry dined with the Berensons at I Tatti, and though charmed with "Mariechen," he did not warm to Bernhard, who by this time had convinced himself that Fry was something of a charlatan. Fry wrote his wife that B . B . was "quite absurd wanting to catch me out over his pictures. So I said, 'I'm very tired and I'm not even going to try to think of the attributions so will you kindly tell me what you think of them.' That stopped it all, but he still tried to make my ignorance as apparent as he could with very little success." [53]

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On another occasion the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von H o f mannsthal put in an appearance. Count Francesco Papafava, the Italian philosopher and economist, accompanied by his daughter and a certain Contessa Valmarana, joined him at tea. Young von Hofmannsthal, a leader in the new romantic movement in the German drama, had published The Death of Titian in 1892 when only eighteen and had now become the librettist for Richard Strauss. He and Berenson hit it off together as kindred souls, and in characteristic fashion Berenson drew him into his circle. Von Hofmannsthal continued to write to the Berensons until shortly before his death twenty-two years later. Despite the stream of visitors at I Tatti and the recurring sieges of illness, whether bladder trouble for Mary or painful boils and intermittent dyspepsia for Bernhard, there was no letup in their professional activities. With dogged persistence Bernhard would pore over photographs each morning, pencil in hand, forever making his notes. Mary's example and prodding had done their work, and getting something down on paper every day—besides the endless correspondence—had now become an obsession. Since the book on "imaginative design" would no longer march, he took refuge in the Lists. Thus in the autumn of 1907 he informed Trevy, " I am working as hard as I can over the revision of my small books, and the preparation of a volume to comprise Lists and indices to all the Italian paintings known to m e . " The revision proved more of a hope than a reality. The Lists were insatiable of time and effort and engrossed much of his time and Mary's for the next quarter century until, greatly enlarged, they were finally published in 1932 in a single volume titled Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. In early October the artist William Rothenstein descended upon I Tatti at Berenson's invitation to do his portrait. In his Men and Memories Rothenstein described life at I Tatti as he observed it that fall. Scott, his Oxford prizes fresh upon him, "dark-eyed and pale," looked "strikingly like a Botticelli portrait. . . . A wonderful talker, his talk at the Berensons' was something to be remembered. Berenson, too, with his astonishing intellect, delighted in the play of ideas; he could illuminate regions, however remote, not of art only, but also of literature, philosophy, politics, history, ethics, and psychology. And sometimes w e gossiped; for there were armed camps and fierce rivalries in Florence then, as in past times; but the fighting was far less bloody, concerned as it often was with attributions rather than with Ducal thrones. Berenson, Home, Loeser, Vernon Lee, Maud Cruttwell, all had their mercenaries—and their artillery." When the sittings with Rothenstein began, Berenson was again out of sorts with an ailing liver. Rothenstein had asked for two-hour morning [54]

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sittings. B e r e n s o n countered: " I a m a restless and altogether p o o r sitter ...

so y o u m u s t a r m y o u r s e l f w i t h patience and I shall do m y best to

diminish the need t h e r e o f . " B y the end o f O c t o b e r the portrait w a s practically finished. It depicted B e r e n s o n standing half-length in a dark blue cloak, his face in three-quarter profile against a b a c k g r o u n d o f pale blue hills and s k y . T h e " m e l a n c h o l y rather s w e e t e x p r e s s i o n " corresponded, M a r y t h o u g h t , " t o w h a t B . B . thinks he is l i k e . " A t first she t h o u g h t it " v e r y g o o d , " but a m o n t h later she c o n f i d e d that " a b s o l u t e l y NOBODY can e n d u r e " it. B e r n h a r d paid the artist's fee o f £150 w i t h o u t demur. N o d o u b t there w a s a t o o - r o m a n t i c s w a g g e r about the pose and the idealizing e x p r e s s i o n o f the face, but the artist t h o u g h t w e l l o f it. H e e x h i b i t e d the painting the f o l l o w i n g year in E n g l a n d , the Daily

Telegraph

c o m m e n t i n g that it w a s the best thing in the exhibition. T h e i r friend R o b e r t R o s s had reservations. W h e n he told B e r e n s o n that "neither his friends n o r enemies r e c o g n i z e d any likeness in the p o r t r a i t , " B e r e n s o n e x c l a i m e d , " I a m v a i n e n o u g h to e n j o y being exhibited as a portrait b y W i l l R o t h e n s t e i n in the teeth o f F l o p p y F r y and G l o o m s b u r y and all its hosts." B e r e n s o n sent a p h o t o g r a p h o f the portrait to " M i c h a e l F i e l d , " and Field, the niece, w i t h w h o m he w a s still a v e r y great favorite, thanked Rothenstein in her distinctive i d i o m : " S o glad w e are y o u set B e r n h a r d against the spaces o f T u s c a n y — t h e w i d t h and austereness. A sad B e r n h a r d — t h e record o f m u c h n e r v e - s u f f e r i n g in the face, w i t h such sensitive chequer o f clouds about i t . " T o B e r n h a r d h i m s e l f she explained that she had talked to the artist a b o u t h i m as a subject, " t h e entertaining design o f y o u r ear, the floating L u n a - c u r v e s o f y o u r e y e b r o w s , y o u r face a l w a y s e v o k e d w o r d s , w o r d s , w o r d s . . . but w h a t I care for in Rothenstein's portrait is the w i d e abstract c o u n t r y r o u n d y o u and s o m e t h i n g caught in y o u r face and eyes o f the c o u n t r y w h e r e the true B e r n h a r d lives w h i l e his appearance plays w i t h d u c h e s s e s . " W h i l e R o t h e n s t e i n w a s at w o r k o n the portrait, he d r a g g e d o f f the B e r e n s o n s to m e e t G o r d o n C r a i g , the brilliant and erratic scene designer w h o had again established h i m s e l f in Florence. C r a i g w a s surrounded w i t h assistants o f b o t h sexes, all in "barefeet and sandals and square cut b l o u s e s . " T h o u g h he had b r o k e n o f f w i t h Isadora D u n c a n and had left her w i t h their child, Deirdre, she w a s taking part in a p e r f o r m a n c e at the theater. M a r y o b s e r v e d that her g a u z e w a s t o o c r u m p l e d to be transparent and the acetylene lights " s m e l l e d like O l d S c r a t c h . " B e r e n s o n , w h o usually dreaded " a n y t h i n g ' q u e e r , ' " w a s at first intrigued b y C r a i g ' s radical ideas. W h e n C r a i g c a m e to dinner, h a n d s o m e and distinguished l o o k i n g despite his w i d e - o p e n collar and rustic san[55]

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dais, he spoke, in a manner to utterly charm his hosts, of a theater of no words, "nothing but light, form and movement" and of " C u b e s " as actors. He talked of Cubes "with Pythagorean rapture" and tossed back his long hair with a look of inspiration. Encouraged by the Berensons' interest, he soon was on such a footing with them that he proposed they devote their "lives and fortunes" to his revolutionary cause. The Craig menage was "a strange, unconventional, promiscuous household, all free love and flies," as Mary Berenson saw it, and they lived from hand to mouth on the uncertain sale of his etchings. But unconventionality in Florence was not restricted to Craig's villa. Neith Hapgood cited the example of Miss Blood, who had tried to make Neith's husband, Hutchins, fall in love with her and had torn off all her clothes in his presence, displaying her "unattractive nudity." "Let it be a warning," she wrote Mary, "always to keep on at least a chemise." Algar Thorold, their guest in the Villino Corbignano, told them of the extraordinary manners of his set in Florence. For instance, he said, a young woman about to be married "asked in her ignorance what to expect and the Count and Countess gave her a tableau vivant" that left nothing to the imagination. There was also a man "called Pasquale who provides boys, enfants Jesu, for the 'Brotherhood of Pederasts' " who congregated in Florence. N o one of course knew what stock to take in Algar's sensational revelations. Gordon Craig's proposal that the Berensons subsidize his theater effectually quenched their interest in him. He had chosen the wrong moment to approach anyone for financial support, for in mid-October the Panic of 1907 had paralyzed Wall Street. The press predicted that Tennessee Coal and Iron stocks, in which Berenson had shares and which had sold for more than a hundred, was likely to fall to sixty or less. At the height of the crisis J . P. Morgan took command and extracted pledges of $50,000,000 from his banking associates with which to save key institutions from bankruptcy. When Berenson had returned from Paris on the eve of the Panic he was "feeling very poor" because no one would pay him. The Metropolitan Museum owed him £1,800, and about £1,000 more in various ways was due. The Berensons' account in Florence was overdrawn by £800. Their situation was further complicated by the news that their landlord, Lord Westbury, had decided to sell I Tatti. In their despair they first considered a move to England, but the thought of being obliged to live the whole year round in England "with the cold and the dark" was too much for Mary, and England as a permanent residence away from the art treasures of Italy would not have suited Bernhard. Daunted by the thought of still more debts, he w a s " o f a half a [56]

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dozen minds at o n c e . " B u t friends assured them that the property was bound to rise in value and that it could be bought cheap. A week later, on December 8, M a r y reported to her family that they had offered 140,000 francs ($28,000) f o r the place. Their offer was quickly accepted b y L o r d Westbury, w h o had been losing heavily at the gambling tables of M o n t e Carlo. T h e estate included, besides the Villa I Tatti, " t w o poderi [farm tracts] w o r k e d by t w o families w i t h their oxen and horses" and several substantial houses—the carpenter's house alongside the mill on the torrente M e n sola, t w o contadini houses with all their farm outbuildings, and the Villino C o r b i g n a n o a short w a y across on the farther slope. T h e w h o l e comprised perhaps as much as f i f t y acres. T h e y felt they had to buy so much land to prevent its being built up with small villas which w o u l d block their v i e w o f the countryside. T h e Italian transfer tax of 10,000 lire brought the cost to $30,000. M a r y optimistically calculated that the t w o farms w o u l d yield about a thousand francs each, the rent o f the houses another thousand, and if the rent of the villa was figured at four thousand ( " w h i c h it certainly w o u l d be raised to if w e could have taken it on lease"), the total annual value w o u l d be seven thousand francs or £280 ($1,400) a year, " n o t a bad return on £6,000 [$30,000]." T h e y were able to make the purchase as a result o f their intimacy with their banker friend Henry White Cannon. T h r o u g h him they got a loan at "absolutely incredible terms, considering the present crisis," a loan at 6 percent secured b y a mortgage to run f o r sixteen years. It was sufficient to cover the entire purchase price. In spite of M a r y ' s self-serving arithmetic, the purchase w o u l d entail considerable added expense. T h e interest on the mortgage w o u l d be approximately £350 a year and the taxes £200, as against the rent o f £80 which they had been paying. T h e delight o f o w n i n g their o w n estate was rapidly enhanced, at least for M a r y , b y the prospect o f " i m p r o v e m e n t s . " She was sure the place had "possibilities of almost ideal c o m f o r t . " A bathroom w o u l d be added upstairs and electric light installed. Water w o u l d be brought to the upper floor f r o m their o w n spring in iron pipes. Arranging for the management of the property introduced them to the Italian hierarchies of domestic authority. In consultation with Placci they hired a fattore, w h o "watches that the contadini do not cheat u s , " and a ragioniere, " w h o watches the fattore. We are supposed to watch the ragioniere." Berenson had the novel experience o f discussing with the staff the "delicate question" o f replacing the oxen with cows and hiring oxen for sowing and reaping. T h e " i m p r o v e m e n t s " multiplied in the planning, which Bernhard surrendered largely to M a r y . With the architect and the fattore at her heels she gave her orders with enthusiastic relish. A large kitchen w o u l d be [57]

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built at the back w i t h " a scullery, p a n t r y , a n d — w i n e cellar!—a servants' hall, larder, i r o n i n g r o o m , and butler's p a n t r y , as well as a big c u p b o a r d f o r sweets and fruits, etc. o f f the dining r o o m (the present kitchen). W e shall gain a n o t h e r sitting r o o m d o w n s t a i r s , and t w o b e d r o o m s and a b a t h r o o m o n the t o p floor. So there will be r o o m f o r endless parties o f Y o u n g People such as I delight i n . " A special attraction o f the w h o l e affair was that t h e y w o u l d have their o w n k e y to the gate w h i c h gave access to the lakelet (laghetto) b e h i n d the d a m in the Mensola, w h i c h ran t h r o u g h the Vincigliata w o o d s a b o v e the villa. D u r i n g o n e o f B e r e n s o n ' s absences in the past s u m m e r the p o o l h a d been the scene o f o n e of M a r y ' s largest s w i m m i n g parties, o n e that included D u n c a n Grant, Cecil P i n sent, her d a u g h t e r R a y , a n u m b e r of y o u n g m e n w h o h a d s p r u n g u p "like m u s h r o o m s , " and " t h e w h o l e Stein f a m i l y . " T h e decision to purchase I T a t t i finally p u t to rest any t h o u g h t s B e r n h a r d and M a r y m a y have h a d o f p u t t i n g d o w n roots elsewhere. T h e y w e r e n o w c o m m i t t e d p e r m a n e n t l y to the life of art and l u x u r y to w h i c h they h a d b e c o m e a c c u s t o m e d and to the h i g h price it w o u l d entail. T h e y m i g h t continue to claim f o r e i g n citizenship b u t " S e t t i g n a n o " — F l o r e n c e — w a s their h o m e . H a p p i l y an e m p l o y m e n t c a m e t o B e r e n s o n a b o u t the t i m e o f the purchase w h i c h indicated that the Italian authorities h a d at last accepted h i m , a foreigner, as a fully qualified art expert. T h e f a m o u s frescoes b y D o m e n i c o Ghirlandaio and his assistants in the Sanctuary of Santa M a r i a N o v e l l a w e r e sadly deteriorating. T h e sindaco (mayor) o f Florence asked B e r e n s o n to f o r m a c o m m i t t e e for their restoration. A n d in the f o l l o w i n g spring he was f u r t h e r h o n o r e d b y being a p p o i n t e d to an art c o m m i s s i o n w h i c h the n e w sindaco, a Socialist, h o p e d w o u l d m a k e Florence an ideal city. T h e a p p o i n t m e n t f o r e s h a d o w e d his lifelong d e v o t i o n to the preservation of historic Florence. For the c o m m e m o r a t i v e v o l u m e m a r k i n g the t w e n t i e t h anniversary of his H a r v a r d class, B e r e n s o n w r o t e that it was "exile to live a w a y f r o m the people w h o u n d e r s t a n d o n e as only they [can] w h o have been b r o u g h t u p in p r e t t y m u c h the same w a y , h a v i n g the same gods and the same ideals. Y e t it w o u l d be h y p o c r i s y to d e n y that m y exile has its pleasant s i d e . "

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V II

Matisse and the Highroad of Art

W

I T H the purchase of I Tatti at the close of 1907, a new era dawned for Berenson, bringing a sense of permanence to his expatriation. Though he would one day assure his old Harvard friend Barrett Wendell, " I have roots nowhere and associations everywhere," his bond to Florence and Tuscany would remain to the end, unshaken by two world wars. He may have often thought himself a liberated citizen of the world, but paradoxically he had intense local allegiances, as for Boston and Harvard, that subsisted alongside his devotion to Florence. There were other signs too of a change of direction in his life. The North Italians seemed to close his survey of the artistic territory he had marked out as his own. What remained would be the correction and enlargement of the Lists for successive reprintings of the essays. Much of the Berensons' travel for years to come would be devoted to that chore. Early in January 1908 Mary informed Mrs. Gardner, "This year w e are hard at work putting all we know into elaborate lists, and then we shall have done our duty to Italian art." At the same time she announced their plan to revisit the United States in the fall, she to arrive earlier in September in order to enroll her daughters at Bryn Mawr. Berenson yearned for larger themes, but long habit shut off escape ino the ideal literary world. Wherever he went, if a gallery, church, or private collection was accessible, he tirelessly scrawled his notes of the salient features of the paintings and his identification of the painter. Then Mary's work began. She would "prepare all the papers and references and lists for him, and have everything under her care." The quest did not always prosper. A t the Vatican that spring he "felt a sudden resentment at there being so many pictures to puzzle out. I suddenly got one of those feelings of blindness, of utter bafflement," he wrote, "which sometimes seized me in the presence of problem pictures. I had too a sinking feeling [59]

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o f h o w w a s t e f u l it w a s to bother about the w h o - i s - w h o s - i t y o f such small f r y . " R e a d i n g p r o v i d e d the o n e sure solace o f a harried existence.

Mary

carefully recorded in her diary one day in February, " H e has finished reading the Italian Journey and is n o w reading a b o o k about R o m e and G o e t h e . H e is G o e t h e m a d as he has been for years. H e is also taking u p p h y s i o l o g y ! ! " T h e next d a y she w r o t e o f his putting d o w n a v o l u m e o f G u g l i e l m o Ferrero, the y o u n g Italian historian, and e x c l a i m i n g that Ferrero " p i c k s his conclusions b e f o r e they are r i p e . " W h e n the t w o v o l u m e s o f A n a t o l e France's Jeanne d'Arc first appeared, he asked her to bring t h e m w i t h her o n her return f r o m E n g l a n d . His appetite for print seemed limitless. His acquisition o f b o o k s in almost e v e r y field, but particularly in art, w o u l d continue to accelerate until at his death the library w o u l d be w o r t h y o f the institute o f w h i c h he dreamed. E a r l y in 1908 w h i l e in R o m e B e r e n s o n forgathered w i t h his Florentine c o m p a n i o n s C o u n t e s s Serristori, the ubiquitous Placci, and the Polish collector C o u n t R e m b e l i n s k i , w h o s e c o m p a n y he especially e n j o y e d , to m a k e the r o u n d s o f St. Peter's and the B o r g h e s e Gallery, R e m b e l i n s k i as a l w a y s impatient o f B e r e n s o n ' s s l o w progress. A t the B o r g h e s e B e r n hard s t o p p e d l o n g b e f o r e C o r r e g g i o ' s Danae, greatest t h i n g here . . .

w h i c h he t h o u g h t " t h e

a perfect representation o f the sexual spasm

w i t h o u t the least s u g g e s t i o n o f a n y t h i n g h o t or g r o s s . " O n e day Gabriele D ' A n n u n z i o c a m e b y to try to persuade h i m to collaborate in a b o o k o f dialogues o n A r t , to be w r i t t e n b y several critics, and Placci teased, " E v e r y b o d y w o u l d o b s e r v e w h a t an a w f u l plagiarist B e r e n s o n w a s . " G l a d y s D e a c o n t o o w a s in R o m e , l i v i n g in l u x u r y w i t h her m o t h e r , w h o had b e c o m e the m u c h - p a m p e r e d mistress o f Prince D o r i a Pamphili. G l a d y s , incalculable and w i l l f u l , and n o w in her m i d - t w e n t i e s an e n i g matic figure, s e e m e d " b u s y spoiling her life in a hundred w a y s . " " S h e d r a g g e d m e a w a y , " B e r n h a r d told M a r y , " a n d b e w i t c h e d m e w i t h [the] e v e r - g r o w i n g c h a r m o f her mere sex, her infinite w i l l o w - t h e - w i s p n e s s , her caressingness. . . . It w a s pure s o n g w i t h o u t w o r d s sort o f h o u r so that I cannot recall a n y t h i n g s a i d . " Hers w a s a vision that could, at least t e m p o r a r i l y , displace that o f L a d y Sassoon. She w a s , he told her, his " b e l o v e d G o r g o n , " and anticipating a m e e t i n g w i t h her at St. M o r i t z he c o u l d w r i t e , " W e shall mellifluize about diverse irridescences, u n g r a s p ables, and i n t a n g i b l e s . " A t the end o f A p r i l , w h e n she c a m e to meet the Berensons at the r a i l w a y station as t h e y w e r e passing t h r o u g h R o m e o n their w a y to N a p l e s and the Floridiana, she w a s " s o m a r v e l l o u s and radiant that p e o p l e started as i f they had been shot w h e n they chanced to meet h e r . " M a r y noted that she w a s taller than her o w n f i v e feet eight and a quarter. B u t i f she stood a couple o f inches o v e r Bernhard, her [60]

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"deliciously slender and willowy figure," unlike Mary's bulk, put him at no disadvantage. Her great blue eyes exercised an uncanny charm, and Albert Spalding, the youthful violinist who was playing to many " b r a v o s " on his tour in Italy, circled round her on the platform, "his eyes dancing with excitement and j o y . " Bernhard and Mary returned to Florence from the comforts of the Floridiana in time to greet a fresh influx of visitors at the height of the social season. One of them, Gustave Schlumberger, the noted Byzantinist and social lion, appreciatively recorded in Mes Souvenirs his meeting the eminent socialist writer Gaetano Salvemini at the American-British menage of the Berensons. He thought I Tatti a veritable paradis. On May 7 Placci joined the Berensons for a month's tour of Sicily in two automobiles manned by his nephews. They circumnavigated Sicily, visiting the chief classical sites and foraging for paintings, frescoes, and mosaics. In Palermo Berenson forced himself to see sixteen churches in a single morning before attending a huge ceremonial luncheon as guest of the Marsala wine people. When the party returned to the mainland, they went from one palatial villa to another calling on Placci's affluent friends before going on to Naples and the Floridiana. Back at I Tatti by June 9, Berenson was immediately involved in the matter of "improvements" being commissioned by Mary. Decisions had to be made, for the work was to be done during their summer travels and their trip to the United States. They planned to build a new contadino's house, farther off, the present one to be ready " f o r any nice friend or relative to inhabit it." At the moment Bernhard was again spending most of the day ill in bed. Once revived, he took his place at the head of the table when Leo and Gertrude Stein came to dinner. He was not up, however, to the lively and alien chatter and, to Mary's embarrassment, said things "so horribly inapropos that one shivered." Berenson may have shivered a bit himself at Leo Stein's monologue on the virtues of thorough mastication, Fletcherizing food, for he spared them "no detail of the effect on the stomach and intestines." Gertrude found her host a fascinating subject for analysis and inscribed in her notebooks characterizations of him in her special idiom. " H e thinks he is great all the time but it isn't his mind; it is his moments of exquisite creative perception that completely expressed themselves. . . . The real sensibility in him is one of affection. . . . He likes the sensation of being tortured and being mellifluous is all B . B . ' s sexuality amounts to, he is not sweet. . . . I think B . B . is intellectual, honest, sensitive on top, the below is the male version of the most perfect balance of flavor and lady which often slops over into a bad expression as when he wants and thinks he can do flavor straight." [61]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

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MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

One aspect of Berenson that escaped Gertrude's observation was his anxiety about his finances. The ever-present specter of overdrafts at the bank increasingly shadowed his existence. Temporary relief came when he managed to sell to John Graver Johnson two Madonnas which he and Mary had stored in England, a Sodoma and a Costa, for £500 each. But the scale of living on which the Berensons were now embarked demanded fresh strategies. Going to America, Berenson could hope " f o r something in the way of business turning up, as it did last time." Moreover, reassuring signals came from the Paris Duveens. These were sufficiently encouraging that he told his brother that once he had paid off the $30,000 debt for I Tatti, "the day may come when I shall be able to advance you discreet sums of money to play with for our mutual benefit." On June 26, Bernhard's birthday, the Berensons reached Paris, and at the request of J o e Duveen, Bernhard conferred with Peter Widener, the American financier, who wished to have his collection at Elkins Park in Philadelphia catalogued. The conference at the Bristol Hotel, where Widener and his party occupied an entire floor, ended in Berenson's accepting the assignment, though with considerable private reservations, for he and Mary believed that Fairfax Murray, a partner of the Agnew firm, had unloaded many "worthless school things . . . for vast sums" on Widener. There followed a cordial meeting with Widener's son, Joseph. Joseph appeared quite eager to "see the collection weeded out and made more important," and he therefore agreed to accept Berenson's attributions. The meeting with Joseph Duveen at the Duveen's handsome new gallery in the place Vendöme glittered with promise, with J o e full of flattery and exuberant talk in which he offered 10 percent of the profit on sales of pictures endorsed by Berenson. " I f one-tenth of what they say is true," Mary diarized, "a future of affluence lies before us!" A month later, in the London galleries, there was more "talkie-talkie" of the roseate future, and things began to "materialize in the shape of a check for £500 on account." Berenson had already earned a fee in connection with Mrs. Gardner's purchase of the Profile of a Lady, and Duveen had begun to ask his advice on collections which, as he wrote, "I should like you to pass before buying." Paris offered the usual round of calls on dealers and visits with friends. At Versailles Bernhard enjoyed the flutter of Sapphic society at the Villa Trianon. Gladys' mother, Mrs. Baldwin, entertained them at a "frightfully simple" lunch at the Ritz, which cost an exorbitant eleven dollars. The interior of Count Robert de Montesquiou's house in Neuilly impressed them as "the most beautiful . . . w e ever s a w . " Mary, always [62]

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keenly alert to sexual ambiguities, was sure that Montesquiou was in love with Bernhard, for "he could not keep his hands off him." The dealer Goupil dined them and inflicted on them an album of Caruso's sketches and made them listen "to his voice on the Gramaphone." Socializing in London was likewise a mixture of pleasure and business. Berenson lunched with the Sassoons, unaware that under her gracious demeanor Lady Sassoon hid the terrible secret that she was ill with cancer. He accompanied her brother Robert de Rothschild to the N a tional Gallery and dined again with Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. At Iffley, in "the bosom" of Mary's family during the bank holiday, Trevy, erudite and eccentric, declaimed for Logan and the Berensons the first act of his Sisyphus, a closet drama in verse. They gathered convivially with the novelist George Moore and the still precariously united Bertrand Russell and Alys. Mary busied herself shopping for her "American outfit" and furbished up her lectures. She had already obtained one invitation in N e w Y o r k for $100, enough to pay for "three evening" and other dresses. This time, Bernhard had told her, he would not object to her accepting lecture fees. Arrangements with the Duveens being still informal, Berenson improved the occasion to prospect Agnew's, where he found an impressive and colorful Giovanni di Paolo, The Child Jesus Disputing in the Temple, which Mrs. Gardner was delighted to acquire for a modest £450. T o Johnson he suggested a painting by the Veronese Cavazzola, offered by the English art dealer Arthur Sulley, but Johnson begged off. Leaving Mary to finish preparations for her departure with her daughters for America, Bernhard headed for his regular month's diversion at St. Moritz, but not before making provision for her expenses, and from St. Moritz he mailed a draft on Baring's for £1,000. St. Moritz, he reported to his brother, was "gloriously French and English, and socially very g a y . " " I partake of it all in due measure," he added. A newcomer to the regulars was Perry Belmont, the politically active son of the N e w Y o r k capitalist August Belmont. In their walks together Belmont briefed him on Democratic politics in America. Berenson found him, like "all these great Americans," "appallingly s l o w " though "smart and affable." He found greater relish in Mrs. Hewitt's sporting companions, who "talked of hunting, the j o y of action, the beauty of sunsets in a way that revealed something that I had missed in life . . . something as definite as my pleasure in art or landscape." He had time also to catch up on his reading. He finished Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta, whose style he thought " a more classic Meredith." Edmund Gosse's Father and Son seemed to him "too abstract and colorless." E. Meyer's Hebrew Origins and Genealogies proved a most "confusing, yet fascinating b o o k . " Soon [63]

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he was deep in Moby Dick, long before its vogue—"Melville's horrible, fascinating, sublime, provincial, stupid, over-transcendental, but altogether irresistible, even when most prolix, M o b y - D i c k . " This season Montesquiou figured in his roll call of notables and of female beauties, but it was with Gladys Deacon, who inspired alternately fatherly and loverlike feelings, that Berenson most enjoyed "mellifluizi n g . " "She has been monkeying with her face, as hitherto with her nose," he informed Mary; "consequently she has lost her beautiful oval and her mouth is queer. But she retains all her radiance." Her "elixir w a y s " still captivated, and Berenson spent an ecstatic day with her on the nearby glaciers. While at St. Moritz he learned of Mrs. Gardner's second "muddle" with the United States Customs office. She wrote that she was being "forced to pay instanter $70,000, most of it for penalty for which there is absolutely no reason and that is only the beginning. They are holding over my head an extra penalty of $150,000, confiscation and imprisonment! N o telling when you arrive I may be in jail. Otherwise I shall be here longing for y o u . " She had unfortunately allowed or—as some hostile skeptics averred—persuaded her friend Mrs. Chadbourne to attempt to smuggle in a number of valuable works of art in a duty-free shipment of Mrs. Chadbourne's household effects. Mrs. Chadbourne had intended the shipment, according to Mrs. Gardner, as a "pleasant surprise." An inquisitive customs agent, struck by the size of one of the crates, opened it and gazed upon the Hercules, the five-by-four-foot fresco by Piero della Francesca which she had bought through her friend Joseph Lindon Smith in 1906. When the remaining objects of art were brought to light, the collection was formally appraised at $80,000. In the end the imbroglio cost her $150,000, the penalties plus the appraised value. Berenson left St. Moritz on the new railway in a driving snowstorm, and by September 17 he had tumbled "into the very lap of the most refined, back-comforting, eye-caressing, tummy comforting, soulsoothing luxury" at the Villa Trianon, "every hair" on Elsie de Wolfe's head "and every stitch on her body singing together an ideated 18th century song of greeting." Left alone for a day, he picked up again The Education of Henry Adams. " Y o u k n o w , " he wrote, " I have seldom looked forward to anything as I have to returning to this singular autobiography. . . . It is not easy reading, for the style is over-Jamesian for my intelligence, and assumes too much knowledge of last century history and personality." After finishing The Education he reexamined Elsie's copy of the Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, finding it "interesting and even remarkable. What coquetry not to publish such masterpieces! Mais e'est un beau geste." [64]

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Henry Adams appeared at tea in the w a k e of his masterpieces, and Berenson was "amazed at his appearance. He wore a suit of rusty black, a cutaway of some twenty-five years standing, and looked like an elderly laborer, respectable when not in drink, but he has fascinated me and as he is really most unworldly he was not sorry to have someone to talk to and w e chatted for an hour until our hostesses separated u s . " Adams reported to Elizabeth Cameron that Berenson had "the unpardonable fault of being intelligent and unsupportable, and, by the w a y , ill." M a r y was by this time in the United States, and Bernhard enjoyed his solitary stay in Paris to the full, dining out incessantly and matching wits and anecdotes with an ever-widening circle of friends and acquaintances. With Gustave Schlumberger, w h o took great pride in his aristocratic and military connections, he held inquest over their friend Salomon Reinach and his family. T h e y agreed that Salomon was the most lovable of the Reinach clan, but Berenson, still smarting over his prudential silence among the anti-Dreyfusards at St. Moritz, felt that "at bottom Salomon despises me, and regards me as a scoundrel because I will not fight for J e w i s h old clothes, which even he won't wear on his back, although he will flaunt them as a flag." One of his visits took him to Le Breau, the artist Walter Gay's chateau. " M y dear," he confided to Mary, "it is a dream of your and m y kind of thing. O f course far grander than anything w e can ever hope to attain." Nonetheless, it whetted his appetite for the improving of I Tatti. At Le Mans he recaptured his intoxicating first impressions of the stained glass in the cathedral where the bold union of Romanesque and Gothic architecture defied criticism. But on the outskirts of the town he encountered a portent that took the edge o f f his delight. Wilbur Wright's airplane was on view at the aerodrome where a short time before Wright had amazed the French experts by successfully flying a figure-8 course at speeds of up to fifty miles an hour. " I cannot tell y o u , " Bernhard wrote M a r y in N e w Y o r k , " h o w I disliked the thing, this innocent monster which will destroy the w o r l d I love, the world of level vision, or vision f r o m d o w n upwards, the world of privacy, the world to which our species, and further back, our genus has been used to for millions of years." A REMARKABLE encounter with Matisse came on a day in October 1908 which began with a luncheon with the French painter Maurice Denis, a spokesman of the N a b i group of Gauguin's followers. For Berenson it proved " a modern art day with a vengeance." Denis' studio was filled with scores of paintings by his contemporaries, and Berenson was bewildered trying to grasp them; the painter Rene Piot was also present but [65]

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t o o i n v o l v e d in s h o p talk w i t h D e n i s to be helpful. His v i s i o n still filled w i t h the n o v e l canvasses, B e r e n s o n d r o p p e d in o n Sally Stein for dinner, and Sally, h a v i n g heard that B e r e n s o n had liked Matisse's w o r k at the A u t u m n Salon, decided to send for the artist, w h o w a s a sort o f p r o t e g e o f hers. For t w o h o u r s B e r e n s o n listened t o Matisse, enthralled b y his ideas. " H e talked as i f he had n e v e r d o n e a n y t h i n g but l o o k and r e f l e c t , " w e n t his excited c o m m e n t to M a r y ; " I cannot tell y o u h o w like to m i n e all his feelings and principles are, w i t h the great a d v a n t a g e to his w o r k o f an infinitely m o r e e x p e r i e n c e d and detailed feeling f o r design. O n e felt in contact w i t h a brain o f astonishing v i g o u r , e n t i r e l y — a l a s , as I a m n o t — absorbed b y a r t . " M o v e d b y w h a t he later saw in Matisse's studio, he b o u g h t one o f his paintings,

Trees near Melun.

In 1910 he lent it to

Fry's " P o s t i m p r e s s i o n i s t E x h i b i t i o n " at the G r a f t o n Galleries, w h e r e it h u n g n e x t to Matisse's Paysage f r o m L e o Stein's collection. M a n y years later he m a d e a g i f t o f the painting to the M u s e e Prince Paul in B e l g r a d e . T h e t h i r t y - n i n e - y e a r - o l d Matisse w a s a b o u t to publish his personal manifesto in w h i c h he declared, " W h a t I a m after is expression. . . .

A

w o r k o f art m u s t carry in itself its c o m p l e t e significance and i m p o s e it u p o n the b e h o l d e r b e f o r e he can i d e n t i f y the subject m a t t e r . " It w a s striking c o n f i r m a t i o n o f B e r e n s o n ' s v i e w o f the organic character o f the w o r k o f art. W h a t h e i g h t e n e d B e r e n s o n ' s pleasure in Matisse's insight w a s the great a d m i r a t i o n

he expressed f o r G i o t t o

and P i e r o

della

Francesca. H e impressed B e r e n s o n as assimilating his w o r k to the great traditions o f art. B e r e n s o n ' s interest in Matisse p r o m p t l y aroused the malice o f B e r e n son's British critics, w h o s o o n circulated the canard that he had j o i n e d the Steins in a financial partnership to exploit Matisse. T h e

rumor

q u i c k l y reached A m e r i c a , as M r s . G a r d n e r i m m e d i a t e l y i n f o r m e d B e r e n son. She asked h i m at the s a m e time w h o the Steins w e r e . H e responded that they w e r e " a tribe o f queer, conceited, u n w o r l d l y , b o o k i s h , rude, t o u c h y , brutal, h y p e r s e n s i t i v e p e o p l e " and that G e r t r u d e w a s " a sort o f Semitic p r i m e v a l f e m a l e straight f r o m the desert. . . . T h e y c o m e o f t e n t o f o r a g e in the library and to sit in o u r midst d i s a p p r o v i n g l y s a y i n g n o t h ing. T h e y all h a v e p o w e r and brains . . . but I a m g e t t i n g so f r i v o l o u s I b e g i n to be b o r e d b y t h e m . " S h o r t l y after he arrived in the U n i t e d States and w h i l e he w a s still in the grip o f his i m p r e s s i o n o f H e n r i Matisse's genius, B e r e n s o n c a m e u p o n a note in the N e w Y o r k Nation w h i c h c h a r g e d Matisse w i t h insulting the " e y e s and u n d e r s t a n d i n g " w i t h his e x p e r i m e n t a l paintings and declared that " b e h o l d e r s are not all f o o l s . " B e r e n s o n , o u t r a g e d b y such philistinism, i m m e d i a t e l y published a letter, " D e G u s t i b u s , " in the N a [66]

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tion: "Will y o u allow one of the fools w h o m Matisse has thoroughly taken in to protest against these phrases? They are more hackneyed than the oldest mumblings in the most archaic extant rituals. . . . I have the conviction that he has, after twenty years of very earnest searching, at last found the great highroad travelled by all the best masters of the visual arts for the last sixty centuries at least. Indeed, he is singularly like them in every essential respect." As for his vivid and luminous color, " w e are easily frightened by the slightest divergence f r o m the habitual." Response to his Nation letter came f r o m Placci, w h o was making his journalistic rounds of the studios in Paris for the Corriere della Sera. " I am not of your admirative opinion which has shocked so m a n y , " he wrote. " S o m e things of Matisse especially in drawings full of movement I like, but some of the things of your friend Stein I find hideous and cannot honestly believe y o u admire them except from the picture dealer point of view of the w o r k of art which will fetch a price some d a y . " In his long, gossipy report Placci told of meeting Degas, " w h o spoke against contemporary civilization and against Dreyfus and Freemasons and J e w s . I heartily agreed but knew the subject by heart." While Bernhard was paying farewell visits to his socialite friends in France, M a r y went as a kind of emissary to his family and to Mrs. Gardner in Boston. The austerity of the cuisine at Fenway Court was secretly relieved for her at bedtime by a tin box of cookies which Berenson's mother had baked for her. Having entered her daughters for the term at B r y n M a w r , R a y as a graduate and Karin as an undergraduate, under the special protection of her cousin Carey Thomas, the president of the college, she had time before Bernhard's arrival for an excursion to Washington to see their friend Israel Zangwill's new play, The Melting Pot. Seated beside President " T e d d y " Roosevelt in a theater box with the Zangwills, she was a witness to the "impetuous energy" of the president's appreciation. T h e play was a strong plea for rejecting the ethnic rivalries which plagued Europe in order to produce a superior American type. During one of the scenes the president jumped up and cried, " A great p l a y . " B u t at another point when the play severely criticized the divorce evil in American life, he turned to Mrs. Zangwill and exclaimed, " T h a t won't do. . . . Y o u r husband must change that." At the close he nevertheless declared, " I never enjoyed a play so much. I tell you it's a play for MEN!" B u t soon afterward, according to the New York Times, " w h e n the glamor of the footlights had lost its influence over h i m , " he sent for Z a n g w i l l and at luncheon told him that the emphasis on the divorce evil in America just would not do. Bernhard took passage on the Provence in mid-October 1908. Louis Gillet, a brilliant French writer on art, was a fellow passenger on his way [67]

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to a year's service at L a v a l U n i v e r s i t y . B e r e n s o n had already had s o m e correspondence w i t h h i m , b u t they seem not to h a v e met until this v o y a g e . Gillet w a s dazzled b y B e r e n s o n ' s erudite conversation as b y " a stroke o f intellectual l i g h t n i n g [coup de foudre intellectuel]."

Berenson's

p s y c h o l o g i c a l m e t h o d o f art criticism, he felt, o v e r t u r n e d for h i m all the c o n v e n t i o n a l n o t i o n s o f his y o u t h and effected a kind o f c o n v e r s i o n . M u c h impressed b y the y o u n g e r m a n ' s lively interest, B e r e n s o n authorized h i m t o translate his f o u r b o o k s o n the Italian painters o f the Renaissance.

Gillet b e g a n a translation o f the

Venetians

almost

im-

mediately, b u t the w o r k w e n t s l o w l y , and in the f o l l o w i n g years there w a s m u c h friendly and fastidious consultation o v e r its progress and its revision. B e r e n s o n s u g g e s t e d possible recourse for help to

Salomon

Reinach, t o C h a r l e s D u B o s , and e v e n to Henri B e r g s o n . B e r g s o n , he felt, w o u l d be the ideal reviser, but he t h o u g h t it w o u l d be a c r i m e to pile " y e t another labor o n his s h o u l d e r s . " H e added, " P e r h a p s I m a y be f o r g i v e n for r e m i n d i n g y o u that I a m t o o o f t e n t o o brief, or indeed confused, to be clear, and that y o u w i l l require the patience o f angels to penetrate m y m e a n i n g t o the point w h e n c e y o u w i l l be able to reincarnate it in y o u r lucid p r o s e . " W o r l d W a r I intervened, and it w a s not until 1934 that the c o m p l e t e translation c a m e out in b o o k f o r m .

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I

N anticipation of Bernhard's imminent arrival, Mary had proceeded to New York to engage accommodations for them. She had expected that they would stop at the luxurious Plaza Hotel as they had five years before but was shocked to discover that nothing was available under seventeen dollars. She therefore reserved a suite of rooms at the Park Avenue Hotel for six dollars a day. Bernhard joined her there when he disembarked on Saturday, October 25. On Monday morning he presented himself at the Duveen Gallery just in time for an anxious conference over a bust that the Duveens had sold to Widener and that Berenson believed might be a fake. H o w to recall the bust diplomatically required earnest discussion. There were already signs that the dealers who had supplied Widener were aware that Berenson had agreed to catalogue his collection and were acutely unhappy at the prospect. Fortunately they were spared embarrassment for several years, since the catalogue was not ready until 1916, the year after Peter Widener's death. The voyage on the Provence had been a rough one, and Berenson's digestion and nerves had suffered so grievously that a visit to a doctor famed for a kind of "nerve center massage" was deemed advisable. The diagnosis—that Berenson's nerve centers did not throw off their waste and thus poisoned him—left him unconvinced. In any event, within a few days he was able to dine out enjoyably at the Colony Club with Miss Marbury, who had already lined up four lectures there for Mary in January 1909. Her hospitality proved too much for Bernhard, for a potent Manhattan cocktail she persuaded him to try so undid him that he could hardly raise his head the next day. Mischance or not, he had to proceed on schedule. The "first law of the universe," he wryly jested, was " 'Thou must muddle along somehow.' " With the help of Mrs. Henry Cannon the Berensons engaged an apart[69]

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ment for the return to N e w Y o r k in January at the Webster Hotel on East F o r t y - f i f t h — t w o b e d r o o m s , a sitting r o o m , and bath for eight dollars a d a y — a n d then they set off for Boston on the Knickerbocker Express, amazed by its luxury. T h e y were put up at the comfortable h o m e of Berenson's parents in Stockton Street in Dorchester, where providentially they were left m u c h to themselves. T h e "little m o t h e r " tactfully avoided reproaching her favorite son for continuing his exile, and his choleric father tended to keep to himself, his son's interests n o w quite remote f r o m his circumscribed world. Senda and Elizabeth were busy with their gymnastic classes at Smith, but Rachel was near at hand in C a m b r i d g e and m u c h occupied with her lively baby, Ralph Barton Perry, Jr. Meanwhile m o r e lecture dates for M a r y accumulated—talks on Italian art at Wellesley College and at B r y n M a w r and a talk at her sister-in-law Rachel's h o m e to Harvard faculty w o m e n , whose d o w diness, she said, m a d e her feel positively chic. Mrs. Gardner came out to visit the pair in Dorchester, and after explaining again h o w her friend had tried to smuggle her art works into the country in a misguided gesture of friendship, she announced she was selling some of her diamonds to pay her fine. Her friends must have been sympathetic, for the i m p o r t duties had long irked and challenged the American traveler. Years earlier, for example, Henry A d a m s had written to Mrs. C a m e r o n that the American diplomat Wayne MacVeagh and his wife "are coming up the lift, with m u c h nervous alarm, at eleven and I am to tell t h e m w h a t to take h o m e to cheat the C u s t o m H o u s e . " O n c e settled at the Somerset Hotel in Boston, Bernhard and M a r y were soon swept into a continuous succession of social engagements, lunching with the aged E d w a r d Everett Hale, "as lively in mind and talk as a y o u n g m a n , " with George Santayana, w h o was " m o s t agreeable as he always is," and with the Ralph Curtises, w h o were m u c h in evidence. It was their Palazzo Barbaro in Venice that Mrs. Gardner used to rent f r o m Ralph's father. Curtis, whose wit constantly enlivened his letters and conversation, could not forbear referring at their meeting to their imperious patroness as "Was-a-bella." M a r y found it all less interesting than before, but Bernhard, she reported, was "simply dripping with the milk of h u m a n kindness and finds everybody nice and enjoys people w i t h o u t expecting either conversation or intellectual s y m p a t h y . " O n e of the most agreeable gatherings was a "little lunch" on a Sunday at Mrs. Gardner's "Palace" at which the handsome D r . M o r t o n Prince, his wife, and Santayana joined in the kind of talk that the Berensons felt m a d e for the art of conversation. Prince was the author of the popular Disassociation of a Personality, a subject in which M a r y Berenson had

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become engrossed. The Berensons also enjoyed being lionized at a huge afternoon reception which Barrett Wendell gave them. In sharp contrast to these lively affairs was the Thanksgiving dinner at the Berensons' in Dorchester. "It was a w f u l , " Mary exclaimed. Soon afterward Bernhard and Mary escaped for a week to the luxury of Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt's estate at Tuxedo Park in the Ramapos Mountains, northwest of N e w York City, where they observed how vast sums of money could be used to "stave off ennui." They also dined with Ralph Adams Cram and his pretty wife and heard him boast that he was "a fervent Catholic" who was "able sometimes to believe as many as seven impossible things before breakfast." His Gothic-style churches were already becoming a striking feature of a number of American cities. Mary thought him a "belated and bigoted Ruskinian" who adored the Gothic and abhorred the Renaissance. Berenson, who had been greatly moved by Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, made room in his aesthetics for this heretical enthusiasm. He and Cram " v o w e d eternal friendship," and the two men exchanged affectionate letters until Cram's death thirtythree years later. Page proofs poured in at the Somerset from Putnam for the new editions of The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance and The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance. There were only minor changes in the text, but the greatly increased lists of paintings reflected the Berensons' diligent explorations. It was evident that the publisher could count on a steady, if modest, sale of the handbooks. Welcome as were the royalties from Bernhard's books, they could by no means free him from his dependence on earnings in the art trade. He had brought with him several photographs of paintings offered by dealers in Europe, and these he showed with some success to prospective purchasers. B y the end of 1908 he had earned $4,000 from the sale of three pictures. In addition Widener bought a painting from the Duveens on his advice, entitling him to a fee of $5,000. This was shortly followed by an unexpected check for $550, which the appreciative Johnson sent when he bought a painting that Berenson had happened to admire in a Washington collection. The gesture elicited Mary's delighted comment: "It certainly is a country where money is dropped around." Welcome too was an unexpected $1,000 from an 1 1 percent dividend on Berenson's Great Northern Railway stock. One sale to Johnson gave the Berensons little satisfaction, though it enabled Bernhard finally to complete the payment of the $10,000 debt to Baring Brothers. It was the sale of the Perugino Madonna that he had once offered to Mrs. Gardner for £4,500. Mary had become greatly

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attached to it, for it hung in her mother's house at Iffley. But their need for cash was insatiable, and Bernhard let it go to Johnson for £2,000. Mrs. Gardner, still eager to add to her collection, managed to lay her hands on funds to buy a bronze bust through Berenson from Gimpel for $9,000. Not being an expert in Italian sculpture, Berenson relied on the assurances of Gimpel and Wildenstein that it was by Alamanno Rinuccini and dated from the 1500s. Though it was obviously aesthetically pleasing and full of tactile values, a quarter century later experts speculated that it was probably a nineteenth-century imitation. An important acquisition that Mrs. Gardner would make in February 1 9 1 0 was the arresting A Doctor of Law by Francisco de Zubarän offered her by the Ehrich Gallery in N e w York for $22,000. She asked for Berenson's approval while he was still in the United States—"I should hate to like something you don't like." Mary had reassured her that they both admired it and added that Archer Huntington had been anxious to get it for his new Spanish museum and Philip Lydig for his " R e d R o o m . " At the end of November 1908 the Berensons had returned to N e w York and were immediately entertained by Elsie de Wolfe at a large dinner and theater party to see Clyde Fitch's The Blue Mouse, a farcical intrigue in which an ambitious employee tries to obtain a business promotion by using his wife to play upon the president of the firm's weakness for pretty women. Both Berensons were revolted by the blatant vulgarizing of romantic love. Bernhard "nearly fainted with disgust," and they got back to their hotel in "absolute despair and g l o o m . " The New York Times reviewer, perhaps made of much hardier and coarser stuff, described the play as a "sidesplitting comedy." Though the theatrical season glittered with the names of Ethel Barrymore, Mrs. Fiske, Anna Held, George Arliss, Lillian Russell, William Gillette, and Billie Burke, The Blue Mouse was the Berensons' only sampling of the N e w York stage. When they were invited by J . P. Morgan to see his library, they were properly impressed with his wonderful book collection. But the "great many fine objects of art" appeared to them to be "mixed with forgeries." Morgan was "genial and pleasant" and promised to give Berenson a copy of all his catalogues. As they strolled about he remarked, "I hear you are going to Philadelphia to bust up Widener's collection." Morgan's collections did impress Berenson, but what left a far more lasting impression on him was his introduction to Belle da Costa Greene, the twenty-six-year-old curator of rare books and manuscripts in Morgan's library. Belle Greene had been recruited by Morgan's nephew while she was working in the Princeton University library, where she had become expert in the cataloguing of rare books. Though she had [72]

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been in M o r g a n ' s service only four years at the time o f her meeting with Berenson, she w a s already a trusted agent w h o s e keen intelligence made her w e l c o m e to dealers and m u s e u m directors. A s M o r g a n ' s protegee she was the darling o f the rich and p o w e r f u l with w h o m he associated, the Rockefellers, the Harrimans, and their like. M u c h sought after and flirtatious, she had the air of a mysterious princess. She was a svelte, dark-haired, strangely beautiful young woman, the dusky oval of her face suggesting an exotic o r i g i n — " M a l a y , " Berenson afterward reflected. T h e forty-three-year-old Berenson had never met anyone with her singular glamour and vitality, and he instantly succumbed. His effect upon her was equally electric. If M a r y sensed this sudden incandescence, she made no note of it or perhaps dismissed it as a passing fancy like so many others. Her first impression of Belle Greene suggests she thought her an unlikely candidate for a romance with the fastidious Bernhard. T o her daughter R a y at B r y n M a w r she described her as a " m o s t wild and w o o l l y and EXTRAORDINARY y o u n g p e r s o n . " Shortly after their encounter Belle Greene w r o t e to Berenson, " I am so glad that y o u are going to be a real friend." T h e y at once began frequent meetings. Separated f o r a f e w days w h e n he made a duty visit to Boston, she replied to his passionate avowals, " D e a r M a n of m y H e a r t . . . I have been with you in thought every moment since y o u left me. I have wished for y o u at dinners, at the theater and opera; morning, afternoon and night, m y thoughts have been wrapped around y o u , as I should wish to be." So began the one romance in Berenson's life that w o u l d stand apart f r o m all others in depth and intensity. N o n e w o u l d cause him longer seasons of lovesick anguish. Its tumultuous course and gradual subsidence w o u l d be charted in the more than six hundred of her carefully treasured letters. In December the Berensons proceeded to Philadelphia to begin cataloguing the J o h n G r a v e r J o h n s o n Collection. Bernhard had written J o h n son a f e w weeks earlier that if he was "still o f a mind to have me catalogue y o u r Italians . . . it w o u l d amuse me greatly, f o r f r o m the art historian's point o f v i e w yours is certainly the most comprehensive collection in this c o u n t r y . " A t the same time he offered, among a f e w other possibilities, his o w n D o s s o Dossi, which he had left with Glaenzer. "Squillionaires have not bitten. I need the m o n e y and I cannot bear to peddle pictures, so I am offering it to y o u at a price that will yield me a decent profit on m y investment." Johnson took it without demur for

$5,000. T h e preliminary w o r k for the catalogue went f o r w a r d rapidly, though it came to a standstill on Berenson's return to I Tatti and the catalogue [73]

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was not completed until 1 9 1 2 , after much consultation by mail over photographs. The Berensons' second assignment in Philadelphia was to begin work on a catalogue of the Italian paintings in Peter Widener's collection at Lynnewood Hall in nearby Elkins Park, where the refurbishing and extending of the magnificent galleries had already begun. The Berensons were touched by the humility of the seventy-four-year-old man who followed after them "asking of every picture, 'Mr. Berenson is this a gallery picture, or a furniture picture, or must it go to the cellar?' " and who was content if they allowed a picture to remain "though shorn of its great name." Fortunately for Berenson, Widener had been prepared for the worst by the recent visit of the great Dutch expert De Groot, who had already weeded out about 150 Dutch and Flemish pictures. The "purified" list of Widener's Italian paintings which Berenson made at that time was to serve as the preliminary basis for the catalogue; added to the list would be the many paintings purchased by his son, Joseph, through the Duveens and other dealers with Berenson's advice or approval. In 1 9 1 2 Joseph sent over "a list of the remaining pictures of the Italian school in our collection," noting the changes since the original list. " I can't but feel," he then wrote, "that the collection has been absolutely purified. . . . Y o u really can't imagine how delightful the new galleries are with the elimination of all unimportant pictures." Mary, on home ground in Philadelphia, gave three lectures to crowded chapels at Bryn M a w r on the new methods of art study illustrated with slides of "hands, ears, hair, etc.," a variation of her earlier lectures. After the first of the series, Carey Thomas assured her that hers was a better lecture than the one Roger Fry had given on the same subject. Mary had also prepared and copyrighted a thirty-eight-page booklet, " A Tentative List of Italian Pictures Worth Seeing," for the use of art students at Bryn Mawr. It sold like "hot cakes" there and at her subsequent lectures at the Colony Club in N e w York. Distinctly fashionable audiences attended her Colony Club lectures. At the first of the series Mrs. J . P. Morgan, swathed in black, sat in the front row. Bernhard was permitted to attend the second one, and "even he was very much pleased," saying she had "a real genius for that sort of thing." The renewal of Berenson's passport proved a surprisingly simple chore. The head of the passport division said "with a wink, ' O f course you are obliged to stay abroad for the present for educational purposes' " and promptly issued the prized document. While in Washington Berenson called on the art dealer V. C . Fischer, who professed to be the intimate friend of John Hay, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and President Theodore Roosevelt. Fischer called the White House "to ask Teddy [74]

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w h e n he could b r i n g B e r e n s o n a r o u n d . " A n invitation w a s i m m e d i a t e l y f o r t h c o m i n g , and t w o days later B e r e n s o n , accompanied b y Fischer, presented himself at the W h i t e H o u s e and w a s ushered into the C a b i n e t R o o m . It w a s filled, he told M r s . G a r d n e r , " w i t h Senators, Chiefs o f Staff, coiffes en homrnes de genie, generals, etc. . . . Finally d o o r s w e r e folded back and o u t stepped a small, y o u n g e r , slighter l o o k i n g m a n than I expected and w a l k e d u p to us. . . . Fischer i n t r o d u c e d m e in the thickest o f [ G e r m a n ] accents as the greatest critic of Italian art in the w o r l d . . . . T h e President pleasantly r e m a r k e d that he k n e w all a b o u t M r . B e r r i n g t o n . . . . H e then chatted truly delightfully, easily, cordially for exactly five m i n u t e s and t h e n dismissed u s . " In his report to M a r y B e r n h a r d a d d e d a f e w details. Roosevelt h a d greeted t h e m w i t h " a m o s t expansive s m i l e " and " s h o w e d even his back t e e t h , " and w h e n they left he had said, " G o o d b y e , M r . B e r r i n g t o n , so pleased to have m a d e y o u r acquaintance." M a r y w a s f u r i o u s that B e r n h a r d had been i n t r o d u c e d to the president b y a m e r e art dealer, b u t H e n r y A d a m s tranquilized her at o n e of his n o o n t i m e " b r e a k f a s t s " w i t h characteristic i r o n y , saying that " n o o n e here w a s m o r e i n t i m a t e w i t h the P r e s i d e n t " and that Roosevelt " h a d even lent Fischer his copy o f The Education of Henry Adams." T i m e passed agreeably e n o u g h in W a s h i n g t o n , w h e r e B e r n h a r d and M a r y h a d daily l u n c h e o n a n d dinner e n g a g e m e n t s . T h e y called o n H e n r y A d a m s ' n e i g h b o r a n d l o n g t i m e friend M r s . C a m e r o n , for w h o m B e r e n son h a d a m b i v a l e n t feelings. Senator Lodge, at luncheon, lent t h e m a copy of A d a m s ' a n o n y m o u s l y published novel Democracy, w h o s e a u t h o r s h i p A d a m s regularly denied. T h e i r m o s t f r e q u e n t contact was w i t h H e n r y A d a m s himself, w h o had o v e r c o m e his initial dislike o f Berenson. B e r e n s o n felt that " ' C o n s e r v a t i v e Anarchists' [ A d a m s ' favorite selfcharacterization] o f o u r t y p e d o n o t easily find playfellows. B u t H e n r y A d a m s is a great r e s o u r c e . " B e r e n s o n ' s conversation evidently had the necessary satirical bite to please A d a m s , w h o invited h i m back a n u m b e r o f times for "pleasantly pessimistic t a l k " o f a w o r l d w h o s e degradation o f e n e r g y was n o w A d a m s ' p r e o c c u p a t i o n . A d a m s f o u n d B e r e n s o n ' s air o f sated worldliness agreeably diverting. " W e are all b e c o m i n g B e r e n s o n s , " he r e m a r k e d to a friend. "I a m f r a n k l y thirteenth c e n t u r y myself. H e is fifteenth, w h i c h I t h i n k d e c a d e n t . " D u r i n g B e r e n s o n ' s w e e k s in the U n i t e d States, relations w i t h the D u veens h a d b e c o m e v e r y close. C o n f i d e n t i a l letters f r o m the f i r m s p o k e o f collections to be inspected and o f paintings being negotiated for. M r s . J o h n J a c o b A s t o r w i s h e d h i m to dine w i t h her w h e n he reached N e w Y o r k . M a r y w r o t e that "dealers tell h i m his sayings are repeated f r o m o n e to a n o t h e r , a n d that n o o n e has such influence in picture selling." [75]

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T h e arrangement w i t h the D u v e e n s continued to be highly informal, the sort to be spoken in confidence and sealed w i t h a handshake. Berenson remained free to trade on his o w n or through other dealers w h o w e r e eager for his expert services. While in N e w Y o r k , for example, he received a cordial letter f r o m D a v i d C r o a l T h o m s o n , w h o s e partnership w i t h Lockett A g n e w had just ended, telling o f his n e w partnership w i t h the French Galleries in O l d B o n d Street, in w h i c h situation he " w o u l d be perfectly free and w o u l d like to be in special relation w i t h y o u . " Early in January 1909 Berenson, again in N e w Y o r k , w e n t w i t h Johnson to H e n r y Frick's palace on Fifth A v e n u e , and as they sauntered through the galleries Johnson took h i m into "corners to gloat on the w a y " M r . Frick had been exploited b y dealers. Frick proudly brought d o w n his daughter Helen's school notebooks containing abstracts f r o m Berenson's b o o k s , w h i c h he said w e r e " m u c h studied in fashionable girls' s c h o o l s . " His cordial reception inspired M a r y ' s pleased speculation, "It m a y lead to s o m e t h i n g . " M o s t portentous o f all w a s the fact that a succession o f emissaries came to Berenson f r o m B e n j a m i n A l t m a n , one o f the D u v e e n s ' principal clients, asking for a conference. Berenson's hopes rose that here at last he might be invited to help f o r m a great collection like Mrs. Gardner's. S u m m o n e d to A l t m a n ' s " e n o r m o u s s h o p " on Fifth A v e n u e , he could hardly believe his g o o d fortune w h e n A l t m a n said to him, " M r . Berenson, I like y o u and I ' m g o i n g to trust y o u implicitly and never believe anything anyone m a y say against y o u . I w a n t y o u to make m e the finest collection o f pictures in the w o r l d and make y o u r fortune out o f it too. I don't care w h a t I spend, nor h o w m u c h y o u m a k e . " T h e offer could not have been m o r e breathtaking, t h o u g h Berenson at once glimpsed difficulties. R i g h t o f f A l t m a n proposed b u y i n g the Q u i n c y Shaw collection in B o s t o n , and Berenson had to explain that it was promised b y the heirs to the M u s e u m o f Fine Arts. T o his alarm he also learned that prospective purchases w o u l d have to be approved b y A l t m a n ' s head b u y e r in Paris, a person w h o s e chief expertise was in ladies' g o w n s . Filled w i t h h o p e despite these unfavorable omens, Berenson w e n t to A l t m a n w i t h photographs o f " f o u r pictures o f the v e r y first order, a Velasquez, t w o El Grecos, and a R e m b r a n d t , " and was closeted w i t h h i m and his personal adviser. W h e n they emerged, "a look o f w e a r y discouragement had settled" on Berenson's face. A l t m a n genially remarked that he w a s not g o i n g to buy anything unless it struck his fancy. M a r y plunged in and said his " f a n c y needed education." His adviser "cast his eyes up to heaven in deprecation o f such audacity but A l t m a n asked to see the photographs a g a i n . " A l t m a n ' s shopkeeper's caution irritated the Berensons. Besides he [76]

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seemed " h a r d l y to k n o w even a n a m e , " being accustomed to " D u t c h pictures and pictures o f the B a r b i z o n s c h o o l . " A n d they suspected that his adviser feared B e r e n s o n w o u l d " t r y to i m p o s e his taste on h i m , " precisely o f course w h a t B e r e n s o n had in m i n d . T o cater to A l t m a n ' s n a r r o w taste " w o u l d n ' t be a bit o f f u n " and j u s t to m a k e m o n e y w o u l d n ' t be w o r t h " o u r leisure and our p r e o c c u p a t i o n , " M a r y reflected. Still there w a s a chance, h o w e v e r problematical, o f m a k i n g a great collection. B e r e n s o n told M a r y that he could d o it o n l y if she decided really to help h i m " a n d put their c o m m o n w o r k f i r s t . " A l t h o u g h B e r n h a r d w a s disheartened at being obliged to deal w i t h " s u c h an ignorant old m a n " and w i t h such " a n insinuating and hostile c o u n s e l l o r , " M a r y e n j o y e d the b y p l a y , thinking it perfectly natural that A l t m a n should hesitate spending a half-million dollars on pictures he loathed " i n the h o p e o f educating h i m s e l f . " T o add to B e r e n s o n ' s humiliation A l t m a n c o m p l i m e n t e d h i m o n h a v i n g the " m a k i n g s o f one o f the best merchants he ever s a w . " In the sequel A l t m a n p r o v e d an exasperatingly timid and meticulous client far different f r o m M r s . G a r d ner, J o h n s o n , Widener, and H e n r y Walters, and the dream o f creating another great collection gradually f a d e d a w a y . B y this time B e r e n s o n w a s v e r y m u c h in the confidence o f " U n c l e H e n r y " D u v e e n , w h o s o u g h t his j u d g m e n t o f the market even outside the Italian field. For e x a m p l e , w h e n J o e D u v e e n o f f e r e d £ 3 5 , 0 0 0 f o r one o f the greatest H o l b e i n masterpieces, the Duchess of Milan, f o r w h i c h the o w n e r , the d u k e o f N o r f o l k , w a s said to be asking £50,000, H e n r y t h o u g h t the f i r m m i g h t g o up to £40,000 i f necessary. " B e f o r e doing s o , " he w r o t e B e r e n s o n , " I should like y o u r v i e w s o n the subject. . . . What is y o u r opinion o f the picture itself? . . . W e should have y o u r opinion b e f o r e w e do anything d e f i n i t e . " E n c o u r a g e d b y B e r e n s o n ' s reply, the f i r m finally raised their o f f e r to £50,000. Late in J a n u a r y 1909 B e r e n s o n returned w i t h M a r y to Philadelphia to m a k e further notes on J o h n s o n ' s collection and to " s e e and catalogue f o u r little pictures w h i c h J o h n s o n had j u s t b o u g h t , at a price unusually h i g h f o r h i m . " T h e y w e r e pictures w h i c h both F r y and Herbert H o m e had guaranteed as genuine Botticellis. H o m e , w h o resided in Florence, w a s an E n g l i s h art collector and the author o f a b o o k o n Botticelli. B e r e n s o n l o o k e d at the pictures incredulously. " F o r heaven's sake, M a r y , u n h o o k t h e m and bring them to the light, and see if they can't be Botticellis. I'd rather h a v e lost a thousand pounds than h a v e had this h a p p e n . " It w a s a d i l e m m a , f o r if they w e r e not catalogued as Botticellis, it w o u l d " b e the last s t r a w " that w o u l d break B e r e n s o n ' s slim ties w i t h the British art establishment. B e r e n s o n w a s so d i s m a y e d that f o r a m o m e n t he t h o u g h t he w o u l d abandon the catalogue. J o h n s o n , w h o natu[77]

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rally had to be told that they w e r e not b y the master, suggested " w i t h his l a w y e r ' s c u n n i n g , " as M a r y put it to her mother, that they could be put w i t h later purchases into a supplement " n o t written b y B B , and that he could [use] Fry's and H o m e ' s o w n n o t e s . " Berenson's disbelief must have been inspired largely by his mistrust o f both Fry and H o m e , for afterward o n m o r e sober and leisurely study he decided that the f o u r panels w e r e indeed b y Botticelli and he so entered t h e m in the catalogue and in his subsequent lists. A g a i n in N e w Y o r k the t e m p o o f life w a s exhilarating and the air seemed full o f promise. A n d once again Bernhard could spend blissful hours w i t h Belle Greene. Business too had its flattering excitements. H e turned d o w n an o f f e r f r o m an important dealer o f a retainer o f $25,000 a year, fearful that it w o u l d spoil his reputation as a scholar to tie himself to one firm. H e succeeded not only in attending to his o w n b u r g e o n i n g affairs w i t h the D u v e e n s and other dealers as an expert consultant but also in disposing o f s o m e pictures for his friend F. M a s o n Perkins, w h o was living in straitened circumstances in Assisi. L u c y , Perkins' estranged w i f e , w a s w o r k i n g at the Metropolitan and was unhappy there. M a r y , always eager to play " P r o v i d e n c e , " engaged her as Bernhard's secretary to lighten her o w n g r o w i n g responsibilities. T h e r e w o u l d be " n o danger to B . B . ' s susceptible h e a r t , " she reflected, " f o r she w o u l d not live w i t h them but c o m e up f r o m F l o r e n c e . " Business and pleasure continued to be inextricably m i x e d in that affluent society. A t a party at the N o r m a n H a p g o o d s ' , Mrs. H a p g o o d ' s strikingly ornate attire made her l o o k , Berenson thought, like " t h e W h o r e o f B a b y l o n . " T h e A r c h e r Huntingtons exuded flattery and wealth. H u n t i n g t o n particularly impressed M a r y , for w h e n e v e r they met he pressed her hand to his heart and b o o m e d out, " T h i s is the most w o n d e r f u l w o m a n in the w o r l d . " A t a select dinner party at M r s . O t t o Kahn's h o m e , Bernhard and M a r y both w e p t sentimental tears listening to the singing o f " T h e Erl K i n g " and " T h e T w o Grenadiers," " a n a w f u l thing to do in such a select and squillionarish audience." T h e debauch o f s e n t i m e n t — a n d rich f o o d — c o n d e m n e d Bernhard to bed and the c o n s o lation o f an icebag. O n a shopping expedition Elsie de W o l f e selected for M a r y a dress o f black satin and l o n g lines o f jet in an overskirt, and Bernhard w a s " i n raptures" w h e n he s a w it. For a solid w e e k dinners and luncheons filled their days until it w a s time to run up to B o s t o n for a last visit. A t his parents' h o m e w o u l d stretch out o n the or talk " s t o c k s w i t h his D e n m a n Ross and paid

Berenson experienced his usual letdown. H e sofa w i t h his eyes closed and his thoughts adrift b r o t h e r . " In B o s t o n he sat for his portrait b y his court to Mrs. Gardner. A return to N e w [78]

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Y o r k on business allowed for more rapturous sessions with Belle. Mary, who stayed on in Boston to lecture at Fenway Court, seems to have been unaware of the romantic attachment which had developed between Bernhard and Belle. When she came down with a case of shingles in Boston, she summoned Ray to help her and arranged for Belle to be there " s o the two girls will have some fun together." In N e w York there was a farewell dinner party for the Berensons at Mrs. John Jacob Astor's home. The conversation at table concerned "the marvellous intellects of various demi-mondaines"; ironically, Lady Cunard was present, and they all knew that she had a bedfellow at the Plaza, " a horrid little English snipe" who had come over with her. An accident to the electric wiring in her room at the Plaza had made her liaison public. Born Maud Burke to wealthy parents in San Francisco, Lady Cunard had married Sir Bache Cunard in 1895. Though a loveless union, it had enabled her to establish herself as a leading London hostess with a penchant for "lions." As if to put a seal on the success of Berenson's visit to America, the grateful Johnson sent him a present before he sailed, a check for $3,000 to express his pleasure in a picture that Berenson had got for him. "It will pay for our motor," Mary exulted. Affairs had gone so swimmingly that Berenson, to reduce the "horrors" of the voyage, took a parlor suite with a private bath on the Mauretania for their return trip. The "horrors" were further reduced by a circumstance Mary reported in a shipboard letter to Mrs. Gardner: " T h e end of our fantastic American adventure has been finding ourselves, all undeserving, in what is known as the 'Millionaires' Corner' at a table with Mrs. Potter Palmer." Bernhard was flirting with "the prettiest lady on board," the actress Maxine Elliott, "and with the naughtiest, Lady Cunard." What Mary did not report—and did not k n o w — w a s that Bernhard had ordered a gift for Belle Greene before leaving N e w York. It was a gift with a special significance, the sixteen-volume French edition of The Thousand and One Nights, his favorite reading. N o r did Mary know that he had sent a loving note to her from the departing ship. Her passionate answer, written on the "very night of the day you left m e , " followed him to London. On it he carefully recorded the omitted date: "March 17, 09."

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H E Berensons landed in Liverpool on March 22, 1909, after a record-setting run b y the Mauretania o f just under five days. T h o u g h Bernhard may have been unhappy at parting f r o m Belle Greene, he nevertheless managed to shine with his usual brilliance in the conversation of the "Millionaires' C o r n e r . " From London he airily reported to M r s . Gardner that his time was divided between M r s . Potter Palmer and the London dealers. A t the moment M r s . Potter Palmer's collection o f paintings was tantalizing the dealers, for she had s h o w n a desire to sell o f f her Barbizons, which she thought were unsuited to her baroque chateau on Lake Shore D r i v e in Chicago. When she balked at paying 10 percent commission to D a v i d Croal T h o m s o n of the French Galleries, T h o m s o n asked Berenson to use his g o o d offices with her because "the real last w o r d lies with y o u r o w n influential s e l f . " For the moment T h o m s o n ' s difficulties probably took second place in Berenson's mind, for he had in his possession to read and reread Belle's letter o f M a r c h 1 7 . " D e s i r e o f m y heart," it began, " T o settle to what is before m e — t h e hours, the days, the months and years without y o u — i s to settle to a dull gray despair or else certain madness." She w o u l d love to be with him in London, " t o see those wonderful things with y o u r eyes. . . . If y o u see any o f m y friends tell them they are seeing the best of me in y o u . " Three days later she was marveling, " W h a t a large factor you have become in m y life. . . . Whatever happens nothing can change or take f r o m us the w o n d e r f u l months w e have lived together and if it is true as y o u say that a greater more glorious and all-filling j o y is in store for us . . . then nothing that might come between us shall count in the least." Berenson had enjoined her to write often and share with him the details of her daily life and her innermost thoughts. Thrilled to have such [80]

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an adoring confidant, she poured out her feelings at extravagant length, her bulky letters frequently crossing his. One can only guess at the character of his letters to her for, before her death in 1950, she destroyed all of them, but their fervor must surely have matched that of hers. O f one which he sent her at this time, she wrote that it was " a living breathing caress—it filled all m y senses with a delicious intoxicating delight." If in the first months he flagged in the least bit in his attentions, she murmured, " W h y do you write me only once a w e e k ? " When he reproached her for a similar lapse, she explained that her " B o s s is so unaccountably prejudiced against you and even dislikes me to write to you." Much indeed was " i n store" for this pair of lovers. Berenson's j o y would be liberally mingled with pain, and love would eventually subside into friendship, but that day was still years distant. At the end of their crowded week in London, the Berensons parted. M a r y set out for I Tatti eager to resume the " i m p r o v e m e n t s " which she had happily envisioned, while Bernhard escaped to Portugal with his old friend Herbert C o o k . C o o k , w h o was chairman of his father's prosperous warehousing firm, had recently married the daughter of Viscount Bridgeport and n o w , with a party of friends, was headed for a threeweek holiday. In his diary letters to M a r y , Bernhard described in loving detail his visits to the Cistercian abbey at Alcobaca and to the twelfth-century convent castle of the Knights Templars at Tomar. In the churches habit asserted itself and he pounced on mistaken attributions. At Cintra, where they all stayed at C o o k ' s "enchanting" place, the scenery surrounding the picturesquely sited town enraptured him. O n its solitary peak high above the town the battlemented Moorish castle seemed straight out of a child's picture book. B e l o w one could stroll among the great gardens and trace the Moorish motifs of the old Royal Palace. A high point of their entertainment came when they banqueted at the chateau of the Marquis de Foz, waited upon by powdered footmen with blazoned stockings. F r o m the younger Foz Berenson learned that the reason for his father's flattering attention was that he hoped to sell a Titian. T h o u g h Berenson was obliged to tell him that the painting was not a Titian, "both father and son behaved like gentlemen." Holiday or not, business affairs had to go on. From Cintra he informed Mrs. Gardner of the liberal credit terms he had obtained for the Manet portrait which T h o m s o n had offered her. There was, moreover, a good expectation that the United States import duty would soon be lifted and she would be spared that exaction. Then, lapsing into one of the frequent personal confidences which characterized his letters, he de[81]

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clared there were no women in the house party with whom he could carry on a flirtation. "When I am not hard at w o r k , " he wrote, "I must have women . . . [to] be in love with." More-insistent business affairs emanated from the Duveens in London and Paris, where Joe concocted vast schemes of acquisitions with his brothers Louis and Ernest. Joe was so impressed by Berenson's familiarity with all European art that he wrote him of a half-dozen miscellaneous projects which were in the wind on which he wanted his opinion when Berenson got back to Paris. Besides the Holford Velasquez, there were Werthheimer's John Hoppner, a Raeburn, two Gainsboroughs, a Donaldson Van Dyke, a valuable Lawrence, and a full-length Romney. " O f course I always bear in mind," Duveen wrote, "your caution never to give too high a price for a Romney." The most sensational project was his plan to acquire the duke of Norfolk's Holbein. Plainly a new epoch was opening for Berenson, one in which the stakes ran into thousands of pounds sterling. Much as he detested the "real inferno" of the dealers' world and suspected the flattering enticements that Joe Duveen dangled before him, he could hardly resist. The end of his long years of anxiety about having sufficient money for his role of man of the world was in sight. Hence when Mary in her daily chronicle reported that complications were arising as the improvements multiplied at I Tatti, he wrote, "Let us do all we can to make ourselves comfortable even if it costs more now. . . . I approve of everything unless I jot things down to the contrary." At the safe remove of Portugal he saw at first but few things to alter. The habit of daily letters posed its usual dangers of compulsive selfanalysis and motive hunting. Buried discontents rose too easily to the surface. Geoffrey Scott's continued presence at I Tatti was unsettling to Bernhard. Mary assured him, " A s he doesn't feel a spark of romance about me, although gratitude and affection, my excitement about him has come to an end, I almost regret to say. And I am not sure whether mere friendship, without a touch of sex, is possible to me. . . . I have more to say upon this and kindred topics, and perhaps at last, when we are together again, I can find tongue to speak out quite openly." Bernhard often grew uneasy and suspicious at the glimpses she gave him of devious and unsounded depths of her nature. Sometimes, he wrote, he wished he had never known her. "I have seldom trusted you without being fooled. . . . Try once more to be truthful and loyal." She had, she admitted, formed the habit of taking paths "around to compass my ends," but only because of her "great dread" of his falling into a rage. She was now resolved to "shut the door on anything that tends to break

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up or really damage the life w e have undertaken in common with full and intelligent consent." Delays and blunders in the work at I Tatti threatened new tensions. Her reports grew more disquieting. T o Mrs. Gardner she confided that "everything has gone w r o n g . " And to Bernhard she declared that if he wanted "thy home to be according to thy wishes thee will really have to come down and share through weeks of mess and disorder and really help grapple with the problems." Their great error had been to leave no one person in charge of the alterations. Besides they had been too offhand in the directions they left with their ragioniere, Ammanati. In Paris for a week after his trip to Portugal, Bernhard learned from J o e Duveen that he would not be needed there again until the first of June and would therefore be able to help Mary if she could use him. In reply to her anxious queries about the new electric wiring and the French chimney pieces, he cautioned that the wiring should be made invisible and that the chimney pieces should "never" be put on socles but let in flush with the floor. In his room at the St. James Hotel he pondered the troubled situation that clearly awaited him at Settignano. He was sure his villa would be uninhabitable for him, yet "a month's tete-ä-tete dinners with Aunt Janet [Ross]" up at Poggio Gherardo would be unendurable. " I f you send Scott a w a y , " he queried, " w o u l d there not be room for me at Villa Linda [a nearby pensione]?" The Wideners were in Paris, and Widener's son, Joseph, took Berenson to see his father. Both Wideners were "greatly tickled" at having acquired a Greco for which "they flatter themselves that at last they had turned the tables and done somebody else." Bernhard acted as cicerone to Joseph on a visit to Seligmann's, and at lunch with him he saw Otto Kahn "doubtless digesting Holbein." It was a piquant though mistaken surmise. At Kleinberger's he saw "a too enchanting predella" which he offered to Johnson by letter, and at Wildenstein's he stopped to inspect a Rossellino. Then he spent two hours with Joe Duveen while J o e was waiting for a telephone message from London to tell him whether the duke of Norfolk had accepted his offer for the Holbein. When the message came that it had been sold to Knoedler's for Frick for £61,000, "Joe nearly went off his head. It was a terrible b l o w . " Duveen's disappointment must have been somewhat tempered by what happened shortly afterward. The public outcry in England against the exportation of the painting to America had become so great that the money to buy it for the National Gallery in London was raised in part by popular subscription. Rumor had it that Frick in a beau geste had made one of the largest contributions. The price of $305,000 must have de-

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lighted the art-dealing w o r l d : it established a n e w plateau to which freespending American millionaires w o u l d have to ascend in their quest for European masterpieces. O n e m o r n i n g Berenson met Duveen at the Maurice Kann house to inspect the important Kann Collection, which Duveen hoped to buy. T h e n he hurried off to inspect Gustave Schlumberger's objects of art and to lunch w i t h h i m and Countess Charlotte de Cosse-Brissac. T h e e m a n cipated and adventurous countess, w h o was allied with one of the oldest families in France, had become one of Berenson's closest friends. Later in the afternoon he w e n t to see Maurice de Rothschild's collection of art, on which he was to report to J o e Duveen at six. Then, if he survived, he hoped to go " o n a spree" with t w o w o m e n friends of twenty years ago. While still in Paris he dined with Leo and Gertrude Stein. In spite of her bulk Gertrude looked "rather h a n d s o m e . " H e kept glancing about with pleasure at some of the Matisses that cluttered the walls. Pleasure of a m o r e intense kind came cascading to him at the Ritz by mail f r o m Belle Greene. "Desire of m y heart, I embrace thee," one missive began. When he sent her a p h o t o g r a p h of I Tatti she protested, " W h e n am I to have your portrait." A spot on her desk at h o m e was waiting for it, she said. " W h a t a relief and j o y to turn to the abundance of your l o v e , " a rapturous letter exclaimed. " H o w w o n d e r f u l that you wish to give m e so m u c h of yourself." She loved literature, for it sounded "the single note of love—love i m p a s s i o n e d — b u r n i n g — s e n s u o u s . " Her rapt musing filled page after uninhibited page. " G o o d n i g h t dear, I sink into your a r m s , " closed one recital; and in another, with shrewd instinct, she wrote, "I'll tell y o u a secret—you are not in love with me but with Love." When in one of his letters to her he incautiously w r o t e sarcastically of J. P. M o r g a n , she begged h i m not to "jeer at m y dearly beloved Boss. . . . In all the too few years I have k n o w n him in a unique way, he has been absolutely like a child in his confidences and the expression of his thoughts and feelings. . . . I w o n d e r h o w m a n y other people k n o w as I do the utter loneliness in life. . . . H e gives all and gets what? O n l y a sickening realization of his m o n e y and the w o r l d p o w e r it brings h i m . " Her adoration for the suffering and near-angelic M o r g a n continued for a few pages in her large scrawl but did not long impede the flow of passionate endearments which Berenson found so life enhancing. Life enhancing too was the pace of life in Paris, even t h o u g h the sessions with the Duveens often proved unsettling. J o e Duveen, full of bustling energy, talked almost all the time, boastful of his successes and full of stratagems and magnificent projects in which he sought Berenson's advice. " H i s lack of culture," Berenson confided to Mary, "is only surpassed by his quickness in seizing hold of what one tells h i m and his [84]

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enthusiastic giving it forth the instant after as his primordial, eternal conviction." From one "purposeless and aimless" session of mere "talky talk," he came away convinced that the "Duveens want to keep me talking so as to get hold of my vocabulary and phraseology." The sight that greeted Berenson when he arrived at I Tatti around May ι was far from reassuring. The front terrace was a mass of rubble from the excavation for the new kitchen. The new contadina house stood too near the villa, and instead of being the pretty little yellow building they had envisioned, it had been made into an imposing habitation. Mary had feared that Bernhard would order it torn down, but the architect managed to placate him. At first Bernhard took the chaos very calmly and even agreed to buy a motorcar, Mary's "chiefest dream of earthly happiness." It was obvious that much remained to be done, but Bernhard thought that the new library joined to the back of the villa would at any rate be "splendid." He put up with the tete-a-tetes at Aunt Janet's after all, but he trudged down to I Tatti with growing indignation at the desolation. " I am nearly dead with disgust, rage and despair over what has been done to our place," he wrote Mrs. Gardner. " G o d knows whether it will ever again be beautiful and whether I shall survive to see it." B y the middle of the month young Cecil Pinsent had come to work as supervising architect. Having "a passion for drains," he discovered that the man who had put in the sewerage pipes "did not know which connected to which." In the month that Berenson was present in the vicinity of I Tatti, one calamity followed on the heels of another. The discredited Italian architect Zannoni was displaced by Pinsent but too late to prevent his successfully suing for damages. The boiler burst and the water pump collapsed. That repaired, the bath overflowed and the walls of the new rooms had to be redone. The telephone produced unintelligible sounds. Berenson's sharp eye missed no instance of slovenly workmanship, and Pinsent lived in terror of his gaze. Annoyance came too in the form of Joe Duveen's importunities dispatched from Paris. J o e was particularly anxious that Berenson keep in touch with Altman, who had himself twice written to Berenson for advice. " H a v e just bought the greatest Velasquez existing outside of Madrid [Captain Holford's Olivares]," Duveen wired. "Explain to Altman. Keep matter absolutely secret otherwise trouble with nation. Net £110,000. . . . Tell him he is getting first offer before M o r g a n . " In a following letter Duveen urged Berenson to write Altman "your views in a very forceful manner. . . . Really his confidence in you is so great that w e feel w e can safely rely upon you to advise him to purchase the picture." [85]

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Bernhard dictated the requisite letter to Mary. He explained that he had known the picture for twenty years; that it was a great coup for the Duveens to have obtained it; that the Duveens were "great and courageous buyers"; that they had to use a secret intermediary because " a social stigma" attached to sales by Englishmen to Americans; that the picture was " f r o m a purely painter's point of view of the finest quality of painting and the grandest design and the grandest and completest and yet most dignified characterization"; and that the price was indeed enormous but there was no other Velasquez of importance left unsold. Altman was not to be persuaded, and Duveen found a purchaser in Mrs. Collis P. Huntington, from whom the painting passed to the Hispanic Society of N e w York. The letter to Altman was to be followed by scores of similar ones during the next quarter century. They were usually typed by Mary, and no doubt often edited or even drafted by her, for she had much less distaste for the task than Bernhard. There were of course other letters to be dispatched during the rush of "affairs" in the summer of 1909. One negotiation to be concluded was that with Gimpel and Wildenstein for the bust Mrs. Gardner was purchasing and another that with Thomson for the sale of the Manet to her. Mary reported to her mother that " B . B . is so deeply in the thick of many affaires that a large part of my time is taken in consulting with him, reading and perhaps copying his letters. . . . He depends on me more than I have ever really grasped. And what he is doing now is so much for the common good that I am more than ever inclined to sacrifice other things to him. . . . In a way he is really enjoying himself." One happy result of this flurry of business activity, she reported, was that Bernhard had been able to "pay off all the debt on our place." Bernhard returned to Paris in early June, leaving Cecil Pinsent in charge with instructions to send him "estimates for everything before launching out." The situation did not improve after his departure. The tragicomedy of errors was to continue throughout the following year. Told that electricity could not be brought up to the villa, Mary was almost persuaded to have a costly generator put in. Saved from that expedient, she learned that the electrician had figured on a 150-volt line, though the fittings were rated for 60 volts. Then it was discovered that the incoming voltage would be 280. Workmen sealed the water-pipe joints with soluble putty, and the result was a hundred leaks. The new masonry settled, and the cracking plaster in Berenson's bedroom began to fall. T o make matters worse, the plumbers somehow filled the washstand pipe with cement. More disheartening was the discovery that the fireplace in the library was set higher than the floor. The entire floor had to be raised. Additional pipes had to be run into the bathrooms when it [86]

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was found that there was not nearly enough hot water. Pinsent had had the peculiarly British idea that "everyone took cold baths." In Paris, when not closeted with the Duveens, Berenson had to remain within call to advise important clients and to inspect for them and for other dealers collections that were coming on the market in anticipation of the impending removal of the American tariff. He found to his dismay that his connection with the Duveens brought with it burdensome obligations of a sort he had not hitherto experienced in his arrangements with other dealers. The Duveens were now laying siege to Altman and counted on Berenson's continuing help. "Uncle Henry" Duveen, who had come over from N e w Y o r k to confer with Morgan and with Altman in London, urgently wired Berenson in Paris: "It is of the utmost importance that I should see you today or tonight. Do not fail m e . " Altman was resisting having his acquisitions channeled through the Duveens as Berenson, at J o e Duveen's insistence, had been urging. He would have preferred to have Berenson act directly as his employee and thus bypass the Duveens and their profits. In anticipation of Altman's arrival in Paris, Berenson returned to the disagreeable chore. " I am very little a businessman," he wrote to him, "and my tastes and habits are for the quiet life of the scholar. . . . There are only two things that I really feel I can do successfully, one is to pass upon the genuineness and the aesthetic value of pictures and sculpture, especially Italian, the other is to keep track to some extent of the worthwhile pictures and sculptures that come into the market. . . and I can prevent your being deceived in what you buy. . . . But as to acquiring these works of art, I am not well fitted to cope with . . . all the unpleasant details attending important transactions of works of art . . . and it would require more time and personal attention than it would be wise for me to take from my studies. . . . This is the reason I suggested to you to allow the Duveens to handle the more difficult purchases for y o u . " Since Altman had turned down the paintings he had proposed, Berenson suggested that they visit together a number of galleries in Paris "so that I might arrive at a just opinion" of what he desired. Altman temporized, making it clear that he did not wish Berenson to accompany him to dealers. Berenson, exasperated with having to cater to such an independent and stubborn client, burst out to Mary, " I can't tell you how wearied I am of the whole business and how I wish I had never heard of pictures, buyers, connoisseurs, and dealers"; and then, realizing the futility of his protest, he concluded, "Still, I am going to try it this time thoroughly and loyally." He swallowed his pride and gave up his month at St. Moritz to await Altman's return from a journey through Belgium and Holland. [87]

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O R T U N A T E L Y time did not hang on Bcrcnson's hands during the interval of waiting for the meeting with Altman. There were friends in Paris and London to divert him and arrears of business to attend to. When he called on Henry Adams, they were joined by William Sturgis Bigelow and John Lodge, the senator's son. "We chatted in sham hilarious vein," he reported, "and then Adams took me to the Lydigs'." Adams accepted Lydig's dinner invitation, but Berenson had to decline because he was engaged for the Seligmanns'. A couple of days later he took Mrs. Lydig, a very wealthy member of the international set, to the Pavilion for Robert de Montesquiou's fete. At another function he encountered the novelist Paul Bourget, who "expressed a profound admiration for my Lorenzo Lotto and gratitude for having made him admire that sublime artist Alvise Vivarini . . . and implored me not to lose myself in aesthetics." Their fellow guests formed a circle and then "everybody thought of nothing but how to place his bon mot." One day at an exhibition he encountered Henri Bergson, "a slight man, with rather sharp but not at all Jewish features, blue eyes, modest demeanor, frock coat and congress boots. He told me at once that my books were not only the best but a unique attempt at a philosophy of painting, that he thought them hard to understand but found them very illuminating. . . . All the time I was having the curious sensation of being with a mind exactly like mine and not superior. . . . And yet he has written books I cannot fathom. . . . He is the first thinker who has expressed an appreciation of m e . " For July and August of 1909 Berenson made London his headquarters and traveled frequently back and forth to Paris as the negotiations with owners, dealers, and intermediaries moved in complicated and labyrinthine ways. If business continued to tyrannize his days, his evenings saw [88]

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h i m petted b y h i g h society at dinners and receptions. M a r y , w h o w a s w i t h h i m in the city t h r o u g h m o s t o f J u l y , protested, " I d o not w a n t a n y o n e to blame h i m f o r snobbishness, f o r that is the foundation o f his business. . . . It is fortunate he enjoys h i m s e l f a m o n g the rich, f o r they are the ones he has to frequent if he makes m o n e y . O n l y I w i s h I liked it m o r e . " T o her m o t h e r - i n - l a w in A m e r i c a she a l l o w e d herself to boast, " T o n i g h t he is even dining w i t h the P r i m e M i n i s t e r . " In A u g u s t M a r y w e n t as usual to her f a m i l y at Iffley. B e r n h a r d j o i n e d her briefly there and paid his respects to his redoubtable m o t h e r - i n - l a w , w h o n o w presided o v e r her b r o o d in a wheelchair, impatient to be o f f , as she said, to her heavenly father. Senda w a s already there, h a v i n g c o m e on f r o m a " w o n d e r f u l t i m e " in Greece and Crete, a vacation subsidized, as his f a m i l y ' s a l w a y s w e r e , b y B e r n h a r d . L i k e her brother, Senda had developed a taste f o r l u x u r y and a fashionably large w a r d r o b e : to M a r y ' s astonishment she spent eight hours packing her steamer trunk b e f o r e sailing f o r B o s t o n . M a r y m u s t have been struck by the contrast w i t h herself. O n l y a f e w m o n t h s before, B e r n h a r d had u r g e d her to b u y clothes: " S u r e l y y o u w i l l need street clothes f o r L o n d o n , no matter h o w little y o u stay in Paris. . . . A w o m a n has no right to leave herself short o f necessary c l o t h e s . " M a r y c o m p l i e d , but not w i t h o u t frequent complaints to her m o t h e r that she detested sessions w i t h dressmakers. D u r i n g one o f his returns to France B e r e n s o n spent a leisurely f o r t night at the Villa T r i a n o n , w h e r e Elsie de W o l f e looked like a " p e r f e c t b i b e l o t " and J . P. M o r g a n ' s daughter A n n e w a s v e r y m u c h in evidence. Senda, w h o had been vacationing in Paris, briefly j o i n e d them. S o m e o f the usual guests put in an appearance, including H e n r y A d a m s , w h o had fallen, he said, " i n t o the clutch o f B e r e n s o n w h o eviscerates the w o r l d w i t h a Satanic s n e e r . " H e took B e r e n s o n to inspect the pictures o f " M a d a m e La C o m t e s s e de Franqueville (nee Sophie P a l m e r ) " at La Muette. L a d y Sophie s h o w e d them all o v e r the chateau while, as A d a m s reported to Elizabeth C a m e r o n , " B e r e n s o n oilily sneered at the pict u r e s . " B e r e n s o n , keenly observant o f his friend, noted, " P o o r H e n r y A d a m s d r a g g e d a leg in a w a y that distresses me. It l o o k e d too m u c h like approaching p a r a l y s i s . " It w a s a p r o p h e c y that w o u l d be fulfilled in 1 9 1 2 . B e r e n s o n kept in frequent touch w i t h R e n e G i m p e l , the j u n i o r partner o f N a t h a n Wildenstein. A f t e r J o h n G r a v e r J o h n s o n had declined to take a S c h o n g a u e r that G i m p e l had o f f e r e d h i m , B e r e n s o n w r o t e G i m p e l , " S i n c e then I h a v e done w h a t I could to sell it and at last I h a v e f o u n d a b u y e r . " H e cautioned, h o w e v e r , that if the painting turned out to be a f o r g e r y , " I shall take it back and I expect y o u to take it back f r o m m e . " F r o m L o n d o n he w r o t e G i m p e l o f a conversation he had had w i t h B a r o n M a u r i c e de R o t h s c h i l d about a Titian the baron had b o u g h t f r o m G i m p e l [89]

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and Wildenstein. At a gathering at Mrs. Potter Palmer's the baron had come up to him and said, "It was because you assured me Wildenstein's portrait was a Titian that I went and bought it. But now Bode comes and tells me it is not a Titian at all but a copy by Rubens or Van Dyck." "I talked to the Baron for an h o u r , " Berenson reported, "telling him just what the difference was between a Titian and a Rubens or a Van Dyck. I hope I have convinced h i m . " In England there was time to make the rounds with Wildenstein to see what paintings were available from owners eager to divest themselves of their country's artistic patrimony for American dollars. The talk at the Duveens' London gallery flowed as furiously as ever of enormous deals in the offing, but Berenson's share at the moment looked highly problematical. It was a relief to retreat to the north of England to Lady Cunard's country house at Inverary, where his old acquaintance the "witty and Irish" George Moore was "very much at home." Before he became a novelist, Moore had served a long apprenticeship as a painter in Paris and had written much on modern art. "I can see," Berenson observed, "he means to pick my brains." In London in the season's lull he had luxuriated in the art galleries, "feeling a perfect hatred of the 'expert' side of the business, and thoroughly enjoying the fine, un-Italian things because I knew so little about them." Then one afternoon he received word that his boon companion Count Rembelinski had died. His gloom was deepened by news that soon followed—Lady Sassoon was dying. Within a few days she too was dead. "You did not like Lady Sassoon," he wrote Mrs. Gardner, "but poor dear she was one of my familiars and life will be much poorer for her loss. But I feel far more the death of Rembelinski. . . . Him I shall never replace, for he was a wonderful combination of so many qualities I love in a man." The deaths inspired "penitential reflections on life in general and mine in particular." Mrs. Gardner expressed sympathy for his losses, "even for that of the beautiful Hebrew because she meant so much to you." Passing to a more congenial subject, she added that since the new tariff act had been passed, the Manet could now be safely sent to her, and she invited his opinion on where to hang it at Fenway Court. The deaths continued to trouble him, and he felt moved to write, "They are the first. It is an epoch in one's life when one's dearest friends begin to g o . " Yet death was not for him the worst of evils. His annual meeting with the aging Egyptologist Theodore Davis had distressed him. " O n e could only wish he would die. He refuses to be pleased with anything." "That, by the w a y , " he added, "is what we all must cultivate as we grow older, the will to be pleased." The tariff act which repealed the duties on works of art over a hundred [90]

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years old was adopted on August 5, 1909. Congress repealed the duties, it was said, "to lure J. Pierpont Morgan's fabulous collection" from his London and Paris homes. According to rumor, Morgan had promised that the nation would have it all if the law was changed, and his collection was in fact brought to America in 1912 and 1913. Whether the rumor was true or not, the idea that the duties discouraged the "big millionaries" from bringing over their collections did enter the debates in Congress, and the repeal of the duties gave a great impetus to American purchases of art abroad and led to an era of unprecedented prosperity in the international art trade in which Duveen Brothers took the lead. The interview with Altman finally took place in London on September 6 and lasted until midnight. Berenson reported to Mary that Altman "implored me to trust him" but added, " 'You do now, and when you leave me you won't,' which was shrewd of him. I found him, I confess, very attractive." The next morning he saw Henry Duveen, "anxious and haggard to know what Altman had said, and I to tell him what an intolerable, untrustworthy creature he was. . . . I feel like a cork on the wide, wide ocean. . . . I begin attendance on his Altmannic majesty tomorrow at 9:30. He is a vampire and God knows how profitably it will all end." For the meeting Duveen had brought over a few Titians. "Altman and his train simply jeered and sneered at them," Berenson noted, "seeing in them no merit whatever." It was apparent that nothing could be expected from him but frustration. "If he despised those Titians and missed the [Velasquez] Olivares what that I can recommend is he likely to want?" Still he could not help liking the man, who, to his surprise, had "an eye" and for three hours at the Victoria and Albert Museum "generally pounced upon the right thing." While making the rounds with him, Berenson caught a distressing cold, and he fumed to Mary from the depths of his sickbed at the Ritz, "I truly believe that is all I positively shall have got out of that old sheenie of an Altman." Indulging his fondness for the Dutch school, Altman bought three more Rembrandts and "the great Ruysdael" from the Maurice Kann Collection, the collection which the Duveens had just acquired for $2,500,000. Immediately afterward he sailed for home, leaving Berenson to nurse his resentment and the loss of the fortune Altman had dangled before him. Fortunately other Duveen negotiations showed more promise, and Berenson felt confident that he would be able to pay the bills that inundated Mary, w h o was back at her beleaguered post at I Tatti. He cautioned her, however, to use the utmost discretion in selecting the automobile he had decided they would buy, in order that they should start out with "a machine that we know to be perfect" and so avoid [91]

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unnecessary expense in upkeep. As for the continuing costly mistakes in the "improvements," she was not to worry about money. He thanked God that his London ordeal was almost over. " I cannot tell you how humiliated and degraded I have felt by it, in what a false position, how thoroughly minchionaro [taken in], by the Duveens, on the one hand, and the Altman crowd, on the other; by which I do not mean to say that I shall not make money out of both and fairly easily, but I hate the position of rage and discontent caused by knowing that I ought to make ten for every pound I get." As he was whirled from one negotiation to another with dealers eager to unload their precious wares on the insatiable Duveens, he felt a loathing for "the whole tribe." But he could not help adding, " I have made my bed and must lie in it." Courted by collectors and dealers, he decided to remain at the Ritz, feeling that its luxuries and faultless cuisine would fortify him for the rush of business affairs and the incessant socializing demanded of him. It was worth, he said, "all the money it costs." Among his business enterprises one of the most successful of 1909 came from his getting sight " o f the finest Hals out of Harlem that I remember having seen." It was a reputed self-portrait of Frans Hals and his family, which he was put on to by the resourceful David Croal Thomson. When he brought it to the attention of Joe and Henry Duveen, "they leaped up in the air. We had Thomson come at once." Berenson promised the Duveens that if they went ahead and bought the painting, he would stay on in Paris and help them sell it. As he estimated that he would thus earn £6,000, it would be worthwhile to "hang o n . " But there were delays, and when the Duveens insisted that he stay on for another two weeks into late October, at which time they expected to have acquired the Hals and to have sold it to Mrs. Collis P. Huntington, he "absolutely refused." He was induced, however, to accept a compromise, to take a ten-day holiday in Milan and Venice and return to Paris by October 2 1 . He joined Mary in Milan and " l o v e d " their new motorcar. For a few days there were delightful excursions to Verona and Venice, visiting friends and hunting pictures. Then calamity struck. When they sent the automobile back from Venice with the chauffeur, it stalled on a railroad track and, according to first report, was tossed into a crumpled heap. Berenson took the news philosophically, saying, " Y o u must expect such things with motors." As it turned out, the automobile was repaired for £160 and the insurance and railroad companies shared the cost. On their last day in Venice the Berensons bought a little Cima da Conegliano for themselves. Immediately after Berenson returned to Paris, the Duveens completed [92]

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the purchase of the Hals, according to the press, for $400,000. The report, as was often the case, was erroneous. The actual cost was still impressive, $225,000. When the painting arrived at the Duveens', J o e Duveen " w a s in ecstasies" and kept poking Berenson in the ribs, saying, " Y o u devil, you! B u t for you w e should never have got i t . " Mrs. Huntington did not take the painting, and it was not sold until April 1 9 1 1 when it went to Otto Kahn. It was subsequently acquired by Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, though by that time its identification as a self-portrait had generally been abandoned. Thomson in a confidential letter to Berenson described the maze of complications which attended the acquisition of the painting, the kind of exasperating complications that Berenson had learned frequently accompanied important deals. T h o m s o n had taken one of J o e Duveen's brothers to Westerham to meet with Colonel Warde, the owner, and his solicitor and an agent of the A g n e w firm. They had been unable to budge the owner f r o m his asking price of £45,000, and the deal was closed at that figure. The arrangement for fees was that the Duveens were to pay T h o m s o n £500 and, if they made a " g o o d " sale of the picture, an additional £1,000. T h o m s o n was also to receive one-third of the 10 percent commission to be paid by the owner to the intermediary, a M r . Bash. Three days after Duveen Brothers bought the picture they wrote as follows to Berenson: We hereby agree to pay you the following sums in connection with the transactions enumerated hereafter: 1. [Otto] Kahn. £4,000. 2. Purchase of Velasquez. £3,000. 3. Purchase and sale of Titians. £4,500. Sale of Franz Hals. £6,000 or if not sold to Mrs. Huntington the same due to you on this latter transaction will be £4,500. It is understood that £5,000 will be paid to you on the first of January and £5,000 on the first of April. The account came to a total of more than $80,000, and in addition there would be his fees from other firms. Berenson in an optimistic burst of exuberance wrote to Mrs. Gardner toward the end of the year, " I am making a great deal o f money. . . . As long as I do, and I trust it will go on for some time, I mean to allow myself two luxuries, one physical and one moral. The physical one is a motor car and the moral that I shall charge you no commission for what you henceforth buy on my advice." Through he continued to spend much of his days fretfully "hanging about" the Duveen Gallery or circulating among the dealers, he found time to enjoy the other side of Paris on which he thrived, the salons of friends and the exquisite cuisine o f his favorite restaurants. He amazed himself at his o w n physical endurance. " I cannot understand where I get the energy to do all that I do. I am a physiological mystery to m y s e l f , " he [93]

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told Mary. In the same letter, however, in commenting on Mary's tale of ill health, he said, " W e are a pair." Only the night before, while dining at Larue's with Ralph Curtis and his wife, he had "fainted dead away. . . . They were angelic to me, put me to bed, put ice on my head and hot water at my feet, called the doctor, etc." He saw a good deal of Henry Adams, w h o rather relished his admiration. "Berenson came to call," he told Mrs. Cameron, "and flattered me as usual till I promised to do anything he wanted." One day when Adams stopped at the Ritz to secure a table, Berenson came in to dine with Ralph Curtis, and Adams suggested they join forces. Ambassador Henry White came by and Adams placed him, "pleased as Punch," between Mrs. Curtis and Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, "surrounded by all the beauty and wit of the Ritzian w o r l d . " The fun, Adams added in his narrative to Mrs. Cameron, was that he gave the ambassador "a charming dinner at the expense" of the others, " f o r my share was only 56 francs." He gleefully concluded his account, " D i d you know me to beat out the Jews when I was young and had my mind still." Meeting Berenson shortly thereafter at Walter Gay's chateau Le Breau, Adams noted, "Berenson is a quivering aspen, pale, shrunken, and coughing, but more cerebral than ever." When not having Berenson to dine, Adams kept track of his activities for his intimates. In one note he reported, " T h e great Berenson is here, on and off, deep in negotiations for pictures, and escorting of Mrs. Potter Palmer." In another he wrote, " I have not an acquaintance now living—unless it is Berenson—who bites hard enough to smart." If Berenson flattered him, Adams reciprocated by his respect for Berenson's intellectual powers. Once, when deep in research for a book he planned to distribute to fellow professors of history, Adams had come upon the discoveries of Giacomo Ciamician, a professor at the University of Bologna who had done notable work on the nature of chemical affinity; he wrote Berenson, "When you get back to Florence, I want to know the name and position of Ciamician. . . . Some day, when you have nothing whatever to explain in the universe, explain me Ciamician." T o Mary, who especially relished news of his meetings with Adams, Bernhard passed on Adams' remark, " I shall depend on you to make me see and hear, if not to know, which is getting beyond my powers." After Bernhard's report of another encounter Mary commented, "Fancy Henry Adams becoming so cordial! T o him who w a i t s — . " Bernhard had written that at a congenial dinner party well served with champagne "Adams must have had the champagne go to his head, for he was most maudlinly affectionate and flattering. They were all discussing Prince [94]

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Collier's book on England when he suddenly turned and said, Ί feel compelled to tell you that no man living could write so good a book on England as you. Y o u have the knowledge, the insight, and the literary gifts.' A t the last I protested . . . and he replied 'That is nonsense. Y o u can say poignantly and clearly whatever you want to s a y . ' . . . I protested that my mistress Italian art would not let me free." The affectionate mood continued when he called on Adams the next day and Adams promised to give him both the Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education and asked him to read the manuscript of the new essay that he planned to publish, A Letter to American Teachers of History, in which, with characteristic pessimism, he concluded that civilization was doomed because of the irreversible loss of societal energy as part of the whole process of entropy. As if to cap his successes of that season, Berenson began a friendship with the distinguished American novelist Edith Wharton, a friendship that became one of the most treasured of his life. Six years earlier he had met her and been repelled by her haughty manner, and they had kept a truculent distance between them ever since, more on his part than on hers. One day late in September 1909, as he was about to leave Henry Adams' apartment, Mrs. Cameron came in with a woman he did not recognize. "It was Mrs. Wharton," he told Mary. "She did not look the least like the woman we met six or seven years a g o . " A week later he dined in the upper chamber of Voisin's as the guest of Adams, who had also invited Mrs. Wharton, Berenson's collegemate Morton Fullerton, and Mrs. Cameron and her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Martha. He and Mrs. Wharton chatted, gossiped, and exchanged limericks. She " w a s affable to the last degree," he wrote, "and so I buried the hatchet and called on her yesterday." Edith Wharton was a peripatetic member of the Anglo-American society. The new motorcar had given a pleasant acceleration to the movement of its members. She too had the virus that had infected Berenson and his wife, and had just published her Motor Flight through France. She and Berenson now met as important personages, each in his own right, and behind her regal bearing he found not hauteur but deep warmth. B y this time her mentally ailing husband had been packed off to America, and she had blossomed emotionally in her rapturous if brief liaison with Morton Fullerton. Before he left Paris at the end of October, Berenson was on the friendliest footing with her. At Christmas time when he sent her a copy of Logan's recent Songs and Sonnets, she responded with a collection of her own, Artemis to Actaeon, which contained a deeply felt sonnet sequence of her secret love for Fullerton. Beneath the surface of Berenson's enjoyment of Paris society there [95]

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continued to smolder a deep-lying vein of discontent whose red glow flamed up amidst his amicable and solicitous letters to his wife. Old grievances and suspicions surfaced united to new ones. Mary had not succeeded in concealing the depth of her affection for her protege Geoffrey Scott. Her strenuous efforts to find a post for him had the result, Bernhard wrote, " o f revealing to everybody that you are madly in love with h i m . " He was irritated also to learn that Mrs. Potter Palmer had been unable to see Mary in Florence because she was "racing about" with Cecil Pinsent. But deeper than all else was the sense of helplessness he felt in the face of her immoderate attention to her family in England and the relentless push of her ambition for them and for him. It was with a feeling of helplessness too that he responded to the incessant pressure from the Duveens. The great burst of business activity of the summer of 1909 began to subside a little as the autumn waned, and Bernhard wrote that "business is chequered, so full of ups and downs I simply do not know where I a m . " The endless conferences with the Duveens bored him, and their rejoicings over the great purchases by Altman, Huntington, and Widener and the enormous profits thereon, in which his own share seemed inadequate, left him with the sense of having been exploited. "It makes me sick when I hear from Duveens how much they are making and dissatisfied with my share." Between Mary and the Duveens he perceived himself to be the consenting victim of complicated injustices for which there no longer was a remedy. The passionate letters that continued to cross the Atlantic between him and Belle Greene served to heighten his disillusionment with Mary. He bitterly reproached her for her lack of wifely devotion. Mary, who did not yet realize the intensity of his love for Belle Greene or of his jealousy of Geoffrey and the way in which these feelings were all mixed up with his distaste for the art trade, was puzzled by the violence of his expressions of unhappiness. A moment of revelation came to Berenson one night after attending Eugene Brieux's play La Robe Rouge, a depiction of the moral corruption worked by ambition and pride. It struck him as a ghastly allegory of his own condition. The story is of a provincial prosecutor who covets promotion to a more lucrative post and the red robe of office which accompanies it. His wife, concerned for the advancement of their children, presses him to disregard his moral scruples in a judicial system that rewards guilty verdicts. He prosecutes an innocent man for murder but then repents of his zeal even though his repentance costs him his promotion. The man is acquitted but the harm is irrevocable; the wife of the accused has been forced to testify to her long-buried criminal past, her

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husband casts her o f f , and in her despair she kills the prosecutor w h o coveted the robe rouge. " I t m a d e m e so u n h a p p y , " B e r n h a r d w r o t e to M a r y , " t h a t despite all the gaiety o f a supper at Paillard's, I could not sleep. I live a life o f excitement and external gaiety. I do w h a t I can to be a m a n and to submit to the c o m m o n lot, but w h e n I g o to a play w h e r e h u m a n misery is touched upon, I realize in w h a t a g o n y , h o w v e r y close to the brink o f tears and torture, m y days are passed ever since our return f r o m A m e r i c a . O u r situation, I mean b e t w e e n y o u and me, is nearly m o r e than I can bear and y o u s e e m deaf to reason, to pity, to c o m m o n h u m a n ity, and w i t h that I abominate m y relations to the w h o l e art dealing and b u y i n g w o r l d . It seems m y lot to be victimized, b a m b o o z l e d and e x ploited all a r o u n d . " M a r y a c k n o w l e d g e d that she had been indiscreet in advancing Scott's ambition, but she assured B e r n h a r d that her friendship w i t h h i m w a s " n o w quiet and suitable and s a t i s f a c t o r y . " B e r n h a r d accepted her protestations, t h o u g h w i t h o b v i o u s reserves, and a courteous truce resumed, even to the affectionate x's at the end o f his letters. H e arrived at I Tatti on O c t o b e r 30, 1909, to a sort o f " R o y a l E n t r y " w h i c h M a r y , w i t h her l o v e o f pageantry and f u n , had prepared f o r h i m . D r a w n u p in a double line o n the terrace, alongside o f M a r y and T r e v y , w e r e all f o r t y w o r k m e n and six servants. B e r n h a r d b r o u g h t w i t h h i m the eighth-century J a v a n e s e stone B u d d h a head he had purchased f r o m B i n g , the Paris dealer w h o s e place had b e c o m e a center f o r the g r o w i n g v o g u e o f collecting Oriental art. M a r y thought the B u d d h a head " c r e e p i n g w i t h tactile v a l u e s " but o t h e r w i s e hideous. F o r B e r e n s o n its purchase m a r k e d the beginning o f w h a t w a s to b e c o m e a v e r y expensive h o b b y . It w a s a dramatic h o m e c o m i n g , and later that day the w a y w a s prepared f o r a different sort o f d r a m a that lay in the future. R e n e Piot, a French artist w h o m B e r e n s o n k n e w and liked, came to call, bringing w i t h h i m a plan f o r decorating the t w e l v e lunettes o f their spacious n e w library w i t h a series o f scenes in fresco illustrating V i r g i l ' s Qeorgics. " H e is the one person w h o paints n o w a d a y s in real old f r e s c o , " M a r y e x plained to her m o t h e r , " a n d w e like his w o r k v e r y m u c h . " T h e y w e r e attracted b y his conception, and in a rash m o m e n t the thing w a s c o m m i s sioned. If the royal entry w a s a success, nothing else about the renovated villa pleased B e r n h a r d , and none o f C e c i l Pinsent's m a n y blunders escaped his searching glance. D o o r s w e r e unshuttable, handles unturnable, and locks i m m o v a b l e . T h e r e w a s " n o t a trace o f a h o m e or a possibility o f quiet w o r k at a d e s k , " he lamented to Barrett Wendell. T o J o h n s o n he e m -

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broidered the theme: "There are at least 50 blackguardly scalawags singing opera tunes and swigging wine over the premises." Within a few days the appearance of calm he had initially managed disappeared, and he began to rage as each new piece of slovenly workmanship came under his eye. He motored off with Mary to Siena for several days to escape the confusion, and she agreed to return with him only on his fragile promise to be " g o o d natured." For a few days he took refuge with the Princess Ghika at the beautifully maintained Villa Gamberaia and on returning said of their own place that they had always lived in a pigsty. T o Mary it was "the worst matrimonial crisis" of their lives. "It has brought to light all the latent or semicovered up differences between us. . . . B . B . wants perfection in physical surroundings and his taste for luxury is modelled on a style of life (and income) I have absolutely no desire to emulate." In the continuing chaos there was little opportunity for serious work. The disorder had made him actually ill, but after the first volcanic explosions he calmed down and they found solace in buying two "ruinously expensive" Signorellis. He spent more time languishing in bed than out of it. Mary was convinced that enduring him through these periods of his "horribility" showed that she really loved him. It did not help matters, however, that she felt it was her wifely duty to help him get over "his weaknesses" and hence could not "pet him and make things as easy for him as my heart tempts."

[98]

X I

The Ixion Wheel of ^Business

T

H E year 1909 had put Berenson in sight of genuine affluence, but the result was that his writing on art was entirely pushed aside. In the intervals of travel and constant negotiation there was Little time for leisurely reflection on aesthetics. Before leaving for America in the fall of 1908, he had managed to produce a three-page article on a newly discovered Lorenzo Monaco for the Rivista d'Arte. Five years would pass before he would publish another article. The Florentine Painters and The Central Italian Painters were reissued in 1909 with greatly expanded Lists, but of fresh prose there was none. The British publisher J . M . Dent & Sons appears, however, to have pressed him for a new book, and Berenson turned to his two essays on Sassetta published in the Burlington Magazine in 1903 as a possibility. Mary had counseled against reprinting the essays, thinking they were not good enough for a book. Her opposition, by a kind of reflex, may have been enough to have determined him. The small book, A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend, came out in 1909. A deeper motive may well have led to the publication. Again and again Berenson had reproached himself for his involvement in the art trade, he who in his youth had aimed at the disinterested worship of Beauty. Publication of his idealized portrait of Saint Francis, who had married Lady Poverty, seems a symbolic act of contrition for his surrender to mere money making and material possessions, for in Saint Francis he had depicted the ideal of his nostalgic, if futile, dreaming: a man who had attained "the most unattainable of emancipations, the emancipation from oneself." He dedicated the book to Count Rembelinski, the friend whose death he so recently mourned. The favorable reception of the book showed that Berenson had lost none of his authority. The Dial concluded its appreciative summary: [99]

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"Although small as to size, the books of Mr. Bernhard Berenson are never otherwise than significant as to art criticism." The London Athenaeum pointed out that Berenson was awakening an appreciation of Sassetta by showing his spiritual affinity to Oriental art, and the Nation thought the book "opened the large question of imaginative as contrasted with realistic design." But the North American Review threw out a challenge that sank deep into Berenson's consciousness. While praising Berenson's earlier books as perhaps the soundest expression of the aesthetics of painting, the writer admonished him that "the day of little books is past." The book was " g o o d , " but it did not have "the firm reality of the great book he owes his generation." Again and again Berenson tried to formulate his "great" book on aesthetics, and each time it eluded him. It seemed to lurk in his inkwell, and it remained there resisting even provisional expression for nearly forty years. An observation by Arnold Bennett in a November 1909 issue of New Age must have impressed him as an admonition to persevere. "I find confirmation of my own view [of the discord between artists and critics] in other arts than my o w n , " Bennett wrote. "The critical work of Mr. Bernhard Berenson, for instance, seems to me wonderful and satisfying. But when I mention Mr. Berenson to a painter I invariably discover that that painter's attitude . . . is well—, aristocratic." Forty-five years later Berenson, recalling Bennett's comment, wrote: " I owe him a debt. He was the first, not himself an art critic, to write about m e . " The beginning of 1910 had brought no diminution of the confusion at I Tatti as Berenson, afflicted with dyspepsia, tried to keep clear of the workmen and, often from a sickbed, to carry on his business affairs. Pictures had to be checked against his library of photographs, nearly inaccessible books consulted, and much conferring completed with Mary to determine attributions or track accounts with dealers. His rages against the pervasive disorder became a recurring feature of life. Dealers were almost daily visitors, each with a pet project. The wonderful flood of pounds sterling that poured into his account at Baring Brothers in London alternately dazzled and alarmed him, for expenditures seemed always to outrun income. At the opening of 1910 Mary told her mother that B . B . had £12,000 owing to him and that they were "really very well o f f " ; still, a delay of a week in a remittance of £5,000 was "horribly a w k w a r d " because they had put off creditors to the first of the month in expectation of it. The scheme of improvements to the I Tatti estate as generously interpreted by Cecil Pinsent called for ever-increasing outlays. When their fattore explained that the new farmhouse would cost £2,400, they half hoped that the work might be abandoned, but the momentum of extravagance could not be stayed nor their [100]

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array of dependents in England and America reduced. Friends had already begun to refer to I Tatti as "Berenson's Folly." As the improvements dragged on, Berenson told Mrs. Gardner that he had "wasted almost a hundred thousand dollars" on the estate, three times what he had paid for it. The cost of maintaining a chauffeur and reimbursing him for the incessant repairs and servicing added a fresh anxiety, delightful as the new motorcar was proving to be on excursions about the countryside and down to Rome. " A t this rate of expenditure," Berenson reflected in some bewilderment, " I cannot possibly afford an auto." But the stream of remittances from his clients and dealers in Europe and America discouraged prudence, and by November of 1 9 1 0 he had bought another automobile and thus owned both " a big and little motor." The second purchase assured that one car at least would always be in running order. J o e Duveen opened the year's correspondence with a succession of anxious queries. He was worried about a picture on which Berenson had changed his opinion since his 1901 List: "Should we buy the picture and then cause endless difficulties?" T o that there could be only one answer: avoid trouble. Lord Cowper's magnificent Raphaels were being shown at the Grafton Galleries: "Wire whether they are authentic. Are they in good condition? Must have your advice." Their authenticity, Berenson assured him, was unquestionable. Duveen subsequently acquired the small Cowper Madonna and the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna and sold the first to Peter Widener for $836,000 and the second to Andrew Mellon for $1,166,000. Both masterpieces fortunately ended up in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Tied to the Ixion wheel of business, Berenson began to learn that its revolutions governed his goings and comings with unexpected rigor. Hitherto he had regulated his life with almost methodical care, with excursions planned long in advance, itineraries carefully laid out, and each day's schedule prescribed. True, Mrs. Gardner had issued her royal commands and he had submitted in his fashion, but they had required that he dance attendance only at yearly intervals. He now had to do with a far more demanding sovereign, one whose disarming friendliness and good humor covered an inordinate ambition to prevail and bend his associates to his purposes. Duveen's deferential but insistent demands could not be ignored, and toward the end of January 1910 Bernhard, improved in health, set out with Mary for London. On their stopover in Paris a hurried consultation with a dealer before breakfast earned him a tidy £340. He wrote Senda, " A s for me I am here to make money and I may say I am making it by the handful." [ΙΟΙ]

BERNARD

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· THE M A K I N G

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In L o n d o n Berenson throve o n the solicitous attentions o f titled picture o w n e r s w h o , eager to repair their fortunes in a b o o m i n g market, sought his expert opinion. Fees seemed to rain upon him. A transaction f r o m w h i c h he had expected £700 b r o u g h t a check for £1,100. M a r y f o u n d Bernhard " a v e r y j o l l y c o m p a n i o n " amidst this golden aura, and she w a s pleased that " p e o p l e do seem to appreciate his w o r k . " Berenson's interest in Oriental art, w h i c h had been inspired long ago in B o s t o n b y his sight o f the Chinese paintings at the M u s e u m o f Fine A r t s in the c o m p a n y o f Ernest Fenollosa and D e n m a n Ross, had n o w g r o w n to a passion, and w h e n Sidney C o l v i n s h o w e d h i m his Chinese paintings, Berenson persuaded Joe D u v e e n to b u y them for £200. H e lunched w i t h M r s . Randolph Churchill, w h o had just refurnished her house, and the contrast w i t h w h a t he had left at I Tatti filled h i m " w i t h rage and e n v y . " H e i m p r o v e d the f e w w e e k s in England b y inspecting the paintings at D o w n t o n Castle and other country places and b y traveling into Shropshire for a first sight o f romantic L u d l o w Castle across the m e a d o w . It w a s such " a castle as I dreamt o f . . . as a b o y reading the history o f E n g l a n d . " B e f o r e leaving England Berenson was persuaded to make a quixotic gesture o n behalf o f the candidacy o f Philip Morrell, Lady O t t o l i n e Morrell's husband, w h o sought to enter Parliament as a Liberal M . P . w i t h the active support o f Bertrand Russell. M a r y f o r w a r d e d Bernhard's check for £200 to A l y s w i t h the c o m m e n t , " H e says it is really satanic o f h i m to lend it for such a purpose, for he hates the idea o f Bertie's wasting his fine intellectual p o w e r s o n politics! A l s o he is a T o r y , and has a fearful dread o f all this Liberal-socialistic legislation." Morrell's candidacy failed. O n the w a y back to Florence, accompanied b y M a r y ' s daughter Ray, the Berensons stopped o f f at Milan to check progress on Cavaliere C a v e n a g h i ' s restorations on their Signorellis, and then Bernhard w e n t o f f to confer w i t h his old friend the art historian D r . G u s t a v o Frizzoni, w h o w a s eager to dispose o f several paintings. Berenson offered t h e m to Johnson, w h o s e most recent acquisition had been a Titian for £4,000. A s Johnson's tastes w e r e broad and his ambitions as a collector modest, Berenson could not forbear remarking to him, " I ' d rather earn y o u r penny than A l t m a n ' s thousand p o u n d s . " Johnson took four o f Frizzoni's paintings. Just at the m o m e n t w h e n the removal o f the A m e r i c a n customs exactions had greatly stimulated the demand for Italian paintings, the Italian g o v e r n m e n t adopted m o r e stringent regulations g o v e r n i n g their export. A progressive e x p o r t duty w a s n o w in effect. W h e n difficulties w e r e posed in connection w i t h Johnson's purchase o f a N e r o c c i o de' Landi [102]

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f r o m A l d o N o s e d a , a collector, Berenson exclaimed to him, "I brutally c o n f e s s I h a v e an infinite c o n t e m p t f o r their D a g o l a w s , a n d n o t h i n g w o u l d g i v e m e g r e a t e r j o y t h a n t o b r e a k t h e m , i f I d i d n o t l i v e here, a n d u n d e r flash l i g h t s as it w e r e . " W h a t especially d i s t u r b e d h i m w e r e the whimsical

decisions

licenses, the permessi.

that s e e m e d

to g o v e r n

the g r a n t i n g

of

export

F o r t h e m o m e n t the d i f f i c u l t i e s a t t e n d i n g permessi

d i s c o u r a g e d his s e a r c h in Italy f o r suitable p a i n t i n g s , and he u n s u c c e s s fully p r o p o s e d a R o g e r V a n der W e y den to M r s . Gardner. It w a s t h e h y p o c r i s y a n d c o r r u p t i o n that s u r r o u n d e d the e n f o r c e m e n t o f t h e Italian l a w s that m o s t irritated h i m . L a t e r that y e a r w h e n he w a s c o n f i n e d t o b e d f o r s o m e w e e k s w i t h his r e c u r r i n g illnesses, h e w r o t e t o H e n r y A d a m s that his illness h a d s a v e d h i m f r o m b e i n g t r o u b l e d b y " a l l t h e g r e a t Italian d e f e n d e r s o f their artistic p a t r i m o n y w h o w i s h to sell m e their r e c e n t l y p u r c h a s e d ancestral t r e a s u r e s . " H e h a d b e e n s h o c k e d t o learn earlier i n t h e y e a r that 4,000 lire ($800) w a s the h i g h e s t salary o f a f u l l - f l e d g e d g a l l e r y d i r e c t o r in Italy and that the i n s p e c t o r s w h o passed o n e x p o r t a t i o n s g o t o n l y 2,000 lire. " I m a g i n e , " h e w r o t e M a r y , " g i v i n g p e o p l e s o e x p o s e d t o t e m p t a t i o n $400 a y e a r . " T h e press o f dealers a n d i n t e r m e d i a r i e s w h o c a m e u p the V i n c i g l i a t a r o a d t o I T a t t i h a d s o i n c r e a s e d b y F e b r u a r y that B e r e n s o n e m p l o y e d F. M a s o n P e r k i n s " t o d o all t h e m e d i a t i n g w o r k i n b u y i n g pictures, s e e i n g the dealers, b e a t i n g d o w n their prices a n d a r r a n g i n g t o g e t t h e p i c t u r e s s a f e l y o u t o f the c o u n t r y . " It w a s w o r k that b o r e d a n d

exasperated

B e r e n s o n . H e r e s e n t e d t h e f a w n i n g o f f e r s o f secret c o m m i s s i o n s , h a v i n g l o n g a g o l e a r n e d t h e a n g u i s h i n g reflections t h e y c o u l d inspire. N o t l o n g after his r e t u r n f r o m E n g l a n d a Paris dealer sent a p h o t o g r a p h w i t h a c h e c k f o r 2,000 f r a n c s a n d a s k e d that B e r e n s o n inscribe an a t t r i b u t i o n t o M o r o n i o n the b a c k o f it. H e d e c l a r e d that B e r e n s o n h a d s o i d e n t i f i e d the p a i n t i n g in his s h o p and that the C a n a d i a n c o l l e c t o r Sir W i l l i a m V a n H o m e , t o w h o m h e h a d s o l d it, n o w w a n t e d B e r e n s o n ' s c e r t i f i c a t i o n . W h e n B e r e n s o n p r o t e s t e d that h e h a d n e v e r seen the p i c t u r e a n d r e t u r n e d t h e c h e c k , he w a s o f f e r e d 15,000 francs t o g e t the dealer o u t o f his d i f f i c u l t y , an o f f e r h e i n d i g n a n t l y r e j e c t e d . It w a s d i s g u s t i n g , M a r y c o m m e n t e d t o her m o t h e r , " t o h a v e o n e ' s n o s e r u b b e d in s u c h c h e a t i n g . " S u f f i c i e n t p r o g r e s s h a d n o w b e e n m a d e o n t h e alterations o f I T a t t i that the s e r v i c e s o f C e c i l P i n s e n t a n d G e o f f r e y S c o t t w e r e n o l o n g e r n e e d e d . P i n s e n t , w h o h a d b e e n in c h a r g e , d e c l i n e d f u r t h e r salary, p r o t e s t i n g that n o o n e w a s e v e r paid so w e l l . T h e t w o y o u n g m e n t o o k quarters in the V i a delle T e r m e a n d set u p as c o n s u l t i n g architects. T h e f a m e o f the n e w l i b r a r y at I T a t t i s o o n b r o u g h t t h e m three n e w clients. W h a t e v e r s a t i s f a c t i o n B e r e n s o n w a s n o w able to take in t h e s p a c i o u s a d d i t i o n s to the villa, the g r a c e f u l flight o f s t o n e stairs that c u r v e d u p [103]

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ward from the entrance corridor, and the newly opened vistas to the outdoors, was embittered, as he wrote Roger Fry, by the loss of a whole year at a time of life when good working years can at best not be many. " W e are n o w , " he explained in March, "where I expected to be a year a g o . " His relations with Fry had settled down to a wary friendliness. Fry had found J . P. Morgan an uncongenial taskmaster, and he had applied for the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge, an appointment for which he had to wait thirteen years. "America has failed m e , " he had written Berenson, who had provided a warm testimonial in support of his application. Alternations between Bernhard's good humor and his despair marked the rhythm of the Berensons' life during the late winter and spring of 191 o. Beneath the surface there coursed a new source of malaise that surfaced during a visit with Ralph Curtis at the Villa Sylvia at St. Jeansur-mer. There, away from Mary's irony, for she did admit to rubbing "things in a bit," he aired his grievance in a letter to her. He wrote that he had returned to I Tatti the previous November autumn with a hunger for her society in the weeks he languished in bed with a nervous illness. "Either you were too busy in the morning, or at night you came so late you were too tired to stay." He had come home "hoping for healing in your arms. But alas I felt you cold and stiff." He denied he felt repugnance to her as she had charged. True, as Mary had known for some time, he was greatly drawn to Belle Greene, whose visit he was eagerly expecting that summer, but she was still, he argued, "only an adventure while you remained forever." Then he declared, " I must keep you, but if keeping you obliges me to let go of Belle it will be so hard that it may not be worthwhile." Mary strove to be tolerant. "If Belle comes over and makes thee happy I shall most heartily enjoy seeing it." There the matter rested like a banked fire. Work had now been resumed on the Johnson catalogue, for which more photographs arrived amidst negotiations for new pictures for the collection and discussions of attributions. The typing as usual fell to Mary's lot, but interruptions multiplied. J o e Duveen came down to Florence with his brother Louis in mid-March looking for bronzes and majolica, having first asked Berenson to "look around to see whether there is anything for our consideration." He particularly had asked Berenson to look at a picture being offered by the dealer Salvatori. His impression, he said, was that it was not by the master, "but I am not a sufficiently good judge to venture upon an expert opinion." Joe and his brother Louis proved "much more agreeable than w e dared hope," Mary noted, and to her great satisfaction "they admired the new library extravagantly." In his bread-and-butter letter Duveen alluded to [104]

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the family lawsuit in which the eight brothers were involved on the breakup of their father's firm. He had been "boxed u p " with his solicitors and barristers but was now pleased to say that it had all ended "satisfactorily for m e . " J o e emerged, in close association with his uncle Henry, as head of the reconstituted firm. Soon he was able to inform Berenson that the opening of their gallery in the place Vendöme would be celebrated on May ι with a great exhibition of their many new acquisitions. There were also, he wrote, "some very important messages to give you that are so private that I cannot write them." Berenson managed to avoid the opening, evidently suspecting the public-relations use that Joe would wish to make of his presence. As a semblance of order began to assert itself at I Tatti, the formal dinners and luncheons multiplied. One catches glimpses of the Zangwills, the sculptor Hendrick Andersen, the Princess Liechtenstein, Cecil Spring Rice, Lawrence Binyon, and such regulars as Placci and Hortense Serristori. Theodore Davis made his annual appearance, but the dinner was marred when without warning Berenson fainted dead away. It was the sixth occurrence that year. Sometimes the fainting was associated with outbursts of anger, on one occasion so violent that Mary locked the door to his room. Dr. Giglioli could only counsel self-restraint and prescribe for the customary ailing liver. After still another hysterical rage he advised that Bernhard seek psychiatric help. During that outburst, while Mary and Elsie de Wolfe, who had come down with Bessie Marbury, tried to calm him, he cried out that he hated the house, hated all Italy, that life was a hell, and he would run away. The fit passed as quickly as it had come, and by the time Elsie left, it was clear that her feminine charm had tranquilized him. As spring bloomed on the hillside, Berenson implored Edith Wharton to come and provide a change of conversation. "Drains and furnaces, short circuits and deaf telephones, . . . drunken servants and Othello butlers are all the talk I have been hearing." Mrs. Wharton was unable to come, but there were other distractions. Bernhard's unmarried sister Bessie, frail in health, came over for a rest, looking prettier than ever and at the beginning of her stay so unobtrusive in her wants that Bernhard and Mary found her thoroughly likable. His uncontrollable rages disturbed her, however, and she declared that she could not imagine "having a man at all—after what she knows of her father and brother" at home and Bernhard here and the ill manners of Pinsent and Scott. She was to remain unmarried to the end of her very long life. One of the more striking sights to amaze the household that season was the apparition at the door of Gertrude Stein, "fat beyond imagina[105]

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· THE

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t i o n , " M a r y recorded, in the c o m p a n y o f "an a w f u l Jewess, dressed in a w i n d o w curtain, w i t h her hair completely hiding her forehead and even her e y e b r o w s . She was called T o k l a s . " It w a s the o n l y visit o f Gertrude's alter ego. Neither Gertrude nor her brother L e o stood o n ceremony, and they came over w h e n e v e r the spirit m o v e d . T h e y w e r e easily a c c o m modated w i t h a " f r e e m e a l " at tea time, hardly an expense at this period since their n e w fad w a s to eat almost nothing. For music the Berensons no longer had to depend solely o n evening musicales. T h e i r "latest j o y , " as Bernhard w r o t e Mrs. Gardner, was a W e l t e - M i g n o n player piano, w h i c h required no k n o w l e d g e o f a score or fingering but o n l y the energy to p u m p the pedals and to change pianola rolls. In quiet intervals he could divert himself as a virtuoso. M a r y , he added, was " m o t o r m a d " and " y o u n g people m a d " w i t h males preferred. His o w n pleasure in the convenience o f the motorcar, t h o u g h more restrained, was real enough. In a jaunt to R o m e by w a y o f Grosseto late in A p r i l 1910, he and M a r y w e r e j o i n e d b y Prince Franz o f Liechtenstein, an avid amateur o f art, and they had only one b r e a k d o w n o n the way. In early M a y they d r o v e to Caprarola, thirty miles north o f R o m e , to visit Mrs. B a l d w i n , G l a d y s D e a c o n ' s mother, at the historic Renaissance Villa Farnese, w h e r e she had been installed since 1908 b y her devoted admirer Prince D o r i a . T h e r e they found l u x u r y and grandeur e n o u g h to satiate even Berenson's dreams o f dazzling elegance. T h e broad spiral staircase that m o u n t e d to the first floor rose so gently it w a s said a horse could ascend it. T h e gardens w i t h their plashing fountains and sylvan figures, their blue-and-white peacocks, and masses o f flowers w e r e o f a nature that o v e r w h e l m e d e n v y w i t h sheer delight. Berenson must have returned to Pinsent's rather elaborate landscape plans for I Tatti in a chastened spirit. W i t h the approach o f s u m m e r H e n r y Walters, again reconnoitering for pictures in Europe, came d o w n to Florence "just to see," as he confided to Elsie de W o l f e , " w h a t kind o f man B . B . i s . " What the " j o l l y , g o o d natured, s h r e w d old bachelor o f 6 1 " saw o b v i o u s l y pleased him, for he commissioned Berenson to b u y regularly for him and proposed an annual b u d g e t o f $75,000. "It w i l l mean £1500 a y e a r , " M a r y j o y f u l l y reflected. Berenson's arrangement w i t h John G r a v e r Johnson had already settled into a steady course o f acquisitions and the sharing o f art-world rumors. E v e r y w e e k or so Berenson w o u l d pass on w o r d o f something that had come up for sale, a Moroni, a Veronese, a Sebastiano del Piombo, usually at a modest f e w hundred pounds, t h o u g h an occasional rarity ran into thousands. H e kept in v i e w Johnson's "legitimate repugnance to further [106]

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M a d o n n a s . " J o h n s o n w o u l d pick and choose at his pleasure and gratef u l l y remit the 1 5 percent fee f o r expert services. J o e D u v e e n ' s s u m m o n s e s b e c a m e m o r e urgent as the f i r m ' s A m e r i c a n clients came abroad f o r the s u m m e r ' s b u y i n g o f art. B e r e n s o n arrived at the R i t z and w a l k e d o v e r to the D u v e e n ' s n e w gallery to listen f o r several hours to J o e ' s masterful plan o f campaign. T h e j o v i a l assurances i m pressed h i m as m o r e talk than substance, and once again he f o u n d his m o r n i n g s " w a s t e d . . . hanging around the D u v e e n s . It makes me hate m y relations w i t h t h e m . " B u t i f the D u v e e n s bored and frustrated him, Paris o f f e r e d its usual satisfying social diversions w h i c h kept h i m trotting about the F a u b o u r g St. G e r m a i n to bask in E d i t h Wharton's " f a i r y g o d m o t h e r " charms or touching d o w n at the Villa T r i a n o n to visit w i t h the " n y m p h s " there, as his friend R a l p h Curtis dubbed the m e m b e r s o f their menage ä trois, Elsie de W o l f e , Elizabeth M a r b u r y , and A n n e M o r g a n . H e n r y A d a m s , established once again in the avenue du B o i s de B o u l o g n e , suggested B e r e n s o n ' s enticing s o m e o n e to dine w i t h the t w o o f them. T h e s u m m e r o f 1 9 1 0 w a s , as usual, a peripatetic season, punctuated b y a stay w i t h M a r y and her f a m i l y at C o u r t Place at Iffley in O x f o r d , in lieu o f taking a " c u r e " at B a d Gastein as B e r n h a r d had first planned. A t Iffley, c o m f o r t a b l y isolated in bed a m o n g his b o o k s , he could hear the c o n g r e gation o f the nearby church " p i p i n g its thin notes to their sort o f c o m i c rural D e a n o f a G o d . " S o o n o n the m o v e again, he returned to L o n d o n , w h e r e f o r a time he w a s entertained b y the c o m p a n y o f Senda, w h o had c o m e o v e r f o r a holiday. Widener s h o w e d up, and he took h i m to S u l ley's, the L o n d o n dealer w i t h w h o m he had close relations. His chief task, he w r o t e M r s . G a r d n e r , w a s to " p e r s u a d e trillionaires to b u y p i c tures, " a chore that required attendance at the D u v e e n s ' L o n d o n gallery, w h e r e he w a s o v e r w h e l m e d w i t h talk. " I w o n ' t g o there again until I a m seriously c a l l e d , " he w r o t e M a r y . W h e n finally a messenger came saying that " M r . J o e " w i s h e d to see h i m , he told h i m " t o tell M r . J o e that w h i l e m y time w a s far less p r o d u c t i v e than his it w a s no less precious . . . I w o u l d gladly c o m e p r o v i d e d he m a d e an a p p o i n t m e n t " and " s t u c k to i t . " G i v e n that p r o m i s e , he did g o , but t h o u g h he f o u n d J o e " m o s t c o r d i a l , " his assignment w a s deferred till the m o r r o w . " M e a n w h i l e I have the f o r m a l assurance I shall h a v e £5000 in the autumn. N o w y o u can feel less anxious about m y land h u n g e r . " H e had recently b o u g h t the f a r m plots across the road f r o m I Tatti to p r o v i d e a b u f f e r against e n croaching villas. A t one meeting w i t h the D u v e e n s he witnessed a great r o w o v e r w h e t h e r they should " g o in f o r Italian pictures or n o t , " at least o n a m u c h greater scale than before. T h e question remained open. D u r i n g a

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lull Henry Duveen told him that Altman had been angered by Berenson's remark, which had been reported to him, that all he got from him was a bad cold. Whenever business affairs permitted, Berenson gave himself up with alacrity to London society. He had become a prominent public figure and a popular guest, and his appearance that season in Reginald Turner's novel Count Florio and Phyllis Κ must have entertained his English friends. Turner, a friendly acquaintance, amusingly satirized his penchant for prolonged study of a painting with a magnifying glass, especially when on the track of a forgery. When "Barnard Barnardsohn" scented a fake, he wrote, his "eyes glowed. . . . 'It's quite a good piece of work,' he said, looking at it ferociously. 'It seems almost a pity to spoil it. But its time has come at last.' " And "Barnardsohn" proceeded to "scrape and chip" to reveal the imposture. It was the same Turner who, when conducted through I Tatti, playfully gushed, " H o w Duveen!" A grand party at Lady Cunard's found Bernhard in the company of fashionable acquaintances like Maurice Baring, Lady Lister, Lewis Malloch, Harry Cust ("including his whole harem"), Lady Horner, and Mrs. Leslie. At Lady Elcho's dinner one night he had "the time of his life." " I sat between her and Arthur Balfour. . . . We talked of anthropology, history, William James, American politics, etc. It was very light, thoughtful, exquisitely comprehending but not witty." His letters to Mary bristled with notables—Cavendish-Bentinck, Lady Charles Burford, Lord Brook. Mrs. Asquith, catching sight of him, was all sympathy: " H o w pale you're looking. Y o u must have been very ill." He dined with Lady Ottoline at her London residence, where he met the young playwright Channing Pollock. He went out to Knole to call on the Sackville-Wests and in the evening dined with Louis Duveen. He kept up friendly relations too with Charles J . Holmes of the Burlington, who was now Slade Professor of Fine Art, and with Holmes and Sir Charles Holroyd he looked appraisingly through George Salting's pictures which were to come on the market. But though the summer days in London passed in agreeably distracting fashion, emotionally Bernhard was only marking time, for he was awaiting the arrival of Belle Greene.

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E L L E G R E E N E arrived at Claridge's in high spirits on August 18, 1910, with a French maid and a mountain of luggage. Bernhard dined with her and they "chatted till midnight," so rapt in each other that " f o r the life" of him he could not recall " w h o , or what, or w h y . " " I am all in a whirl," he exclaimed to Mary, " f o r she is the most incredible combination of sheer childishness, hoydenishness," intermixed with "sincerity, cynicism and sentiment." Mary, herself bemused with Geoffrey, sagely advised him, " Y o u are getting old. Make the most of it, if thee can without doing her harm." Bernhard was quite ready to follow her advice. Belle's incendiary letters had kept him in a fever of expectation. " I would kiss you until you cried for mercy," she had written in May, "and I would cuddle up in your arms and go to sleep with my mouth on yours and my heart on yours with your hands in my hair and with mine round your neck." He wondered, after a few days with Belle, what the exotic creature would grow into. " W h o can tell? Perhaps I shall count for something in that. But as yet she is much more cerebral than sensual. O f the erotic there is little in her and under the mask and manner and giggle there is something so genuine, so loyal, so vital, so full of heart. . . that. . . my impressions vary from minute to minute." Afloat in good feeling, he ended the letter to Mary, " G o o d b y e my darling. Even though polygamous I am not the less yours." He was to be Belle's companion during the most of the month that followed. She had come over to make purchases for J . P. Morgan's collections, and manuscript dealers were eagerly seeking her patronage. Bernhard accompanied her to shop in London and Paris before they set out for an exhibition of Eastern art in Munich. At one place he happened to call her attention to a fine manuscript for which £8,000 was asked.

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Interested in it, she cabled Morgan, and, to Berenson's amazement, Morgan told her to use her own judgment. At another place she calmly used her carte blanche to select a half-dozen expensive medieval manuscripts. The wonder of this belated romance colored all of Berenson's thoughts. He ruminated on it, incredulous of his good fortune, and kept turning it over in his mind, verbally probing his feelings. He felt a kind of terror of "this incredibly unlooked for love that is being given me," a fear of its illusory character. Just before setting off with Belle, he reflected for the benefit of Mary, who was once more trying a reducing cure, "When shall I grow up, cool off, settle down?" He felt a "desperate desire to mortgage the future forever." Perhaps, he mused, he did not have "enough strength for actual emotions," for "putting such new wine into an old bottle." Baffled by the tyrannous rush of feeling which mocked the orderliness of his life, he went on with his soul searching: " N o , I ought to confine myself strictly to ideated sensations. . . . But again something in me loves the actual that I am getting n o w . " Mary had become reacquainted with Belle Greene in London before leaving for the reducing spa. Reflecting on that encounter when she got back to Iffley, she admitted to Bernhard, "I was really quite charmed by Miss Greene and wish this might be the beginning of a permanent relation such as our middle-aged, bourgeois romantic souls sigh for." She could not forbear, however, adding some motherly advice: " O n e thing dear, I want to say in thy ear, Don't boast to her, either of thy moral or intellectual qualities. . . . Excuse this marital word but I want thee to appear at thy best." Mary's liking for psychologizing more than matched Bernhard's. She too had sat at the feet of William James. As a friend of her family, James had been wont to call the matriarchal Hannah Smith the "Mother of Pragmatism." N o w Mary urged Bernhard, "Tell me all thee can. . . . There is something fundamental, even mystical in loving a person. . . . It is the nearest we get to how God must love his creatures." Love "opens the heart," so much so, she ventured, that "I truly believe thee is fonder of me than thee ever has been." When this declaration elicited a complicated analysis the upshot of which was that he did not love her "at this minute as preoccupyingly as I have at times," Mary hurried to explain that she was not referring to "the present moment." As for his analysis that "a torturing preoccupation seemed essential" to love as a passion, she countered that "the excited state of nerves doesn't comprise the whole of love." So, like fellow researchers, they continued to exchange their findings. After sightseeing and shopping in Paris for fourteenth-century manu[no]

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scripts, Bernhard and Belle proceeded to the Munich exhibition. "The Renaissance is no longer my North Star," he had confided to Edith Wharton. "The tide of my interests is flowing fast and strong eastward." To Senda he wrote that the exhibition was a "perfect wonder . . . beyond expectation instructive." Knowing her puritanic scruples, he avoided any mention of Belle Greene. To Mary he was more voluble and intimate. "I feel so grateful," he said, "to what you are and the way you are taking this new situation, so simple, so natural and yet from any conventional point of view so extraordinary." But soon the idyll had an alloy: the "terrible business of dodging acquaintances has begun." Though painfully distracting, it was necessary because word of their companionship might give offence to J. P. Morgan and even arouse his jealousy. Bernhard's daily letters to Mary must have thoroughly satisfied her appetite for candor. "In the evening," he recorded in Munich, "I read aloud a great deal of French and English verse (How one returns to one's old tricks but with what stiff joints!). She likes my reading probably because she likes to look at my eyes while I read." He basked in the pleasure of her discoveries in the museums, all so new and fresh to her. "I cannot conceive," he exclaimed, "one person caring more for one person than she for me." Then, as a kind of caution, he appended, "A sheer miracle it is. I get what I can out of it now and what a glory it will be to look back to." At the moment Mary, who had returned from England, was herself en route to the Munich exhibition with Geoffrey Scott, who was as passionately attached to her as she to him. The pair reached Munich after Bernhard and Belle had moved on to Italy. It now appeared that the chaperon who was to meet Belle in Rome would not be available. Bernhard begged Mary to take her place, explaining that Belle expected to call on "her boss's favorite dealers" and they would undoubtedly spy on him and report to Morgan. "It is very necessary that he should suspect nothing. . . . I would suggest that you bring Scott along. Four is always easier to manage than three and it perhaps would make it pleasanter all around." Though put out by his request, she wrote she would be "glad" to help him. O n their way to Rome Bernhard and Belle traveled to Bologna, where he ran into the Blumenthals, prominent American acquaintances of his. Since they too were planning to visit Perugia, he decided to escape their company by going instead to Siena. He would show Perugia to Belle on the way back from Rome. "All this dodging about," he lamented, "half spoils my pleasure." The amorous pair of sightseers detoured to Ravenna, where Bernhard marveled that his companion was "incredibly and miraculously responsive and most of all to the things I really care [III]

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most about." She was in fact the "most responsive person excepting your beloved self," he assured Mary. Mary fell ill with her recurring bladder infection and so did not have to sacrifice herself for Rome after all. A chaperon of sorts did turn up, "a poor specimen of a poor type of striving, silly moneyed American female," in Bernhard's unflattering portrait, whose endless chatter made Belle "waspish" and Bernhard "miserable." The "idyll as idyll" was over, he feared. "After three corrupting weeks" with him, Belle's meeting with the chaperon dropped her "into the worst fit of the blues." The idyll could not be prolonged in any case. Miss Greene had to busy herself daily with Morgan's dealers in Rome, and Berenson had to return to Paris to inspect a collection for Duveen. Not one to spend time in his beloved Paris merely on necessary chores, he arranged to dine with Henry Adams. " M y life is that of a black beetle," Adams had written. "It is you who are occupied and useful, appreciative and decorative." Dinner under such auspices could only be delightful. Berenson found a cordial welcome also at Mrs. Cameron's table in the company of Ambassador Henry White. While Bernhard was busy in Paris, Belle Greene's business required her to go to Florence. At Bernhard's urging, Mary took her about. "Show her only the very best," he said, "the Pazzi [chapel], the Giottos at Santa Croce, the Medici, the opera del D u o m o . " Belle's presence in Florence seemed to heighten her ardor for him. "I could not have believed it possible," she wrote, "that anyone would become so much a part of me and my life as you have." After inspecting the collection for Duveen, Berenson returned to I Tatti where, to Mary's great relief, he professed himself to be pleased on the whole with the condition of the villa. Piot's frescoes had at first alarmed them, but for the moment they did not excite revulsion, for Piot had "modified the vulgarity of the nudes and opened out a soft landscape behind." In any case Berenson had a more diverting subject of contemplation. He hurried off to Perugia to join Belle on their deferred study of Perugino. After Perugia they went on to Venice, where they were met by Mary, Geoffrey Scott, and Cecil Pinsent. The whole party, including Miss Greene's maid, put up in "a splendid suite." The incessant sightseeing, the exchange of visits with the Humphrey Johnstones and the Ralph Curtises, and "a magnificent banquet" in their sitting room one night with Placci, Princess Mary of Greece, the Countess Czernin, and a few Americans gave little opportunity for the continuance of Bernhard and Belle's intimacy. Belle, however, thrived on the limelight. The crowding distractions in Venice seemed to him the result of Mary's passion for managing things to his disadvantage, and at the first [112]

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o p p o r t u n i t y he r e n e w e d his accusation that she regularly deceived h i m , that her deeds w e r e " e v i l and her heart b l a c k . " She retaliated that she had had to lie to spare his feelings and then to p r o v e her point infuriated h i m w i t h a dash o f truth-telling, n a m e l y that Pinsent had got a n e w architectural c o m m i s s i o n t h r o u g h C h a r l e s Loeser, w i t h w h o m B e r n h a r d w a s at odds. H i s i m m o d e r a t e outbreak in Belle's presence so o f f e n d e d her that she v o w e d she w o u l d " g i v e it to h i m hot and h e a v y " w h e n he took her to the A c c a d e m i a . H e r r e p r o o f w o r k e d . Later in the day he sought out M a r y and pleaded w i t h her, " M a r y , don't g o back on me. I've n o b o d y and nothing in the w o r l d but y o u , " an a v o w a l w h i c h she took to be an apology. W h e n after a w e e k the party b r o k e up in Venice w i t h B e r n h a r d g o i n g to Paris w i t h B e l l e G r e e n e and M a r y returning to I Tatti w i t h Cecil and G e o f f r e y , M a r y r e v i e w e d their life together in the light o f their recriminations in Venice. " W e used to quarrel dreadfully even before I fell in l o v e w i t h [ H e r m a n n ] O b r i s t , " she reflected, recalling one o f her clandestine affairs o f the 1890s, " a n d it w a s generally (not a l w a y s ) because I either concealed things f r o m thee o r misrepresented them. O f course this w a s w o r s e each time I fell in l o v e partly because thee w o u l d not believe that that need not alter a really devoted already existing relation. . . . S o I have fallen into the w a y s o f not telling thee a g o o d m a n y things that I feel w o u l d arouse scorn o r w r a t h or opposition. . . . P o o r B e r n h a r d , it has been thy cross and a h e a v y o n e . " B y the time M a r y ' s letter reached him, Belle Greene had departed to L o n d o n w i t h her maid and b a g g a g e , apparently unruffled b y the thought o f her separation f r o m h i m , a fact w h i c h left h i m desolate. A f t e r a sleepless night he felt he understood the temptations of Saint A n t h o n y . H e a c k n o w l e d g e d that the b o t t o m had dropped out of things. H o w e v e r , a three-hour chat w i t h H e n r y A d a m s set h i m up s o m e h o w , and he rem a r k e d to M a r y that w h e n he recently dined w i t h A d a m s and his friends, he " c o u l d not help contrasting his w o r l d w i t h Belle Greene's. What a relief it w a s to be in h i s . " B u t no matter h o w he tried to rationalize his feelings, he w a s tormented b y Belle's absence. It w a s true that during the day living w e n t o n and he w a s cheerful and carefree f o r hours. H e enjoyed seeing M a d a m e R e j a n e (Gabrielle Charlotte Reju) in a play, dined convivially w i t h a G e r m a n tenor and his w i f e , and w r o t e letters. H e unburdened himself to R a l p h C u r t i s during luncheon at Larue's and received "excellent but, I fear, useless a d v i c e . " A r c h e r H u n t i n g t o n also listened sympathetically. Bessie, taking a rest cure in Paris, reported his cross-gartered state to Senda and w i d e n e d the circles o f concern. " E v e r y t h i n g seems so v e r y far a w a y , so unreal, so o b j e c t l e s s , " he anguished, and the solitary nights in [113]

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his r o o m s at the R i t z w e r e " s h e e r h e l l . " H i s letters w e r e so filled w i t h w o e that M a r y demanded, " W h a t is the matter w i t h thee that thee is so miserable? Is it j u s t l o v e sickness? O r has thee the horrid suspicion that it w a s only an adventure f o r her. . . . I hope to be a raft f o r thee, m y dear, but I ' m not the stately l u x u r i o u s yacht thee r e q u i r e s . " In the midst o f B e r n h a r d ' s alternating misery and euphoric distractions, there came a " s i n g u l a r catastrophe" to the D u v e e n s w h i c h B e r e n son feared m i g h t upset all his plans and " a l s o endanger the immediate future, i.e. the £2500 I a m e x p e c t i n g . " T h e details o f the catastrophe w e r e served u p in the press w i t h considerable relish. O n the J e w i s h D a y o f A t o n e m e n t , O c t o b e r 1 3 , 1 9 1 0 , the U n i t e d States C u s t o m s Service w i t h biblical rigor sprang its long-prepared trap. T h e D u v e e n f i r m w a s charged w i t h evading millions o f dollars in customs duties b y the wholesale undervaluing o f art objects in the years b e f o r e the repeal in 1909 o f the i m p o r t duty. A g e n t s arrested B e n j a m i n D u v e e n and seized H e n r y D u v e e n w h e n his ship docked in N e w Y o r k . A b o o k k e e p e r o f the f i r m , at odds w i t h B e n j a m i n D u v e e n , learning that the C u s t o m s Service paid i n f o r m a n t s liberally, had betaken h i m s e l f to the head o f the service. R e p o r t e d l y the undervaluations had been m a d e w i t h the paid connivance o f customs officers. T h e D u v e e n s w e r e to be m a d e a spectacular e x a m p l e in N e w Y o r k as M r s . G a r d n e r had been pilloried in B o s t o n . T h e C u s toms Service put in a claim f o r ten million dollars and criminal proceedings w e r e b e g u n against various m e m b e r s o f the f i r m . Serious as the b l o w s w e r e , they did not in fact cripple the f i r m . T h e L o n d o n and Paris branches held their o w n . T h e gallery in the place V e n d o m e w a s bringing luster to the f i r m . B e r e n s o n ' s alarms s o m e w h a t subsided w h e n the check f o r £ 2 , 5 0 0 arrived w i t h the assurance that a similar s u m w o u l d be paid o n the first o f N o v e m b e r . T h o u g h B e r e n s o n ' s dependence on D u v e e n had g r o w n , his services w e r e still m u c h sought after b y other dealers. A s if to exorcize her w o r r i e s about their extravagance, M a r y carefully noted s o m e o f the potential fees outstanding that autumn. In a long m e m o r a n d u m she listed fifteen negotiations, f o r e x a m p l e , that w e r e pending w i t h N a t h a n W i l denstein, the m o s t prestigious dealer in Paris. T h e y generally called f o r a fee o f 1 0 percent. In a f e w instances B e r e n s o n w a s d o w n f o r a share o f one-third or one-half the profits. P r o m i n e n t a m o n g the expected p u r chasers w e r e M r s . Potter P a l m e r o f C h i c a g o , M a u r i c e de Rothschild, M r s . G a r d n e r , and the A m e r i c a n capitalist T h o m a s Fortune R y a n . She also noted that the S t e i n m e y e r f i r m o f Paris had agreed to share one-third the profits on the sale o f a L o t t o . " W e r e I o n l y rapacious and mercenary e n o u g h , " B e r e n s o n c o n f i d e d to J o h n s o n , " I could, w h i l e the v o g u e lasted, spend e v e r y minute amassing a f o r t u n e . " [114]

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Belle Greene m a d e a flying visit to Paris for a brief reunion with Berenson before going back to London to pack for her return to America. It b r o u g h t h i m little relief. In a dark m o o d he prepared a will and sent it on to M a r y . What made him "long for death," he told her, was that he was " o v e r w h e l m e d with an emotion too p o w e r f u l " for him. "I can give physiological details but really Dante's Vita Nuova gives a better description of m y state." Belle was his unattainable Beatrice, and he chivalrously resolved " t o be a providence to her for the rest of m y days." When M a r y scoffed at his idealizing portrait of Belle, he begged, "Please, Mary, d o n ' t think such thoughts. T h e y nearly kill me. . . . I k n o w the child is perfectly sincere, disinterested, utterly abandoned in her love for m e . " O n learning that Belle had sailed, he dared to hope that he w o u l d "begin to calm d o w n . " A n d calm d o w n he did, briskly resuming his circuit of the dealers and his cultivation of his friends in Paris. His relations with H e n r y Adams were n o w so cordial that Adams gave h i m one of the f e w copies of his privately printed b o o k on Tahiti, Memoirs of Arii Tamaii. Ralph Curtis told h i m that gossip had it that Belle Greene had used h i m as a mere "valet du place." Berenson replied that he had "so little vanity and a m o u r p r o p r e " that he was delighted that people should think so. H e dined again with A d a m s and reported that they " m o a n e d and groaned over time and tide and man and w o m a n and our friends and enemies and had a very good t i m e . " Just w h e n he felt he had mastered his unruly heart, something w o u l d remind h i m of Belle's absence or a cable or letter would come f r o m her so reviving his sense of her presence that it plunged h i m again into " b l u b b e r y " grief. M a r y did her best to give h i m solace. She would put everything aside, she said, and join h i m if he needed her or she would set off with h i m on diverting travel. " O u r affection is such a sure thing I feel as if it w o u l d c o m f o r t thee even in thy lovesickness, as thine always did me. . . . H o w different f r o m all I had hoped for thee, dear. 11 est. She told h i m that they were all w o r k i n g hard to prepare the villa for his return, that the w o r k in fact was almost finished. B u t again and again some n e w mishap thwarted her until he announced that he could not further delay his return, that if she wished she could lead him into his b e d r o o m "blindfolded, and I promise to stay there until you are ready to s h o w m e the h o u s e . " H e declared that once he had rested he would " p u t the w h o l e accursed thing up for sale to the highest bidder. . . . I feel as if the house was the only thing that holds m e to a past which I would gladly have done with. . . . If only you were even in as good health as I, I should be seriously inclined, house or n o house, to give it all up and [115]

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disappear from circulation until I have joined a new road or got the full conviction that there is none." He marked time a bit longer in Paris, conferring a few times with Joe Duveen, who flattered him with attention. He consulted also with Nathan Wildenstein and paid court to Jacques Seligmann, whom he desired to "neutralize" amidst the competition for desirable paintings. There were teas and dinners at Edith Wharton's hospitable apartment in the rue de Varenne, where writers and artists congregated and tried out their bons mots. Berenson's friendship with Mrs. Wharton had by this time ripened into an amiable camaraderie. He thought her "human, cordial, even devoted," and reported that she "prophesied I was to do far more interesting writing than any I had ever done yet." Then, with the unfaded recollection of Mary's and Logan's strictures in his mind, he added that she "went so far as to say she liked my prose." He arrived at I Tatti on November 13, 1910, in a peaceful mood. It did not last long. Piot's workmen, still busy with the frescoes, were ever more objectionable. Mary had learned to her horror that they "always obeyed the call of nature from the big window on the terrace." But worse than that, when the furnace was lighted an appalling stench rose from the little basement room. It was later learned that the workmen had used the place as a water closet, and as a result the floor had to be excavated to the bedrock. Worst of all were the frescoes themselves. Perhaps if Piot had worked from the drawings that the Berensons had approved, the results would not have so painfully disappointed them. Unfortunately, excited by the possibilities of the conception, he had made new drawings. Andre Gide, to whom he showed them, privately thought they lacked "the decisive quality, the gravity, even the attractiveness of the first ones." The small preliminary sketches, with their suggestion of a classical landscape with graceful nudes disposed about like figures out of Virgil's Georgics, had seemed pleasant enough, but when they were modified and transferred to the plaster in vivid colors in the first four lunettes, the effect could only appall the domestic jury. Shortly before Bernhard's return Pinsent had written in his notebook: "Unanimous decision to destroy Piot frescoes. But nothing is to be said. It is to take shape FIRST in B . B . ' s mind." When Bernhard looked up at the arresting apparitions, he could only shudder at the "lunatic optimism" with which he had commissioned the work. The frescoes would have to go, but he was undecided whether "to cut them out, whitewash them, or cover them with canvas." As only four of the frescoes had been completed, he wrote to Piot as tactfully as possible that his means did not permit him "to indulge in [116]

IDYLL

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such luxuries. . . . My eye is formed on pictures faded and ruined by time. . . . All this does not imply any criticism of your art as art." From Paris a month later Lucien Henraux reported that Piot took his dismissal with dignity but with great sadness, a report which made Berenson miserable with a sense of guilt. In his reply to Berenson's letter Piot hoped they would remain friends and leave the frescoes in oblivion—and friends they did remain. N o t long afterward the frescoes were covered with canvas—peeling the frescoes from the wall to return them to Piot had not proved feasible—and the wall was restored to its blank state. Nearly seventy years later the canvas was removed—Mary and Bernhard long since at rest—and the offending frescoes, their colors still fresh and startlingly vivid, were once again visible. Confronted with the disaster of the frescoes, Bernhard again suffered from neurasthenia. The slightest noise upset him. The prevalence of garlic in the cook's cuisine nauseated him. The extended debate over the garden plantings exacerbated his nervousness. N o r was it any comfort to behold in his sister Bessie, who had returned from Paris, symptoms that mirrored some of his own. Her insomnia drove her to hours of tears, and her fits of nausea were strangely like his. Once again Berenson took to his bed for most of the day, where he brooded impatiently over Mary's untidiness and her easygoing ways. "Shocking so young as I a m , " he wrote to Henry Adams, "and already so out of sorts with the house of life I smuggled into so expectantly at twenty." Yet he was obliged to admit that he was "perfectly enchanted" with I Tatti "as Mary had succeeded at last in knocking [it] into shape." He relished "the sound of water rushing down streams which meet at the bottom of my garden. . . . And the whisper of the wind in the trees is very soothing." From Paris Adams, somewhat chary of sympathy, replied ironically, "You have the singular good fortune to be in bed and read books. Here we are not allowed to stay in bed and we have no books to read. We flit through the gloom and hover on the bridges, always in the dark with the water close below." Adams passed on the doleful news to Mrs. Cameron, "Berenson is in bed ever since he got back, and talks of his back and of nausea. I suspect his nerves are all gone. So are mine!" "Young Duveen," Mary's characterization of the hyperactive Joseph, who was but five years her junior, came down to Florence the first of December, and Berenson, out of bed again, spent the day with him on business, returning "very tired and awfully cross." Duveen's habitual affability never succeeded in hiding from Berenson his determination to have his own way. Nor could his crassly commercial outlook have cheered him in his already melancholy state. To further roil his spirit, word arrived that the Italian government had impounded the two beauti[117]

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ful Signorellis being cleaned by Cavenaghi for which export licenses had been withheld. M a r y descended u p o n the Uffizi official to disentangle the matter while Bernhard fulminated against the Italians. Heightening his feeling of persecution was a letter f r o m the director of the Brera M u s e u m boasting that he had managed to get a "fine Lotto out of the country to sell in L o n d o n . " T h e one glimmer of light that relieved the gloom at the end of the year was that a n e w secretary, the "very capable and business-like" Maurice Brockwell, w h o was doing a catalogue of the British National Gallery, was soon to replace the temperamental Lucy Perkins, w h o had obtained a divorce and to the Berensons' relief had decided to quit and set up as an art dealer. Berenson's dependence u p o n Belle Greene's letters had meanwhile g r o w n to an obsession. T o w a r d the end of the year she protested, "This is m y fourth letter to you this week—insatiable m a n . " Her o w n appetite was hardly less ravenous. " Y o u may as well k n o w n o w , " she told him, "that I keep them. . . . What does it matter if some one at some time, anyone, should see the letters. . . . I am so p r o u d and happy to love y o u . " His depression was not relieved by her blithe Christmas injunction to r e m e m b e r those "divine nights. . . . There are millions m o r e in store for u s . " Christmas D a y did nothing to lift his spirits. At the ten o'clock mass there was a great gathering of dependents, while he lay in bed groaning that he was " f i n i s h e d " and D r . Giglioli urged repose upon him. All but Bernhard had h u n g u p their Christmas stockings. T h e peasants came with eggs and figs, and Mary, resentful of the custom, distributed the usual cash bonuses. Before the year ended, a further misfortune struck. A heavy squall blew d o w n three of the fine cypresses which Berenson prized, and in spite of the efforts of a crew of t w o dozen w o r k m e n , they could not be saved. T h u s ended a year which had begun with so m u c h promise. T h e undreamed-of riches which the Duveens had promised hung in the balance while their lawyers in N e w York argued with the United States C u s t o m Service, the Great Good Place that Bernhard and M a r y had dreamed of creating w h e n they left for America nearly t w o years ago still lacked the final touches, and the romance on which he had lightheartedly embarked at the M o r g a n Library had become a Nessus shirt of torment.

[118]

Lady Aline Sassoon, 1903

2. Bella da Costa Greene, about

j . Berenson,

igog

IΝΛ'^?^0

Ü2 "'

. ge § i

4· Henry Adams, crayon sketch by John Briggs Potter, 1914

f < 5. Geoffrey

Scott

6. Elsie de Wolfe

8. Mary Berenson and her great-grandson, Roger, igj5

g. Elisabetta (Nicky) Mariano,

igi8

XIII

Λ JVlarital Truce

G

L O O M settled ever deeper over I Tatti in January of 1 9 1 1 as Bernhard brooded over the impasse in his relations with Belle Greene. Work on the Johnson catalogue "proceeded very, very slowly." "Each item," Berenson temporized, "entails my consideration of the whole master or even group." His sister Bessie's presence only deepened his melancholy. The luncheon table often had a funereal character, with Bessie weeping and Bernhard leaning his head on his hand and scarcely saying a word as he toyed with the bland dishes prescribed by Dr. Giglioli. Their commiseration with each other had the depressing result, according to Mary, of their "both saying ten times a day they wish they were dead." Nevertheless, Bernhard professed that he enjoyed being with his sister and trudging about the countryside with her. During January Senda, alarmed by Bessie's account of Bernhard's infatuation, decided to talk with Belle in N e w York and sent a box of pink roses ahead as a peace offering. The two women talked quite frankly together. Belle told her that she did not wish to marry at all, but if she did marry, it would be for "money—much money." Senda cautioned Bernhard, " Y o u would be separated in two months. . . . She would never for one moment wait upon you, make paths easy and smooth for y o u . " Besides, she concluded, " Y o u could not live without Mary and you know it more than anyone else." As for his crossing over to visit Belle, even Belle thought it "utterly foolhardy." Belle's report to Bernhard differed considerably from Senda's. Senda, she wrote, "considers me a 'body snatcher' and a professional flirt." The mission proved a failure, and the protestations of eternal and undying love on both sides went on. Belle kept Berenson posted on the state of the N e w York art trade following the disaster which had struck the N e w Y o r k branch of the Duveens. The Seligmann establishment had almost been caught in the t119]

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C u s t o m H o u s e dragnet, but Seligmann had fortunately destroyed his papers. For the m o m e n t , trade w a s paralyzed and only Knoedler's w a s said to be doing any business. Joe, h o w e v e r , w e n t his confident w a y in L o n d o n and opened the n e w year for Berenson b y telling him they had several orders for fine Italian pictures: " A s y o u k n o w , [we] have determined to make a speciality o f t h a t s c h o o l . " H e envisioned success, "as our clients here are realizing that w e w i l l deal w i t h only the v e r y finest and authenticated w o r k s . . . . Y o u m o r e than anyone w i l l realize h o w disastrous a false step w o u l d be in our n e w enterprises." With the g r o w ing passion b y rich collectors for " n a m e s , " Joe repeated the counsel t o w a r d the end o f the year that they must have " o n l y the finest authentic w o r k s . . . . O n e mistake w i t h a single client" w o u l d mean ruin. T h e caution w a s hardly needed, for Berenson's chief p r i d e — n o t to say v a n i t y — l a y in the superiority o f his attributions. H e w a s keenly aware that his livelihood depended on his preeminent reputation, and that in the intense rivalry o f the art market that reputation was a prime target for his competitors, w h o hungrily c h e w e d o n every morsel o f hostile innuendo. O n c e after a m o r n i n g w i t h O t t o Gutekunst, he w r o t e to M a r y that O t t o told h i m " h o r r o r s are being said . . . h o w I w i l l do anything for m o n e y , lend m y authority to any lucrative attribution. . . . It simply did not touch m e for m y heart is p u r e . " Bernhard's continuing preoccupation w i t h Belle Greene put s o m e thing o f a strain on the truce he maintained w i t h M a r y , and they wisely t o o k leave f r o m each other for a month, M a r y taking refuge w i t h her family at Iffley and Bernhard heading south to the C a p u a n comforts o f Ralph and Lisa Curtis's Villa Sylvia at St. Jean-sur-mer on the Riviera. T h e change revived him, and he informed Bessie that he was enjoying "all the l u x u r y , all the pretty clothes and playful w a y s o f their c r o w d . " It might be " d e p l o r a b l e , " he a c k n o w l e d g e d , but he enjoyed it "as I e n j o y the sunshine and the w a r m t h . " T h e vacation did little, h o w e v e r , to ease the struggle w i t h M a r y , especially because w h i l e they w e r e still at I Tatti, she had l o o k e d at a letter to Belle Greene w h i c h he had left open on his desk. In it he had said that his w h o l e existence w a s a nightmare and that every happiness he could ever receive n o w and for all his future must c o m e f r o m her hands. A w a y f r o m I Tatti Bernhard w r o t e letters to M a r y so burdened w i t h suicidal thoughts that she w r o t e to Belle, as she confessed to Bernhard, to let her k n o w " t h e h a v o c she has w r o u g h t in thy nerves and the w a y she has taken the point out o f life for thee and in a large measure for m e t o o . " M a r y n o w had ample reason to regret her encouragement o f the affair. It had been a "miscalculation" on her part. " I thought to g i v e thee happiness," she lamented. [120]

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Bernhard demurred that "apart from bad health, what makes me far unhappier than anything connected with Belle is the tangle you and I have got ourselves into. . . . All Belle has done is to give you an instrument for tightening the knot." The real cause of his despair, he said, was that at bottom Mary did not try to understand him, even though for so many years he had turned himself "inside out" for her inspection. "What I would like is what I no longer hope for. . . . I would like you to take great, great pleasure in being with me, in keeping house for me. I would like you with spontaneity and eagerness to put me first in everything. . . . I want if possible to have a house and possessions of which I am the real master or if I can't and find that instead they are more a burthen than anything else, I want to give them all up, everything, everything. I want to be able to dream of Belle, and to be with her once every while. . . . So it comes back to the fact that the vital difficulty is the lack of perfect sympathy between us." Berenson's notion of the ideal marriage had its peculiarly masculine and romantic features, reflecting the male chauvinism of that period; Mary's, expressed less explicitly in her analytical letters than in her conduct, anticipated the freedoms of a later generation. In their nine years of premarital intimacy each had had ample opportunity to observe the idiosyncrasies of the other and to discover their divergent social ideals. What they learned had not resulted in either tolerance or forbearance. Bernhard's ideal of marriage could hardly have been drawn from the many cynical unions of the fashionable world which he loved to frequent; rather, it owed much, it would appear, to the world of his childhood and to his idealizing of his mother's self-sacrificing role in their household. Mary had been his devoted and admiring pupil and he had been for her a liberating influence, but the rebel whom he had loved could not return to the sort of marital bondage from which she had fled. Once when Bernhard and their friend Rembelinski had confessed to her and the discontented Countess Serristori their "poetic cult for women," Mary had written in her diary, "I cannot say I find in my heart a mystic cult of Man. I wish I had." However emotional their disagreements, they regularly recorded their movements as their letters flew back and forth, and always with endearing salutations and leave-takings. So after pages of recriminations and reproaches, Bernhard told her, quite matter-of-factly, of going over to the casino at Monte Carlo with his friends and being driven out by the stifling air. Undoubtedly there was much self-serving testimony as they analyzed themselves and motives too confused and obscure to be put into words. Both had a penchant for self-deception, yet in the main they took each other's measure and reluctantly reconciled themselves to their part[121]

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ner's s h o r t c o m i n g s as they self-righteously indulged their o w n . D u r i n g the quiet F e b r u a r y B e r e n s o n spent at the Curtises' Villa S y l v i a , he w e n t in to N i c e to consult w i t h B r a u e r , a dealer w h o had been a u s e f u l source o f paintings. W h e n B r a u e r s m u g l y i n v e i g h e d against the sins o f the D u v e e n s , B e r e n s o n l o o k e d h i m in the e y e and o b s e r v e d that w h i l e " a l l he said w a s true, it w a s as true o f e v e r y other d e a l e r . " A f e w days later the L o n d o n dealer A r t h u r J . Sulley came to call " a n d d r e w an a w f u l picture o f the D u v e e n situation" in N e w Y o r k , saying that " U n c l e H e n r y " had sold all the Fifth A v e n u e lots on w h i c h they had planned to build. " P e r s o n a l l y , " B e r n h a r d c o m m e n t e d to M a r y , " I doubt w h e t h e r I h a v e any other feeling except perhaps relief. T h e y w e r e too o v e r w h e l m ing and rather frightening and I as lief they w e r e s n u f f e d o u t . " Besides, he added, " I d o u b t w h e t h e r I shall lose b y it financially. Sulley, f o r instance, is c l a m o r i n g f o r the kind o f thing that the D u v e e n s w e r e so keen a b o u t . " " I fear m y p o o r e n e m y - f r i e n d s , the D u v e e n s , " he w r o t e M r s . G a r d n e r , " a r e 'clobustered' as a firm." B e r e n s o n had had a variety o f business arrangements w i t h Sulley, sometimes expertizing pictures or locating them f o r h i m f o r a set fee and on occasion disposing o f one f r o m his o w n collection, sometimes acting as an intermediary f o r the sale o f a picture to the D u v e e n s , and o c casionally sharing in the profits o f a transaction in w h i c h he w a s agent and expert. A t the end o f 1 9 1 0 he had received £ 2 , 0 9 0 as his share o f the profits on the sale o f a V a n D y c k w h i c h he had b o u g h t w i t h Sulley. E a s e f u l as life w a s at the Villa S y l v i a , the m o n t h o f inaction finally palled on B e r e n s o n and he became eager to " r e t u r n to the familiar habits and pottering that I grace w i t h the n a m e o f w o r k . " B e f o r e leaving, he dashed o f f a report to H e n r y A d a m s , w h o s e habitual pessimism he attempted to match in his o w n w a y . H i s winter, he said, " w a s rather disagreeable, w e a k back, nausea, bad temper, sorehead (in e v e r y sense o f the w o r d ) and f e a r f u l m i s a n t h r o p y . " His only " s u r c e a s e " had been in b o o k s . H a v i n g read A d a m s ' 1 9 1 0 Letter to American Teachers of History, w h i c h applied the S e c o n d L a w o f T h e r m o d y n a m i c s and entropy to h u m a n history, he b e s o u g h t A d a m s to tell h i m w h a t " f u r t h e r s y m p t o m s y o u have noticed o f the running d o w n o f the cosmic c l o c k . " A d a m s ' v o l u m i n o u s response s h o w e d no diminution o f his o w n e n e r g y . In his hyperbolic style he declared, " L i t e r a t u r e is a blank, A r t does not exist. . . . T h e r e is not vitality e n o u g h in our w o r l d to keep it f r o m s e n i l e — o r infantile—paralysis. . . . A l l this has been the theme o f m y w i n t e r ' s s t u d y . " H a v i n g heard that B e r e n s o n w a s ill again, he concluded, " I h o p e y o u r c o n f i n e m e n t has w i d e r horizons, and y o u can enlarge m i n e . " B e r e n s o n returned to I Tatti f r o m the Villa S y l v i a f o r the spring r o u n d

[122]

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of visitors almost restored to good humor, and Mary was able to record that B.B. was "a real angel" and sometimes "so witty that we die laughing." She found him "a delicious companion" now that he was "nice." When at Easter the Berensons' little chapel was crowded with their dependents, she was moved to reflect that it was "rather awful to think how many people live off of B.B.'s interest in Italian art." She counted "seven servants, six contadini, two masons, one bookkeeper, one estate manager, and their wives and children and then me, with a mental trail behind me of all the things I do and the people who look to me. And then B.B.'s whole family. Really it is a lot for the shoulders of one poor delicate man." With the approach of spring, luncheons, teas, and dinners for eight became the order of the day. Berenson enjoyed his role as lord of the manor, but the social activity kept work on the Johnson catalogue at a standstill. Jefferson Fletcher, one of his classmates and now teaching at Columbia University, came up with his wife, a sister of their friend Robert Morse Lovett; they had followed Salomon Reinach and his wife. Reinach returned alone somewhat later to dazzle the Berensons with "an indescribable mixture of erudition, shrewdness, and damn foolishness . . . that takes your breath away." He argued, for example, that it was important to fix the epoch when "the back of a woman's neck came to be recognized in art and literature." Another I Tatti familiar, Dan Fellows Piatt, now entirely turned connoisseur and collector, came with his wife and one of the directors of the Metropolitan Museum to a particularly fine formal dinner at which Berenson must have enjoyed the lively shoptalk more than the meager victuals Dr. Giglioli allowed him. The French painter Jacques Emile Blanche and his wife were the center of another dinner party. Blanche, known for his lively conversation and wicked tongue, was a member of Edith Wharton's Paris circle. One of the most animated discussions that enlivened the I Tatti dinner table occurred when the twenty-eight-year-old John Maynard Keynes took on the banker Henry Cannon, and they held the guests absorbed until nearly midnight with talk of "economics, trade, and taxation." By contrast, on the following day the Egyptologist-art collector Theodore Davis impressed Mary as "a complicated and exhausting bore." After lunch "the whole riffraff from the Laboucheres" descended upon them and somehow fell to talk of "love and the sufferings of the rejected." It was a subject on which the lovesick Bernhard must have had views, but Mary did not record them. The women in the gathering let it be known that fashionable women prized Berenson's friendship because it gave them "an intellectual cachet," and besides, "he had the power of making them feel twice as intelligent as they usually felt." [123]

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A new initiate in the I Tatti circle was young Count Hermann Keyserling, whose love of philosophical speculation about world culture and spiritual regeneration chimed in with Berenson's humanism. Berenson described him to Henry Adams as "a vital Dionysiac giant of a young Baltic junker," whose Prolegomena "may help you pass an hour not too heavily." The two men had three days of "uninterrupted talk." Keyserling, then at the beginning of his notable career as a popular thinker, was at this time most widely known to society gossips as having been engaged to Gladys Deacon. The traffic at I Tatti had grown to formidable proportions. " M a n y are students or collectors w h o m we can't refuse, others are dealers and millionaires w h o m business obliges us to see," was how Mary described it. " T h e corridors are quite crowded with dealers every forenoon and the terrace crowded with motors every afternoon." Berenson quipped that he "receive[d] like a dentist every morning and like a femme du monde every afternoon." And of course each dealer expected them to believe that he was "the only honest man in a gang of thieves." O f the millionaires, Henry Walters of Baltimore, now Berenson's "chiefest buyer," was one of the most congenial, and when he arrived Berenson "put him to work almost at once," showing him all he had bought for him and stating "the price of each article." He was "most appreciative . . . constantly surprised . . . such splendid things for him so cheap." As a "great collector of Persian things," he admired an illuminated manuscript that Berenson had recently purchased for himself from the Paris dealer Bing for 16,000 francs ($3,200) and he pleased his host by assuring him that the price was very reasonable. Late in April 1 9 1 1 Mary was summoned to Iffley. Word had come that her mother was dying. On the first of May the redoubtable matriarch achieved her last ambition, release into glory. Mary arrived too late for that moment, but she was in time for the cremation. "We saw the fire take mother's body today," Mary told Bernhard, "and now nothing is left but our memories." Though Hannah had wanted them to "rejoice" at her death, her three offspring were "heartbroken." T o Johnson Berenson commented, " M y grand old mother-in-law died a few days ago, very happy to be going, but leaving a terrible void behind her in the lives of her children. None of them were weaned, least of all my w i f e . " Mary found it hard to return to I Tatti and its recurring tensions. Bessie's gloomy state was aggravated by the recent announcement of her sister Senda's engagement to Professor Herbert Abbott, a fellow teacher at Smith and the son of Lyman Abbott, the famous preacher and editor. The formal social rituals at I Tatti contrasted sharply with the easy camaraderie of Iffley, and Mary fantasized that she would have to "take [124]

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my eggs out of B . B . ' s basket, for I find they're getting addled there." A further cause for her distress was the discovery that Bernhard, who was so "very selfish about his own things, is giving some of his loveliest pictures" to Belle Greene. The news of Senda's impending marriage delighted Bernhard, for at forty-three she had seemed a confirmed spinster. He wished, though, that she could get away from provincial Smith College to "Harvard, or Columbia, or even Chicago." The marriage took place in Boston on June 15 and Bernhard dispatched a present of $2,500. Almost on the same day that Senda was married, Mary's daughter Rachel (Ray) broke the news that she and Oliver Strachey, a dozen years her senior with a little daughter Julia, had been married at the Registry Office in London. Oliver, an elder brother of Lytton Strachey, was one of the ten children of Sir Richard Strachey. "Uncle Bernhard" matched his wedding present to Senda with a similar one to Ray. Arrangements with the Duveens began to take a significant turn in April when Louis Duveen came down to I Tatti to propose taking up business "on a vaster scale than ever." More collections were coming on the market, and J o e pressed upon Berenson the importance of inspecting them to be sure nothing of value escaped. Later in the year Louis was worried about Volpi, the Florentine restorer: "We are afraid he overrestores things." He therefore asked Berenson to introduce the firm to the most highly regarded of all restorers, Cavenaghi in Milan. The business correspondence fell, of course, on Mary, and her very rudimentary shorthand grew more elliptical as Bernhard's dictation increased. More and more, the Duveens and other dealers came to treat her as Berenson's business partner, often addressing their inquiries directly to her. And Berenson would generally shift irksome letters to her thickskinned typewriter. When experts had informed them that Piot's frescoes could not be peeled from the wall for years, it was Mary who had to write to him to say they planned to cover them up. The frescoes had become notorious. Early in the year Mary's mother had written that she had heard from the Marchese Visconti-Venosta that "they were perfect monstrosities, tomato red naked women set in bright blue landscapes." With the heat of summer again signaling the usual exodus, the Berensons vacationed together briefly—at Mary's urging—at Mrs. Baldwin's Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola. They parted at I Tatti on the twentieth of June, 1 9 1 1 , Bernhard heading for Paris and London and Mary remaining behind until the end of the month in order to put I Tatti into summer trim. This last was a formidable task. As a preliminary, four men had to "swathe" the library for the covering of the frescoes. All the carpets had to be rolled up and carted off, a picture restorer mended cracks in their

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pictures, all w o o l e n things w e r e put a w a y in camphor, a carpenter repaired furniture, a f e w frames w e r e regilded, mosquito netting had to be mounted, a decorator put stucco ornaments on a wardrobe, all the mattresses w e r e unstuffed and restuffed, servants carted o f f b o o k s to be bound, three w o r k m e n w e r e putting the finishing touches on the n e w little French salon, and G e o f f r e y Scott busied himself taking measurements for another library r o o m to be attached to the back o f the large library. A l l the activities w e r e accompanied by a constantly ringing telephone. For a final couple o f days before her departure M a r y took an agreeable m o t o r jaunt in the c o m p a n y o f G e o f f r e y Scott. A f t e r she left for E n gland, Scott and Pinsent seem to have taken up bachelor quarters in the villa and to have commandeered w h i c h e v e r one o f the t w o automobiles was in operating order. W h e n Senda and her husband arrived that summer on their h o n e y m o o n to j o i n Bessie, they had to defer to M a r y ' s proteges and use the streetcar. In a progress report to M a r y during the summer, Pinsent spent six pages detailing the w o r k under w a y : fireplaces were being rejuvenated, the canvas covering the Piot frescoes was being stretched, the secret d o o r into the n e w library was being installed w i t h its hidden mechanism o f wheels and wires w h i c h Pinsent had b o u g h t in G e r m a n y , and w i r i n g was being put in for heaters and electric stoves. In addition lightning rods had to be installed, a pebble pavement completed, and stone installed for the curving stairs leading d o w n f r o m the terrace to the garden b e l o w . T h e s e and a dozen other tasks remained to be done before Bernhard w o u l d find I Tatti habitable.

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N Paris for a few days in July 1 9 1 1 , Berenson was met by the news that the United States Customs Service officials were intent on making a salutary example of the N e w York Duveens. On Henry Adams he left "the dark suspicion" that he "was depressed by the Duveen affair." But the depression proved transitory. He crossed to London and ensconced himself in a comfortable suite at Claridge's fashionable hotel, much buoyed up by the news that Belle Greene might be coming over before the summer was out. He wrote her of his "friendly" encounter with J . P. Morgan at his mansion at Prince's Gate, and on Morgan's return to N e w York she sent a grateful response: " I told him all the nice things you said about his treasures." The running debate with Mary over Belle Greene continued its analytic course, accelerated by the efficient British postal service. He told her of the great esteem that Belle's friends had for her, but Mary was not to be placated any longer. " I am often tempted," she replied from Oxford, "to give up trying and to go back to the conventional attitude thee always took to my 'affaires.' . . . I assure thee the variations between intense sympathy and amused contempt this affair of thine has caused me to pass through have been most agitating." She would have felt better about it " i f this affair had made thee happier, or if it seemed to be improving my character." For Bernhard there had been "lots doing" in London while he conferred with the ever-sanguine J o e Duveen and shuttled between Sulley's and Agnew's galleries with quick trips to country houses to appraise collections for the dealers. A t the Dowdeswell gallery he was much taken by a Saint Catherine and asked Mary when she came down to London to look at it, " f o r I want your approval." He counseled her to ignore the price and consider only "the desireableness of the Catherine." He wanted [127]

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her approval also for two other paintings, and he charged her to insure a number of their paintings—the Signorellis at £2,500; a prized Bellini Madonna, a Guardi, and a Sebastiano for £2,000 each; and several others for lesser figures. The Bellini was one of Berenson's most satisfying acquisitions. He had bought it three years earlier for £1,000, having recognized a Bellini Madonna underneath the dirt and cracks. Cavenaghi's skillful restoration came "out very grand and noble," and since Berenson had nothing at all like it in the house, it became a permanent part of his collection. As always in London Bernhard moved happily from one fashionable luncheon engagement to another. One with Addie, the cultivated wife of Otto Kahn, marked the beginning of a brother-and-sister friendship. He dined also at Lady Cunard's with Arthur Balfour, the former prime minister; Lord Curzon, the recent viceroy of India; and his own old acquaintance Sir Lionel Henry Cust, art historian and joint-editor of the Burlington Magazine. They had, he reported, three hours of the "drollest talk." Hoping to come to a more friendly understanding with Mary, he joined her at Iffley for ten days. She did not find the visit pleasant, and the presence of two of her daughter Karin's girlfriends proved "indigestible" to him. He managed to tell her that if he had life to live over again he would marry a woman who would have " n o other thought or interest but himself with a capital H . " T o Bessie she queried, " H o w can men be such monstrous fools? . . . Human nature isn't made so. . . . Men are not so thrillingly absorbing as all that except in that fatal brief period of being in love." With Mary obviously content to spend the remainder of her summer at Court Place at Oxford among her kin, Bernhard had once again to fend for himself. There being no urgent business to hold him in England, he decided to pick up his old life again at St. Moritz after an absence of three years from that spa. At the Hotel Caspar Badrutt life resumed its familiar pattern, with only small changes in the cast of characters. Teas, dinners, dances, and tableaux vivants kept the celebrants busy, though Berenson avoided the dances in favor of conversation and walks about the jeweled lake in the sunshine. The Countess Serristori provided soothing companionship. Joseph Widener was on hand with his wife to discuss art or his other great passion, horse racing. Berenson was also very friendly with Henry White, the former American ambassador to France who had been dismissed by President Taft in 1909. Berenson's lengthy narratives to Belle Greene brought her comment: " M y but you are the giddy one—for a frail and delicate person you can put in more festivities than any other such invalid I ever heard o f . " [128]

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At St. M o r i t z an u n e x p e c t e d and dramatic e n c o u n t e r w i t h Charles Loeser p r o v e d painfully unsettling. Loeser was a H a r v a r d classmate and fellow Florentine f r o m w h o m B e r e n s o n had l o n g been estranged as a result o f their rivalry as connoisseurs of Italian art. A n interested observer was M a b e l D o d g e , the rich and personable y o u n g heiress w h o w i t h her architect h u s b a n d h a d r e n o v a t e d the Villa C u r o n i a at Arcetri across the A r n o f r o m Florence. A c c o m p a n i e d b y Loeser, she and her h u s b a n d had driven over to St. M o r i t z f r o m the hotel at Maloja Pass. Berenson, catching sight o f her and n o t noticing Loeser's presence, ran after the carriage. "I shivered for w h a t m i g h t h a p p e n , " M a b e l excitedly reported to G e r t r u d e Stein. T o her a m a z e m e n t , she witnessed a " r e m a r k a b l e den o u e m e n t . " B e r e n s o n d o f f e d his hat and extended his hand, saying, " ' H o w are y o u Loeser?' and they shook hands. T h e n w e had s o m e talk t o g e t h e r — h e all t r e m b l i n g and quite p a l e — a n d then d r o v e off. ' T h e first t i m e in fifteen years,' said Loeser meditatively!" T h e rift b e t w e e n the f o r m e r friends was to r e m a i n u n b r i d g e d for a n u m b e r of years m o r e . M a b e l D o d g e m a d e the m o s t of her o p p o r t u n i t i e s for her a u t o b i o graphical b o o k s as she circulated a m o n g the villas. She recalled, " W e w e r e always talking trecento, quatrocento, cinquecento or discussing values—lines, dimensions, or nuances in k n o w i n g phrases. . . . At the B e r e n s o n s ' they played a guessing g a m e that consisted of spreading a lot of p h o t o g r a p h s o f paintings o n a table and then taking one, s o m e b o d y w o u l d cover it w i t h a piece of paper out of w h i c h a little hole was cut, so that only a fold of a cloak, or a part o f a hand w o u l d be seen, and e v e r y b o d y w o u l d guess, b y the ' t r e a t m e n t , ' w h o had painted it. T h a t was considered the w a y to pass a really gay evening u p at I T a t t i ! " In late s u m m e r B e r n h a r d and M a r y m e t in Holland, w h e r e they w e r e " g r e a t l y p e r t u r b e d " over R e m b r a n d t , w h o m , M a r y said, " w e b o t h a b h o r . " Perhaps they w e r e r e m e m b e r i n g A l t m a n ' s passion for the artist. T h e r e was little t i m e for gallery g o i n g o r travel, for the D u v e e n s w e r e impatiently awaiting B e r e n s o n in Paris. M a r y w e n t on to her u n c o n g e nial j o b at I T a t t i o f getting the h o u s e into order for B e r n h a r d ' s return and t r y i n g to reestablish c o n t r o l o v e r the volatile staff of servants. A f t e r a brief initial m e e t i n g w i t h J o e D u v e e n in Paris, Berenson m a n a g e d to get a w a y for a visit to E d i t h W h a r t o n and a dinner w i t h H e n r y A d a m s . Relations w i t h the D u v e e n s had entered a n e w and m u c h m o r e dem a n d i n g phase. " T h e y are o c c u p y i n g and p r e o c c u p y i n g m e a great d e a l , " he told M a r y . " T h e y are o n the w a r p a t h . T h e y w a n t m e to g o to Scotland, Ireland, to B u r g u n d y , to a chateau, e t c . " A couple of days later he w r o t e , "I have been closeted for h o u r s staying w i t h the D u v e e n s and there is plenty d o i n g and plenty of m o n e y c o m i n g . At present they d o n ' t o w e m e a farthing, bad luck to i t . " T h e pressure o n h i m g r e w m o r e [129]

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intense. " I had the m o s t dreadful time f o r hours and hours against the aggressive m o n o p o l i z i n g w i l l o f the D u v e e n s , " he w r o t e a w e e k later. " T h e y w a n t m e to spend all m y time in their o f f i c e or running about f o r them. I resisted stoutly and on the w h o l e s u c c e s s f u l l y . " T h e experience m a d e h i m long to get h o m e and " g e t to w o r k , " t h o u g h M a r y ' s too frequent and detailed reports o f her troubles in running the household g a v e h i m pause. " I am not b l a m i n g y o u , " he said. "Italians, G o d l o v e them, are w h a t they arc. . . . I w o n d e r whether y o u w o u l d not be personally happier if I w e r e out o f the w a y and y o u could g y p s y it about w i t h y o u n g people in a battered discolored [ m o t o r c a r ] . " A s f o r the d i f f i c u l t y she w a s finding in setting up the library, it w a s clear it w o u l d b e c o m e " u n m a n a g e a b l e w i t h o u t further arrangement and a good catalogue." W h e n B e r n h a r d returned to I Tatti on O c t o b e r I, 1 9 1 1 , still b u o y e d up by the p r o m i s e o f Belle's visit, he w a s " v e r y m u c h pleased w i t h e v e r y t h i n g " and " c l a s p e d C e c i l ' s hand in both his, apropos o f the small n e w library, and said it w a s the best thing Cecil had done and far surpassed anything he had hoped f o r . " H e also enthusiastically a p p r o v e d the elegant little eighteenth-century salon. H e w r o t e Walters that the w o r k on the n e w library had progressed so rapidly that he f o u n d it is " a dream o f scholarly s e c l u s i o n . " A m o n t h later, in the midst o f fresh proposals to Walters, he said he w a s still rejoicing in the T u s c a n sunshine, finding the house delightful and his n e w secretary p r o m i s i n g " t o be a t o w e r o f strength." Walters' check f o r the D a d d i w h i c h B e r e n s o n had first o f f e r e d to J o h n s o n helped staunch the h e a v y o u t f l o w o f funds w h i c h w a s n o w the n o r m a l state o f affairs. A m o n g the n e w pictures w h i c h Berenson o f f e r e d to Walters w a s a M a d o n n a b y the Florentine painter C o s i m o Rosselli. " M a r y has the bad taste not to like i t , " he exclaimed, " a l t h o u g h it is one o f the best things that this not inconsiderable artist ever d i d . " A t £500 it w a s not to be resisted. Walters took it and also, f o r a mere £200, a panel b y the A b r u z z i g o l d s m i t h N i c o l a da Guardiagrele. H e hoped B e r e n s o n could find an "interesting Sassctta 'at a p o o r man's price.' " B e r e n s o n ' s extensive correspondence w i t h Walters dealt largely w i t h the pictures that he turned up f o r his consideration—and frequent acceptance. B y this time the style o f his r e c o m m e n d a t i o n s f o l l o w e d a familiar pattern. For e x a m p l e , in the case o f a painting believed by its o w n e r to be a Titian but w h i c h B e r e n s o n w a s certain w a s " b y the ablest o f his f o l l o w ers, P o l i d o r o L a n z a n i , " he w r o t e , " I w a n t y o u to b u y this canvas not o n l y on its intrinsic merits w h i c h really are all but the highest, but also because short o f a miracle w e are not likely ever to c o m e across a real Titian o f the 'Sancta C o n v e r s a z i o n e ' type. E v e n if w e did, the price [HO]

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would be fabulous. This canvas we can have at the very reasonable figure of £2000." This letter to Walters had a special interest, for it concluded with a paragraph which displayed Berenson's long-standing antipathy to the military adventures of the Italian government. In 1896 he had strongly disapproved of the imperialist adventure in Ethiopia which had ended in the Italian rout at Adowa. N o w the new Nationalist party had pushed Italy into war with Turkey over Tripoli. "This unspeakable war in Tripoli," he wrote, "is keeping our Italian acquaintances away from us. They are too well aware what they would think of any one else who committed murder and robbery upon peaceable householders. . . . A people like the Italians which so recently became a nation not by its own strength but through the sympathy, pity and powerful aid of stronger nations, has no right to become the cowardly oppressor of weaker races." With Bernhard's return from Paris the villa had begun to fill up again with guests. Edith Wharton and her long-time friend the American lawyer Walter Berry, with maid and chauffeur, came on from Ravenna and were soon o f f motoring through the countryside with Bernhard while Mary kept an eye on Pinsent's progress with the garden and the making of the wood below, for which three hundred ilexes had been ordered. The changeable and moody Karin, who had finished her studies at Newnham College, Cambridge, was on hand to be indulged by her mother. The dashing Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, whose £100,000 a year greatly impressed Mary, had to be taken motoring by Berenson. Mary Crawshay, the sister of Sir John Leslie and one of Berenson's favorite London hostesses, had also to be put up with her maid. The company was further swelled by Ralph Curtis and his wife. Indeed the house was "crammed," the confusion compounded by the usual procession of dealers. The enthusiasm for Maurice Brockwell had soon dwindled and in his place the new secretary and part-time valet, Lancelot Cherry, was now at work. Cherry, Oxford educated, came fresh from three years' experience in a city bank. He confided to Scott that he was horrified by "the troops of middleaged females who surge through the house. . . . Wharton, Crawshay, Strong, Priestley, B l o o d . " He did not know that such people existed and he believed his employer sought them out "like rare needles in a haystack." At least one male leavened the bustling crowd— tall, studious Trevy, who browsed at his leisure in the library. The disarray in that room had been put "in perfect order" by Cherry. In the midst of all these distractions, a cable came from Belle Greene: since Morgan had decided not to go to London for the sale of the Huth [Hi]

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Collection, he w o u l d not c o m e to E u r o p e at all that year and she w o u l d h a v e to f o r g o her visit. T h e n e w s stunned B e r e n s o n . With the cable in hand he " t u r n e d a w a y and burst into bitter t e a r s . " Further explanation w a s s l o w in c o m i n g , and he w e n t about desolate and half-frantic. M a r y , ready as a l w a y s w i t h advice, suggested he cable, but she made h i m take out the expression "endless l o v e . " Belle's answering cable explained that she had been so " b l u e and m i s e r a b l e " that she " h a d n o heart to w r i t e . " T h e letter that came on its heels c o m m a n d e d , " N e v e r question m y a b s o lute l o v e . " A c c o r d i n g to M a r y , B e r n h a r d at once became a n e w m a n and j o y f u l l y returned to penning his endless effusions. H e seemed m o r e in l o v e than ever and told M a r y that if M o r g a n died and left Belle u n p r o v i d e d for, he w o u l d support her. " I s n ' t it f u n n y ? " ran M a r y ' s baffled c o m m e n t to her sister. W h e n J a m e s K e r r - L a w s o n came f r o m L o n d o n to hang his " d e c o r a t i o n s " in the salotino, B e r e n s o n ' s initial pleasure in the elegant little salon subsided. T h e " d e c o r a t i o n s " seemed as inappropriate as Plot's frescoes had been in the library. H i s forehead in a cold sweat, B e r e n s o n w e n t d o w n to face the " o r d e a l " w i t h K e r r - L a w s o n . T h e painter took the rejection as resignedly as Piot had, c o m f o r t e d perhaps b y the recollection that B e r e n s o n had recently rescued h i m f r o m penury b y selling one o f his O l d Masters to H e n r y Walters, thereby saving, as w a s said, his " h o n o u r . " ~A f e w m o n t h s later B e r e n s o n again came to the rescue o f K e r r L a w s o n and his w i f e w h e n they w e r e " a l m o s t d o w n to their last £ 5 " b y selling another one o f their pictures, " a f t e r endless t r o u b l e s , " f o r £2,000. W h e n the autumnal rout subsided a bit, B e r e n s o n turned at long last to the d e m a n d i n g task o f the J o h n s o n catalogue. S o o n he w a s putting in six hours a day at his desk. " I return to m y f o o l j o b , " he w r o t e to Barrett Wendell, " a n d e n j o y the tracking o f infinitesimal painters like f o x e s to their l a i r s . " B u t the congenial study w a s an imperfect antidote f o r his discontents. H i s sister Rachel and her t w o children, little R a l p h B a r t o n , a child o f five, and B e r n h a r d ' s namesake, a y e a r - o l d b a b y , m o v e d into the Villino C o r b i g n a n o across the w a y to spend the w i n t e r there as his guests. T o his surprise he t o o k to the infant. " E v e n I w i t h m y H e r o d - l i k e d i s p o s i t i o n , " he w r o t e his mother, " e n j o y seeing h i m . " In a letter to Senda, Rachel reported that t h o u g h B e r n h a r d seemed better than the year before, he w a s easily upset and distraught. T h e situation g r e w n o m o r e cheerful w h e n his sister Bessie began "railing at f a t e , " inspiring her exasperated brother to o f f e r to p a y f o r a trip to E g y p t to get rid o f her. N o r did it help matters that in the absence o f a servant she w o u l d not " l i f t a f i n g e r . " M a r y thought her the m o s t " l i f e - d i m i n i s h i n g " person she k n e w . " A b s o l u t e l y spontaneous speech is at present quite i m p o s s i b l e , " Rachel reported. F e w days passed w i t h o u t

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"outbursts of contradiction of Mary. He accepts nothing she says . . . an extraneous something is consuming him." The "something" was another long hiatus in Belle Greene's letters. "What food for thought in this whole situation," Rachel concluded. "Culture almost over-acquired, great wealth amassed, exquisite beauty enhaloing their lives, yet the flavor of dust and ashes." The flavor of dust and ashes was deepened that December of 1 9 1 1 when Berenson received a long and rather formal letter from Charles Loeser telling of the recent death at forty-four of Enrico Costa, the brilliant young companion with whom, twenty years earlier, Berenson had made the compact to devote their lives to connoisseurship, not to stop "until we are sure every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a Cariani, every Santacroce a Santacroce." Their intimate collaboration had lasted four years until 1893, when Costa was obliged to leave for South America. For a few years he had lectured at the University of Bogota on art. When afterward in the summer of 1909 he returned to Italy to resume his passionate study of European art, he became a protege of Berenson's adversary Loeser and an intimate of the art historian Carlo Gamba, and he dropped out of Berenson's sight. The promise of some great accomplishment by the talented Costa was ended by his premature death. The loss of so dear a friend to Loeser and now to death was not easily to be borne. WHATEVER private uneasiness the Duveens may have felt about the civil and criminal actions against them, they exhibited no public anxiety and plunged ahead to keep their place at the head of the procession of dealers as though in command of unlimited resources. In a sense they were, for when the customs claim was settled for $1,800,000, J . P. Morgan, who was much attached to "Uncle Henry," directed the First National Bank to advance money to cover the duties and the $50,000 in fines levied in the various criminal actions. Morgan prudently accepted as security Altman's debt to the firm. An onerous condition of the settlement required the N e w York branch to suspend importations for fourteen months, until the spring of 1912. The lawyer who had engineered the settlement thought it so favorable that he sued the Duveens for additional compensation. The press reported that the whole affair cost the Duveens two and a quarter million dollars. As for the ex-bookkeeper who had turned informer, the Customs Service paid him a bounty of $50,000. He was promptly sued for $5,000 by an office associate who claimed he had been promised that sum for supplying part of the incriminating evidence. N o w firmly committed to their decision to make a specialty of Italian paintings, the Duveens began to deluge Berenson with queries. With the [133]

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costly Customs Service imbroglio safely weathered, they assured him that business in N e w York was again going on "very nicely." Morgan was looking for a fine Piero della Francesca: " D o you know of one?" J o e asked Berenson to cable at length his views on a painting offered by an old lady in Quebec and sent on a batch of photographs of other paintings as well for attribution. He reported that Altman, who evidently had absorbed some of Berenson's instruction, was "very pleased" with the fine Mainardi tondo "which you so much advised us to b u y . " Duveen succeeded in selling Altman a number of other Italian paintings before his death in 1 9 1 3 . For some months the Duveens had had their eyes on a spectacular collection of sculpture from the Martelli palazzo in Florence that was expected to come on the market. It included the famous marble, long ascribed to Donatello, which had been in the family since the fifteenth century. Joe Duveen assured Berenson shortly before the end of 1 9 1 1 , "We are quite prepared for the Martelli business when you are. . . . Are you quite sure that you have the affair in your own hands?" Berenson believed he had. Rumors, however, were already afloat that a dealer planned to offer the marbles to J . P. Morgan or to Thomas Fortune Ryan. It soon developed that still other fingers were in the pie. In early February Berenson learned that Salvatori had called on Ernest Duveen in Paris offering to act as an intermediary and it appeared that he was acting for, or in concert with, Stefano Bardini in Florence, who had told him that Morgan would offer $160,000 for one of the smaller items. The main stake was the unfinished David, and the maneuvering for it became intense. Mary told her sister. Alys, that they were "living in a most agitated w a y , " having received in one day no less than fourteen telegrams connected with its sale. Louis Duveen cautioned Berenson not to make an offer: "Once you give your hand away we shall be done f o r , " as the sellers could then play one bid against another. While the Martelli business hung fire, Berenson went down to Naples for two weeks early in March 1 9 1 2 to enjoy the diversions of the Villa Floridiana and his favorite masterpieces at the Naples Museum, grateful, he airily remarked, that his hostess, Mrs. Harrison, had pulled him away from "any temptation to sacrifice any serious part of my remaining days to the frivolity of making m o n e y . " Fortunately Mary remained at I Tatti, for in his absence important transactions came to a head and she had "the fearful responsibility" of buying two pictures for £8,000 each. "It terrifies m e , " she wrote Berenson's mother, and to her sister she declared she was "hopping around like oysters in a stew seeing dealers for B . B . " Louis Duveen wrote to her from Paris, " A l l the married

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m e m b e r s o f D u v e e n B r o t h e r s feel a little e n v i o u s " o f her husband's h a v i n g " s u c h an excellent locum tenens." H e cautioned her not to m e n t i o n the f i r m ' s n a m e " o n any a c c o u n t " : " Y o u are b u y i n g for an a n o n y m o u s p e r s o n . " For o n e o f the pictures, a Botticelli, the o f f e r w a s to be m a d e o n l y o n condition that the painting be delivered in Paris. " N a t u r a l l y , w e w i l l h a v e n o t h i n g to d o w i t h g e t t i n g it o v e r the f r o n t i e r . " S u m m o n e d to R o m e b y Joe, B e r e n s o n w e n t " n o t o n l y for darling Joe's sake but for less vital reasons o f business and s t u d y . " H e n o sooner g o t there than he heard f r o m Florence that the Martelli business had reached a critical point. H e i m m e d i a t e l y notified Ernest D u v e e n , and Ernest cautiously authorized h i m t o o f f e r £70,000. T h e n he heard f r o m Florence that the sellers w e r e considering £72,000, w h e r e u p o n o n his o w n responsibility he m a t c h e d the o f f e r , but to n o avail, for o n his return t o Florence his butler, A r t h u r , told h i m that the dealer B r a u e r w a n t e d to see h i m a b o u t the marbles. It s e e m e d to h i m the cat w a s quite out o f the b a g . " I f I had been g i v e n authority to close, as I b e g g e d y o u ,

for

£86,000," he reproached L o u i s , " t h e affair w o u l d have been settled." H e w a s furious at h a v i n g had his hands tied, and he raged at the f o l l y o f the D u v e e n s . " I n their e x c i t e m e n t , " he s u g g e s t e d to M a r y , " t h e y m a y h a v e t h o u g h t I neglected their interests." H i s ever-ready suspicions rose to the surface: Ernest D u v e e n m u s t h a v e enlisted Salvatori and thus undercut the efforts he had been m a k i n g , and i f he had not, he protested, they s h o u l d h a v e " f l a t l y d e n i e d " it. L o u i s responded that he and his brother Ernest w e r e " d e e p l y h u r t " at the i m p u t a t i o n that they had n o t been w h o l l y honest w i t h h i m . S o m a n y other projects w e r e in train that it b e c a m e useless to d w e l l o n his complaint. T h e e x c i t e m e n t subsided and s o m e w h a t later J o e D u v e e n inquired in a conciliatory manner, " W h a t is the latest concerning M a r telli? D o y o u think after M r . M o r g a n has turned t h e m d o w n and so m a n y dealers f o l l o w e d suit that it w o u l d be possible for y o u or us or s o m e o n e else to m a k e an o f f e r n o w o f about £60,000?" A w e e k later he o b s e r v e d , " T h e w h o l e affair has been spoiled b y so m a n y dealers k n o w i n g the price asked for t h e m . " H e n o w authorized B e r e n s o n to o f f e r £50,000 to acquire the David

for " s t o c k . " T h e expedient failed, and

seeking to m o l l i f y B e r e n s o n the D u v e e n s w r o t e , " T h e capacity for l y i n g is a b n o r m a l w i t h s o m e Italians and y o u h a v e been the v i c t i m o f such m i s r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . " " V o l p i , Bardini, T r o t t i , Salvatori, all w o r k i n g indep e n d e n t l y , " they p o i n t e d out, had pulled one string after another, and V o l p i h a d b r o u g h t Wildenstein into the matter, so the D u v e e n s had also to p r o m i s e h i m an interest in it. " Y o u r l o y a l t y to us is a l w a y s i m m e n s e l y a p p r e c i a t e d , " the letter w e n t o n to say, and it is "certainly r e c i p r o c a t e d . "

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A further complication m a y w e l l have been the difficulty o f getting an export license. Four years later, w i t h the art market depressed b y W o r l d War I, Joseph Widener b o u g h t the David and a bust o f a y o u t h b y Rossellino for £45,000, permission for exportation having been g i v e n to the dealer Fenaro on condition that other important sculptures in the collection remain in Italy. T h e ascription o f the David to Donatello, early g i v e n b y Vasari, remained unchallenged until 1959 w h e n John Pope-Hennessy, in a study based on its style, concluded that it was the w o r k o f A n t o n i o Rossellino, a y o u n g e r contemporary o f Donatello. T h o u g h inferior to Donatello, it w a s " o n e o f the finest quattrocento sculptures outside o f Italy." Disappointing as the Martelli affair was, it did not stem the flood o f demands the D u v e e n s w e r e m a k i n g for Berenson's services. Joe, w h o never lost sight o f the main chance, cast a covetous eye upon Berenson's chief client, H e n r y Walters, and he urged Berenson to bring him into the D u v e e n fold. " I k n o w that y o u are the person to do it. . . . D o y o u k n o w all o f his m o v e m e n t s ? " Berenson appears to have declined that chore. In any case, Walters was not a g o o d prospect. His tastes w e r e m o r e modest than those o f D u v e e n ' s clients, and he b o u g h t w i t h a kind o f frugality. O n e o f Berenson's chief business responsibilities was evaluating the contents o f collections in w h i c h the D u v e e n s had b e c o m e interested. For example, he w a s called o n to review the pictures in the Weber C o l l e c tion. Louis D u v e e n told him, " W e shall in the end act on y o u r a d v i c e , " and Joe D u v e e n asked for separate letters o f authentication on each o f the paintings b r o u g h t f r o m the collection to be s h o w n to prospective buyers. "[I] trust y o u w i l l m a k e t h e m as interesting as possible, as w e are sure y o u w i l l , " he w r o t e . Berenson's recommendations for purchases had b y n o w settled into an established pattern: his precis o f each painting discussed its merits, its place in the oeuvre o f the artist, its condition, and finally its price. In a long letter to Louis D u v e e n urging the purchase o f three o f Baron Lazzaroni's offerings, he w r o t e , for example, " O n e o f the pictures is a simply delicious tondo o f a M a d o n n a and A n g e l s b y Raffaellino del G a r b o . It is on w o o d o f pleasant size (about 30 inches) and fresh strong color. It is the last w o r d in composition, line and sentiment o f the f o r mula invented b y Filippo Lippi, perfected b y Botticelli and pursued b y Filippino Lippi. It is o f course neither Filippo, nor Verrocchio, nor B o t ticelli. It is h o w e v e r j u s t under these greatest masters, and to m a n y o f pure heart and h u m b l e mind, m o r e genuinely attractive. I must add Raffaellino del G a r b o is one o f the w e l l k n o w n names in Italian art. . . . T h e price o f this G a r b o is 50,000 francs." [136]

'THE

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AND

ASHES'

While the Martelli business was still pending, Berenson received an urgent summons in March 1 9 1 2 to meet Henry Duveen, head of the N e w Y o r k office, at Monte Carlo. As he had suspected, the chief reason for the summons was that the firm wished him to approachj. P. Morgan to interest him in Italian paintings. " I quickly showed him it was not to be thought o f . " However, "Uncle Henry" kept after him into the following year, finally provoking him to protest that it was untrue that Morgan had a good opinion of him. " I know from unimpeachable sources of which I am not at liberty to say more that Mr. Morgan dislikes me personally more than ever." (His unimpeachable source was, of course, Belle Greene.) "In any case," he elaborated, " I am a very poor salesman, a wretchedly incompetent diplomat, and not a bit of a flatterer." Hollow as the protestation was, especially in the light of his ingratiating letters to Mrs. Gardner, he had more compelling reasons for declining the chore. The work he was already doing for the firm, advising the three branches and working up letters of authentication, left him with less and less leisure to pursue his researches and to resume his writings. " I f I stop my researches I shall lose my eye. If I stop my writing I shall lose my reputation and authority," he explained to Henry Duveen. "Whispers already are getting harsher and louder that for money I am sacrificing my gifts and my higher calling. . . . Not that I object to making money but I want to make it with scrupulous honesty and absolutely aboveboard. . . . It would be fatal to cheapen me to the rank of a disguised salesman. . . . Y o u live for business. . . . It is your whole life and a splendid life I respect and approve and at times envy but this is to me a nuisance, a necessary evil. . . . I practice it only as a means to an end. The end is not to enlarge my business and to pile up money but to enlarge my mind and to pile up understanding. All the millions of my compatriot billionaires could not induce me to give up more than I give you n o w . " The line that Berenson had drawn between his activities and those of the Duveens was one that during the remainder of their long association he tried hard not to cross in spite of incessant pressure. Life at I Tatti had now developed a peculiarly complicated social and business character. Dealers beat the accustomed path to Berenson's door of a morning bearing their purported treasure, and he was still loath to turn them away. When a Milanese suddenly appeared at the top of the steps one day "waving a small picture" which " B . B . " recognized as "a pretty little Sassetta," he "took it at once." But the morning traffic remained usually invisible to his guests. Old Parisian intimates like the Countess Charlotte de Cosse-Brissac came for a few days to stimulate his conversation. In January 1 9 1 2 Bessie decamped for the tour of Egypt and [137]

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Greece, much to Bernhard's relief, and soon after her return in March she departed for home. His sister Rachel and her husband, Ralph, expected soon to leave for a tour of Greece. As his guests in the villino on the hillside across the way, they had kept pretty much to themselves with their children, their only complaint being that Geoffrey Scott was never allowed to come or go "except in the motor," whereas they had to trudge down the dusty road " t o the very slow tram" at the Ponte a Mensola. Though Bernhard praised Geoffrey's "brilliant mind, keen wit, and charming personality," Rachel thought him a lazy parasite. Despite Mary's patronage, Scott and Pinsent had not thrived in their business as architects, and Scott rather despaired. Their end-of-the-year statement told the story: "Receipts £470, Expenses £760." But fortunately for the pair their small commissions were soon supplemented by plans for continuing work on the garden and on the interior of the Villa I Tatti. B y the time Berenson got to Paris for his regular sojourn in June, Pinsent could report to Mary in England that the drawings for the projected cascade were under way, the gateway for the outside wall was designed, the piers for a new wall were up two meters, and the rest of the house was divided off by screens and temporary safety doors so that dust could be kept out and workmen could pass through the openings. The alterations would "give a distinct impression of greater size and ampleness to the first floor, and make you feel at last that you have got some r o o m . " Pinsent had already put in some cypresses in the garden forty feet tall so that the Berensons could enjoy them during their lifetime. He expected that all would be ready, as promised by the contractor Somigli, by August 3 1 . That talented fellow, he assured her, understood drawings and even did his calculations with a slide rule. He was "a distinct exception to the usual Florentine type." Berenson had completed the manuscript for the catalogue of Italian paintings in the Johnson Collection by the end of 1 9 1 1 , and Mary spent much of January 1 9 1 2 transcribing it. It was especially gratifying that Johnson had responded to Berenson's plea to reproduce "everything of artistic or historical importance" by authorizing all the illustrations he had asked for. At intervals in the following months he tackled the Widener catalogue and by June it too was completed, "so now the winter's work is off our minds."

[138]

χ

ν

The "Merchants"and the "ixpert"

O

N E day in late M a r c h 1912 B e r e n s o n ' s passion for w a l k i n g in the n e i g h b o r i n g w o o d s t o o k h i m u p the Vincigliata road into the secluded dell in w h i c h lay the tiny lake and Grecian temple

constructed b y the first L o r d W e s t b u r y . W h e n he attempted to leave the area, the k e y b r o k e in the l o c k o f the gate. T h e r e w a s n o t h i n g for it but t o c l i m b o v e r the w a l l and j u m p . H e miscalculated the height and fell to the g r o u n d , injuring his back. T h e result w a s a curious aesthetic and m y s t i c a l experience w h i c h he described to E d i t h W h a r t o n : " T h e instant o f pain w a s f o l l o w e d b y a m o s t extraordinary appreciation o f the beauty b e f o r e m e , and an expectation that I s h o u l d never see it again. I did not w a n t to live like the heroine o f Ethan Frome." T h e pain, he said, b r o u g h t a " m y s terious euphoria w i t h i t , " the T u s c a n landscape had never

looked

lovelier, and to his surprise he felt " s o alert, so patient, so pleasant, so charitable." B e r e n s o n t o o k a d v a n t a g e o f his i n j u r y to find solace in the spring o f 1912 at the C u r t i s e s ' villa o n the Riviera. " S o here I a m , " he w r o t e Edith, " a c h i n g and m e r r y and e n j o y i n g solid B o s t o n i a n talks w i t h the ast r o n o m e r Percival L o w e l l . " His amiable m o o d had been disturbed, h o w ever, b y her latest story, " T h e L o n g R u n , " in the Atlantic

Monthly.

" C e r t a i n p h r a s e s " in the tale o f a H a r v a r d poet w h o c o m p r o m i s e d his ideals to b e c o m e a rich industrialist, he told her, " m a d e m e feel the mental equivalent o f biting o n a sensitive t o o t h , and the w h o l e story as i f I had hit m y crazy b o n e . " It seemed a parable o f his o w n fate. T h o u g h the D u v e e n projects w e r e t i m e - c o n s u m i n g and t r o u b l e s o m e , they p r o m ised the financial security for w h i c h he had l o n g hoped. B u t there w a s n o b l i n k i n g the fact that his research and w r i t i n g had descended f r o m G o e t h e a n visions t o the prose o f catalogue m a k i n g . A n d the increasing t e m p o o f business w i t h the f i r m f o r e s h a d o w e d a n e w stage in their [i39]

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relations, one that might permanently close the door for escape from the trap into which he had fallen. As the dependence of the Duveens upon his expertise grew, they were increasingly anxious to bind him to the firm for a term of years and have first claim upon his services. Already there was talk of the desirability of a written contract. Mary drove up in their automobile to join Bernhard at the Curtises' so that they might spend a week on their return revisiting the provincial galleries of Italy. She came down with a cold, however, and had to return to I Tatti by train, leaving Bernhard, who was quite recovered, to make the tour with Mrs. Shields, the secretary of the expatriate British writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). Mary hoped the trip would at least take his mind o f f Belle Greene, whose " f a t " letters she forwarded to him. Belle's after-hours dissipations, which she merrily recounted, had recently evoked his puritanical reproaches. In one lengthy screed she burst out, " Y o u despise everything I write, do or say and everyone I k n o w . " Her anger did not last, and it was not long before she thanked him for "the dearest letter you ever wrote to me. . . . I kiss your mouth and cling to you as I remember doing the night in Venice." N o r did he neglect to ply her with impressive tokens of his love. " I am quite overwhelmed by my Daddi," she wrote. This was Bernardo Daddi's Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints. It had been preceded by his gift of Spinello Aretino's The Angel of the Annunciation. Ralph Curtis found it hard to understand Berenson's attention to so many other women, and when Berenson returned to I Tatti he begged for an explanation. Berenson prepared a little essay and, pleased with its implications, showed it to Mary, who diverted her sister, Alys, with a copy. " Y o u ask m e , " he wrote, " w h y I waste so much of my time on women seeing that in general, I have so poor an opinion of them." It was only poor of them in the mass, he explained, or in the case of "TL permanent relation based on submission of their impulses and interests to mine. . . . But outside of these solemn and impossible relations, women can be and are delightful i) as playthings, 2) as playmates, 3) as stimulants, 4) as inspiration. A man's mind has as much need of a female mind as a male of a female b o d y . " After point four Mary inserted, " H e might have said as consolation." " Y o u may deplore it, and most men have," his disquisition continued. "With the Jason of Euripides, you may rage against the arrangement of the gods which compels us to plant our children in a female body instead of in our own loins. And as with the body so with the mind. The female stimulus is scarcely less necessary for the mental than for the physical procreative act. And in the state of permanent warfare between the sexes, it is sweet to have breathing spells of illusion, halcyon days in the cold [140]

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THE

"EXPERT

w i n t e r o f o u r discontent w h e n w e seem to e n j o y a truce f r o m the s t r u g gle o f self-assertion to abandon oneself to the abandon o f a w o m a n w h o seems to l i v e and breathe o n l y f o r us . . . to pick o u t w i t h a lobster f o r k all the sweetness that life has to o f f e r in its m o s t inaccessible tentacles. . . . For . . . each m o m e n t has its cash value, and it is that cash value w e m u s t insist u p o n particularly w h e n it is at once pleasant and not t o o expensive. Eviva la vita. T h o u g h it slay m e y e t w i l l I trust in it. B . B a c c h u s . " C u r t i s d e m u r r e d . " M y verdict after h a l f a century o f rather varied experiences is that [ w o m e n ] contaminate one's sense o f h o n o u r . T h e y are enervating ' p l a y m a t e s ' and are v e r y fragile ' p l a y t h i n g s ' w h i c h generally get o u t o f order a w e e k after X m a s . " B e r e n s o n w a s not to be s w e r v e d . W h e n E u g e n e Glaenzer c a m e in to see h i m at the Ritz in Paris that s u m m e r and sighed " h e had d o n e w i t h w o m e n , " B e r n h a r d c o m m e n t e d to M a r y , " L u c k y m a n , I e x p e c t t o have d o n e w i t h t h e m o n l y after I a m cremated." B e r e n s o n had n e v e r been quite so peripatetic as during the remainder o f the spring m o n t h s o f 1912 and perhaps n e v e r so happily diverted b y the frequent c h a n g e o f scene. D u r i n g one o f his brief I T a t t i sojourns he s u r v e y e d the w o r k o n the garden and, to the alarm o f C e c i l Pinsent and M a r y , m a d e c o p i o u s suggestions f o r changes. Fortunately he s o o n d e parted f o r another short visit to N a p l e s . In A p r i l there w a s an excursion to V e n i c e , for the reconstructed campanile w a s to be dedicated o n Saint M a r k ' s D a y , A p r i l 25, at a spectacular c e r e m o n y . O n his first enchanted visit to V e n i c e in O c t o b e r 1888, he had been sure that V e n i c e w o u l d haunt h i m " f o r ever and e v e r . " A n d haunt h i m it had. H e had returned t o it again and again. A n d o n each return for m o r e than a d o z e n years the o l d campanile, w h i c h had s u r v i v e d nearly a m i l l e n n i u m , had filled his sight. In 1902 the h u g e t o w e r had collapsed into an appalling heap o f rubble. It had n o w been rebuilt to its f o r m e r g l o r y , and the great bell, the M a r a n g o n a , w h i c h had escaped d a m a g e , h u n g o n c e m o r e in the l o f t y b e l f r y . B e r e n s o n and his friends had special tickets for the celebration and m a n a g e d s o m e h o w to get t h r o u g h the e n o r m o u s c r o w d w h i c h packed the Piazza San M a r c o to reach their seats j u s t under the D o g e s ' Palace. C o l o r f u l banners h u n g f r o m the pillars, and w h e n the battle flag o f the cruiser San Marco soared aloft o n the rebuilt campanile, the cannon b o o m e d and the bells in the b e l f r y c h i m e d . D e e p amidst their m u s i c c a m e the r h y t h m i c c l a n g o r o f the M a r a n g o n a . S u d d e n l y a single t r u m p e t note sounded, thousands o f children b r o k e into the ancient chant o f " L a Cantata del C a m p a n i l e , " and t w o thousand carrier p i g e o n s fluttered aloft to carry the n e w s to all Italy. T h e n , escorted b y a c o l o r f u l detachment o f carabinieri w i t h blue and scarlet p l u m e s in their hats, the ecclesiastical [141]

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procession of prelates and bishops in gorgeous copes proceeded from the Basilica to the platform facing the duke of Genoa for the ceremony of consecration. Again the cannon boomed and the bells jubilated. "I began to sob and blubber and choke," said Berenson, "and I had quite a time calming myself down. . . . It is too terrible how subject I am to being literally overwhelmed by irrational emotions, the emotions of the crowd. N o wonder I dread them." Back at I Tatti before going to Paris in June on the way to London, Berenson accumulated a supply of paintings for Henry Walters, who, when he came, took them all. This would make it easier, Mary reflected, for " B . B . to give Ralph and Rachel the Cambridge house" for which they had been hunting. His sister Senda and her husband, Herbert, were also house hunting, but Berenson felt he could afford "only one house at a time"; Rachel's need was more pressing because she had two children. Senda agreed. As for Bernhard's suggestion that she and Herbert try for a university and leave Smith College, the sad fact was that Herbert did not have a Ph.D., and besides he was too unworldly to push for advancement. In Paris there were the obligatory hours of clamorous strategy at the Duveens in the place Vendöme. At his hotel from nine to eleven he held levees "with people hot on each other's heels." Arthur Sulley came for a long conference "while other suppliants were kept at the door." Baron Lazzaroni brought over "his new Bellini, damaged but attractive." Joe Duveen would have to look at it. More agreeable were the excursions to the Villa Trianon to talk with the enterprising theatrical agent Bessie Marbury and to admire Elsie de Wolfe's newest wardrobe. As Mary had accompanied him, he persuaded Elsie to take her in hand. Mary submitted with what grace she could. After an agreeable chat with Rene Piot, Bernhard went to see Henri Bergson. " I found him rather aged," he wrote, "living austerely. . . . The poor man is most wretched over his unsought for popularity. . . . He is going off to the Jura to work night and day preparing lectures and writing books. He again assured me that after all his reading on aesthetics he found my books alone of interest." At the Triennial Exhibition "the only good thing was a Matisse landscape, good but not very much better than a Sargent." On his forty-seventh birthday, June 26, 1912, Berenson, following his yearly custom, wrote to thank his mother for the "gift of life." " I am very much in love with life," he declared, perhaps feeling it desirable to assuage her anxieties about him since neither Mary nor his three sisters concealed from her his sessions of ill health or his changeable and violent moods. Nevertheless, he wrote, he felt an epoch coming to an end. [142]

THE

"MERCHANTS''

AND

THE

''EXPERT'

Something of the bloom of existence had vanished, he had philosophized to Walters. After "forty we begin to look at things with the cold eye of reason and reason is suicidal. The truth is life is a miracle enacted for the delectation of childhood and youth." It was clearly time to put his affairs into some kind of order. As a first step he and Mary prepared their wills. More important, however, was the need to systematize his relations with the Duveens. These had now become a confusing welter of arrangements contained in scores of letters and cables and oral understandings. The basic "convention" with which they had worked was that he should receive "a fourth of the profits on all Italian works bought" on his advice. It was a liberal arrangement and no doubt had overcome some of his dislike of the firm, but too many contingencies remained in limbo, particularly what claims his wife and their two families might have in the event of his death. He moved toward entering a formal contract with the Duveen firm with considerable reluctance, realizing, no doubt, that a contract would limit his freedom in dealing with other firms and subject him to more tyrannous demands upon his time. Yet a contract would at last assure him a measure of financial security. To the conservative Johnson, who had warned him against the Duveens, he justified his services to them and to other dealers on the ground that his attempts "to help the squillionaire buyers directly" through him as an adviser had been rejected. "If I refused my help to the dealers, Altman and the others would probably pay no less but get no return at all. . . . I hate the sordid hypocrisy," he continued, "which would pretend that one did all this for nothing. I get my ample remuneration which I earn as amply and honourably. . . . And economizing Mr. Altman's or Mr. Morgan's money should be no concern of ours." "I could never see the least reason," he subsequently explained, "for being ashamed of making money out of such professional knowledge of mine as happens to command a market price." Having enjoyed the life enhancements of Paris, he crossed over to London to be available for the contract negotiations. Physical London displeased him after the agreeable amenities of Ritzian Paris in the spring. The Claridge Hotel seemed dilapidated: "windows not opening, no shutters, electric lights not working, valet abed, and motors hooting, hooting, hooting all night." A three-hour luncheon with Edith Wharton helped to lift his spirits, as did one with Henry James. "What I enjoyed most about him was William's merry twinkle that I discovered in his eye." James, he thought, was "complete," in need of no further stimulus from the outside world, a state quite unlike his own. Social London soon offered its delights, and Berenson eagerly escaped from the evils of the dealers in Old Bond Street to the flattering company [143]

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of Princess Polignac, Lady Elcho, Lady Herbert, Lady Ripon, and other aristocrats. He bowed to Nijinsky and to Diaghilev, "his lover and impresario," and encountered Leon Bakst, " w h o turned out to be an old acquaintance." The ballet Swan Lake, attended in the company of Lady Sybil Cutting, the Fiesole neighbor to whom he was much attached, struck him as "just an ordinary leg s h o w . " With Edith Wharton and Henry James at hand there was commiserating talk of Henry Adams, who on April 24, 1912, had suffered a stroke and lay paralyzed in America. A stream of letters of concern went back and forth across the Atlantic among his worried circle of friends, and the devoted Elizabeth Cameron hurried to be as close to his bedside as his family would allow. " T h e world will be a different place without that kindly light—and clear," she wrote Berenson. " Y e s , " he agreed, "it will be a greyer and frostier world for all of us who loved him, when his stimulating mind and affectionate heart are here no more. I can't tell you with what zest I used to give up everything else of a morning and rush to his rooms in the hope of finding him for a talk." In June she wrote that Adams was recovering. Barrett Wendell sent confirmation: "Adams has rallied wonderfully." Learning that Adams was with relatives in Lincoln near Boston, Berenson teased him, " I hope they are not smothering you with kindness." He told of having completed the Johnson catalogue of nearly five hundred Italian pictures—"Four-fifths of them were enigmas" that he had solved as best he could. " O f course I have missed some solutions and gone astray in others. A n y other pair of eyes would see something that somehow escaped my attention." For relaxation, he said, he preferred the society of women, "like the rest of us" (for he knew Adams' preferences). "Rather funny is it not for the likes of me to have access to a Balfour or a Curzon through some fluffy females." He had talked, he said, with Henry James, w h o "discoursed upon the cant and rawness of the Britishers, from whose island he nevertheless never wishes to depart again." Adams promptly dictated a long and characteristically whimsical reply. His other correspondents were unreliable so " I fall back upon you as my staff and hope. . . . If you hear of anything, whether literary or artistic, you would confer an enormous grace upon us by letting us know. Really, you would do something more, for you would cure me of a terrible habit I am falling into of taking for granted that the world is coming to an end, and that there never will be anything more that I feel any interest in. Stir it up please." Berenson conscientiously did as he was asked, and their exchange of ironies continued into the autumn. "What a grand time you will be [144]

THE

''MERCHANTS''

AND

THE

"EXPERT

h a v i n g , " Berenson w r o t e , " w i t h a loge d'avant scene in our quadrennial national Saturnalia. Foolish foreigners ask m e w h a t it all m e a n s — T a f t , W o o d r o w Wilson, T h e o d o r e Imperator Caesar, and I tell them . . . as h u m a n nature is e v e r y w h e r e h u m a n nature, the pent-up Ausgelassenheit [exuberance] once in four years is allowed to have its course. . . . W e grace the o r g y w i t h the appearance o f political purpose and call it a presidential e l e c t i o n . " E u r o p e w a s b e c o m i n g so Americanized that "pride in p l u m b i n g seems t h o r o u g h l y to have replaced pride in spirit." A s for literature, his y o u n g uppercrust friend Philomene de LevisM i r e p o i x w a s creating a flutter w i t h her b o o k Cite des Lampes. T h e Irish writer John M . S y n g e w a s " d e a d and g o n e , " " b u t surely his ' P l a y b o y o f the Western W o r l d ' and his 'Tinker's W e d d i n g ' are real w o r k s o f art. A n d so to m y utter amazement is G e o r g e M o o r e ' s ' A v e A t q u e V a l e . ' " A s for w o r l d s ending, " W h y should w e care, w h e n t w e n t y life-times w o u l d not suffice to let one drain the cup o f beauty and interest distilled for us b y the P o e t . " While Bernhard w a s e n j o y i n g L o n d o n and uneasily anticipating c o n tract negotiations w i t h the D u v e e n s , M a r y at Ford Place, Arundel, w h e r e L o g a n and A l y s w e r e n o w living, w a s eagerly waiting to preside at the birth o f her daughter R a y ' s first child, as t w e n t y - f i v e years before her o w n mother had presided at the birth o f her first child, Ray. T h e b a b y , a girl, w a s b o r n on the seventeenth o f j u l y , 1912, and was named Barbara. Like her matriarchal mother, M a r y w a s pleased that it w a s o f the m o r e admirable sex. Bernhard sent o n for her critical e n j o y m e n t a letter f r o m Lady Sybil, w h o s e w i d o w h o o d had left her at loose ends. In it she confessed h o w great her dependence u p o n h i m had g r o w n . She feared that on her return f r o m a visit to A m e r i c a there w o u l d be " n o kind person to take m e to see beautiful things animate and inanimate." Her letter, M a r y prophetically observed, gave one " t o think, as the French say. She has evidently bec o m e v e r y f o n d o f t h e e . " Berenson's thoughts had been again turning to the w o m e n in his life. In his chronicle to M a r y he noted, " I am c o m i n g to the conclusion that none o f the w o m e n that I frequent are satisfied w i t h friendship. I fear they either w a n t passion or the offer o f it. W a y d o w n they resent one's g i v i n g t h e m friendship." E v e n M a d a m e de C o s s e Brissac said one day, " w i t h a distinct ring o f regret in her voice, ' V o u s ne m e jamais pris en f e m m e [ Y o u never regard m e as a w o m a n ] . ' T h o u g h the birth o f M a r y ' s first grandchild opened a n e w chapter o f maternal pleasure for her, Bernhard's reports f r o m L o n d o n troubled her. In spite o f herself and her emancipated principles she k n e w jealousy. A s she ruminated o v e r her discovery o f one o f his " a m o u r s , " it was but a short step to recrimination. H e defiantly responded, " T i m e and again [145]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

have I told you that you knew little about my 'amours' and again that I would not tell you anything about them until I was sixty or sixty-five and time and again you have teased me to tell you. . . . I have no idea what particular amour you have found out. For all I know it is not authentic, a false attribution in fact." The contract negotiations finally got under way in London in mid-July of 1912. "Three hours of talky talky with the Duveens who rather upset m e , " he informed Mary. " W e are to meet with lawyers in a few minutes, insisting on some formal legal statement which would enable my heirs to recover the very considerable moneys which may be due my estate from the Duveens. . . . The lawyer and I could have done it all in an hour at the utmost. But in a way the Duveens are so stupid and at such cross purposes that God knows how many more sittings will be necessary." With the layman's impatience Berenson grossly underestimated the difficulties which had to be confronted. The contract which finally resulted ran to more than twenty pages and was not ready to be signed in Paris until the twenty-fifth of September. The parties to it were described as the " M e r chants and Bernhard Berenson, citizen of Boston, Massachusetts, residing at I Tatti, Settignano, Florence, Connoisseur of works of art, and hereinafter called the Expert." The contract was to take effect retroactively as o f j u l y 1, 1912, and run for five years. The Expert was not to be in the exclusive employ of the Duveens, but he was required to give the firm first refusal on any "first class Italian pictures" of which he had knowledge or potential control and to supply "every possible information concerning Italian pictures and other works of art, their history, their owners, and any dealings or negotiations so far as the Expert has knowledge or belief or any opinion or any opinions or criticisms concerning them." If the firm declined a proposal, the Expert could offer it to a collector but not to another dealer. He was also to abstain from arrangements with other dealers in which he was paid a fee based on a percentage of the purchase or sale price; for his advice in such cases he was to charge " a fixed monetary s u m . " The provisions governing arrangements with other dealers quickly succumbed to complications. The provision that was to prove most troublesome was the one requiring that pictures bought on Berenson's advice by each of the three D u veen galleries were to be entered into a special book called the " X " Book, the original of which was to be kept in the Duveens' Paris gallery at 20, place Vendöme. Excepted from this provision were transactions for which "private and separate arrangements" were made, a purchase on shares, for example. A fee of 25 percent of the net profit was to be paid on purchases entered in the " X " Book. Berenson was strictly en[146]

THE

" M E R C H A N T S "

AND

THE

"EXPERT

joined to keep secret the fact that the Duveens compensated him on a percentage basis. Accountings would be made half-yearly, on August 31 and February 28, and it was to be "distinctly understood" that the fees paid were to be regarded as for "services rendered" as a consultant and not as "commissions." If the Duveens took back a picture from a buyer or exchanged it for another, " o n any terms they see fit," Berenson was to be debited the amount of his fee and charged 5 percent interest, the intention being "that the Expert shall follow their fortunes in such matter." Despite this last feature, which proved particularly irksome to Berenson, it was stated that the arrangement between the "Merchants" and the " E x p e r t " was not to be "deemed in the nature of or in fact a partnership agreement." Sir William Plender, chief partner of the London accounting firm of Deloitte, Plender, Griffiths and Company, was identified as the " X " who would serve as arbitrator to deal with the Duveen accounting firm of Westcott, Maskall & Company. T o maintain secrecy only partners of these firms were to have any knowledge of the transactions. The contract expressly stated that the agreement "shall be kept absolutely secret by both parties and by the executors, administrators, and heirs of the E x pert," who were to attempt no communication with the Merchants in the event of the Expert's death but apply for any moneys that may be due to his estate to " X " and accept his settlement without question. The following passage provided the rationale for the curiously detailed provisions of the contract: "This agreement is based upon the very considerable value attaching to the opinion and belief of the Expert concerning the authenticity, history or criticism of Italian pictures and other works of art . . . [and also] upon the fact that the dealings of the Merchants in Italian pictures and other works of art are necessarily of a singular and exceptionable nature . . . frequently involve long credits or the return of works of art . . . [and] on many occasions very special arrangements as do not normally take place in ordinary business." The keeping up to date of the " X " Book and of the " X " Ledger, in which both purchases and sales were recorded, became from the very outset a recurring and complicated tussle among the three branches. Moreover, much to Berenson's annoyance, J o e continued to hold on to the substantial balances and to credit Berenson with 5 percent interest rather than disgorge all of the highly useful "float." In wiring the firm, Berenson was to sign himself the code name DORIS. The Duveens were to be LOUBEATA in London, O C T A V U S in Paris, and LOGHOFF in N e w York. The many cables and telegrams that came to I Tatti made very little use of code language and were usually transparently intelligible. Joe Duveen may have hoped to monopolize Berenson's services—and to some extent he succeeded—in the firm's campaign to dominate the [147]

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MAKING

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LEGEND

trade in Italian Old Masters, but there was a troublesome ambiguity in the arrangement. The provision entitling the firm to first refusal on "first class" pictures of which Berenson had "knowledge or potential control" could not apply to those submitted to him for attribution by other dealers. And what were not "first class" pictures left much to Berenson's discretion. Hence Berenson felt relatively free to continue counseling other dealers. The customary 10 percent of the profit on sales or other rewards which they pressed upon him may have been overshadowed by Duveen's 25 percent, but their fees would help him indulge more freely his taste for books, objects of art, and luxurious living. Principal among these auxiliaries was Arthur Sulley of London, whose business relations with Berenson continued until the year of Sulley's death in 1 9 3 1 . Berenson's friendly relations with Otto Gutekunst were similarly long-lived. Once when Gutekunst reported to Berenson the gossip that the Duveens had exclusive call upon his services, Berenson replied, " I wrote you about your version of the Venus and Adonis not as a matter of business but to prove to you the falsity of the amiable charges against me by Bond Street that I am not free to give my opinion to all and sundry." In a friendly gesture he returned Otto's check for £500. Berenson's association with the famous Nathan Wildenstein, his son Georges, and grandson Daniel paralleled that with Arthur Sulley and continued at intervals to the end of Berenson's life. Relations with the F. Kleinberger Company of Franco-American art dealers endured for nearly forty years, during which Berenson supplied critical opinions and certificates of authenticity. The 174 letters from the firm reflected an especially close collaboration. The connection with Julius Boehler of the Munich firm of Boehler and Steinmeyer was equally durable. Anxious to have Berenson's favor, Boehler wrote, after Berenson had expertized a Pontormo in 1 9 1 1 , " O f course for your trouble I should be very pleased to give you a share in the profit or make any arrangement which would be convenient for y o u . " During the twenties the occasional fees from Boehler would run from $1,500 to $2,000. Among the many Paris antique dealers who had branched out into picture dealing was amiable Jacques Seligmann, an important rival of the Duveens in the sale of objects of art. He was, he confessed to Berenson, "picture blind." He therefore relied much on Berenson's judgment. Seligmann worried about Berenson's uncertain health and advised him to take life easier: " Y o u have got money enough today," he wrote in 1 9 1 5 , "and you will easily make a lot of money more." When Jacques's young son, Germain, joined his father in the business, he achieved his first success by urging his father to call in Berenson to identify a small Venetian altarpiece. It proved to be the Madonna and Child with Saint [148]

THE

" M E R C H A N T S "

AND

THE

" E X P E R T '

Jerome and Saint John the Baptist by Cima da Conegliano. After Lord d'Abernon thereupon bought it in 1919, it passed into the hands of the Duveens and came to rest at last in the Mellon Collection. At his first meeting with Berenson Germain recalled seeing "a delicate-looking man —his expressive hands, his delightful manner, his soft, well-modulated voice, pronouncing decisions that one felt were beyond appeal." Father and son were to call upon Berenson from time to time until as late as 1949. Rene Gimpel was another of the Paris dealers who was eager to call upon Berenson's services. Gimpel's father, who died in 1907, had been a partner of Nathan Wildenstein. Only twenty-six at the time, Rene took over his father's share of the business as a junior partner. Later, as a brother-in-law of J o e Duveen and now in business for himself, his arrangement with Berenson called for a fee of 25 percent on profits "realized whether on buying a picture on your advice or your giving an attestation." Much as Gimpel appreciated Berenson's expertise, he resented being patronized by him. In the pages of his diary—published posthumously—he fantasized an imaginary dialogue with Berenson's spirit: " I f small and agile tigers could speak they would have your voice and your intelligence [ta voix et ton intelligence], feline Pole," with "velvet paws and killer talons of steel." THEIR respective missions in England completed, Bernhard and Mary went their separate ways. Instead of returning to St. Moritz in August, Bernhard took his chronic ailments to Carlsbad for a four-week stay to be x-rayed, diagnosed, and treated. The best that the learned physician could tell him was that he had too big a head and too small a stomach, that the muscles of his stomach and intestines were too flabby to hold his food in a proper posture for digestion. Hence he must stuffand of course drink the waters. Mary, from an opposing necessity, headed for Aix-lesBains with her sister and cousin Grace to try again to subdue her resurgent corpulence. Glad to learn that she was "beginning to melt at last," Bernhard again lectured her on the importance of attending to her wardrobe. She went to Paris at his urging to get a supply of dresses. Elsie de Wolfe took her down to Worth's for long hours of fittings. When Bernhard joined her, she appeared at dinner at Edith Wharton's in a new evening gown, which kept slipping off her shoulder. Bernhard "rather liked it, for I looked fashionable at last." It was mid-October of 1 9 1 2 before Mary was reequipped and the contract with the Duveens finally signed. In spite of the lateness of the season the Berensons drove back to I Tatti in an open touring car and "paid for it" in chilly discomfort. Bernhard found that his "runners," [149]

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w h o had scoured the country for Italian paintings for four months, had "gathered in a very scanty harvest." H e was able to offer Walters only a single picture. O n l y three m o r e turned up in N o v e m b e r . T h e Duveens, "very m u c h concerned about the scarcity of great Italian pictures," hoped that at least " o n e or t w o might spring up f r o m time to time f r o m unexpected sources." J o e admonished Berenson, " W e must control all fine Italian masterpieces." In this succinct fashion Joe defined what he t h o u g h t were Berenson's responsibilities under the n e w contract. What were acceptable masterpieces unavoidably pitted the Berensons' taste against that of Joe Duveen. O f a Lotto portrait, for example, J o e w r o t e that it seemed to h i m a picture of a man in pain "as if he had lost a shilling and f o u n d a sixpence or has been jilted." Lotto, Duveen felt, unfortunately specialized in " s o r r o w f u l countenances." H e d r e w the line also at portraits of men with beards. Another subject of dispute arose f r o m his preference for paintings w h o s e colors were fresh and vivid. Paintings acquired f r o m private collections were often "in dire need of cleaning" and restoration. T h e y w o u l d be sent off to the Paris restorer M a d a m e Heifer for treatment, and knowing Joe's taste—and his impatience—she had a tendency to overpaint. Joe, himself realizing the need for more careful restoration, again asked Berenson to e m p l o y for the firm his friend Cavenaghi, the artist long recognized as " t h e most scrupulous of all restorers." When, however, a Bellini which they hoped to submit to Benjamin Altman seemed to languish at Cavenaghi's, Louis urged speed. Berenson had to explain that it would be "a grave mistake" to rush the restoration, as each layer of glaze must be thoroughly dried or in a year or t w o it would look different f r o m the rest of the painting. H e also insisted that he must see the restored painting before it was sent if he was to "guarantee its quality." T h u s instructed, Louis agreed that Cavenaghi should not " r u s h the w o r k in any w a y . " T h e difficulties of restoration were of course complicated by the g r o w ing dispute a m o n g art critics over h o w m u c h restoration was permissible or justifiable. Purists resented any alterations though they might accept some cleaning. Yet few if any O l d Masters in their transit through the centuries had escaped restoration or even change as the result of chemical changes in the pigments. H o w puzzling the matter could be is illustrated by a painting which Berenson enthusiastically recommended to Joe Duveen earlier in the year, the Portrait of a Young Venetian by " t h e rarest, most wonderful, most fascinating artist of the Renaissance—Giorgione!" H e spoke also of its "miraculously fine state." It was then o w n e d by the Countess of T u r e n n e of Florence. T h e Duveens sold it to Altman with Berenson's [ISO]

THE

" M E R C H A N T S "

AND

THE

" E X P E R T '

c e r t i f i c a t i o n . B e r e n s o n h a d first e n c o u n t e r e d the p a i n t i n g at the e x h i b i t i o n o f V e n e t i a n O l d M a s t e r s in L o n d o n in 1895, there e x h i b i t e d as a Giorgione.

In

his

iconoclastic

article

which

rejected

attributions

w h o l e s a l e , h e h a d r e m a r k e d that t h e p a i n t i n g , t h o u g h n o t a G i o r g i o n e , w a s " o f e x q u i s i t e q u a l i t y " b u t o f " d e p l o r a b l y b a d p r e s e r v a t i o n . " In t h e s e v e n t e e n y e a r s since his first v i e w o f the p a i n t i n g , it h a d e v i d e n t l y b e e n very

skillfully

restored

and

he

had

forgotten

his first

impression.

W i l h e l m B o d e r e f e r r e d t o t h e p a i n t i n g in an article in Art in

America,

s h o r t l y after A l t m a n ' s p u r c h a s e , as s u p e r i o r t o t h e B e r l i n v e r s i o n , " m o r e c o l o r f u l , d e e p e r in t o n e , " and b e t r a y i n g " a later p e r i o d in the

more

p o w e r f u l turn o f t h e h e a d . " H e t o o a d m i r e d the " p r e s e r v a t i o n " o f " t h i s splendid portrait" b y Giorgione. N e a r l y s i x t y y e a r s after the sale, w h e n t h e p a i n t i n g h a d passed t o the M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m , P r o f e s s o r Francis H a s k e l l , w h i l e n o t d e n y i n g the a t t r i b u t i o n , r e f e r r e d t o the p a i n t i n g as " t h i s sad, b u t still m o v i n g g h o s t o f a p i c t u r e . " W h a t h a d h a p p e n e d , a c c o r d i n g t o the art h i s t o r i a n T e r i s i o P i g n a t t i (1969), w h o f o r his part c o n c l u d e d it w a s the w o r k o f " t h e y o u n g T i t i a n , " w a s that " t h e p a i n t i n g has b e e n e x t e n s i v e l y

damaged

t h r o u g h c l e a n i n g , w h i c h has t h i n n e d t h e c o l o r . . . a l l o w i n g t h e g r o u n d t o s h o w t h r o u g h in s o m e p a r t s . " S h o r n o f m u c h o f the c o l o r that h a d e n t r a n c e d b o t h B e r e n s o n a n d B o d e , the p a i n t i n g , p r e v i o u s l y a t t r i b u t e d t o G i o r g i o n e a n d T i t i a n , is n o w g i v e n entirely t o T i t i a n .

[151]

Χ VI

Last Season of the Tlelle Epoque

T

H E immigration of European art into America before World War I paralleled the flood of human immigrants, which reached a peak by 1 9 1 3 . The multimillionaires who operated or controlled the great industries employing the newcomers populated their homes and private galleries with thousands of real and dubious masterpieces which had come to the United States largely through the help of the international art dealers, firms like Duveen, Knoedler, Seligmann, Glaenzer, Kleinberger, and Wildenstein-Gimpel, and the press made the names of the great collectors and the enormous prices they paid for prized acquisitions familiar to an awakening public. Isabella Stewart Gardner, J . P. Morgan, the Wideners, and Benjamin Altman had led the pack, with Henry Clay Frick, Clarence Mackay, Jules Bache, Henry Walters, John Graver Johnson, Henry Osborne Havemeyer, and their lesser competitors following at a distance. Gifts and loans of the new acquisitions to the growing number of public galleries were opening new worlds of aesthetic experience. Hence it was that the New York Times welcomed the first number of Art in America as appearing "at precisely the right time." Its editor, thirty-three-year-old Wilhelm Valentiner, who had earned his doctorate in art history at Heidelberg, had been brought from Germany to serve as curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum. From the beginning J o e Duveen recognized Art in America's great potential for educating the taste of prosperous Americans, somewhat in the way the Connoisseur served the British. He not only subsidized his "beloved magazine" in its first years but also helped the young editor recruit his first contributors.

Berenson was one of the six contributors to the inaugural issue of January 1 9 1 3 . His contribution marked the beginning of his seventeen-

[152]

LAST

SEASON

OF

THE

BELLE

EPOQUE

year association with the magazine. Preoccupied with getting the Johnson catalogue ready for the press when the request for an article reached him, he turned back to a 1 9 1 1 unpublished piece, " A Nativity and A d oration of the School of Pietro Cavallini in the Collection of Mr. John G. Johnson," in which he argued for a pre-Giottesque Italian origin for the painting— in spite of its strikingly Byzantine elements—on the basis of its similarity to a Cavallini mosaic in Rome. The lead article by Wilhelm Bode dealt with the dating of the earliest Rembrandt. Similar problems occupied the other contributors—Valentiner, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Joseph Breck, and Allan Marquand—thus establishing the scholarly character of the magazine. The satisfaction that Berenson felt in being included among the first contributors was no doubt clouded by the prominence given to Bode and the choice of Bode's protege Valentiner as editor. He had protested to Henry Duveen that if he stopped writing he would lose his reputation and authority, yet with Valentiner's invitation in hand he had to face the fact that he had published nothing for four years. Hence when he returned to I Tatti in the fall of 1912, his thoughts ran back to the book he had envisaged long ago when Jaccaci had sought his collaboration. He now saw it as an extended study of Venetian paintings in America. Soon Mary and his secretary, Lancelot Cherry, began the hunt for appropriate photographs for his examination. There were of course the usual distractions, an incessant procession of visitors and house guests. Rene Gimpel and his bride, a sister of Joe Duveen, made an agreeable impression. Charles Piatt, the "squillionaire" architect, as Mary called him, came for a brief visit. Edith Wharton spent nearly a month at the villa, giving Berenson a chance to pamper her as much as she always indulged him at Hyeres. A dedicated writer, she kept to a regular schedule of work and made few demands on her host. Santayana also showed himself the "ideal guest," considerately staying in his room until lunch. During his visit in November there was much philosophizing with their neighbor and Bernhard's college classmate, Charles Augustus Strong, and with the resident philosopher of the Florentine colony, Alfred Benn, who had dedicated his book Modern England to Bernhard. At a succession of luncheons and dinners Santayana held forth on the three realms of being on which he was then engaged and showed an interest in "everything except art." He reported that his host "is full of espirit, and there is a stream of distilled culture flowing over us continually in the form of soulful tourists and weary dilettanti who frequent this place." Clive Bell, the London art critic, husband of Vanessa Bell and an intimate of the Bloomsbury group, disdainfully

[153]

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remarked after his visit that I Tatti was "full of Old Masters, mysterious countesses and unspeakable Americans." In the midst of things, Mary suddenly had to hurry over to England to see her doctor about a mysterious illness. Her doctor, she wrote, said she might expect "to be laid up very soon, but he couldn't give a date." During her absence Bernhard "burst out" by buying a large Chinese Buddha, for he had become enamored of Oriental art, having already obtained a number of pieces—a "fine bronze," a vase, a small statue, and other items—from the French dealer Leon A. Rosenberg. He was also unable to resist " t w o little clerics" who came up with a small picture, " m o s t l y " Botticelli, for which they asked 20,000 francs ($4,000) but, after some haggling, sold for 8,000. Hitherto he had thought of his collection of art as "representing merely his normal activity as a man of taste," as he put it to his friend the art critic Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., in deprecating a famous colleague as "merely a collector." When he unpacked his summer purchases, however, he "suddenly realized" that he had become "the thing he loathed—a collector." Her medical treatment completed, Mary made a quick visit to her children and the new grandchild, saw three of Bernhard's intimates in Paris—Edith Wharton, Mrs. Cameron, and Madame de CosseBrissac—dispatched some business chores, and got back to I Tatti in time for Christmas mass for their dependents in the chapel. In her absence Bernhard, who had been critically studying the appearance of Arthur, their new valet, decided it would be more elegant if he wore livery. Mary balked at this ultimate expression of fashionable living and ordered a plain black suit and white gloves for the servitor. The talkfests continued into the January evenings and were joined by the intellectual Eugenie, the "talkative single track" widow of Berenson's one-time adversary Standford Arthur Strong. Once a vehement partisan of her husband, she was again on good terms with the Berensons. Sometimes the discussions became so vigorous that the ritual camomile tea was brought in early to quiet the contestants. A new name dropped into one of their conversations, that of Sigmund Freud, who, as Mary explained to Alys, "traces all our character to the influence of our very earliest years even before we speak." The subject was to become one of Mary's obsessions and arouse Bernhard's greatest scorn. If conversation was a pleasure to Bernhard, reading was an urgent necessity, and it filled almost every interstice of his crowded days, whether in books on art, antiquity, biography and history, or fiction as demanding as Dostoevsky's Idiot. He ventured into unknown waters, however, when Gertrude Stein sent him a special number of Camera Work (August 1912) with illustrations of the work of Matisse and Picasso [154]

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and a two-page introduction to each artist in her nihilistic prose. In a concluding passage on Matisse she declared, "Everyone would come to be certain of this thing. This one was one, some were quite certain, one not greatly expressing something being struggling." Evidently pleased by the phrasing, she repeated it in several variations in the piece on Picasso. Berenson thanked her for the "extraordinarily fine reproductions" of the works of Matisse and Picasso and after due contemplation continued, "In a moment of perfect peace when I feel my best I shall try again to see whether I can puzzle out the intention of some of Picasso's design. As for your prose I find it vastly more obscure still. It beats me hollow, and makes me dizzy to boot. . . . But I'll try again." Not talkfests nor reading nor business chores kept Berenson from his desk in the early months of 1 9 1 3 . Fortunately the noise of continuing improvements at I Tatti—three new upstairs rooms and a bathroom— did not reach him where he spent his mornings "spinning out his articles," as Mary said, "faster than I can type." In swift succession he wrote a note on Pietro and Antonio (Antonello) da Messina, which appeared in an Italian version in April in his friend Don Guido Cagnola's Rassegna d'Arte, and three substantial articles published in French versions in Charles Ephrussi's Gazette des Beaux-Arts in March, June, and September. The original versions of the Gazette essays would be included in his Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Third Series. In the Gazette article on the Antonello Madonna and Child in the Benson Collection, Berenson took pleasure in correcting Tancred Borenius' attribution of a painting to Antonello's son Jacopo, a painting which had been "successfully hiding as a work by a chubby provincial named Marcello Fogolino." It did not daunt him that a dozen years earlier he had himself accepted that attribution in his Lotto. Berenson now concluded that its author was Antonello himself. " I should recognize the left hand here to be [Antonello's] by its shape as by its action." The other two Gazette articles, one on a St. Justine in Milan and the other on four triptychs in Venice, reflected his revived interest in the work of the great Venetian Giovanni Bellini. As a beginner, twenty years earlier, he had attributed the St. Justine to Alvise Vivarini, an artist he had "labored almost fanatically to revive and enhance" in order to show his influence on Lorenzo Lotto: " T o roast my pig, I had at that time to burn down the whole house." His detailed review of the work demonstrated, he felt, the superiority of the St. Justine to Alvise's "poverty stricken w o r k s . " Earlier he had also ascribed the four triptychs in the Church of the Caritä in Venice to Alvise. At the beginning of his study of Venetian art, he wrote, it had "scarcely occurred" to him "to question attributions," [155]

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unless they w e r e " f l a g r a n t l y inconsistent w i t h the little k n o w l e d g e [he] had already a c q u i r e d . " N o w that he could g i v e " u n d i v i d e d attention" to the Venetians and l o o k at the panels " i n the light o f a l l " he had "seen, t h o u g h t and learnt s i n c e , " he w a s c o n v i n c e d that they w e r e " i n essential the creation o f Bellini's b r a i n " and w e r e executed b y his assistants, a product o f his studio, " o r j u s t outside i t . " T h e analysis indicated that B e r e n s o n w a s beginning to m o v e t o w a r d w h a t w o u l d be called an " e x p a n s i o n i s t " theory o f attribution. A c o m p a r i s o n o f the French versions o f the Gazette articles w i t h the original versions reveals that the French translator, p r o b a b l y the v e r y Gallic S a l o m o n Reinach, did not hesitate to revise the text in accordance w i t h his notion o f French d e c o r u m or to subdue or delete B e r e n s o n ' s autobiographical touches, so that the w h o l e tone o f the essays became m o r e judicial, m o r e impersonal, and m o r e elegantly phrased. Picturesque and colloquial expressions fell b y the w a y s i d e . A " c h u b b y p r o v i n cial" and " V e n e t i c c l o d h o p p e r " became s i m p l y a " p e i n t r e p r o v i n c i a l . " D i f f u s e paragraphs o f c o m m e n t a r y w e r e omitted. When B e r e n s o n published the articles in his Study and Criticism of Italian Art, T h i r d Series, in 1 9 1 6 , he disregarded the French i m p r o v e ments, preferring his o w n h i g h l y personal, discursive, and frequently e x c l a m a t o r y style. It w a s a style w h i c h reflected that note o f personal intimacy w i t h a painting and its author and all their kinships w h i c h so irresistibly attracted his c o m p a n i o n s w h e n he acted as their cicerone. T h e r e m a y h a v e been e g o t i s m in it, nourished as it w a s b y the deference so w i d e l y paid to his opinion, but no other style w o u l d so w e l l h a v e suited his exuberant self-assurance. D u r i n g the early m o n t h s o f 1 9 1 3 a puzzling contretemps arose o v e r a reputed Bellini w h i c h the D u v e e n s had purchased f r o m R o b e r t L a n g t o n D o u g l a s . B e r e n s o n accepted it as genuine on the basis o f a p h o t o g r a p h , and it w a s submitted to C a v e n a g h i f o r cleaning and restoration. Shortly thereafter M a r y B e r e n s o n i n f o r m e d E d w a r d F o w l e s , the D u v e e n f a c totum, that C a v e n a g h i had g i v e n it up because it had turned out to be a m o d e r n imitation. B e r e n s o n apologized f o r having g i v e n his authentication and p r o p o s e d that the cost o f the " f o r g e r y " be charged to him. " A l l o f us [experts], w e are half a dozen at the u t m o s t , " he explained, " k n o w w e l l e n o u g h h o w likely such things are to happen. T h e v u l g a r , h o w e v e r , expect us experts to be infallible, and i f this mistake o f mine g o t abroad it m i g h t be d a m a g i n g to y o u . " Louis D u v e e n hastened to reassure B e r e n son that he should not think f o r a m o m e n t that the mistake w a s g o i n g to " s h a k e our confidence in y o u . T h e r e is o n l y one M r . B e r e n s o n and I a m sure m y partners w i l l take the same v i e w . " T h e matter w o u l d g o n o further: " I shall entirely erase it f r o m m y m i n d . " A l t h o u g h D o u g l a s is

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said by Fowles to have supplied a complete provenance for the painting, Terisio Pignatti, author of a comprehensive study of the works of Bellini, reports that he can find "no trace" of the picture in his files. When urgently summoned to "important" conferences by the Duveens, Berenson sometimes exaggerated his illnesses and thus obliged them to see him on his own turf at I Tatti. There he could comfortably display his finds without the hubbub o f the Paris gallery. On one foray "Uncle Henry" came to tea and stayed to dinner. "The time flew as when Scheherazade recounted tales to the king," ran Mary's amused report. "He is a wonderful genial old rogue. . . . He as it were unbuttoned himself and told dramatically long tales of contests with various American millionaires. . . . He is quite wild to get more Italian pictures. . . . He would pay us £5000 at once for six or seven of our things, he said! I do so wish B . B . would let them go." A short time before Henry Duveen's visit, Joe had written that Mrs. Otto Kahn was in Italy, and he besought Berenson to arouse her interest in the "fine Italian pictures" in which the firm dealt. Addie Kahn was a diminutive five feet tall, and Berenson, from the height of five feet seven, could look down upon the attractive matron of thirty-seven with benign concern. Her husband, Otto, who had been taken in as a partner into her father's prestigious banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Company at the time of the marriage, had become a leading financier and the Maecenas of the Metropolitan Opera Company. To her as a talented sculptress fell the main responsibility for building the family's notable art collection. Immediately after Henry's departure in February Berenson took Mrs. Kahn and a companion to Siena, and was so charmed by her and she by him that they became fast friends and exchanged hundreds of affectionate letters until her death in 1949. She shared his enthusiasm for the Italian Renaissance, and masterpiece after masterpiece which he helped her acquire came to adorn the walls of the Kahns' splendid homes. One of the paintings which later went to the Kahns was the profile of Giuliano de' Medici which a dealer, Baron Michele Lazzaroni, had shown to the Berensons on a visit to I Tatti. They spent hours looking at it and studying photographs. "With wonder and surprise," as Mary put it, they came to the conclusion that it was by none other than Botticelli. The painting was of extraordinary interest to them, for two portraits of the young Giuliano de' Medici were known to them at the time, one in the Morelli Collection in Bergamo and the other in the Berlin Museum. Though they each had their champions as authentic Botticellis, Berenson, along with other connoisseurs, regarded them both as copies. This painting then, he and Mary believed, was the original that had not been known to be in existence. [157]

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The painting made a sensation at the Duveens' gallery. "We have all been dreaming about this picture," Louis exulted. "For myself I could not sleep at all. It seems almost incredible that we should have here a portrait of a handsome boy by Botticelli himself. I am sure that when Mr. Altman sees this picture (it will naturally be shown to him first) he will drop his walking stick and throw up his hands in amazement." Altman declined to take the painting, and the ever-resourceful Duveen immediately began the search for other possible purchasers. Benjamin Altman died in October 1913 at the age of seventy-three, leaving an estate estimated at $45,000,000 and a priceless art collection. J . P. Morgan had died in March, "the last to buy paintings without an authentication from Bernhard," Mary boasted to Bernhard's mother. " N o w no important buyer will do without it." T o Berenson's surprise the absence from the art market of Morgan's extravagant purchases did not produce "a great slump," as might have been expected. Prices, he told Johnson, "have been steadily rising" and in Paris were "positively orgiastic." Morgan may be dead "but his soul goes marching o n . " Berenson's quixotic resolve to support Belle Greene if Morgan should neglect her proved needless. The will left her $50,000 and assured her employment for life as librarian at a salary of $10,000 a year. Belle's black-bordered missives, however, kept Berenson straining on her leash. " Y o u are all I have left n o w , " she wrote. She expected to stay on at the Morgan Library at least for a year and hence could not come abroad. (She was to continue at her post until her death in 1950.) That she continued to hold an ardent place in the hierarchy of Berenson's women admirers was painfully apparent to Mary. In May of 1913 Mary wrote to her own much-treasured confidant, Geoffrey Scott: Only my conscience does prick me a little remembering that I encouraged B . B . in the affair partly for my o w n reasons. I think if I had been strictly against it, he would really have kept it at the cool safe distance he has kept all his other escapades and fancies. I thought it would make up to him for the unhappiness of all the building upset and for not finding me very satisfactory (which I wasn't), but I also thought it would leave me much freer, which it did, as you remember. So I am honestly and truly responsible for its gravity.

What complicated Mary's situation was the fact that Bernhard would have to return to the United States before the end of the year to avoid the cancellation of his American citizenship under the 1907 law. The D u veens also strongly urged his return for business reasons. After much soul searching Mary told Bernhard, " I have decided to go to America with thee," though, she felt obliged to tell him, she could not "feel an atom of friendliness" for Belle Greene. Her decision, she confessed to-

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w a r d the end o f the s u m m e r , had not been easy to arrive at. In the m i x t u r e o f d e v o t e d understanding and patronizing reproach habitual w i t h her, she w r o t e , " A l l thy talk f o r a long time past has been eminently reasonable, granting the crazy fact o f being in l o v e w i t h a person so unsuited to thee b y circumstances and nature and habits, but thee has been as secretive as death about the kernel o f t h a t craziness." W h a t disturbed her w a s his denials that he any longer felt " t h a t 'all o v e r l o v e ' w h i c h as thee said thee yielded to only t w i c e . " H e r instinct told her that, o n the contrary, he w a s " c o n s u m e d w i t h physical d e s i r e " f o r Belle. She admitted that she had c o m e u p o n confirmation o f t h a t fact one day at I Tatti w h e n , " u p s e t w i t h d o u b t , " she had surreptitiously read a p a g e o f a letter he w a s w r i t i n g to Belle, " a n outburst o f o v e r w h e l m ingly lyric a d o r a t i o n " containing the sentence " A l l I have and all I a m are y o u r s . " " B e r n h a r d , people o f thy age cannot w r i t e these things as a poetic e x e r c i s e . " What she w a s careful not to reveal to h i m w a s that her feelings about his passion f o r B e l l e w e r e not the only reason f o r her reluctance to m a k e the trip. H e r intimate letters to G e o f f r e y Scott s h o w e d that she dreaded the l o n g separation f r o m h i m that the trip to A m e r i c a w o u l d entail. T h e B e r e n s o n s left Florence in J u n e 1 9 1 3 f o r their customary s u m m e r travels. B e f o r e p a r t i n g — M a r y to j o i n her f a m i l y in E n g l a n d and B e r n hard to attend to business and pleasure in P a r i s — t h e y prospected f o r pictures and gathered notes f o r the Lists f o r a f e w w e e k s in northern Italy and in G e r m a n y . T h e stop in M u n i c h had its bittersweet m o m e n t s f o r M a r y , f o r they lunched w i t h H e r m a n n Obrist, the artist w i t h w h o m she had been infatuated during the nineties. O b r i s t s h o w e d them his f a m o u s fountain, w h i c h he s a w did not please them. T h e i r departure f r o m Florence left a v a c u u m a m o n g their neighbors, as Florence B l o o d reported to G e r t r u d e Stein: " T h e Berensons had left b e f o r e I arrived and really t h o u g h they are neither y o u n g , or fresh, or cubistic they are the best the place a f f o r d s and w h e n they h a v e gone w h a t is there?" T h e social kaleidoscope in Paris displayed its usual glitter. A t the Villa T r i a n o n B e r n h a r d reveled in Elsie de W o l f e ' s "petits soins and last touches o f daintinesses." A t a fashionable gathering, again in the c o m p a n y o f E d i t h W h a r t o n , he encountered his f o r m e r neighbor Gabriele D ' A n n u n z i o ; D ' A n n u n z i o ' s s u f f e r i n g mistress, M a d a m e de G o l o u b e f f , w h o reputedly a l w a y s carried a r e v o l v e r ; and another o f D ' A n n u n z i o ' s w o r s h i p e r s , M a r i e M u r a t . L o n g an admirer o f B e r e n s o n , D ' A n n u n z i o had once written, " T o be habitually j o i n e d w i t h a rare spirit like y o u r s w o u l d b e o f priceless v a l u e to m e [pregio inestimabile]." T h e poet's flamb o y a n t e x t r a v a g a n c e and his often sordid sexual escapades a m o n g [159]

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w o m e n , high and low, had made his situation in Paris precarious, t h o u g h he was still welcome in ultra-chic circles. At their meeting Berenson " c o n j u r e d " h i m to return to Italy, "prophesying disaster if he did n o t . " Afloat in the literary and sporting w o r l d of Paris, D ' A n n u n z i o was to hang on until the coming of World War I, w h e n the "syphilitic, debtridden D o n J u a n " w o u l d return to Italy to become the strident ultranationalist hero of his homeland. At the Steins' Berenson found Gertrude "really looking h a n d s o m e , " the clean-shaven Leo "priest-like," Mabel D o d g e " h e a v e n l y , " and Picasso "a delightful toreador-like g a m i n . " When he chaffed Picasso about his latest "declension" into cubism, Picasso "protested like Luther that he could not d o o t h e r w i s e . " H e visited Henry Adams, convalescent in his luxurious "attic" on the avenue du Bois de Boulogne, attended by Louisa H o o p e r , his adoring niece, and by Aileen Tone, the y o u n g musician w h o had been engaged as his watchful companion. Miss T o n e sang to t h e m twelfth-century chansons, the collection of which had become A d a m s ' h o b b y . "I don't k n o w w h e n I heard anything so lovely, so poignant and yet so restrained," ran Bernhard's c o m m e n t to Mary. A tete-ä-tete with Henri Bergson ranged over the things in America which had impressed h i m on his recent lecture tour. T h e y also talked of the essay which Karin Costelloe, Mary's daughter, had written defending him f r o m the charge of anti-intellectualism, Bergson declaring it the most intelligent critique he had ever read, "illuminating even to h i m self." A lunch at Reinach's exposed Berenson to " t w o hours of vertiginous talk on every possible t o p i c , " with the famous bibliographer Seymour de Ricci as a participant. T h u s the days passed in Paris in a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates—Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, A b b e Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, M a d a m e de Cosse-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James ("the best hostess I have ever k n o w n " ) , and Philomene de Levis-Mirepoix—all members of the fashionable u p per crust of cosmopolitan Paris. Business of course had to be attended to, and during a duty call on the Duveens he listened for t w o hours to their interminable "I say, I say" as they broached their plans for still-greater coups. H e deplored their " s t u p i d i t y , " which he felt was matched by the "stupidity of their b u y e r s , " and he had little taste for Joe's "bluster, cajolery, flattery and heartless resolution to achieve his p u r p o s e . " O n another day he called on Jacques Seligmann, w h o "looked like a figure out of Michelangelo's 'Last J u d g m e n t ' and as violent." When Berenson got over to London, he learned f r o m Sir William Plender's office that the Duveens "had handed in n o account w h a t e v e r " as required by the contract. T h e y w o u l d therefore have to be " h o u n d e d " [160]

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into it, a necessity that was to become all too frequent. The account, when it was finally rendered on December i , showed that the fees accrued to July 3 1 , 1 9 1 3 , amounted to £19,358, of which £1,500 had been paid to Berenson on October 3, leaving a balance of £17,358, on which 5 percent interest was to be paid. Large unpaid balances were to be a continuing worry to Berenson in his relation to Duveen as his desire to increase his investments and achieve a stable income grew more obsessive. In London there was much visiting with Edith Wharton and Henry James. James, he felt, seemed " s h y " of him, and a suspicion of lurking anti-Semitism crossed his mind. At the home of Lady Charles Beresford he encountered Roger Fry, and " f o r the first time in nine years" he sensed no feeling " o f hostility emanating from him. . . . I was glad to meet him again." With Edith Wharton and Walter Berry he heard the great Russian basso Chaliapin in Boris Godunov. He dined with George Moore, " w h o would not tell me how literature had gone to taxes but other sagas and the time passed and lo before w e knew it, it was midnight." He conferred with the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; dined again with Lady Beresford, who "spit venom at Lady Cunard"; listened to the talkative John Singer Sargent, who, when Berenson suggested he paint King George V , vowed he would not "take any more humans"; and squired Lady Cunard to her "grand b o x " at the opera. Mary, with her family at Ford Place, Arundel, passed on to him the gossip of the uninhibited antics of the "Gloomsbury doings" which she had picked up from her daughter Ray. They were " 'horripelent' as thee says." The three delightful weeks in England were marred by "very serious and urgent affairs" to which J o e Duveen summoned him with diplomatic apology. A "very important" collection which they had just acquired must be inspected. Ten days later he was called upon to appraise "a great picture" from Vienna which had to be returned the same day. He spent considerable time also with the Duveens on pending sales and with other London dealers checking on a multitude of negotiations. Henry Walters had come abroad on his regular shopping tour for works of art, and he looked in on Berenson, who found him "as dear as ever but gloomy about things in America," where socialism seemed on the rise as it was in Europe. Nevertheless, he bought all the things that Berenson offered him. In August at Brides-les-Bains, where Mary had retreated, she heroically lost about 20 of her 200 pounds while enjoying the company of Bessie Marbury and Elsie de Wolfe. She began her ordeal, she confessed, with a gratifying "bust" at the dinner table. Scott, who had just com-

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pleted a draft of his book The Architecture of Humanism, came for her at the end of the cure and motored her back to I Tatti. Bernhard, with his various missions accomplished in England, was now ready to begin a highly novel experience that he projected with Edith Wharton. They would make an extended tour of the art cities of Germany, where he would bring himself up to date on the Italian paintings coming into private and public collections. Before 1913 Berenson had been Mrs. Wharton's cicerone on very short excursions. The trip they now planned was to take four weeks. They had discussed it in mid-July but at her insistence the date had been left open. She was, she said, determined to finish her novel The Custom of the Country before their departure. Berenson, impatient to be on the move, crossed to Brussels ahead of her, believing that her delay was more on Walter Berry's account than on account of her exhausting struggle with her novel. She arrived at the Grand Hotel in Luxembourg on August 17 rather thoroughly run down but with an entourage that amazed him. It included her butler-major domo, her young chauffeur, her traveling maid, and her lapdog, Nicette, all comfortably disposed in a large and expensive motorcar. For one who had satirized Berenson's luxurious style at the Ritz, it seemed oddly ironic. Hotels had to meet her fastidious standards, and when they did not, new ones had to be hunted out. It was "the most thoroughly luxurious party I have ever travelled with," Bernhard told Mary. His own high standards of comfort paled in her shadow. Her fastidiousness took other forms as well. Berenson learned that though Edith "hates beards," she graciously tolerated his. " H o w fascinating I must be if she can put up with mine," he reflected. That the clean-shaven Joe Duveen disliked paintings of bearded men may well have strengthened Berenson's preference for them. T o the end of his life he was to prefer the look of Old World and Renaissance distinction his shapely beard conferred on him. For perhaps the first time in his life Berenson found himself second in command of a tour, and the position proved irksome. Edith had expected to take a week's holiday with him in the wooded countryside before getting down to serious gallery going, but Berenson dissuaded her in the name of the higher duty. When she collapsed in Cologne and generously offered her car and chauffeur to Berenson to continue his tour without her, her need for rest seemed genuine, and a repentant Berenson accompanied her to a rural resort in Thuringia. But he chafed at the delay and a few days later wondered whether she was "shamming" illness "so that she could have her own w a y . " Edith did not share Berenson's passionate interest in the formal qualities of paintings, and, in spite of his example, she did not enjoy the [162]

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leisurely scrutiny o f stylistic details. " S h e sees only the s u b j e c t , " he complained to M a r y , " a n d in the subject only w h a t appeals to her literary sense." In the c o m p a n y o f her entourage, forays o f f the beaten path in quest o f neglected masterpieces p r o v e d frustrating. " Y o u can scarcely understand the misery o f trying to find anything w i t h her in her car," his complaint continued. " E d i t h travels in the first place for m o t o r i n g , then for porcelain baths, then for country, and finally for Eighteenth century architecture and g a r d e n s . " She also liked places "haunted b y a great w r i t e r " and had therefore s w u n g h i m out o f his course to visit Goethe's Weimar, thus cutting h i m o f f " f r o m C o p e n h a g e n , f r o m O l d e n b u r g , f r o m R ü g e n , f r o m Stalsund, and a score o f other delightful things in the north. In m y y o u n g e r years I should have boiled over with indignation and left her in a r a g e . " A s a companion, he conceded, she was delightful, always ready to talk on a multitude o f topics. It was a pleasure to chat with her, for she was "quite inexhaustible, and so easy to amuse and please." She did like the pictures at A l t e n b e r g , t h o u g h she lingered for only ten minutes. " O n e w o u l d think she could not bear art. I w o n d e r w h a t she and Walter B e r r y find to admire in travel?" B y the time they reached Dresden, he concluded that "art is a sealed b o o k to h e r . " Edith's reports to M a r y provided an amusing counterpoint to B e r n hard's frequent complaints. She had thought she w o u l d not be o f m u c h use unless she had a " w e e k ' s holiday in a g r e e n w o o d , " but Bernhard "fancied I w a s j u s t uncertain and c o y and a little gentle persuasion w o u l d soon cure me o f t h a t i d e a , " and it took her collapse in C o l o g n e to change his opinion. Forty-eight hours o f rest and his promise to take her for a w e e k " t o a place w h e r e there w e r e a great m a n y trees and no pictures did m u c h to a d v a n c e " her convalescence. T h e y started for O b e r h o f , w h e r e she w a s "credibly assured there is not a single picture," but after "loitering at the Frankfort gallery for an hour or t w o , " Bernhard " b e c a m e unmanageable again and insisted on conducting the remainder o f the trip on principles o f his o w n , w h i c h i n v o l v e d reconstructing the solar system w i t h an audacity undreamed o f b y G a l i l e o . " A s self-appointed navigator he assured them they were g o i n g east w h i l e they " w e r e actually plunging into a particularly s h o w y sunset," w i t h the result that they w o u n d up at Fulda only a f e w kilometers f r o m Frankfurt. In the management o f the motorcar he was proving " a n intelligent pupil, a trifle headstrong at times but lively, intelligent, anxious to learn" and m a k i n g progress in his " m o t o r training." " H e has learned f r o m bitter experience to give his address w h e n he sends an 'answer paid' telegram for r o o m s at a c r o w d e d hotel, and has found out that to pull up a m o t o r w i n d o w w i t h a j e r k and leave it dangling does not constitute [163]

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shutting it and that keeping one's eyes on the map instead of looking at the points of the compass, or asking the indigenes where one is, is not an infallible way of reaching one's destination. . . . He has learned several useful things that appear to have been omitted from his earlier education:—Going through galleries with a firm step instead of gaping and dawdling, letting Nicette sit on his lap when she feels like it, getting out of the motor to ask the way of an intelligent-looking person on the corner instead of calling to the village idiot or a deaf octogenerian from one's seat; and abstaining from shallow generalizations such as, 'You'll always find it safe in Germany to follow the telegraph poles' or O n mountain roads there are never any crossroads.' . . . Such, dear Mary, have been the results of our first eight days of travel and my pupil's aptitude and eagerness to learn give me every hope of continued progress. I take pleasure in adding that he is good-tempered, punctual, and polite and always brushes his hair for dinner and puts on a muffler when it is chilly." Mary, who knew so intimately Bernhardt vagaries, undoubtedly relished Edith's irony as well as Bernhard's admission that "it is good discipline being with other ladies. It teaches self-control. I wonder if Edith has even an inkling of how often she has brought me to the verge of exasperation. She is not sensitive in the least to my moods." From Berlin he wrote, "This is the first time I come as a Ritzonian. I no longer can roam the streets looking into all the shop windows, peering into all the faces, so Berlin is now a place of museums, theatres and drives. . . . She can't conceive of taking a glass of water elsewhere than in a hotel. . . [and] has no notion of what it is to wander about the streets." At their "marvellous" hotel the beds were in alcoves, and when Edith found she would not be able to read in bed she was "almost" hysterical. "A meal scarcely goes by without her returning nearly every dish." Yet she could be "an enchanting companion." In Berlin they attended Strauss's Ariadne and Wagner's Ring. "It is absurd," he wrote, "to judge Wagner musically alone. It is sublime, cosmic, and teleological drama full of simple but suggestive symbolism that makes one feel and think as if going on a mighty tidal wave of inspiring emotions." He renewed acquaintance with Max Friedländer at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum; approved a Correggio that Julius Boehler brought over for his opinion; got out to Potsdam in spite of Edith's delaying tactics in the pine woods; and talked with Denman Ross, whom he encountered at the museum, and found him "generally unintelligible" since he was "in a mood of looking at everything as a Turkey carpet." Though Edith had brought along a Baedeker guidebook for Austria and a custom's triptyque for the motorcar to cross the frontier, she was [164]

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n o w anxious to get back to Paris, h a v i n g learned that Walter B e r r y had returned there f r o m his cure, and it seemed to B e r e n s o n that she put on a " s o m e w h a t m a r t y r e d a i r . " O n September 2 they parted amicably. T h o u g h he had generally e n j o y e d her c o m p a n y and did not relish the thought o f continuing his travels alone on trains, " y e t it w i l l be s o m e thing o f a relief to be w i t h o u t her. . . . H e r m o o d s and her temper colour her daily life t o o m u c h and tend to i m p o s e themselves on her c o m p a n i o n to his d i s c o m f o r t . I suspect she k n o w s this well e n o u g h but claims the privilege o f g e n i u s . " W h a t e v e r her reservations, E d i t h soon a f t e r w a r d w r o t e appreciatively to B e r e n s o n : " I t o o k back d'un oeil attendri on e v e r y stage o f our little trip, and should regret m o r e and m o r e m y u n l u c k y physical and mental incapacity to profit b y it m o r e f u l l y if that chance hadn't b r o u g h t out in m y travelling c o m p a n i o n such treasures o f indulgence and dearness that they h a v e m a d e m e m o r e and m o r e his affectionate f r i e n d . " B e r e n s o n m u s t h a v e felt that the tour o f the N o r t h G e r m a n galleries to w h i c h he had eagerly l o o k e d f o r w a r d could be easily resumed at a m o r e convenient season w i t h M a r y . H e w a s u n a w a r e that events w e r e m o v i n g in the B a l k a n s w h i c h w e r e to defer that experience f o r nearly ten years. H e had g i v e n no m o r e than passing thought to the turbulent political currents in E u r o p e except as they affected Italy, w h o s e seizure o f T u r k i s h Tripolitania had angered h i m . T h e Italian v i c t o r y o v e r T u r k e y opened the d o o r to Greece's attack o n T u r k e y , a short w a r in w h i c h Serbia and B u l g a r i a also j o i n e d . A brief truce f o l l o w e d this struggle, and, in J u l y o f 1 9 1 3 , w h i l e B e r e n s o n w a s still in L o n d o n , the Second B a l k a n War b r o k e out w i t h a complicated array o f allies. A peace treaty w a s signed at B u c h a r e s t on A u g u s t 10. B y the time B e r e n s o n left Berlin an uneasy quiet had settled u p o n the B a l k a n s and restored the illusion o f peace, an illusion that w o u l d be abruptly ended in the f o l l o w i n g year b y the guns o f A u g u s t that heralded W o r l d W a r I. T h u s it w a s in that last season o f the B e l l e E p o q u e that B e r e n s o n j o u r n e y e d to the Schloss G r a t z in the mountains o f Austrian Silesia to spend a f e w days w i t h Princess M a r y and her husband. H e liked the princess, he thought, " b e c a u s e o f all possible facets the feminine prism can s h o w " she exhibited one o r t w o he had not yet seen in combination w i t h the others. A t night there w a s a desultory talk o f politics w i t h the prince but nothing o f sufficient m o m e n t to record f o r M a r y . A w e e k in V i e n n a stirred old ecstasies and m e m o r i e s . T h e sight o f the paintings in the gallery " b r o u g h t back m y first visit there w i t h G e o r g e Carpenter t w e n t y - f i v e years a g o , " he reminisced to M a r y , " t h e n w i t h E n r i c o C o s t a t w e n t y - t h r e e years ago, and w i t h y o u a year later. What adventures o f the soul and m i n d m a n y o f these represented." [165]

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Louis Duveen kept track of his itinerary, so there was no slackening of chores to be attended to—an "important Botticelli" at Graz to be evaluated and an analysis of the Aynard pictures, which Berenson regretted he could admire only as "school" pictures. As soon as he got home he was to inspect a purported Giorgione at Grassi's and send his report. According to Fowles's account he also appraised that fall a Madonna and Child which a couple had brought from St. Petersburg, and confirmed the ascription to Leonardo. J o e Duveen agreed to pay a staggering one million pounds for it, confident that the Wideners would be eager to have it. He was, however, persuaded to include a clause in the contract giving Czar Nicholas II a prior option. The czar promptly exercised the option. It was a grievous setback for the Duveens—and for Berenson, who conjectured that the offer had simply been a trap by the owners to get his valuation. Berenson's last stop before returning to I Tatti was Venice, where his pleasures were dampened by word that Louis Duveen hoped to go over to America on the same boat with him. " W e particularly want you to be in N e w Y o r k by the first week in N o v e m b e r , " Louis wrote, "as we have so many important things on which we need your guidance and help." Berenson drew back from that too-cordial embrace. He felt "very gloomy over financial prospects and the chances of continuing with the f i r m , " for the Duveens, he was convinced, had begun to show signs of "getting restive" under his "unyieldingness" and were even showing tendencies to "worship at other altars." "They are continually at him," Mary confided to her family, "to make him say pictures are different from what he thinks, and are very cross with him for not giving way and 'just letting us have your authority for calling this a Cossa instead of School of Jura' or 'allowing us to take it if you will approve us calling this by the master's name, as it is so close, etc., etc.' They sent up an emissary the other day to say a certain picture here had been pronounced an early Titian by Dr. Siren, Dr. Bode and Dr. Gronau and why couldn't B . B . agree—and although he didn't, he thinks they have bought the picture all the same, and that is the beginning of the end." It might become necessary, she felt, for them "to draw in our horns, for we have been living not on income, but on incoming capital." And she added, with her usual blitheness, " I f it were not for the various people I love to give money to, I should not be at all sorry to be poor again." However, they had "plenty of stored up capital to last us the rest of our lives if w e sold our things." It was high time, nevertheless, for Bernhard to go to America "to re-establish, if he can, his prestige, or else economize, very, very considerably."

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Jimerica Revisited ; F T E R a last f a r e w e l l t o the aesthetic delights o f V e n i c e , B e r e n son returned to I T a t t i late in O c t o b e r 1913, w i t h scarcely time e n o u g h t o d o a n y t h i n g m o r e than j o i n M a r y in p a c k i n g their steamer trunks in readiness for the departure for Paris o n N o v e m b e r 19. A l l the t i m e he felt " t h e e b b i n g tide o f health flowing fast a w a y . " G e o f frey Scott, w h o w a s t o be left in charge o f I Tatti, w o u l d see to the furnishing o f the r o o m s w h i c h had been recently added to the villa. His m a i n enterprise, h o w e v e r , w o u l d be revising the manuscript o f his Architecture of

Humanism.

S h o r t l y after the B e r e n s o n s left, a beautiful y o u n g w o m a n o f t w e n t y six w h o w a s visiting the Giulianis at their villa a b o v e the nearby village o f Scandicci w a s taken b y B y b a Giuliani to call on an E n g l i s h couple o c c u p y i n g the B e r e n s o n s ' villino. She w a s Elisabetta M a r i a n o , the N i c k y M a r i a n o w h o w a s to p l a y a leading role in the life o f the Berensons, a role that she w o u l d o n e day record in her b o o k Forty Years with

Berenson.

D u r i n g her visit the tall, thin Scott, his pince-nez spectacles clipped to the b r i d g e o f his nose, s h o w e d her t h r o u g h I Tatti. It struck her as "fascinati n g and a w e - i n s p i r i n g . " T h e cypresses w h i c h the B e r e n s o n s had planted in a l o n g avenue leading u p f r o m the road w e r e , she r e m e m b e r e d m a n y years later, " g r o w i n g u p w e l l b u t l o o k e d p u n y against the majestic old cypresses near the h o u s e . " T h e r o m a n t i c Scott w a s attracted to her, an attraction that w o u l d later invite M a r y B e r e n s o n ' s m a t c h m a k i n g p r o clivities. A t the m o m e n t M a r y ' s t h o u g h t s w e r e o n m o r e m u n d a n e matters. F r o m Paris she w e n t o n to F o r d Place to take leave o f her f a m i l y and t o see her d o c t o r , w h o prescribed as an addition to her array o f n o s t r u m s " t h e n e w m e d i c i n e — m i n e r a l o i l . " In L o n d o n she a n x i o u s l y checked the N e w Y o r k hotel prices and learned that at the best hotels they had risen [167]

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to twenty to thirty-five dollars a room, with suites going at fifty to seventy. Concerned about the need for economy, she obtained accommodations on the British White Star liner Olympic for £52 instead of more luxurious ones at £250. Bernhard stayed on at the Ritz in Paris for a week. The dealers, he said, had little for him to see. Carlo Placci dropped by with a budget of quite unreliable speculation: the Panama Canal was a fiasco and Japan and Mexico were preparing to conquer the United States. The world press rang with word of the ritual murder trial of Mendel Beiliss in Russia, but it appeared to awaken no memories in Berenson of the barbarous folklore of his Lithuanian childhood. He saw Elizabeth Cameron at Edith Wharton's and was "as much as ever impressed by her elegance and grande dame manner." A n amiable Rene Piot reported that a Paris journal had asked Carlo Placci to do an article on Berenson. Edith Wharton summoned him for a last dinner with Paul Bourget and the duchess of Clermont-Tonnerre; he made the rounds with Karin Stephen to the Bergsons and the Reinachs; and he accompanied Lucien Henraux to the Art Decoratif exhibition "to give them attributions for their Italians." The Duveens showed him their new Raphael at an interview that "really was too lively." Bernhard and Mary rendezvoused at Cherbourg on December 1 ready to board the luxurious Olympic. They sailed on December 3, once more to challenge fortune in the homeland which they had abandoned. The Olympic docked at N e w York on December 10, 1913, seven days out of Southampton after a "pretty rough crossing" that tried sealegs and stomachs. A warm greeting awaited Bernhard from Belle Greene. She had secured comfortable rooms for the travelers at the Belmont for thirty dollars a day, a hostelry well away from the city shelters where thousands of the city's poor had taken refuge from the unprecedented cold. T o Berenson the N e w York skyline exhibited a vigorous faith in the future. " T h e skyscraper has fulfilled my prophecy and become articulate," he reflected. "That is perhaps the most interesting contribution that we have made to the world's art." On the front pages of the newspapers much space was given to the growing rebellion in Mexico, where the Zapatistas pressed hard against the federal troops in one sector while General Francisco ("Pancho") Villa routed them in another. Talk grew of American intervention, but for the Berensons it was all too remote for mention. More relevant was the fact that Elsie de Wolfe had just contested the constitutionality of the new federal income tax and that her suit had been thrown out of court. Within a month Berenson was himself deep "in the tangles of the new income t a x . " He spent hours on it and still could not understand it. B y [168]

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c o m p a r i s o n w i t h the forms o f three-quarters o f a century later it w a s a m a r v e l o f simplicity. T h e tax w a s levied on net i n c o m e to be arrived at s i m p l y b y deducting expenses f r o m gross income. In s o m e quarters there w a s outrage at the exactions, but in long retrospect they can arouse o n l y e n v y . T h e rate w a s ι percent on the first $ 2 0 , 0 0 0 after a deduction o f $4,000 f o r a married couple, w i t h progressive increases up to a m a x i m u m rate o f 6 percent on net incomes o v e r $500,000. B e r e n s o n ' s situation posed interesting complications since he received i n c o m e f r o m investments in A m e r i c a ($3,000 at this date); b o o k royalties; and fees f r o m A m e r i c a n clients, f r o m the D u v e e n s in E u r o p e , and f r o m other dealers. T h e pocket ledger w h i c h he carried w i t h h i m s h o w e d little aptitude f o r systematic b o o k k e e p i n g and must h a v e required considerable inventive interpretation. B e r e n s o n ' s reunion w i t h Belle Greene appeared to r e v i v e their ardors, t h o u g h at a l o w e r temperature. N o w w i t h an independent i n c o m e she w a s m u c h m o r e her o w n mistress, and her almost daily chronicles w h e n he w a s not in N e w Y o r k w e r e filled w i t h her activities at the M o r g a n L i b r a r y and the names o f the eminent personages w h o catered to her. In one letter she teased h i m w i t h Bessie M a r b u r y ' s opinion that " I w o u l d n e v e r really possess y o u r soul until I had in s o m e w a y attached a title to m y n a m e , or a string o f pearls to m y n e c k . " M a r y l o o k e d o n at the a f f a i r w i t h a kind o f clinical detachment, e x plaining to Scott that she thought it " t h e m o s t natural and sanest thing to let his unkillable affection f o r her run a simple unchecked course, g u a r d ing as m u c h as possible against a n n o y i n g s c a n d a l . " Such a course assured her o w n f r e e d o m , w h i c h she had in fact " a l w a y s m o r e or less t a k e n " t h o u g h w i t h " m a n y material h i n d r a n c e s . " She surmised that Bernhard's happiness lay in continuing the a f f a i r and " g r a d u a l l y humanizing i t . " O n C h r i s t m a s D a y in B o s t o n B e r n h a r d and M a r y w e n t out to the " d r e a d e d f a m i l y d i n n e r , " she fearing that he w o u l d be tongue-tied as usual b e f o r e his t o o - a d o r i n g mother. H a p p i l y the presence o f his t w o b r o t h e r s - i n - l a w , R a l p h B a r t o n P e r r y and Herbert A b b o t t , decently loosened his tongue. H e missed seeing Barrett Wendell w h e n he called at his h o m e but elicited the h e a r t w a r m i n g message, " I should h a v e g l o w e d w i t h j o y to tell y o u to y o u r face h o w m u c h y o u r friendship, in fact y o u r m e r e existence means to m e . " T h e y learned that B e r t r a n d Russell had accepted an invitation to lecture at H a r v a r d , but the n e w s could hardly have g i v e n them pleasure, f o r Russell had m o v e d out o f their orbit w h e n he separated f r o m A l y s in 1 9 1 1 . In C a m b r i d g e and B o s t o n there w e r e the usual " h i g h b r o w " dinners and a visit to the M u s e u m o f Fine Arts to see the Chinese acquisitions. B e r e n s o n c o m m u n i c a t e d his enthusiasm f o r Chinese art to M r s . G a r d n e r [169]

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when he visited her at Fenway Court and offered to help her make "as fine a Chinese collection as you have of Italian." He brought tears to her eyes when he told her that "although he had found her fascinating and wonderful before, he had never loved her until this time, for she had never been lovable." She said it was true, that Okakura Kakuzo, the Japanese mystic at the Museum of Fine Arts, had taught her to seek to love instead of to be loved, and now at seventy-four she felt herself a changed person, all hardness of heart gone. The Berensons thought that at last, without the hypocrisy that had for so long colored so much of their intercourse with her, they could "really care for her as a human being." The practical-minded Mary urged that they visit Sir William Van Home in Montreal inasmuch as he was the foremost Canadian collector of art. Van Home had recently retired from the presidency of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Though wealthy, he could not compete with the Wideners and the Morgans, and in addition he admired mostly Dutch and Spanish masters. T o make prospects worse, they found him laid up with inflammatory rheumatism and his "luxurious and overheated mansion" cluttered with hundreds of "indifferent pictures." The visit to their hospitable host and to three other Montreal collections proved unprofitable. "Provincial America," they agreed, "is one and the same whether millionaire or modest. They have no taste." The two travelers returned to N e w York in mid-January 1914, this time to the luxury of a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, to confront a flood of invitations to dinners, musicales, the theater, and the opera. At one musical function Bernhard disgustedly contemplated the backs of "overdressed" Vanderbilts, Astors, Stuyvesants, Schuylers, Harrimans, and Goelets, crammed into high-fashion gowns that seemed to him quite foreign to the bodies of their wearers. It was but the beginning of a week's entertainment in which he flourished though he professed feeling "very detached and alien." Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt gave the most sumptuous of the parties in their honor. The dancer Ruth St. Denis performed for the forty guests and was followed by a couple who slithered violently through the mayhem of the French Apache dance. Tangoing followed, and Berenson remarked that this world was no longer "Ritzonia" but "Tangonia." Berenson sent a full report of their diversions amidst the N e w York "social blizzard" to Edith Wharton, who of course knew N e w York society from the inside. In her reply to his letter from the " N e w - R i t z Vortex" she conceded that it must be very nice to be "petted and feasted" but then added, " I don't see how you can stand it for more than two or three weeks o f t h a t queer rootless life." She underestimated his appetite [170]

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for society. He informed Ralph Curtis that they were "feasted and toasted everywhere" but had not yet encountered the "intellectualistic phase. . . . One hears of it having discussions at teas on syphilis (favorite topic), homosexuality, prostitution, etc. When someone the other day asked, 'Why does [Walter] Berry come to seduce the minds of our women?' Frank Crowninshield sighed, 'If only he left them in any interesting condition.' " Berry had put Crowninshield in touch with Berenson, and as the new editor of the sophisticated Vanity Fair Crowninshield asked Berenson to dash off "an ironical, or whimsical, or satirical" article of a couple thousand words "to set an example for other men to follow. . . . I can pay you four cents a w o r d . " Berenson was not tempted. In N e w York Berenson became acquainted with Paul Joseph Sachs, a wealthy member of the family banking firm of Goldman Sachs & C o m pany. A diminutive and scholarly young man of thirty-six and a diligent collector of Italian and Flemish drawings, Sachs took an instant liking to his visitor with whose work he was already familiar. Sachs was then on the point of retiring from the banking business to become an assistant to Edward Forbes, director of Harvard University's Fogg Museum. What then began as admiring deference to Berenson ripened into an enduring friendship between the two that made Sachs Berenson's most devoted and important supporter at Harvard. Perhaps Berenson's most intellectually challenging encounter was his meeting with Simon Flexner, director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. The foremost epidemiologist in world medicine, Flexner had recently discovered the virus of poliomyelitis. When he had married Helen Whitall Thomas, a cousin of Mary Berenson, in 1903, there had been family objections over the fact that he was Jewish; Mary, impressed by his great distinction, had scoffed at the obstacle. A man of immense culture, his "exquisite courtesy, good taste and refinement" made Berenson feel "abject and almost suicidal." The contrast between Flexner's world and the world of wealth and fashion by which he had been seduced seemed to him overwhelming. Despite the distractions of the city, Berenson managed to see Belle Greene almost every day, but his "experiment" was obviously not going well, for she resisted his efforts to change her character and her hectic way of life. Still he defended her, declaring that she was "overworked and neurasthenic." Mary, not one to stand by idly at such a juncture, had a "real talk" with Belle, who told her that though she was devoted to Bernhard she was not "one particle 'in love' with him," and never would be again, and urged Mary to make him understand that fact. Whether to allay any jealousy on the part of Mrs. Gardner or because she was herself taken in by Belle's professions, Mary assured the mistress

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of Fenway Court that the "young librarian at the Morgan Library" showed no "signs of wishing to blow the dead ashes into flames." The "signs" may not have been visible, but Belle's messages to Bernhard, which resumed their almost daily flow when the Berensons traveled about, assured him that he was "all in all to her." His need for reassurance did, however, place something of a burden upon her. After his departure at the end of March 1914 she wrote, "Much as I adore you, this daily epistle is getting on my nerves." After her return to Florence Mary revised her estimate of the intensity of Bernhard's involvement, telling Mrs. Gardner it was "only fair to let him create a little life of his own as his heart is rather empty of intimate figures," whereas she had "him and five other beings to love and adore," including especially her granddaughter, Barbara. T o Scott, she confessed that he too was ofthat choice company. High society and business tended as always to become inextricably mixed. Berenson helped the young Rockefellers select some things on approval at the Duveens' N e w York gallery, which rivaled in architectural elegance the "little palace" in the place Vendome. The richly classical fagade of the massive structure on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Fiftysixth Street, its Corinthian pilasters surmounted by an imposing pediment with sculptured figures in the tympanum, guaranteed the value of the treasures within. Luncheons with the Rockefellers followed, and he and Mary found themselves "incredibly b u s y " taking Mrs. Rockefeller, Mrs. Harriman, and other millionaire ladies to see pictures, hoping "to inspire them with the desire to form collections of their own under our guidance." N o r did Berenson neglect calling on one of his own very appreciative clients, Grenville Winthrop, a N e w York lawyer who was making a "nice little collection" of Old Masters, a collection that eventually went to the Fogg Museum. There was such a stream of callers, all viewed as prospective buyers, that sometimes, to economize effort, Bernhard took charge of one party and Mary commanded another. And their effort was yielding results. B y the first of February Mary could report that Bernhard "has already made plenty of m o n e y , " though it would come in during the next four or five years since people paid slowly. Her euphoria about their finances prompted her to buy and ship to Florence "a little Ford" to run herself. After a hiatus of almost four years, Mrs. Gardner was again turning to Berenson for acquisitions. Through Sulley and Company she acquired A Boy in a Scarlet Cap by Lorenzo di Credi for $25,000 and a "severely monumental" Madonna and Child with a Goldfinch by Bernardo Daddi for $7,000. She was soon to purchase also the colorful and elegant profile of [172]

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A Young Lady of Fashion attributed to Domenico Veneziano with which he was tempting her. It came from Boehler and Steinmeyer at a cost of $60,000. It has since been assigned, by other authorities, to Uccello or to the painter known as the Master of the Castello Nativity. A few additional purchases followed before the end of the year. The most spectacular transaction of the Duveen firm concluded while Berenson was in N e w York was the sale to the Wideners in January 1914 of the small Cowper Madonna and Child by Raphael, an exquisite portrait of pensive maternity. Duveen had queried Berenson about it in 1910 when it was shown at the Grafton Gallery. Joseph Widener had balked at taking the Botticelli portrait of Giuliano de' Medici, the painting which had made such an enormous impression on the Duveens and which Altman had refused. He said he thought it was not important enough for his gallery. Mrs. Gardner too was much interested in the painting—the name Botticelli had long had a special magic for her. Joe Duveen reported to Berenson that she had come down to N e w York "to ask especially about the Botticelli which she is very anxious to acquire." He explained that Otto Kahn had been hesitating over the high price for it, but Mrs. Kahn was "still crazy about the painting," and he therefore asked Berenson how he was to act. Superior financial resources evidently carried the day: the painting went to the Kahns for Sioo.ooo. Amidst their many successes worrisome gossip reached the Berensons: Wilhelm Valentiner, the curator of decorative art at the Metropolitan and editor of Art in America, and Sir Hugh Lane, the wealthy former proprietor of the Marlborough Gallery, were said to be "doing all they can" to oust Berenson from public confidence. Since the Berensons made no secret of their low opinion of the Italian paintings at what they called the "Necropolitan" Museum, it was understandable that Valentiner should be joining Berenson's detractors, and Sir Hugh Lane, who was now much involved with Lady Gregory in establishing a public gallery in Dublin, was a rival expert whose confident attributions of Old Masters Berenson had sometimes challenged. Rumors of American "enemies" were dispiriting, but when Berenson went out to Detroit to study again Charles Freer's great collection of Chinese paintings and bronzes, he was so warmly received that he felt he had regained a footing, and Mary was "relieved to see poor old B . B . happy again." Freer brought out his Chinese paintings and Berenson felt himself pass " f r o m ecstasy to ecstasy." Freer proposed that they all go to China together in 1 9 1 5 , and Mary delightedly informed Geoffrey Scott that in that event he could accompany her and Belle Greene could accompany Bernhard. [173]

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Their b u s y schedule next took t h e m to N o r t h a m p t o n to attend a reception w h i c h Senda and her husband gave for them. T h e "little m o t h e r " came o v e r f r o m B o s t o n w i t h M a r y to see, if not hear, her famous son. H e made up for his silence b y writing, shortly afterward, to congratulate his parents on their fiftieth w e d d i n g anniversary. " L i f e , " he averred to his " B e l o v e d M o t h e r , " "is a v e r y m i x e d dish even for the most f o r t u nate. Y o u r s has been full o f self-sacrifice and hardships. Y e t I hope that in m e m o r y at least the colour o f the w h o l e is not too g r e y . " F r o m N o r t h a m p t o n Bernhard and M a r y w e n t d o w n to Baltimore o n M a r c h 3, 1914, in the midst o f a heavy blizzard to begin w o r k in H e n r y Walters' h u g e private m u s e u m . M o r e palatial than Mrs. Gardner's, it was c r a m m e d w i t h art objects o f a half-dozen ancient cultures as well as w i t h hundreds o f paintings. Berenson proposed dividing Walters' Italians into three g r o u p s — g o o d , bad, and i n d i f f e r e n t — a n d disposing o f the rubbish and forgeries, t h o u g h Walters " l o v e s them a l l . " H e also persuaded Walters to adopt a plan for b u y i n g about sixty genuine Italians to replace the rejects. T h e delightful w e e k ended in a flurry o f note making. T h e y left a formidable list o f the scores o f paintings w h i c h they thought o u g h t to be r e m o v e d , but Walters apparently could bring himself to discard only twenty-three o f them. F r o m B a l t i m o r e the Berensons proceeded to Washington, their valet, H e n r y , in w h o s e hands " B . B . was like a bottle-fed b a b y , " having g o n e ahead to unpack their trunks at the residence o f a friend on I Street, a short distance f r o m H e n r y A d a m s ' h o m e in Lafayette Square. A d a m s had invited Berenson to call on h i m in Washington inasmuch as he was not likely " t o m o v e f a r " at that season. In his mortuary style the seventyfive-year-old A d a m s explained, " N o one k n o w s me, all m y c o n t e m poraries having died in the T h i r d Crusade: but w e still have some n e w songs o f theirs." Berenson had responded that he w o u l d like to "hear Miss T o n e sing us a N o e l f r o m the days w h e n people believed the w h o l e blessed fairy tale." H e remarked that he had seen H e n r y ' s brother B r o o k s t w i c e at the Q u i n c y house but had not "hit upon a subject o f conversation to please h i m . " H o w e v e r , in a letter w h i c h reached the Berensons just before they sailed, M r s . Gardner informed them she had dined w i t h the B r o o k s A d a m s e s and that she " l o v e d to hear him admire you both." In W a s h i n g t o n Berenson had their j o i n t passport renewed and he stopped in alone on H e n r y A d a m s , M a r y having been prostrated b y a h e a v y cold. T h e y talked about Georgian poetry and enjoyed hearing the plaintive melodies o f Aileen T o n e ' s repertoire. M a r y ' s cold brought on a depression so severe that she thought she was d y i n g . Her mind filled w i t h final thoughts, she seized her pen and addressed a testamentary [174]

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letter to Bernhard: " I f I die thee will take thy chance of a different happiness and without doing any wrong to me. If I have any wishes left they will be for thy happiness and well being." She begged him to provide £100 a year to each of her descendants "(if thee continues rich)" and to give her daughter Ray a house like the Perrys'. " M y dear, we've been together so long and so well there aren't any 'last words.' Thee never bored me and I have always loved thee. M a r y . " Soon recovered, she was her optimistic self again, and a few days later when they stopped at B r y n M a w r to visit her cousin Carey Thomas, president of the college, she gave " a little talk" on art to the young women, the only missionary lecture she managed to give on this tour. The pair hurried on to Philadelphia, where Johnson showed Berenson "endless letters of praise" for his catalogue Italian Paintings, which had been issued in a private edition of three hundred copies in 1913. Even before its completion Johnson was so pleased with it that he had sent a check for £1,000. Berenson's graceful acknowledgment modestly protested his generosity but then admitted that "when the draft came, I at once recalled a glorious Sha-Nameh with 32 early 16th century Persian miniatures that I longed to possess, and how far your gift would go to pay for i t . " The sumptuous catalogue was an impressive achievement and Berenson was understandably proud of this first venture into catalogue making. There was time in Philadelphia for a last dinner at the Wideners', where the Cowper Madonna by Raphael was already in place in the gallery at Elkins Park. The "ubiquitous Duveens" followed Berenson to Philadelphia and summoned him into town for more important conferences. One matter that Berenson undoubtedly raised was the past-due state of the accounting, for he had in his hand a "private and confidential" letter from Sir William Plender's accounting firm asking, " D o you want us to write again strongly and insist upon prompt delivery of the accounts or do you wish us to allow some further time to elapse?" There was little to be done in the face of J o e Duveen's repertory of excuses, but Berenson's dissatisfaction was becoming chronic and his impatient and repeated demands on the firm made him appear insatiable. The Berensons returned to their luxurious base at the Ritz-Carlton for a last few days in N e w York. While there Bernhard received an account from Edith Wharton of an incredible scandal that was wracking France with a plot suitable for the Parisian stage. Gaston Calmette, editor of Le Figaro and a strong supporter of President Poincare, had got hold of some highly compromising letters that Joseph Caillaux, a cabinet minister, had written to his mistress. Wishing to silence Caillaux, who had been advocating friendship with Germany in opposition to Poincare's [175]

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anti-German policy, Calmette had threatened to publish the letters. At this point Madame Caillaux, armed with a pistol, descended upon the offices of Le Figaro and mortally wounded Calmette. Edith had got the dramatic details of the incident from their friend Paul Bourget, who happened to be at the offices intending to see his friend Calmette. Tumult followed in the Chamber of Deputies when the Radical Right and the Socialists who opposed Poincare's bellicose policies abandoned words for fisticuffs. " I wish you'd been in Paris during the week after the Calmette murder," Edith added. "It was extraordinary." What was to be even more extraordinary, as he would learn, would be the sensational trial of Madame Caillaux later in the summer. Passport secured and business attended to, the Berensons prepared to return to Europe. In her goodbye letter Mrs. Gardner wrote, " T h e j o y of this winter has been seeing you both and the sadness of spring is your going a w a y . " Among the four hundred first-class passengers on the outward-bound Olympic, which sailed on the morning of March 28, 1914, they had as friendly companions Henry Cannon; Dr. Morton Prince, w h o m Mary urged to come to I Tatti; and Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt. Berenson just missed the Easter Sunday supplement of the New York Times that reproduced in color thirteen of the "Gems of the Altman Collection," part of Altman's bequest to the Metropolitan Museum. One of the paintings featured was the Portrait of a Young Venetian, attributed to Giorgione. The caption read, "This is the most valuable painting in the Altman Collection." It was, of course, the painting Berenson and Bode had praised for its fine condition. In the same issue, the couturiere Madame Susanne Joire, another fellow passenger on the Olympic, was quoted as deploring the appearance of American men on Fifth Avenue. They were clean shaven, she said, "like French servants." "In Paris, the officers wear the mustache and the great men wear beards or whiskers. . . . It is hard for a man to look like a grand seigneur with no beard." Berenson's carefully trimmed Van Dyck unquestionably met the highest Parisian standard.

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H E spring and early summer of 1 9 1 4 showed peaceful enough to deceive cosmopolites more politically conscious than the Berensons. When they landed at Southampton on April 4 after a " h o r rid crossing," no hint appeared in the press of the conflagration that w o u l d engulf E u r o p e within a short four months. In the Americas " D o l lar D i p l o m a c y " had given w a y under Wilson and his secretary of state, William Jennings B r y a n , to military intervention in M e x i c o . Vera C r u z had been bombarded and occupied but the proceeding was as local an affair to Americans as the tumult in Northern Ireland was to the British. There Ulstermen by the thousands were arming to resist the imposition o f h o m e rule, which w o u l d subject their provinces to an all-Ireland parliament. France f o r its part was winding up its military campaign in French M o r o c c o under General Lyautey. T h e ever-mounting arms race among the European powers had become so thoroughly accepted by the public as a normal fact o f existence that the photographs o f new battleships of the powers gave a kind o f reassurance of peace to the patriots o f each country. T h e many accidents on land and sea made their little sensations in the press. T h e society pages glittered with coronets; parades and pageantry marked King George's visit to Paris and President R a y m o n d Poincare's visit to the czar. In England and America elaborate plans were under w a y for the celebration o f the centenary o f peace which had f o l l o w e d the Treaty o f Ghent. E v e n as late as J u l y 6, more than a w e e k after the assassination at Sarajevo o f the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife, the Vienna correspondent of the London Times reported, " T h e r e is no ground for anxiety as to w a r . " A n d t w o days later the British and G e r m a n fleets met at Kiel in a display o f "brotherhood in a r m s " as the bluejackets f r o m both navies " m a d e merry ashore."

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T h e prospect o f an unchanging and hospitable w o r l d lay before the Berensons as they entrained for Paris bearing the memories o f their h i g h l y successful visit to America. M a r y w e n t on to Florence to ready their h o m e for Bernhard's return, w h i l e he stayed in Paris for a f e w days. F. Steinmeyer cabled the gratifying n e w s that Mrs. Gardner had taken A Young Lady of Fashion. Berenson w r o t e Mrs. Gardner that his friend V i c t o r G o l o u b e v , a Russian expert on Oriental art, was offering to sell a Chinese carved v o t i v e stele o f the Sixth D y n a s t y w h i c h D e n m a n Ross agreed w a s the finest C h i n e s e sculpture that had appeared on the market. It w a s priced at $11,000. M r s . Gardner p r o m p t l y b o u g h t it and impatiently requested delivery, although it was on loan to a noted French m u s e u m . Berenson b o u g h t t w o v e r y fine Chinese paintings for himself that w e r e so expensive he did not k n o w h o w he w o u l d raise the cash to pay for them. H e dined w i t h Elizabeth C a m e r o n and found her " m o r e affectionate than i l l u m i n a t i n g . " Edith Wharton w a s o f f o n her royal progress to A l giers w i t h the literary critic Percy L u b b o c k and friends. In the diminished Paris circle Berenson conversed w i t h Henry A d a m s ' friend Mrs. H e n r y C a b o t L o d g e and her entourage over the state o f the w o r l d . A d a m s ' habitual pessimism and echoes o f Senator L o d g e ' s disgust w i t h Wilson's M e x i c a n policy evidently flavored the talk. " T h e y sang the usual song, h o w the w o r l d w a s c o m i n g to an e n d , " Berenson said, "and I told them the m e l o d y was pleasant but the w o r d s nonsense." O n A p r i l 12 he signed out o f the Ritz and headed home. A f t e r stopping o f f for a f e w days to visit the Curtises at the Villa Sylvia, Berenson reached Florence in an agreeable state o f mind, glad to get back to his desk to sort out his notes for the b o o k w h i c h he had been projecting o n the Venetian paintings in A m e r i c a n collections. H e w a s " n o w never a nuisance," M a r y communicated to her sister. " H i s character has certainly changed . . . I am a w f u l l y glad for him for his rages used to poison h i m . " His health also appeared to be on the mend, thanks in part to the energetic ministrations o f N a i m a Löfroth, the tall y o u n g Swedish masseuse w i t h the "fine figure and p u g d o g face" w h o had b e c o m e a permanent m e m b e r o f the household staff. For a m o n t h D r . M o r t o n Prince stayed on in Florence as the Berensons' guest. A prominent neurologist and professor at T u f t s Medical School, Prince had b e c o m e an authority on abnormal p s y c h o l o g y . H e had been a m e m b e r o f the commission that found Harry K . T h a w sane after his murder o f the famous architect Stanford White. A t the time the Berensons w e r e in B o s t o n , he was under a cloud o f gossip, accused o f financial irregularities, marital infidelities, and a scheme to make his w i f e disinherit their children. B o s t o n society, including Mrs. Gardner, had [178]

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closed its doors to him. T h e Berensons, convinced that he was innocent, had taken u p his defense. M a r y n o w w r o t e M r s . G a r d n e r that B e r n h a r d and Prince w e r e sitting in the L e m o n H o u s e , a tile-roofed structure b e l o w the I T a t t i terrace, discussing "Isabella's fascinating n a t u r e " and p r o p o s i n g that he s h o w her his i n c o m e tax papers and j o i n t account w i t h his wife, Fanny, so that she could help h i m b e c o m e friends again w i t h his children. M a r y ' s plea did n o t succeed. Prince's e x p e r i m e n t a l a p p r o a c h t o the p s y c h o l o g y of the unconscious p r o v i d e d a congenial subject for discussion, for B e r e n s o n had been steadily m o v i n g in his psychological t h e o r y o f art appreciation t o w a r d a m o r e subjective and intuitive approach. A trace o f their conversations o n Prince's e x p e r i m e n t s w i t h h y p n o s i s was to surface in B e r e n s o n ' s essay o n L e o n a r d o da Vinci w h e n he suggested that " p o s t - h y p n o t i c s u g g e s t i o n " w a s a factor in L e o n a r d o ' s reputation. N o sooner had Prince departed than Edith W h a r t o n , r e t u r n i n g f r o m her exciting t o u r o f Tunisia, settled in for a visit " w i t h all her t r o o p of s e r v a n t s . " Fortunately she lightened the b u r d e n b y being " v e r y j o l l y and a m u s i n g . " G e o f f r e y Scott's Architecture of Humanism had c o m e out shortly b e f o r e her arrival; she w a s so impressed b y it that she r e v i e w e d it in the Times Literary Supplement as a "brilliant and discriminating b o o k . " In his preface Scott gratefully a c k n o w l e d g e d B e r e n s o n ' s " m a n y s u g gestive p o i n t s . " H e h a d in fact ingeniously transferred to architecture B e r e n s o n ' s conception o f "tactile v a l u e s . " " T h e tendency to project the i m a g e o f our f u n c t i o n s into concrete f o r m s , " he declared, "is the basis, for architecture, of creative d e s i g n . " Barrett Wendell exclaimed to B e r enson that he did n o t "feel quite s u r e " w h e t h e r Scott's ideas w e r e " u n i versally t r u e or universally p a r a d o x i c a l . " B e r e n s o n agreed: " Y o u r i m pression coincides w i t h mine, a l t h o u g h in a sense he is m y p u p i l . " Paradoxical or n o t , the keen insights of the b o o k rescued Scott f r o m the r e p u t a t i o n of b e i n g a self-indulgent dilettante and paved the w a y f o r his r e m a r k a b l e Portrait of Zelide. If the season at I T a t t i passed serenely, violent disorders elsewhere in Italy revealed the discontents that seethed b e l o w the surface. A r e v o l u t i o n a r y rising against the m o n a r c h y was suppressed after three days of b l o o d s h e d and m u c h d a m a g e to churches and public buildings. T h e leaders w e r e the anarchist E n r i c o Malatesta and the fiery M a r x i s t editor o f Avanti, B e n i t o Mussolini. T h e significance o f these events seems to h a v e been quite lost o n the colony o f expatriates in Florence a n d its environs. T h e i r w o r l d appeared to t h e m so secure that Berenson t o o k the " m o m e n t o u s d e c i s i o n " to build a third and larger library w h i c h w o u l d c o m p l e t e the circuit a r o u n d a central court a n d allow access back again to the m a i n structure. Cecil Pinsent prepared the plan and the w o r k started. [179]

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While Berenson began work on his Venetian Painting in America, Joe Duveen waited impatiently for his return to London and Paris. He plaintively reminded Berenson that he had promised to bring to the gallery a millionaire couple from Baltimore, and, still on the lookout for prime Italian paintings, he asked whether he could see his way clear to dispose of his precious "Baldovinetti" and the Sassetta "triptych" of Saint Francis. " I think I can sell them for a big price to Mr. Lehman." Berenson declined to part with his treasures. With work on the new library begun, Bernhard and Mary set out again on their travels, Bernhard heading for Paris and Mary for a Swiss spa in still another attempt to trim her weight. In a note sent to the Hotel du Rhein, J o e Duveen deprecated, " I do not suppose for a moment that you will feel sufficiently well to come here." He would therefore call at six, "after you have had a refreshing cup of tea and feel rested." Berenson was actually in good fettle; during the afternoon he went over a provisional catalogue of the Walters Collection with Henry Walters and then held a levee for a procession of callers. He obviously preferred to keep Joe in his place. When J o e and his brother Ernest put in an appearance, they were in a very real state of alarm about the authenticity of the Botticelli Giuliano. A complicated chain of events lay back of their anxiety. The announcement of the sale had created a sensation, for on April I, 1914, the London Times had devoted an editorial to Otto Kahn's very fortunate acquisition through the Duveens of this hitherto unknown Botticelli. The current issue of the Burlington used a reproduction of the picture as its frontispiece and featured a "note" on the portrait by Roger Fry. Mary had also published the painting in an article in the April Art in America. All of this publicity seems to have aroused a fervent wish among Berenson's enemies to challenge the attribution. B y midsummer the campaign against the painting was in full swing and there was no way of avoiding the agitating conferences at the Duveen Gallery. Bernhard feared that the controversy might "lead to a collapse" of his relations with the firm. Mary, however, felt that "they will probably come around," for "they cannot do without thee in regard to Italian pictures." But, she added, " i f thee really and truly wants to get out of it, why we can change our extravagant way of life." There was no more talk of quitting. Brought up short by her suggestion, Bernhard telegraphed to her: " N o catastrophe expected. Building at I Tatti must go o n . " Mary promptly informed "Dearest G e o f f r e y , " " S o you are safe anyhow. . . . But evidently our feet are set upon the path of worldliness and riches and the devil take the hindmost." What had happened was that Herbert Home, who had done a percep[180]

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tive m o n o g r a p h on Botticelli, had asked the Duveens for a p h o t o g r a p h of the Giuliano as soon as he learned of the sale. T h e Duveens sent h i m one over the objection of Berenson. Meanwhile the Italian government got w i n d of the affair, and C o r r a d o Ricci, a m e m b e r of the Italian Fine Arts C o m m i s s i o n , demanded of the reputed seller, C o u n t Procolo Isolani of Bologna, whether he had sold a Botticelli to the Duveens. T h e count, of course, could honestly say that he k n e w of no Botticelli having been smuggled out of his collection. Even Baron Lazzaroni, the intermediary, had not k n o w n that it was a Botticelli until Berenson had subsequently identified it. Ricci inferred f r o m the count's assurance that the picture was not authentic. T h e " h a p p y tidings," as Berenson reconstructed the affair, went f r o m Ricci to Giovanni Poggi, f r o m Poggi to Carlo Gamba, f r o m Gamba to Charles Loeser, and reached "the hospitable ears" of H o m e . H o m e , having seen only the photograph, accepted Ricci's inference and p r o m p t l y w r o t e to Walter Dowdeswell, a Duveen associate, declaring the painting a forgery. T h e Duveens were panic-stricken and questioned Lazzaroni's honesty and Berenson's competence. T h e only thing that w o u l d satisfy them, they insisted, was a declaration by the count that the picture had in fact been in his family for generations. Lazzaroni came back to London in t r i u m p h f r o m Bologna with the required letter and a photograph of the painting on the back of which the count stated that it was one of t w e n t y eight which he had b r o u g h t d o w n f r o m his villa and sold to Baron Lazzaroni. Joe D u v e e n proposed showing the documents to H o m e , but Berenson, seconded by H e n r y Duveen, objected that it would set a "dangerous precedent to be accountable to anyone as a tribunal." T o protect himself f r o m Joe's impulsiveness, Berenson kept possession of the documents. Peace was slow to arrive, and " i m p o r t a n t " conferences on the subject continued in London. "Ernest [Duveen] is in a f u n k , " Berenson reported, "and can't get over it and Joe w h o is very impressionable can't get over it, so again I don't k n o w what rash thing Joe will d o . " It seemed to h i m that "they are hysterically possessed by a d e m o n of selfdestruction and I fear I cannot exorcize t h e m . " Berenson was convinced that a "systematic campaign has been made against the Botticelli which however is only the w h i p p i n g boy, f r o m both Florence and Berlin. . . . Dowdeswell reported that Siren had been dinning into all their ears that I am a hopelessly discredited person!" Fortunately, in spite of Ernest's skepticism, " U n c l e H e n r y and Louis [Duveen] and Dowdeswell seem unshaken." Joe, in his anxiety, wanted to rush to the Kahns to forestall criticism. Berenson got ahead of h i m and "in a casual way . . . told Mrs. Kahn all the gossip emanating f r o m both Berlin and Florence." [181]

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B e r e n s o n m a n a g e d to remain fairly calm in spite o f the c o n t r o v e r s y . H e had the satisfaction o f seeing h i m s e l f cited as an authority in the Times in connection w i t h a painting, La Schiavona, w h i c h Wildenstein and G i m p e l had sold to Herbert C o o k f o r £40,000 f o r his father's gallery at R i c h m o n d . A c c o r d i n g to the Times story the picture, " c a r e f u l l y cleaned b y P r o f e s s o r C a v e n a g h i " and on exhibit at the B u r l i n g t o n G a l l e r y , had once been called b y A d o l f o V e n t u r i a B e r n a r d i n o Licinio and had theref o r e been a l l o w e d e x p o r t , but " a critic w h o ranks still higher [than Venturi] in E n g l a n d and A m e r i c a , M r . B e r n h a r d B e r e n s o n , n o w writes, in a letter w h i c h w e h a v e seen, that it is not only an original Titian, but one o f the finest existing w o r k s o f the m a s t e r . " B e r e n s o n ' s ten days in early J u l y 1 9 1 4 in Paris passed agreeably e n o u g h w h e n out o f range o f the D u v e e n s ' importunities. In his daily chronicle to M a r y he tried to c o m m u n i c a t e the flavor o f his social encounters. H e reported that E d i t h W h a r t o n "rather d e f i a n t l y " proclaimed she had never read ten lines o f C o n g r e v e . A f t e r dinner w i t h H e n r y A d a m s , Paul B o u r g e t told o f his horrified sight o f his friend Calmette's death throes. Later Aileen T o n e entertained them f o r nearly t w o hours w i t h her chansons. A d a m s r e m a r k e d that the best talkers he had k n o w n w e r e Jusserand, R o o s e v e l t , and B r y c e , J u s s e r a n d best at initiating conversation, B r y c e at displaying the greatest m i n d , and R o o s e v e l t at w i n n i n g an a r g u m e n t only b y shouting d o w n his opponent. Alone with Walter B e r r y in his b o o k lined library, B e r e n s o n relished an hour's talk about travel and India and f o r the first time f o u n d B e r r y " g e n u i n e l y l o v a b l e . " Visiting again w i t h H e n r i B e r g s o n , he heard h i m say o f K a r i n ' s thesis on h i m that " i f w o m e n w o u l d not regard it as an insult he w o u l d say she had a strong masculine intellect." A t dinner w i t h B o n i de Castellane, w h o s e glitter had begun to fade since his d i v o r c e f r o m A n n a G o u l d and her millions, he f o u n d the f o o d p o o r , the w o m e n rather "tarnished h a n d s o m e and b o r i n g , " the m e n " n u l l i t i e s " ; the evening w a s relieved f o r h i m only b y " s o m e V o l g a songs that carried h i m a w a y . " A large dinner party at M r s . C a m e r o n ' s yielded a cordial invitation b y the Peter C o o p e r H e w i t t s to sail along the D a l m a t i a n coast in A u g u s t . " C o o p e r , " he said, " t o l d m e m o r e about color in a f e w m i n u t e s — I mean s t u f f w o r t h k n o w i n g — t h a n I h a v e heard in all the rest o f m y d a y s . " O n e m o r n i n g after a strenuous " c o n f a b " at the D u v e e n s , he adjourned to a luncheon meeting presided o v e r b y the aging p o l y m a t h G u s t a v e L e B o n , w h o s e antidemocratic Psychology of the Crowd, published in 1895, had m a d e h i m f a m o u s as a pioneer social psychologist. " W e hated each other at sight, at least he hated m e , " B e r e n s o n exclaimed. " H e is utterly spoiled, as m a y G o d save m e f r o m being in m y s e n i l i t y . " T h e meeting, attended largely b y m e m b e r s o f the Institute o f France, did not scintil[182]

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late, but fortunately Berenson sat next to Aristide Briand. " H e has a mind of extraordinary clearness, vitality and freedom from every form of cant. It was a j o y to hear him talk," Bernhard wrote to Mary. " Y o u are so ignorant," he teased her, "that I may do well to remind you that he has been premier and will be again—if he likes." When Berenson crossed to London on July 10 to confer once again with Baron Lazzaroni and the Duveens about the Botticelli, there seemed to be nothing to disturb public tranquillity save the chronic deadlock over Irish home rule. He spent a quiet Sunday luxuriating for hours among the Chinese treasures at the British Museum and the Oriental collection of the archaeologist Sir Aurel Stein. " H o w little I really cared for and felt twenty years a g o , " he mused. " T h e life of the eye is at last a very real one for m e . " For the moment he felt quite out of things in England. Nobody seemed to pay the least attention to him, he wistfully meditated. " H o w different from Paris!" T o counter the threat of civil war in Northern Ireland, army recruiting in England had stepped up, and Bernhard now learned that their secretary-librarian, Lancelot Cherry, had enlisted. When he informed Mary, she immediately wrote to Geoffrey that the librarianship might be available to him. "It may mean so much if we can pull it o f f . " Then, as the prospect of attaching him permanently to I Tatti rose in her matchmaking imagination, she went on, " T h i n k — ! Even the Nicky [Mariano] rumor might come true, so eager is my Geoffrey to become what he fondly hopes will be 'settled.' " Mary had first met Nicky the preceding spring at a small party Scott and Pinsent gave in their flat in the Via delle Terme. She invited her to lunch at I Tatti, and it was on that occasion Nicky had her first encounter with Bernhard. He looked, she afterward recalled, "elegant and aloof and somehow very intimidating." They did not meet again until after the war. During the weeks that followed, however, Mary saw her frequently and pictured her as securely established at I Tatti as the wife of Geoffrey Scott. Nicky left in June to visit her sister, Alda, and her brother-in-law, Baron Anrep, at Schloss Ringen in the Baltic provinces of Russia. Absence worked its usual chemistry on diffident Scott and when the outbreak of the war threatened to block her return, he urged her to "please get into a train at once and come here. I am told it is quite easy by way of Sweden." The prospect somehow did not entice her, and she spent the war years with her family in Estonia. Berenson's mornings in London were largely preempted by the Duveens, whose anxieties about the Botticelli continued until the outbreak of World War I eclipsed all lesser concerns and Home's challenge disappeared from notice. The painting, now in the Crespi Collection in Milan, [183]

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has remained w i t h i n the Botticelli canon to the present d a y , t h o u g h not w i t h o u t challenge. For B e r e n s o n there w e r e t i m e - c o n s u m i n g appeals in L o n d o n f o r an accounting and audit o f the D u v c e n b o o k s . Plender's representative explained that " s h o r t o f taking legal p r o c e e d i n g s " they could not c o m p e l the D u v e e n s to be p r o m p t . T h e f i r m therefore had to accept the D u v e e n statement that the balance o f fees o w i n g to B e r e n s o n on J a n u a r y 3 1 , 1 9 1 4 , w a s £ 3 7 , 0 0 0 plus 5 percent interest. U n f o r t u n a t e l y the beginning o f the w a r paralyzed the international transfer o f funds and no payments could be made. T h e gathering s t o r m in the B a l k a n s inspired little public concern in E n g l a n d and e v e n less in A m e r i c a . M r s . G a r d n e r continued eager to i m p r o v e her collection, and on B e r e n s o n ' s r e c o m m e n d a t i o n she b o u g h t f r o m the French dealer D e m o t t e t w o French reliefs o f three figures f r o m Parthenay f o r " 1 5 0 , 0 0 0 f r [ $ 3 0 , 0 0 0 ] " and a R o m a n e s q u e portal f o r " 8 0 , 0 0 0 f r [ $ 1 6 , 0 0 0 ] . " A n 1 8 7 6 e n g r a v i n g o f the portal depicts it " i n s i t u " in a m e d i e v a l h o m e in La R e o l e , France. T h e " l o w e r b o d i e s " o f t w o o f the statues o f kings are m o d e r n restorations. In L o n d o n Chaliapin w a s starring in M o u s s o r g s k y ' s Boris Godunov, Ivan the Terrible, and La Khovantschina at the D r u r y Lane Theater, and F o k i n e and K a r s a v i n a w e r e p e r f o r m i n g in the ballets Petrouchka and Spectre de la Rose. T h e operas attracted such c r o w d s n e w to opera p r o tocol that letters to the Times complained o f the latecomers and talkers in the audiences. A t a concert conducted b y D e b u s s y , B e r e n s o n f o u n d h i m s e l f " a b s o r b e d " b y the sight o f Chaliapin in the audience, "entirely changed in a p p e a r a n c e " o f f s t a g e and talking like a professional musician all t h r o u g h the concert. W h e n he visited the British M u s e u m w i t h M a r y C r a w s h a y and learned o f the m u s e u m ' s attempt to b u y an early S u n g painting, he j o i n e d the e f f o r t to raise the m o n e y f o r it. T h e conversation w i t h M i s s C r a w s h a y happened to turn to Belle Greene. " I told h e r , " B e r n h a r d related to M a r y , " w h a t a perfect brick y o u had been t h r o u g h it all." H e had " a l o n g t a l k " w i t h P r i m e Minister Herbert A s q u i t h , w h o w a s v e r y m u c h preoccupied m a n a g i n g a divided Cabinet on the e x p l o s i v e Irish question, but the conversation got round, evidently on B e r e n s o n ' s m o t i o n , to Italy's recent aggression in N o r t h A f r i c a against T u r k e y , and it pleased h i m to note that A s q u i t h " s p o k e in terms o f withering c o n t e m p t " f o r Italy. A s q u i t h ' s insular detachment f r o m the p r o b l e m s o f the Continent seems to h a v e been typical o f British opinion. E v e n w h e n the Austrian u l t i m a t u m to Serbia came a w e e k later and A s q u i t h thought it " a possible p r e l u d e " to a E u r o p e a n w a r , he declared, " H a p p i l y there seems to be no reason w h y w e should be anything m o r e than spectators." [184]

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On Sunday, July 16, 1914, the news broke that Austria had ruptured diplomatic relations with Serbia. T o the French, absorbed in the dramatic Caillaux trial that had just ended with the acquittal of Madame Caillaux, the news came "as a bolt from the blue." Berenson, visiting at Theydon Mount near Epping, north of London, wrote to Carlo Placci, who was at the Bayreuth festival, "It is very exciting here now what with Ireland on the one hand and Servia on the other. . . . Sympathy here seems to me strong for Austria and I don't believe that in case of war England will support Russia." With such reassuring thoughts Berenson joined Mary at Ford Place, in southern Sussex, expecting to remain there until August 5. What they would do afterward he had not decided, "perhaps visit Scandanavia, perhaps even go to St. Moritz," to which he had not returned since the summer of 1 9 1 1 . A stunning succession of events now intervened to alter all plans. The Austrians bombarded Belgrade on July 29 and Russia immediately began mobilization. On the thirty-first Germany sent an ultimatum to Russia to stop mobilization and on the following day, without waiting for a reply, declared war on Russia. The dominoes began to fall. France, as an ally of Russia, immediately ordered a general mobilization. T w o days later, anticipating the formal declaration of war against France, the German troops entered Luxembourg and demanded free passage through Belgium. On its refusal the invasion of Belgium began. At midnight August 4, 1914, a somber British Cabinet voted to honor its commitments to Belgium and France and enter the war. T o his colleagues Lord Grey of Fallodon sadly observed, " T h e lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime." At first it was thought that Germany had overreached itself by rushing into a war on two fronts. Besides, France had been relieved of fear of invasion from the south when Italy, after protesting Austria's unilateral action, declared its neutrality on August 3. The first reports of French successes from the battlefront in northern France gave a false sense of security, and except for the flood of volunteers and conscripts to the cantonments, the momentum of life for noncombatants ran on for a time almost unchanged. Mary had fortunately motored to England from her Swiss cure a few days before the invasion began. The Berensons had been at Ford Place only a few days when the Cabinet's fateful decision was announced. Scandinavia and St. Moritz ceased to be possibilities; even Italy had seemed doubtful in its neutrality. Ford Place, in the "lovely country between Arundel and the sea," became their "delightful refuge." There Bernhard relaxed among Logan's books in "a big cedar-panelled room looking out on a rose garden." Israel Zangwill was a near neighbor and old ties were renewed. Zang[185]

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will's interest in a Jewish homeland still engrossed him: as head of the Jewish Territorial Organization he had recently published a long letter in the Times reviewing the obstacles placed in the way of his plan for a British-Jewish colony in one of the "empty places" in the empire. Having broken with the Zionists, w h o favored Jewish settlement in ancestral Palestine, he now found himself in an impasse, for the doors were closing everywhere against the multitudes of refugees from the Russian pogroms and his efforts to establish a British-Jewish colony in Africa, though supported by Joseph Chamberlain, had ended in frustration. Three weeks later when the Ottoman Empire came to the support of Germany, Zangwill returned to the Zionist fold. The opening of hostilities found J o e Duveen vacationing at Evian and Henry Duveen reduced to "casual office w o r k " in Paris. Terrible as the struggle was, Henry drew some consolation, he wrote Berenson, from the news that "up to the moment, things are going mightily bad for Germany." But the early reports of successful counterraids proved illusory. The heroic defi, On ne passe pas (They shall not pass), thrilled the French people, but the frightful cost was to be learned on September 6, 1914, at the First Battle of the Marne, which turned back the German advance with the help of the reserves rushed to the front from Paris by taxicabs. Bernhard advised his brother back in Boston that "all hopes of business are over" and that he was instructing his N e w York brokers to pay all his American dividends to him. He agreed with his brother that Germany had "a marvellous war machine," but he was confident it would be destroyed. "This is not a war between nations, but between good and evil. . . . The evil is overwhelmingly on the side of Germany." He hoped that his house was "fairly safe." Cecil Pinsent was in charge. But, he added, " I put no trust in the American consul, for I am halfway criminal, being an expatriate and of alien birth." Not long afterward his brother, once again invited to join in a business venture, asked Bernhard for financial help. " I cannot help feeling," Bernhard replied, "that your straightforwardness, and quixotic honesty and unsuspiciousness will be taken advantage of. . . . I personally prefer you as you are, poor, innocent, honorable and even gullible." T o Senda, who was traveling in Italy, he wrote, "It is the completest and most unexpected disaster. I was unprepared and caught with big sums owing me and myself owing other sums." Hence he could give her only modest help. Mary informed her that they had dismissed their secretary, their valet, and their chauffeur and had stopped building and buying and were having difficulty meeting their "habitual overdrafts" at Baring Brothers. Among their friends the war had begun to make its terrifying levies. [186]

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Lucien Henraux's four sons w e r e at the front and so w e r e Salomon Reinach's n e p h e w s . Berenson's friend V i c t o r G o l o u b e v ' s seven sons had j o i n e d their units. B y w a r ' s end all seven w o u l d be dead. Hard pressed for funds, Berenson anxiously requested several thousand pounds o f the D u v e e n s but learned f r o m their accountants that, like all other dealers, they had closed their galleries and offices. In desperation he w r o t e directly to H e n r y D u v e e n in L o n d o n , w h o responded that the firm's funds w e r e blocked b y the unsettled financial conditions in A m e r i c a but that w h e n the m o r a t o r i u m was lifted at the end o f N o v e m ber they could promise a check for £5,000 and that meanwhile he could provide a f e w hundred pounds for current needs. Berenson's anguished plea to Joe b r o u g h t a m o r e concrete response, a check postdated to D e c e m b e r 5 for £5,000 to stave o f f creditors and an offer to remit four or five hundred pounds in the meantime. A n e w anxiety was also about to be added: his stepdaughter Karin had announced her engagement to Adrian Stephen, son o f Sir Leslie Stephen, at thirty-one still unsettled either in business or profession. T h e r e had been s o m e thought o f returning to L o n d o n , but Berenson decided against it because, as M a r y said, " w h e n w e see the bands o f y o u n g m e n enlisting w e burst into tears." In his enforced leisure, Berenson and his brother-in-law L o g a n visited Henry A d a m s at Stepleton H o u s e at Blandford, Dorset, w h e r e A d a m s had taken refuge in the absence o f Elizabeth C a m e r o n and her daughter, Lady Lindsay. Berenson w r o t e to Mrs. C a m e r o n f r o m her desk, w h e r e he w a s enjoying, he said, the T u d o r l i k e paneling o f the r o o m , so curious a touch in the " A n g l o Venetian architecture" o f the house. A d a m s seemed to him to be " l o o k ing extraordinarily w e l l " and to be regretting the idea o f having to leave "this fair h a v e n . " (He was b o o k e d to sail on the Olympic on N o v e m b e r 4.) H e is "happily quite as Anti-Prussian as m y s e l f , " t h o u g h " n o t so eager and excitable as the rest o f us and I e n v y him. I am a w r e c k o v e r i t . " T o M a r y he admitted that t h o u g h the house had but one b a t h r o o m and w a s p o o r l y lighted, he w o u l d " l o v e a house so beautiful and so secluded." W i t h A d a m s in " g o o d f o r m " and Aileen T o n e ' s chansons to entertain them, if o n l y "those damned D u v e e n s w o u l d pay up, I should be e n j o y i n g m y s e l f . " Bernhard and M a r y argued a g o o d deal about the w i s d o m o f returning to Italy, for the changing rumors about Italy's neutrality made a f i r m decision difficult. H e t o y e d w i t h the idea o f g o i n g back to A m e r i c a and spending the winter at Harvard. In that event M a r y , unwilling to be separated f r o m G e o f f r e y Scott, declared her resolve to leave on the same day for Florence. A s the w a r n e w s worsened, Bernhard decided that there w a s n o choice but for the t w o o f them to return to the U n i t e d [187]

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States, but his insistence that she accompany him stiffened her own determination. In a rage he demanded that she sign a statement that if "any misfortune happened in Italy," it would be her fault. Each attempt to make her change her mind, she told Geoffrey, made her more sure that " I belong in my own house." In the daily clash of wills hers proved the stronger, and Bernhard began to envision the likelihood of his own retreat to I Tatti. Back at Ford Place after his visit with Adams, he occasionally ran up to London to confer with Henry James, Sir Lionel Henry Cust, or James L. Garvin. Henry James, ardently pro-British, at seventy-one envied the young men who could act in the "great cause." Cust, surveyor of the king's pictures, had now to consider what protective measures to take as the prospect grew of zeppelin raids on London. Garvin, editor of both the Observer and the Pall Mall Gazette, had long written of the German peril and urged an alliance with Russia, and his belief in England's sacred mission in the war provided a refreshing reinforcement of Berenson's views. In London Israel Zangwill took Berenson to see Prince Kropotkin, the exiled revolutionary anarchist. The talk turned inevitably to Russia, and Kropotkin declared that though he hated the Russian government, he thought it "likely to do less harm if it prevails than Prussian militarism." Though the bottom had fallen out of the international art market, a few chores continued for the N e w York office and for Berenson's American clients. A typical cable from the Duveens read: "Understood your cable Bellini but not Titian stop if picture not Titian please say so naming your attribution praise it highly intimating [the client, presumably Frick] did right in purchasing it. Duveen." Before year's end Berenson agreed, at Joe Duveen's urging, to contribute an article to Art in America. Wilhelm Valentiner, the editor, who had been visiting his native Germany, had been shipped off to the front, and Berenson's friend Frank Jewett Mather, J r . , now professor of art and archaeology at Princeton, had taken over as acting editor. Henry Duveen promised to remit a second £5,000 as soon as the Italian moratorium was lifted. The French victory at the First Battle of the Marne had stabilized that section of the battlefront, and the heroic resistance of the British E x peditionary Force in the trenches at Ypres stopped the German advance to the Channel ports. The hope of a quick victory by either side soon faded, however, and the bloody stalemate in the trenches of the western front began. Having survived the first appalling onslaught, France, outside the war zone, became safe for travel. Weary of the provincial and pacifist society of Arundel, the Berensons crossed to Paris by November 10, 1914, and were lodged at Edith Wharton's apartment at 53, rue de

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Varenne for ten days. Accommodations at the Ritz were reduced as a section had been set apart to care for wounded soldiers. Edith Wharton was busy all day with war relief work at the ouvroir she had established nearby for seamstresses who had been idled by the patriotic sewing circles which had sprung up. Her energies also went into another relief project, as reported in the European edition of the New York Herald of November 22: she and a group of her friends had established two hostels where some of the refugees who were flooding into Paris from Belgium could be housed and fed. Among the chief contributors heading the published list were Edith Wharton herself and Bernhard Berenson, each down for a thousand francs. In Paris after the bucolic quiet of Ford Place Berenson felt in his element again. There were people to share what had now become "almost his keenest interest . . . the discussion of international politics." Practically all of Europe was now in the struggle, and the old scores of a hundred years since the Congress of Vienna demanded settlement. "People treasure up his words and repeat them everywhere," ran Mary's admiring comment to Senda. "I don't wonder he likes being here." They saw Reinach almost every day, compared notes with Henri Bergson, and talked with the poet-novelist Abel Bonnard just before he left for the front. Civilian Paris slowed to a near standstill, the streets nearly empty, the smart shops closed, and the theaters dark. The government was still in its temporary refuge in Bordeaux. Berenson's French friends greeted him "so grave and earnest" in their anxieties that he felt a kind of reverence for them. " I love them like this," he told Mrs. Gardner. It now seemed unlikely that Italy would enter the war on the side of its nominal German allies while Austria held so many Italians subject in the Tyrol. And Bernhard was now ready to return to I Tatti because he had formed "a rather romantic friendship" with Lady Sybil Cutting, their "neighbor in the Villa Medici." She had become one of his avid pen pals, constantly seeking his advice and filling her endless pages with philosophic musing. An attractive widow, cultivated but talkative, she had been an agreeable resource in the Anglo-American colony in the Tuscan hills. " Y o u can imagine I encourage that all I can," Mary informed Senda, little dreaming what that encouragement would lead to. "It begins to cast Belle Greene into the background and Sybil is such an improvement on that horrible creature." The war cast a sobering shadow upon the two expatriates. It was hard not to think of death as each day's newspaper printed its somber column of French and British officers "Dead on the Field of Honor." Mary instructed her daughter Ray, " I f we die, thee and Oliver [Strachey] and

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Karin had better go down with Adrian [Stephen] and arrange things. I think the photos and art library might be sold together and Messrs. Duveen would buy the pictures or some of them and perhaps Mr. Charles Freer of Detroit would buy some of the Chinese things. . . . But I hope not to die now, when there is such a slump in works of art!" Leaving such mortuary reflections to Mary, Bernhard looked forward to the return to his desk and leisure for the book on the Venetians in American collections, which had begun occupying his thoughts. And so with travel by train interdicted by the movements of troops and materiel, Bernhard and Mary motored all the way across the south of France and on to Florence. They saw almost no one on the roads "but soldiers and officers." Bernhard could scarcely have foreseen that he would not cross the frontier again for two years.

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F

O R the first time since Bernhard and Mary moved to I Tatti, the social season of the expatriate colony on the Fiesole slopes came and passed in 1915 with few foreign visitors to disturb the quiet of their daily lives. Their aristocratic Italian friends had yet to be won over to the Allied cause, for their natural ties were with the Austrian and German nobility, and when the Countess Serristori, who was strongly pro-German, came to stay early in the new year, Berenson's tact was severely tried. For him, as he wrote to Barrett Wendell, this was "a religious war if ever there was one," and though he continued to write in kindly fashion to his German friends, he thought them "temporarily insane." The war continued to dominate his thoughts as he pored over the many newspapers to which he subscribed. " I wish w e were officially less neutral," he complained to Mrs. Gardner. "This should not be a war but a crusade." And in one letter to Wendell he burst out that he wished the new year would see the downfall of "the unholy alliance of Jesuitized, financialized, mercantilized militarism known as the German Empire." Ironically a translation of his little book on Sassetta had been published recently in Germany, his only appearance in print during 1914. A long and appreciative article on the English edition of the book by Emilio Cecchi in the Rome Tribuna in April of 1914 had at least kept his name before the Italian public. The Duveens wrote that affairs in their line were almost at a "standstill," though there seemed to be a great interest in Sienese pictures, "caused no doubt by your last visit here." Their agent Dowdeswell was in Florence at the moment trying to buy the Chigi Sassetta and the Angeli Neroccio, though the sale to Philip Lehman would at best, they said, yield only their commission. Moreover, seven paintings had been

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rendered unsalable because of a fire aboard the French steamer Mississippi. The news that Dowdeswell was foraging in what Berenson regarded as his exclusive territory did not please him, and he soon protested to the firm. He was assured that there was no intention of having Dowdeswell trespass "upon your domain. . . . Y o u surely do not imagine that w e regard him as an expert!" They had stationed him in Florence merely " f o r the purpose of being informed of what is being done in the world of art generally in Italy." Berenson's suspicions of Dowdeswell's role were only temporarily assuaged. A letter from Henry Walters turning down the offer of a Caravaggio supplied confirmation of the paralysis in the American art trade. It was "utterly impossible," Walters wrote, to think of buying works of art "during the present condition of depression in business in America." A railroad in which he was a director had suffered a 50 percent decline in income, and business in the South was "absolutely stagnant." He had, however, been able to send another remittance to Baring Brothers for Berenson's account. Because of the business recession he had delayed opening his gallery for the winter, but finally he had gone down to Baltimore, rehung the paintings, and personally revised the catalogue before sending it on to the printer. This was the catalogue which had been prepared with the help of both Mary and Bernhard. With few visitors to distract him Bernhard regularly labored in his study during the winter months of 1 9 1 4 - 1 5 and Mary carried on her typewriting for him in the library, happy to be at work, "especially when Geoffrey sits opposite also at w o r k . " Her scheme to have Scott made Bernhard's secretary had succeeded. It was frustrating to Berenson that he could not in person vent his fury on the barbarians from the north. His bellicose rhetoric inspired Mary's comment that since he was "unable to wield the bayonet and unwilling to advise the World at this crisis he has gone back to work and is to send an article to America at the several times cabled request of the editors of the magazine." He was "writing one o f h i s heavy-handed articles," she told Alys. " H e begins his sentences fairly well, but then slips in conditions and hangs on modifying clauses, and adds hints and innuendoes till the result is more like a tapeworm than anything else." Tapeworm or not, the richly allusive article, the first of a series titled "Venetian Paintings in the United States," took shape with surprising rapidity. The floodgate of his reflections on Venetian paintings in America swung open as if he were driven to make up for the years of bondage to the art-dealing world. The six articles of the series were published in Art in America in February, April, June, and December of 1915 and in February and April of 1916, and they were followed in June [192]

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and December 1916 by two more articles, also on Venetian painting in the United States. The articles reviewed the historical development from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries as illustrated by the more than 130 paintings in American collections. When the second article in the Venetian series, treating of Vivarini and Crivelli, appeared in April, J o e Duveen cabled his appreciation and asked the "further f a v o r " of an article on Mrs. Gardner's last-year's purchase of A Young Lady of Fashion. As the painting had been purchased by her from Boehler and Steinmeyer, Joe's request was to some extent disinterested. In no mood to do favors for Joe, Berenson declined. Once the Italian moratorium was lifted, Berenson was able to draw on his accumulated earnings and his anxieties about meeting expenses subsided. At intervals of several months the Duveens sent Berenson checks for £5,000 against the large balance owing to him, so that he could inform his brother, " M y affairs are not so much bad as in a muddle, and I have no idea what the future will be like. However, I anticipate no difficulty in making the usual home payments." Work on the new library addition resumed under Cecil Pinsent's direction, with the usual infuriating blunders of the Italian workmen; their most recent exploit demolished a wall and flooded the servants' hall. As the war progressed, Italian neutrality soon became neutrality against Austria, for popular resentment of the long Austrian occupation of the Italian provinces of Trentino and Alto-Adige had never slackened. N o w the Italian nationalists cried for the rescue of their humiliated countrymen and they were joined by the Socialists, who hoped the war would be the means of bringing down the Italian monarchy. Popular feeling ran so strong that as early as January 18, 1915, Berenson wrote to young Louis Gillet, who had just been promoted to captain, that he would not be surprised if Italy entered the war in spite of the Germanophiles and clerics. On May 5 D'Annunzio returned from France to deliver the oration at the unveiling of the statue of Garibaldi at Quarto near Genoa, and his fiery and mystical invocation of Italian liberty stirred the crowd to a frenzied clamor for war against the hated Austrians. T o Berenson his one-time neighbor's "spouting of 'Grab and glory' " seemed as detestable as the German self-glorification. The news of the torpedoing of the Lusitania with the loss of twelve hundred lives on May 7 horrified the world, and tremendous crowds surged through the streets of Rome to attack the German and Austrian embassies. T w o weeks later Italy declared war on Austria and ordered a general mobilization. Berenson, like many Americans abroad at the time, was disgusted by President Wilson's stubborn neutrality in the face of the sinking of the [193]

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Lusitania, and he raged that "the utmost that will happen is that Wilson will let his whiskers g r o w . " Lancelot Cherry, his former secretarylibrarian, and Henri, his valet, were with their regiments at the Dardanelles; within six months both had been killed in action in that ill-fated campaign, and he reported to Edith Wharton, " A l l my servants are crying their eyes out." Inspired perhaps by Edith's example, Mary enlisted about a dozen women to make felt slippers and socks to protect the feet of the wounded from the cold floors of the hospitals, and Bernhard, as Mary wrote Senda, "promised so many monthly payments" to the Red Cross and local and national charities "that we haven't a cent left without selling out." His checks to Edith Wharton's war relief projects brought a warm response: "Beautiful and welcome as your cheque is, it seems negligible besides the good letter that brings it." He missed the stimulation of Edith's robust intelligence and wrote to her, "This human world of ours is at best a rickety craft, and now that it is being reduced day by day, one fain would cling closer to the few shipmates one has found in life. The Lusitania business has done for me. . . . It is so much beyond the worst I conceived possible in the conduct of organized gregarious society that it seared and withered all my capacity for response." He followed her involvement in relief work with repeated contributions, and a year later she wrote, " I ' m full of compunction about accepting the twenty pounds for you have already splendidly supported my many charities." After the morning's stint on his articles, Bernhard as regularly had himself driven up to the Villa Medici on the road to Fiesole to spend the afternoon with Lady Sybil, whose frail elegance increasingly attracted him in spite of her compulsive talkativeness. The spirituelle young daughter of an Irish peer, Lady Sybil Desart had married Bayard Cutting, a rich American, in 1903. Cutting died of tuberculosis seven years later, leaving her comfortably established at the Villa Medici. It was not long before it was taken for granted in the Berensons' circle that she had become Bernhard's mistress. He usually dined with her twice a week, sometimes accompanied by Geoffrey Scott, who began also to be drawn to her. Neither development brought pleasure to Mary, weakening as it did her hold on both men. Her only consolation was that Belle Greene had retreated to the background. As the months passed it turned out that the war was actually stimulating the sale of art in America. Lucrative war contracts began to breed a new generation of millionaires who succeeded the generation of the "Robber Barons." Joe Duveen wrote from N e w York, "We have had a tremendous season here—in fact the greatest in the history of the firm." Duveen's boast was soon reflected in Wilhelm Bode's article in the May [i94]

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1916 Die Kunst in which he bitterly commented that in the course of the next few years the museums of N e w York, Boston, Washington, and Chicago would equal or surpass the great museums of Europe as the natural result of the enormous sums of money accumulated by the munitions makers who were arming Germany's enemies. The Duveens made important purchases from the Morgan estate— Chinese porcelains, eighteenth-century furniture, objects of art, and the magnificent Fragonard Room, which they sold at cost to Henry Frick to encourage his patronage. Belle Greene, Joe informed Berenson, had been very "considerate and kind to us. . . . In fact she admitted that she was anxious to oblige us because of your friendship for us, and this is something w e very highly appreciate." The letter must have amused Berenson, for Belle had earlier written how she had outmaneuvered the D u veens: they had offered two million for the porcelains and she had successfully held out for three. As for the Fragonard Room, which had cost $300,000, she sold it for $1,250,000. Although the Duveens had disposed of only one Italian painting in the first half of the year, they kept after Berenson to acquire paintings for their stock for the booming market, especially since Frick and Lehman were showing a growing interest in Italian paintings. Frick, Joe said, "was exceedingly pleased to get your cable about the Bellini and the School Titian. He is beginning to realize now that there is only one man to look up to for the best advice on the Italian School." The Bellini to which Duveen referred had been jointly acquired by Duveen, Knoedler, and Colnaghi. It was the large and beautiful painting of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata with outstretched palms as he stands in the foreground of an idealized landscape that recedes upward to a crenellated castle in the far distance. Toward the end of May 1 9 1 5 , with the first three articles safely in print, Bernhard took to the road again, accompanied by Mary and Lady Sybil, to restudy the painters of the Italian Marches on the slopes of the Apennines. Wartime travel, they soon discovered, had its perils. When they reached Urbino, they found the hotel crowded with frightened refugees from Ancona, which had been bombarded by the Austrians. The next morning at Fossombrone they were all arrested on suspicion of being Germans, and their car had to be rescued from a frenzied mob. It was their first encounter with what Berenson called "spymania." They retreated to Perugia and then struck south to Aquileia in the Abruzzi. Their adventures were not yet over. Shortly after Bernhard walked out alone to study the celebrated fagade of the Basilica de Santa Maria di Collemaggio on the edge of the town, a messenger hunted out Mary and the rest of the party and told them that Berenson had been arrested. They all went [195]

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over to the jail, where they discovered that he had been saved by a kindhearted police officer " f r o m being torn to pieces by the excited populace" w h o had taken h i m to be a G e r m a n spy. By easy stages they reached Rome, none the worse for their terrifying adventures and, for Berenson at least, with undiminished passion for tracking d o w n the unregarded art treasures of remote churches. T h e t u m u l t u o u s outpouring of patriotic fervor in R o m e convinced h i m that not diplomacy but enthusiastic popular support for the war had been the decisive factor in bringing in Italy on the side of the Allies. R o m e had asserted itself as the real capital of Italy, whereas the United States had no real capital " t o express the popular will." If N e w York had been the capital, he felt confident, " w e should have been in a state of war with Germany." After several days of note taking in R o m e , Bernhard and M a r y parted company, she to go up to the spa at Fiuggi, where she was joined by Janet Ross for a brief reducing cure, and Bernhard to return to Florence with Lady Sybil. M a r y reported to Alys that the " c u r e " was a fraud: she had gained a kilo. She regretted, she w r o t e Bernhard, that his fiftieth birthday w o u l d not have the eclat of hers, which had been "such a splendid success o w i n g to your generosity," but she hoped, not w i t h o u t irony, "that Lady Sybil w o u l d h o n o r the d a y . " With the prospect of having to spend the summers of the war in Italy, Berenson detoured to the pass at C o n s u m a "exploring hotels" with Lady Sybil. O n the back road to Vallombrosa amidst the w o o d s of birch and conifer high above the distant Arno, they looked in on the comfortable t w o - s t o r y peasant house solidly built of stone o w n e d by the Marchesa Peruzzi, William W e t m o r e Story's daughter. They found it attractive and Berenson resolved to write to Story's son, Julian, to ask whether it could be rented. N o t h i n g came of that negotiation, and it was not until twenty-three years later that the house, k n o w n as Casa al D o n o , became Berenson's s u m m e r refuge. Back in Florence Berenson again immersed himself in writing the remaining articles for Art in America and also articles for Rassegna d'Arte Antica e Moderna. T h e " s p y m a n i a " reached "fabulous lengths" in Florence that s u m m e r . Self-appointed patriots, American as well as Italian, kept coming up to I Tatti to inquire whether Berenson was "really a G e r m a n s p y . " There were indications also that Berenson was under suspicion in Washington. T h e American consul broke out in fury one day at dinner with Berenson against the ambassador at R o m e for not having formally protested to the g o v e r n m e n t the arrest and m o b b i n g of Berenson at Aquileia. When the British colony at Florence learned that w o u n d e d officers

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were soon to land at Leghorn, some seventy miles to the west, there was much rivalry among the hostesses for putting them up. Bernhard reassured Mary, who was eager to offer their house, that there would be sufficient accommodation for the convalescents. The officers arrived from Leghorn, and four Australians wounded in the savage fighting at Gallipoli were after all allotted to the Berensons. They were put up in the rustic Villino Corbignano on the hillside across the road from I Tatti, an old-fashioned stone farmhouse that dated at least from the seventeenth century. Berenson ameliorated the rather Spartan comforts by supplying ample food, wine, and cigars and by having wires run so they would have electricity. Reports of the men's rough behavior in town disgusted Mary. Bernhard hoped to get more scholarly officers assigned to him in the future so that they might frequent the library at I Tatti and help supply the lack of intelligent conversation. Lady Sybil enjoyed fussing over her contingent of British officers who, she told Bernhard, hated to slaughter. Berenson countered that his Australians were not so highly evolved—that although they liked the Turks, "the sport of potting them was too tempting." Though one group of convalescent officers succeeded another in the villino, none of them provided intelligent talk. Once Bernhard even had a contingent in to dinner, but the patriotic chore palled on him and seems not to have pleased Amerigo, the new butler. The men sensed their host's lack of enthusiasm and they did not hesitate to let on to outsiders that they felt they had been insulted. They were nevertheless immensely impressed by the great collection of paintings and books at I Tatti, amazed that a private owner could have so many. In spite of the difficulties of wartime travel, Mary had insisted on visiting her family in England after her cure at Fiuggi. En route she stopped off in Paris for a few days at Edith Wharton's in the rue de Varenne and marveled at the vast extent of Edith's war relief activities. She also called on Henry Duveen and found him still jubilant over the business prospects of the firm, an optimism that Bernhard did not share. Because of his distrust of the firm, Berenson felt that there would be little room for him in their grandiose plans. The days passed pleasantly enough at I Tatti. It was a lovely summer, and after each day's work Berenson and Scott drove up into the hills in the Ford to stroll in the familiar paths through the umbrella pines. "Of course I ought to be moaning and groaning about the war," he told his mother. "But the world is too beautiful and work too interesting for that." The mood carried over into a letter to Mary in which he fell to musing sentimentally about his meeting with her at Bank Holiday time

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in A u g u s t 1890. " H a l f m y existence has g o n e b y since then. . . . E v e n n o w it is difficult to think o f m y life as separate f r o m y o u r s . . . . I l o v e y o u still, less g l a m o r o u s l y but so m u c h m o r e r e a l l y . " H e told her he had recently received a " g l o w i n g d e v o t e d " letter f r o m Belle G r e e n e t o o v o l u m i n o u s to send, w h i c h left h i m m y s t i f i e d b y her lapses into such l o n g silences. M a r y w a s all s y m p a t h y . She t h o u g h t it " r u d e and horrible to a d e g r e e selfish and i n h u m a n " n o t t o w r i t e letters, not understandable to us " w h o b e l o n g to the civilized class o f h u m a n i t y . " A "brilliant l e t t e r " f r o m E d i t h W h a r t o n reported that the ailing H e n r y James had c o m p l e t e d his expatriation b y b e c o m i n g a British s u b ject. B e r n h a r d could not resist passing o n to M a r y a p a r o d y o f the " L o s t L e a d e r " : " A l l f o r a m o u t h f u l o f drivel he left u s . " T h o u g h the G e r m a n s u b m a r i n e c a m p a i g n had b e g u n to take its toll o f transatlantic shipping, there w a s still little interruption o f the mails and f o r a t i m e n o military censorship o f letters. B e r e n s o n u r g e d his brother t o w r i t e freely. " T h i s is not G e r m a n y , " he exclaimed. " Y o u can say a n y thing y o u like, as indeed y o u can in E n g l a n d and F r a n c e . " H i s favorite, self-indulgent Senda, c o n t i n u e d to be rather e x i g e n t in her requests. H e s u g g e s t e d that i f she needed m o r e m o n e y she should m o r t g a g e her house and he w o u l d p a y the interest. She had also asked for a picture or t w o — a tender subject w i t h h i m , e x c e p t w h e n the recipient w a s Belle Greene, and he had assured her he had n o n e left, h a v i n g g o t " r i d o f o d d s and ends w h e n w e c a m e t o the final h a n g i n g . " T h e purse strings did relax s o m e w h a t and M a r y f o u n d r e n e w e d scope f o r her b e n e v o l e n t impulses. B e r n h a r d a d m o n i s h e d her, " O f course I ' m glad y o u h a v e g o t a little car for R a y but I m u s t w a r n y o u that it m u s t f o r m n o precedent either for herself o r for K a r i n . " A s for their o w n F o r d car at I Tatti, he reported that the Australian officers used it m o s t o f the time. H e w a s chagrined to learn o f his friend Z a n g w i l l ' s r e m a r k that " t h e w a r w a s j u s t as m u c h E n g l a n d ' s fault as G e r m a n y ' s . " A n unpleasant debate had been a v o i d e d w h e n A l y s " t a c t f u l l y p r o p o s e d a g a m e o f c r o q u e t . " T h e constant a n t i w a r talk M a r y w a s e x p o s e d to in E n g l a n d in the f a m i l y circle palled o n her. Feelings ran strong in her f a m i l y , for K a r i n and A d r i a n v e h e m e n t l y o p p o s e d the w a r and R a y and O l i v e r s u p p o r t e d it and w e r e e n g a g e d in w a r w o r k . N o r c o u l d Bertie Russell be i g n o r e d . H e had " a d o p t e d the G o s p e l o f Nonresistance as a mystical religion w h i c h he preaches w i t h apostolic v i g o u r . " A t I T a t t i w o r k o n the library w a s nearing c o m p l e t i o n and the villa b e g a n to take o n an a l m o s t palatial character. T h e estate still seemed vulnerable t o e n c r o a c h m e n t o n one side; and it w a s therefore w i t h m u c h satisfaction that B e r n h a r d i n f o r m e d M a r y that their fattore,

Ammanati,

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mately $12,000 at the then rate of exchange. With that purchase in view, he was disappointed to learn that Mary's share of the estate of her Aunt Lill (Elizabeth Smith) was less than he had counted on: like her brother and sister she was to receive $5,000 in cash and an equal sum in trust. Her income from all sources would then amount to about £1,200 a year. She suggested that Karin's promised wedding present of £500 should come from the cash legacy. Bernhard disagreed. " I am afraid if any of it falls into her hands now, she will spend some of it on the 'Stop the War, Pity the Blessed German lambs,' or kindred fads." And with his gorge rising he continued, "It is with Germany we have to deal, the most murderous, unscrupulous, barbarous, irreconcilable, unassimilable state entity the world has ever seen." B y the end of August Mary, weary of the pacifist debates and charmed by Bernhard's letters, confided, " I shall be so very glad to get back. What luck I have in having such a delightful companion to return to!" Bernhard was quite ready for her return. Though his frequent visits to Lady Sybil's had continued, her preoccupation with her contingent of highranking convalescent British officers had begun to bore him. Besides, having passed his fiftieth year, he was wryly noting the signs of aging. The grayness of his beard, he discovered one day while shaving, was not caused by dried lather as he had lightly assumed. In mid-September 1915 Mary returned with her maid Elizabeth to find Bernhard "quite angelic in temper" and happily engrossed in his manuscript. I Tatti bustled with Mary's war work. There was much need for felt slippers as the returning troop trains brought back their pitiful cargoes of wounded. The Italian armies had forced the lower passes of the Dolomites and had driven the Austrians back from the frontier to the line of the Isonzo; they had also seized and dug in on Mount Nero but at such a heavy cost that the losses were not published. In October the great attack on Mount Sabotino began as the wintry storms enveloped attackers and defenders in the frigid cold and snow. Wave after wave of Italian troops flung themselves in vain against the frozen cliffs that bristled with Austrian artillery, and it was not until the summer of 1916 that the mountain fortress was captured. On October 27 Berenson's old friend the forty-two-year-old Gaetano Salvemini spent a last evening with him before leaving for the front. A month later he was invalided home with frozen feet, having cried with pain for three weeks. T r y as he might, Berenson had not been able to ignore the urgencies of the war news in the newspapers that had brought their conflicting reports to him in all the languages of the belligerents. His relish of the Tuscan countryside during the year had often given way in his letters to his exasperation with the conduct of the Allies. He was disgusted with the [i99]

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way the French and English diplomats had botched matters in the Balkans so as to drive Bulgaria into the arms of the Entente. "I cried to heaven," he wrote, "almost as much as at the monstrous folly o f the first attack o f the Dardenelles." There was no diminution, however, in his loathing for Germany. The Teutonic spelling of his name so oppressed him that in the late summer of 1915 he decided to drop the " h " and give his name a French character. Henceforward he would be "Bernard." The alteration had Mary's enthusiastic approval and she began at once to practice the new spelling. " B . B . , " of course, continued to suffice for ordinary occasions. The transformation of Goethe's Germany, whose culture and literature was so much a part of Berenson, into an aggressive military machine preoccupied him. He read nothing but German history and memoirs. T o Barrett Wendell he wrote, "I want to understand how they became such obscene fiends in such a short time." The book that impressed him most was Jacques de Dampierre's scholarly study showing the sources of German imperialism and its tactics of terror in prewar German writings. He sent a copy of the just-published French edition to Henry Walters, w h o replied that though personally he would have preferred that the United States had declared war on Germany, he thought Berenson was mistaken in thinking that the people, in opposition to President Wilson, wanted it. T o Paul Sachs at the Fogg Museum, w h o also deplored American neutrality, he wrote, "Americanism has been to many of us, and not least to most of us expatriates, a religion almost more than patriotism. We should have declared our moral horror of Germany's doing at the very start and excommunicated her." The intellectual stimulus that the war had brought in its beginning had, he admitted to Elizabeth Cameron, long ago died away. Although he could not help reading the papers and discussing them, he did so with disgust for them and contempt for his own silliness. "Gnashing one's teeth in impotent rage is about the most distressing condition an unrcgenerate mortal can be reduced t o . " T o Barrett Wendell he put the matter in much the same way: "One's intellectual and spiritual interest in the war which at first had marked something like a mental and spiritual revival in all of us has exhausted itself. . . . The soldiers tell us they have long forgotten w h y they are fighting and almost whom. . . . They fight to w i n . " The articles that seemed to issue pell-meU from his pen offered the one sure escape from his sense of futility. " T h e Bellini" appeared in Art in America in December 1915; " T h e Autograph Paintings of Giovanni Bellini," in February 1916; and " M r . Frick's 'St. Francis,' " in April. In June he analyzed a Bellini recently acquired by John North Willys, the Toledo [200]

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motor magnate, whose collection was reputedly the largest in Ohio, and in the following December a Bellini recently acquired by Philip Lehman, of the New York banking firm. These last two articles were added to the series when Venetian Painting in America was published. Berenson also published during 1915 and 1916 an article on the Annunciation of Masolino in Art in America and six articles in the Rassegna d'Arte Antica e Modema on various paintings of the early Venetians, of which two on Carpaccio would be included in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Third Series. As 191$ drew to a close, Berenson looked back on its passage with a degree of complacence. "Except for some six weeks in May and June in the Abruzzi and Rome," ran his comment to Wendell, " I have not stirred. Despite the gloom and horror into which the newspapers plunge us each morning I have kept unusually well. . . . For a year I have lived an all but cloistered life. . . . M y secretary Geoffrey Scott was with me and we had long and almost adolescent talks." Then, turning to his writing, he continued, " I have been drowning care in hard work and have nearly ready the first volume of a study of Venetian painting. It is going to be perfectly unreadable, pure pedantry. This war has given me such a horror of 'ideas' that I will never indulge in them again, at least not in print." The "horror" of course passed with the war, and a compelling need to indulge in "ideas" colored his writing for the rest of his life.

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O R T U N A T E L Y for Berenson's writing during 1916 he was not greatly harassed by the Duveens or other art dealers. Early in the year when he was asked by the London solicitors of the Duveen firm for copies of his original "certificates" to help settle a legal dispute among the Duveen partners, he impatiently replied that he had none and that they, being "business people, which I am not," should "have all the machinery for keeping their documents filed and indexed." During the course of the year twenty-nine letters and cables from Louis Duveen reminded him of the irksome responsibilities for which he begrudged the time, though the firm reduced its debt to him by very considerable remittances. Mostly he was asked simply to confirm an attribution or to give a valuation of a painting the firm wished to purchase. When, for example, he was sent a photograph of Lord Weymss's Lorenzo di Credi, he urged its purchase. In another communication he acknowledged that he liked a "Filippo Lippi" but he "denied its being autograph." When asked what price ought to be paid for a group of Baron Arthur de Schickler's paintings, he cabled, "Would pay £20,000 for Verrocchio, £8 for Alvise, £4 for Pintoricchio, £6 for Antonello." Early in the year he got wind of a fine Piero della Francesca from one of his correspondents and suggested it be offered to Mrs. Gardner or to Frick. Mrs. Gardner resisted Joe's glowing blandishments, and the painting ultimately reached the Frick Collection. At the beginning of 1916 Mary had hastened to England to manage things for her daughter Karin, who was expecting her first child. Bernard had protested the interruption and its implications for the future: " I wish her well and with all my heart I want you to do what you think best. O n the other hand, it is rather difficult for me to return and stay at I Tatti with a new cook and nobody to help me out in my work. Should

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your absences tend to grow more frequent, I should, I fear, be sorely tempted to chuck the whole business, which as a business, sometimes becomes intolerable, and which I certainly should not carry on either for myself or by myself. I hope it will not come to this." His mood, as so often before, changed as he grew accustomed to Mary's absence. For a respite he ran down to Rome, and once in the Vatican galleries petty concerns dropped away. In the Stanza della Segnatura he raptly studied Raphael's paintings, "particularly as color, which seemed to me ever so much finer than I used to think." Taken about to dealers by his friend Count Pasolini, he discovered a bust that he liked better than one he had thought of recommending to Henry Walters and he countermanded the letter he had asked Mary to forward to Baltimore. When Aristide Briand and his associates, in Rome for a high-level conference, came to Berenson's hotel, he "enjoyed seeing those French rulers come in, slouch-hatted and creased-coated, and making no pretense, as we Americans always do when official, of being if not great feudal lords, at least tremendous patricians." He met Paul Claudel, a leading French diplomat and Catholic poet, "simple, cordial, and charming," and talked with his military aide, who told him of the atrocities in Belgium and how "systematic they had been." One forenoon he encountered Corrado Ricci, "looking aged and diabolic," and vehemently rhetorical about the Austrian attack "on his dear Ravenna." Ricci was keen on excavating the ancient imperial forums. " I naturally encouraged him about digging, for I believe that Italy should spend every available centime of her art budget on that." Karin's baby arrived, and Mary delightedly reported it was a girl, "Thank G o d . " As usual she regaled Bernard with her daily budget of gossip. Trevy, their poet friend, " w h o they say is perfectly mad . . . wants to give in to the Germans at every point. He says every man who enlists is a 'skunk.' " Henry James seemed strong but his mind was going. Lady Ottoline had thrown over Bertie Russell " f o r a young writer named Lawrence, whose novel The Rainbow has been suppressed by the censor, greatly to the indignation ofthat ass Philip Morrell." She finally tore herself loose from the nursery and on her way home stopped off at Paris, where Bernard commissioned her to pick up three Chinese paintings that he had bought two years before. The two were soon working amicably together and were rejoined by Scott, who had been temporarily detached to assist Edith Wharton in her labors. Word came that Herbert Home, w h o m Berenson had come to regard as a traitorous friend, was dying in his austere palazzo in the Via de' Benci. Mary went to see him, and he asked her to tell " B . B . " that "he should not take it amiss if he, too, had wanted to 'play the game' and [203]

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have some rewards, where B . B . had such success," and he asked to see him before he died. Touched by the message, Berenson went down to his bedside. "We talked of the many years that we were intimate," he told Johnson, "and how sweet they were." Home died the day after Berenson's visit. Mary, remembering that it was Home's collaboration with Roger Fry that had led to the break with both men, wrote to Fry after Home's death, wondering "whether you and B . B . couldn't be friendly again. . . . You still have so much in common." Fry responded directly to " M y dear B . B . , " explaining that Mary had told him all about Home's death "and how you and he were reconciled at last. . . . It seems absurd that for want of a little insight we should deprive ourselves of the pleasure we should both get from talking together. So let us try to meet again in some leisurely way as soon as this infernal war which separates and destroys all is once over." Berenson answered in friendly fashion but with a degree of unforgiving self-righteousness: "Dear Roger," he wrote, "With all my heart, and now let me tell you something. Years before I ceased seeing Home, I knew perfectly well what he was, for evil as well as for good. I stopped seeing him for that one and only reason, that I suspected him of having with his subtle, violent cunning managed to estrange you from me. . . . It was like a wound that would not heal. I hope we have not run out of possible contact with each other in the intervening years. There is left in all this the possibility of much affection and the revival of many delightful memories." Bernard showed his reply to Mary before mailing it. It filled her with some misgivings, and she hastened to supply a long gloss to Fry a few days later, recounting that when Trevy or someone else told Bernard "that Home had put you against him he had been so hurt that he said he would never go near Home again. You were a necessary part of his imaginative life . . . even if chiefly as an irritant." Her letter continued: B y this time I think I really know the ins and outs of B.B.'s character. At the bottom of everything is a curious lonely wish to be loved. It acts just the wrong way, often, making him very suspicious of not being loved. . . . On the other hand, when he feels people do like him, he becomes very genial and winning and gives himself unreservedly. . . . However, there are several other thorns to his nature. One of them is a great recklessness of statement about things where he doesn't feel responsible (combined with an utter unscrupulousness if it comes to argument), while at the same time holding himself and everybody else to strict account on subjects he really does know (or thinks he knows) about. . . . That is the secret of his "touchiness" about attributions. . . . Another thing which imposes on ladies and drives men to thoughts of murder is his occasional manner

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of seeming to think himself omniscient. To us who know him this manner is merely funny because he is so winningly ready at other times to confess and even point out his follies. But in renewing friendly relations with him there's the chance that he may sometimes drive you wild that way. . . . I have just thought it wise to warn you of the difficulties. It was not a letter that she could show to her husband, yet its patronizing tenor must have often been dinned into his ears throughout the enduring truce of their marriage. In her desire to manage affairs she seems once again to have overreached herself, for the two men drifted even further apart. But though Berenson may have distrusted Fry, he did not withhold praise when he thought it due. In his Venetian Painting in America he wrote in reference to Fry's note in the Metropolitan Bulletin on a Madonna and Child by Bartolomeo Montagna, "It would not be easy to point to a short article on a newly discovered picture that is more appreciative, better informed and more delightful." During the spring and summer of 1916 there was no slackening in the pace of Berenson's literary activities. Frederick Sherman was readying the articles which had appeared in Art in America to serve as the core of Berenson's book Venetian Painting in America, and the George Bell C o m pany in London was preparing to publish The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Third Series. Much of Berenson's time was therefore taken up in 1916 with both projects. He was also at work on a lengthy and thoroughly "destructive" article on the work of Leonardo da Vinci for inclusion in the Third Series. " I am fearfully busy, writing, correcting and revising the two books I am getting out," Bernard wrote his brother in July. He did not, however, forget the family in Boston, who were moving to a new address. T o Abie, who was a kind of major-domo, he sent $1,000 to "help pay for moving and furnishing" and to his mother and Bessie another $250 for a vacation. He also arranged to pay for a piece of land and a house at Northampton for Senda and her husband, prompting Mary to remark to her sister that when the time came she could ask the same for Ray and for Karin. Mary was persuaded to give up her summer visit to England in exchange for a few weeks at a cure in Switzerland with Karin and the new grandchild. With all work on his two books finally completed and the proofsheets out of the way, the whole strangely linked menage—Bernard and Mary, Scott and Sybil—retreated to the seashore at Marina di Massa north of Pisa to sun and bathe. Peace was shattered when Karin wrote asking for £500 in order to take over a dairy farm to produce milk for babies as an alternative to war service. Berenson erupted, "uttering bestialities," but after he subsided he agreed to give her the wedding present he had [205]

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p r o m i s e d and also t o invest half o f a further s u m he o w e d her, p r e s u m ably f r o m her aunt Lill's inheritance. His annual a l l o w a n c e to her o f £200 remained unscathed in spite o f his dislike o f her pacifism. W i t h i n a year K a r i n and her husband d i s c o v e r e d they had n o calling for dairy f a r m i n g and they w e r e a l l o w e d to expiate their pacifism as simple farmers. R e f l e c t i n g o n B e r e n s o n ' s volatile e m o t i o n s , w h i l e they w e r e all at the seashore, M a r y w o n d e r e d w h e t h e r it w a s his not b e i n g " a n

Anglo-

S a x o n " that m a d e h i m so different " f r o m all the rest o f us. H e is really difficult. E v e n S y b i l feels it acutely. She and G e o f f r e y and I seem to understand each other at o n c e and B . B . enters as a foreign element w i t h claims and d e m a n d s and desires n o n e o f us can understand o r s y m p a t h i z e w i t h . . . . B u t he is so nice and interesting and delightful, it's a pity he is a 'foreigner.' " T o B e r n a r d ' s great a n n o y a n c e , M a r y p r o p o s e d to visit her f a m i l y in E n g l a n d rather than to g o w i t h h i m to Paris for a f e w w e e k s as he u r g e d . A t o n c e a t u g o f w a r b e g a n . " M a r y , " he said, "I'll g i v e up the w h o l e thing and stay here till the w a r is o v e r i f y o u w i l l do the s a m e . " She had n o interest in the bargain, f o r her little granddaughter Barbara, o n w h o m she doted, needed an operation and her daughter R a y w a s close to c o n f i n e m e n t w i t h another child. H e c l u n g to her " t r e m e n d o u s l y , " she told A l y s , " a n d can't bear m y travelling in w a r t i m e ! " A n d y e t " e v e r y fibre in m y b e i n g drags m e back to R a y in her trial." Bernard, w h o said he w o u l d like t o spend a year in Eastern travel, complained, " H o w can I w i t h a s q u a w w h o needs to run back to her papooses e v e r y

four

months?" L i k e a prisoner in a cell she plotted means o f escape. " I j u s t m u s t c o m e . I m e a n to start o n the tenth [of O c t o b e r ] , " she w r o t e , t h o u g h she had not yet b r o k e n the n e w s to Bernard. She w o n her "final g r a p p l e " and rej o i c e d that she w o u l d get to E n g l a n d in time for the birth. It turned o u t there w a s n o need f o r haste. F i v e w e e k s later she w r o t e to Bernard in Paris. " R a y is so ashamed o f her delay and sends m a n y apologies to thee. She has d o n e all she c o u l d — h o t baths, n i g h t and m o r n i n g , etc., etc., and still the reluctant infant refuses t o enter the w o r l d . " T h e infant, o f the " i n f e r i o r " sex, fortunately m a d e his entrance a f e w days later. A f t e r the l o n g isolation in Italy, B e r e n s o n rejoined his circle in Paris w i t h the liveliest relish. E d i t h W h a r t o n , drained o f e n e r g y b y her w a r w o r k , had eagerly awaited his r e v i v i n g presence. " I l o n g and thirst for o u r talks and w a l k s , " she w r o t e , " a n d refuse to decline into old age w i t h o u t a last halt o n a hilltop in the sunset w i t h y o u . " Settled once again in the l u x u r y o f the Ritz, Bernard w r o t e daily to M a r y o f life scarcely t o u c h e d b y the privations o f w a r . F r o m the Villa M e d i c i the bereft L a d y S y b i l lamented, " I fear y o u h a v e practically decided to stay in P a r i s . " [206]

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Berenson's days passed in the usual run of fashionable dinners and luncheons, but he prized most the hospitality of Edith Wharton in the rue de Varenne, even though there Paul Bourget, Walter Berry, and the rotund Abbe Mugnier, vicar to the haute monde of Sainte Clothilde, talked much of the fearful losses on both sides in the battles of the Somme. The Abbe spoke pessimistically about the seemingly inexhaustible forces the Germans could still draw on thanks to the prevision of great leaders like Bismarck, w h o m Berenson had to agree was "the most wonderful intelligence known to history." At Walter Berry's there turned up a "queer fish" w h o m Berenson had not seen for years: "Finally and portentously, there was Bob Herrick. His mouth was smaller and the rest of his face rounder, and quite grey. He looked disapproving, contemptuous, hating and when he talked, it was drily and coldly." Herrick had come to Paris as the foreign correspondent of the Chicago Tribune. Though he was an ardent supporter of the Allies and had in his recent "Recantation of a Pacifist" in the New Republic declared that "War is a great developer as well as a destroyer of life," he was opposed to American intervention and his opposition must have had a chilling effect upon his auditors. Berenson had his first encounter at Salomon Reinach's with the slimwaisted and seductive young lesbian Natalie Barney, whose "physical radiance" drew him into a long and sexually frustrating friendship. Reinach had once said, "Surely 'the wild girl from Cincinnati' and the 'sauvage du Danube' were meant to meet!" Reinach's amusing labels for the pair may have been rather fanciful, but after all he had seen Berenson through the lovesick months of his infatuation with Belle Greene and was no stranger to his other romantic attachments. A rich expatriate American whose unconventional love poetry gave her the sobriquet of "Amazon of Letters," Natalie Barney had established a fashionable literary salon in the rue Jacob with a Doric temple in a corner of the garden dedicated " Α Γ Amitie." T h e roster of habitues and visitors came to include all the brightest names in Paris, from Cocteau and Colette to Gertrude Stein and Rilke. She relished the conversation of scholars like the classicist Reinach, the Orientalist Joseph Mardrus, and the art critic Berenson, her chameleon wit keeping serious thought afloat. In her memoirs she recalled the meeting with Berenson as "one of those lightning bolts of friendship. . . . From then on we remained fidelement et tendrement attached to one another." To the American colony in Paris the most worrisome matter at the moment was the possible reelection of President Wilson, who was seen as a staunch supporter of neutrality. When the Republican candidate, Charles Evans Hughes, went down to defeat, Walter Berry exploded to [207]

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Berenson, "G d d η it all to Η 1, four more caterpillar years as they might have said in Egypt in plague time." There was also the disturbing appointment of Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, confirmed by the Senate in May 1916 after a long and bitter controversy. A Jew and an active Zionist, Brandeis was a Boston lawyer who was regarded by many in the business community as a radical reformer. His egalitarian philosophy worried Berenson and he therefore put the question to O t t o Kahn. Kahn reassured him: " O n the whole, I believe that the forebodings which Mr. Brandeis's appointment . . . has aroused in some quarters will not be realized." He thought, however, that the appointment "at this particular juncture" was open to serious "criticism" as a merely political move to win the Jewish vote. Berenson's concern about American politics soon gave way to more pressing personal matters. For some time he had known that Belle Greene was planning to come to Europe. Mary had concluded that that was the real reason Bernard had decided to go to Paris. However, when Belle wired him that she was in London and invited him to come over, he declined. He cited the difficulties of getting permission to travel, but a more compelling reason was that he did not fancy sharing her with the troop of sycophants w h o n o w thronged about her as the potent agent of the Morgan Estate. He was sure, he wrote Mary, that "her head will be turned." There may also have come to him gossip of her romantic attachment to an Englishman. N o r did he invite her to join him in Paris, where he felt most at home. Her kind of "High Life" seemed less attractive to him n o w that he had discovered the allurements of Natalie Barney's salon in the rue Jacob and felt himself falling under the mysterious spell of that extraordinary creature. Bernard's show of indifference to Belle alarmed Mary. The Duveens, she wrote, would be "endlessly grateful to thee if thee could detach Belle from Jacques Seligmann and make her more friendly to them. . . . If she is a faithful ally to thee she could help thee a lot, I fancy; but it is clearly impossible to do anything with her by letter." She was sure that Bernard "could pull wires and get across very comfortably," and if he did not go she thought that Belle "might really turn against" him and do him "a lot of harm." He doubted that it was worthwhile to try to please Joe. He "encourages every vile plotter against me and would drop me like a hot potato the moment he did not need m e . " Louis Duveen showed up in Paris to talk with Berenson about his tyrannical brother. Joe was "a vulgar, impulsive bully" w h o ran them all, and Louis said he intended to leave the firm next May. The interview left Bernard with a bad taste in the mouth for "Duveen and business and the struggle for things." "I cannot tell y o u , " he fretted to Mary, "what [208]

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loathing all that part of my past and present inspires me with." He doubted that even she realized "how much of life is scarred and fouled by that connection." With Joe and Louis at loggerheads, Berenson grew increasingly concerned to lessen his dependence on the Duveens. Arthur Sulley was a London dealer whom he respected, and he urged Mary to examine one of his pictures "and be as nice and sympathetic about his daughter as you can." He also commissioned her to urge Dowdeswell to buy their Giovanni di Paolo, which Louis had agreed was worth £1,500. It was a picture the Berensons had bought from Lady Henry. "Please do what you can, for money is more not less valuable in a time like this." Concerned about their finances, Mary proposed that they go to America for a few months as he had originally urged. "Going together I shouldn't so much mind it. But we mustn't put the ocean between us." Bernard objected that though his presence in America might be "very profitable . . . I fear it would lead to my becoming totally a dealer or to a bad smash. . . . I doubt that even a severe retrenchment would move me from my determination to get no deeper into the dealing world. For me it is hell." A week later, after a "horrid morning with Louis Duveen" listening to his complaints about his partners, he nevertheless supposed that "the best on the whole is to stick to them. We'll pull through somehow." By the end of November 1916 Mary had got her daughter through the early days of baby Christopher and had obtained a nurse for her granddaughter Barbara, Ray being too busy with public work "on a small income" to attend to that chore. After some difficulties with the American consul in London about her visa, she finally rejoined Bernard in Paris about the first of December to start out with him on a three-week holiday in neutral Spain with Count Serristori's sister Sophie. For Bernard it was a relief to escape the pressures at the Duveen offices and the grim wartime aspects of Paris, where unending streams of wounded were arriving every day from the front. For Mary the journey provided her first view of the Italian treasures of the Prado. Day after day they returned to the museum, where, as Mary recounted to Alys, "B.B. pores and pores over each picture asking himself aloud of each detail how he would know it was by the painter if it was isolated from the rest of the picture." Berenson may well have felt that the Spanish holiday had been earned. His two books were to come out simultaneously in the United States and in England before the end of the year. A letter from Sherman caught up with him in Madrid: "It is hard for me to find a word fine enough to express my gratitude to you for allowing me to publish so much of the work in Art in America without expense." [209]

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B y the first of the new year Bernard and Mary were back at the Ritz, and within a dozen hours he had signed up for a solid succession of luncheons, teas, and dinners for the next few weeks. The sordid necessities of business with the Duveens and other dealers could be relegated to the interstices. For Mary the social carnival that followed wearied her flesh, especially because of the exhausting seances at the dressmaker's trying to fit her corsetted amplitude into the latest fashions. She marveled at Bernard's social agility and wryly jested, " H e spreads his leaden wings and flits from flower to flower." Bernard was in his element in the high life of Paris with its kaleidoscope of personalities and sophisticated talk, liking it "the way he likes pictures, instinctively." Few dinners glittered more delightfully for him than those at the Baroness Rosa FitzJames's. Mary found them overpowering but conceded that Bernard had a certain genius for making new friends whom she liked to see afterward. When in mid-January 1 9 1 7 they packed for a trip south to visit the Curtises at the Villa Sylvia, Mary recorded that " B . B . has had a succes fou here, especially among the semi-Apaches and very fashionable young w o m e n . " Following the brief visit with Ralph Curtis on the Riviera— "the last of the boulevardiers," Bernard called him—the Berensons settled down again at I Tatti late in January. T o Dan Fellows Piatt in America he described his three months' absence in Paris and Madrid as "a perfectly elegant time." As always when writing to friends, he completely erased from consciousness the penance he was obliged to pay to the art trade for his "elegant time." At the very moment he was trying to bring off one of the most spectacular transactions of his career. The previous October, while still in London, he had learned from the art dealer Arthur Sulley that he expected to acquire the famous Giovanni Bellini Bacchanal (The Feast of the Gods) from the duke of Northumberland. Berenson had once mistakenly attributed it to Basaiti. In a footnote to his just-published Venetian Painting in America he referred to it as "Bellini's own unfinished creation . . . which Titian did not disdain to complete." As for his earlier attribution to Basaiti, he acknowledged, " I alone was guilty of this act of f o l l y . " Berenson had promptly written to Mrs. Gardner and whetted her curiosity by telling her "in confidence" that an extraordinary painting to crown her collection might come on the market for $600,000. On his return from Madrid he alluded to the "great secret," saying he was writing to the owner " f o r permission to divulge i t . " A week later he broke the news that the painting was "the world-renowned masterpiece" The Bacchanal by Bellini. It could be hers for half a million dollars. In page after page he eloquently lauded "the greatest creation of Italian

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painting." Mary, at his command, followed with an equally enthusiastic panegyric and enclosed photographs supplied by Sulley. In the course of his exhortation Berenson expressed the wish that "Dearest Isabella" might have made "heaps of money in the manufacture of arms and ammunition" thus doing "a holy deed in helping to destroy Will-Hell-me [the Kaiser] and all his hosts." She declared the staggering price for The Bacchanal was out of her reach; moreover, she would have no stock in "blood money," though it was indeed true that munitions makers were "rolling in billions." In spite of her obvious yearning for the painting, she was obliged to decline. She lamented, no doubt with her usual exaggeration, that she was down to a "dwindling nest egg of $300,000." Berenson, however, was not finished with The Bacchanal. He would try again with another client four years later.

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Venetians Kestudied and Leonardo Oethroned BERENSON'S

Venetian Painting in America: The Fifteenth Century was his first important work since The North Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Though "nominally about Venetian pictures in America," it was, as he confided to Barrett Wendell, really "a re-study of the history of Venetian painting." He had returned to the subject, he said, with a fresh eye, and the result was "disastrous" to his youthful conclusions. He was, however, unrepentant: " I had my fun then and I have it again n o w . " At times, excited by the war news, he had been tempted to burst into print in imitation of H. G. Wells and Arnold Bennett & Company, but he had remembered Wendell's counsel to "stick to my last. . . God knows it was hard, for nothing has so absorbed me as this war. And so, mindful of your advice I began this book." Nearly two-thirds of the contents of the substantial volume formed a kind of supplement to the eight articles reprinted from Art in America. In the ampler pages of the book he was able to use the magazine articles as points of departure for discussions of many subordinate figures in smaller American collections, all illustrated by n o pages of half-tone reproductions. The preface, dated July 1916, stressed the intensely personal character of his observations: " I have made the stray pictures in our collections the pretext for saying what I wanted to say about their authors in general. . . . In some ways this form suits me as it suited my master, Giovanni Morelli. Like him . . . I prefer to avoid such systematic treatment as entails dealing with materials either at second hand, or out of dimmed and attenuated recollection." If he avoided the rigors of a systematic treatment of the interrelations of the painters, their followers, and imitators, he did strive to establish the place of each artist in the historical chronology of the fifteenth century. "It is my conviction that we shall make little progress in knowing or understanding Venetian

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painting in the fifteenth century until we have established chronology on a sound basis," he wrote in discussing Winthrop's Belliniesque Madonna. "I am appalled when I think of the nonsense that for so many years has been written and spoken regarding Venetian art, and the more so, as I myself have been one of the worst sinners." For him the process of revision of attributions was ongoing and perpetual, and an attribution or a date, however positively asserted, could be only provisional. The art critic and historian had a freedom that the art trade usually denied to the professional expert. Berenson not only corrected some of his "youthful conclusions," he also tackled the more mature ones of other critics in the field. For example, in his analysis of Henry Flick's St. Francis he wrote: "According to Mr. Fry this most noble work is not by Bellini at all but by Marco Basaiti. Mr. Fry surely would not have fallen into this error had he considered the chronology of this w o r k . " He also warned against the "attributions, estimates, or conclusions" of the "archivist" Dr. Gustav Ludwig and his associate Pompeo Gherardo Molmenti, "not that they are infallibly untrustworthy; but nearly so." The book touched a sensitive nerve of British critics, for, as one of them put it, "many of the works" considered in the volume "were once the glory of English collections." Reviewers, though respectful, did not hesitate to set forth points of disagreement. The London Times, cautioning that all previous efforts to provide a historical sequence for the Venetians had been unsuccessful, questioned whether Berenson had fully settled the matter. In his Lotto twenty years earlier, he had attempted a reconstruction of the period around Alvise Vivarini; " n o w Alvise is summarily, and we think wisely dethroned and a new edifice is erected in which Antonello da Messina and Giovanni Bellini assume prominence." But though the new edifice seemed rather illusory, the book had the value of "presenting a familiar subject from an entirely fresh point of view," and because of "its speculative character" the book was "packed with matter for critical controversy." Venetian Painting received more appreciative treatment in America. Art and Archaeology declared that "the scholar will see in it a brilliant study of the whole development of quatrocento art in Venice." Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., in an enthusiastic anonymous review in the Nation predicted that readers of " M r . Berenson's articles on Early Venetians in American Collections in Art in America will be delighted to have the series somewhat amplified and in book form. O f his attractive task Mr. Berenson has made a joyous adventure writing always with the gusto of liking and misliking. The obvious importance of the book lies in the display of the surprising richness in America in Early Venetian paintη ing. [213]

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Berenson's companion volume, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, came out in England just after the turn of the year, the American publication following in May 1917. The provocative lead essay on Leonardo da Vinci, which he had written almost a year earlier, had no relation to the remaining six pieces, which continued the discussion of Venetian painting. These were, he deprecated, mere "studies in what one may call the casuistry of chronology." In his brief preface he justified including the da Vinci essay on the ground that it "may interest the general reader." A destructive reevaluation of Leonardo, the piece was more likely to infuriate than interest him. It reflected Berenson's violent revulsion against the outpouring of sentimental idolatry which had deified Leonardo following the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1 9 1 1 and its recovery two years later. As the most famous painting in the world the Mona Lisa had become an international fetish along with The Last Supper in Milan, which in its ruinous state continued to inspire ecstasies of indiscriminate piety. Berenson had not been the only one to experience a "fierce reaction against the 'legend' " of Leonardo. D'Annunzio had been reported as feeling "satiety and disgust" with the lavish homage being paid to him. And a French painter, Orthon Friecz, confessed the Mona Lisa's "artificial and dreary smile" had ceased to be attractive. Leonardo's admirers had been quick to answer such attacks. It may have been something of a last straw to Berenson to read Sir Lionel Cust's pious advice in the October 1915 Burlington: "Whenever Mona Lisa shall re-appear to smile upon her votaries in Paris, let her be accepted as the harbinger of a new era in criticism when it shall be a nobler duty to maintain and add to the worth of a great work of art, than to undermine and belittle it." A little earlier Berenson's friend Herbert Cook had published a defensive article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts on the "charme particulier" of the Benois Madonna and the works of the young Leonardo in which he asked, " D o n ' t we run the risk, as a result of much research and over-subtle analysis, of reducing Leonardo to a shadow of himself?" Among the paintings that Cook welcomed to the Leonardo canon was Ginevra de' Bend, which, he wrote, "Morelli, followed by my friend Berenson," had given to Verrocchio. It was not until 1932 that Berenson put aside his doubts and attributed the painting to Leonardo. Berenson's essay was an extraordinary confession of aesthetic error, of how he had been taken in by the Leonardo cult and taught to admire the icon paintings of its worship. " A s a b o y , " he wrote, he "felt a repulsion for Leonardo's 'Last Supper.' The faces were uncanny, their expressions forced, their agitation alarmed me. They were the faces of people whose existence made the world less pleasant and certainly less safe." He re[214]

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membered feeling that the figures were too big "and that there were too many of them in the r o o m . " Forty years of experience had gone by and he had gazed endlessly at the painting, "eager to let it hypnotize me if it could." He had tried to find in it "all that the rhetoricians persuaded me they had felt; and I dare say I, too, ended in speaking in tongues." Yet he could not ignore the ugly details. "What a pack of vehement, gesticulating, noisy foreigners they are, with faces far from pleasant, some positively criminal, some conspirators, and others having no business there. But I never dared say it out loud." Later when he beheld the Mona Lisa in the Salon Carre, "breathing its lifeless air, with the nasty smell of fresh paint in my nostrils, occasionally stealing a moment's rest on the high stool of an absent copyist," he tried to match what he "really was seeing and feeling · . . with the famous passage of Walter Pater." Reality could not be withstood, and "an enchanted adept died in me when I ceased listening and reading and began to see and taste. What I really saw in the figure of 'Mona Lisa' was the estranging image of a woman beyond the reach of my sympathies . . . a foreigner with a look I could not fathom, watchful, sly, secure . . . and [with a] pervading air of superiority. And against this testimony of my instincts nothing could prevail." B y degrees, however, he learned to revel in its mysterious landscape, its "conscious art," its bold and large conception, and its imposing simplicity, and he joined his voice "to the secular chorus of praise." Had he not written in his Florentine Painters of the Renaissance as long ago as 1896, " W e shall seek in vain for tactile values so stimulating and convincing as those of his 'Mona Lisa' "? But his lingering doubts would not die. When the rumor reached him one summer's day in the high Alps that the painting had been stolen, his suppressed feelings were released. "She had simply become an incubus, and I was glad to be rid of her. But I did not dare even then. Who was I to lift up my feeble voice against the organ resonances of the centuries?" There were other works attributed to Leonardo about which he had misgivings, "objects of worship in the imaginary temple of Leonardo." The face of Saint John "leered" at him with an exaggeration of all that had repelled him in the Mona Lisa and in the St. Anne. He could not conceive " w h y this fleshy female should pretend to be the virile sundried Baptist, half starved in the wilderness. And why did it smirk and point up and touch its breasts?" On the other hand, his "whole heart went out to the portrait of the girl known as 'La Belle Ferroniere.' I was on my own level again, in my own world, in the presence of this fascinating but yet simple countenance with its look of fresh wonder." In his uncertainty he had assimilated it to BoltrafFio because it was more like Leonardo's imitators than like Leonardo himself. For a time " I resented [215]

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this beautiful thing because I could not name its author. . . . I fear, however, that in discussing Leonardo we cannot safely count her as his. But whose in all the world if not his, and if his, in no matter how limited a sense, in what moment of his career could he have created her?" It was a question that he would be summoned to answer—yea or nay—in 1923 in the sensational lawsuit brought against the Duveens by Mrs. Harry Hahn. All of his "doubts, questionings, and spiritual combats might have remained confined to his breast," Berenson continued, "but one unhappy day I was called upon to see the 'Benois Madonna' [a picture that had turned up in Russia some few years earlier]. I found myself confronted by a young woman with a bald forehead and puffed cheek, a toothless smile, blear eyes, and furrowed throat. The uncanny anile apparition plays with a child who looks like a hollow mask fixed on inflated body and limbs. The hands are wretched, the folds purposeless and fussy, the colour like whey. And yet I had to acknowledge that this painful affair was the work of Leonardo da Vinci. It was hard, but the effort freed me, and the indignation I felt gave me the resolution to proclaim my freedom." Why then had Leonardo been so highly admired through the centuries? Berenson thought it was owing to his invention of two painterly formulas—chiaroscuro, the creation of illusion through light and shade of vanishing planes, and contrapposto, counterpoise, or the twisting of the human body on its own axis—which had been made into dogmas in the teaching and practice of art. Leonardo's failures stemmed from his "over-intellectualism." His "absorption in the science of his craft ruined the artist" and was responsible for the "contrast between his spontaneous genius, as manifested in his drawings, and the quality of most of his highly elaborated paintings." "Florentine art tended to be overintellectual, and ofthat tendency Leonardo was the fullest exponent." "The ultimate aim of art is ecstasy," Berenson asserted, "and any diversion that prevents our reaching that state is bad." Leonardo misused his cherished formulas and sacrificed to them the aesthetic moment. Only one of his paintings was "a truly great masterpiece," the happily unfinished Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi, and "had he completed it he might have ruined it as he did the Hermitage 'Madonna.' " It was unlikely, he concluded, that Leonardo would maintain his standing as one of the supremely great painters. Berenson let stand his original praise of Leonardo in all the reprintings of The Florentine Painters, but he appears never to have recanted the vehement polemic against the merits of his paintings. When Edith Wharton received her copy of the Studies, she wrote, " I [216]

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must dash off a word of gratitude and rejoicing, for on the very first page I find an 'execution' o f ' T h e Last Supper.' Ever since I first saw it (at 17) I've wanted to bash that picture's face, and now, now at last, the most authorized fist in the world has done the j o b for me. Hooray!!!" Later she wrote from war-diminished Paris, "The only cheerful thing that has happened here is your Leonardo. Walter [Berry], Charley [Du Bos], and [Paul] Bourget and I are licking our chilly chops over it. . . . It's splendid and such a glorious sample of the big book you promised me to write. . . . H o w I wish you were here that I might gloat with you successively over each admirable point. . . . The way your mind dominates your erudition and takes a right view of the whole matter makes me feel as if I were sitting over a good fire." Edith Wharton's violent image had its counterpart in the press. The Literary Digest quoted at length f r o m the essay and from a review in the Boston Transcript which declared that Berenson had "torpedoed Leonardo . . . without warning and sent him to the b o t t o m . " Current Opinion in N e w York saw the iconoclastic essay as "a sensational reevaluation of Leonardo's position" and quoted key passages from the "brilliantly based attack." The most favorable review was the one in the London Connoisseur. " M r . Bernard Berenson," the writer declared, "is among the few erudite critics on art whose writings display a marked and distinctive personality. . . . Though one does not see eye to eye with Mr. Berenson in his suggestion of the causes which lead to Leonardo's unique position in art, one must agree with most of his searching and discriminating criticism regarding his w o r k . " Earnest defenders of Leonardo were not lacking. The London Times accused Berenson of trying to strike "a popular note" in joining the current avant-garde rebellion against traditional values when he argued that "science, logic, and attention to technical problems are ruinous to the artist." The writer resented the depreciation of The Last Supper, which he called "for all time the recognized illustration of the Sacrament of the Eucharist." As for the remaining six essays, they reflected the spurious "reconstruction of Venetian painting to which Professor Venturi and Mr. Berenson have set themselves and by which incidentally a good many second-rate pictures in American private collections are acquiring first-rate names." The International Studio expressed its disapproval of the Leonardo essay with energetic brevity. "The author admits such want of sympathy with a certain phase of Leonardo da Vinci's work as is generally considered to place a critic's estimate out of court." The Nation also took issue with Berenson. Although "inclined to agree . . . that Leonardo has been overestimated, we by no means share the individual appreciations or depreciations upon which Mr. Berenson's view is [217]

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based. T o him 'The Last Supper' is restless in a sinister way, to us it is a tranquilizing masterpiece." Despite such protests, Berenson's disenchantment with Leonardo's paintings, especially with the Mona Lisa, helped inspire a vogue in "smart connoisseur circles" epitomized by Marcel Duchamp's mustached caricature of the enigmatic lady. In the long run, however, the attacks have not lessened the enormous critical interest in Leonardo's genius nor weakened the magnetism of his few paintings upon the popular imagination. The enshrinement of the Ginevra de' Bend in 1967 in the National Gallery in Washington at a reputed cost of six million dollars would suggest that Berenson's pessimism was premature.

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E R E N S O N ' S wartime isolation at I Tatti troubled h i m — h e felt tongue-tied for want o f auditors—yet he could not return to Paris because it was no place for M a r y . In the absence of G e o f frey Scott, w h o was n o w an attache at the British embassy in R o m e , she too was bored. Berenson continued to pay Scott his salary of £75 a quarter, despite his annoyance with M a r y ' s obsessive interest in him. Cecil Pinsent, w h o had joined the Red C r o s s , had been "kicking his heels" in Florence and involving the Berensons in ever-increasing expenditures f o r improvements. When he finally obtained the command o f a Red Cross section on the Italian front, Berenson supplied him with an x ray ambulance. Running the large villa and the surrounding farms became more difficult as servants were called up for the army. Ammanati, their fattore, was fortunately exempt, having a son at the front. M a r y at times felt the place beyond her ability to handle. As she pointed out, it was also a library-museum and the many thousands o f books were a prey to larvae and the masses o f photographs to fungus. Besides, great bundles o f books came f r o m the binders, "half-bound and all in a m u d d l e . " S o m e times, himself o v e r w h e l m e d b y the threatening chaos, Berenson w o u l d exclaim in despair that he w o u l d "cut and r u n " ; then the next m o m e n t he w o u l d order more books and plead with his correspondents to send more photographs o f Italian paintings. In the absence o f visitors and house guests, letters became even more o f a necessity. Those he awaited most eagerly were the ones f r o m Natalie Barney. R e m y de G o u r m o n t , the famous Symbolist critic w h o had been her Platonic lover and literary mentor, had recently died, and she n o w proposed that Berenson succeed him. That role did not appeal to him, especially as he believed he was " f a r more pleasing to the e y e " than de [219]

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Gourmont. His romantic advances to her had posed a puzzling challenge to her lesbian nature. "I am too perplexed in all my feelings and sentiments," she had written, "to know what or how I am just now. . . . B.B., what shall I say—just sans phrases or verbal agility, that I'm glad you're here and that I know y o u . " When she tried to set the tone of their friendship by sending him a slim volume of her verses and a copy of the letters of Remy de Gourmont, he cautioned her, "I fear I cannot replace the friend you have lost. It would be absurd to compare myself to him in any way"; besides he had to be away from Paris nine-tenths of the year and when there he did not have "the leisure of spirit essential to seeing one person beyond others." "Why not get away at once and come to stay with us?" Some of her verses he was able to admire with romantic fervor. More often they offered an occasion for sentimental and philosophical musings. When she sent him her book The Woman Who Lives with Me and noted on the flyleaf that she could not come to I Tatti, it touched off a long stream of self-analysis that half-revealed and half-concealed the nature of his complicated frustrations: "Disappointed I am—at least one great part of me, the whole of me that still thirsts for experience as experience and receives it always with ardour and never looks back with regret. That part of me had, I confess, taken the upper hand. But there is another great part of me which has always been the greater part . . . to dream intensely, and ask of the not-me no more than it should come just enough into my ken to dream about. . . . This is very egotistical, and would be thin and poor if it were all of me, but there is ever and ever and ever so much more—so much in fact that looked at from within I can come to no conclusion with regard to myself. . . . I grind out pedantic studies which waste my soul, and you who are much more exquisite and above all ever so much more of an artist, you write cryptic short stories like the one I am n o w returning—with regret for I should like to keep it. . . . Evidently it shadows forth one of your vous, and I want to know as many of them as will not kill and devour me. For of course you have such too. We all have cannibal selves." For all its circumlocution the drift of his thought arrived at its destination. Like a character in one of James's late novels, he had a "cannibal" appetite for affection and domination and a desire to search out and relish every cranny of thought and feeling in the object of his passion, just as he sought to possess every detail of a painting he admired. That Natalie Barney was profoundly unattainable left him, when he was an old man, with fond memories of "those bitter-sweet days of intense living." He could never forget that he had once been madly in love with her. If thoughts of Natalie Barney filled his reveries they could not extin[220]

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guish his anxieties about the desperate course of the war. When the longed-for word came at last that the United States had entered the war against Germany, he was so excited by the news that he dashed across the corridor to embrace Ammanati, who was going over the household accounts with Mary. His dislike of Wilson changed to admiration when he read Wilson's stirring address to the joint session of Congress on April 2, 1917, asking for a resolution that a state of war existed. Wilson's speech, so full of high idealism, seemed to herald the dawn of a new era. Germany's war, Wilson declared, was a "challenge to all mankind." The object of the United States was "to vindicate the principles of peace and justice . . . as against selfish and autocratic power. . . . The world must be made safe for democracy. . . . To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes." " I feel suddenly converted to democracy and republicanism," Berenson exclaimed. " I don't think better of either than before, and I see all their squalid drawbacks but all in all these are less dangerous and destructive than ruling castes and monarchies." He hoped that his brother, Abie, although now forty-four, would go to Plattsburg for officers' training. "It will do you a world of good," he said. "How I wish my country realized that never was a crusade more holy. . . . All descriptions of the Evil One are of angels compared with what the Germans really are like. If I were a well man, even at my age, I should join one or the other of the armed forces in some capacity." Bernard's hope for Abie went unfulfilled, for he was as little fitted for military service as his elder brother. Berenson's gratification at the entry of the United States into the war was clouded by the divisions he found among his Italian friends. It continued to pain him to hear the pro-German sentiments of the Countess Semstori. As for Carlo Placci, who telephoned his congratulations "that we too are at war," he soon learned that, like D'Annunzio, Placci saw the war not as a democratic crusade but as an opportunity for Italy to share in the territorial spoils. Edith Wharton, knowing Berenson's ardent patriotic sentiments, promptly wrote to him from Paris after the formal declaration, "Why on earth don't you ask for a job in our embassy here? They are sure to be wanting polyglots now." For the moment he was not ready to make any decision, being perplexed about his and Mary's situation in Italy. But to prepare for any contingency, he registered on May 1 1 at the American consulate in Florence as a citizen of the United States and deposited his last will and testament with the consul with the directions that in the case of his death in Italy his body should be cremated. The needs of the Italian war machine grew more and more exorbitant [221]

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as General C a d o r n a pressed back the Austrians higher and higher into the A l p s , w i t h e n o r m o u s losses o n both sides. C i v i l i a n shortages demanded increasing retrenchments, especially in the use o f m o t o r vehicles. T h e " b i g c a r " at I Tatti had to be stored a w a y , and the " t i n y F o r d " w h i c h Belle G r e e n e had obtained f o r M a r y w a s converted b y H u g h P a r r y , their chauffeur, into " a fairly c o m f o r t a b l e f o u r seater." T e n thousand dollars w e n t patriotically into the 8 percent Italian w a r loan. In the midst o f the unsettling prospects, B e r e n s o n ' s thoughts turned increasingly to the f u ture o f his villa and its treasures. L o n g a g o w h e n M r s . G a r d n e r established her m u s e u m in the F e n w a y , he had b e g u n to dream o f leaving his collections to H a r v a r d . T h e dream had b y n o w b e c o m e an o b s e s s i o n — and the despair o f M a r y . She suggested to A l y s that she bring R a y ' s daughter, the f i v e - y e a r - o l d B a r b a r a , to I Tatti in the hope that B e r n a r d m i g h t b e c o m e so m u c h interested in her grandchildren that he w o u l d think o f t h e m as his heirs and so get o v e r " h i s foolish idea o f turning it into an 'Institution.' " T h e stratagem could not be m a n a g e d in w a r t i m e . T h e forecast that the w a r w o u l d accelerate the o u t f l o w o f art to A m e r i c a w a s s o o n c o n f i r m e d b y the D u v e e n s , w h o i n f o r m e d B e r e n s o n that they w e r e encouraged " f i n a n c i a l l y and m o r a l l y b y the entrance o f the A m e r i c a n troops into the f i g h t i n g . " In M a y 1 9 1 7 Louis w a s u r g i n g , " B y no means stop b u y i n g . " T h e pictures could be put a w a y until the e x p o r t permessi w e r e issued. " B u s i n e s s should be g o o d after the w a r as m a n y A m e r i c a n s have m a d e large fortunes. . . . T h e y m a y not b u y openly as they d o not w i s h to m a k e a bad impression b y spending m o n e y on luxuries." T h a t spring the relations b e t w e e n Louis D u v e e n and J o e g r e w increasi n g l y tense, and L o u i s , instructing B e r e n s o n to g o ahead w i t h a purchase, explained, " I d o not consult N e w Y o r k any m o r e as I find that if I like a thing after y o u h a v e r e c o m m e n d e d it, it is quite sufficient and I a m quite prepared t o - d a y to b u y anything o n y o u r recommendation as I find results h a v e been g o o d . " A t times B e r e n s o n m u s t h a v e felt s w a m p e d b y the n u m b e r o f requests that poured in f r o m the firm. Whereas in 1 9 1 6 there had been o n l y t w e n t y - s i x c o m m u n i c a t i o n s , in 1 9 1 7 there w e r e s i x t y - t w o f r o m J a n u a r y to M a r c h and s e v e n t y - f i v e f r o m A p r i l to D e cember. B e f o r e the year w a s out M a r y w o u l d have listed the dispatch o f opinions o n 108 days on s o m e 2 5 0 paintings g i v i n g or denying authentications, s u g g e s t i n g valuations, o r r e c o m m e n d i n g or discouraging p u r chase. T h e D u v e e n s ' eagerness to increase their stock o f Italian paintings led to their p r o p o s i n g pictures to B e r e n s o n w i t h such undiscriminating enthusiasm that his rejections vied w i t h his approvals. With f o r e i g n travel largely interdicted b y the w a r , B e r e n s o n coined the s u m m e r ' s intermittent leisure into a succession o f articles that flowed in

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the wake of the two published collections of essays. Mary, unable to visit her adored family in England, welcomed a chance to get away from "Frumpignano"—her epithet for Settignano—for Rome, where she could enjoy "long and intimate conversations" with Scott. Her absence this time seems to have actually given an impetus to Bernard's writing. In July he reported to her that he had singlehandedly "corrected" two articles returned by the typist and sent one to Sherman for Art in America on "Ugolino-Lorenzetti" (the first of two articles on the artist to w h o m he had given the name of his two teachers) and one to Reinach for the Revue Archeoiogique on " A n 'Assumption of the Virgin' by Turino Vanni at B a y e u x . " He added that he was "busy preparing" an article "on Solomon and the Queen of Sheba to crush Siren." Osvald Siren, the young Swedish art historian who had recently become curator of the National Museum in Stockholm, had published an article in the May issue of the Burlington Magazine in which he established that Berenson had been mistaken in attributing to Matteo di Giovanili a Ferrarese marriage salver in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Siren argued that the salver, which depicted Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, was painted by the Umbrian artist Boccati. Berenson took to his now greatly augumented photograph files to combat the attack. He admitted that he had been mistaken in those early days of the science back in 1897 in his attribution to Matteo. " T o speak the truth," he continued, " I now feel doubts on the subject of most of the works which I have not reviewed in the course of these last years. . . . Today our knowledge of second-rate artists, formerly so rudimentary, is now very complete." Granting that he had been wrong in naming Matteo, "one has the right to be astonished at an erroneous attribution to Boccati in the face of all the evidence now available disproving Boccati's authorship." He thus evened the account with Siren, who earlier, in a "sumptuous" catalogue of the Jarves Collection at Yale, had rejected a number of his attributions. The exchange of amenities between the two critics did not, however, dampen their occasional scholarly correspondence during the next forty years. When there came to Berenson that summer from the Yale University Press in three quarto volumes Arthur Kingsley Porter's Lombard Architecture, accompanied by a folio collection of 244 plates of illustrations of architectural details, he wrote to Dan Fellows Piatt at Princeton to inquire w h o the author was. He had received, he said, "without a word of explanation his stupendous work on Lombard architecture." " H e and I are kindred spirits," he added. His appreciative letter to the thirty-fouryear-old Porter drew a flattering response: " I have read and reread and admired your works so intensely, that an autograph from you carries [223]

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with it the romance of a relic. I wish I dared believe you that there is a kinship between my method and yours. I think it may be so in the sense that your scholarship has been my inspiration." In this fashion began one of the most intellectually rewarding friendships of Berenson's life. His voluminous correspondence with Porter on art and archaeology would continue almost to the day of Porter's tragic death in 1933. A t the end o f the summer the Berensons escaped briefly from the heat to a resort in the mountains near Vallombrosa where they enjoyed one of the "grandest views" of the valley o f the Arno, a view that would in a few years bring them back as regular summer residents. Gaetano Salvemini, w h o had been invalided out of the army, was Berenson's companion on donkey rides to the mountain top. The mountains provided relief from the heat, but there was no escaping troublesome business concerns. The struggle among the Duveen brothers had come to a head early in June 1917 with Joe, Henry, and Ben of the N e w York gallery endeavoring to get rid of Louis and Ernest, who were in charge of the business in London and Paris. Louis explained to Berenson that the N e w York members, annoyed that Ernest had left the Paris branch to enlist in the French army, had become convinced that the money which the firm made was "being made only by them." O n Louis' behalf Berenson wrote to Joe in N e w York expressing his disapproval. Responding for Joe, Edward Fowles protested that Louis had not been at all conciliatory and that since the partnership agreement ended on May 31, Joe and Henry had bought the goodwill of the firm and the N e w York and Paris premises. The trouble among the Duveens, he blandly assured Berenson, was "not of such a nature as to cause enmity, as between the Brothers Seligmann," whose feud had become notorious. In July Joe anxiously cabled Berenson that since the contract with him remained in force, he assumed that he would go on acting "for us as heretofore" and avoid associating "himself with Wildenstein, Louis, or others." Berenson replied that though he feared that without Louis in London it would be difficult to acquire Italian pictures in England, he would stick with Joe "because I believe in you but you must make it worth my while by your keen pursuit of Italian picture business." The apparent break between Joe and Louis disturbed Berenson because it had delayed the usual quarterly remittance of £5,000, and, more important, because it made him uneasy about the future of the firm. Aware of Berenson's feelings, Joe dispatched Fowles to Florence in early September to reassure him that "the firm was still in business and that his own position was unchanged." Among the matters to be aired were Berenson's right to buy Italian sculptures for the firm and the more

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delicate question of the extent to which Berenson might continue to advise other dealers. During his week at I Tatti Fowles learned the unvarying summer's routine that governed a guest's stay: after luncheon one lolled in a shaded hammock trying to nap in the oppressive heat; later as the sun declined toward the west, tea was brought out. Afterward one walked down the stone stairs through the limonaia and the garden paths past the pools that Pinsent had laid out to the ilex wood and back through the upward sloping avenue of cypresses to the terrace, from which was visible the ring of hills against the hazy blue of the sky. The evening dinner, presided over by Berenson faultlessly dressed in his dinner jacket, would be followed by coffee in the library. Promptly at 10:30 a servant handed one a cup of the customary camomile tea, a signal for all to prepare to retire. In response to Fowles's urging, Berenson reluctantly agreed to meet with "Sir Joseph" in Paris. He and Joe had not seen each other since the beginning of the war, and Joe presumably was anxious to reestablish his personal authority. Fowles reserved rooms for Bernard at the Ritz and for Mary at the St. James and Albany, having been prepared for this diplomatic arrangement by witnessing a lively dispute between them. "Our marriage," Mary told him, "is not of the usual type, but a union of intellects." She also shared with him her dissatisfaction with her treatment in their partnership. " I want my share of the profits resulting from our joint efforts for my daughters and granddaughter; B . B . on the other hand wants to raise funds to endow a foundation . . . for the benefit of students of Harvard. I agree that his wish is commendable, but each time I ask for my share of our earnings, he makes a great fuss." In spite of the annoyances of business, Berenson had been able to devote some time during the late summer and early fall to more congenial projects. Frederick Sherman had persuaded him to gather together his articles on Sienese painters for a book which he hoped to bring out before Christmas. Bernard and Mary prepared the manuscript and collected the illustrations, but Sherman then announced that publication would have to be put off until the following year. In October an urgent call came from Glaenzer and Seligmann for Berenson to come to Paris to examine a "Leonardo" that they hoped would be a "gold mine." Since Berenson was already committed to meeting Joe in Paris, the proposal offered a more congenial inducement. Mary was delighted at the interruption because it would permit her going to England for a long-deferred reunion with her family. The "gold mine" proved to be only dross, an eighteenth-century copy of the Louvre La Belle Ferrottiere. Joe Duveen evidently anticipated a

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noisy meeting over the question of Berenson's services to other dealers and placed mattresses at the doors of his apartment at the Ritz "so that others would not hear." Berenson forestalled the stratagem by arriving for the appointment not at the apartment but at the firm's offices at the place Vendöme, and Joe, obliged to meet him there, calmed down. Fowles wrote that "after a long talk they reached an amicable settlement," but it was one that did not really tie Berenson's hands. He continued to resist Joe's every effort to monopolize his services. While Berenson was settling affairs with the Duveens, Edith Wharton went ahead with her plan to find patriotic employment for him. She turned for help to Walter Berry, who, as a prominent international American lawyer in Paris and a popular advocate for American intervention, had been "replacing everybody as the real representative" of his country. Berry helped Berenson in the first instance in obtaining a military pass from the American Mission. Signed by Lieutenant Royall T y ler, with w h o m Berenson was already acquainted, it authorized his travel in the war zone. Berry busied himself to find a suitable post for him, while Berenson toured the devastated areas in northern France with Edith in her Red Cross car on the way to the hospital with which she was connected at Compiegne. In one village they encountered workers clearing out a well that the German troops had fouled with refuse. Berenson offered to pay for an electric pump to restore the water supply. They joined Elsie de Wolfe at her quarters in Compiegne, where she worked with her patroness Madame Henri de Rothschild. Elsie told of treating a poor soldier whose face had been burned away. He mumbled, "Je voudrais vous donnez un sourire pour vous remercier [I wish I could give you a smile to thank you]." T o Berenson the journey through the war-ravaged countryside was unnerving. He felt the "spectre of sordidness and the nightmarish visions" were so frightful that they "surpassed anything I could feel as pity." Lunching with Edith Wharton and Walter Berry back in Paris, Berenson was given the good news that "our government was really anxious to have me for just the j o b I am fit for." It would not require more than "three hours of office work a day," and it would be work that Mary could help him with when she returned to I Tatti. While the details of the appointment were being worked out, Mary wrote approving his plan to stay on in Paris. Bernard, however, fell prey to misgivings. " M y heart begins to fail me," he wrote. "I think of my library, my leisure, my work, and have a fear of inchoating my holiday life with the aridity of a work-a-day one." Rumor soon had it that he had joined the army and had been commissioned as an officer. Santayana wrote to Berenson's [226]

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brother-in-law Logan, " H o w curious that Berenson should be a captain in the U . S . A r m y . We are living in a world of wonderful changes and this one is typical." He was in fact offered a commission, but, as he wrote Piatt, he turned it down because "I have too much sense of the ridiculous to don a uniform at my age and with my physique." Bernard reported to Mary on December 6 that he had dined at Edith's with the Royall Tylers, and Tyler had "significantly" asked him to come round to his office. This he did the next day, whereupon Tyler offered him "what may ultimately amount to being general but secret and unofficial adviser, with regard to things Italian and German too, if I can manage both, to our general staff." He would not have any official rank or uniform—"which will distress you no doubt, nor shall I have office hours." His j o b would be "to see and hear and report." She was to say that he was "loosely" attached to United States Intelligence and, if asked, " o n the German side of it." She could, however, confide in the United States consul Dumont in Florence. He also instructed her to enlist Salvemini to sound out opinion, though he needed to be cautioned not to "swallow Carlo [Placci's] Austro-Papal blarney." He further requested that she have extracts made from the Italian press so that he could follow the people "on our side" and the "bad ones opposed to us—the pseudoPrussians, the Teuton-idolators, the Clericals, etc." Mary thereupon engaged Salvemini's wife for the j o b at 200 lire a month. T o facilitate the sending of information to Berenson, Consul Dumont sent o f f a communication to Ambassador Thomas Nelson Page in Rome quoting Tyler's certification that Bernard Berenson "is employed in the Intelligence Section of the General Staff, American Expeditionary Forces, as a First Class Interpreter and has been assigned to duty with the American Mission, Bureau Interallies Paris." The title was to serve as a cloak for his intelligence duties. The international situation was now in a state of tremendous flux as a result of the decisive American intervention, and the rumors of peace initiatives vied with speculation concerning the probable postwar settlements. Colonel Edward House, President Wilson's personal representative, noted that Baron Sonnino of Italy "is as difficult today as he was yesterday. . . . If his advice should carry, the war would never end, for he would never consent to any of the things necessary to make a beginning towards peace." The military council's deliberations were made even more difficult by the collapse of the provisional Russian government under Prime Minister Kerensky, the government which had replaced the czarist regime in the spring revolution." The October coup d'etat led by Lenin and Trotsky had ushered in the Bolshevik dictatorship, and Kerensky fled the coun[227]

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try. Amidst growing anarchy, negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk for a separate peace with Germany. The enormous chaos in Russia, the factional struggles, the strikes, mutinies, and confiscations impressed Berenson as if "the whole of Russia were behaving like characters in a Dostoevski novel." The winding down of the war on the Russian front in the late autumn of 1917 had had grave consequences for Italy, for it released tens of thousands of troops to spearhead an Austro-German offensive under General Von Ludendorf on the Alpine front. Soon news came of the appalling rout of the Italians at Caporetto and the loss of all the territory that had been won in two years and a half at such enormous cost. When Berenson realized the extent of the catastrophe he told Mary, "It prevents my sleeping and eating and makes me unhappier than any public event that has taken place in my lifetime." Mary had gone on to I Tatti "to put things in order for a long absence," Berenson wrote Mrs. Gardner, and he was now established in the apartment of the Ralph Curtises at 40, avenue du Trocadero, while they wintered on the Riviera. He expected Mary soon to rejoin him. Their anxiety about the safety of the villa had grown with the rapid advance of Von Ludendorf's combined armies to the line of the Piave, where the shattered Italian army was being regrouped to make a stand. Though Berenson did not expect the actual intrusion of enemy troops into Florence, he worried that the unoccupied villa might be commandeered to house refugees. Bernard sent Mary careful instructions concerning the safekeeping of his masses of correspondence. The "merely personal stuff" could be left locked up, but business letters of a delicate nature, like those relating to Otto Gutekunst and Mrs. Gardner, were to be hunted out in the various cubbyholes in which he kept them and, together with the Baring and Duveen correspondence, the Duveen Code Book, and his copy of the " X " Book, placed in a "strong iron-shod trunk" and entrusted to Lady Sybil at the Villa Medici. The trunk was not to be identified with his initials. And looking ahead to his summer's duties as a civilian agent of the army, he listed the clothes to be sent to him in Paris—green knitted waistcoat, pearl gray summer suit, blue summer suit, yellow boots, summer waistcoat, tail coat, morning coat, and all his best summer underclothing and pajamas. These would supply his uniform. Thus he embarked on a role for which his gregarious nature peculiarly fitted him. The art of conversation in which he was adept might after all have practical political value.

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E R E N S O N ' S evaluation of Italian war aims was inevitably colored by his long-standing antipathy to Italian imperialism. The price of Italy's entry into the war on the side of the Allies had been set in the secret annexes of the Treaty of London of April 26, 1915. Italy was to receive the Trentino, the Tyrol to the Brenner Pass, the provinces at the head of the Adriatic, and Dalmatia down to Cape Planka. In 1 9 1 7 the Italian Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino openly declared a protectorate over Albania. Berenson, outraged by the move, freely expressed his disgust with Sonnino's ambitions, and his view soon got back to Carlo Placci, who promptly denounced him to his circle of friends in Florence for carrying on anti-Italian propaganda in Paris. Placci's vehemence spilled over on Mary at I Tatti. When Berenson first heard of Placci's accusation, he had expostulated to him, " S o you want me to go on with inni ed elogi [hymns and praises], and the whole pack of swindling lies that has brought so low the country I love best on earth, and its people whom I regard as a marvellously gifted one. . . . I do here all I can for the real Italy and not the pseudo-Prussia of the last thirty years." After learning of Placci's tirade to Mary he added: "It is true that on arriving here I felt so bitter against your pro-Boches on the one hand and against your Nationalists on the other that I did speak against them. . . . If your representatives here had a grain of wisdom they would instead of conspiring against me . . . attempt to use my knowledge, my authority, and my possible influence for the Italy we all love together. . . . As for you, my dear Carlo, there is in my heart under much annoyance and exasperation a profound affection for y o u . " Placci's affection for Berenson was equally deep, and six months later when he came to Paris the two old friends "sat and groaned" together over their troubles. [229]

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In the midst of her safeguarding work at the villa, Mary received the devastating news from Geoffrey Scott that he was engaged to marry Lady Sybil. At first she put on a brave front to cover her anguish by telling Bernard she was sure the marriage would fail. But soon she was reflecting that Geoffrey would be lost to a person whose notorious affair with Bernard had publicly humiliated her. "Thee will not forget," she reminded Bernard, "that Sybil was thrust down my throat so that it is hard to get the taste of her out of it." Sybil had confided to her that "it was thy Pisgah sights" which prepared her for Geoffrey's promised land. T o complicate matters, Geoffrey, who was himself a vessel of troubled emotions, implored Mary almost daily not to abandon him. Lady Sybil similarly pleaded with Bernard to continue writing to her: "Don't give it up because I am going to marry G e o f f r e y . " Mary's plans for somehow binding Geoffrey permanently to I Tatti lay shattered. There was no alternative but to tell Sybil as gracefully as she could that she approved the marriage. Sybil responded that, knowing how much Mary cared for Scott, " I think you would tell me if you thought it all very amiss." Once more the psychological duel between husband and wife resumed. Bernard declined comment "on the you, Geoffrey, Sybil triangle." "For m e , " he said, " I feel deliciously, benevolently out of it, with a faint touch of irony and humor." H o w very deeply Mary was hurt by Geoffrey's defection she soon began to discover. In her misery she saw no alternative but to break with him. For years, she reminded him in her heartbroken reflections, they had shared all "their thoughts and hopes." Even his difficulties and love despairs "welded us together." She felt his marriage a death sentence, and, weakened by a current illness, she wished life might end "along with the best thing in my life." She could not pretend that her love for him was like that of a mother. It was "a strange creature" they had snared in the net between them. What stood in the way of their remaining friends was that he was marrying the woman she most detested in the world, one whose "unsuitable" intimacy with Bernard had dug a chasm across which Bernard and she could now only make friendly gestures. Bernard, who too easily forgot his own suicidal despair over Belle Greene, offered no sympathy. " G e o f f r e y , " he told Mary, "has always been an aspiring little brother of the rich and well placed." The union with Sybil would free him from dependence on the Berensons and replace it with the more acceptable dependence on a rich wife. " Y o u r heart bleeds for the penguin escaped from under your wings," Bernard's remorseless analysis went on. He had the small grace to add, " A n d I am not at all out of sympathy with y o u . " Berenson found his work for the Army Intelligence Section much to [230]

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his taste, for it involved him in conversation with the political and financial leaders who were converging on Paris. From time to time he sent reports of what he had gleaned to Royall Tyler for transmission to the embassy. His keen relish of his task came out in his long account to Mary of his first high-level meeting on December 8, 1917, with Prime Minister Eleutherios Venizelos of Greece. Venizelos had formed a separate government at Salonika and, with British and French support, aimed to force the abdication of the pro-German King Constantine. The two men were joined by Clarence Dillon, a leading American banker and assistant chairman of the War Industries Board; Colonel Theodore Dillon, assistant chief engineer of the American Expeditionary Force; Vasiliy Maklakov, the ambassador to France appointed by the provisional government of Russia; and Sultan Mohammed Aga Khan III, leader of the Muslim minority in India and the Middle East. It was the Aga Khan who had directed his millions of followers to support the British war effort. For Mary's benefit Bernard recounted the discussion, which Venizelos had dominated. There was a minute's embarrassment at the beginning, and Berenson, fearing "a frost," boldly asked some "whopping question." Venizelos instantly took it up, inspiring Berenson to "pose question after question." Venizelos said he had to return immediately to meet an attack on the Salonika front, an attack for which the Greek army was not ready because the Allies had delayed sending supplies. Greece, he asserted, was still being treated by the allies as a blockaded enemy, and he told of his conference with Lloyd George in which he had pointed out that his subordinates still treated the Greeks as enemies. When Berenson asked about the contention that the Greek people were not behind him, Venizelos pointed to his successes in the elections. As for the Bulgarians and their pretensions to "Balcanic hegemony," he could not understand Lord Grey's "infatuation" with them. Berenson suggested that that was in the misguided "Gladstonian tradition" of carrying on a bankrupt policy. Everyone knew Bulgaria would support Germany. Then talk turned to Rumania, and Maklakov spoke up saying Rumania could not conceivably resist a Russian attack. Having carefully rehearsed for Mary what took place, Bernard copied out what he had said about Venizelos for use in his report to Tyler. Tyler afterward told him that the report had reached headquarters and had been much appreciated. The pattern thus established was to continue for two years. One conference or interview followed another, accompanied by a succession of political and society luncheons and dinners. Notes and visiting cards piled up, witnesses to scores of conversations with envoys, ministers, heads of military missions, and members of the French cabinet. Berenson

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met with Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia and became a friend of the exiled Kerensky. All was grist to what must have been a series of voluminous reports to the Intelligence Section, reports now buried in the War Department Archives apparently beyond the reach of its employees. It was to be for Berenson a remarkably life-enhancing existence: an encounter with Jules Cambon, secretary-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, might be followed by one with Henri Bergson or the anthropologist-geographer Jean Brunhes, professor at the College de France. Joseph Grew, acting chief of the Division of European Affairs in the State Department, came by for talk. Before the war he had been the charge d'affaires at Vienna. Like many another visitor he began a long friendship with Berenson. Henry White, former ambassador to France, whom Berenson had known as a member of Henry Adams' circle, was soon to make an appearance as a member of the American Peace C o m mission. Berenson also maintained contact with Ambassador Joseph E. Willard, who came up from his post in Madrid. During the early weeks of 1918 the prospect of an Allied victory remained in doubt and the transport of American troops and materiel to France on a massive scale had yet to be managed. The French and British pressed the American command to supply reinforcements to their terribly battered units rather than wait, as General Pershing was insisting, for the creation of an army under the American flag. In the midst of divided counsels and in the absence of a unified command, the European Allies could not bring themselves to enunciate a statement of war aims that might unite world opinion against the Central Powers. President Woodrow Wilson on January 8 decided to implement his pledge to make the world safe for democracy by dramatically issuing his Fourteen Points as the basis for peace. The underlying theme was that peace should be unselfish, just, and impartial. For the Allied statesmen there was no choice but to appear to support Wilson's idealistic program as the price for American intervention. Like many other high-minded Westerners Berenson embarked on his duties in the service of the "crusade" against the Boches and their hated minions with only a slight perception of the jungle of cross purposes hidden beneath the Allied acceptance of " w a r aims." The claims of the Italians under the terms of the "secret" London Treaty, which by now were common knowledge, were to prove but the first installment in the catalogue of sordid agreements. Berenson's many months in Paris gradually became an education in disillusionment. Berenson found himself "fearfully active," going from one political luncheon after another with no time for writing anything, "except rubbish of a highly impersonal nature and uttermost futility." T o Barrett

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Wendell he was soon confessing that it was not so much the military disasters "due to British folly" that depressed him as the muddle of political matters which made him "at times doubt whether in ultimate aim there is all the fundamental difference between the two camps of belligerents that I had innocently believed." He was also finding that members of the American colony openly sneered "at our ostensible aspirations" and boasted that "they cover 'healthy' annexationist intentions. If I thought so I should give up the ghost. Were this war to end in a mere shuffling of the cards, in an unchanged lust for subjugation, this earth would be no fit home for the likes o' me." While the armies measured their bloody gains in a matter of yards, new weapons were introduced to terrorize civilians far from the battlefronts. Berenson became accustomed to taking cover when the sirens blew in Paris. O n one sortie German planes managed to drop seven bombs, killing twenty-four persons and wounding sixty. Even more sensational was the emplacement of an enormous long-range cannon behind the German lines that was able to drop shells on Paris from forty miles away. The press promptly named it "Big Bertha" after the wife of the inventor. "The air raids rather excited and keyed me u p , " ran one of Berenson's reports. His long reports to Army Intelligence often took hours to draft. Other hours saw him closeted with Allied journalists to avoid "the worst of all moral tortures . . . the ever increasing and never ceasing sense of impotence." Listening to Otto Kahn at a gathering, he thought "it was just a shade painful to hear him talk against the Germans with an accent that still betrayed his origin." It was Kahn who had been doing much to rally German-American support for the war effort, addressing mass meetings in the heart of German-American centers like Milwaukee on such topics as "The Poison Growth of Prussianism." Though much of Berenson's time was taken up plying statesmen and politicians with his diplomatic queries, there were frequent intervals for his social existence. He was Edith Wharton's favorite dinner companion, often dining with her tete-ä-tete. O n one occasion he made her "scream with laughter" by giving her "a truthful account" of his and Mary's hostile first impression of her. She confided that she had been overcome with shyness though she had longed to meet them, and she "moaned thinking of the years we lost." The home of her friend Walter Berry was another center. At a dinner party there which sparkled with a "Cleopatra-ish" female and the Aga Khan, Berenson first met the "pilgrim of the night," Marcel Proust. It was eleven o'clock, Bernard reported to Mary, when there "entered a dark rather long-haired man— obviously of letters—and [he] was introduced as Marcel Proust. In voice [233]

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and diction singularly like Montesquiou. We exchanged compliments and he assured me that my books had been bread and meat to him. . . . I confess I often wondered while reading Du Cote de Chez Swann whether my books had not influenced him." Proust had long known of Berenson's early writings on the painters of the Italian Renaissance, having become a devotee of the early Italian painters from his addiction to Ruskin. Like a pupil of Berenson he would undertake a journey simply to study a single painting. He wrote to his friend George de Lauris in 1906 that he once asked Ruskin—"his work and not his spirit alone"—what he thought of Berenson. He gathered from Ruskin's writing that more important than a correct attribution was learning "what either the master or his work was good for." "All the same," said Proust, "I would very much like to know Berenson." And he inquired in the same year, "Have you any idea of Monsieur Berenson's fortune (dans le sens le plus vulgaire du mot)? I will tell you why it interests me and I would also be glad to know what there is of Berenson in French or translated into French." Louis Gillet's translation was years in the future, but as a contributor to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts Proust could have had convenient access to Berenson's many articles in that periodical. Why he wanted to know how rich Berenson was, was never revealed in his published correspondence. Berenson was already a legendary figure in the Paris beau monde at that date, and Proust may well have been curious to know how an art critic like Berenson could afford to move in the affluent circles that Proust himself frequented. Parisian friends invited Berenson to meet Aleksei Peshkov—"Maxim Gorki." As he and Gorki strolled home together the evening after their meeting, the sense of their distant homeland seemed to draw them together and Berenson mused, "What a dear creature he is!" The unpredictable Gorki, though himself an ardent revolutionary, had stormily criticized his friend Lenin's tactics and the excesses of the Bolsheviks. He had come to Paris, however, to use his great prestige as a literary figure to oppose the threat of foreign intervention. Reconciled with Lenin, he returned to Russia to devote himself to preserving its cultural and artistic heritage. Berenson saw much of his friend Andre Gide, who he thought was not at his best on art. One day he took him to the Durand-Ruel art gallery to see the contents of the studio of Degas, who had recently died. The art chatter of the crowd annoyed Berenson, and his "picture soaking" was constantly interrupted by acquaintances; he went away with a sense of having been "baffled" of his purpose, a feeling compounded later at a gathering where the talk about Degas exasperated him. "We kill the

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thing we love," he fumed. He felt more at home in the company of the novelist Paul Bourget, who was "at his best very profound," as when at the salon of Rosa Fitz-James he conjectured that Richelieu had founded the French Academy because "he realized that literary people were dangerous folk who had to be tamed." Occasionally Berenson escaped for a few days of convivial distraction at Elsie de Wolfe's Villa Trianon. There he felt himself back to his "real s e l f . . . in the midst of visual values that call back all that I have striven and lived for." Troops of callers filled the exquisitely furnished rooms till late in the evening. General Tasker Bliss, United States Army chief of staff, "a simple nice old boy," talked to him about the uses of the "regimental bands," but far more interesting was an "enchanting rather negroid youth named Cole Porter," who "improvised ragtime music and words really droll." The meeting with the composer launched a friendship that lasted for forty years. With the war drawing to a close, Paris became a magnet for old friends and acquaintances, and these required cultivation. The Roman Duchess Grazioli, who used to entrance him at St. Moritz, joined him at lunch with Gladys Deacon's sister Dorothy Radziwill, the Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga, and the Russian correspondent of the London Times Emile Joseph Dillon, who was, according to W. T. Steed, "the ablest, most cultured, and most adventurous newspaperman I have ever known." Dillon undoubtedly interested him most, for not only was he an authority on Russia, he also had friends among all the leading statesmen of Europe. "It is a fair sample," Berenson reported to Ralph Curtis. " I have literary greats and at times scholars, but generally war men like Myself." Among the more agreeable of the "war men" was his friend Eric Maclagan, art historian and museum curator, who had become head of the Paris bureau of the British Ministry of Information. Like the "unemployed old sinner" Ralph Curtis, he had "a pretty nose for entertaining indecencies." Fortunately for his peace of mind, Mary remained at I Tatti until the middle of February 1918 looking after their treasures in the intervals when she was not ill in bed. With faithless Geoffrey Scott off in Rome, she had only Algar Thorold for companionship. He had taken up Buddhism and soon had Mary grasping at that straw for consolation. Bernard scornfully commented, "What utterly formless, shapeless, flatness, all that Buddhist literature is cursed with, compared with our Bible for instance or even the Koran." With much time to brood on her grievances, Mary unceasingly rehearsed them all for him with her usual prolix eloquence. In his own justification Berenson insisted that he had

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been " o n affectionate terms to the very end with G e o f f r e y . " As for Lady Sybil, "one of the most enchanting moments in my life was when I learned that Geoffrey had taken her to his bosom." Life in Florence had been appallingly dull for him, Bernard reminded her, and gave "insufficient experience and exercise" of his social instincts, and in their little world Sybil was the least impossible person. "Besides she had an attractive house at the distance of a pleasant w a l k . " Her means and her literary interests made her companionship easy and desirable, but " I had enough of it long ago. Then came the 'tyranny of tears' and the coward fear of giving pain. . . . But one thing I never could or would conceal from her and that was that I could get on very well without her." He urged Mary not to cut herself off from Geoffrey, and he proposed the very role which Geoffrey had offered, that she continue as his "mother confessor." In spite of Mary's many pathetic entreaties to join him in Paris, Bernard pressed her to remain at I Tatti until she was recovered in health. The prospect of her coming to Paris in her anguished state as a semiinvalid alarmed him. And as if to placate her, he redoubled his endearments, only to have her protest she would be happier if "there was some 'distinction of quality' between the nice things said to a wife and those to a mistress." Finally he yielded assent to her joining him, and Louis Duveen promised to see "that Mrs. Berenson has every assistance possible on her journey to Paris." Mary established herself in his apartment at 40, avenue du Trocadero, in mid-February. Unfortunately Bernard had now embarked on a thrilling new affair with Baroness Gabrielle La Caze, an emancipated cosmopolite who had conceived a boundless admiration for him. A highly cultivated and fun-loving person, she was the center of a group of scholarly intellectuals which included "the mediaevalist Joseph Bedier, the geographer Jean Brunhes, the Sinologists Sylvain Levi and Paul Pelliot," and her overtures proved irresistible to Berenson. He was like the guest in the medieval fable, as Nicky would one day write, who "liked to have the roast pigeons fly into his mouth." In the intense glow of his new attachment, he was unwisely moved to ruminate to his distracted wife that all he would care "to take from this world to the next" would be the "memory of [her] young eyes, of Miss Greene's, and of Madame La Caze's . . . at a sexual crisis." The Epicurean appraisal haunted Mary for many months. Coming in the midst of her illness, she felt it "destroyed her universe." The effort to keep up appearances proved beyond her strength at fifty-four. Her condition steadily worsened and her nervous depression over the loss of Geoffrey, whose marriage to Sybil was to take place early in May, became so intense that, according to family

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report, she attempted to t h r o w herself out a w i n d o w . H e r daughter R a y came o v e r f r o m E n g l a n d to take her to a L o n d o n hospital, her state being such that she had to be d r u g g e d f o r the departure ( " c h l o r o f o r m e d , " as she a f t e r w a r d recalled). H e r e m o t i o n a l and physical s u f f e r i n g c o n t i n u e d — a n g u i s h o v e r G e o f f r e y ' s m a r r i a g e and despair o v e r B e r n a r d ' s rejection o f her and the p r o s pect o f u n d e r g o i n g an operation f o r her female ailments. B u t neither anguish n o r pain could interrupt the torrent o f letters. " I f it w e r e n ' t f o r t h e e , " she w r o t e B e r n a r d , " I should cry u p o n death to deliver m e f r o m the horrors o f l i f e . " She thanked h i m f o r the gentleness he had s h o w n in Paris and added that should she h a v e an " 'accident' as a result o f the operation please r e m e m b e r a l w a y s that thee g a v e m e a v e r y h a p p y and interesting 26 years f o r w h i c h m y soul is n o w f u l l . . . o f understanding and appreciative g r a t i t u d e . " T h e i n f l a m m a t i o n w h i c h f o l l o w e d the operation b r o u g h t " m e n t a l and emotional pain b e y o n d d e s c r i p t i o n , " and yet strength remained to try to put it into w o r d s and to adjust accounts b e t w e e n them. B e r n a r d w o n dered, f o r e x a m p l e , w h a t confidence o f theirs she had shared w i t h G e o f f r e y , and she f r a n k l y admitted that to allay G e o f f r e y ' s fear o f " n o t finding S y b i l possible sexually, I did permit m y s e l f to reassure h i m o n that point f r o m w h a t y o u said about her being tres accomplie au lit." H o w ever rationally she sometimes w r o t e , it w a s o b v i o u s she w a s in the midst o f s o m e sort o f n e r v o u s b r e a k d o w n , and B e r n a r d , w h o felt certain his presence w o u l d o n l y exacerbate it, kept putting o f f g o i n g o v e r to E n gland. M u c h to his relief, M a r y had taken r e f u g e in a sanatorium, instructed b y h i m to spare no expense f o r her treatment. H i s w o r k f o r A r m y Intelligence w a s o f a sort to g i v e full play to his passion f o r h u m a n society. " N e a r l y e v e r y meal is still a s y m p o s i u m , " he e x c l a i m e d to R a l p h C u r t i s in a style to match Curtis's j o c o s i t y , " a n d e v e r y tea a flow o f s o u l . " " I n the evening y o u r so fragile furniture almost b r o k e under the w e i g h t o f discourse b e t w e e n the Russian ambassador, O t t o K a h n , [Maurice] Pernot, and [Arthur] R a f f a l o v i c h . . . . T r o y is b u r n i n g and Sparta starving w h i l e C l y t e m n e s t r a is preparing a bath f o r A g a m e m n o n and A e g i s t h u s lurks in the s h a d e . " A t a luncheon w i t h the A b b e M u g n i e r and the f o r m e r ambassador to Russia M a u r i c e Paleologue, he heard " w o n d e r f u l tales o f H u g o , Renan, Chateaubriand, and Ste. B e u v e . " A t this or another meeting w i t h Paleologue, he seems to h a v e freely expressed his h e t e r o d o x opinions about E u r o p e a n politics. T h e y w e r e opinions that did not sit w e l l w i t h the ultraconservative French diplomat. H e did not f o r g e t t h e m and three years later, to B e r e n s o n ' s considerable embarrassment, he passed them on to the U n i t e d States N a v a l Intelligence in Paris during the " R e d s c a r e . " [237]

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There came a lull in Berenson's official duties that spring during the tense months of the great German offensives with which General Ludendorf hoped to break the stalemate on the western front. For the time being the chief concern of the American command was to deploy the divisions that were arriving in France. As there was nothing he could do to help in that enterprise, Berenson made plans to go to the Pyrenees with Madame La Caze, whose ardent missives challenged action. He broached the matter to Mary with his usual remorseless frankness. In her nervous, disordered state she was at first reconciled to his going. She thought it unlikely that he would give up "love affairs for years to come (why should you?)"; hence she would try to cultivate "the surface indifference" which had worked "moderately well." A few days later, however, she threatened to kill herself if he went off with Madame La Caze. The threat, and a telegram from her doctor, brought him to his senses, and he promptly wired that he would cross to England on June 20. In order to travel in wartime he had needed to bring his papers up-todate. In his application for registration as an American citizen of alien birth, which had gone off to Florence for Consul Dumont's signature, he described himself as "art connoisseur and expert" whose "legal domicile" was in Boston, where he paid his American income tax, and whose "temporary local address" was the Villa I Tatti, Settignano. In place of the easygoing standards of the past, the applicant had not only to affirm his "desire to remain a citizen of the United States and intent to return thereto permanently" but also to state when he would return. Berenson gave "two years, or when my business shall permit." So armed he hastened to London.

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ίο. Two of the four Rene Piot frescoes at I Tatti

11. Corner of main library, built igog

12. Last addition to library (second-floor stacks), about 1950

i j . Salon with Sassetta panels from St. Francis polytych

14. Reception salon

15- Berenson with Barbara and Ursula Strachey,

1919

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E R E N S O N established himself in a comfortable flat in St. Leonard's Terrace in the Chelsea district of London and embarked, full of misgivings, on the role of comforter to Mary. To his mother on his fifty-third birthday he wrote, " I have given up my busy, interesting, and enchanting life in Paris to give myself up to her entirely." He did in fact spend much time with her, but he also got away for a delightful week in the countryside where life was "so comfortable and deliciously restful to old bones." Though at first he felt a lack of zest to plunge into society, having been away from London for nearly four years, he was soon seeing people from the American embassy and many of his English acquaintances. London at night in the "black-out. . . had an eerie aspect" and rationing and restrictions made entertaining somewhat difficult, but he found his friends "easy to please." Some of his time in London had to be spent in the art trade, for his expenses and those of his dependents continued to mount. During the winter and spring of 1918 in Paris he had occasionally conferred with Rene Gimpel and other dealers, but his chief professional work continued to be with the Duveens. Though the contract with the firm had by its terms expired in 1917, business was being carried on as if it were still in force. Requests for his expert opinion came at frequent intervals from the Duveens as the firm sought to increase their stock. In the first months of 1918 he was asked to pass on the authenticity of more than a dozen paintings. Berenson met with Joe Duveen and found him looking "tremendously fit. " J o e told him that Uncle Henry, who was very ill in New York, was probably dying, but assured him that his disappearance from the firm would make no difference to business, which was excellent. He boasted that Frick was in his pocket and the Huntingtons too. In London [239]

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Berenson also renewed his acquaintance with the art critic Charles J . Holmes of the National Gallery, w h o m he went to see to refute the charge made by the gallery's "practical wood expert" that a famous Madonna and Child he had assigned to the fifteenth century was painted on American basswood. The painting had been quietly withdrawn from exhibition. Berenson was unable to win him over. Several years later scientific investigation established that Berenson was correct: "the wood was 450 years old and not 50." A w a y from Mary, whose moods swung disconcertingly from "deepest despair to cheery hopefulness," Berenson fell back with relief to the pleasures of London life that centered about the famous hostess Lady Sybil Colefax. A t one of the dinner parties at which he was host he gathered together a choice company of old friends, Gilbert Murray, Lawrence Binyon, and Percy Lubbock. George Moore joined them and gleefully outraged everybody with his "half naughty" and perverse way of talking about literature, especially about Russian literature. Turgenev and Tolstoy "spoiled everything with moral prejudices" and Dostoevski was simply "confused." Murray concurred, saying that he had read The Brothers Karamazov "twice with increasing disgust." Berenson enjoyed several days with Santayana, whose philosophic flights continued to puzzle him. " M o r e than ever he is one of the gods of Epicurus," he reflected, "but with a penetrating subtle yet vigorously constructive mind." Santayana had saved enough money to resign his uncongenial role as a professor at Harvard and, having been caught in England by the outbreak of the war, was much relieved to settle down in Oxford. Berenson returned to Paris on October 1, 1918, leaving Mary in the care of Logan and Alys in their home at Chilling on the coast of the Solent. The two had set up house together after Russell abandoned Alys in 1 9 1 1 . Berenson could not afford to remain in England, he explained to Mrs. Gardner, and pay income tax there "on top of all I pay at home and in Italy." On the day he left he wrote Wendell that the end of the war seemed at last in sight, for Bulgaria had surrendered. The previous year Wendell had retired, broken in health, after forty-five years at Harvard as student and teacher. Berenson urged him to write his autobiography, adding, " I dream of doing something similar." He thought that his by comparison would be "thin and meagre . . . and yet I too may leave a book of some value." The mood in Paris was far different from what it had been in June when he left. The expectation of victory was in the air. Marshal Foch had launched his great counteroffensive in August, and the American armies had reduced the St. Mihiel salient. Under the overwhelming assault of the French, British, and American armies the Hindenburg line had [240]

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crumbled f r o m the C h a n n e l to the V o s g e s , and the ravaged cities o f B e l g i u m and northern France w e l c o m e d their liberators. T h e G e r m a n request for an armistice w a s turned o v e r to the Inter-Allied C o n f e r e n c e w h i c h had been set up at Versailles, and the terms o f w h a t was in effect unconditional surrender w e r e w o r k e d out. T h e German delegation did not reach the French lines under a w h i t e flag to accept the onerous conditions until N o v e m b e r 7, 1918, the Austrians having already signed an armistice w i t h the Italians on N o v e m b e r 3, and the fighting was abating o n all fronts. A s the complicated drama began to unfold in Paris, Berenson f o u n d himself s o u g h t out b y participants in the m a n y rival negotiations, and he lent a willing ear to the tales o f the secret machinations a m o n g the p o w e r s . H e resumed his daily " c h r o n i c l e " to M a r y w i t h hardly a break, always recounting, after disposing as best he could o f her criticisms o f his behavior t o w a r d her, w h a t he had picked up concerning political developments and contentions o v e r the division o f the spoils. H e learned, for example, that w h e n A l e x a n d e r K e r e n s k y escaped f r o m Archangel in disguise, he had been landed in England. His arrival had been kept secret because negotiations at that time w e r e being carried on w i t h the B o l sheviks. W h e n the negotiations broke d o w n , he was dramatically ushered to the fore. A charismatic figure in the opening months o f the Russian revolution, K e r e n s k y had been a prominent l a w y e r w h o had j o i n e d the cause o f r e f o r m as a moderate socialist revolutionary. H e had risen to prime minister o f the first provisional g o v e r n m e n t after the fall o f the czar in February 1917. O n O c t o b e r 30, 1918, K e r e n s k y w r o t e to Berenson that he was alarmed b y reports that the U n i t e d States " i s supposed to refuse the recognition o f the Provisional G o v e r n m e n t re-established at the National C o n g r e s s and insists even on the cessation o f the future development o f the allied operations in European Russia." H e deplored the absence o f Russia f r o m the A l l i e d W a r C o u n c i l , w h i c h w a s discussing the p r o v i sions o f the armistice, and w a r n e d that a feeling o f mistrust o f the Allies w a s being created " w h i c h w i l l lay the foundation for n e w severe international conflagrations. . . . I am convinced, dear M r . Berenson, that y o u w i l l use all y o u r influence and that y o u w i l l help Russia w i t h all y o u r energy." Neither Siberia nor m u c h o f European Russia had yet c o m e under the control o f the Bolsheviks, and civil w a r was in progress. T h e refugee m e m b e r s o f the provisional g o v e r n m e n t had set up a democratic antiB o l s h e v i k g o v e r n m e n t , and as its representative K e r e n s k y sought de facto recognition for it b y the British. T h e Allies, h o w e v e r , had different aims and supported A d m i r a l A l e x a n d e r Vasilievich K o l c h a k and the re[241]

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actionary elements led by Anton Ivanovich Denikin. That policy, Kerensky warned, would assure the ultimate success of the Bolsheviks. What most shocked him was the discovery that immediately after the collapse of Russia the British and French laid plans for the dismemberment of Russia into spheres of influence. Even while Kerensky's plea was in Berenson's hands, the United States had already agreed to join the Allies in sending troops to collaborate with Kolchak, who had gathered around him "the forces of the Old Regime." Berenson's virulent antiBolshevik attitude would seem to owe much to his friendship with Kerensky, with w h o m he kept up a correspondence for a number of years. O f equal concern to Berenson was the future of Italy's relations with her neighbors on the Adriatic. When early in October Berenson had a luncheon meeting with two members of the about-to-be-created Jugoslav government, Ante Trumbic, the prospective minister of foreign affairs, and Petar Jovanovic, the prospective secretary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trumbic impressed upon him the difficulties that lay ahead because of Baron Sonnino's unyielding desire to control the Adriatic shores. He predicted that bad blood between the Italians and the Slavs would be bound to persist. Paris swarmed with fellow Harvard alumni, and Berenson enjoyed the thrill of a reunion dinner at which scores of them appeared in khaki. When he visited the pleasant little house of Brand Whitlock, the refugee American ambassador to Belgium, he was rashly assured that the Flemish separatists, whose dislike of French culture was deep-rooted, had no political influence. That impotence was not to last. Often the host at luncheon meetings, Berenson commanded a wide range of political and social gossip. At one gathering Jean Cocteau brought rumors of possible armistice terms as well as the piquant news that Marie Murat was to be D'Annunzio's next mistress and the more improbable information that the flamboyant poet was coming to Paris as an agent for aircraft firms. Weekends with Elsie de Wolfe and her diverting entourage at the Villa Trianon had their special charms and they also provided a useful listening post. While at the villa he learned that someone at the Council at Versailles had asked that Italian troops be allowed after the armistice to occupy all the lands claimed in the Pact of London. It was enough, he said, to "make one regret almost that the Americans came into the war." Ward Cabot told him Marshal Foch had "implored" that the armistice be delayed for five days; he could then "guarantee no German army would remain." Wilson would not hear of it, perhaps, Berenson thought, because he dreaded a too-complete victory which would remove all restraint upon the greed of the Allies. General Pershing had also protested [242]

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that the proposed armistice w a s premature. Foch, as head o f the Supreme War C o u n c i l , set the draconian armistice terms, and these w e r e perforce accepted b y the U n i t e d States. O n N o v e m b e r n , 1918, the guns at last fell silent and the G e r m a n e n v o y s signed the armistice d o c u m e n t in Marshal Foch's railway car in the forest o f C o m p i e g n e . C o l o n e l H o u s e cabled to President Wilson, " A u t o c r a c y is dead. L o n g live democracy and its immortal leader." A l l the pent-up expectation burst out in tremendous emotional demonstrations in the streets and squares o f Paris as e v e r y w h e r e else in the Allied w o r l d . Strangers embraced and danced in j a m m e d streets. T w o days earlier the disenchanted Berenson had expressed his dread o f "all the follies that will n o w lay the dragon's eggs to be hatched as the years g o b y , " a dread w h i c h "takes a w a y all the satisfaction I m i g h t have for m y conceit in having a l w a y s believed in our v i c t o r y . " H e w a s o v e r c o m e w i t h sadness at the sight o f the " p e o p l e b a w l i n g , squealing, tooting penny whistles, m a k i n g every kind o f animal n o i s e . " H e suddenly felt alone in Paris and w a s o v e r c o m e b y " a dreadful fit o f convulsed s o b bing." M e m b e r s o f the D u v e e n f i r m had already gathered in Paris, confident that peace w o u l d open the floodgates releasing European art for their m o n e y - b u r d e n e d clients in America. T h e y w e r e polite to Berenson but had little time for h i m . " I a m d r i f t i n g , " he told Wendell, " l i v i n g in a state o f humiliating impotence, o w i n g to too absorbing an interest in public affairs." H e w a s obsessed w i t h the thought that E u r o p e was " s w i n g i n g back so surely to the glorious and predatory past" and that " t h e harvest o f the w a r w i l l be as poisonous as its conduct has been m u r d e r o u s . " B u t impotent or not, he felt a compulsion to " m e d d l e " in the tumult o f politics that swirled about the Q u a i D ' O r s a y , the Palace o f Versailles, and the hotels that o v e r f l o w e d w i t h delegations and hundreds o f o m nipotent journalists. T h e c o m m o t i o n soared to fever pitch w i t h the arrival in France o n D e c e m b e r 13 o f President Wilson, hailed b y delirious c r o w d s as the savior o f E u r o p e . B u t the w o r l d l y - w i s e m e m b e r s o f the A m e r i c a n c o l o n y did not share the enthusiasm o f the c r o w d s . C y n i c a l pragmatists, they insisted that " E u r o p e a n affairs w e r e none o f America's business." T o M r s . Gardner Berenson admitted that he t h o u g h t it a pity that " P a r s i f a l " W i l s o n " c o u l d not remain in the Sinai o f the White H o u s e thundering forth c o m m a n d m e n t s . . . w h i c h w e r e truly admirable, noble, and o f constructive benefit. . . . G o d s should not leave their h e a v e n s . " W i t h H . W i c k h a m Steed, f o r e i g n editor o f the L o n d o n Times, Maurice P e m o t , and Walter Lippmann, Berenson set up a w e e k l y political luncheon to w h i c h each o f t h e m b r o u g h t one or t w o others. L i p p m a n n w a s [243]

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to prove an especially valued friend. The brilliant young author of A Preface to Politics had in October of 1 9 1 7 been recruited as one of Secretary of War Newton Baker's secret intelligence team, vaguely called " T h e Inquiry." A strong supporter of Wilson's pacific war aims, he had helped prepare a memorandum, " T h e War Aims and Peace Terms It Suggests." In Paris he had been called on by Colonel House to prepare a detailed explanation of the Fourteen Points and especially of the proposed League of Nations for presentation to the Allied armistice commission, but his liberal views prevented his being given a place on the American negotiating team. Shunted off to routine assignments, he rapidly grew disillusioned with the peace process and his role became less that of agent for Baker and House than that of an investigative journalist. Thus from different sectors of A r m y Intelligence the two idealists, Berenson and Lippmann, made common cause. As Berenson sized up Lippmann after their first meeting, he saw a face "curiously full of power and calm and depth." Later they had an "almost heart to heart talk" and Lippmann "revealed himself, on matters international at least, entirely of our way of thinking," Bernard reported to Mary. " H e has a loathing of propaganda which he declares has inevitably been turned into an instrument for reaction and annexationism. I hope that his solid common sense in loathing everything imperialistic and his hatred of all militarism will pull him through." He feared, however, that "his opinions may matter as little as mine. . . . It is too late for opinions or ideas." With the war over, Elsie de Wolfe's hospitable villa provided a refuge on weekends for many of the high-placed officials who eagerly welcomed a change from Paris tables d'höte. The company at the villa was "boisterous and in high spirits," with the irrepressible Harry Lehr, former arbiter of N e w Y o r k high society, setting the pace. When the crowd went off to a dance, Berenson stayed behind to talk with General Thomson, who "aired his strong Bolshevik sympathies." They were sympathies that Berenson vigorously rejected, and he wrote to Mary that most of the Bolshevik "leaders are J e w s filled with hatred and resentment and bloodthirstiness." Sitting beside the Aga Khan at luncheon, he listened skeptically to his professed interest in Bertrand Russell's philosopy. " I doubt whether he has read a page of him," he commented. During a talk with Melchior de Polignac he was told that "the wave of fierce chauvinism that had overwhelmed France" on the eve of President Wilson's arrival was engineered entirely by Georges Clemenceau, w h o was living up to his sobriquet of the " T i g e r . " The company at the Villa Trianon weekends almost always had its mixture of literary as well as military and political figures. On the eighth [244]

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o f December, for example, Jean Cocteau shared the stage with Robert Trevelyan, Augustine Birrell, and Royall Tyler, who had been recently promoted to captain. Berenson tried without success to keep the party French-speaking, and Cocteau was "snowed under." Cocteau took some o f them to a dealer to see a large Madonna and Child by Picasso, which Berenson thought nearly as good as a Jordaens. The dealer also showed them a little Ingres, "as lovely as any Raphael." It was a painting, Bernard said, "I would have acquired at any price before my confidence in all sorts o f things was shaken." As he contemplated the influx o f thousands o f emissaries from all the governments o f the victors, the vanquished, and the newborn countries, accompanied by "un-commissioned interlopers" like himself, Berenson wondered whether as much as "one percent of the Wilsonian program will be realized in practice." While the stringent terms o f the peace were being drafted by the Supreme Council at Versailles and the maps o f national territories were being redrawn, the principal activity on the periphery o f the deliberations was talk—endless, unceasing, and argumentative. Every political claim had its high-placed advocates who urged their proposals upon the foreign officers. At one meeting an array o f eminent persons was harangued by exforeign minister Gabriel Hanotaux on his solution for the German question: prolonged occupation o f the Rhineland. "Hanotaux held forth all the time," Berenson reported, "making it impossible for others to talk and he uttered such monstrous nonsense about Germany that I marvelled how such a swinish chatterer should have attained such authority and reputation." Hanotaux asserted that the Germans were not really beaten: they had stopped only when "their comfort and ease and well-being" were menaced. He had already submitted to the Ministry o f Foreign Affairs his proposal to "free the populations west of the Rhine from Prussian tyranny." The occupation of the Rhineland and the Saar took place soon afterward. With the signing o f the armistice travelers could once more cross to Europe in safety and old ties could be reestablished. As he made his social rounds, Berenson one day encountered Aileen Tone, who had returned in the company o f the political and social leader Mrs. J . Bordon "Daisy" Harriman. From Miss Tone he could learn the details of the last days o f his old friend Henry Adams, who in the spring of the year had died in his sleep at the age o f eighty. Disillusioned and pessimistic, he had been "anxious to g o . " She had ministered to him to the end and as a pious Catholic had arranged the room in which his body lay as a "chapelle ardente" with burning candles. For Berenson as for Edith Wharton, Adams' passing broke a much-treasured link with the past. Berenson had [245]

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greatly admired Adams, even while he sensed a certain distance between them. He felt indebted to the old man for having aroused his interest in the Middle Ages, and in after years he came to think of himself as his disciple. Berenson kept up his tantalizing relation with Natalie Barney, mixing, as he said, connoisseurship with Lesbos. She seemed to him to know everything and understand everything "although she has studied nothing." Edith Wharton in 'ited him to dine alone with her on Christmas Day, and the following day he was again at Elsie de Wolfe's villa. There some forty guests listened to Cole Porter sing "some of his delicious songs" and Elsie gave a dramatic reading. After luncheon the celebrants danced while Berenson observed: "It gladdens my senile heart to see people amusing themselves so innocently and spending their energy so unproductively.'' Seething beneath this glamorous and diverting life of politics and society and hidden from all his friends, except sympathetic Edith Wharton, was the lacerating debate with Mary, who bitterly resented her exclusion from his company. As she nursed her grievances, she brought up the one that had most deeply wounded her self-esteem, his reminiscence earlier in the year of the most exquisite sexual experiences of his life. He conceded that it had been a foolish thing for him to utter those "unfortunate words," but argued that they were "loathesomely untrue in the sense that your disordered spirit insisted in giving them." He implied that he had simply intended an aesthetic observation such as he might have made of supremely great paintings. "Were I sure that the real trouble between you and me was over that matter, I could undertake never again to have sexual intercourse. But I cannot forego what amounts to a real need, for a certain kind of society and social amusement. When I am not absorbed in work I love to go out, to see pretty women, to have illusions about their power of understanding and appreciating what I like to say. I love as well to take part in society life and feel that there I am realizing a big part of myself." Hence he feared that since she abhorred that life, it would be folly to have her in Paris with him. If he admonished her to conquer her jealousies and half-mad discontents, she for her part and at even greater length depreciated his political activities and his susceptibility to female charms. "I am inclined to think," she wrote, "that in spite of thy historical knowledge, or perhaps because of it, thee is not likely to make a mark in practical politics, where thy vehemence puts everyone of the opposite way of thinking. . . . I think the sooner thee gets out o f it the happier thee will be." And as for his pleasure in the festivities at Elsie's Villa Trianon, she thought she could view them, if not for her intense "nervous suffering," as "leniently [246]

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and amusedly without any more disgust than one gives to the contemplation of the habits of strange beasts and insects." Nevertheless, she insisted, she longed for his society. He objected that in a Paris overrun by delegations there was "not a hole in the wall to be had." She received an invitation from Elizabeth Cameron to visit her at year's end at Stepleton House at Blandford. But Stepleton House proved an uncheerful refuge, for the death of Henry Adams had been followed a few months later by the death of Elizabeth Cameron's husband and by the death of her daughter, Martha, the last so crushing a blow that Martha's gravesite on the grounds of Stepleton House became an altar on which Mrs. Cameron sometimes flung herself. Mary soon returned, therefore, to Hampstead to stay for a month with her daughter Ray, who was much occupied with her unsuccessful bid for a seat in Parliament, a bid wholly financed by Berenson. Bernard's coolly rational explanations for keeping her at a distance gave Mary as little surcease as his denials of being in love with another woman. "Although I am very fond of one or another and still another," he said, "not one would keep me, nor indeed my love of the life I live here. . . . I cannot join you, as I long to do, while you are capable of getting poisoned by a casual harsh or searing word of mine. Nor can I join you while you insist on giving my amorous adventures the importance that you do in the history of the past twelve months." Women, he said, took little of his dreams and none of his thoughts "except as they are human, adolescent-minded and attractive . . . machines of pleasure, and sleeping with [them is] seldom the goal of my relationship or even the accidental end." In one of her letters she admitted to having felt "jealousy, hatred, and gnawing envy." Bernard thereupon admonished her that if she would now fight against those sins, she would become " a far more interesting, more companionable person. . . . Hitherto you have been a child, a mere animal, delightful and sustaining and comforting but only, or little more than, as a physical force. O f the deeper realities of humanized people like myself, of people shall I say with souls you would not hear." Cut to the quick, Mary jotted in the margin, " M y God, his conceit, selfishness, snobbishness. Good heavens, what a revelation of self-satisfaction and cruelty to me. I wish I were dead. I have never known him." She fortunately did not communicate her private outrage, and their exchange subsided into less turbulent psychologizing. In the midst of their most recent recriminations, Bernard told her of receiving an official invitation from the duke of Alba for the two of them to go to Madrid in May to "help them hang the Italian pictures in the new rooms" in the Prado. Mary quickly agreed, but then, remembering [247]

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the proposal he had once made w h e n Belle Greene came to Italy, she added that she w o u l d be delighted to g o but not as a chaperon to another o f his loves. H e r unsettled emotions remained a stumbling block to her j o i n i n g h i m in Paris, and she finally consented to return to I Tatti late in February 1919 to "untie the k n o t s , " as Bernard told Wendell, " o u r 'estate' and household have w r i g g l e d themselves into during our long absence." T h e v o l u m i n o u s letters o f the acrimonious year-long debate between the t w o adversaries w e r e carefully filed a w a y b y each o f them to j o i n the thousands w h i c h had preceded them, as if life depended on their being kept for posterity. N o despair w o u l d tempt them to destroy the life record that each entrusted to the other. T i m e in its flight m i g h t w a i t for n o person w h o m it hustles o f f to oblivion, but their written w o r d s m i g h t p r o l o n g their earthly identity.

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N mid-October of 1918 Frederick Sherman brought out Berenson's Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting. It gathered together the articles he had published during the preceding year and a half in American, French, and Italian periodicals. The ninety-four pages of text embellished with sixty full-page illustrations demonstrated the lines of filiation among the Sienese artistic personalities. The chief instrument in his researches, Berenson explained in the preface, was his reliance on chronology: " N e v e r have I thrown my nets so wide or been so painstaking in gathering up the facts that go towards determining a date." T o illustrate that more was needed for the understanding of a painting than rapturous contemplation, he recounted a disarming anecdote. Once as a beginner in a gallery in tow of his mentor—perhaps Richter or Frizzoni—he had gushed with emotion before a painting. His companion, who "perchance, was growing impatient with my neophytic aphasia," cut it short with " Y e s , yes, but please observe the little pebbles in the foreground." Among his intimates, Berenson concluded, " O b s e r v e the little pebbles' has become a phrase for all detailed, at times ludicrously minute, comparison upon which so large a part of my activities are spent." The book was reviewed in both America and England, and generally with appreciation. Walter Pach, writing in the Chicago Dial, thought that though "the ordinary student of art" might not be equipped to evaluate the arguments, he could "enjoy with the critic the zest of his researches and the ingenious fitting together of fragments which reconstitute some lost personality of the quattrocento." The writer of the review in the London Times Literary Supplement observed that " o f all the papers in the book, the most instructive in its drawing of fine distinctions . . . between the work of a master and that of a close and intelligent [249]

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follower" was the concluding one on "Guidoccio Cozzarelli and Matteo di Giovanni." In it Berenson had revised his attribution of one of Henry Walters' paintings, assigning it to Guidoccio, Matteo's pupil. "Mr. Berenson makes out a good case for his surprising change and in doing so gives this volume the piece of criticism which will perhaps prove to be its permanent attraction." The change of attribution appears not to have disturbed Walters. "I have enjoyed immensely your interesting analyses," he wrote Berenson, "and the delightful way in which you are always able to present even the dryest facts." Walters, who had retired on the first of the year from the wartime Railroad Administration in Washington, reported that he knew very little about current art matters in the United States, for he had been careful to keep himself "out of the way of temptation." He declared, however, that the new tax laws would have a serious effect "on some of us who have been collectors, in that our ability to purchase will be so much curtailed." As for President Wilson, who had arrived in Europe, he thought him "unfortunately a little too much a Socialist, with theories that are beautiful, but not all of them practical." It was becoming all too clear that Wilson's ideal of a just peate with "covenants openly arrived at" was suffering the usual fate of an admirable theory confronted by an implacable fact. As the disillusioned Colonel House would write, " N o tribal entity was too small to have ambitions for self-determination." During the months after the armistice, rumors of Wilson's difficulties eddied about Paris "in the gilded salons of the great," and it was being said, as Berenson facetiously recounted to Ralph Curtis, "that Parsifal has fallen victim to the flower maidens, and that is why he occasionally plays the role of Titurel." He regretted that the "author of The Spoon River Anthology is not here to write epitaphs of all and sundry." In January 1919 with the approach of the first plenary session of the Peace Conference at Versailles, the behind-the-scenes confidences to Mary grew more portentous. Sonnino, ran Bernard's comment, seemed to be "having it all his own way, secret diplomacy, no recognition of Yugo-Slavia . . . and his rival Lenin . . . is tramping westward and southward but likely to lose Petrograd and even Moscow." To Mary's entreaties that he return to Florence he remonstrated, " I do not see how I can tear myself away now at last when I am going to have a chance of bringing my ideas home to influential people." Besides, he confessed, the political activity "distracts, amuses, and absorbs me. . . . And there really is a chance of contributing a winged word, of driving home an idea that may help the decision as to whether Lenin, Sonnino, or Wilson are to rule the world." [250]

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In the early weeks of the year Berenson had long talks with Walter Lippmann and passed on to him what he heard from his various informants of Wilson's disturbing compromises. He and Lippmann dined with Melville Stone, the elderly and autocratic head of the Associated Press, whom Berenson found intolerant of even "a very mild and sketchy opposition." Shortly afterward he took Lippmann to the E. J. Dillons to meet Take Ionescu, the veteran Rumanian cabinet minister. Berenson pumped Ionescu "for hours," and what chiefly stuck in his mind was his insistence that it was not Kaiser Wilhelm but Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the architect of the German navy, who was most responsible for precipitating the war. Later Lippmann and he went to see Prime Minister Venizelos, who was persuaded to talk "on all the questions of the settlement." The upshot of the interview seemed to be that "everything may be upset by the British and the Italians refusing to buy any more of our pigs." Then at a meeting with Steed, Joseph Pulitzer, and Pernot, Berenson got Steed to "tell Pulitzer the whole story of ItaloJugo-Slav relations" in an effort to offset the Italian propaganda. A most disturbing recent development had been the resignation of Leonida Bissolati from the Italian cabinet. As a supporter of Wilson's proposed League of Nations and an advocate of conciliation with the Jugo-Slavs, Bissolati had violently quarreled with the Italian foreign minister. Lippmann, despairing of carrying through "our program," announced that he was returning to America. "He assures me," Bernard said, "that my worst fears with regard to Wilson's coming over have come true, and that Wilson will go back satisfied that everybody has accepted his words." He could not be dissuaded from leaving at such a critical moment because "the only control one has over a government is through publicity," and publicity was a weapon he could employ only by going back. From America, after he had returned to his post at the New Republic, Lippmann wrote that the superpatriots feared contamination by Europe and besides "the people are shivering in their boots over Bolshevism, and they are far more afraid of Lenin than they ever were of the Kaiser." Years later Berenson reminded Lippmann of their colloquy when he had come to see him in his office in the corner of the rue Royale. "You were still in uniform at your desk. I came to ask you whether you were aware that we Americans were being betrayed . . . and that a most disastrous peace treaty was being forged. You said nothing, but your eyes were filled with tears. I have loved you since." Of the political leaders Berenson was most impressed by Venizelos, and he met more often with him than with any other leader. At one long interview Venizelos told him that he believed the British would offer Cyprus to Greece. He also stated that at a meeting with Sonnino, the [251]

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Italian had reproached him for harping on the Dodecanese islands, which the Italians coveted. He agreed with Berenson that an Allied investigative mission ought to go to Moscow before attempting intervention and certainly ought to consult "all shades of Russian opinion," including Kerensky, to see that no reactionary government was established. He believed that the land ought to be given to the peasants, with compensation to the landlords, and, completing the European survey, he advocated home rule for Ireland "with Ulster permitted to follow its own course." Eager to have Venizelos carry his case concerning Greece to influential Americans, Berenson arranged a meeting with "Daisy" Harriman, who had vigorously campaigned for Wilson and had become an important figure in the Democratic National Organization. An ardent suffragette, she had come over to England in an official capacity to investigate the working conditions of women in the munitions factories and after the armistice had come to Paris to take charge of the Red Cross Motor Corps. Not yet fifty, she was an immensely energetic person and in Washington the mistress of a notable political salon. She regarded Berenson as "one of the most charming of the everybodies who spent the winter at the Ritz," and recalled that "several times a week during breakfast at Laurent's he drew about him the progressive liberal figures of the Conference." At one of their occasional luncheon meetings she confided to him she could not make up her mind whether to marry again. Berenson reported that he "strongly urged her not to unless she could not help it." She did not remarry, and many years later Franklin Roosevelt appointed her ambassador to Norway. It was at the home of the Baroness La Caze that Berenson had met Eduard Benes, then a young statesman of thirty-five and a tremendously active spokesman for Bohemia "as the center of a new states system." Berenson and Pemot managed to snare him for a dinner at which he expounded his scheme for a "loose confederation" of Poland, Jugoslavia, Rumania, and the Magyars. "Like most sensible folk," Berenson noted, "he regards the union of Germany and Austria as the safest solution." Benes told him too how at the last minute the Austrian emperor and the archduke tried to win him, "a despised and persecuted exile, over to a compromise." A "quiet modest individual," Benes asked Berenson to use his influence to put him in contact with the State Department. This Berenson effected with the help of Felix Frankfurter. Benes and Berenson met off and on until, shortly after the Peace Conference, Benes gave a "farewell luncheon" to all who had helped him. When young Gaetano Salvemini, dismayed by the resignation of Bissolati, came on from Italy to try to marshal opinion against Sonnino's [252]

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reactionary policy, Berenson took him over to one of his weekly luncheons to confer with important journalists and with delegates from the ethnic minorities of the defeated empire. On another occasion he arranged a luncheon for Joseph Pulitzer "to see something of the best French journalists. "Joseph Reinach did most of the talking, "a revelation of the average well-to-do French mind . . . interesting, if not very wise." At the invitation ofJoseph Grew, who had just been appointed secretarygeneral of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace, he lunched at the Ritz to meet the Robert Lansings and the Franklin Roosevelts. The clatter of the fashionable place made conversation difficult. "At every table was a party, and everybody was looking and craning their necks at everybody else." He did have some talk with Secretary of State Robert Lansing and found him "a very average man, far from stupid, but equally far from brilliant." Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt made a far different impression—"a radiant youngster of thirty-seven, and not looking that, keen and piercing and jolly" but as a husband blessed "with one of the most hideous . . . females ever seen." In the great Hall of Mirrors at Versailles the Supreme War Council held its first plenary session on January 18, 1919, each of the Allied leaders accompanied by his foreign minister. A commission on the League of Nations was set up a week later; its final draft of the covenant did not receive approval until May 28. Day after day the serried ranks of diplomats listened to the many anxious petitioners who advanced their claims for national identity, claims they had already aired among the hordes of journalists and well-wishers. As the days passed and confusion deepened, Berenson began to take an apocalyptical view of the crisis. "All I want," he informed Curtis, "is that [Wilson] should down Bolshevism of every kind and type. I suppose it is really Lenin or Wilson, and I greatly prefer Wilson." His vehement speaking at luncheon and dinner tables against British, French, and Italian territorial claims soon gave him the reputation of being a radical, and the next ironical step could have been foretold. At tea one day with the Bourgets, his chauvinistic host greeted him like a "naughty boy," with a loud "Hello Bolshevik." One day he had occasion to meet the fifty-nine-year-old General Pershing. The general unbent and showed himself "the most utter jollier imaginable, with a smile like Granville Barker's only more so on a face more manly [and] a most powerful skull." At a tete-ä-tete dinner with Mrs. Harriman he listened until midnight to her admiring talk of Woodrow Wilson. A few weeks later, after learning of the obstacles being thrown in Wilson's path, he wrote to Mary that if Wilson "did not look sharp, he would turn out to be a bigger and more disappointing Kerensky." [253]

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B y that time Berenson's disillusionment with the peace negotiations was so nearly complete that he had little heart for further political meddling. He begged off attending a meeting in Paris which Felix Frankfurter, who was back as one of Wilson's legal consultants, urged him to attend to meet some of the leading members of the Zionist delegation. Frankfurter was particularly optimistic about Zionist prospects, having recently received a letter from Emir Faisal of the Arab kingdom of Hedjaz stating that it was "a happy coincidence" that Arabs and Jews, "cousins in race," had come to Paris "to take first steps toward the attainment of their national ideals together." "We Arabs," he had written, "especially the educated among us, look with deepest sympathy on the Zionist movement." In his own alienated and disenchanted state Berenson appears to have had small interest in the matters before the Zionists. As an Arabic scholar he may well have felt more keenly the clear indications that Britain and France, determined to divide the Arab world, would not honor the recent British manifesto proposing the creation of an independent Arab state including Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria and excluding Palestine. Apparently he had already met some of the delegates to the Zionist meeting, for he was to carry on a friendly political correspondence for a number of years with Judge Julian Mack, head of the Zionist delegation, as well as with Thomas Lamont and Felix Frankfurter. Twenty years later Frankfurter wrote of the wonderful talks he had had with Eduard Benes in Berenson's company. However much Berenson was absorbed with political developments during the first three months of 1919, the art trade as always imposed its demands upon him. There were the indispensable visits to the Wildenstein and other galleries to learn what new treasures had come on the market. He took pains to improve his relations with Arthur Sulley. His respect for Sulley was widely shared. As Rene Gimpel noted in his diary, "There are three great art dealers in London: Agnew, Colnaghi [Gutekunst], and Sulley, each of very good reputation, but Sulley comes first by dint of his incomparable fairness." In mid-January Henry Duveen died. His death brought consequences more serious than Joe had predicted. For a time it threatened to put the firm in liquidation, and as a result payments to Berenson were delayed. With his usual acumen, however, Joe persuaded his brother Louis to buy out Uncle Henry's shares and allow the firm to continue. The prospects were excellent, for the multimillionaire Frick had been making major purchases. The day after Henry's death Louis wrote to Berenson that Joe had cabled him about the Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman, which the firm had now acquired from Lord Rochdale, and the Andrea del Sarto Portrait of a [254]

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Lady, bought from the Carfax Gallery. Both paintings had been lent on approval to the veteran steel magnate in his Fifth Avenue palace. Joe wanted letters from Berenson about both portraits—especially a "logical important letter" about the Titian. Louis remarked that he did not know what Joe meant by "logical," but at any rate "you can see what he wants, you to enthuse in your letter regarding its importance." Joe could then show the letters to Frick and " I suppose settle the sale of the pictures." Berenson complied in the midst of his "humbler" but yet necessary tasks in connection with the Peace Conference. Now convinced of the attribution to Titian, he abandoned himself to a flood of appreciative hyperbole to proclaim it "as one of the grandest achievements of human art. . . . Every trait in it bespeaks energy concentrated on one supreme purpose. If only one could guess what that purpose was. Perhaps the author o f ' T h e Ring and the Book,' perhaps Browning could have told us." His letter had also to justify his change of attribution. Twenty years earlier, he explained, Giorgione was so sacred a name to him that he was "afraid of becoming the dupe" of his own enthusiasm, for he had not yet learned to distinguish between Giorgione and the Giorgionesque Titian." Returning a few years ago to the "glorious task" of studying Venetian painting, he "naturally had occasion to revise a certain number" of his youthful opinions. The "higher the quality of a work of art the less it is capable of quantitative quasi-geometrical demonstration. . . . One's sense of it is based on something deeper and much less tangible, on one's accumulated experience and trained taste." "It occurs to me," he concluded, "that the carping youthful or senile critics might question [whether] your portrait is an original. . . . I can only pit my authority against theirs and do not fear the issue of the contest." The letter on the Andrea del Sarto, if less argumentative, was equally enthusiastic and confident. Perhaps Berenson's extensive explanation was a little too "logical" for the cautious and ailing Frick; he took neither portrait, and a week before his death in December of 1919 he requested Joe to remove from his gallery all the paintings he had decided not to buy. In the following year, presumably with the help of Berenson's report, Duveen sold the Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman as a Titian to Henry Goldman of New York for $125,000. The painting finally came to rest in the Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art. The Andrea del Sarto went to Mrs. Francis F. Prentiss for $105,000. The subsequent history of the paintings provides an illuminating commentary on the art, science, or craft of connoisseurship. The Rochdale portrait has through the years been given to Titian by, among others, Valentiner, Venturi, Suida, Offner, and Pallucchini. Earlier Cook and [255]

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Richter opted for G i o r g i o n e , as did Phillips and m o r e recently Pignatti, the G i o r g i o n e authority. In the National Gallery o f A r t it is n o w "attribu t e d " to " G i o r g i o n e and T i t i a n . " B u t the tale is not yet told. Harold E . W e t h e y , in his m o n u m e n t a l study o f The Paintings of Titian, takes issue w i t h all his predecessors. T h e portrait strikes h i m as "disagreeable. . . . only a minor artist could be responsible for this picture, so t h o r o u g h l y unpleasant both in f o r m and c o n t e n t . " A s for the A n d r e a del Sarto, Berenson, on further reflection, identified it in his 1932 Lists as a studio picture. In the preface to that extensive compilation he expressed a sobering w a r n i n g : " E v e n unquestioned attributions are not trademarks although collectors and dealers w o u l d like them to be. T h e y are stepping stones rather than g o a l s . " Six years before that time he w r o t e to Paul Sachs, " I do not flatter m y s e l f that m y attributions are final, but I dare h o p e that, at w o r s t , they are on the w a y to truth and not to e r r o r . " Such qualifications w e r e usually avoided in his letters to dealers' clients. T h e y required either " y e a " or " n a y " in their investment in art, and if " y e a " they desired enthusiastic confirmation. Hence Berenson confined his scholarly reservations to his b o o k s , his articles, and his correspondence w i t h professionals. T h e ending o f the w a r had acted like a strong tonic o n Joe D u v e e n , and as soon as his chief aide, E d w a r d Fowles, w a s demobilized in February 1919, he saw to the refurbishing o f the Paris premises in the place V e n d ö m e , w h i c h had been used b y the British military. Fowles resumed his activity as a chief intermediary w i t h clients, selling and b u y i n g paintings, and he frequently sought out Berenson for his opinion and advice on possible purchases. A s the market began to b o o m , Joe was m u c h in evidence in both L o n d o n and Paris and he did not hesitate to interrupt Berenson's patriotic duties. O n e urgent note in late February read: " C a n y o u c o m e to see m e at the office at 5 or 5:15 w h e n w e can have at least an hour or an hour and a half o f undisturbed talk? W e shall see M r . [William] Salomon [of N e w Y o r k ] . A v o i d discussing any o f the pictures w e b o u g h t f r o m Lazzaroni as I am n o w negotiating the sale o f all o f them to h i m . " These and a f e w score others f o u n d their w a y into the " X " B o o k that year w i t h Berenson's valuations. T h e great activity o f the D u v e e n s during 1919 can be j u d g e d f r o m the fact that the inventory o f their purchases ran to thirty pages. T h e r e can be little doubt that rival dealers w e r e equally enterprising as the w a r ravaged aristocracy sold o f f their objects o f art. A n article in the L o n d o n Times noted w h a t seemed to be a paradox in the art m a r k e t — a multitude o f sales b y estates and needy o w n e r s accompanied b y a rapid increase in prices. T h e increase, it w a s explained, w a s the result o f purchases b y the [256]

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new rich. Similarly the great development before the war of collections and museums in Germany had come with the rise of "a new rich class, chiefly J e w s , " w h o formed collections "with the best advice." In both countries "the influence of Morelli and after him of Berenson" had stimulated the taste for early Italian pictures. B y late March 1 9 1 9 the press was reporting that the Big Four were deadlocked over the question of reparations and that the impasse was aggravated by the French demand that the Rhine be made the new frontier. Irritation was growing in Paris over the delay in drawing up the peace treaties. The blame was laid on Wilson for having insisted on giving priority to discussion of the covenant for the League of Nations. The Italian delegates, angered by Wilson's opposition to their claim to Fiume, voted to quit the conference if Fiume was not assigned to Italy, and they did absent themselves in a huff for a few weeks. The chaos was confounded by continued warfare and revolution. In Berlin the Red Spartacist revolt almost succeeded. In Hungary a Bolshevik revolution did succeed and was under attack by Czech troops from one direction and Italian troops from another. T o the north there was violent opposition by the Germans to the establishment of a Polish corridor to the Baltic. Hence there was ample reason for Berenson to decamp as Lippmann had done earlier. Nothing further could be accomplished in person. T o Mary at I Tatti he inquired whether they had contributed to a school that she had praised highly. " I f so, that is deductible from our American income, of course." He noted that "our Italian tax of 27 per cent would make it impossible to remain in Italy if it were seriously applied. Y o u must find out, and w e shall make our bed accordingly." He also instructed her to check whether any of their export permits had expired on their paintings. She was to renew those still in force and try to bring out on her next trip the other paintings, "if not too big." She should also try to bring "all our Chinese paintings that you can, particularly the scroll with the Botticelli-Masaccio figures and all the Persian miniatures, especially the finest of all, the early 15th century's." He was of two minds whether he would ever return as a resident to the Italy that he had come so profoundly to distrust. In any event their most valuable possessions would be safer in their vault in London. Already there was a sign that a new Italy was about to be born: the renegade Socialist, Benito Mussolini, had just founded his Fascist party in Florence. Toward the end of March Berenson headed for Edith Wharton's haven on the Riviera, hoping to purge his mind of the political frustrations of Paris. With the bitter taste of Italian intransigency in his mouth, he had little stomach for Florence. There disorder was afoot that would erupt in the first week in July 1919 with widespread looting that reached I Tatti

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itself. A m o b of y o u n g m e n declaring they were sent by the C h a m b e r of Labor to requisition all wines and foodstuffs broke open the cellar door and made off with t w e n t y - o n e bottles of whiskey, t w o of cognac, three of champagne, ten of Rhine wine, and six flasks of oil. Mary duly filed a claim against the delinquent authorities with the American consul. At Hyeres Berenson surrendered gratefully to the cordial hospitality Edith W h a r t o n offered. T h e y were, she remarked to him, as comfortable with each other as a pair of old shoes. T h e contrast of her o w n relation to Bernard was t o o m u c h for M a r y . Filled with resentment, she responded, "I cannot but suspect Edith has been making you feel a martyr or a soulful angel." Struggling to bring order to the neglected household, she felt specially put u p o n reading what a delightful time he was having in Edith's company, surrounded by the "beauties of nature" and listening to Edith reading the opening chapters of her n e w novel, The Age of Innocence. With bitter sarcasm she burst out, "Whenever you give m e permission, I will end m y encumbering, unenjoying and unenjoyed existence." As was her w o n t , she soon apologized for her desperate reproaches and, worried about her mental state, she pleaded, "Dear old companion w e must not be separated now. I do believe thee like the law of gravitation w h e n I am in m y right mind. . . . Please hang on for m y sake, Bernard. I am lost w i t h o u t thee, lost sometimes with thee, it is true, but recoverable." O n e chore that M a r y p e r f o r m e d that April was to have a p r o f o u n d influence on both her life and Bernard's. Learning that Nicky Mariano was n o w safely back f r o m Estonia, where she had stayed out the war, she offered the attractive y o u n g w o m a n of thirty-two a j o b at I Tatti as a librarian-secretary. Miss Mariano eagerly accepted the offer, being at loose ends in the gloom of postwar Florence. Having learned f r o m Geoffrey Scott that a k n o w l e d g e of Latin w o u l d be necessary, she assured Mrs. Berenson that she could "pick it up again quite easily," as she had had lessons in her childhood in Naples with her professor father and was only out of practice. Berenson's o w n list of desired qualifications, as retailed f r o m Hyeres to Wendell, was m o r e extensive: "I need a secretary w h o is a good librarian and at the same time can revise m y bad spelling. . . . As he has to be a m e m b e r of the social and even family circle the choice is a difficult one. So f e w too have the competence, e.g. an acquaintance with French and German, Italian and Latin and fewer still want to exile themselves in such a social and musical void as Florence." If Mary's choice of a secretary to succeed Geoffrey Scott was not entirely governed by Bernard's criteria, she could hardly have chosen m o r e wisely, as the event w o u l d prove. [258]

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Scott, romantic and emotional, resumed his pursuit of Nicky, despite his marriage to Lady Sybil, but his troubled state was only too obvious and Nicky discouraged his ardent advances. He submitted after a fashion, telling her, " I am going to be very good and contented and happy on your account; I am also going to break the furniture sometimes and throw things about the room, not being a dear cold-hearted philosopher like you but wholly composed of flesh and blood." It was clear too that the tangle of his relationship with Mary had revived after her return to I Tatti. He later wrote reproachfully to her that Nicky's being taken on had "ruined his old home for him." His marriage to Lady Sybil was scarcely more than a year old, but their incompatibility, as Mary had foreseen, was all too evident. Their divorce did not take place, however, until 1926 after Scott had given up his post at the British embassy in Rome and was living in England. From London the gentlemanly Scott sent Lady Sybil the statutory evidence to use against him.

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E J U V E N A T E D by the few weeks at Hyeres and with the duke of Alba's cordial invitation in hand, Bernard went up to Paris in May 1919 and summoned Mary from I Tatti to join him for the visit to Madrid. James Fitz-James Stuart, the seventieth duke of Alba, a vigorous sportsman of forty-one, was a notable collector and writer on art. Berenson had met him on a previous journey to Spain, and during the intervening ten years they had kept in touch with each other. Educated in England, Alba was proud of his English blood. If, as has been said, Berenson relished the titles of his friends, Alba furnished satiety: at his death in 1953 he was said to have had the largest collection of titles in Europe outside of members of the royal families. He had been a member of the Spanish senate from 1 9 1 1 , and when the Board of Patrons of the Prado Museum was created in 1912, he was named its first chairman.

Berenson had also known the recently appointed director of the Prado, the art historian Aureliamo Bereute, from as far back as 1906. Bereute had undertaken the immense task of reorganizing the collections, and Berenson's help with the rehanging of the paintings may well have been considerable, for he remained in Spain for most of three months. The rehanging proved a temporary expedient. Ten years later the difficult process was repeated, though without Berenson's help. During the Berensons' stay in Madrid, Alba arranged for a prince of the blood to take them about almost every afternoon to inspect the private collections of "Spanish grandees" whose names, Mary informed Bernard's mother, were "more wonderful than their pictures, alas." Alba lived in suitable splendor with his brother and sister in his enormous palace " L i r i a , " located in the midst of its own park in Madrid. It was there one day in June that Bernard and Mary came to dine. Platoons of [260]

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servants in blue velvet knickers and gold lace attended them as they sat down in the great dining hall hung with Gobelin tapestries to "dine off gold and silver plate." Berenson's friendship with Alba, sustained by scores of letters, continued until Alba's death, though troubled for a time by Alba's support of Franco. In 1939 Franco appointed him ambassador to Great Britain; in 1945, disenchanted with Franco, he resigned to support Prince Juan, the future king of Spain. Early in his visit Berenson developed a passion for primitive Spanish art and he proselytized for its study. In one place he discovered a valuable "primitive" painting. It was thereupon put on exhibition in the Prado and a fund started for its acquisition by the nation. Queen Mother Maria Cristina welcomed the Berensons to a special audience to express her appreciation. They found her " v e r y jolly and full of good sense." Shortly before their departure for Paris in late July, the authorities offered Berenson a decoration for his services. He modestly declined the honor. With the signing of the peace treaty with Germany on June 28, 1919, Paris began to return to its normal bustle. Reporters and members of delegations streamed out of town, leaving the executive commissions behind to implement the complex provisions of the treaty. One day Berenson encountered Benes at a luncheon, "disheveled and suave and subtle as ever," holding forth against the Latin policy of the fait accompli. Berenson noted a change in himself: " A l l the international affairs suddenly seemed" to him "mere phonographic . . . of time long silenced in the real w o r l d . " Mary, much recovered in health and mind, crossed over to Big Chilling to her adored grandchildren, while Bernard fell back into his accustomed ways. Rene Gimpel, invited to visit him at the Ritz that summer, jotted down in his diary Berenson's pronouncement that Spain was "the only place in the world to study French art. Your thirteenth century stonecutters had all the grace of Watteau; all your churches are restored, but down there they're pure." Edith Wharton, relieved of her war work, had carried out her plan for a summer and autumn residence at a convenient distance from Paris and had acquired a handsome property in the village of St. Brice-sous-Foret, a short motor drive north of Paris. The low-lying house and spacious gardens were shielded from the village street by a high wall. There Berenson found himself one day early in August "inaugurating Edith's new villa, extraordinarily comfy, dainty and charming, nothing wanting to please a chastened eye and sobered sense." The village noises in the early morning were its only drawback. Edith, busy with housekeeping, pressed on nevertheless with her writing and found in Berenson a dis[261]

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criminating critic. Listening to her read f r o m her projected b o o k on M o r o c c o , he thought it " p e d a n t i c and v a g u e " and u r g e d her to stick to fiction. H e t h o u g h t her Age of Innocence w a s getting "better and b e t t e r , " displaying " m o r e solid p s y c h o l o g y and deeper h u m a n i t y , " and he f o u n d himself e n v y i n g her mastery. " I feel so f i n i s h e d , " he remarked, " a n d she is still climbing the h e i g h t s . " A t his international crossroads post at the Ritz, B e r e n s o n d r e w an array o f visitors into his hospitable net. Y o u n g Prince Paul o f Y u g o slavia, n o w g r o w n up and a student at O x f o r d , came by during the college vacation f o r a long talk w i t h his m e n t o r in art. T h e i r v o l u m i n o u s correspondence w o u l d flourish until B e r e n s o n ' s ninety-second year. Baroness La C a z e returned to Paris f r o m her travels and he dined w i t h her. H e w r o t e that he f o u n d her l o o k i n g " h a g g a r d , w a n and g h o s t l i k e , " and to illustrate h o w unfit he w a s f o r adventures, he i n f o r m e d M a r y that h a v i n g eaten next to nothing that d a y , he " n e a r l y fainted a w a y w h i l e at the t a b l e " and w e n t h o m e to bed. " S u c h w a s the redoubtable 'lovers' meeting, that y o u used to dread in y o u r bad m o m e n t s . " H e also met w i t h the K i n g s l e y Porters. T h e brilliant y o u n g archaeologist and art historian had c o m e to France in 1 9 1 8 f r o m his post at Y a l e U n i v e r s i t y to serve as liaison adjutant to the French C o m m i s s i o n o f Historic M o n u m e n t s to aid in the preservation o f art in the w a r zone. His w o r k n o w nearing an end, Porter w a s in something o f a quandary about his future and discussed long w i t h B e r e n s o n whether he should return to Y a l e or accept an o f f e r at H a r v a r d . B e r e n s o n w a s able to speak well o f both schools. Porter did return to Y a l e as a full professor, but in 1 9 2 4 m o v e d on to H a r v a r d , h o p i n g to c o m b i n e living in C a m b r i d g e w i t h residence in Florence, f o r w h i c h , he said, he w a s homesick. B e r e n s o n , full o f enthusiasm f o r his "last l o v e , " medieval sculpture and architecture, f o u n d a f e l l o w enthusiast in Porter, w h o s e Medieval Architecture: Its Origin and Development w a s already something o f a classic in the field. With the Porters he sallied forth into B u r g u n d y to study the subject. T o B e r e n s o n their j o u r n e y i n g s e v o k e d memories o f H e n r y A d a m s , w h o s e Mont Saint Michel and Chartres had first opened his eyes to the w o n d e r s o f medieval art and architecture in France. When after a w e e k the Porters had to leave to meet a c o m m i t m e n t in E n g l a n d , B e r e n son continued his p i l g r i m a g e to A m i e n s , Chartres, and B o u r g e s before returning to Paris. D o r o t h y Straight, w h o w i t h her late husband had subsidized the New Republic, w a s also in t o w n and she b e g g e d to be taken to the L o u v r e . T o B e r e n s o n she and her husband had seemed " u l t r a - r a d i c a l , " and he anticipated h a v i n g a " h e a r t to heart t a l k " w i t h her on the perils o f the peace. F o r the present, h o w e v e r , he w a s content to s h o w her and her c o m p a n [262]

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ions " t h e B a b y l o n i a n and the t w e l f t h century Christian sculpture . . . things w h i c h w e r e m o s t pleasant to m y present m o o d . " A m o n g the n e w acquaintances he m a d e that s u m m e r , the most challenging and unpredictable w a s C a r l H a m i l t o n , a kinetic and enterprising y o u n g capitalist o f thirty-three w h o had m a d e a killing in scarce copra oil during the w a r . B o r n into a p o v e r t y - s t r i c k e n f a m i l y in Pennsylvania, H a m i l t o n had b e g u n as a shoeshine b o y in his h o m e t o w n and had later f o u n d w o r k in the steel mills. T h r o u g h the interest o f a c l e r g y m a n he w a s b r o u g h t to the notice o f M r s . Ε . H . H a r r i m a n , w h o helped h i m to an education at A n d o v e r and at Y a l e . N o w confident that he w a s a m a n o f destiny, he had determined to cap his financial success b y j o i n i n g the ranks o f the great art collectors. H e had read B e r e n s o n ' s b o o k s at Y a l e and, carrying an introduction f r o m J o e D u v e e n , quickly attached himself to h i m . " C a r l H a m i l t o n has b o b b e d up a g a i n , " B e r n a r d w r o t e to M a r y , " a n d is c l a m o r i n g f o r m e . " H a m i l t o n ' s enthusiasm w a s contagious and B e r e n son mused, " I f I w e r e free o f all obligations o f l o y a l t y to the D u v e e n s I should be tempted to invest in h i m . T h e r e really w o u l d be a chance o f a partnership b e t w e e n m o n e y and taste." H a m i l t o n pursued B e r e n s o n w i t h his grandiose visions, and after one three-hour tete-ä-tete w i t h the brash enthusiast, B e r e n s o n w r o t e , " H e seemed like clay in m y hands, inviting m e to d o w h a t e v e r I willed. H e w a n t s to b u y up the w o r l d but I do not k n o w h o w he is to pay f o r it. Perhaps he w i l l pan out. H e m a y be a w o n d e r . W e m a d e all sorts o f proposals to each o t h e r . " It w a s arranged that H a m i l t o n should g o on to I Tatti w h e n M a r y returned there in September. M a r y , m e a n w h i l e , had c o m e up to L o n d o n f r o m B i g Chilling to meet J o e D u v e e n at J o e ' s request. She f o u n d h i m ready to c r o w w i t h j o y : he had j u s t been i n f o r m e d b y L l o y d G e o r g e that he w a s to be knighted in recognition, as reported in the Times, o f his " p u b l i c services, m o r e particularly in connection w i t h the extension o f the T a t e G a l l e r y o f British A r t . " M a r y w e n t w i t h h i m to " p i c k up his k n i g h t h o o d . " R e s u m i n g their long-interrupted business relation, he confided that M r s . Rockefeller, " w h o a l w a y s asks after t h e e , " had " b e g u n nibbling u p o n Italians." H e therefore w a n t e d B e r n a r d and her to g o o v e r to A m e r i c a " t o clinch i t . " M a r y also visited A r t h u r Sulley's gallery and again enjoyed the sight o f Bellini's Feast of the Gods, the painting w h i c h M r s . G a r d n e r had declined to b u y nearly three years a g o in spite o f both her and B e r n a r d ' s eloquence. Sulley n o w h o p e d that J o e D u v e e n w o u l d b u y it f r o m h i m , and he therefore asked her to have B e r n a r d tell Sir J o s e p h that M a d a m e H e i f e r w o u l d clean the painting. Sulley also urged the Berensons to g o to the [263]

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U n i t e d States, f o r i f D u v e e n did not take the Bellini, a rich A m e r i c a n w o u l d . D u v e e n , f o r his part, boasted to M a r y that he w a s g o i n g to b u y the " B r i d g e w a t e r " Titians, w h i c h w i t h his usual elan he described as " t h e greatest pictures in the w o r l d . " M a r y interposed that she thought the Bellini Feast w a s " j u s t t h a t , " a r e m a r k that made D u v e e n " v e r y t h o u g h t f u l . " B e r n a r d h o p e d that she had not encouraged J o e ' s strategy, because he did not plan to g o to A m e r i c a until the autumn o f 1920. " I shall see plenty o f h i m here in S e p t e m b e r , " he said, " a n d then I m u s t return to m y studies. I a m beginning to get rusty as an instrument. I do not intend to end as a charlatan." His recent i m m e r s i o n in late medieval art called f o r s o m e sort o f expression. M a r y took up her duties again at I Tatti in m i d - S e p t e m b e r and p r o m p t l y set M i s s M a r i a n o to w o r k . T h e y o u n g w o m a n , rather o v e r a w e d b y her responsibilities, came d o w n f r o m the Villa Rondinelli in San D o m e n i c o each day after an early luncheon to pick up the w o r k in the library o f her predecessors, C h e r r y and Scott. T h e arrival o f C a r l H a m i l ton p r o v i d e d an exciting distraction. M a r y took his art education in hand and, accompanied b y N i c k y M a r i a n o , toured the galleries o f Florence, Siena, and Padua, amazed again and again b y his instinctive attraction to the finest o f the masterpieces. She readily s u c c u m b e d to his charm, finding " s o m e t h i n g exhilarating, infectious and intoxicating about this A m e r i c a n B a c c h u s . " H e s e e m e d " a savage, uncultivated child o f n a t u r e " w i t h a Franciscan l o v e o f all h u m a n beings—especially ' B o y s . ' " His singular tastes came out b e f o r e the Titians: " H e doesn't like nude w o m e n m u c h . " Impatient to add to his collection, he o f f e r e d to b u y their precious Lorenzettis " a n d nearly everything e l s e " and g r e w cross at her refusals. T h e i r conversation happened to turn one day to a painting the B e r e n sons o w n e d w h i c h w a s stored in L o n d o n f o r safekeeping. What f o l l o w e d has been m u c h garbled in the retelling. T h e painting w a s not h a n g i n g at I Tatti. T h e space w h e r e it had h u n g w a s apparently visible and thus must h a v e been a cause o f M a r y ' s allusion to it. F r o m allusion to impulse w a s but a step. M a r y explained to B e r n a r d : " B u t (don't be cross) I h a v e p r o m i s e d to give h i m o u r little Pesellino o f St. J o h n in the Desert. W e w e r e speaking o f it and he said he m u s t b u y it and as w e w e r e h a v i n g a v e r y intimate j o l l y talk I said, ' C a r l , has a n y o n e ever m a d e y o u a present?' ' W h y n o , ' he said. 'Well I ' m g o i n g to g i v e y o u that little picture. I should l o v e y o u to h a v e it and I k n o w B . B . w o u l d t o o . ' I cannot tell thee h o w touched he w a s . I did it spontaneously, but on thinking o f it I believe it w i l l be the best investment w e ever made. C a r l has a thousand plans f o r m a k i n g thee rich. I said I'd send the key to our safe and he can get it in L o n d o n and e n j o y it all the w a y o v e r . " T w o days later she w r o t e [264]

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B e r n a r d that she felt a bit a n x i o u s " h o w thee w i l l take the P e s e l l i n o g i f t . I cannot think m y impulse w a s w r o n g . " I f B e r n a r d d i s a p p r o v e d o f t h e g i f t , he m a d e n o m e n t i o n o f it to M a r y at the t i m e .

When

Hamilton,

"smartly

dressed a n d v e r y

cordial,"

d r o p p e d b y i n Paris f o r " a h a l f h o u r chat all o v e r the p l a c e , " B e r n a r d g a v e h i m t h e k e y and the p h o t o s o f the p a i n t i n g s in the safe. M a r y h a d o v e r l o o k e d o n e f o r m a l i t y , an a u t h o r i z a t i o n s i g n e d b y b o t h B e r n a r d a n d her. T h i s w a s s o o n f o r t h c o m i n g . " H o w s t u p i d o f t h e m t o require b o t h n a m e s ! " she e x c l a i m e d to H a m i l t o n . " I a m so s o r r y f o r the e x t r a t r o u b l e y o u have been put t o . " T h e o f t - r e p e a t e d tale that B e r e n s o n d i d n o t k n o w o f M a r y ' s g e n e r o s i t y t o H a m i l t o n a n d f u r i o u s l y r e p r o a c h e d her o b v i o u s l y has n o f o u n d a t i o n . It m a y w e l l be, h o w e v e r , that B e r n a r d d i d b e c o m e f u r i o u s w h e n s o o n a f t e r w a r d R i c h a r d O f f n e r , w h o s a w the p a i n t i n g h a n g i n g i n H a m i l t o n ' s a p a r t m e n t in N e w Y o r k , c a b l e d to tell h i m that the p a i n t i n g w a s n o t a P e s e l l i n o b u t w a s a c t u a l l y a far m o r e v a l u a b l e D o m e n i c o V e n e z i a n o , part o f the predella o f the Saint L u c y altarpiece. It is n o t i m p r o b a b l e that in l o n g r e c o l l e c t i o n B e r n a r d laid t h e w h o l e b l a m e o n M a r y , since she w a s t h e o n e w h o h a d p r o p o s e d the g i f t . T h e p a i n t i n g later fell i n t o the h a n d s o f the D u v e e n s — p r o b a b l y t o p a y o f f s o m e o f H a m i l t o n ' s d e b t s t o t h e f i r m — a n d in 1942 w a s s o l d t o K r e s s f o r $450,000. It f i n a l l y e n d e d u p w i t h the rest o f t h e great K r e s s C o l l e c t i o n in t h e N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y o f A r t . W h i l e the " D i o n y s i a c " H a m i l t o n w a s e n c h a n t i n g the susceptible M a r y B e r e n s o n at I T a t t i , the K i n g s l e y P o r t e r s s h o w e d u p in their quest f o r a " s e c o n d r e s i d e n c e " in F l o r e n c e , a q u e s t that h a d " w o n d e r f u l m o m e n t s , " as P o r t e r w r o t e B e r e n s o n , " b u t w a s o n the w h o l e futile a n d f a t i g u i n g . " T h e y v i s i t e d v i l l a after villa w i t h o u t f i n d i n g w h a t t h e y w a n t e d ; the e l e g a n t G a m b e r a i a o n the S e t t i g n a n o h e i g h t s w a s " a d r e a m , " b u t he feared it w o u l d r e m a i n o n e since H a m i l t o n w a s after it and " I a m n o m a t c h f o r h i m w h e n he w a n t s s o m e t h i n g . " F o r P o r t e r the visit t o I T a t t i

was

a m o n g " t h e m o m e n t s o f p u r e j o y in F l o r e n c e . " B e f o r e the Sassetta St. Francis h e " s h i v e r e d w i t h d e l i g h t . " B e r n a r d w a s a little d a u n t e d b y M a r y ' s g o l d e n v i s i o n . H e t o l d her that he w a s w i l l i n g " t o d o a g r e a t d e a l " f o r H a m i l t o n " b u t all business m u s t b e carried o n t h r o u g h the D u v e e n s . I w a n t n o m o r e b u t less t i m e a n d t h o u g h t w a s t e d o n m o n e y - m a k i n g . . . . I can m a k e all I w a n t o u t o f t h e m w i t h t h e least w a s t e o f s e l f . " A s f o r C a r l , h e w o u l d l i k e t o " d i r e c t h i m a n d c i v i l i z e h i m . " It w a s o b v i o u s that h e h a d m u c h t o learn. H e c a m e back f r o m a visit to G i m p e l ' s gallery w i t h William S a l o m o n declaring that t h e f o u r t e e n t h - c e n t u r y p a i n t i n g s there w e r e " n o g o o d . " B e r e n s o n w e n t t o l o o k at t h e m h i m s e l f , and " o f c o u r s e h e w a s all o f f . " D a z z l e d b y Hamilton's display o f wealth, M a r y bethought herself o f [265]

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The Feast of the Gods (The Bacchanal) languishing in Sulley's gallery for want of a suitable collector. Who could better appreciate it than the arthungry Hamilton? In spite of Bernard's injunction against bypassing the Duveens, she wrote him of her delight in the painting and sent him a copy of her letter to "a friend" about it, the ecstatic letter which she had sent to Mrs. Gardner in 1 9 1 7 at Bernard's bidding and which she was to publish, perhaps to please Hamilton, as the main part of a brief article, "The Feast of the Gods," in Art in America. A month later Hamilton bought the picture from Sulley for. an undisclosed price. Sir Joseph learned of the transaction and cabled Berenson that he was "distressed" and "puzzled" by the violation of their customary arrangement. In reporting the contretemps to Hamilton, Mary lightheartedly explained that the scruple of fair dealing was "about as effective in nearly all cases, as the Hague Convention about usages in w a r . " In spite of Duveen's effort to "muzzle" him, her husband reserved the right "to advise any friend of his, whether one of his clients or not, if his opinion is asked." She admitted, however, that Duveen's annoyance "makes me a little uncomfortable, for it certainly was I who told you about the picture." If Mary had hoped to profit monetarily from the transaction, that hope was doomed to disappointment. Within a year Sulley was obliged to repossess the painting, Hamilton having greatly overextended himself. Late in 1921 Sulley and Agnew sold it to Joseph Widener under the title The Bacchanal at a price running into "hundreds of thousands," according to the press. Widener declined to give the precise figure, saying, " I don't want the price to overshadow the great artistic importance of this painting." In due time it went with his collection to the National Gallery of Art. From Paris Berenson informed Mary that he was at last admitted to the presence of Sir Joseph, and "his bluff and pretentiousness and fausse bonhomie and vulgar cynicism" left him such a wreck that he could hardly sleep afterward. Duveen sneered that Hamilton was good " f o r only a paltry 30 or 40 thousand pounds a year and that is not business." The next evening Bernard had another audience with "the n e w " Joe, "and he talked me blind and again into sheer exhaustion and a sleepless night." Berenson lingered on in Paris until early October 1919. Though it was "becoming socially fascinating," the life there had begun to tell on him, and after his two years' absence from I Tatti he longed to "have it all behind m e . " T o his aging mother he wrote that he had just dined with Arthur Balfour and still saw "many so-called 'great' people, but it does not any longer amuse me. I pine for my books and pictures and writing."

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One of the "great" persons who did interest him at a tete-ä-tete luncheon shortly before his departure was young William C . Bullitt. A letter from Lippmann had prepared him for the encounter. On his return from a secret mission to Moscow with Lincoln Steffens, Bullitt had been exasperated by Wilson's apparent hypocrisy about the notorious secret treaties, and at the Senate Committee hearing he had "blurted" out the truth about the "behind the scenes negotiations." "When there is an almost universal conspiracy to lie and smother the truth," Lippmann had commented to Berenson, " I suppose someone has to violate the decencies." Berenson observed of his luncheon companion, " H e is consumed with self-importance but is truthful in the main." Bullitt's consuming grievance against Wilson had grown out of the short shrift given to the treaty he had brought back from Bolshevist Russia. The account he gave to Berenson and that Berenson later passed on to Nicky was that, to his surprise, he had obtained "very satisfactory terms" from Lenin and brought the treaty "back to Paris in triumph." He was unable to get an appointment to see Wilson until evening. Meanwhile Lloyd George "got hold" of Wilson "and told him about it and then Wilson huffed and would not receive him nor hear the treaty mentioned, so it fell through." "It might have made the difference," Berenson remarked. "Imagine that piece of petty vanity having such awful consequences." The more Berenson thought of the solitude and rest that awaited him amid his books and paintings at I Tatti, the more impatient he grew to be off. It was high time to return to his desk. A last tedious chore in Paris, applying for the required emergency passport, ended on a pleasant note. For an hour and a half he endured "a sort of third degree of prying and silly questions." Then his interlocutor asked, "Have you a spare photo?" With some irritation Berenson replied, " Y e s , what for?" The young man answered, "I should like to stick it in one of your books." Pleased at this unexpected notice, Berenson agreed to look at the young man's little collection before leaving Paris on the deluxe train to Rome, which was again in service. Thus reassured that his writings had their appreciative audience, he embarked for the twenty-four-hour run to Pisa, transferred for the short run to Florence, and arrived at I Tatti on October 9, 1919.

[267]

X

X

V

I

I

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E R N A R D was only too ready to lean on Mary's ample shoulder when he arrived at I Tatti in a "very tired and collapsed state" to resume his life as a host and scholar. Mary could once again ready materials for his work and relieve him of the vexing demands of his business correspondence, a task that she relished. "Paris," she assured his mother, "is washed away." He did not know what he would write next but "it may be something on medieval sculpture." The sculpture of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in France had become an obsessive hobby, and he bent over the heavy volumes from his library like a man gorging himself after the end of a famine. He found the "relative solitude" an agreeable change from the two years of luncheon meetings and conferences. It was pleasant, he reflected, to see the same two or three faces daily. The presence of Mary's sevenyear-old granddaughter Barbara considerably thawed his "Herod-like" feelings about the very young. "I am discovering how very charming the society of children can be," he acknowledged to his mother. He was also finding Miss Mariano, his "female secretary . . . as perfect as she should be and very good company to boot." She was particularly companionable because she was "as super-national a person as myself and it is pleasant to be able to discuss the day's events without treading on hypertrophied corns. Her father was a well-known Neapolitan theologian, her mother a Baltic lady of good family. . . . Her story has a 'Winter's Tale' interest and she has no small gifts of narrative." Her gift of narrative would find full expression seven years after his death in her Forty Years with Berenson. There was much reading to catch up with, for new books had piled up in his absence, and he often took refuge in bed with a book in hand, though even there he was never quite free from calls on his expertise. [268]

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Mary would come to his bedside and take down his dictation in a wondrously abbreviated script. Since she often signed business letters in her role as her husband's business associate, inquiries were frequently addressed directly to her. Her usual plea for speaking for Bernard was his illness, or at least indisposition, a plea made more often to protect him from annoying importunities than was warranted by the fact. Sir Joseph asked not only for pictures but also for Renaissance furniture, marbles, and terra cotta. " M y husband asks me to answer your letter," Mary wrote, "as he has come home so tired he has-been ordered to bed to rest. . . . If w e let it be known that we want some objects ofthat kind, some good ones no doubt will be forthcoming," she assured him, while pointing out that "up to now you did not seem to value his opinion on anything but pictures." An inquiry from Edward Fowles about a reputed Luini drew the reply signed by Mary, "It looks like a fine Luini. Would not be too dear at 100,000 francs." Louis Duveen sent on some photos of a Carpaccio and asked for Berenson's opinion. Mary, after conveying Bernard's apologies for not being well enough to write, reported that the painting was "perfectly authentic. . . . We are really enchanted with it." As for the Mainardi and the Pinturicchio sent by Baron Lazzaroni from Paris, the former was "the best Mainardi in existence." Her husband hoped both paintings would pass into the possession of the firm. Then she turned to the recurring delays in the payment of accrued fees. " T h e idea of money gives my husband an attack of neurasthenia, and he more and more leaves me to pay all bills and keep our accounts." Louis replied that he was sorry to learn that " M r . Berenson is not well again," adding, "It is a pity that he should be worried." He would cable N e w York at once to send the check. Hamilton's purchases were now on a scale to erase Sir Joseph's sneer. In a fresh agreement with the Duveens, he agreed to pay $860,000 for eleven paintings within two years at 5 percent interest. A month later he added four more paintings, raising his total debt to $1,100,000. Though the spread between the cost of a painting to Duveen and the sale price varied widely and though some of the Hamilton paintings had been in " s t o c k " for three or more years, there was nevertheless expectation of handsome profits. A Costa portrait which had cost $7,500, for example, was sold to him for $40,000; a Crivelli acquired for $20,000 went for $75,000; and a Fra Angelico bought for $31,000 sold for $$0,000. Some clients, of course, bargained more effectively than others. A Bronzino portrait of Eleanora which came to the firm for $10,000 sold for $85,000, whereas Kleinberger, the astute Paris dealer, got a Fiorentino Virgin and Child for $8,500 which had cost the firm $6,000 and the [269]

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Fogg Museum bought a Simone Martini Nativity for only $10,000 which the Duveens had taken in at $8,000. There were occasional losses as well. The Worcester Museum bought an Antonazzio Romano for $2,900 for which the firm appears to have paid $4,000. What the net profits were on the many scores of transactions must have often baffled the accountants who had to deal with the three widely separated galleries of the Duveen firm and with the accounts of clients who often bought on long-term credit and frequently returned pictures or turned them back as part payment on new purchases. Adding to the complications of the bookkeeping were the disbursements for cleaning and restoration, insurance and shipping, and payments to intermediaries and to joint owners. Sir Joseph must himself have sometimes wondered what his cash resources were, and he put off sharing profits as long as he conveniently could. Walter Dowdeswell had now set up headquarters in Italy. Though Berenson had had friendly relations with him for many years, he continued to question the value of Dowdeswell's work as an intermediary in Italy and found his presence there one more hateful annoyance. He remonstrated that Dowdeswell was too inexperienced to do business with wily Italian art dealers and, more important, that his being known as a Duveen agent was having the "effect of enormously raising prices." Among a number of paintings which Dowdeswell had recently recommended for purchase by the firm was a Jacopo Bellini owned by the shrewd Venetian dealer Italico Brass. Fowles, anxious to mollify Berenson, managed to get down to Florence to call on him despite a railway strike. Berenson insisted that Dowdeswell "was spoiling good chances of obtaining pictures" and that his "hands were tied" while he remained in Italy. He could have got the Bellini for much less than it now was being offered for if Dowdeswell had not forestalled him. A few days later Fowles wrote from Paris that Dowdeswell had frantically wired that he had seen the Bellini and a quick decision must be made. Fowles added that the price was still too high, considering they would have to pay 10 percent to Dowdeswell and 6 percent "to some brigands" who had taken him to Brass. " A s you know Mr. Brass personally I am sure you will come to a satisfactory arrangement." A satisfactory arrangement was not achieved, and Fowles came to believe that Berenson had deliberately "spoiled the negotiation" in order to teach the firm a lesson for engaging Dowdeswell. Berenson's reproachful requests for payment passed through Fowles's hands so frequently that he came to regard Berenson as thinking too exclusively about his fees. The Berensons for their part suspected that the firm was too cavalier in its bookkeeping, if not actually dishonest. In the spring of 1920 Mary plaintively complained to Fowles, "We do not [270]

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know where my husband stands financially with the f i r m . " The payment due in January was still unpaid and " w e are decidedly embarrassed." A week later when Fowles sent a list of the firm's purchases, she pointed out that it did not include those purchases made on her husband's "recommendations" in which Fowles had not participated. "If we were suspicious people we should be troubled by the fact that he has not been systematically informed whether or not pictures have been acquired which he has recommended and consulted about, but which have not been directly negotiated either by himself or y o u . " She ironically conceded it might be "easy to overlook them in such stirring business that occupies Sir Joseph but in all fairness the point should be attended to in a more thorough manner." She particularly asked Fowles, "What has happened, by the way, to the Jacopo Bellini which belonged to Brass?" It was plain that neither Bernard nor she wanted to spoil a negotiation which might yield a substantial fee. Louis Duveen soon indicated the value he put on Berenson's services. He bluntly informed Dowdeswell that inasmuch as Berenson had expressed the wish to have Italy for himself, he was to go immediately to Zurich and leave the Bellini matter in Berenson's hands. He followed up his action by reminding Berenson that now that Dowdeswell had "left Italy for g o o d , " it was important that he get "in touch with all the people in all the towns as much as possible, as we are leaving Italy entirely to y o u . " It proved too late to salvage the Bellini. Three days after he recalled Dowdeswell, Louis Duveen suddenly died following an operation for cancer of the liver. Ernest Duveen immediately took charge of the London gallery and Fowles of the gallery in Paris. Fowles now began to be associated even more closely with Berenson. " B . B . worked hard to find good Italian paintings for which Joe was clamoring in N e w York and I was in constant touch with him at this time," he recalled. " I often received letters from him two or three times a w e e k . " The requests for payment finally bore fruit, and toward the end of March J o e agreed to send £10,000 sterling "at the beginning of April." At the same time Fowles reported that the N e w York office had at last supplied the needed information for the " X " Book, and he sent a list of the pictures entered in it. The number ran to more than seventy, representing paintings of practically all the Italian schools. Their best client for the Sienese school, Fowles wrote, was Carl Hamilton. Mary, much more sanguine about Hamilton's future than Bernard, wrote Hamilton that they would be glad to advise him for no fee, but would, in exchange, appreciate tips on good investments. How weak a reed Hamilton was did not become apparent until more than a year later during the recession of 1 9 2 1 - 2 2 . [271]

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T h o u g h Berenson m a y have " w a s h e d " Paris a w a y , he had not lost interest in politics. W h e n he learned that the Senate had not approved the peace treaty w i t h the necessary two-thirds majority in N o v e m b e r 1919, he w a s pleased that " o u r reprobate Senate has turned d o w n the cup o f iniquity b r e w e d b y the conceit and one-track-mindedness o f Wilson o n the one hand and o n the other, [by] the hoary drabs w h o s e m u s h y abominations have long infested the various foreign offices o f E u r o p e . " T h e treaty w a s n o t approved until the f o l l o w i n g March. T h e recent Italian elections in w h i c h the Socialists made great gains pleased B e r e n son as a " c o m p l e t e disavowal o f the monstrous and impotent imperiali s m " o f those w h o had misruled Italy for the "past miserable thirty y e a r s . " H e evidently discounted for the m o m e n t the r o d o m o n t a d e o f his one-time friend D ' A n n u n z i o , w h o s e theatrical seizure o f Fiume had flouted the League o f Nations. If I Tatti w a s an island o f "relative solitude" and peace for Berenson, the Italy that lay b e y o n d it s h o w e d disorder. Violent strikes by Syndicalists and Socialists in Milan and R o m e spread to Florence, and o n one day w h i l e Bernard w a s deep in the M i d d l e A g e s M a r y busied herself putting "all our pictures and objects o f art into the asbestos s a f e . " There w a s n o escaping s o m e contact w i t h the revolutionary ideas that w e r e unsettling T u s c a n y and other sections o f Italy, for Salvemini, w h o had been an independent m e m b e r o f Parliament, regularly put in an appearance. D e spite the large gains the Socialists had made in the Italian parliament, the delusive specter o f Italian bolshevism raised b y Catholic peasants at B e r g a m o w h o cheered Lenin's rule in Russia w a s not easy to exorcize. T h e Socialist League in Florence had enlisted seven thousand peasant families, and their menacing demonstrations had forced most landlords b y A p r i l to grant reforms in their contracts w i t h tenants, including the elimination o f forced labor. Elsewhere widespread peasant strikes continued and w o r k e r s ' seizures o f s o m e factories obliged the g o v e r n m e n t to take them over. In Fiume D ' A n n u n z i o postured before his troops as dictator and threatened w a r against the g o v e r n m e n t if it tried to oust him. His escapade w o u l d not be liquidated until D e c e m b e r o f 1920. T o the expatriate Americans and Englishmen the confused drama in the city b e l o w could have o n l y an unreal and s o m e w h a t theatrical character. Salvemini m a y not have agreed w i t h Berenson that G e r m a n y w a s being too harshly punished, but they w e r e o n c o m m o n ground in their antipathy to the Italian " N a t i o n a l i s t s " w h o supported D ' A n n u n z i o and to the extremists o f both the R i g h t and the Left. T h e " b o l s h e v i s m " that the Fascists w e r e cynically to identify as the fate f r o m w h i c h they saved Italy had in fact been unable to take root there. F r o m the politically

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conscious Salvemini Berenson doubtless learned of the sinister agitation of Benito Mussolini, the renegade Socialist whose small cadre of henchmen had begun to sport their version of the black-shirt uniform first worn by D'Annunzio's arditi, as they would also borrow from the poet's arsenal the use of castor oil upon their opponents. B y the time of the Fascist march on Rome in 1922, Berenson and Salvemini would enter the ranks of avowed anti-Fascists. Berenson may have enjoyed "relative seclusion" on his verdant hillside below Settignano, but his passion for congenial company required a stream of invited guests. They came and went little affected by the social turmoil engulfing Italy. Mary's brother, Logan, had settled in for the winter, and he reported to their sister in England that "in spite of strikes and fears of Bolshevism and all the contemporary troubles, life goes on at this villa in great comfort and leisure" much as it was before the war, "only w e are all five years older, and the trees have grown, the gardens become more perfect. . . . It's a strange beautiful uncanny house, full of great rooms and corridors and libraries and pictures, and full too of taboos and distant sound of thunder and imprecation echoing about the corridors." He found it "immensely amusing" to watch how strangers, eager to make a good impression, would unknowingly break the taboos and bring on themselves "the most appalling condemnations." The most frequent "regulars" in attendance at I Tatti, while Nicky Mariano labored in the library or showed visitors through the house, were Carlo Placci, who could always be counted on for toothsome gossip, and the ever-faithful Countess Serristori, witty and still elegant at fifty and with a great talent for drawing out Berenson in pungent talk. Trevelyan too was much in evidence in the spring of 1920, free to poetize at his leisure and startle the unwary with his idiosyncrasies as when, after a cooling dip one day in one of the garden ponds, he strolled about stark naked to dry himself. Salvemini's wife happened to see him and announced that a species of savage was promenading about as if it were the most natural thing in the world. At the end of April 1920 a trio of free spirits came up from a holiday in Rome—John Maynard Keynes, whose book on the Peace Conference had made him a celebrity in England and Europe, and his artist companions Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, whose paintings had recently been exhibited in Paris with those of Roger Fry. Habitues of uninhibited Bloomsbury, they found the daily ritual at I Tatti, where Berenson now presided en grand seigneur, depressing. Vanessa and Duncan, as friends of Fry, knew also that their tastes in art would be suspect, and when they voiced them "the atmosphere darkened." Vanessa took a deep dislike to

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Berenson's manner and wrote to Fry " 'cursing the horrors' of life at I Tatti in spite of the extreme comfort of the place, the Louis X V furniture, and exquisite breakfasts in bed." While Vanessa sat "almost invariably wrapped in sulky silence" during the visit, Keynes held forth at length about some of the persons at the Peace Conference whose wickedly stupid antics he had left out of his book. They all attended a large reconciliation dinner party at Charles Loeser's villa, celebrating the end of the vendetta between Loeser and Berenson, at which Loeser unfortunately confused Grant with the celebrated Keynes. Grant, more resilient than Vanessa, was unperturbed by the alien environment and remained grateful that Berenson's writings had freed him from Ruskin's influence and had taught him to appreciate the "life-enhancing" qualities of "tactile values" and "ideated space composition." Mary undoubtedly enjoyed the Bloomsbury visitors more than Bernard did, but the advent of Belle Greene was another story. N o w the undisputed mistress of the Morgan Library, Belle had come abroad on one of her buying missions and headed for I Tatti and the delights of a reunion with Berenson. She was, as Nicky observed, not only intelligent and full of vitality, but physically "a provocatively exotic" type. Her effect on Berenson was all too apparent, and soon after her arrival and before dinner was announced Mary, in spite of her heroic resolves to stifle her jealousy, angrily retreated to a darkened sitting room. Bernard sent Nicky to find her, but she would not return and asked only that a Bach music roll be set going in the player piano. Resolutely keeping to his libertarian principles, Bernard drove down to Rome to spend several days there with Belle. Parry, who had returned from military service, was again at the wheel. Mary was left to enjoy being tyrannized by her little granddaughter. Bernard came back to I Tatti with Belle, and the remainder of her visit seems to have passed without major incident. Soon after her departure, however, Mary went off to the Fiuggi spa for ten days to diet and to free herself from "the insane thoughts" inspired by Bernard's " l o v e s . " On June 2, 1920, three persons arrived whose lives thereafter would be closely linked to I Tatti: Nicky's sister, Baronessa Alda von Anrep; her husband, the refugee Baron Egbert; and their young son, Cecil. Mary saw them as a useful addition to the I Tatti establishment, and by autumn Nicky and her kinfolk took up residence in the Villino Corbignano on the hillside across the road. In spite of business and social distractions and his preoccupation with medieval sculpture and architecture, Berenson completed a twenty-page illustrated article for the October 1920 issue of Art in America on the [274]

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Christ between Saint Peter and Saint James Major which Carl Hamilton had acquired through Duveen in 1919. He had at first declined to contribute to Art in America when he heard there was a likelihood of Valentiner's returning from his German war service to edit the magazine, protesting that the magazine should not become the "German dumping ground" he believed it had been under Valentiner. Frederick Sherman assured him that an excessive "Boche influence" would never again be allowed to "parade" itself in his pages: his aim was to keep the magazine up to a standard that Berenson would approve. So assured, Bercnson had submitted his article. The Hamilton painting had long gone under the name of Margaritone d'Arezzo, but when the Duveens bought it from the Comtesse Bertrand de Brousillon, Berenson concluded that it was an early work of Cimabue. Acquired for $39,000, it had been sold to Hamilton for $150,000. Repossessed by Duveen, it was sold to Andrew Mellon in 1937 as a Cimabue. The authorship of the painting has been the subject of considerable dispute. Siren, Venturi, Muratoff, Valentiner, and Toesca ("tentatively") supported the attribution to Cimabue, and it would be thus assigned in Berenson's posthumous Lists. Others like van Marie, Salmi, Salvini, and Zeri proposed a variety of authors, including " f o l lower" of Cimabue, and it is as the work of a "follower" that the picture now hangs in the National Gallery of Art as part of the Mellon Collection. The painting was one of four which Hamilton loaned to the Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, which had just opened in May 1920 with an impressive list of lenders, including among others Otto Kahn, Jules Bache, Henry Goldman, and William K. Vanderbilt. The " C i m a b u e " was particularly admired by artist-critic Walter Pach in his review of the exhibition. " O u r Cimabue," he wrote, "is as far a reach toward the heights of the world (or beyond them as Roger Fry prefers to state it) as man had made." The other three Hamilton masterpieces were the Bellini Bacchanal, a Mantegna Judith and Holfernes, and a Piero della Francesca Crucifixion, which he bought from Duveen for $50,000. It is a striking illustration of the wildly speculative nature of the art trade that when Hamilton had the Crucifixion auctioned in 1929, Duveen bought it in for Rockefeller for $375,000. Berenson's article, titled " A N e w l y Discovered Cimabue," contained, as his writing often did, a touch of autobiography. Having been led during the war years, he wrote, " t o a deeper study of the monuments in all forms of art in the centuries preceding the period of the Renaissance . . . I have become aware of two things which bear upon what I have to say here—one, that this was perhaps the very greatest period of art since [275]

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the Greeks . . . the other, that it has not been studied, o n its pictorial side at least, w i t h scholarly conscientiousness." What most interested h i m and led to his attribution w e r e the parallels he saw between the figure o f Christ in the triptych and the Christ in the apse mosaics at Pisa and at San Miniato in Florence. B e f o r e departing for a m o n t h in Paris, Berenson dispatched filial greetings to his mother across the w i d e n i n g chasm that separated his interests f r o m those o f his family in time to reach her b y June 26, his f i f t y - f i f t h birthday. " W h a t can I s a y ? " he w r o t e . " I suppose that all in all I do not regret having been b o r n . " H e enclosed a check for $500 and promised another soon so that she could permit herself "the luxury o f an o u t i n g . " H e also assured her that he and M a r y w o u l d be visiting her b y the end o f the year. Joe D u v e e n ' s visions o f postwar prosperity had not allayed his recurring anxieties about the future. W i t h the Great War w e l l over, it was time to cultivate the n e w A m e r i c a n millionaires it had created and also to renew acquaintance w i t h the survivors o f the older generation. M o r e o v e r , another five years w o u l d have passed since the renewal in Washington o f his claim to A m e r i c a n citizenship and he w o u l d need to put in an appearance again for a renewal o f his passport. T h e rise in prices and the obstacles to travel as a result o f the w a r furnished unpleasant surprises. T h e Berensons' dependence on their motorcar and chauffeur had n o w b e c o m e second nature. W h e n they decided to take the car to France and England, they learned that a deposit o f 45,000 s o m e w h a t depreciated francs w e r e required to cross the f r o n tier. M a k i n g inquiries for their planned visit to America, they discovered that a modest cabin on a b i g ocean liner w o u l d cost $2,000. B y July 2, 1920, the pair w e r e at the Ritz in Paris, and within a day or t w o M a r y w e n t on to England, accompanied b y the motorcar and chauffeur. T h e days in Paris passed s w i f t l y for Bernard as he resumed his role as man o f the w o r l d . G i m p e l read to h i m an "intolerably real farce" that he had written about a millionaire A m e r i c a n buyer and a Paris picture dealer. Natalie B a r n e y fascinated h i m as m u c h as ever. A t her " t e m p l e " in the rue Jacob, he talked w i t h a pair o f avant-garde poets, Paul Valery and Ezra Pound. H e t h o u g h t Pound " a n ultra-Europeanized yank f r o m Idaho, superficially attractive." A s the enterprising agent o f Harriet M o n r o e , editor o f C h i c a g o ' s Poetry magazine, P o u n d had b e c o m e a literary entrepreneur, encouraging and advising T . S. Eliot, James Joyce, and others in his brash and staccato style. A supremely self-confident prophet o f the n e w in literature, he impressed Berenson as being " w o r t h y " o f his biblical namesake w h o had revitalized the Jewish religion. A kind o f rapport developed between them, and P o u n d kept in touch w i t h his n e w acquaintance for several years. [276]

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In one characteristically untidy letter from Rapallo, Pound addressed himself " T o the respected Behrenson [sic] for 'egregious' I will not call you: May I recommend to your mercy two young friends now I believe in Firenze, and w h o have sufficiently cast off the usual stigma of humanity to enter our somewhat exalted sphere. Case ι. Miss Olga Rudge . . . who must be a fairly good violinist, as bad music annoys me. Case 2. Adrian Stokes, a savage and somewhat more ultimate Briton, with decorative appearance, who is seeking some sort o f . . . I leave it to you . . . superfactural, perhaps, comprehension of the Quattro Cento. The verbal manifestation being wholly . . . no not incomprehensible, but couched in a metaphoric language that shows only indubitable mental struggle on the part of the protagonist." Paris was as usual a crossroads for Americans, and Berenson walked and gossiped with Santayana, conferred with Denman Ross, and accompanied Richard Offner to the Louvre, to which he returned to see the collection of Manets, Cezannes, and Degas. Their paintings seemed "old friends" and he was impressed by " h o w well they wear. Manet best of all." He called on Seligmann, and the old man fumed that the new law about the export of art was a plot against him. With Ralph and Lisa Curtis he drove in the Bois de Boulogne and fancied himself "sick for home, the library and my w o r k . " At Rosa Fitz-James's salon he discussed aesthetic theories with Paul Bourget. Pleasantest of all was his brief stay at Edith Wharton's villa at St. Brice-sous-Foret, where she read to him her article on Henry James. He found it "a great relief to hear this human account after the mystical nonsensical reviews of Virginia Woolf and others." He and Edith had some "good talk," though he had to confess that by "good talk" he meant that he did most of it. In London Mary found plenty to do to keep her busy. At the Duveens she encountered Sir Joseph, full of "fervor and loving kindness . . . full of confidence in thee," and "bursting over with Royalty and Aristocracy." He told her that "Dionysius" Hamilton had not yet paid up and already owed $2,000,000 to the firm. Duveen appears to have crossed to Paris a day or two later, for on the twenty-first of July 1920 he signed a document which provided that the contract of 1 9 1 2 "shall be treated as if it had been continued" from the first of July 1917. T w o provisions were added: either party could terminate the agreement after six months' notice and the same percentage of fees that applied to paintings would also apply to Italian sculpture. In addition he appears to have agreed informally to pay £5,000 semiannually against fees already earned. The formalizing of the relationship came as something of a relief to the Berensons, for it assured the firm's support for their projected visit to the United States. A few weeks later Joe informed Berenson that the firm [277]

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had b o o k e d passage f o r h i m and M a r y on the Olympic f o r N o v e m b e r 1 7 . With B e r n a r d ' s a p p r o v a l M a r y rented a place f o r them to spend A u gust near H a s l e m e r e in Wessex, the " v e r y p l a c e , " he told M r s . Gardner, " w h e r e I first fell in l o v e w i t h her on A u g u s t 4, 1 8 9 0 . " A f t e r f o u r " h a r a s s i n g " days in L o n d o n he reached the G e o r g i a n mansion k n o w n as " C o p y h o l d . " It w a s on a hillside a short w a y a b o v e Friday's Hill, the house once occupied b y M a r y ' s parents. N e a r b y w a s " M u d h o u s e , " an adobe dwelling w h i c h M a r y ' s inventive daughter R a y had built in the hope o f revolutionizing rural housing. " H o w I w i s h y o u w e r e h e r e , " Berenson exclaimed to M r s . Gardner, " i n this Sleeping B e a u t y ' s b o w e r o f v e r d u r e . " T h e charms o f the refuge, h o w e v e r , soon palled in M a r y ' s c o m p a n y , and he complained o f feeling " n e r v o u s and irascible" and o f h a v i n g " l o s t all pleasure in the people I used to s e e . " It w a s w i t h s o m e relief that he took himself o f f to France to travel f o r three w e e k s in the c o m p a n y o f Baroness La C a z e to study medieval sculpture as far south as A r i e s and A v i g n o n . T h e y w e r e j o i n e d b y Elsie de W o l f e , " w h i c h m a d e a great difference to c o m f o r t and e x p e n s e . " In the m u s e u m at T o u l o u s e he f o u n d sculptures w h i c h " a l m o s t made a complete series f r o m B . C . to 1 6 0 0 , " and he concluded that the V i s i g o t h s had picked up various elements, including the pointed arch, before g o i n g on to Spain. T h e K i n g s l e y Porters happened to be at T o u l o u s e , and they all " h a d a v e r y exciting evening e x c h a n g i n g i m p r e s s i o n s . " While B e r n a r d w a n d e r e d hither and y o n in central and southern France, M a r y descended u p o n B r i d e s - l e s - B a i n s w i t h her sister, A l y s , to resume the battle w i t h her incorrigible flesh. When B e r n a r d w r o t e o f s o m e o f the difficulties o f travel o f f the beaten paths, she conceded, w i t h due i r o n y , that " t h e w a y o f the aging aesthete is (in s o m e respects) indeed h a r d . " O f course he had " a perfect right to travel a r o u n d " w i t h his mistress " t o see the things I should have l o v e d to share w i t h t h e e . " H e suggested that she had less reason to " f e e l jealous and shut o u t " n o w that age tempered " b o t h passion and poetry and d r e a m s . " T h a t assurance, she declared, " i s not one to m a k e m e h a p p y . " T r a v e l in such agreeable c o m p a n y considerably revived B e r e n s o n , and he expatiated as w i n n i n g l y as a l w a y s to his companions on the marvels he encountered and attended too to the business letters that tracked h i m about France. In one, F o w l e s i n f o r m e d h i m that Sir J o s e p h desired h i m to keep the hours o f t w e l v e to one open on M o n d a y s and T u e s d a y s o n his return to Paris. H e s u r v i v e d the O c t o b e r conferences, thanks, it appears, to other distractions. W h e n G i m p e l called o n h i m at the R i t z one m o r n i n g at ten, " h e w a s l y i n g d o w n , " G i m p e l noted in his diary. " H i s small face, like that o f an anemic lion cub, looked v e r y tired. H e seemed

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ill, and I asked him how he felt. He replied very gravely, 'I'm in love, it's stupid at my age. . . . I haven't slept.' " Gimpel wryly added, " A n d I asked him yesterday for news of his w i f e . " Soon afterward Berenson fled for solace to Beaulieu for the companionship of Ralph Curtis and, thus restored, entrained for home. Once at I Tatti Berenson groaned "at the thought of tearing himself out of his library" for the impending voyage to America. A welcome remittance arrived from Rene Gimpel, who had just ended his partnership with Nathan Wildenstein. Grateful for Berenson's help in a recent sale, he sent a check for 50,000 francs, although that sum represented more than a third of what he would realize. He felt it proper, he wrote, not to reduce the amount promised because it was their first "affaire." There was distraction in a visit by the editor of Century magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, and his wife; though "a dear fellow," Johnson set too hard a pace. As D'Annunzio threatened war and the press reported increasing discord over the peace settlement, Berenson was moved to parody Longfellow's "Psalm of L i f e . " "What can you expect," he wrote in disgust to Ralph Curtis, "after the last fifty years inspired with and by the profound conviction that you must act in the sordid present, rage within and the devil overhead. . . . A history of the last five years might appropriately be entitled 'The Cannibal Out-Canniballed, or the Further Adventures of the Duke of Rigoletto.' Apocalyptically yours, B . B . " The final arrangements for the Berensons' departure for America were made easier when the Kingsley Porters agreed to stay at I Tatti during their absence and pay all bills, including the wages of the gardener, heat, and food. Best of all, Nicky Mariano would be there to look after things. "We both think Nicky is a nearly perfect human being," Mary told Alys. "It is a daily j o y to see her coming in and to hear her charming voice. What luck for us!"

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Suspect in the Tromised Land H E Berensons departed f r o m Southampton on the Olympic on N o v e m b e r 1 7 , 1920, their destination in N e w Y o r k not the Ambassador Hotel as Berenson had originally planned but Carl Hamilton's luxurious apartment at 270 Park Avenue. Hamilton had been persistent in his invitation that they be his guests in spite of Berenson's excuses, and he met them at the dock with his two Japanese servants, reporting that he had already moved to a hotel and his apartment was theirs. Bernard had acquiesced with some misgiving but M a r y had had no reservations. The great advantage, she said, was that they could entertain as much as they liked instead of going out all the time. It was a comfort also to have housed with them her maid Elizabeth, w h o doubled as Bernard's valet. The walls of Hamilton's apartment were hung with a large array of unpaid masterpieces, evidence to the Berensons that Hamilton's muchvisited collection had " b o o m e d the Duveens tremendously." It was not long, however, before they learned that the recent downturn in business had greatly embarrassed Hamilton, whose enormous debt to the D u veens cast a shadow on his prospects. It seemed obvious to them that he was using them "as decoy ducks, in order to strengthen his credit." Ironically enough, the N o v e m b e r issue of Art and Decoration had just published a full-page reproduction of the Bellini Bacchanal and named Hamilton as a "possible successor to the giants of American collecting" w h o had recently died. Carl was courting at the time a very rich young socialite, Alice De Lamar. The Berensons thought him on the verge of becoming engaged, a development they favored because the marriage would help rescue the improvident financier f r o m his difficulties. T o Mary, w h o was as conscious of American fortunes as of British titles and w h o soon learned to [280]

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identify millionaires by the amount of their reputed assets, the marriage would be "eminently suitable": Alice was a "nice girl ($15,000,000 incidentally)." Carl's eccentricities, however, were to make the young woman cautious and the romance "finally petered out." The pattern of the Berensons' days in N e w York repeated that of their previous visits, though the additional years of expatriation made them feel even more alien in their native land. The country had returned to "normalcy" with the egregious Warren Gamaliel Harding about to occupy the White House, accompanied by Calvin Coolidge as vicepresident. The wartime boom had given a hectic flush to life in N e w York and the signs of great wealth and extravagance glittered on Fifth Avenue. The Berensons found themselves in "a whirl of millionaires" who escorted them through one palatial mansion after another. The Blumenthal house seemed a veritable museum. Helen Frick, the "wraithlike daughter" of her recently dead father, showed them the treasures in the exquisite palace which he had reared on Fifth Avenue. Henry Goldman, they thought, had a few very fine things, including, of course, the Giorgione which Bernard had recommended to him. N o w in their mid-fifties, their health a little more precarious than before, they found the incessant luncheons and dinners, however kind the intention of their hosts, more and more wearing. They were repelled by the sight of the women at the formal parties who acted "exactly as they did before the w a r , " dressing themselves "like skittish girls, [and] hanging their wrinkled necks with fabulous jewels." At one millionaire dinner party "the table literally groaned under orchids, caviar, turtle soup and golden plate." Twenty-two old people sat around "guzzling champagne and all sorts of wine (in spite of prohibition)." All the women seemed even fatter than Mary and were "nearly naked and hung with ropes of pearls and diamonds." After dinner opera singers appeared and "yelled horrible music," and " B . B . nearly fainted a w a y . " A "typical morning" was spent with Miss Frick "($30,000,000)" and with Otto Kahn "(endless millions)," the day ending with the Archer Huntingtons "($180,000,000)." In the interval they lunched with the luxuriously bearded Indian poet Rabinrath Tagore and had tea with the Rockefellers. The succession of entertainments followed each other with such rapidity that when Berenson was asked whether he enjoyed himself, he replied, " I don't know, I just spin." The prospects that the Duveens opened up inspired a sense of euphoria, and Bernard sent word through Mary to her sister, Alys, who was to undergo surgery, that she should not hesitate to ask for money. Besides, Mary added, " I am quite half the show, so to speak, so it is thy own sister's earned money (how easily earned!) which is waiting for [281]

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t h e e . " M u c h as M a r y d i s a p p r o v e d o f the "squillionaires" w h o m they f o u n d " v e r y h a r d to d i g e s t , " she w a s h o n e s t e n o u g h t o a c k n o w l e d g e that their relations w i t h t h e m m e a n t "cash and I tie myself to that sordid fact." It was a killing pace to w h i c h they had c o m m i t t e d themselves, and Bernard, less r o b u s t than his wife, tended to faint u n d e r the pressure o f business. N o t so M a r y . " I , " she said, " h a v e a greater incentive, for I have Descendants. Y o u can't i m a g i n e h o w I w a n t to be sure that n o grandchild o f m i n e need 'stand behind a c o u n t e r ' as G r a n d p a S m i t h said o f h i s . " A f t e r all, B e r n a r d had n o o f f s p r i n g to care for but only a visionary expectation of f o u n d i n g an Institute and p r o v i d i n g for his B o s t o n relatives, objectives far less i m p o r t a n t in her eyes than his, t h o u g h she was quite a w a r e h o w seriously he t o o k his responsibilities t o w a r d his family. H e h a d j u s t given his sister Bessie, w h o had been very ill, a t h o u s a n d dollars extra f o r her d o c t o r ' s fees, and he was establishing a trust " f o r the w h o l e family, three o f w h o m he entirely supports, and the other three in p a r t . " A m o n g B e r e n s o n ' s cousins in B o s t o n w e r e three l a w y e r s — A r t h u r Berenson, head of the f i r m ; B e r n a r d Berenson; and Lawrence Berenson. A r t h u r , w h o had previously attended to s o m e of Bernard's A m e r i c a n affairs, d r e w u p the family trust i n s t r u m e n t . A p o w e r of attorney w a s given to L a w r e n c e B e r e n s o n , a y o u n g e r m e m b e r of the f i r m . It w a s Lawrence w h o later b e c a m e B e r e n s o n ' s American l a w y e r and investm e n t counselor, a post that, as a successful N e w Y o r k lawyer, he filled w i t h the u t m o s t loyalty t h r o u g h o u t the l o n g negotiations w i t h H a r v a r d to establish the H a r v a r d U n i v e r s i t y C e n t e r for Italian Renaissance S t u d ies at I Tatti, w o r k for w h i c h he refused pay f r o m his expatriate cousin. For the holidays B e r n a r d and M a r y w e n t u p to B o s t o n , this t i m e taking l o d g i n g at the C o p l e y Plaza. T h e y w e r e horrified b y the presence of a spittoon in every r o o m . T h e passage of t i m e seemed to have t a r nished B o s t o n a n d Bostonians. T h e y n o longer seemed "so grand and i m p o r t a n t . " T o the anglicized M a r y , the people's voices w e r e " q u i t e h o r r i b l e , " so inferior to the cultivated speech of her O x f o r d friends. C a r l H a m i l t o n and Alice D e L a m a r accompanied t h e m to B o s t o n , arrangem e n t s having been m a d e for t h e m to see M r s . Gardner's collection. As a sort of p a y m e n t in kind, C a r l b r o u g h t w i t h h i m to s h o w the aged Isabella a M a n t e g n a , the Piero della Francesca, the Alvise Vivarini portrait, and t w o Fra Angelicos, all in f o u r large suitcases. Alice D e L a m a r , in an account o f the visit, gives a vivid portrait of M r s . G a r d n e r in those last years of her reign at F e n w a y C o u r t . O n a table in the center o f the Venetian patio lay a "clutter of tins of biscuits, cartons o f grocer's p r o d u c t s , magazines, bottles and jars . . . medicines and pills. [282]

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In a thronelike chair beside the table, wrapped in an ermine robe and chiffon scarves, was what appeared to be a m u m m y carved in ivory wearing a s o m e w h a t disordered, yellowing white wig piled on the head. . . . She managed to hold out a parchment bird's claw to greet B . B . " Berenson, with due emphasis, said that he " n o w wished to introduce the really important guests he had b r o u g h t — M a n t e g n a and Fra Angelico." Isabella's face "lighted u p " and Carl's t w o Japanese servants displayed each painting in turn while she gratefully scanned t h e m through her lorgnette. So deeply touched that "tears stood in her eyes," the f o r m i d a ble old w o m a n — t o o paralyzed n o w to be able to s h o w the way her treasures should be viewed—said, " G o upstairs, all of you. Go through the house and see everything and take plenty of t i m e . " All the Berensons came to call on Bernard and M a r y at the Copley Plaza—"the little mother the best of the l o t , " said Mary, "so neat and dainty, holding herself so erect, with a y o u n g trim little figure in spite of her seventy-three years. T h e brother is heavy and uneducated, but has n o h a r m in him. Senda has got great and squat and looks very Russian. Her voice pierces one's ears. . . . Bessie's hair is quite white . . . [she] giggles and t h r o w s herself about like a spoilt child"; Bessie was living in N e w Y o r k and trying " t o do sculpture." Accustomed to a house full of servants, M a r y learned to her amazement that in postwar America w o m e n did all the housework, as servants were not available. F r o m the Copley Plaza Berenson posted his views to Natalie Barney, the ambiguous Circe in Paris: "It would be delightful if w e were well enough to enjoy our opportunities. But neither of us can any longer stand the fun. . . . I like the m e n well enough, but the w o m e n ! When the sex attraction is over, h o w few of t h e m attract. I remain faithful to old loves, however, and I truly revel in Isabella Gardner, although she is 8$ and i m m o b i l e . " A message to Belle Greene in N e w York repeated his lament: " H o w simple it w o u l d be if I did not care so m u c h for y o u . " His letter elicited a lengthy homily: "I honestly cannot see that I am anything except an ineradicable m e m o r y . " She reminded h i m that she had not made the "slightest m o v e " to bring herself into his "active living—not even here in N e w Y o r k — a s I so easily could, because I have a hunch that it is not me that you need but the rush and wear and tear. . . . There is some antagonism on m y side and a Christlike, all-enduring, all-suffering Patience and Forbearance on yours. . . . I am trying to 'analyze' m y antagonism. I k n o w that its roots lie in r e m e m b e r i n g the really innocent . . . utter and world-excluding w o r s h i p I once gave you. . . . I think it really ceased to exist w h e n I left y o u to go to London. . . . It rarely occurs to m e that y o u are s o m e o n e with w h o m I have been in personal (and acute) [283]

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touch. O n the f e w times that I c o m e closer to y o u , I cannot but sense an obscuring w a l l o f Pretense and E f f o r t . . . . It is h i g h time that w e released each o t h e r . " B u t as s o o n as he departed f o r E u r o p e her m o o d changed: " A l r e a d y it has b e g u n , dear B . B . I miss y o u horribly, j u s t h o r r i b l y . " A f t e r the holidays the social w h e e l turned ever faster as B e r e n s o n shuttled back and forth b e t w e e n old friends and acquaintances and n e w . C a r l H a m i l t o n came in one night in triumph carrying under his a r m Botticelli's portrait o f a y o u t h in a red cap w h i c h B e r e n s o n had d i s c o v ered in the Schickler Collection. H e had j u s t b o u g h t it f r o m D u v e e n , on credit like all the others, f o r $250,000. It too w o u l d return to the D u veens and later adorn the M e l l o n C o l l e c t i o n at the N a t i o n a l Gallery o f A r t . T h e B e r e n s o n s s a w a g o o d deal o f the sculptor Paul M a n s h i p , w h o had done a " f i n e bust o f old M r . R o c k e f e l l e r . " A t the Vanderlip mansion up the H u d s o n , to w h i c h they traveled in the D u v e e n motorcar, B e r n a r d " c a s t a g l o o m " o v e r his host b y telling h i m that one prized painting w a s o n l y a M a r c o Palmezzano and that his M i n o da Fiesole w a s a f o r g e r y . T h e r e w e r e r e n e w e d dinners w i t h the R o c k e f e l l e r s , w h o w e r e still " t o o m u c h w e d d e d to C h i n e s e v a s e s " to d e v e l o p a taste f o r Italian Primitives. O n e night they dined in " A r t J e w r y w i t h M r s . William S a l o m o n and Sir J o s e p h D u v e e n " and the next night w i t h the Italian ambassador, and they ended the w e e k w i t h a dinner at their apartment f o r the painter Cecelia B e a u x and other luminaries. A m o n g their m a n y luncheons, B e r e n s o n m o s t prized those w i t h W a l ter L i p p m a n n and " h i s l o v e l y little w i f e , " f o r a m o n g all those w h o m he had c o m e to k n o w he t h o u g h t Walter the ablest and brightest. T h r o u g h L i p p m a n n he appears to h a v e met J u d g e Learned H a n d , w h o w a s f a m o u s f o r his scholarly opinions. T h e meeting began a w a r m l y admiring f r i e n d ship. H a n d ' s w i d e reading and breadth o f interests matched those o f B e r e n s o n . B e r e n s o n spent an evening also at the h o m e o f William B u l litt, an evening doubtless spiced w i t h Bullitt's contempt f o r W o o d r o w Wilson, a contempt that w o u l d one day inspire his excoriating study o f Wilson in w h i c h S i g m u n d Freud collaborated. O n e expedition t o o k the B e r e n s o n s and H a m i l t o n to a p r e v i e w o f the E x h i b i t i o n o f W a r Portraits at the Metropolitan. M a r y had declared " t h e y must g o . . . the C u r a t o r w o u l d insist! B . B . sounded adamant. ' I ' m not g o i n g : I hate receptions, w i t h all those pushing c r o w d s ! ' " M a r y had her w a y and after dinner the party, w h i c h included Walter L i p p m a n n , A r c h e r H u n t i n g t o n , the senior M r s . H a r r i m a n — C a r l ' s p a t r o n e s s — a n d B e r e n s o n ' s sister Rachel, proceeded " i n a fleet o f three stately limousines w h i c h C a r l had e n g a g e d . " T h e y g o t t h r o u g h the reception line and to the galleries w h e r e the three portraits b y Cecelia B e a u x o f Cardinal Mercier, A d m i r a l B e a t t y , and G e o r g e s C l e m e n c e a u seemed the only ones w o r t h [284]

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looking at, according to Mary, among "the dreary waste of Tarbells and other mediocrities who painted the infamous crew at Versailles." The sight of the war leaders w h o m Berenson had come to despise was evidently too much for him: before long it was noticed that he had disappeared. Hamilton, sent to investigate, discovered that he had wandered off to a remote gallery and taken a nap on a Directoire couch. A burly Irish guard had discovered him and roared, "You can't sleep here!" Ordered to "Get up and get out of here," Berenson had slowly risen and with "devastating dignity" said, "Take me to the Curator—at once." When the guard described Berenson's offense, the curator broke into laughter and declared, "I feel sure Mr. Berenson may be permitted to enjoy an undisturbed nap in any museum in the country." Professionally there were the unavoidable and frequent conferences at the Duveen gallery, sessions which Berenson counted on to strengthen the Duveens' confidence in him in the face of the postwar invasion of German experts. There were of course the usual chores of the expert— valuations of paintings as of the Duccios from the Benson Collection and advice on purchases of paintings whose photographs the Duveens had ready for him. There could also be no slackening of his study of the Italian paintings in American collections, the constant absorbed review of their features to hold their place in his memory. He went out to Englewood, N e w Jersey, to inspect his friend Piatt's collection and up to Yale to check thejarves Collection. In N e w York, besides the Italian paintings of the Metropolitan, there were the choice masterpieces at the Frick and in other private collections. Ahead lay visits to the Walters Collection in Baltimore and the Widener Collection in Philadelphia. In N e w York Berenson got a fresh taste of the suspicion ever present in the art trade and of the dislike other dealers had for Joe Duveen. Belle Greene turned over to him a rambling confidential letter which she had just received from Jacques Seligmann, to whose son Germain she had entrusted some sort of confidential mission that related to Berenson. Though Seligmann denied working against Berenson's interests, he reminded her, "You must not forget that Berenson is intimately associated with the Duveens: in consequence he must be my enemy, it is impossible otherwise." He went on to unburden himself about the "underground w o r k " that he assumed Berenson was carrying out in America against him and threw in for good measure the accusation that Philip Lehman had returned a beautiful wood bust to Dikran Kelekian, a dealer specialist in early art, because Berenson had said it was new. This was not the first—nor would it be the last—business confidence that Belle shared with Berenson. Her role at the Morgan Library placed her at the center of [28j]

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the art trade and her friendship w a s coveted b y e v e r y dealer. For B e r e n son she p r o v i d e d a valuable listening post in A m e r i c a . R u m o r s about B e r e n s o n i n v o l v e d m o r e than his role in the art trade. T h e rising tide o f R e d baiting in A m e r i c a had b e c o m e associated w i t h anti-Semitism, o f w h i c h H e n r y Ford's Dearborn Independent w a s a principal mouthpiece. M a n y o f Lenin's associates, including L e o n T r o t s k y , w e r e k n o w n to be J e w s and m a n y Russian i m m i g r a n t s had w e l c o m e d the overthrow o f the czarist regime. Carlo Placci wrote Berenson in February 1 9 2 1 asking h i m w h e t h e r the alleged " a n t i - J e w document o f the U . S . Secret S e r v i c e " w a s true. What that document w a s remains obscure. E v i d e n t l y the ubiquitous Placci had picked up w o r d a m o n g his diplomatic and military friends that B e r e n s o n w a s himself under investigation. T h e fact w a s that a confidential report f r o m a naval attache at the A m e r i c a n e m b a s s y in Paris to the director o f N a v a l Intelligence stated that B e r e n s o n had recently returned to A m e r i c a and that M a u r i c e Paleologue, the f o r m e r French ambassador to Russia, had described h i m " a s a dangerous individual in character." T h e attache, T . R . M a g r u d e r , suggested that " i t m i g h t be well to o b s e r v e this individual's m o v e m e n t s in connection w i t h propaganda relative to (1) the Z i o n i s t m o v e m e n t , (2) the w o r l d ' s unrest, (3) the T h i r d International, and the Soviet s y s t e m . " H e concluded that " i t is p o s s i b l e " that this report " m a y corroborate other r e p o r t s . " O n c e set in motion, the bureaucratic wheels continued turning. T h e attache's report progressed to General Dennis E d w a r d N o l a n , director o f military intelligence f o r the A m e r i c a n E x p e d i t i o n a r y Forces; f r o m h i m it w e n t to W. L . H u r l e y in the o f f i c e o f the undersecretary o f state; and f r o m H u r l e y t o j . E d g a r H o o v e r , w h o w a s at this time special assistant to A t t o r n e y General A l e x Mitchell Palmer, author o f the ruthless anti-Red raids o f 1920. H o o v e r ' s agent interviewed the secretary o f the H a r v a r d Class o f 1 8 8 7 , w h o "stated the subject w a s not the kind o f m a n to indulge in radical v i e w s . " T h e agent also noted that Berenson g a v e an i n f o r m a l talk at the F o g g M u s e u m on M a r c h 14 and that his w i f e " a l s o spoke on M a r c h 1 5 but the place and subject w e r e not r e p o r t e d . " ( M a r y g a v e a lantern slide talk at the F o g g on C a r l H a m i l t o n ' s pictures.) H o o v e r transmitted the report to H u r l e y . Since b y that time B e r e n s o n had left the c o u n t r y , further investigation w a s dropped, but the echoes o f the affair n e v e r quite died a w a y f o r s o m e bureaucrats and it cast a s h a d o w o f mistrust o n B e r e n s o n ' s patriotism. His patriotism had in fact revived. B e r n a r d w r o t e to Edith Wharton o f his r e n e w e d respect f o r A m e r i c a . T h e amazed Edith responded, " A n d to think o f the U n i t e d States being the P r o m i s e d Land after all. A letter in w h i c h y o u announced this d i s c o v e r y so t o o k m y breath a w a y that I h a v e [286]

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sat gasping ever since. I suppose the answer is that w e all have our elective countries deep down in u s . " Toward the end of February 1921 the Berensons' schedule took them to Bryn Mawr, where Mary delivered a lecture on the masterpieces in Carl Hamilton's collection, her first lecture in a dozen years. Her hospitable cousin President Carey Thomas arranged a series of banquets, Bernard having said he would like to meet people. Though most of the guests were academics, at one of the dinners they met the very engaging Gifford Pinchot, conservationist head of the Pennsylvania Commission of Forestry, and his "gorgeous" wife, the former Leila Brice. They spent four or five days at Dr. Barker's famous clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In a thorough going over by a dozen or more doctors, they had "every square inch x-rayed and examined, blood pressure and metabolism (oxygen and carbon) tested, blood analyzed, bile pumped (B.B. said it was 'awful') and new glasses ordered." T o Mary's horror she was told she was forty-four pounds overweight. Bernard wrote his mother that his examinations had been "on the whole, satisfactory. . . . Unfortunately, they have little to suggest that I don't know already." Mary, more forthrightly, wrote her sister that Bernard "learned what he already knew—he is nervous, too thin, and digests badly." In Washington for a week, they dined with Mrs. Borden Harriman; lunched and had tea a few times with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson's foe; met with Hutchins Hapgood's publicist brother Norman and his young wife; looked up Aileen Tone; and dined with Prince Antoine Bibesco, the Rumanian minister to the United States. Berenson also scheduled a conference with James Parmelee, an art collector and trustee of the Corcoran Gallery, w h o m he had met on a previous visit. The most interesting meeting of the week was probably the one with Associate Justice Louis Brandeis, whose opinions had once worried him. Berenson came away apparently satisfied he was not a dangerous radical. Felix Frankfurter, professor of law at Harvard, with whom Berenson had renewed acquaintance in Boston, had planned to join them but had been called away to "a study of the administration of criminal justice" in Cleveland. "It was good to have had that long afternoon with you [in Cambridge]," he wrote, "and to have had both of you for an evening. . . . I count on you not to forget m e . " Unfortunately, neither Berenson nor Brandeis left a record of their encounter. One recollection that may well have diverted them was that of their chance meeting thirty-four years earlier in Boston. Brandeis, then a young lawyer of thirty-one, had written to Alfred Brandeis in January 1887, "Saturday at the Salon met an extraordinary man— Berenson, I think, is the name, a student at Harvard of great talents— [287]

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particularly literary talent. A Russian J e w I surmise, a character about whom I must know more. He seemed as much of an exotic lure as the palm or cinnamon tree. He is the most interesting character I have found for some time." Again in Cambridge, Berenson met with some of the Harvard students at the Fogg Museum in March and gave the talk mentioned in the government report. Arthur McComb, a young art historian, wrote John Dos Passos, who was in Spain working on his novel Three Soldiers: " T h e great Berenson proved to be a small bloodless exquisite creature. He made a few remarks worth passing on. He slammed Siren by stating that it was impossible to distinguish any of the Giottoischi except Bernardo Daddi and Taddeo Gaddi. Giottino is a myth. Anybody who says to the contrary is a charlatan. (Siren has written two volumes on him.) About your man Lo Stamina, he connects nothing with him except the three Alhambra paintings, which were done either by him or under his influence. Again Whistler came in for the remark that 'he was responsible for the theory that the artist must be an inspired idiot.' There remained the duty calls in Boston and Cambridge, visits with Paul Sachs and Edward Forbes at the Fogg, a last dinner with the family in Brookline, and a touching farewell with Mrs. Gardner. Business and social responsibilities attended to, Bernard and Mary left for N e w Y o r k with Mrs. J . Montgomery Sears and her daughter, who were coming down to see Hamilton's pictures. The few days remaining before their sailing on March 22, 1921, were crowded with society and more business. Cecelia Beaux, the Danas, and Paul Manship graced a large afternoon reception at the Park Avenue apartment, Carl being temporarily absent in the West trying to remedy his deteriorating finances. The day before they sailed they stopped in at Henry Reinhardt and Son and were dazzled by the sight of a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini which Walter Fearon had acquired from Boehler of Munich. It had come from the Prince Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen Collection. Fearon had reduced his asking price from $100,000 to $75,000, and Bernard at once directed Mary to offer it to Mrs. Gardner, who had nothing by that great Venetian master in her collection. The picture, "a severe yet radiant Madonna," Mary wrote, "made our hearts ache for y o u , " for Giovanni Bellini " w a s the Tree of Jesse of the whole Venetian school." When some time afterward he urged upon Mrs. Gardner another acquisition, a Gothic statue of Saint Paul which Rene Gimpel was offering for $100,000, he added that much as he liked the Bellini, "I should not hesitate to chuck it for Gimpel's Gothic statue." On the back of the envelope of Berenson's missive Mrs. Gardner noted, " S w i f t [her financial adviser] has decided that I have no money for anything." She [288]

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underestimated both the temptation of the Bellini and her own bargaining powers. She acquired it on liberal credit terms from Fearon, as she reported to Berenson, for $50,000. As for Gimpel's statue, his price erected "an impossible wall." For the return voyage Berenson chose the luxuriously refitted Aquitania, Sir Joseph's favorite ship. The suites had the air of an art museum, each one hung with reproductions of a famous master. From shipboard, before the liner put out to sea, Berenson sent an affectionate note to "Dearest Isabella. . . . Hold the fort till my return and keep it warm and cozy." He was not to see her again nor was he ever to make a return voyage to the United States. Bernard and Mary took their last backward look at Bedloe's Island and its hospitable statue amidst a gala throng of millionaire travelers who filled the first class of the sumptuous Cunarder. Their fellow passenger the ever-resourceful Elsie de Wolfe had secured a table for the three of them and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, whose elegant presence assured them an agreeably aristocratic voyage. Mary disembarked at Southampton to rejoin her kin, and Bernard submitted himself to the rigors of landing at Cherbourg, where the flood of waiting emigrants to America overwhelmed the facilities.

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Land of the Tharaohs L E T T E R from Ralph Curtis awaited Berenson in Paris, urging him to come down to visit, as the weather at the Villa Sylvia was "perfectly Duveen." But days of chores faced him before he could join the Curtises and stop with Edith Wharton at Hyeres. First, he had to have a thousand dollars' worth of fashionable dentistry "in the hands of a pirate," work which Mary assured Mrs. Gardner he could have had done in London for one hundred dollars—"but B . B . is unable to resist fashion." Second, he had to huddle with Edward Fowles over the scores of entries in the " X " Book and in the many-columned ledger pages recording the firm's transactions. And having spent a great deal on the trip to America, he had also to impress Fowles with the need to extract a substantial remittance out of the always-reluctant Sir Joseph. Moreover, the medical school education of Karin and her husband now added a fresh drain of £1,700 a year on his resources. He enjoined Mary to check their hoard of "pictures, Chinese scrolls, bronzes, etc." in their London vault and see that they were properly aired, a task she performed with dispatch. He told her that German art dealers were buying frantically even in Italy, a sure sign that inflation in Germany was worsening. He also told her not to plan on visiting her family in September because of his design to spend three months in Egypt that winter. After Egypt he proposed to archaeologize in Greece with Kingsley Porter. During his short stay in Paris he joined the medievalist Joseph Bedier at the Trocadero for study sessions on the casts and sculpture there. Etienne Houvet's monumental volumes on the sculptures at Chartres were fascinating him with their revelations of anonymous masters. Soon Kingsley Porter would be writing him " h o w closely akin those adossed statues" in Egypt "are in spirit to Chartres and Loches." [290]

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A f t e r he visited w i t h the Curtises, M a r y j o i n e d h i m at Edith Wharton's " r o m a n t i c monastery o n the r o c k y h i l l " a b o v e H y e r e s , w h e r e he had had " t e n days o f w a l k and talk and sail w i t h E d i t h . " T h e t w o itinerants reached I Tatti on A p r i l 26, 1 9 2 1 , in time to w e l c o m e a stream o f visitors and house guests. Elsie m o t o r e d d o w n f r o m Cannes w i t h her architect friend O g d e n C o d m a n , w h o N i c k y imaginatively assumed w a s her cavaliere servente. Elsie w a s lavish o f advice on " h o w to g a y up the r o o m s , " w h i c h tended t o w a r d Renaissance f o r m a l i t y . L y t t o n Strachey, flushed w i t h the success o f his Queen Victoria, loitered at I Tatti f o r three w e e k s in the c o m p a n y o f G . L o w e s D i c k i n s o n , the " G o l d i e " w h o had long been his intimate friend. T h e self-conscious Strachey f o u n d little to a p p r o v e . " B . B . , " he i n f o r m e d a correspondent, " i s a v e r y interesting p h e n o m e n o n . T h e m e r e fact that he has accumulated his wealth f r o m h a v i n g been a N e w Y o r k guttersnipe is sufficiently astonishing but besides that he has a m o s t curious complicated t e m p e r a m e n t — v e r y sensitive, v e r y c l e v e r — e v e n , I believe, w i t h a strain o f niceness s o m e w h e r e or other but desperately w r o n g — p e r h a p s s u f f e r i n g f r o m s o m e dreadful c o m p l e x e s — a n d w i t h o u t a spark o f naturalness or ordinary h u m a n enj o y m e n t . A n d this has spread itself o v e r the house w h i c h is r e m a r k a b l y depressing. . . . O n e is struck chill b y the atmosphere o f a c r y p t . . . and then, outside a dead garden, w i t h a v i e w o f a dead T u s c a n l a n d s c a p e . " Senda and her husband, P r o f e s s o r Herbert A b b o t t , lingered on into J u n e , w h i l e " h o r d e s " o f R u s s i a n exiles came b y w i t h their tales o f outrages. O n e o f them, Serghei S a z o n o v , the czar's foreign minister, w a s under sentence o f death in absentia. W h e n M r s . Chanler, a d e v o u t R o m a n C a t h o l i c , put in an appearance w i t h her daughter, M a r y arranged to h a v e mass held f o r them in the little chapel on C o r p u s Christi D a y . A frequent visitor w a s Alice D e L a m a r , w h o , w i t h her distractingly pretty c o m p a n i o n , E v a n g e l i n e J o h n s o n , had rented L a d y Sybil's M e d i c i villa. N e a r l y e v e r y evening the B e r e n s o n s d r o v e w i t h them to a distant hilltop at sunset f o r a leisurely picnic as the s h a d o w s lengthened in the valleys. Visitors could be counted o n to bring B e r e n s o n up-to-date on the gossip o f the fashionable w o r l d . T h e m o s t titillating o f the s u m m e r concerned G l a d y s D e a c o n , w h o had once so bewitched Berenson. T h e d u k e o f M a r l b o r o u g h , recently d i v o r c e d b y C o n s u e l o Vanderbilt, legitimized his relation w i t h G l a d y s , according to Elsie de W o l f e , at an " a p p a l l i n g " c e r e m o n y . M r s . C o l e Porter (the f o r m e r Linda T h o m a s ) corroborated Elsie's account; the c e r e m o n y , she w r o t e , w a s " t h e m o s t incredibly v u l g a r p e r f o r m a n c e I h a v e ever w i t n e s s e d . " T h e walls o f the d r a w i n g r o o m o f G l a d y s ' s cousin E u g e n e H i g g i n s , w h e r e the w e d d i n g t o o k place, w e r e " a l i v e w i t h pictures o f nude w o m e n . " Walter B e r r y served as a g r o o m s m a n . T h e guests included the A m e r i c a n and Italian

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ambassadors, a maharajah, f o u r princesses, a countess, and a sprinkling o f c o m m o n e r s , a m o n g t h e m Elsie de W o l f e . A s the duke had been the offending party in the divorce, no A n g l i c a n clergyman could be found to officiate, and a Scotch-Presbyterian minister had c o m e to the rescue. A t Gladys's insistence " o b e y " w a s omitted f r o m the v o w s . W i t h this exploit G l a d y s passed out o f Berenson's life, t h o u g h not f r o m his m e m o r y . H e came to feel that she had s o m e h o w betrayed him, and he recalled her w i t h a degree o f bitterness. " I decided to stop seeing Gladys D e a c o n , " he later told his friend the Italian writer U m b e r t o M o r r a , " w h e n I convinced m y s e l f that in h u m a n relationships she o f fered nothing but an offensive arbitrariness, pursuing people in a flattering and ensnaring fashion, only so as to be able to break o f f w i t h them noisily w h e n the fancy struck h e r . " H e w a s to encounter her only once after her marriage. While he w a s w a l k i n g in Paris one day in 1934, after the death o f the duke o f M a r l b o r o u g h , an " o l d horse d r a w n coupe stopped beside h i m and a w o m a n clothed in mourning g o t o u t . " H e did not at first realize that the somber apparition was Gladys. She p o k e d a finger at h i m and cried, " H o r r i b l e B . B . , y o u mean y o u don't recognize m e ? " Her c o m p a n i o n w a s the painter Boldini, w h o impressed Berenson as " a n even m o r e deplorable figure all bundled up in s h a w l s . " T o SATISFY Frederick Sherman's repeated requests for an article, Berenson turned to the portrait o f a y o u t h in a red hat w h i c h Hamilton had purchased f r o m the D u v e e n s . In a short article he recalled the intense rapture w h i c h the sight o f this painting had inspired in h i m w h e n he first saw it in a "Paris expert's j u n k shop under a fierce light. . . . O f t e n w o u l d this exquisite, wistful face appear before me, and I could only m u r m u r to myself: ' N o , it cannot be! Painters never express the w h o l e o f their art so completely in one single head.' . . . True, it is m o r e Botticellian than any other Botticelli in existence. H e must have uttered this completest note o f his o w n music just before he was seized b y the Savonarolian madness . . . just at the m o m e n t w h e n he w a s most peculiarly and poignantly and, if I m a y say so, most extravagantly h i m s e l f . " T h e Portrait of a Youth, after it w a s surrendered to D u v e e n , passed to the Clarence M a c k a y Collection and subsequently, in 1937, to that o f A n d r e w M e l l o n and then b y his gift to the National Gallery o f A r t , w h e r e it carries the name o f Botticelli, attested b y a majority o f the art historians w h o have studied it. Before the s u m m e r o f 1921 w a s out Berenson also produced a longer and m o r e scholarly article, " T w o T w e l f t h - C e n t u r y Paintings f r o m C o n stantinople," a piece inspired b y his n e w interest in medieval art. T h e paintings w e r e impressive Byzantine pictures o f the enthroned M a d o n n a holding the C h i l d and, i f o f the Constantinople school, they were unique [292]

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s u r v i v i n g e x a m p l e s o f painting o n canvas. " I m a g i n e , " he w r o t e , "that all the pictures d o n e in Paris b y F r e n c h m e n had disappeared, and that w e could g r o p e at their character f r o m n o t h i n g better than the s u r v i v i n g canvases o f such i m i t a t o r s — t o n a m e the m o s t f a m o u s — a s Sargent, or Z o r n , o r L i e b e r m a n n , or Sickert, o r M a n c i n i , or Sorolla. W h a t a revelation it w o u l d be to d i s c o v e r a masterpiece b y M a n e t or D e g a s . " T h e t w o panel paintings w h i c h he had recently c o m e u p o n in the K a h n and the H a m i l t o n collections in N e w Y o r k seemed to h i m to e p i t o m i z e in similar fashion the art o f m e d i e v a l C o n s t a n t i n o p l e . B o t h panels are said to h a v e c o m e f r o m the C h u r c h o f C a l a h o r r a in A r a g o n , Spain. B e r e n s o n presented his thesis w i t h " d i f f i d e n c e , " because " i n medieval studies I a m a n e o p h y t e . " Rather than w a i t f o r years in order to " d e m o n strate m y thesis w i t h all the necessary s c h o l a r s h i p , " he had decided " t o present m y idea, or, i f y o u w i l l , m y fancy, at all events m y intuition, to other students to c o n f i r m o r d e n y . " O n e o f the paintings, the K a h n panel, had been published in the Burlington Magazine

in 1918 b y O s v a l d

Siren w i t h an attribution to Pietro C a v a l l i n i that w a s " n o t o n l y w r o n g , but utterly misleading . . . and thereby stifled interest." B e r e n s o n w a s c o n v i n c e d b y the details o f color and ornamentation o f b o t h paintings that they had been d o n e " u n d e r the s h a d o w o f Santa S o p h i a " and w e r e p r o b a b l y part o f the l o o t carried o f f f r o m C o n s t a n t i n o p l e after its sack b y the Venetians in 1204. H e did not o f f e r the article to S h e r m a n for Art in America but g a v e it instead to his enterprising friend U g o O j e t t i for his i m p o r t a n t art j o u r n a l Dedalo. A m a n o f m a n y interests, O j e t t i w a s also director o f the leading Milanese n e w s p a p e r , Corriere della Sera. His w r i t i n g s o n Italian art alternated w i t h n o v e l s and short stories and a travel b o o k o n the U n i t e d States. Fluent in E n g l i s h , he translated the article for the magazine, the first o f nearly a d o z e n articles w h i c h B e r e n s o n w a s to s u p p l y to h i m d u r i n g the n e x t eleven years. T h e p r o v o c a t i v e challenge B e r e n s o n t h r e w o u t in the article w a s taken u p b y a n u m b e r o f art historians. B e r e n s o n ' s conjecture that the panels w e r e f r o m the C o n s t a n t i n o p l e s c h o o l held its g r o u n d , t h o u g h his dating is n o w regarded as several decades t o o early. T h e t w o w o r k s n o w repose in the N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y in W a s h i n g t o n ,

assigned to the

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S c h o o l o f C o n s t a n t i n o p l e , XIII C e n t u r y , " there being g o o d evidence that the C o n s t a n t i n o p l e s c h o o l continued into that century. H a m i l t o n ' s panel w e n t back to the D u v e e n s and then entered the M e l l o n C o l l e c t i o n . K a h n ' s w i d o w g a v e her panel to the N a t i o n a l Gallery in 1950. H i s m o d e s t stint o f w r i t i n g c o m p l e t e d , B e r e n s o n turned his thoughts to m o r e delightful matters. " P o o r B . B . ! " M a r y i n f o r m e d the v a c a tioning N i c k y , " h e had arranged his various h o n e y m o o n s w i t h his v a r i -

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ous ladies so very carefully—Mrs. Lanier in Venice from the 20th to the end of the month, and Baroness La Caze from September 12 till I come back [from England] and now suddenly the Baroness writes that she is coming to Venice on the 20th and that upsets all his plans." He survived the change and went off with Baroness La Caze to Siena and the hill towns in search of early Christian art. Although Mary had tried to bring herself to agree with Bernard's philosophy that "marriage is a sacrament tempered by adultery," the La Caze junket tried her resolve. "It is impossible," she wrote, "to express the ice that I feel imprisoned in, thinking of thee touring round Italy with a woman who lives as thy wife. However, it is the same as the children's toys and plans to them, and one wouldn't or couldn't have it different." Berenson was an incorrigible philanderer, and his blend of romantic aestheticism and exquisite sensuality seemed irresistible to women. On his drive with a new female companion he would "press an ardent kiss upon the beauty's lips," a lovely Italian contessa confided to a friend, after her first drive with him. She musingly added, "His immaculate beard was so soft and silky." While touring with the Baroness La Caze, he found time to pour out his meditations to a new friend, the Comtesse Philomene de LevisMirepoix, w h o m he had met at Edith Wharton's shortly before his trip to America. In reply to his reflections she wrote, as translated from the French, " I love your vast and tranquil wisdom where all sounds fall quiet to allow your silent thoughts to rise, thoughts so pure which you teach me and which until now I did not k n o w . " He told her that he lived "in a suspended w o r l d " of thought but that he never confounded it with " m a terial reality," and she replied, "It is just what I must do and it is what you must teach m e . " O f a poetic and independent nature, Philomene was a graceful and attractive neighbor of Edith at Hyeres. A passionate love affair with a married man had left her with a child that she had chosen to rear. An air of romance hung about her that captivated Berenson, and the scores of letters they exchanged during the next quarter century breathed a shared ecstasy of feeling. He became, she said, the Guru of her fragile thoughts and his letters were "a lamp to give light in hours of self-doubt and indolence." Her charm and "exquisite sense of humor" suggested a perfect traveling companion, and Berenson invited her to join his party in their forthcoming visit to Egypt. After an absence of five years from Siena, Berenson returned to it with the keenest appreciation, especially of the Donatello St. John Enthroned in the cathedral. He had to hurry back to I Tatti with Baroness La Caze to meet Sir Joseph, who was arriving with his daughter and Edward Fowles [294]

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for a four-day conference. The visit, Bernard reported to Mary, who was still in England, " w a s as great a success as it could be without YOU. Nicky was helpful." Joe Duveen was at his most expansive, full of optimism, breathing affection and enthusiasm. Eager as always to further his own expertise, he hung on Berenson's comments as they talked about paintings, trying to memorize telling words and phrases. From time to time he would nudge Edward and say, " T r y to remember that." Although a business recession in the United States had nearly paralyzed the art trade, Joe was still predicting—quite correctly as it turned out—an imminent boom market in Italian paintings. His assurance of a substantial payment against the steadily accumulating thousands of pounds in fees removed the last obstacle to Berenson's projected "expedition" to Egypt. In planning the trip he was fortunate to have the counsel of Robert Greg, who had been head of the British Agency in Cairo. With his wife and the popular London hostess Lady Sybil Colefax, Greg came by for luncheon, and the two men talked long of Egyptian archaeology, Greg's hobby. Berenson's own hobby of early art continued to keep him on the move through the autumn of 1921. In Venice he joined forces with Paul Manship and grew ecstatic over the "light, the color, the works of art." But the persistent hectoring of the gondoliers inspired such a rage that he almost quit his beloved Venice. At the Palazzo Barbaro, where Mrs. Gardner had once presided, he spent the evening with the James Dunns, who were returning to America, and was amazed to see the American diplomat do his own packing for the journey. What most stirred Berenson in Venice was the spectacle of St. Mark's Square. "It would take literature," he said, "to convey my impression of enchantment, my hunger, my sense of unworthiness, my despair." Fortunately, Mrs. Chanler carried him away from "the pedantic path of iconography," and with her he went off to the lonely isle of Torcello to find solace in its Byzantine relics. On Mary's return from England in October the pair went down to Rome in vain quest of a flat in the hope of Bernard's spending a few months there in medieval study. He had "such a head of steam" for early medieval and early Christian art that he hated to "draw across his track the huge red herring of E g y p t . " The impulse to put off Egypt passed, however, and they returned to I Tatti to assemble the considerable baggage of books and other impedimenta for their extended absence. Even in the final week of preparation in early November the "I Tatti bus," as Nicky was to call it, was busy ferrying guests from the railroad station to the villa. Santayana and Charles Strong dropped by on their way to Rome and Walter Lippmann and his wife stayed for a few days. On one [295]

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day "the dear little pair with shining happy faces," as Mary pictured them to Mrs. Gardner, were sent o f f in the Berenson motorcar to San Gimignano. The time for departure finally arrived and Bernard and Mary set sail from Naples for Alexandria on November 17, 1921. In his bags Bernard carried James H. Breasted's classic History of Egypt; Alfred von Kremer's learned study Orient under the Caliphs, which had been recently translated; Macaulay's version of Herodotus' ancient account; and Annie and James Quibells' Guide to the Cairo Museum. Just before sailing both were struck by the thought that since Nicky had become so much a part of their lives, she ought "to be in on it," and they posted an invitation for her to join them by the next boat. The two travelers did not tarry at Alexandria but went on immediately to Cairo. T o Bernard's romantic vision the sight of the myriad minarets of the city as they came into view must have seemed to welcome him back to the world he had once dreamed about as a student at Harvard. There he had read in the original Arabic The Thousand and One Nights. He could hardly have forgotten the eloquent invocation to the "Mother of Cities": " H e w h o hath not seen Cairo hath not seen the w o r l d . " He dismissed the too-worshipful dragoman, who persistently addressed him as "Father," and established himself at the historic Shepheard's Hotel overlooking the Nile. The dazzling sunshine and exotic ambience, the colorful life that pulsated along the Sharia Maspero below his window, so captivated him that he said he did not care if he stayed there "all the rest of his life." Word of his arrival soon spread. He and Mary were warmly welcomed by Robert Greg, who was now in charge of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They also met Bernard's old acquaintance Sir Ronald Storrs, the British governor of turbulent Jerusalem. In his memoirs Storrs recalled that he "took 10 o f f " Berenson for his ProJerusalem Society to further the restoration of its monuments. Another old acquaintance, Anna De Koven, the wife of the composer, lavished her admiration upon Bernard. His eyes, she said, were "the most beautiful ever created . . . his soul the most refined and exquisite, and his figure that of a divine youth." He ruefully commented he "would gladly have a paunch instead, if he could digest with it." They invited Mrs. De Koven to live at I Tatti during their three-month absence, and she gratefully accepted the invitation. She would have for company Nicky's sister, Alda, and brother-in-law, Bertie von Anrep. Displaced and despoiled by the Russian revolution, Anrep was at loose ends, "perishing for want of something to d o . " A swarm of "savants of Egyptology, Arabology, and Coptology" soon gathered about the Berensons. The most distinguished caller [296]

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among the archaeologists was "old Flinders Petrie," who at sixty-eight, "grey and hairy like a prophet," was en route to his excavations at Abydos. Professor of Egyptology at the University of London, Petrie had begun his long series of notable excavations along the Nile in 1880. Also among the savants were the James E. Quibells of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities; Cecil M . Firth, in charge of the Sakkara excavations; and Achille Creswell, an authority on Arab architecture. With the lively and expressive Achille Patricolo, superintendent of Arab monuments, they explored the old city and the Mameluk tombs. Though less erudite than the "pedantic and dogmatic" Creswell, Patricolo was a far more companionable guide. People rather fought for the privilege of taking them about, Mary reported, so that they had to go in a "clandestine fashion with some of our cronies so as not to offend the specialists." Early in their stay in Cairo the Berensons visited with Viscount and Lady Allenby, although they shared the Conservative belief that Allenby as British Resident of the Protectorate had unwisely given in to the populace and endorsed Wilson's democratic principle, as Mary put it, of "savagery for the savages." Nationalist fervor had continued to erupt in widespread strikes and occasional riots, punctuated by the assassination of a few British officials, but foreign visitors like the Berensons were able to go about unaffected by the revolutionary ferment. Toward the end of December 1921 they learned of "great rows in Cairo" and demands that the British clear out. But all the Berensons saw when they ventured out of their hotel were "a few broken street lamps and soldiers everywhere." Berenson's only mishap was to catch a cold one day on a windy minaret. Since they were important American visitors, the United States representative held a reception in their honor. The affair brought together a striking array of notables of the Byzantine society that moved between the residency and the court of Sultan Ahmed Fuad, the former Khedive of Egypt. The "cultivated and affable" sultan followed suit by inviting them to his court. Berenson rose to the occasion and, according to Mary, was never "more brilliant or thrilling." If Fuad had any inkling that he would soon be king of Egypt, he let fall no hint of that prospect. Fortunately only a few letters and cabled requests for opinions on pictures from the Duveens came to distract Bernard from his new avocation as an Egyptologist. One notified him that a Giotto which he had promised his cousin Arthur had been sent on to Boston. Arthur wrote that he had explored, at Bernard's entreaty, the possibility of his investing in conventional business enterprises and had concluded that in that recession year, given Bernard's reputation and knowledge of values, it would be much safer and more profitable for him to invest in paintings. On N e w Year's Day Berenson sent his greetings to Mrs. Gardner, as [297]

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he had regularly done for many years, telling her he had a cordial invitation from Sir Ronald Storrs to spend three weeks with him in March in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, he said, " w e are in the midst of a revolution. The naughty infants think they would prefer a world without grown-ups." He expected to start up-river on the tenth for Wady Haifa in the Sudan near the Second Cataract of the Nile so as to view on the way Ramses' great rock temple of Abu Simbel, which was then on the river's edge. Nicky's arrival after Christmas added an agreeable dimension to the Berensons' lives. She had a refreshing curiosity for all the "marvels" and a way of assimilating knowledge of the monuments that recalled Berenson's feats of memory when he was younger. Under Nicky's serenely competent direction, the complicated packing for the voyage up the Nile on the S.S. Egypt took place with the help of their new dragoman Abudi, who had accommodated himself to Berenson's slow and methodical manner of sightseeing. At the vast complex of Sakkara, their first stop, Bernard and Mary, doubtful of the wisdom of riding donkeys, elected to be dragged in a sand cart. That roughly jolting vehicle invited no second trial. At Beni Hassan, Berenson mounted a donkey and took to that mode of conveyance with agility. B y the time they reached Luxor he had become "a famous assineer, on his spirited little grey ass," enjoying it "like a boy, laughing and playing tricks and jumping around on the ruins." Traveling in Egypt, they found, was "furiously expensive" and the requests for baksheesh unrelenting, but at Luxor comforting word reached them that a "fat check" of £5,000 from the Duveens had arrived at Baring Brothers in London. A few days later any lingering anxieties were dissipated when Berenson learned that Arthur Sulley had sent a check for £5,000. B y the end of 1922 another £5,000 would be forthcoming from Sir Joseph. These sums, together with £2,000 return on investments, would produce a gross income of approximately £17,000 ($85,000) as recorded by Berenson in his loosely kept pocket ledger. His contributions to his family trust and to Mary's dependents could for the present continue undiminished. Beyond the First Cataract and the Old Aswan Dam they resumed their voyage on the S.S. Thebes and wound their way past the temples of Abu Simbel and "between the diorite rocks of the Second Cataract." The stark, eerily empty landscape was a constant enchantment, especially when the sandstone cliffs glowed pink in the setting sun. On the return down-river, though the planned three-week visit at Luxor lengthened to a month, Berenson complained of being "snatched away before he had seen anything." The poetical Philomene de Levis-Mirepoix joined the party at Luxor, fitting in pleasantly with all of them. Personable, gay, [298]

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and "unrepentant of her irregular past," she gazed at the ruins with eager curiosity. Berenson remarked of her mind that it stretched like an elastic but came back again to its follies. Always the schoolmaster, he wished to improve her; besides he felt "too rheumatic and full of aches to flirt." At neighboring Thebes Berenson had a disconcerting encounter with an Egyptologist w h o m he met at lunch at the American House at Deir el Bahri. The fellow scarcely acknowledged his overtures. Baffled, Berenson asked, "What is the matter? Why do you look so sullen and why won't you be civil?" "I'll tell you," he burst out. "That damned Joe Breck so rammed you down my throat that I got to hate the name of Berenson." The overenthusiastic Joseph Breck was the curator of decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The temples at Luxor and neighboring Karnak proved an overwhelming seduction. Bernard told his mother that he never went out without the scarf she had knitted for him during his visit. The "little old man," as he described himself to her, "in the white pith helmet, with the bluegreen scarf" had "grown to be all but a landmark." Mary had by this time begun to travel among the ruins by donkey, and though only a small one could be found, her onetime skill as a horsewoman asserted itself and she mounted her incongruous bulk upon it with unexpected ease. But the exposure of her complicated Victorian underclothing worried Bernard. "Mary, you are too shocking a sight for a Muslim population." "Nonsense, Bernard," she replied. "The unveiled face of a woman is so shocking for these people that they do not pay any attention to the rest." One of Nicky's first duties during their stay in Luxor was to arrange for a riding skirt for Mary, buttoned front and back like her own. Thereafter Mary sallied out on their daily expeditions without further offense to imagined Muslim sensibilities. After Berenson had somewhat slaked his craving for sight of the great columns in the hippostyle of Karnak and for the marvels of the Luxor temples, whose grandeur made him feel as if his "whole life has been a preparation for it," he daily shepherded the women across the Nile to the west to the Valley of the Kings. Their donkeys carried them three or four kilometers through the naked hills of tumbled rocks on which no green thing grew to the excavations where the archaeologists and their teams of fellahin patiently dug away at the vast mounds of debris. Each day they brought lunch and tea things and never stopped looking "until the sun went d o w n . " Scores of tombs challenged Berenson's curiosity. The Egyptian archaeologist N o r m a n de Garis Davies let them climb down into the tomb of a nobleman which had just been penetrated. Half-asphyxiated by the ancient dust, Berenson was amazed at the extraordinary "freshness and [299]

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intensity of color of the hieroglyphs." He learned that Howard Carter and the earl of Carnarvon, having noted that Theodore Davis had turned up some discarded objects identified with King Tut-ankh-amen, had decided to dig through the mountains of old rubble to bedrock in the hope of finding his tomb. The work had gone on for six seasons with essentially barren results, but neither Carnarvon nor Carter had given up hope. Lunching with the two men at their desert site, Berenson felt that "thirty years" had dropped off his "aching back" and he frisked and leaped "even as a gazelle." Ten months later on November 5, 1922, Howard Carter was to uncover the steps cut in the solid rock below the tomb of Ramses VI that led downward to the golden treasures of King Tut's tomb. Even without that revelation, Berenson felt that his experiences at Luxor were the most "life-enhancing" he had ever known. N o other art, it seemed to him, approached Luxor's in intensity. B y the first of March the river level had begun to fall, and the remaining voyage down-river became an increasing succession of groundings on sand bars and the occasion for a deafening tumult each time the crew kedged the ship free. They were hung up so long at Assiut that Mary and Philomene, impatient for family news, dragged Bernard from his dreamy meditations and entrained for Cairo. In their absence from the city a revolution of sorts had taken place. Lord Allenby had ordered the rebellious nationalist leader Peter Zaghlul deported to Aden, and in midFebruary 1922 a limited independence for Egypt had been proclaimed. Within a fortnight Sultan Fuad assumed the title of King Fuad I. Berenson maintained a distance from these developments, spending the remaining days of his stay in a hotel near the pyramids and at Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo, dividing his time between studying the excavations at Sakkara and reveling in the archaeological treasures of the Cairo Museum. Early in April 1922 the Berensons landed at Venice. There Mary, still suffering from her "Cairo fever" and a return of cystitis, was attended by the English doctor Wilfred Blaydes, who had in the distant past pursued her with desperate passion. Married now to a woman whom Mary judged "not quite a lady," Blaydes was leading "a nice quiet cultivated life." Bernard too found himself "far from well." He felt a letdown from the exhilaration of the trip and returned to I Tatti momentarily bored and "too stupefied to turn to anything." After four months' immersion in the antiquities of Egypt in which time stood still among the millennia of history, he had to face again the restless tyranny of his profession as an art expert.

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H E "usual bustle" of guests greeted the Berensons on their return to I Tatti from their Egyptian trip in the spring of 1922. If on the surface Berenson radiated wit and charm to his guests, he managed to suppress the gnawing financial anxieties that he read in his pocket ledger of his account at Baring Brothers. In the first six months of the year £12,700 was to dwindle to less than £2,000. As a result, amidst the flood of correspondence with Edward Fowles and Sir Joseph counseling for or against the purchases of paintings or supplying attributions, there were long letters protesting against the firm's policy of restricting his access to other dealers and of delaying the semiyearly payments of £5,000 for months after they were due. Bernard instructed Mary, " D o in heaven's name tell [Edward Fowles] to let me have some money." Sir Joseph at last came through with a postdated check, as "things are very tight." The discussion about the Duveen "embargo" on Berenson's recommending pictures to other dealers continued through the remainder of the year. In December 1922 Mary sent off a long letter to " M y dear J o " which, after explaining the tangled circumstances surrounding the possible availability of a Bellini, turned to the "more serious business" of Bernard's relation to the firm. " I f now and then he could do the dealers a good turn by recommending some minor picture which you would not in any case want," Mary explained, "nearly all the pictures to be sold in Italy would come to him as they used to d o . " Fowles assured Berenson that Sir Joseph never objected to his offering paintings to others so long as their "chief competitors do not get works that we have not seen." The protestations of good faith on both sides did not eliminate the mutual suspicions that lurked beneath the surface, however, and the issue was never forthrightly settled. What were major and what minor paint[301]

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ings could not always be easily determined, and sellers could not be asked to wait while the Duveens made up their minds. Moreover, the secret maneuverings in the trade prevented any really systematic procedure from being worked out. What may also have disturbed Sir Joseph were Berenson's substantial dealings with Arthur Sulley in London, an association which in fact yielded Berenson £6,100 in fees in 1922. Duveen had doubtless not forgotten his "distress" at having been bypassed by the Berensons in Sulley's sale of the Bellini Feast of the Gods to Carl Hamilton three years earlier. In the long-running contest between Berenson and Sir Joseph, Fowles served as best he could as a sort of mediator. Occasionally he advised the Berensons how to deal with his imperious master. At the same time he needed to protect his principal. An occasion to try to do so arose early in September 1922 when he met Berenson at the Hotel Bristol in Berlin. Berenson had arrived with Nicky Mariano, who had been traveling alone with him for the first time as his secretary and valet, having been carefully instructed in the latter role by Mary's Elizabeth. Fowles had been solicited by Sir Joseph to obtain a certificate of authenticity from Berenson for a reputed Botticelli in the estate of the late William Salomon of N e w York, a painting bought from Duveen on the recommendation of Siren. T o Duveen's embarrassment the art critic Maurice Brockwell, who had once been Berenson's secretary, had declined to include it as a Botticelli in a sales catalogue of the Salomon pictures. Berenson was furious at the request, according to Nicky, and categorically refused. He wrote to Mary, "Yesterday evening Edward and I patched up some sort of letter. He assured me that J D had hoped I would guarantee that the beastly Salomon portrait was a Botticelli." In the "patched u p " letter of September 8 to "Messrs Duveen," preserved in the Duveen files, Berenson temperately explained that he had seen the painting at a "big dinner and reception" given by Mrs. Salomon in N e w York but had not been able to give it "very careful attention. This much, however, I can say, that it is not by Botticelli, but it might conceivably be by Jacopo del Sellajo, whose better works, until not long ago, were frequently ascribed to Botticelli himself." In his old age Fowles in a lapse of memory wrote that Berenson suggested the painting "was an unusually late work of Botticelli." Duveen, disappointed by the failure of Fowles' mission, noted in a memorandum, " I felt on the whole compelled to acquiesce in Mr. Berenson's possible ascription of it to Jacopo del Sellajo." In November, still hopeful, he sent on a set of Salomon photographs to Berenson. Mary replied, " T h e difficulty, as you are aware, lies in the Young Man's

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Portrait, w h i c h is n o w called not Botticelli, but Sellajo, and in the ' L u i n i . ' W e cannot (with the best w i l l in the w o r l d ) guarantee either—the first is 'close to Sellajo' but does not really correspond w i t h anything w e k n o w o f his. T h e second is o b v i o u s l y a G i a m p i e t r i n o . " In the end, according to F o w l e s , D u v e e n agreed to b u y back all o f the Italian paintings f r o m the estate. M a r y w a s scheduled to i n t e r v i e w Sir J o s e p h in Paris, and B e r n a r d u r g e d her to h a v e F o w l e s " c o a c h " her f o r the meeting. " H e thinks the m o s t important matter is to insist u p o n [the] regularity and frequency o f a c c o u n t s , " he w r o t e . " I t is t w o years at least since w e h a v e had any. E d w a r d thinks w e o u g h t to have them e v e r y six m o n t h s . " B e r n a r d thought a simple code could be devised identifying the pictures in the " X " B o o k and indicating w h e t h e r they w e r e sold " a d v a n t a g e o u s l y or n o t . " " D o consult E d w a r d on this point. . . . I really like h i m and w a n t in e v e r y w a y to help m a k e h i m one o f u s . " That he never became, and t h o u g h their amicable relations continued f o r the rest o f their lives, F o w l e s retained ambivalent feelings about Berenson, w h o w a s , he felt, too aggressively self-seeking. T h u s he speculated in his m e m o i r s that B e r e n s o n w a s reluctant to attest the " B o t t i c e l l i " portrait because he had derived no p r o f i t " o n the initial p u r c h a s e . " H e underestimated B e r e n son's virulent contempt f o r Siren's j u d g m e n t , a subject on w h i c h B e r e n son c o u l d hardly contain himself. " J D is f e a r f u l l y w o r r i e d o v e r the S a l o m o n b u s i n e s s , " he e x p l o d e d to M a r y at the period o f F o w l e s ' s mission. " N o w o n d e r . N o t only w a s the sainted S a l o m o n m o s t mercilessly o v e r charged but the so-called Botticelli portrait is an utter s w i n e r y . " M a r y had sent B e r n a r d a detailed list o f the points that she thought she o u g h t to take up w i t h D u v e e n . " A s to p o l i c y — w e m u s t h a v e a free hand, and he m u s t trust our j u d g m e n t . " His refusal o f a Crivelli, since sold to an outsider, " d i d a lot o f h a r m to thy prestige and discouraged dealers f r o m s h o w i n g thee t h i n g s . " She w o u l d , o f course, g o o v e r all matters with E d w a r d "before J o arrives." T h e conference appears to have g o n e o f f agreeably enough. J o e p r o m i s e d that hereafter all sales w o u l d be reported f o r entry in the " X " B o o k as soon as they w e r e concluded, " h a i r b y h a i r , " and since the 1 0 percent e x p o r t tax had been reduced to 5 percent, he intended to p a y it in " a n open and a b o v e - b o a r d w a y . " A second talk seemed equally satisfactory. In the presence o f F o w l e s and y o u n g A r m a n d L o w e n g a r d , Sir J o s e p h ' s n e p h e w w h o had been b r o u g h t into the business, D u v e e n agreed that B e r e n s o n should be free to o f f e r pictures the f i r m did not w a n t to private people and that B e r e n s o n could b u y f o r the f i r m " a n y t h i n g urgent and important on his own authority." A s f o r arrears, he w o u l d " r e a l l y pay us quickly if we would cable him."

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H a v i n g g o t these partial concessions out o f him, M a r y felt m o v e d to advise D u v e e n that he should g i v e his w i f e " a holiday f r o m his o v e r p o w ering self." Her business w i t h the D u v e e n s completed, M a r y j o i n e d Bernard and N i c k y in Berlin, w h e r e they all made the rounds o f the galleries and indulged in an " o r g y o f o p e r a . " A g a i n s t his better j u d g m e n t Bernard let M a r y persuade h i m to meet his "arch e n e m y , " Dr. W i l h e l m v o n B o d e . T h e meeting w a s a fiasco. B o d e " w a s horribly rude, scarcely paid any attention to us and rushed o f f several times w i t h o u t a w o r d . " T h e Berensons had spent several w e e k s in G e r m a n y earlier in the s u m m e r , having driven up in their car f r o m Florence w i t h Parry at the w h e e l as always. Bernard had felt relief escaping f r o m the supernationalist frenzy w i t h w h i c h Mussolini was infecting Italy. " O h the j o y o f being in a country that has not w o n the w a r , " he exclaimed. " I will have to do henceforth o n l y w i t h people w h o k n o w they are beaten, w i t h statesmen w h o have failed, w i t h diplomats w h o have been dismissed." It did his heart g o o d , he w r o t e f r o m M u n i c h to M r s . Gardner, to see again " s u c h exemplary order, such competence, such cleanliness and such friendliness." T o his ailing father Bernard w r o t e that the German people w e r e " a t least as civilized and as gifted as any o f u s . " T h e German culture o f his father's circle had been the liberating influence o f his b o y h o o d . " I don't k n o w w h a t I don't o w e , " he w e n t on, " t o the talks I used to overhear between y o u and y o u r f r i e n d s . " W h e n later in the year Albert, w h o w a s then seventy-seven, had to be m o v e d to a nursing h o m e , Bernard s y m pathized, " I think o f y o u v e r y often and always w i t h l o v e . " Bernard's pleasure during his travels in G e r m a n y w a s tempered b y the k n o w l e d g e that the G e r m a n people w e r e approaching an economic abyss. R u n a w a y inflation w a s carrying the deutschemark l o w e r and l o w e r . B y the end o f A u g u s t 1922 the rate was 2,300 to the British pound. T h e Berensons felt like "brutes to live in l u x u r y for almost n o t h i n g " — a s u m p t u o u s dinner for all o f them cost about four dollars A m e r i c a n currency, about half a month's salary o f " a Professor or M u s e u m d i r e c t o r , " and they felt ashamed that " o u r side" w a s g o i n g on year after year " p i l i n g misery on the best people . . . the middle and learned classes." Berenson w r o t e M r s . Gardner that the w o r k i n g people " c a n n o t earn e n o u g h to e a t . " Berenson's dependence o n N i c k y had been g r o w i n g almost since her first days at I Tatti. E v e n before the tour o f G e r m a n y he confessed to her, w h e n she was a w a y w i t h her sister, Alda, " O l d N i c k I feel only half alive w i t h o u t y o u and I can't quite believe that i f I g o into the library I w o n ' t find y o u , or that y o u w o n ' t c o m e back for dinner t o m o r r o w at latest." [304]

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Her intelligence and endearing nature had also made a conquest of Mary, who appreciated her role as a protector against Bernard's volatile rages. As Bernard's fondness for her mounted, his other distracting "loves" came to have less urgent appeal for him. He felt himself to be "a reformed character" and philosophized that he had become painfully aware that with "almost vanishingly rare exceptions, women are time wasters and men bores." Nicky was clearly the wonderful exception. As for her affection for him, it had become central to her existence. Being with the Berensons, she said, had taken all the sting out of being an Old Maid, though there were to come times when his philanderings anguished her. The trio returned from Germany early in October 1922, and the autumn found Berenson again at ease in his study. " I meditate, I read, I walk, I talk," ran his summary to Charles Du Bos. He acknowledged that his years had begun to weigh upon him. He regretted, he said, that Proust—who had recently died—"did not live to feel, to analyze, to record the first approaches of old age." It was a task he would himself undertake late in life in his own diary. As if in anticipation ofthat future, Nicky was moved from the villino across the road to a comfortable apartment on an upper floor of the Villa I Tatti. There she would reside until Berenson's death thirty-seven years later. On his arrival Berenson had found a discomforting inquiry from his cousin Lawrence, who had begun his devoted service as Bernard's American lawyer and man of affairs. The Internal Revenue Service had challenged the deductions in his 1040 income tax report. Berenson's lengthy rationale has a timeless interest for the independent professional. "Unfortunately," he began, " I have never regarded myself hitherto as a man of business. . . . So I had no occasion for keeping accounts. . . . From an aesthetic and spiritual point of view, it is regrettable that a person of my kind and in my position should be forced to treat himself and to organize himself as a business." As to the difference between personal and business expense, he continued, " I do not earn money by trade. I earn it by enjoying such authority and prestige that people will not buy expensive Italian pictures without my approval. . . . T o keep that authority I must keep myself in constant training by contact with works of art and by being surrounded by them in my own home." At least three-quarters of his expenditures were on "travel, books and photographs and reproductions. Travel in my present state of health and greatly diminished forces implies the constant presence of my wife, a secretary and servants. M y wife is all but as good at my job as myself and without her and my secretary I could not possibly get through the work I undertake, or a journey. M y home is little more than a library." He bought books primarily to stimulate his "aesthetic sensibility." [305]

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Lawrence informed him that using the figures Bernard supplied of his expenses, including professional gifts and Italian taxes, he reported a 1921 net taxable income of $20,000 out of a gross of $90,000. Life at the villa seemed singularly peaceful that October in spite of the burgeoning Fascist turmoil that was sweeping Italy. Guests could always be counted on for agreeable diversion. Aileen Tone evoked nostalgic memories of Henry Adams as she sang her eleventh- and twelfth-century songs in the Music Room. Israel Zangwill put in a welcome appearance, "much mellowed," though his bonnet was still "full of bees." He was now working on a play, The Fording House, in which a Socialist regime replaces the monarchy, a kind of forecast of what was about to happen to Italy. Preparations for the Fascist March on Rome had already begun, but in Zangwill's tolerant eyes "the events of those days resembled comic opera more than a real revolution." When one day the Fascist leader Curzio Malaperte took Zangwill about Florence and tried to persuade him that a revolution against the government was under way, what Zangwill saw was that the authorities appeared to be actually collaborating with the Fascists. The following day, October 28, 1922, the March on Rome took place while Mussolini prudently waited in Milan for word of its success. On the thirtieth he arrived in Rome and took over the post of prime minister. Some weeks later Berenson wrote Judge Learned Hand that the mark was 6,000 to the pound when he left Germany in early October and now [in December] was 35,000. " O n e of the most appalling fatalities of history was first England's and then our interference in the race between France and Germany as to which should be the Boche-ist. It has produced a disequilibrium that it will take generations to right. . . . Here we are all pretending like five year olds that Santa Claus will bring us all things. . . . And all by believing in Mussolini and the Stellotii d'ltalia [Italy's lucky stars]." Rene Gimpel, who was among the guests the day after Mussolini took command, recorded in his diary that the talk at the table ran much on fascism and that Berenson commented with heavy irony, "These Fascists are the same people who requisitioned my most precious wine three years ago in the name of the Florentine Soviet Committee; then they were Communists. They don't know what they are. . . . I've lived here for thirty-two years and I've never seen a government, and that's their way of governing, like their police who lie low during strikes. . . . But nevertheless everything works in this country. That's because Italy isn't a nation; it is a civilization." After dinner, Gimpel's account continued, "Berenson, that model of integrity, tried to sell me pictures, and very bad they were." If these pictures were indeed inferior, the same could not [306]

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be said of the succession of paintings Berenson was recommending to Duveen, Gimpel's brother-in-law. He asked Mary, for example, to urge upon Fowles and Lowengard the purchase not only of Bardini's Fra Angelico but also Liechtenstein's portrait Ginevra de' Benci. Whether the price of the latter masterpiece was too high or the tender was withdrawn, the portrait remained in the Liechtenstein Collection for another half century. B y the Christmas season the villa was again bursting with guests. T o the absent Nicky, Berenson wrote, "Beloved, I miss you so much that I cannot write to you and I do all I can not to think of y o u . " His sister Bessie, he told her, was a transformed person since becoming a sculptor. "She is now alive, zestful, intelligent and perceptive." Mary's sister, Alys, was also on hand and they were awaiting the arrival from Jerusalem of Sir Ronald Storrs, "successor to Pontius Pilate," who was said to be coming to court a granddaughter of Rockefeller residing in Fiesole. There was the usual run of young art historians—Arthur M c C o m b and Richard Offner, among others. Paul Manship had already come and gone. The Hapgoods horrified Mary with their lurid tales of their bohemian existence, and she thanked her guardian angel that deterred her from letting Hutch make love to her "or I would have been in that hysterical b o o k . " She was referring to Hapgood's novel An Anarchist Woman (1909), with its tales of "getting drunk and kissing each other all over the place and chewing strange plants and going temporarily crazy." Their most exciting dinner guest was William Bullitt, full of boisterous vivacity, who came with his young wife. After Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George had repudiated his mission to Lenin, he had indignantly turned from affairs of state to roaming about Europe for a leading Hollywood maker of films. He could still be counted on to be voluble on his betrayal. Amends would be made to him years later when Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to the Soviet Union. The Egyptian journey whetted Berenson's appetite for travel and archaeological adventuring. However much he longed for quiet, as he so frequently professed, an inner restlessness demanded other horizons. Since his arrival on the Continent thirty-five years earlier, almost every year had found him journeying ceaselessly about Europe. His five long visits to America had obviously confirmed the habit of travel. Happily the archaeological trip to Greece with the Kingsley Porters was being planned for the spring, and sustained by that prospect he began work after his holiday guests departed on a long essay which would demonstrate that, in spite of his active service as an art expert, he was primarily a scholar in art and archaeology. He resented the legend that was growing up about him, as he was to say in his Sketch for a Self-Portrait, that he [307]

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" r a n k e d w i t h fortune-tellers, chiromancists, astrologers and not even w i t h the self-deluded o f these, b u t rather w i t h deliberate charlatans" and that he had " i n v e n t e d a trick b y w h i c h one could infallibly tell the authorship o f an Italian p i c t u r e . " A n article a p p l y i n g his m e t h o d to a particular case, w o u l d , he h o p e d , e x p l o d e that m y t h . T h e essay turned o u t t o be a remarkable tour de force and belied his complaints o f fatigue, t h o u g h the w r i t i n g o f it during the first t w o m o n t h s o f 1923 w a s n o t w i t h o u t a f e w violent outbursts o f rage against M a r y . T o Senda she deplored the " n a s t y little injustices and the betrayal o f a suspicious, self-seeking e g o i s m " and the " s c e n e s " that he seemed to need to relieve his discontents. N o r did it help that he s o m e t i m e s felt that she and her b r o t h e r w e r e in s o m e sort o f league against h i m w i t h their thinly veiled air o f m o r a l and social superiority. A f t e r an eruption that ended w e e k s o f s e e m i n g h a r m o n y , M a r y in a m o m e n t o f bitterness confided to her diary, " I f he o n l y k n e w h o w it makes m e despise h i m , and he pretending to be so i m m e a s u r a b l y superior and m y s t e r i o u s l y saintly that I ' d o n ' t understand' h i m in the least. Silly little p u p p e t . " D e s p i t e the tense ambience, B e r e n s o n m a n a g e d to g i v e free rein to the far-ranging insights o f the n e w article, " A Possible and an Impossible ' A n t o n e l l o da M e s s i n a . ' " T h e " p o s s i b l e " A n t o n e l l o w a s a Saint Sebastian, a half-ruined fresco in the M u s e o C i v i c o o f V e r o n a attributed to the s c h o o l o f G i r o l a m o dai Libri. " T h e instant I l o o k e d at the fresco w i t h a seeing e y e , " he w r o t e , " I m e a n w i t h all faculties c o - o p e r a t i n g , I felt that it m u s t be b y A n t o n e l l o . " H e then proceeded to demonstrate in a f e w pages h o w he c o n f i r m e d that intuition b y means o f c o m p a r i s o n s w i t h telltale aspects o f A n t o n e l l o ' s k n o w n w o r k s . A d m i t t e d l y the r e s e m blances and parallels w e r e hypothetical, and he left it " t o f e l l o w stud e n t s " to decide " w h e t h e r this ruin o f a o n c e w o n d e r f u l design is to be admitted t o the c a n o n . " H e never g a v e u p his hypothesis, and the fresco w a s identified as A n t o n e l l o ' s a half century later in his Venetian List. A recent catalogue o f A n t o n e l l o ' s w o r k s assigns it to G i r o l a m o dai Libri, w i t h the explanation that critics h a v e n o t shared B e r e n s o n ' s v i e w . T h e m a i n thrust o f the essay concerned the " i m p o s s i b l e " A n t o n e l l o . B e r e n s o n had n e v e r seen the painting, a Madonna and Child with the Infant John, and had o n l y recently c o m e u p o n a p h o t o g r a p h o f it f r o m o n e o f his correspondents. T h o u g h its current w h e r e a b o u t s w e r e not k n o w n , it had received m u c h attention f r o m critics and w a s c o m m o n l y ascribed to A n t o n e l l o . In 1927 w h e n the painting w a s acquired b y the M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m o f A r t , the ascription to A n t o n e l l o , despite B e r e n s o n ' s article, had the impressive s u p p o r t o f A d o l f o and Lionello V e n t u r i , W i l h e l m v o n B o d e , M a x Friedländer, T a n c r e d B o r e n i u s , and other experts, but in the end B e r e n s o n ' s o p i n i o n prevailed. [308]

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The painting, Berenson argued, did not exhibit the artist's "mood, his music, his tempo." More important, the details, the "quantitative things," the shape and drapery of the face, the treatment of the hands, and so on, were not those of Antonello. The reed cross in the Infant John's hand was a motif that did not appear in Italian painting until after Antonello's death, and, as he demonstrated by a dazzling survey of Italian Renaissance paintings, the Infant John figured only in Florentine and Perugian works during the fifteenth century. Other anomalies, such as the motif of the Child leaning away from the Madonna, the type of hood, and the folds of the Virgin's drapery, all indicated a later date. Replying to critics w h o had attacked him for excessive Morellianism, he declared: " T o reach my conclusion it was not necessary to depend on the Morellian methods of connoisseurship alone. These may be allimportant in determining the difference between a copy and [the] original, or between one painter and another in a small group, but in this case the more palpable, more obvious, less subjective, and almost purely quantitative methods of archaeology suffice." Not only were his methods free from any suggestion of legerdemain, but they also utilized the full resources of the trained mind. Intuition might provide a necessary hypothesis, Morellianism might offer confirmation at one level, but central to his method were the circumstances of "historical probability." He summarized those applicable to the "impossible Antonello" in "seven labor-saving" criteria, their character suggested by the following examples: " A picture containing a reed cross is not earlier than the last decade of the fifteenth century; a Madonna deliberately leaning back, away from the child . . . is not found in the fifteenth century; a picture in which a curtain is drawn across a considerable portion of the sky . . . is little, if at all, earlier than 1480." The article did not have an easy birth. It opened a "new field in our studies," Mary proudly wrote to her mother-in-law. She firmly added, however, that "it was certainly very carelessly written, and it took two weeks of very hard work on my part and on the part of Bobby Trevelyan, who is staying here, to put it into possible English." Trevy, who, like Mary, balked at Bernard's purple passages and parenthetical asides, recalled that the " r o w s were a w f u l . " Bernard's highly personal idiom largely survived the assault, though, as Mary added, "it was really a miracle that divorce proceedings were not to follow immediately." In March the article was sent off to Ojetti to be translated, and it appeared two months later in the June 1923 issue of Dedalo. Berenson sent an offprint of the article to Fowles. Fowles had it translated, because he did not understand Italian sufficiently well to follow a long article. It would thus also be accessible to Sir Joseph, who often [309]

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adopted the language of Berenson's analyses as his own. He so prized Berenson's presentations that he was having "bound all the letters he [had] received from Berenson over a period of fifteen years . . . with an index." Gimpel advised his brother-in-law to bequeath the volume to the British Museum together with the firm's business correspondence. Fate decreed otherwise, and the letters, which Fowles inherited, were ultimately left to the Metropolitan Museum, together with the N e w York office correspondence, under restriction until the year 2004. According to Fowles, the valuable files of the Paris branch had to be destroyed for want of a willing depository. With the essay on Antonello safely out of the way and peace restored with his "board of editors," Berenson eagerly set out on his expedition to Greece in a party which included Mary, Nicky, and Logan. It would be his first return to the idealized land since his visit there in 1888 as a young man of twenty-three.

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H E return to Greece after the lapse o f thirty-five years was a deeply m o v i n g adventure in nostalgia. O n that first visit Berenson had seen the land as the visual illustration o f the Greek classics he had been translating at Harvard, and he had felt himself a true Hellenist for w h o m H o m e r was still a living presence. For many years thereafter he had begun his day with a few pages o f an antique text. H o w amazingly his personal circumstances had changed since long ago he had shared the deck o f the little steamer with its motley passengers and their livestock on the passage to Piraeus! His solitary and dusty marches with his meager purse o f drachmas were long past. Then he could afford only a limited reconnaissance, as when he made his "comfortless" journey to the recently uncovered Olympia. But his vision o f the Parthenon crowning the Acropolis never faded, and he spoke o f it as a kind o f talisman to the end o f his days. Once when Louis Gillet wrote that he planned to visit Athens, Berenson exclaimed, "I never ccase regretting that as a youth I did not dedicate m y life to Athens rather than to Florence." He came n o w to Athens affluent and famous and filled with a grander vision o f the significance o f the past. His travels in Egypt had awakened in him a sense o f the remarkable continuity o f the aesthetic experience. In E g y p t he had seen it carried back for distant millennia. It was thus with fresh eyes that he looked upon the artistic remains o f antique Greece, and undoubtedly there took root in his mind the conception o f the continuity o f Mediterranean art that w o u l d one day demand expression. Sailing from Brindisi the Berensons joined forces with the Kingsley Porters in Athens by April 23, 1923. Determined to make every moment o f the Greek tour count in his study o f antique art, Berenson tired out the whole party with "his passionate sightseeing." N o longer a mere tourist, he haunted the Athens museums in the mornings, where he fixed his eye

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upon the recently recovered sculptures. He climbed the Acropolis to the Parthenon with Nicky to watch the sunset coloring the Pentelic marble. There were rapid excursions in the Porters' car to nearby Daphne, Eleusis, Marathon, and Sounion. In Athens he conversed with the international archaeologists who made it their headquarters, the heads and associates of the French, German, British, Italian, and American schools. Wilhelm Doerpfelt, who had been responsible for much of the success of the Olympia excavations, was on hand to brief him. He conferred with Alan J. B. Wace, director of the British School at Athens, who had worked at Mycenae and Sparta, and with Wace's American colleague Carl William Biegen, a member of the group that had taken part in the reexcavation of Troy and worked in the digs of the Peloponnesus. He felt closest kinship to the Italian archaeologist Doro Levi. Levi, a Jew, was soon to be dismissed by the Fascists from his chair at the University of Cagliari, and Berenson later helped him find refuge in the United States. Following the days in Athens there were excursions to Corinth and a journey across ancient Arcadia to Andritsaena and the great temple of Apollo at Bassae. At Olympia Berenson's weary companions somewhat deprecated the sculptures in the museum, and to combat their heresy he insisted on returning with them the next day to convert them to a proper appreciation. He succeeded with all except Porter, who, to Berenson's annoyance, took an interest only in archaic Byzantine art. O n one occasion, however, when there seemed too much awe in the air at the theater of Dionysius and Nicky remarked how wonderful it must have been to see a performance there, he said, " D o not forget they were all munching garlic while watching the show." Some of the expeditions embraced places off the beaten track in the Peloponnesus—Nauplia, Epidaurus, Mycenae, Nemea, and Sparta— and to ensure comfort at the country inns the travelers were accompanied by a motor truck "carrying field beds and a cook." Every morning their dragoman would courteously inquire whether they had been troubled by fleas. Their pilot, a Milanese chauffeur, rather deplorably lacked Greek, with the result that Berenson made do with the Greek of Homer and Thucydides. Sometimes truck and car had to be abandoned and mountain trails had to be negotiated by donkeys. So the ascent was made to the medieval Turkish citadel of Acrocorinth. Wearing his white topee against the sun, his slight figure astride the donkey, Berenson fearlessly trotted along the narrow trails that skirted deep ravines, diverted by this mode of transport as much as he had been in Egypt. One journey took Berenson to the monastery of Hosios Loukas with Nicky and the Porters, Mary and Logan going on by boat to Delphi, as [312]

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both were out of sorts. The eight-hour ride across the mountain spurs brought them to the great Byzantine monastery-shrine on the flank of Mount Helikon. At dinner when a whole roast lamb was brought in, their host, a great bearded monk, honored Berenson and Nicky by carving out the eyes and placing those delicacies on their plates. In the morning they studied the remarkable series of mosaics of the Church fathers. The extensive ruins at Delphi littering the slopes above the precipitous gorge that descends to the sea marked the dramatic end of the monthand-a-half tour. Here the mystic Oracle issued her riddling commands to all Greece. T o Berenson the place seemed a kind of religious marketplace, which in its prime must have looked like the well-known cemetery at Genoa, "filled with hideous little sanctuaries one on top of another." The descent from Delphi to the port led through the great olive orchards that filled the valley and the plain. En route to Venice the travelers spent a final day of sightseeing at Corfu, that loveliest of the Ionian islands. In the small museum they gazed in wonder at "the grinning, powerful, life-enhancing" archaic Gorgon that dominated the room. The Berensons arrived in Florence with "the music of Greece still echoing" in their ears. Settled at I Tatti at the beginning of the summer of 1923, they could scarcely draw breath before being caught up in a rush of activity. There were unmistakable stirrings of the art market. Berenson cautioned young Lowengard that "the dikes that have held up . . . the speculation in works of art in the past six or seven years are breaking." Important things were coming on the market and the Duveen firm needed to get busy. Practical matters would have to be taken up with Sir Joseph, who was momentarily expected in Paris. But the prospect of listening to Duveen's rodomontade at the gallery in the place Vendome was more than Berenson could face. He therefore dispatched Mary to Paris on the first of July, a chore that she welcomed as it would permit her to go on from there to England again to pamper her grandchildren. Mary found Duveen in good fettle, full of "encouraging business and friendliness," boasting as usual of triumphs past and to come in the presence of the long-suffering Edward Fowles and Armand Lowengard. He had "high hopes" for Hearst and felt sure of Rockefeller. She could bear it, Mary wrote Bernard. "In fact I like it, once in a way, for J o triumphans is necessary to us and besides it is a vital spectacle." When she had confided to Sir Joseph that they had settled £5,000 on Nicky, he said, " 'It's the best investment you ever made,' and he beamed all over when I said that it was because of him we could do it." The trust had been in existence for almost a year, the money invested "in good Brazilian stock that pays 7 % so that she will be provided for if we die sud[313]

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denly." The Duveens, Mary learned, had not taken back all of the pictures sold to Carl Hamilton. He had managed to pay for the Fra Filippo Lippi, the Piero della Francesca, two Fra Angelicos, a Lorenzetti, and several other paintings, and thus had been left with a respectable collection. His investment was to pay off: the Piero della Francesca Crucifixion would bring $375,000 and the Fra Filippo Lippi Madonna and Child $125,000 at auction in 1929. In Mary's absence Bernard kept her posted daily on life at I Tatti. A visit by Salvemini had alarmed him, for he learned that though he had been denied a passport by the Fascist authorities, he planned to cross the frontier anyway. Lady Sybil depressed Bernard by remarking that it was a pity that Salvemini was going to England to speak against the Fascisti. The Fascist movement was in full bloom. "Freedom of the press has been abolished," Bernard sadly reported, and the streets of Florence were placarded with Basta Col Parliamento Evviva Mussolini. "What a queer fish man is. A hundred years ago the same species of Italian was making fish eyes at parliamento and libertä and all the other catchwords he is now abbasso-ing." T o Mary, fresh from the heady presence of Duveen, Italian politics seemed irrelevant. "Cheer up, old man," she responded. "$100,000 a year isn't bad." One of the " B i g Fish" whom Duveen wished to entice into Italian acquisitions was the multimillionaire head of Western Union, Clarence Mackay. He wanted the Berensons to join him and the tycoon in Paris in mid-September. Berenson thought it "a particularly crazy idea." Joe "ought to know by this time it is no use my attempting to tout for him." Besides, "attempting it damages what awe the midases might have for my name." J o e added a further request that when Berenson came to Paris he examine the "so-called Leonardo" which was to be on view at the Duveen gallery in the place Vendöme. The "so-called Leonardo" was La Belle Ferroniere, a painting owned by Mrs. Harry J . Hahn. A reporter from the New York World had asked Joe's opinion of it in June 1920 when Mrs. Hahn had offered it to the Kansas City Art Institute as a Leonardo. Joe, who prided himself on his expertise, had unhesitatingly replied that it was a copy of the original in the Louvre. Thus had begun the most famous cause celcbre of the art world. Soon afterward Duveen incautiously complicated the matter by adding that, like other experts, he doubted that Leonardo da Vinci had painted the Louvre La Belle Ferroniere. Armed with these opinions, Mrs. Hahn filed suit in N e w York against Duveen in November 1921, charging slander of title. Duveen's lawyers thought at first it would be sufficient to obtain affidavits from art experts abroad based on a comparison of photographs. It was subsequently arranged that the experts should examine [314]

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the two paintings, and the Hahns sent their picture to Paris for the purpose. When Mary told Duveen that she and Bernard would arrive by airplane, he protested, "Surely you would not be so careless as to travel, both of you, by flying machine. Y o u have no right to do so, for the sake of us all, I mean the art w o r l d . " It was a needless protest, for Bernard did not share Mary's enthusiasm for air travel. T o view landscapes in that fashion, he felt, destroyed all normal responses to spatial relationships and violated the nature that he so passionately loved. This had been his conviction since his first sight of the planes at the Le Mans meeting in 1908, and there is no indication that Mary ever succeeded in getting him aboard an aircraft. Duveen followed up his written request for Berenson's presence in Paris with a telegram in which there was now no mention of a meeting with Clarence Mackay. " O u r American lawyer [Louis Levy] . . . who will be in Paris . . . especially for Leonardo case wires us that he begs you to examine pictures and give your evidence in writing. . . . I hope you will help us, J o e . " Berenson tried to beg off. Another telegram arrived: "Much disappointed. In fact cannot take refusal. You will have to stand by and help us. Everybody expects your opinion on this matter. . . . Do not disappoint me. . . . J o e . " Reluctantly Berenson agreed, and he and Mary picked up Nicky in Switzerland and entrained for Paris. His reluctance was understandable. He must have recalled that he had once attributed La Belle Ferroniere to Boltraffio, "the ablest of Leonardo's pupils." And much more recently in his iconoclastic essay on Leonardo he had said of the painting, "I fear . . . in discussing Leonardo we cannot safely count her as his," though suggesting the possibility that the painting might be Leonardo's "in no matter how limited a sense." B y the time Bernard arrived in Paris the dispute had become an international sensation. Once the N e w York court authorized the taking of depositions by art experts in Paris, the newspapers in N e w York, Boston, and Paris were on the qui vive for details. The London Times declared that the case seemed "destined to create almost as great a commotion in art circles as the theft from the Louvre o f ' L a Gioconda' in 1 9 1 2 . " It was reported that "Madame Andree Hahn" was suing for $500,000 damages, charging that Duveen's criticism had prevented the sale of the painting to the Kansas City Art Institute. The examination of the expert witnesses was to take place on September 3, 1923, in the office of the American consul general, with Berenson appearing as Duveen's first witness. Earlier on that day he spent an hour examining the Hahn picture with a magnifying glass at the Duveen [315]

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gallery and then w e n t on to the Louvre to see La Belle Ferroniere. Then, accompanied by the D u v e e n lawyers, he proceeded to the American consulate, w h e r e the Hahns awaited h i m with their lawyers, Hyacinthe Ringrose and George Campbell. In the course of the hearing Ringrose vigorously "attacked the witness f r o m every angle." Berenson appears not to have lost his composure during the ordeal, t h o u g h he was hard put to contain his fury. After three solid hours of questioning, a reporter heard Berenson timidly request that he be allowed to stop to have his tea, at which w o m e n in the audience were heard to m u r m u r , "Isn't he just too sweet." At the beginning of the cross-examination, Nicky, w h o had come in late, softly asked Mary, " H o w is it going?" Mary, quick to misjudge her husband, whispered back, "Bernard has already made a fool of himself." Nicky thought his answers "simple and convincing," and the reporters' accounts bore her out. Berenson testified that he had k n o w n the Louvre picture for forty years, and t h o u g h he had at first doubted its authenticity, he had since changed his mind and was n o w positive it was by Leonardo and that the H a h n picture was "a bad c o p y . " " T h e copy has nothing like the vitality of Leonardo's w o r k . T h e eyes lack Leonardo's sparkle. . . . T h e treatment of the hair in it was like that of a wig and quite different f r o m da Vinci's style." What was most conclusive was that "the parapet in the Louvre picture was absent" f r o m the copy. When Ringrose pressed h i m on w h y he had not informed the experts at the Louvre that he had changed his mind about the attribution, Berenson haughtily replied, " T h e r e aren't any experts at the L o u v r e . " Ringrose also asked, " Y o u ' v e given a good deal of study to the picture in the Louvre?" "All m y life, I've seen it a thousand t i m e s . " " A n d is it on w o o d or canvas?" Berenson reflected a m o m e n t , "I don't k n o w . " Ringrose scoffed, " W h a t , you claim to have studied it so much, and you can't answer a simple question?" Berenson retorted: "It's as if you asked m e on what kind of paper Shakespeare w r o t e his i m m o r t a l sonnets." Sir Joseph reported this diverting exchange to his brother-in-law. Gimpel, w h o did not greatly admire Sir Joseph, added in his diary that Duveen had not told h i m — w h a t had come out in the press—that Ringrose had presented Berenson as a mere employee of Duveen and asked whether he had been paid. Berenson, w h o was under oath, had had to reply, " Y e s . " Gimpel gloated, " S o compromised in the face of the intellectual world his mask fell, that mask which so m a n y enemies have sought to tear away." T h e cross-examination of Berenson continued the next m o r n i n g . U n d e r questioning he frankly admitted that he was not an expert on techniques or the chemical composition of pigments in paintings or the [316]

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mechanical manner in which painters go about their work. He explained that through a lifetime of study of Italian paintings he had accumulated knowledge that almost amounted to a sixth sense so that he was able to place a painting in its exact school or era. His entire study was based, he said, on the examination of paintings and not on a knowledge of the methods of producing them. Having done his duty by Sir Joseph, Berenson immediately left for London, pleading ill health and fatigue. The hearing dragged on for another two weeks as expert after expert was exhaustingly grilled by Ringrose. All agreed that the Hahn picture was a copy. The parade of Duveen's distinguished experts was interrupted for one day when all nine adjourned to the Louvre to scrutinize the two paintings, which had been removed from their frames and laid side by side on a table in the office of the curator of paintings. The men spent two hours scrutinizing the paintings with their magnifying glasses. The " j u r y " was unanimous: the Louvre painting was an original by da Vinci, the Hahn a copy. Roger Fry, one of the experts, was quoted a few days later in the New York Times as saying that he could tell the Hahn picture was a copy without knowing the original existed. In his account to Vanessa Bell Fry wrote, " Y o u see I was called up to Paris to give evidence about the absurd case of the so-called Belle Ferroniere. I tried not to go but Duveen insisted, so I thought I must and I expect to be well paid for it." Sir Joseph returned to N e w York and, oozing confidence, he boasted to an interviewer at the Plaza Hotel that he had acquired many noted masterpieces while in Europe, including works by Frans Hals, Vermeer, Holbein, Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Gainsborough, Reynolds, and Bellini. T o Mary Berenson he wrote that he hoped Bernard's "coming to Paris to testify in the Hahn matter did not fatigue him too much. I am indeed most grateful for the wonderful assistance he rendered." Duveen's satisfaction proved premature. One continuance followed another until the case at last came to trial in 1929, the suit now reduced to a claim for $250,000 damages. What had seemed simple in 1923 became troublesomely complicated under the cross-examination of the Hahns' new attorney, who relentlessly ferreted out every contradiction or improbability in the testimony of the witnesses and in the depositions made in 1923. He particularly stressed that Duveen paid the experts for their "certificates." Langton Douglas frankly admitted on the witness stand that he had gone into expertizing because he needed the money. The jury reported their inability to agree, the vote standing 9 to 3 against Duveen, and the judge ordered a retrial. Sir Joseph had spent days on the stand exuding confidence in his own expertise to no avail. He settled the case out of court for $60,000 in October 1929. [317]

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Comments in the N e w Y o r k City newspapers reflected a general feeling that the lawsuit was absurd. As the Evening Post put it, " H o w can anyone outside of a comic opera expect the authenticity of an old painting to be settled by a lawsuit? . . . A verdict of damages against Sir Joseph Duveen might have meant the silencing of all expert comments in our country. This would have been a very real calamity." Berenson maintained the attribution of the Louvre painting to Leonardo da Vinci in his 1932 Lists, and the ascription was repeated in the posthumous List of 1963. The Louvre catalogue continues to give the painting to "School of Leonardo" in spite of the fact that in 1952 for the five hundredth anniversary of Leonardo's birth Madeleine Hours, a Louvre official, x-rayed all of its "Leonardos" and found that the x-rays showed the technique of La Belle Ferroniere was similar to that of the Mona Lisa. She communicated her findings to Berenson. Conservative art historians, however, still are doubtful of the attribution to Leonardo. Impressed by the comic opera aspect of the trial, the British Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton concocted a burlesque mystery novel of the case, The Missing Masterpiece. Duveen is displayed in the character of Sir Henry Bensington as a self-proclaimed expert and dealer and as a master of shady money-making stratagems. Berenson enters as Edward Mowlem, an art expert whose testimony runs on in an arcane and confusing stream. The New York Times objected that " M r . Belloc never allows the reader to forget that he is prejudiced against the Jewish race, to the detriment of his artistic judgment as well as his former reputation for fair play." Upon his arrival in London after the Paris hearings, Bernard discovered he had made a mistake in acquiescing in Mary's scheme to rent her daughter Ray's apartment for their stay. Doubtless Mary thought it an ingenious way of increasing Bernard's subsidy to the impecunious pair, but her fastidious husband was soon railing against the bohemian untidiness of the place fit only for "intellectual cave dwellers." Mary's sister, Alys, had not improved matters by engaging a novice woman driver ignorant of the streets of London. For Nicky, who accompanied the Berensons everywhere—to the salons of London friends, on weekends to Oxford and Cambridge, and once to Robert Benson's great country house with its impressive array of servants—the sudden plunge into that harried social existence proved an unsettling though useful initiation. Returning to Big Chilling, they met Salvemini, who was staying with Alys and Logan. They learned that he was studying English, determined to speak in England on the dangers of Italian fascism. At one "stormy luncheon party" in London at which Bernard displayed his unfortunate propensity for waspish ridicule of popular taste, [318]

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Trevy brought over Augustine Birrell, the writer and statesman, and Raymond Mortimer, a rising young journalist, both of whom Berenson was eager to meet. Early in the conversation Berenson lashed out at the current canonization of Rupert Brooke, the soldier-poet who had died in Greece on the way to Gallipoli. Brooke's war poems were on everyone's lips at the time, and the legend of the handsome youth cut off in the midst of great promise commanded universal reverence. It was no moment to point out that Brooke's poetry suffered from mellifluous sentimentality. Both visitors protested Berenson's sacrilege, and Birrell "was almost beside himself with indignation." Mortimer later forgave Berenson his iconoclasm and became a warm friend, but Birrell kept his distance thereafter. When the Berensons returned to Paris, Bernard held court at the Hotel Beau-Site. Here old friends like Abbe Mugnier brought the amusing gossip of French high society and Edith Wharton opened her arms to him. With Philomene de Levis-Mirepoix he and Mary shared the memories of their life-enhancing days in Egypt. Natalie Barney still cast her ambiguous charms and Baroness La Caze her all-too-intelligible authority. It was an ambience in which Berenson could toss off his outrageous paradoxes to an appreciative audience. At a tea one day Rene Gimpel found him "surrounded by an admiring group of sophisticated young women who were reminding him of all his witty remarks . . . such as: Ό God, grant me this day my daily idea, and forgive me yesterday's.' " Gimpel and Berenson fell to discussing the recent novel Le Grand Ecart by their younger acquaintance Jean Cocteau, who at thirty-four was one of the literary stars of Paris. Berenson agreed with Gimpel that the book was "very banal" and he elaborated, "The boy is just a brilliant talker I love listening to, but not half as much as he loves someone to talk to! And whenever he opens his mouth he takes you straight to paradise." If Berenson scorned the Duveens and their connections as clamorous money-grubbing vulgarians, an opinion he did little to conceal, Joe Duveen's nephew young Armand Lowengard, who had joined Gimpel at the tea, entertained an equally unfavorable though discreetly concealed opinion of Berenson. After Berenson and Gimpel departed that afternoon, Armand broke out, "It pains me to visit that hypocrite. . . . Y o u ' v e seen how the snob plays at being disinterested in the eyes of the world. . . . He'd like us to pay his expenses in Paris and give him an advance on his commissions; . . . well, you ought to see his letters asking for money, the baldness of it." What especially exasperated Armand and Gimpel was Berenson's attitude that dealers were below the intellectual salt and therefore fit only to be patronized and unceremoniously called to [319]

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account as b y a British milord. It w a s an attitude that left a long trail o f resentment. Bernard and M a r y ran up to Brussels briefly to see the collection o f A d o l p h e Stoclet at his magnificent Villa Stoclet o n the avenue Tervuren. Stoclet, a banker and railway magnate, was a man near Berenson's age w h o had built up " a truly glorious collection o f Byzantine and Italian primitives; o f enamels and Chinese things and the finest existing collection o f E g y p t i a n t h i n g s , " a collection that offered a breadth o f artistic and archaeological interest that touched Berenson at every point. It was a feast o f eye and mind that the Berensons w e r e to repeat four years later w i t h N i c k y w h e n again the priceless treasures were " b r o u g h t out f r o m cupboards and drawers to be relished long and q u i e t l y " in the presence o f Stoclet and his w i f e . While Berenson paused in Paris before j o i n i n g M a r y at B a d Gaustein in A u g u s t 1923 for a " c u r e , " n e w s came that Premier Henri Poincare had " g r a c i o u s l y " accepted the proposal o f Secretary o f State Charles E v a n s H u g h e s that a c o m m i s s i o n o f experts meet to determine G e r m a n y ' s actual capacity to continue paying reparations. Reparations had c o m e to a standstill because the French occupation o f the Ruhr early in the year had accelerated the collapse o f the mark to nearly 300 million to the pound. Poincare, determined not to be cheated o f revenge, was insisting that the experts should not be permitted to reduce the French reparations claim nor rescind the occupation. U p o n hearing this news, Berenson, n o w reduced to almost total cynicism, declared: "It w o u l d be like arranging a marriage in the hopes o f an heir on w h o m all the nations depended but first emasculating the b r i d e g r o o m . " L o n d o n and Paris had diverted Berenson as always, but the incessant activity w h i c h he craved levied a tax upon his reserves o f energy, w h i c h B a d Gaustein could scarcely restore. H e had been determined to make g o o d in t w o months all that he had missed in staying a w a y f r o m Paris and L o n d o n for three w h o l e years. In consequence he arrived at I Tatti early in N o v e m b e r 1923 feeling " b r o k e n and stunned w i t h fatigue." H e arrived, h o w e v e r , w i t h a fresh supply o f photographs w h i c h his reconnaissance o f m u s e u m s and private collections had yielded and soon, in spite o f weariness, he and M a r y set to w o r k on them.

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E E S T A B L I S H E D among the familiar comforts of I Tatti in the late autumn of 1 9 2 3 , Berenson found himself drawn to a new and engrossing project. It g r e w out o f a visit he had made to Walter B e r r y ' s apartment shortly before he left Paris. There he had pored over a sumptuously illuminated antiphonary that he recognized as o f Sienese origin. T h e anonymous w o r k with its forty exquisite miniatures instantly challenged his detective instinct, and he arranged to write up his find f o r the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. T h e miniatures, he deduced, were the w o r k o f the fourteenth-century artist Lippo Vanni and could be made to serve as a key to Vanni's artistic personality. A s far back as 1900 Berenson had been s h o w n a photograph of a triptych signed b y the then very little k n o w n Vanni. Since that time the studies of his friends F. M a s o n Perkins and Giacoma de Nicola had established the existence o f a considerable Vanni oeuvre, sufficient, with the addition o f the B e r r y miniatures, to establish his chronology and artistic identity. T h e more Berenson pondered the matter, the wider he ranged among the early Sienese painters in order to place Vanni f i r m l y in his age. He conjectured that Vanni's w o r k could n o w be discerned in a small panel in the Jarves Collection at Y a l e , in a triptych in the Walters Collection, and in a painting o w n e d by Colonel Michael Friedsam. T h e essay on which he embarked, with its array of striking parallels, was the kind o f scholarship in which he excelled. Completed in February 1924, the piece appeared in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts in M a y , translated b y S e y m o u r de Ricci, the noted J e w i s h bibliophile. T h e English version did not appear until 1930 w h e n it was collected with seven other similarly learned essays in the 1930 Y a l e edition of Berenson's Studies in Medieval Painting. B y that time Walter B e r r y had given the precious

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miniatures to the F o g g M u s e u m , w h e r e they continue to be recognized as significant examples o f Vanni's w o r k . T h e w r i t i n g that winter had taken a g o o d deal o f resolution, for not only had Berenson suffered a recurrence o f physical malaise but the " I Tatti b u s " had b r o u g h t increasing contingents o f visitors and guests. Edith W h a r t o n had arrived for a stay almost as soon as the Berensons had returned, and she enlisted N i c k y to accompany her on her lingering forays in the antique shops o f Florence. T h e y w e r e all j o i n e d one day b y the forty-one-year-old C r o w n Prince Gustaf A d o l f o f S w e d e n and his bride, Lady Louise Mountbatten. Charles Loeser had brought the royal pair to I Tatti. T h e prince, m o r e than six feet tall, t o w e r e d over his host. British educated, he had a scholar's interest in archaeology and during 1922 had spent six w e e k s in Greece studying the various digs. Like Berenson he was also interested in ancient Chinese ceramics and was a discriminating collector o f art. This meeting was the first o f m a n y and w a s to be f o l l o w e d b y a v o l u m i n o u s exchange o f letters on shared interests. O n his return to S w e d e n Prince Gustaf found copies o f Berenson's b o o k s waiting for him, and in graceful return he sent photographs o f paintings in his collection. Personally modest and simple in manner, he must have been s o m e w h a t amused b y the marked defcrencc that Berenson paid him on his return visits. A f t e r his accession to the throne in 1950, Berenson w o u l d sometimes address h i m w i t h old-fashioned courtesy as " S i r e " and earn the gentle r e p r o o f that the king wished to be treated merely as another guest. While Berenson labored over the Lippo Vanni article, the relentless transformation o f Italy b y Mussolini and his Blackshirts swiftly gathered m o m e n t u m . B y the first o f the year 1924 the Fascisti in Florence began to threaten the Berensons' estate manager, w h o resisted their demands for contributions. T h o r o u g h l y frightened, the servants urged the Berensons to give in and pay the tribute o f $250. T h a t unpleasant duty fell upon Mary. There w e r e other crosses for M a r y to bear. A n e w estate manager had been e m p l o y e d , and he f o u n d that m u c h waste and extravagance had taken place in the villa, g i v i n g Bernard reason to angrily deplore her management. W h e n she further annoyed him b y incautiously proposing that her daughter Karin should c o m e for a visit w i t h her children, he forbade anything longer than a "short h o l i d a y . " Her daughter R a y was already there w i t h her y o u n g son, Christopher, upon w h o m M a r y doted despite his sex. She professed to be conscious all the time that Bernard w a s " o n the w a t c h " to see that she did not spend too m u c h time w i t h the child a w a y f r o m her duties to him, especially the duty o f getting o f f [322]

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replies to queries from Fowles in Paris. In the margins of Fowles's letters Bernard would usually jot down a few words of the point to be elaborated. Matters were not eased when the Duveen semiannual check for £5,000 due on January first had not arrived in the middle of February and was then deferred to March. T o Mary it was a "disaster," for it meant delaying remittances to her children, who anxiously depended on them. She resented Bernard's want of sympathy and toyed with the idea of deserting him, only to reflect that her daughters depended on the £800 to £1,000 a year which he supplied. Fortunately by the end of the winter Christopher had succeeded to some degree in winning Berenson's tolerance, though, as Mary explained to Mrs. Gardner, " B . B " was "in principle like Charles Lamb, who, when asked how he liked children, replied 'Boiled.' " Among the many queries relayed by Fowles that season was one whose drastic implications would not become manifest for thirteen years. Joe desired an opinion on "Lord Allendale's Giorgione"— Adoration of the Shepherds—which had evidently caught his fancy as a possible acquisition. It had been attributed to Giorgione by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but long ago Bercnson had challenged the ascription. In his 1894 Venetian Painters he had given it to Catena and in an 1897 article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts he had described it as a copy of a lost original by Giorgione. N o w in a draft dictated to Mary he said, " T h e Allendale Nativity is a picture that has tormented me for thirty-five years. I have studied it from every point of view and have never yet reached a satisfactory conclusion. I saw it again as recently as last October and went away baffled. . . . I would suggest parenthetically that the author . . . may be Campagnola. . . . That it was somebody very close to Giorgione may be readily assumed. . . . The most likely suggestion as to the author of the original is in part Giorgione himself, but it is not safe to dogmatize." The winter and spring of 1924 proved to be one of Berenson's most productive seasons as a writer on Italian art. From the essay on Lippo Vanni he turned at once to the writing of a brief article in which he applied "quantitative" archaeological criteria to the study of a reputed Botticelli altarpiece in the Florence Accademia that Bode in his recent book on Botticelli had attributed to the master. Thirty years earlier Berenson had not admitted it "into the Morellian canon." He now acknowledged that Bode was right. What had misled him, he explained, was that the heads of the Madonna and Child had been repainted in a style different from Botticelli's, and he had failed to take that into account when he first studied the painting. The archaeological study of the head, especially of the coiffure, revealed that it was of a later date than the [323]

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rest of the painting and hence should have been disregarded. He could not resist adding, however, that proof that the remainder of the painting was an autograph rested on "connoisseurship," which was the product of "natural skill and training." Later study led him to change his mind, and in his posthumous List he relegated the altarpiece to "school w o r k . " A recent authority, Ronald Lighthown, believes the cartoon at least was probably by Botticelli. Almost without pause Berenson undertook a much longer essay, "Nine Pictures in Search of an Attribution." He labored over it at intervals between February and August of 1924 and took the manuscript with him to the mountain resort of Poggio alio Spino. The article demonstrated by archaeological research and by a complex and exhaustive array of parallel features that not only the nine widely scattered panels but also twelve others in the Este Collection at Vienna could probably be attributed to Domenico Morone. His aim, he declared, was to tell "younger men what an old explorer like myself has to do when he starts out to find the author of a work of art." Though "the quarry may not be worth the pains expended in pursuit. . . . I, for one, love the sport. Only one must enjoy it for no utilitarian or pretentious reason,but for its own sake and because it exercises eyes, mind, and judgment." During the spring Berenson interrupted his work on the Morone article to dash off for the June issue of Art in America a brief detective piece, " A n Annunciation by Botticelli," in which he proposed that a small painting recently purchased by Louis Hyde of Glens Falls, N e w York, presumably on his advice, ought to be ascribed to the master, and confidently predicted that the ascription "will not be seriously questioned." He was joined in his attribution by a young Japanese professor of art, Yuki Yashiro, who was just completing a book on Botticelli for the Medici Society. Berenson had given Yashiro help during his visit to Florence, and the two began a lively correspondence that flourished for the next quarter century. In a footnote to his article Berenson praised him as "one of the most competent and earnest students of Botticelli." As for the bold prediction of the article, the attribution has been accepted by no fewer than nine authorities, beginning with Yashiro and Raimond Van Marie and including Ronald Lightbown, whose magisterial two-volume study and catalogue of the works of Botticelli was published in 1978. Berenson regularly stole time from his writing to pore over book catalogues. His appetite for books in the most varied fields was insatiable and the flow of volumes for his library continued to grow, whether costly folios on art, learned treatises in French, German, and Italian, or notable works of fiction. Periodicals arrived by the score from all over Europe and America. Mary complained to Senda that he was spending

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" o c e a n s " on the library and " w o n ' t have e n o u g h to e n d o w the p l a c e . " H e w a s h i m s e l f s o m e w h a t daunted and asked Belle Greene f o r advice, f o r he and M a r y w e r e at the time discussing the revision o f their wills. Belle cautioned that I Tatti w o u l d have either to be united to " s o m e larger institution" or to h a v e a sufficient e n d o w m e n t and a w i s e board o f trustees, or it w o u l d " d e g e n e r a t e into a w a y s i d e inn f o r loafing schola r s . " T h e disposition o f his collection, she said, w a s m u c h on her m i n d . If no other solution could be f o u n d , the collection o u g h t to be left to the F o g g M u s e u m , and she suggested he w r i t e to Paul Sachs at H a r v a r d . H e r suggestion to enlist Sachs, w i t h w h o m he had long been in c o m m u n i c a tion, c o n f i r m e d his o w n strong leaning t o w a r d H a r v a r d , and the first soundings soon began. T h e dependence o f the B e r e n s o n s on N i c k y ' s e n e r g y , intelligence, and sunny disposition had n o w b e c o m e almost total. A f t e r the insecurity and hardship o f the w a r years in the Baltic provinces N i c k y deeply appreciated the r e f u g e that she and her f a m i l y had f o u n d at I Tatti. H e r i m p o v e r i s h e d sister, the B a r o n e s s a A l d a v o n A n r e p ; A l d a ' s husband, E g b e r t ; and their son, C e c i l , continued to o c c u p y the villino, and E g b e r t had b e g u n to help in the running o f the estate. N o w N i c k y endeared herself even further to M a r y b y confessing that she enjoyed the " f o o d p a r t " o f housekeeping. T o M a r y that w a s the " b e s t n e w s I h a v e had f o r an age. . . . A n d if y o u take it o v e r I should bless y o u f o r e v e r . " T h e calm o f the s u m m e r o f 1 9 2 4 w a s disturbed f o r a time b y the n e w s that Sir J o s e p h had e m p l o y e d Wilhelm Valentiner to prepare an illustrated catalogue o f the D u v e e n exhibition o f Italian Primitives w h i c h had been held in N e w Y o r k that spring. B e r e n s o n w a s indignant. H a v i n g frequently discussed plans f o r the catalogue w i t h D u v e e n , he thought it had been decided that he w a s to do it. H e w o r r i e d that this w a s a sign that he had lost credit w i t h Sir J o s e p h , and w h e n J o e cabled that the exhibit " i s m a r v e l l o u s . . . causing e n o r m o u s sensation here . . . such a w o n d e r f u l achievement is due largely to y o u r rare j u d g m e n t and k n o w l e d g e to which it is a magnificent tribute," he thought the praise disingenuous and g l o o m i l y predicted that all w a s o v e r w i t h his connection w i t h the D u veens. Valentiner, as a d v i s o r y editor of Art in America, w a s in fact a s h r e w d e r choice, since, unlike B e r e n s o n , he w a s not k n o w n as being previously employed by Duveen. D u v e e n returned to E n g l a n d after the exhibition and conferred w i t h M a r y during her visit to E n g l a n d late in J u n e 1924. G l o r y i n g in his n e w conquests, he w a s especially vain o f having " r o p e d i n " the taciturn A n d r e w M e l l o n . A n d quite unconscious o f h a v i n g o f f e n d e d B e r e n s o n , he p r o p o s e d that the B e r e n s o n s j o i n h i m as his guests at St. M o r i t z . B e r e n son s a w to it that M a r y should decline the invitation. If D u v e e n w i s h e d [325]

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to see him he must come to I Tatti. After their meeting Mary reported that she also had conferred with Joe's lawyer, Louis Levy, who agreed that the Berensons should have freer access to other dealers in need of encouragement, for "the big fish live on little fish," and again she urged the need for full and regular accounts from the firm. "We never see the accounts," she declared to Joe. "We are in a sense partners in your great Italian adventure. . . . B . B . ' s advice would be more valuable to you i f h e knew what you sold and how much you got for each picture." She also reminded him that half-yearly remittances needed to be paid on time, for " y o u swim in ever widening and deepening floods and have endless credit for times of drought. We sail our little bark on a shallow stream," and "many people who are dependent on us . . . sail lighter barks in still shallower streams." Though Joe was all sympathy and understanding, her eloquent appeal had no effect. The remittance due July ι arrived October 15. In spite of Joe's dilatoriness and the equivocal arrangement for the catalogue, Mary was convinced that they ought to agree to his request to see him in Florence in the fall. "With all his faults and wickednesses, if you like, he is useful to u s , " she confided to Nicky. "It is clear that my skin is made of rhinoceros hide, and . . . I think of nothing but money. The truth is I have the paying out of it to do and I know how each comfort and luxury and refinement that B . B . insists upon mounts up." After Mary's return she and Bernard escaped in August to Poggio alio Spino, a square block of a house near the Consuma pass which commanded a view of the high valley of the Mugello and the mountains beyond. Though inelegantly furnished and with few of the facilities of I Tatti, it had become their favorite refuge. They "donkeyed" along the mountain trails, visiting the churches tucked away among the slopes, though Mary, whose rheumatic knees "hurt like f u r y , " wished there were someone else to go with Bernard. T o Bernard the region was pure delight. He rhapsodized to Nicky over "the freshness of the air and the jewel-like sparkle of the foliage, the rank and slightly alcoholic smells." He heard "the babbling of brooks, the rustle and swish of the wind in the trees and then for a moment fifty-five years fall away and I am an exquisite instrument in the hands of that mighty musician Nature that I was in early boyhood." Nothing so empurpled his prose as a vista that composed itself against the horizon. Once, at the austerely beautiful site of ancient Baalbeck, he wrote that it "confirmed my conviction that all visual art exists only to teach one to appreciate landscape." Carlo Placci was among the friends who, like Judge Learned Hand and his wife, made their way up to Poggio alio Spino. Placci's company was more agreeable now that he had become "very anti-Fascist." He pro[326]

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fessed, however, to being puzzled how Italy had succumbed, failing, Berenson observed, "to connect causes and consequences as the patriodiots in all countries d o . " Like many other conservative and nationalistic Italians, Placci had doubtless been shocked by the brutal assassination on June n , 1924, of Giacomo Matteoti, a right-wing Socialist deputy who had opposed Mussolini's move to destroy the independence of Parliament. When Matteoti's naked body was found, it had been decapitated. For a few weeks a wave of revulsion against the Fascisti swept the nation. Count Sforza publicly denounced Mussolini, but Benedetto Croce, fearing political chaos, addressed the Senate with the plea that fascism be allowed time "to complete its process of change," a plea that he was afterward to regret. Mary, who hated the cold and discomfort on the windswept mountains, insisted that they return to I Tatti on September first, scarcely a day too soon to welcome Sir Joseph, Lady Duveen, their maid, their valet, their daughter, and a friend of their daughter. The six-day visit went off "beautifully" and the euphoric Mary told the absent Nicky that " w e all became real friends." Joe bubbled with spirits and energy until midnight and it was very hard to make him go to bed. Mary, however, had a hard j o b ahead of her "to screw money out of him" and persuade him to keep them "au courant in accounts," from all of which arrangements, she said, B . B . "wants to be kept like a god on an altar free from human wrangling." Bernard, for his part, counted the hours until Nicky's return. He admitted that "Duveen turns out ever so much more interesting and agreeable than I expected." On his return to Paris Joe wrote that he had bought from F. Kleinberger a Botticellian tondo depicting a Virgin and Child which they had discussed during his visit. Mary had previously seen the painting and Bernard had at the time confirmed her opinion that it was indeed a Botticelli autograph. At that time Kleinbcrger had expected to sell it to Colonel Michael Friedsam, and since the attribution greatly enhanced the value of the painting, he offered Berenson an honorarium of 100,000 francs. Friedsam, who disliked round pictures, decided not to take the tondo. Duveen thought it a "veritable masterpiece," and wrote Mary with regard to Bernard, " I am increasingly conscious of his great genius." The grateful Kleinberger now sent the honorarium. Berenson, embarrassed, informed Duveen of the circumstances and indicated he was willing to have the 100,000 francs deducted from his account with the firm rather than give "the slightest suspicion" that he was taking an unfair advantage. Unfortunately Joe's reply was not preserved. In spite of Joe's enthusiasm, the tondo, though frequently exhibited, remained unsold until 1940 when it was acquired by the Samuel Kress [327]

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Collection. Since 1961 it has hung in the Kress regional collection at the El Paso Museum of Art. Though late in life Berenson questioned his attribution, the painting is listed as a Botticelli in the posthumous List. The Kress catalogue gives it to a " f o l l o w e r . " The fate of this painting became linked, after a fashion, with a painting from the Thaw Collection, Young Man with a Red Hat, which Berenson had once believed to be by Fiorenzo but now assigned to Botticelli. Sir Joseph believed it could be sold for a "Botticelli price" if Berenson would publish an article about it and the tondo. Once again Berenson refused the request. He would not write to order, for he wished to preserve his "rank not merely as a connoisseur but as a scholar and a humanist." Fowles, protesting that he was making it very difficult to sell the two pictures, pleaded that there was "no question of boosting the Firm." Berenson need not even mention "our name. . . . We are not running after cheap publicity, but to sell these pictures at a big price" they needed his backing. Berenson remained adamant. Only a month earlier the firm had asked Berenson to publish an article in Art in America on the Entombment of Christ, which Henry Goldman had purchased from Duveen as a Fra Angelico. Fowles thought it important for the article to appear at the beginning of the season to inspire collectors. Berenson flatly refused: it could not help looking "as if his pen was in the service of his interests." If Goldman doubted "this noble picture," he suggested, "Sir Joseph had better take it back" and teach him a lesson. The chastened collector kept the painting, and after his death in 1937 it was reacquired by Duveen Brothers. Recradled and restored at considerable expense, it went into the Kress Collection as "attributed to Fra Angelico." The National Gallery of Art subsequently assigned it to Jacopo del Sellaio. B y this time Edward Fowles had come to look upon himself as something of a connoisseur, and on one occasion that autumn he ventured to argue with Berenson when Berenson refused to confirm the attribution to Raphael of a Madonna and Child Holding a Lily which was being offered to the firm. Berenson said that it was not a Raphael but possibly a Lo Spagna. Fowles could hardly contain his indignation. He conceded that there were weaknesses in the drawing but insisted that drawing was not Raphael's forte and that Berenson had "taught the world to look upon Raphael as the great Master of Space-Composition and a loveable illustrator." He went on at length to compare the painting with the Cowper and Granduca Madonnas and contrast it with Lo Spagna's work. This challenge to his authority was too much for Berenson, and he deputed Mary to set Fowles in his place. "We read your letter with admiration and yet with a little dismay," she wrote. " B . B . says you have [328]

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just reached—if you will allow him to say so—l'äge dangereux in connoisseurship. . . . B . B . has a feeling that you are among the few who are capable of going on and ultimately distinguishing between a master and a follower." Even putting aside the Lo Spagna hypothesis, the painting was clearly not a Raphael. Fowles accepted the reproof without visible demur and resumed the usual budget of queries and reports of progress in negotiations. Whatever resentment he may have borne he saved for his posthumously published memoirs. Soon after the Duveens' visit in early September 1924, the Berensons and Nicky went south for a three-month working holiday in Rome, the holiday Bernard had contemplated before his trip to Egypt. One excursion followed another to museums, churches, and archaeological digs. In a transport of appreciation Bernard would seize Mary's arm and cry out, " O h Mary, isn't this wonderful. H o w happy I a m . " At the Vatican he examined illuminated manuscripts with Adolfo Venturi, the eminent art historian with w h o m he had long since ceased to quarrel. Eugenie Strong, now much mellowed in years, graciously showed them the underground basilica at the Porta Maggiore, and other scholar-specialists took them in hand. It was while they were in Rome that Mary conceived the idea for several "surprises" with which she expected to astonish Bernard, and she ran up to Florence for a few days to see about them. There would be an open fireplace in his bedroom, for he liked to spend a few hours there each morning reading. The wine cellar and the servants' hall were being relocated, and other improvements were under way. She was doing all this because Bernard "will not take any practical interest in anything except his own profession." A young woman from Chicago, a Miss Richert, was engaged to work on the Lists, the large-scale revision of which Bernard now projected, and all his materials had been "roughly arranged" for him to begin work on as soon as he got back. The most striking of the surprises was to have been a clock tower which Mary had ordered to be built on the roof. Designed by Cecil Pinsent, it was to be carried out by a Florentine architect. That surprise, however, had to be deferred for lack of time. "We are as different as can be," she admitted to Bernard's mother. " I am all for experiments and he gets exasperated at the very notion." Her realization of that fact did not stay her impulses. As usual there was no escaping special chores for Sir Joseph. A wealthy new collector had appeared on the scene that autumn, the American newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and Mrs. Hearst and Mrs. Helen Young were dispatched to call on the Berensons in Rome. " I shall be so glad if you will make a fuss over them," Sir Joseph wrote, "as Hearst is a big buyer of [Italian] primitives." The Berensons made a

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suitable fuss, but the optimistic expectations were to go unrealized. With Christmas approaching, Sir Joseph sent a mark of his esteem—and gratitude—to Berenson, delivered personally by Fowles, a gorgeously regal dressing gown that "positively took our breath a w a y . " With Rome now in full control of the Fascists, Berenson's circle of acquaintances was reduced, for he found it hard to repress his acid disapproval. Even Lady Sybil, Geoffrey Scott's estranged wife, had "gone native"; she spoke with "the deepest sympathy of Fascisimo," he told Mary. " I was aghast." The menacing political climate did not disturb his friend George Santayana, who had settled in Rome. When asked, "Didn't the war sadden you?" he answered, " N o t particularly." He lived so alone, he said, that he felt sometimes as if he had forgotten how to talk. "This is not the case with Bernard," Mary reflected. Nicky went to gaze on the bellicose posturing of Mussolini in the company of Mary's friend Lina Waterfield, now a reporter for the Observer. Neither Bernard nor Mary risked that depressing sight. Instead they conferred with antiFascists like deputy Giovanni Amendola, the courageous publisher of II Mondo and leader of the Aventine opposition in Parliament against Premier Mussolini. Only a short time before, Amendola had presented to the king a memorandum of the serious charges against Mussolini. Fearful of losing the throne, the king had pleaded, "Don't make me read it; take it back." In early December 1924 the Berensons left Rome, Bernard's cynicism about Italian political life deepened by what he had learned about the progress of fascism from his conversations there. A few weeks later Amendola published his charges against Mussolini, hoping to force his dismissal. The tactic had no effect. On the last day of the year the minister of the interior ordered raids upon the homes of the anti-Fascist leaders and the seizure of all opposition newspapers. Within three days Mussolini boldly provoked the call for total power. In Florence the Fascist militiamen swarmed through the streets, machine guns and rifles in hand, shouting, "Mussolini the Dictator. . . . Let's finish off the enemy." The following May Amendola persuaded Croce to draw up a countermanifesto against the Fascists, but the battle was already lost. Ordered to leave the health spa of Montecatini, Amendola was ambushed on the road and so severely beaten that he died a few months afterward. For a foreign resident like Berenson, made hostage by his "estate," his great library, and his collection of art, there was nothing to do but swallow his indignation and pay tribute money to the local Fascists, who hated him but still feared the power of his American passport.

[330]

i8. Domenico

Veneziano,

Saint John in the Desert, gift to Carl

Hamilton

ig. Giovanni Bellini, The Feast of the Gods

20. Kenneth Clark,

ig20

Rachel Berenson (Mrs. Ralph Barton Perry)

24. Abraham Berenson, Bernard's brother

26. Elizabeth ("Bessie")

Berenson

27· Isabella Stewart Gardner, portrait by John Singer Sargent, IQ22-1923

XXXIII

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F

O R E I G N visitors continued to come and go in Italy with customary freedom, enjoying the tourists' rounds safely insulated from the terror that stalked the streets by night. A visit by William Rothenstein had to be put off because the Berensons' "limited accommodations" would be filled until summer. Early in 1925 Mary's brother was already there, T r e v y was due to arrive, grandchildren were on hand. Bernard's sister Bessie came for a long stay. Princess Mary of T h u m and Taxis would soon be due; Philomene de Levis-Mirepoix was arriving, as was Louis Gillet, who was finally finishing his translations of Bernard's "Four Gospels," his four small books on the Italian Renaissance painters. There were, besides, the usual business callers. Rene Gimpel brought a painting for inspection, hoping to have it passed as a Bellini despite the fact that Berenson had attributed it first to Vivarini and then to Lotto. When Berenson held to Lotto, Gimpel, suspicious and disappointed, conjectured that he did so only to spite Nathan Wildenstein, who had a stake in the picture. Among the "tourists of the season" was William M . Ivins, Jr., the curator of prints at the Metropolitan and a fellow admirer of Belle Greene. A Harvard graduate, he had studied for a year in Munich and caught the virus of art appreciation. He took a law degree at Columbia, but his heart was in print collecting and in 1916 he founded the print department at the Metropolitan. In the forty-three-year-old Ivins Berenson immediately recognized a kindred spirit. " I wish I could see you very often," he wrote to him after their first meeting. " H o w sad that the handful of people who really life enhance are apt to be centrifugally located or disposed. Edith Wharton is at Hyeres. I have a few playfellows in Paris, as many in London, as many again in N e w York. Here none, alas! except such as are brought like Elijah's food by the ravens." On [331]

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Ivins' return to N e w Y o r k B e l l e Greene w r o t e that he w a s " a w f u l l y keen about y o u . " Since the death o f c o n v i v i a l and w i t t y Ralph C u r t i s in 1922 B e r e n s o n had had n o correspondent w i t h w h o m he could so freely unbend. T h e hundreds o f letters e x c h a n g i n g intimacies and ribald jests and g o s s i p y n e w s o f each other's w o r l d had ended. In Ivins he f o u n d a w a r m l y cherished replacement. In their y e a r s - l o n g interchange n o subject w o u l d be t o o sacred for c o m m e n t and n o feeling t o o intimate to be concealed. W h e n Ivins sent the manuscript o f an article w h i c h disappointed B e r e n son, he e x c l a i m e d , " A r t is an experience, an ecstasy, a m y s t i c u n i o n and w h y in H e l l didn't y o u say s o ? " It w a s t o Ivins that he could w r i t e in his mid-sixties, " I a m old, Billie, I feel m o r e and m o r e disinclined to m a k e an effort. . . . S o I h a v e m o r e time for d a w d l i n g and d a y - d r e a m i n g than I used to. A n d the d e m o n o f sex gets m o r e chances than w h e n I w a s t o o b u s y for h i m . I d a r . s a y he w i l l be e x o r c i z e d b y m o n e y w o r r i e s w h i c h g r o w m o r e and m o r e p r e o c c u p y i n g all the t i m e . " In his hundreds o f letters B e r e n s o n recreated for Ivins the life he had m a d e at I T a t t i and peopled it, s o m e t i m e s u n s p a r i n g l y , w i t h all w h o i m p i n g e d u p o n it. Financially the n e w year o f 1925 b e g a n o n a c o m f o r t i n g note. H a n g i n g o v e r B e r e n s o n had been a debit o f £10,200 interest o n fees w h i c h had been credited to h i m o n sales to W i l l i a m S a l o m o n and then canceled, in accord w i t h the 1912 a g r e e m e n t , w h e n the pictures w e r e taken back after S a l o m o n ' s death. E d w a r d F o w l e s n o w w r o t e that Joe had ordered the interest w a i v e d . " T h i s act o f h i s , " B e r e n s o n responded, " g i v e s m e a h u m a n and recherche pleasure o u t o f all relation to the m o n e y i n v o l v e d . " T h e n , reverting to a discussion o f theirs concerning the reliability o f attributions, he r e m i n d e d F o w l e s that changes w e r e inevitable. W h e n , for e x a m p l e , he had prepared the J o h n s o n catalogue, he had ascribed a M a d o n n a to E u s e b i o da San G i o r g i o . " I should hesitate to d o so n o w [that I am] m o r e a w a r e o f the great c o m p l e x i t i e s o f the s u b j e c t . " B u t he g o t " a certain peace o f m i n d , " he said, f r o m k n o w i n g that "I a m b r i n g ing to bear o n the p r o b l e m all that I k n o w and all that I feel. . . . If I fail I remain unashamed. I h a v e done all I can d o . " H e explained that in his articles o f the past several years he had b e g u n to l o o k m o r e analytically at the process o f attribution. It had, he believed, t w o distinct aspects: the critic m u s t k n o w first " w h e n a thing w a s painted and then b y w h o m . " U n t i l that first i n q u i r y w a s made, the search for the identity o f the artist could n o t begin. It w a s this principle that B e r e n s o n w a s n o w a p p l y i n g to a l o n g and recondite essay o n three m e d i e v a l manuscript series o f illuminated miniatures illustrating the Speculum

Humanae

Salvationis

(Mirror o f H u m a n

Salvation), a D o m i n i c a n Latin manual o f d e v o t i o n w h i c h first appeared [332]

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about 1324. It took two solid months of research and continued the kind of ingenious and learned detection he had devoted to Walter Berry's antiphonary. Medieval art had become a passion; he valued the escape it provided from an increasingly intractable world. Here, in his study, in cerebral pursuit of more and more esoteric lore he could in some measure cut himself off from the sordid concerns of the art-dealing world. Montague Rhodes James, the noted medievalist, had invited Berenson to write " A Discussion of the School and Date" for his edition of a manuscript of the manual owned by T. R. Riches. Shortly after finishing the "Discussion," which dealt with the Riches manuscript and those possessed by the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Paris Arsenal, Berenson adapted it to a two-part article in the Bolletino d'Arte. The English version of the article was included in 1930 in his Studies in Medieval Painting, where it was lavishly illustrated with seventy-eight reproductions from the Speculum and with cognate paintings from more than a dozen churches and collections, including the collections of Otto Kahn, Kingsley Porter, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as well as the Morgan manuscripts. The essay confirmed his "first impression" that the sophisticated miniatures in the Riches manuscript and its companion in the Bibliotheque Nationale were done "during the last quarter of the Trecento." Determining the place of origin of the popular illuminations in the Arsenal manuscript obliged him to consider a problem which had interested him, he said, for thirty years, "the problem of provincialism in art and its close relation to . . . most of the phenomena of decline and decay" in art. After ranging over the whole field of early Italian art, he deduced that the artist of the Arsenal Speculum must have come from the region around Foligno, Spoleto, and Chieti and that he must have worked "just after rather than just before 1400." A tour de force of detection, the essay exemplified Berenson's lifelong devotion to minute scholarly research, a devotion which filled the shelves of his library with recondite works and learned periodicals in each of the fields which he successively explored. For his analysis of the Speculum he drew, for example, upon materials as varied as the Ashburton and other Catalan manuscripts, the Chinese Lohans, the Livre des Merveilles, the Queen Mary's Psalter, a Morgan Library manuscript, Von Loga's Malerei in Spanien, Ο. von Falke's Kunstegeschichte der Seidenweberei, Stryzgowski's Lehrkanzel, and Breasted's Oriental Forerunners of Byzantine Painting. While Bernard preoccupied himself and Nicky with work on the Speculum, Mary and her assistant wrestled with the monumental revision of the Lists. Half of the revision was finished and ready for "his seal," but [3 3 3 ]

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he declined to look at a single item until he finished his article. Though the flow of requests from the Duveens was increasing, he usually managed to keep his distance from such concerns by turning them over to Mary with his laconic notations. When, however, the problem of attribution was especially difficult, he requested large photographs or even insisted that he see the painting itself. Mary made her annual escape to England, more than earning that holiday by attending to business in Paris and London. Joe, she reported, had sold the Heseltine Botticelli to John D. Rockefeller and was confident that he had snared Andrew Mellon as a client. Sulley showed her the Bellini Orpheus, which had come out "jewel-like" from its cleaning, but Widener had "beat down the price" so Bernard's fee would be only £1,000. The painting was once one of the prizes of the National Gallery of Art. From Paris, after a gathering at Edith Wharton's Pavilion Colombe, Mary told of having "received a rather ghastly impression" from the "crackling of dry anecdotes and a cackling of laughter at them." The conversation, "worse than mediocre," made her long for his. What was only too evident from the " t w o or three remarks on politics" was that the members of this wealthy and official circle were "all Fascists," like members of similar circles in America. The subject of politics had been "dropped like a snake," but not before Edith had declared that Bernard ought to avoid politics and added "the deadly remark that after all thee was a stranger in Italy." Berenson had had long talks with Gaetano Salvemini after his return from England in 1924. Salvemini's opposition to the Fascists placed him in peril, and Berenson had urged him to find a post out of Italy. But, like Giovanni Amendola, he still thought the Fascist tide might be turned back. A professor of history at the University of Florence with a worldwide reputation, he was especially hated by the Fascists for having opposed Italian expansionism in the Adriatic. On June 2, 1925, after a compositor accused of setting type of a clandestine newspaper Non Mollare (Don't Weaken) told his Fascist interrogators that Salvemini was known to him, Salvemini was arrested in Rome and incarcerated in the Florence prison. T w o thousand Italian scholars and writers published a protest in Turin and letters of protest poured in from abroad. Shortly after the arrest, Salvemini's wife, Fernande, sent a message to Berenson urging him to gather notices of the outrage in the foreign press. The message was brought by young Count Umberto Morra, a student of literature and fluent in English. His family having close ties to the king, he was presumably above suspicion by the Fascists. Part of his mission was to ask Berenson to lend his passport to Salvemini. It had [334]

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been suggested that there was a sort of resemblance between the t w o men: they had similar beards and similarly shaped heads. But the scheme was not feasible. After forty-five days in the Murati prison Salvemini was released provisionally when his lawyer pointed out that his only accuser had been found guilty and therefore could not testify against him. The release angered the Fascist crowd in the Florence courtroom, and in the fracas that ensued seven or eight persons were taken to the hospital while Salvemini and the rest sought safety in shops whose owners quickly pulled d o w n the metal shutters. O n August 5 the king issued a general amnesty which included Salvemini. A f e w months later, deprived of his professorship at the University of Florence for publishing "unpatriotic propaganda" in an English periodical, he fled to England and began lecturing at King's College on the evils of fascism. In England he " f o u n d a h o m e " with M a r y ' s sister, Alys, and her brother, Logan, a fact that became k n o w n to the Fascisti in Italy and increased their animosity toward the Berensons. Berenson and Salvemini did not meet again until after the end of World War II, when Salvemini returned to Florence from his long exile in the United States, where he had held a post at Harvard as lecturer. " A m o n g my friends," Berenson wrote in 1952, "Salvemini is one of the brightest, sunniest, as well as best-intentioned to be fair and j u s t . " Count Morra's mission proved for him, as he later said, of inestimable worth. It introduced him into a lifelong intimacy with the Berenson circle, an intimacy which would bear fruit in his Boswellian volume Conversations with Berenson. For Berenson the chief excitement of the summer of 1925 was the arrival in Italy of Belle Greene with a young woman companion. A c companied by N i c k y , he joined the t w o at Perugia and then drove about the Tuscan hill towns with them and as far south as Orvieto. For the first t w o days he found Belle "rather wild and shrieky," but soon she proved congenial. She did not seem to him a day older " o r better or worselooking than four years ago in N e w Y o r k . " They shared their common enthusiasm for illuminated codices, but he was still unable to persuade her to linger in front of paintings, and she put him in mind of Sir Joseph's peremptory " N e x t ! " She was impervious to any criticism of Italian fascism, having been enormously impressed by her ship's steward's kissing Mussolini's photograph in her presence. Berenson tolerated her heresy, for, as he wrote after her departure on August 1, "she is a very wonderful, exciting, life-enhancing personality and she stirred and whipped me up for m y g o o d . " Another of the summer's guests, Arthur U p h a m Pope, a connoisseur [3 3 5]

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of Persian art, found a fellow enthusiast in Berenson, and he eagerly joined the ever-growing circle of devotees. His response to their first meeting suggests something of Berenson's personal magnetism. " I f the truth be told," he wrote Berenson in the course of a long letter about aesthetics and Persian art, "the sound of your voice and the sight of your library stirred the unsleeping pain of insufficient knowledge to new virulence." The exchange between master and disciple endured to the last years of Berenson's life when Pope, on his seventy-fourth birthday and Berenson's ninetieth, wrote that he was feeling his years and "vividly envying" Berenson's "prodigious vitality." The Berensons retreated to their mountain refuge in August, but there was little interruption in the procession of visitors. Mary, who wore her prejudices on her sleeve, deplored the arrival of Bernard's cousin Arthur and his wife, Jessica. Jessica, however, had changed her hair and looked like a presentable French lady, and the truth was that her talk "was not at all a w f u l . " However, "more awful people" followed, namely, Kleinberger's daughter and son-in-law. The son-in-law brought "a fat check," which "gilded his visit." He also brought a request from Colonel Michael Friedsam to catalogue the Italian pictures in his collection. Friedsam, who had been Benjamin Altman's associate, had become head of the firm after Altman's death in 1913. He too was an important collector and like Altman favored the northern painters. Berenson reluctantly agreed to do the chore for a fee of £2,000. Kleinberger had said Friedsam "wouldn't think anything of it unless he had to pay a big price for it." One day at tea their guests were their Italian landlords and the Cyrus Adlers of Philadelphia. The Adlers had come up presumably at the suggestion of the Abraham Flexners, who had visited I Tatti earlier in the year. Then sixty-two, Adler was president of both the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning and the Jewish Theological Seminary in N e w York. A trained scholar in Semitic languages and Assyriology, he reawakened Berenson's interest in the subjects that had absorbed him at Harvard. Berenson "itched" to ask him questions about Hebrew scholarship and Jewish history, but his aristocratic Italian landlords "could not be swayed toward the subject." An affable and kindly individual, Adler "looked unmistakably J e w i s h . " T o Berenson the contrast with the other guests was instructive: " O u r landlords had every advantage in manners and looks but oh the agony of making talk with them." The holiday in the mountains had to yield to "the ukase from Kaiser J o e Duveen" that he would like to confer with the Berensons in Rome the first week in September. The Berensons took Duveen and his lawyer, Louis Levy, who had accompanied him to Rome, on a giro to Siena, where Berenson, in Mary's opinion, excelled himself in brilliant talk. [336]

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B e r e n s o n f o u n d J o e in " g r e a t f o r m . " " H e is really intelligent," he w r o t e N i c k y , " a n d at last I get in h i m sparks o f real feeling in the presence o f w o r k s o f art and even a desire to linger b e f o r e t h e m . " L e v y w a s so impressed b y B e r e n s o n that he " u t t e r e d the g r a t i f y i n g sentiment that he w a s so precious that the w o r l d m i g h t [well] l o v e to g i v e h i m all possible conveniences and l u x u r i e s . " T h e e x c h a n g e o f c o m pliments ended in an arrangement under w h i c h L e v y took charge o f B e r e n s o n ' s investments. What w a s even m o r e g r a t i f y i n g w a s that M a r y extracted f r o m J o e t w o checks o f £ 5 , 0 0 0 postdated J a n u a r y and J u l y o f 1926. Perhaps reassured b y the congenial atmosphere o f the meeting, Sir J o s e p h s o o n a f t e r w a r d m a d e another attempt, " a s a personal f a v o r , " to get B e r e n s o n to w r i t e an article, this one f o r the Burlington o n the " F r a A n g e l i c o " recently b o u g h t b y H e n r y G o l d m a n . In the m a r g i n o f the letter B e r n a r d curtly w r o t e , " I m p o s s i b l e . " T h e strenuous exertions o f the days w i t h D u v e e n and L e v y depleted B e r e n s o n , and their departure w a s f o l l o w e d b y days o f "suicidally l o w " depression and fatigue. B u t h o w e v e r l o w in spirit he m a y h a v e been, he could respond w i t h alacrity and enthusiasm to a sufficiently interesting interruption. O n e c a m e in the person o f a h a n d s o m e y o u n g O x o n i a n o f t w e n t y - t w o , filled w i t h a passion f o r Italy and, like the y o u n g B e r e n s o n , carrying w i t h h i m B u r c k h a r d t ' s Cicerone and Italian Renaissance. H e came o n a p i l g r i m a g e to Florence w i t h an older c o m p a n i o n , Charles Bell, an E n g l i s h art historian and l o n g t i m e keeper at the A s h m o l e a n . T h e y w e r e put up b y B e l l ' s f o r m i d a b l e friend J a n e t R o s s in her ancient villa on P o g g i o G h e r a r d o within sight o f I Tatti. T h e y o u n g m a n w a s K e n n e t h C l a r k ; his object w a s to meet the great authority on Renaissance art. In the l o n g retrospect o f Another Part of the Wood the visit w a s s o m e w h a t d a m p e n e d b y the c l a m m y bed sheets at J a n e t R o s s ' s castellated villa and b y the ordeal o f dining alone w i t h M r s . R o s s . O n the evening o f S e p t e m b e r 1 2 M r s . R o s s t o o k C l a r k d o w n to I Tatti f o r dinner. " T h e b o y turned out a perfect d e a r , " M a r y w r o t e N i c k y . " B . B . w a s enraptured w i t h his intelligence and c u l t u r e . " T h e next day he c a m e to a luncheon w h o s e ritual o f courtly deference to B e r e n s o n rather o f f e n d e d the w e a l t h y y o u n g aristocrat, at least in the w i n t r y recollection o f his a u t o b i o g r a p h y . T h e impressionable M a r y assured N i c k y , " Y o u are sure to like h i m and he is as keen as s n u f f on m o s t o f the things w e are for. . . . A f t e r m o r e talk w i t h h i m B . B . invited h i m to c o m e and w o r k under himself f o r t w o or three years and the y o u n g m a n w a s enrapt u r e d . " T h e o f f e r in an uncanny w a y fulfilled C l a r k ' s s c h o o l b o y a m b i tion. H e did tell B e r e n s o n that there w a s an obstacle: his father w a n t e d h i m to be a l a w y e r . A f e w days after the meeting w i t h C l a r k , the Berensons took to the [3 3 7]

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road again to join Nicky in Munich, traveling by easy stages northward, stopping with hospitable friends and refreshing their memories of paintings in places along the way. H o w much Berenson looked forward to seeing Nicky again may be gathered from his letter to her urging her to get a room near theirs at the fashionable Continental: " I could not bear being in Munich without having you with us all the time." He enclosed a check for £100 so that she might have sufficient spending money. " I have looked forward so much to tasting you again and beginning to live my normal life again. For you are the real center ofthat life, and without you I no longer feel at home with myself." Mary was equally ardent. " N i c k y , w e long to see you. Y o u are the sunshine of our lives." The Germany they visited was on the road to economic if not political recovery, and the prospects for stability were much in evidence after the frightful inflation of two years earlier. The new mark introduced in the autumn of 1924 by Finance Minister Hjalmar Schacht replaced a trillion inflated marks. In effect a capital levy, it reduced the national debt to less than $250. Under the Dawes Plan the burden of reparations was eased with an enormous loan, and foreign private investment poured in to finance the rehabilitation of industry. The Pact of Locarno in October 1925 promised further stabilization with the imminent withdrawal of Allied troops from the Rhineland and the guaranteeing of borders. Thus the Berensons spent several weeks in Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, and Budapest agreeably enough attending the opera and theaters and visiting the country houses of old friends. Berenson was almost as much at ease in the German language as Nicky, and her partiality for the people who in a sense had been her compatriots could not help strengthening his sympathy for the defeated Germans. They all returned late in November 1925 from the diversions of ten weeks of travel, music, and sightseeing to an accumulation of chores. Overshadowing all was the task that was to become a lifetime obsession, the revision of the master List. " I am proceeding apace with the Lists," he reported to Paul Sachs at the Fogg Museum a few months later. " I do not flatter myself that my attributions are final, but I dare hope that, at the worst, they are on the way to truth and not to error."

[338]

XXXIV

ine lwo bposini

Ι—Γ-1

" τ '

C

I

'"

N December of 1925 while Berenson was himself recuperating from his travels in Germany, Israel Zangwill came by on a whirlwind journey for a much-appreciated few "hours of rest," as he put it, "in a house reminding him of Henry James's story of 'The Great Good Place.' " On his return to London he wrote of stopping off in Milan, where he witnessed a violent affray outside his hotel between Fascists and their opponents. With a foreigner's detachment, he had been able also to appreciate one of the bizarre aspects of the Italian regime. He took tea with Mussolini's "sub-editress," " o f course a Jewess." In Paris he had a heated argument with Salomon Reinach over the German reparations issue. Reinach, very much the French patriot, bristled at word of Berenson's charitable views: " S o he has returned to his pro-German vomit." The political climate in Italy continued to deteriorate. In January 1926 Dino Grandi, a former Blackshirt leader, took the headship of the Foreign Ministry and proclaimed the "century of Italian power." The Berenson circle grew more constricted as the opposition was driven underground or went into exile. The Berensons had to advise Walter Lippmann not to visit them after Henry Coster, the American vice-consul in Florence, conveyed warnings to them said to have come from "Mussolini's headquarters." T o frustrate possible spies among their visitors, the Berensons used the code name " T e d d y " when expressing their contempt for Mussolini. "It made things safer and also a bit ridiculous." While Mary, Nicky, and their assistants busied themselves with the endless tasks of checking entries, reading proof, and verifying materials for the projected edition of the Lists under Bernard's often impatient and irascible supervision, he devoted himself to the more interesting enterprise of deducing the correct or probable attribution of two paintings that had recently come to his attention. One, in the Palffy Collection at [339]

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Budapest, which the curator had graciously taken down from the wall for his closer study when he was there the preceding November, was a Michelangelesque Portrait of a Woman ascribed to Titian and so signed. The signature of Titian, he argued, was not controlling: the true test was in the painting itself through comparison with known parallels. The Titian stood up under the "true test," and Berenson went on to conjecture that the lady was a member of the Farnese circle. The article, translated by Seymour de Ricci, appeared in the March 1926 Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The other painting, Madonna and Angel, had recently been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston as a Piero della Francesca. In an article in Art in America Berenson challenged the ascription, analyzing the various elements of the painting—for example, the "V-shaped opening of the Virgin's tunic"—that convinced him the painting could not be by Piero. B y w h o m then? The painting brought to mind two others that seemed by the same hand which he had attributed to Bartolomeo della Gatta, Piero's follower. In the thirty years that had since elapsed he had become dissatisfied with the attribution, which, he explained, "like many another," had come "near enough for a provisional hypothesis." N o w a chance clue in a faded fresco on a bell tower at Cittä di Castello had provided the revealing link among the paintings: " T h e best working hypothesis I can now frame—all [were] painted by Luca Signorelli." And so attributed, the paintings took their places in the Lists, and the Madonna and Angel took on the new identity at the Boston museum. Young Kenneth Clark returned early in the new year to a warm welcome at I Tatti. T w o months of awe-struck pilgrimage to the art cities of Italy convinced him he had found his true metier, the study of Renaissance art, whether his parents approved or not, and he talked enthusiastically of "devoting his life to working with B . B . and carrying on his w o r k . " The Berensons saw him as "another very congenial and reliable and satisfactory prop for our declining years." Clark's conquest of the Berensons discomfited Alpheus Hyatt Mayor, a young art historian then working at I Tatti, for there had been talk of his staying on at I Tatti. Logan amusedly observed to his sister Alys, "It is just like a little court here with favorites and changes of favor and jealousies." He thought Clark's "knowledge and reading and his power of expressing himself are certainly prodigious for his age. He likes it here immensely, loves the good talk and . . . [being] rich, popular and independent, he is not much concerned as to what happens." His task would be to assist Berenson with the revision of t-he Drawings of the Florentine Painters. The month he spent at I Tatti that spring was to serve as a sort of trial run, and he left again for England determined to return.

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T o help with the long-range project on the Lists, Mary had recently engaged as an additional secretary Pellegrina Del Turco, a young Florentine woman, "graceful, gay, quick-witted with a natural gift for appreciating art and p o e t r y . " It was not long before Mary observed that " p o o r old N i c k y is in real trouble over B . B . ' s having taken a slightly amorous fancy to Pellegrina. She suffers but quite needlessly." It was only the first o f such emotional trials that Nicky was to endure during her forty years with the incurably romantic Berenson. Her own rise in favor had outraged the redoubtable Naima Löfroth, Berenson's Swedish masseuse who regularly came up for weekends. A woman with a "fierce Nordic t e m p e r , " she was not easily placated, according to Nicky, but there finally arose between them a sort o f "armed truce." N o favorite, however, was immune from Berenson's Jovian rages. His inherited touchiness seemed to grow more sensitive with age, and his bouts o f gastrointestinal illness aggravated his outbursts. Mary was always the main target, nor was she behindhand in her own exasperating counterattacks. Better able to contain her anger, she raised his to a higher pitch b y her cool and biting satire, so that in impotent frustration he lashed out at all around him as i f berserk. After one deplorable exchange Mary confessed to her diary, " N o doubt I am more provoking than I realize. This is m y blind s p o t . " Unfortunately she continued to thrust her children and grandchildren at him as the true center o f her life. Her idea o f happiness, she admitted to her sister, was to spend ten days at Big Chilling " w i t h the people I l o v e . " Bernard was conscious o f his own blind spot, for in his remorseful birthday greetings to Mary he wrote, " I wish you well, dear companion o f m y life. I ask only that we may never be parted. With all m y rages so furious and denunciations so eloquent, I love you as I love the human not-me, and m y denunciations and rages are through you directed at that; but I would not and could not be without y o u . " It may well have been that what made life tolerable for the two was that they so thoroughly vented their hostilities that each outburst was succeeded by a remorseful and even affectionate calm. After one o f his rages, Mary recorded in her diary, Bernard looked " s o ill and tired and old and miserable [that] I opened m y arms and he came trembling and laid his silly furious unkind, ungovemed throbbing head on my shoulder." Mary's decision to lend some money to an old friend that spring festered into raging argument that ended with his shaking his fists hysterically at her, his face distorted with passion, shouting curses, damning Nicky for seeking to mollify him, raging against Mary's children and grandchildren, and in hopeless despair beating his head against the wall, crying out that Mary had ruined his life. There was nothing left for him [341]

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but to run away. A species of calm arrived when Mary rang for their maid to pack his things. At such despairing moments all the contradictions that lurked beneath the surface of his life arose to torment him. What had become of the aesthete's dream of savoring intensely the beauty of the world around him, of living life, as he once hoped, as a sacrament? For a moment he saw himself, like the farmer in Thoreau's vision, condemned to push his burdensome house and possessions single-handed down the road of existence, and athwart his dream of fair women stood Mary's monumental presence like a satire on sexuality. What must have deepened his selfdisgust at such times was the knowledge that he had willingly and even gratefully surrendered to her the management of so much of their worldly affairs and daily lives. He could hardly help being aware that she often looked down upon him as a rebellious child and proffered her advice with patronizing insistence. Even her daughter Karin resisted her will to dominate, demanding that she "not thrust her advice upon her again." With the tightening of Fascist control in Italy, uncertainties about the Berensons' status increased. The American banker Thomas Lamont learned from Walter Lippmann that the Berensons, who were contemplating two months' travel in Sicily in the spring, feared that they might be denied reentry to Italy if they traveled abroad as it was known that they were friendly with Salvemini and that he was entertained by Mary's brother in England. Lamont therefore sent Berenson a copy of a letter of protest he planned to write to the American ambassador in Rome. "It would be a shocking revelation to citizens of America if they found it true that the present government of Italy were disposed to take discriminatory action against American citizens of such high standing and character." Berenson suggested to Lamont that he might also drop a hint that "while I am the most utterly private and unpolitical of persons, I am not without friends in America who appreciate what I have done in the course of forty years to make Italy known, understood, and loved and who would take it ill i f . . . I should in any way be molested or hindered in my w o r k . " The threat did not materialize, and Henry Coster, the American vice-consul, agreed to stay in the villa to protect it during the Berensons' absence. Shortly before their departure for Sicily, Paul Sachs of the Fogg Museum came for a "heart-to-heart" talk about the ultimate disposition of I Tatti. They reached a "working understanding" that the Institute of which Berenson dreamed would become part of Harvard University. O n his return to America Sachs had a "long pow w o w " with Belle Greene at which he told her "the glorious news." "I am so thrilled and [342]

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pleased and happy for and about y o u , " she wrote " B . B . , " "that y o u should have done it so handsomely, so really scientifically. . . . In m y deeply-considered opinion your name must be connected with it. It simply must always be k n o w n as your foundation." T h e Sicilian adventure took them at a leisurely pace all around the island. T h e y dreamed away hours at Taormina, where on the heights amid the remains o f the ancient Greek theater the eye swept the rugged coastline and came to rest on distant M o u n t Etna. Everywhere, from Messina to Agrigento, the dim past came alive for them in the monumental ruins. O u t w o u l d come the "invaluable tea basket" as they lingered in the lengthening shadows o f an afternoon. Mary and N i c k y gloried in Berenson's inspired commentary. "His understanding o f beauty, o f art, o f Italy, o f history" freed them, they felt, from the taint o f being "mere idle or self-indulgent tourists." A t Palermo they encountered Edith Wharton and her party, guests on a steam yacht which she had chartered for an Aegean cruise. Mary's brother was among the group, as was Margaret Chanler, the learned musician w h o m Berenson had met in the prewar circle o f Henry Adams and Edith Wharton. T h e Berensons and "their charming familiar spirit," N i c k y Mariano, took Edith and her friends to the recently opened cloister o f Santa Chiara, a seventeenth-century structure o f such loveliness that Mrs. Chanler thought it w o u l d cure the "aesthetic dyspepsia" o f the classical traveler. O n their return C o u n t Morra joined them in Naples, where Berenson met Benedetto C r o c e for the first time. Croce was n o w thoroughly disillusioned with Mussolini, and the t w o men would henceforth share their distaste for fascism. T h o u g h ill at the time, Croce received Berenson with cordiality. But to the unmetaphysical Berenson the "philosophy o f spirit" had little attraction, and he reported to Thomas Perry that "like most philosophers that I have k n o w n , he is very stupid or at least one-tracked in Wilsonian fashion. . . . But he is patently the most candid, innocent and goodest o f Italians." Berenson thought Croce's approach to aesthetics too exclusively literary, and their correspondence across the years showed a certain reserve. In their occasional meetings, to Berenson's dismay, Croce never asked him what he "felt and t h o u g h t . " But in spite o f their differences Berenson professed to retain " a deep affection" for him. O n his death in 1952 he characterized him as a "narrow conceptualist and anti-psychologist and anti-empiricist" w h o was nevertheless "the great influence on intellectual life in Italy." It was at this time that a remarkable newcomer entered Berenson's gallery o f w o m e n friends. She was a y o u n g Neapolitan writer, Clotilde Marghieri. A close friend o f Pellegrina, Clotilde had married into a [343]

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p r o m i n e n t patriarchal clan after an unusually scholarly education. It w a s not l o n g b e f o r e B e r e n s o n w a s w r i t i n g to her. " I h a v e a sense that w e are destined [to be] great, v e r y great f r i e n d s . " T h a t letter w a s the first o f hundreds that the t w o e x c h a n g e d in a correspondence that continued almost to the end o f B e r e n s o n ' s life. T h e y e n j o y e d verbalizing all the subtle c o m p l e x i t i e s o f platonic l o v e for each other, r u m i n a t i n g o n its w o n d e r s in an ethereal fashion that s o m e t i m e s skirted the edges o f i n tenser passions. H e c o u l d w r i t e , " Y o u are one o f the f e w I s h o u l d like t o form

a

constellation

with

myself

included

floating

through

the

infinitudes o f spaces till the end o f t i m e . " Five years after their first meeting and after rapturous e x c h a n g e s o f endearing fantasies spun out in sentimental v a p o r i n g s , she c h a r m e d h i m w i t h her w i s h to be his "last l o v e . " " Y o u r frail b o d y , y o u r delicate s p i r i t , " she asked, " c a n they undertake such a responsibility?" T h e i r letters g l o w e d w i t h a perpetual adolescence, a sense o f being in l o v e w i t h l o v e , and t h r o u g h the uninhibited analyses o f their feelings they created an A r c a d i a n i d y l l o f E r o s . A f e w years b e f o r e her death in 1981, C l o t i l d e published their correspondence in an Italian version. T h e m o r e prosaic details o f existence, o f travels, o f b o o k s and people c a m e to fill a larger place in their letters, but the o r g a n note o f r o m a n t i c l o v e vibrated far into B e r n a r d ' s sunset years. W h a t B e r e n s o n constantly d e m a n d e d o f C l o t i l d e w a s total possession o f her spirit. H e c r a v e d the details o f her existence as i f to s u b m e r g e h i m s e l f i m a g i n a t i v e l y in her identity. In her Forty

Years with Berenson,

N i c k y calls the m a n y w o m e n to

w h o m B e r e n s o n paid c o u r t " B . B . ' s O r c h e s t r a . " A n d the i m a g e is apt, f o r he d r e w f o r t h f r o m t h e m notes o f the m o s t v a r y i n g pitch and harm o n y across the w h o l e scale o f l o v e , f r o m the m o s t spiritualized to the m o s t passionately

and physically

consuming.

W h i c h notes

actually

b r o u g h t the l o v e r s to b e d seems n o w o f little m o m e n t . For even there, passion tended to be strangely transmuted and idealized b y B e r e n s o n ' s aestheticism. It has been said he m a d e o f it a kind o f mystical experience. C l o t i l d e ' s chastity m a y h a v e remained inviolate, as she insisted, but, in the spirit, l o v e w a s surely c o n s u m m a t e d . T o N i c k y , w h o had succeeded to the virtual role o f w i f e b y the t i m e o f B e r e n s o n ' s m e e t i n g

with

C l o t i l d e , the appearance o f a n e w c o m e r in that " O r c h e s t r a " w a s at first a desolating experience and she " w e n t t h r o u g h agonies o f despair and doubts." O n their return to I T a t t i B e r e n s o n t o o k to his bed w i t h a severe attack o f colitis, l e a v i n g M a r y free to carry out her ambitious plans for i m p r o v i n g the villa. T h e chief one, in her eyes, w o u l d be the i m p o s i n g clock t o w e r o f w h i c h she had d r e a m e d for t w e n t y years. S o m e t h i n g , [344]

she

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thought, was called for " t o lead the eye up and end the line of the garden path." The clock would have a blue face and gilt hands, and the tower, she hoped, would have a glassed sunroom for her sunbathing. In addition, the floor of the entrance hall was to be dignified with mosaic and strips of green marble. She was encouraged to go ahead with the improvements, she declared, because Bernard was " s o keen to leave this place as an Institute for Humanistic Studies." He n o w felt easier about the financing, convinced—apparently f r o m what the enthusiastic Belle Greene had written—that as soon as his scheme was definite it would be "splendidly endowed by sympathizers." Absent, of course, from all calculation was the coming of the Great Depression and the Second World War. With the house cleared for the builders, the Berensons took o f f for their mountain sanctuary at Poggio alio Spino for the month of August. While Bernard nursed his colitis and his recurring grievances against M a r y , she kept busy at her typewriter transcribing the Friedsam catalogue f r o m Bernard's disorderly notes. E v e n on his sick bed Bernard wrote on, and M a r y had to " w o r k like a d e m o n " to keep up. The catalogue, which had been " a great w e i g h t " on their minds, was completed by the middle of August 1926 and w o r k on the Lists resumed. The extensive catalogue remained unpublished, Friedsam having decided to put o f f publication until he stopped buying. O n Friedsam's death in 1 9 3 1 it accompanied his bequest of the great collection of paintings and objects of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Some of Berenson's descriptions were incorporated in an article on the bequest in the museum Bulletin. Once well enough to walk in the woods with Mary, Bernard strolled with his eye heavenward hoping, as he did each month, to catch a glimpse of the new moon, an event which had a strong superstitious attraction for him. "Well, w e managed to see the m o o n , " Mary informed N i c k y , "but only just in time to prevent the disaster of seeing it first on a Friday the thirteenth. . . . Yesterday B . B . was desperate . . . but just as the car drove up to the door at seven the clouds parted and she appeared, whereupon B . B . went through his customary rites and retired to his room full of contentment." What those rites were has gone undescribed. Before the month of August was out M a r y had to go north to Venice to join J o e Duveen's family party. In spite of the luxury which J o e provided, she chafed against her enforced submission and the frantic social pace in which it involved her. From the Lido she informed Bernard that J o e presented her to everybody and even " d r a g g e d " her round to balls, but " n o important talk yet, only boasting." There was much busi[345]

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ness to talk about, not only the state of accounts but also the proposed Institute. Duveen had assured Berenson he would be glad to endow it and serve as one of the trustees. On the Lido Duveen had taken up again with a former mistress, now married, and insisted that his wife receive her. The strain between them led to such heated arguments that Mary commented to Bernard, " O u r quarrels, thine and mine, are love-making by comparison." Belle Greene, who Berenson heard had been "purpling Italy with passion" for the past few weeks, was also in Venice. She regaled Berenson with word of Duveen's business strategy. He was on the trail of Andrew Mellon in Europe, he had told her, and he had a reservation on every train leaving Paris awaiting calls from his spies as to Mellon's whereabouts, saying, " Y o u know what I am when the quarry is in sight." In Paris he did catch up with his " q u a r r y , " and Mary, who had accompanied the Duveens there and was lodged at the Ritz, wrote that he had "had a wonderful afternoon with Mellon." Louis Levy was on hand and urged that Bernard should not commit himself to the "Institute" until the money was definitely promised. He talked so persuasively of the market boom under way in America that Mary gave him permission to "play with the $25,000" they had available at the Duveens to invest at the moment. He thought he could do "something big with it" if they would risk losing the interest for a little while. " I said, go ahead. He wants to make you rich!" Though Mary declared it was "ghastly" to be with the Duveens, her collaboration promised to be highly profitable. Valuing her expertise, J o e took her about to examine his finds in Paris and afterward in London. He triumphantly announced that Mellon was eating out of his hand and promised Mary an extra £5,000 for her services. He said that though "English pictures gave him his money, it is the Italian pictures alone that gave him his prestige." Thanks to the pressure from the Berensons and Levy, the Duveens had sent a recapitulation of transactions in the spring of 1926 which showed that of 242 paintings in the " X " Book, 173 had been sold and only 69 remained in "stock." On second thought J o e gave Mary half of the £5,000 and a large check against accumulated fees. She hurried off both checks to Bernard by registered mail. In Mary's absence Belle Greene arrived at I Tatti for her promised visit, a visit that Mary feared Nicky might resent, particularly since she had been asked to accompany Berenson and Belle on their travels to Ravenna and then to Genoa, the port from which Belle was to sail on the new Roma. If Nicky felt any jealousy, she did not show it; moreover, Berenson's fondness for Belle had lost much of its fervor. Belle, as Nicky recalled, was "full of zest for sightseeing and altogether at her best, bon[346]

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enfant, gay, quick, and responsive, ready to enjoy whatever we were looking at under B.B.'s guidance." She prudently shared a bedroom with Nicky during their travels. When on her return to New York Belle "carefully explained" the location of their bedrooms to Billie Ivins, an ardent suitor of hers, Ivins said that he "would have given a lifetime to change places with Nicky." After Belle's departure Berenson set off for the north, again accompanied by Nicky. They met Mary at Turin, and he seemed not to notice that she had had her hair fashionably bobbed in Paris, a step that he had forbidden her to take. Unreproved, she continued on to I Tatti to see to the renovations and the progress on the clock tower while Bernard and Nicky stayed on at Turin to work on the corrections of the Lists. They proceeded next to the Brera Gallery in Milan, which, in spite of the fact that some of the paintings were now shielded by glass, he still considered "one of the most enjoyable galleries in Europe." In October Kenneth Clark turned up in Milan "full of zest," and Berenson again found him "delightful and most promising." He and Clark studied the drawings at the Ambrosiana together in such a congenial fashion that Nicky felt Clark "would be what B . B . needs" for getting the revisions of the Drawings "into shape." At an evening dinner party for the editor Ugo Ojetti, Clark showed a reassuring grasp of Italian. His accent was "very good," and he also displayed facility in German, having already read Wölfflin's difficult prose. For company, in the absence of Bernard and his co-workers, Mary had Senda and her husband, Herbert, as guests in the villino, the Anreps by this time having moved down to Florence. Senda, she wrote, has "thy trouble, B . B . , in an accentuated form, that is to say sagging of the great intestine," and she included a diagram to illustrate the deformity. The news could not dim the comfort of her earlier report to Bernard, who was anxious about their finances again, that £20,000 had come in, presumably the arrears of fees from the Duveens. His income this year would appear to have been the largest he had ever earned, certainly well over $100,000. The receipts included £3,000 from Sulley and £500 from Wildenstein. Nevertheless, given the haphazard character of his personal bookkeeping, he must have remained rather uncertain what the exact state of his finances was. With Clark, the new protege, Berenson and Nicky set out on a tour of art towns like Treviglio, Bergamo, and Brescia. The tour was marred somewhat by a misadventure at Brescia. Late one night members of the Fascisti militia charged them with having stolen some sacred objects at Treviglio and threatened to take them all off to jail. Nicky dissuaded them by pointing out they could not run away since their car was parked [347]

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in a distant garage. The intruders searched their rooms, and, finding nothing, took their departure. Nicky theorized that the thieves must have bribed the sacristan to "denounce us as culprits to the police." The tour with Clark proceeded thereafter without incident, and whatever tests Clark faced he successfully passed. Berenson found him "thorough and painstaking" in his study of works of art, and in their evenings on the road he thought him "genial and lovable and always consumed with intellectual passion." B y the time they returned to I Tatti, Berenson showed every sign of having become very fond of Clark, and Mary found it "quite moving to see how Kenneth admires B . B . He says he has never before been with a person who, in three weeks, never repeated himself." As for Berenson's bursts of temper, Clark took them in stride. They were much less fearful to him, Mary concluded, "than similar traits" in his own unpredictable father. Warming to his role as schoolmaster, Berenson sallied out again with Clark and Mary to study the artistic masterpieces of Trento and Padua, and it was not until late November 1926 that he put Clark to work in the library. The construction of the clock tower had proceeded with such dispatch that on Bernard's return Mary, who thought it looked "very well," displayed it to him. Obviously displeased, he "only grunted." Even she suspected that it was "too b i g . " When in the following spring he cast his eye upon it and inspected the garden walk which Cecil Pinsent had redesigned, he was overcome with despair and shouted at her, " Y o u simply don't care how I feel. Y o u r one idea is to give that insolent, unbearable Cecil something to d o . " There was no help for it but to have Pinsent reduce the size of the structure, but the improvement, though "somewhat better," pleased no one. The tower would remain and in time become to visitors an admired feature of the fagade, but the massive clock machinery eventually fell into disrepair and the hands remained fixed at 10:07. Again at his desk Berenson tackled the large arrears of work on the everlasting Lists which were the ground scheme of his existence. He told Charles Du Bos he had "all the joys and sorrows of homecoming. A whole world seems to wait to jump at one the moment one gets back. . . . It seems one has become an institution, for some a quarry, for others a raft, for others still, mere carrion." For one amorous visitor he was something more interesting, as he confided to Billie Ivins. She was a Dutch matron separated from her husband and "brainy enough for our kind of good time between f s." Berenson had the satisfaction at the turn of the year of knowing that Louis Gillet's French version of his books on Italian Renaissance painters [348]

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had at last been published. T h e elegant volumes in the "Editions de la Pleiade" were admired by the Revue des Deux Mondes as jewels of t y p o g raphy w h o s e essential idea was that a w o r k of art was sufficient unto itself with a nature and laws independent of other h u m a n activities. E d w a r d Fowles informed Berenson that a Paris bookseller said "they are selling like hotcakes." O n the occasion of the publication Ojetti delighted Gillet by publishing a notice in the Coniere della Sera of his w o r k as a p r o m i n e n t writer. Gillet contributed a laudatory article on Berenson to La Revue de Geneve, which was republished in translation in the N o v e m b e r Boston Living Age under the title "Bernhard Berenson: An American Aesthete A b r o a d . " T h e publication of Gillet's edition had been negotiated by Charles D u Bos, w h o m Berenson had met m a n y years earlier as a m e m b e r of Edith W h a r t o n and Paul Bourget's circle. Grateful for his help, Berenson w r o t e to him, "I must insist on your taking for yourself whatever royalties may accrue f r o m the sales." D u Bos, a prolific contributor to the literary journals, flourished in recurring ill-health somewhat like Berenson h i m self. Berenson counseled him, " Y o u must live, m y dear boy, on what is best in yourself, and that is your purely contemplative, intransitive side." T h e letters of Berenson and D u Bos constituted an ardent dialogue on art and literature. Once, for example, w h e n D u Bos told of his dismay on reading a recent b o o k on Giotto that rejected the Assisi frescoes, he asked Berenson for his opinion. Berenson explained that he too in his y o u t h "had refused to accept the Giottos in the upper church. . . . That was the time w h e n w e were all possessed by the Geist der statts verneint [the spirit of contradiction]. That spirit is very old fashioned n o w . At present I witness a race as to w h o shall attribute the greatest n u m b e r of w o r k s to a great master. . . . All the apocrypha are rapidly becoming canonical." H e urged D u Bos to read the recent book of his learned friend Pietro Toesca, with w h o m he had begun what became his most voluminous correspondence with an Italian art historian. "It is the most remarkable v o l u m e , " he said, " o n the history of Italian art that has ever appeared." A few weeks after Clark began his w o r k with Berenson there was disconcerting news. " T h e y o u t h I have annexed to help me o u t , " Berenson w r o t e Ivins, "announced that he has been annexed and is about to m a r r y . " T h e n e w s of Clark's engagement was far more disturbing to Berenson than his laconic report suggested. T h e self-absorbed y o u n g man, thirty years younger than his host, seemed for his part quite unaware that he had been less than frank with the Berensons, w h o had counted on an unattached apprentice. When shortly after Christmas, while Berenson was at his m o r n i n g toilet, brushing his teeth, M a r y [349]

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brought C l a r k to the d o o r saying he was o f f to be married, all that the disgruntled Berenson could muster was, " I don't m i n d . " T h e y o u n g man never f o r g o t the remark nor did he f o r g i v e it in the reminiscences o f his old age. ' T h e twenty-three-year-old C l a r k hastened back to L o n d o n for his marriage, w h i c h t o o k place o n January 10, 1927, his plans for a simple ceremony at the registry office firmly countermanded b y his fiancee in favor o f a church w e d d i n g . T o M a r y this was an auspicious sign: "It w o n ' t d o any harm for her to have the upper h a n d . " T h o u g h referred to in the L o n d o n Times as Elizabeth Winifred Martin, Clark's bride w a s f r o m the beginning called Jane. She was "certainly a c o m p l i c a t i o n , " M a r y admitted to Logan, though it was possible "she will be the right s o r t . " Jane, w h e n she arrived, seemed "neither pretty nor s m a r t , " but she was " v e r y sensible and keen on w o r k . " T h e Berensons' policy must therefore be " t o m a k e the best o f it, while it lasts, and not speak against either o f t h e m . " T h e n e w l y w e d s settled into the " C l o i s t e r , " the building attached to the ancient church o f San Martino w h i c h was on the hillside above I Tatti. It had been added to the estate in 1920. Jane, eager to justify her n e w role, said she w a s l o o k i n g f o r w a r d " i m m e n s e l y to setting to w o r k o n the D r a w i n g s . " N i c k y felt d r a w n to the " t w o sposini," and within a f e w months thought that the y o u n g man w a s " i m p r o v e d b y being associated w i t h Jane's nature and t e m p e r a m e n t . " She had a "sensual" rather than a "cerebral" w a y o f l o o k i n g at beautiful things and "a natural taste and eye for c o l o r . " " I don't w o n d e r , " she w r o t e to M a r y , "that he w i t h his slightly puritanical nature delights in h e r . " T o the reserved y o u n g O x o n i a n the anti-Fascist talk that w a s n o w the staple o f the Berenson salon had little attraction, and he secretly deplored Berenson's "laudable, but m o n o t o n o u s " vituperative diatribes. T h e lively free-for-alls during that first winter w i t h Hutchins H a p g o o d , U m berto M o r r a , T r e v y , L o g a n , and the y o u n g C y r i l C o n n a l l y , Logan's secretary, w e r e a different matter. T h e y often read aloud o f an evening and w e r e especially charmed b y M o r r a ' s beautiful rendering o f Italian texts. A m o n g those congenial companions H a p g o o d was Berenson's favorite. " T h e contrast b e t w e e n h i m and m e is p r e t t y , " Berenson w i t h some puzzlement told Ivins. " H e loves b o o z e and h a r m o n y w i t h himself on a l o w e r level and believes in the PEEPLE to the nth p o w e r . . . . A n d yet I greatly prefer h i m to all but a f e w bipeds n o w a l i v e . " If Bernard sometimes found himself puzzled to understand the vagaries o f his o w n character, for M a r y there w a s no such obstacle. She had p s y c h o l o g i z e d h i m in season and out and l o w conceived for herself a n e w and m a j o r project, " a b o o k about Bernard and his m e t h o d . " Hence, [350]

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early in 1927 when she went up to Berne for a month's course of treatment with the "famous Dr. Kocher," she took with her part of the hoard of letters that she and Bernard had exchanged in the nineties. "His character is exactly the same—after all my attempts to modify him," she told his mother. T o Nicky she was more detailed: " B . B . at 25 was almost exactly what he is now—mystical, ecstatic, and scientific as regards pictures and interested in origins and development and influences, antidemocratic, anti-philosophic, believing in culture above all else." Mary's ambitious book had to be put aside when she returned to I Tatti, not to be picked up again for nearly five years. It finally bogged down in the overwhelming masses of letters.

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X X X V

The ind of Trofit Sharing H E anti-Fascist tirades went on with undiminished vigor at I Tatti, but the times called for watchful speech outside and, unsure of the privacy of letters, the Berensons restrained their pens. They were grateful to Walter Lippmann for his scathing editorials on Mussolini but admitted that, for them, "silence is best." Antibolshevism, however, was a safer matter, and when Kerensky asked Berenson's help in reaching the American public, Berenson gave him a letter to Lippmann in which he urged Lippmann to help Kerensky meet "the right people" if he found him "worthwhile." He also took the occasion to caution Lippmann about the reputed Antonello da Messina which the Metropolitan had just bought. It was the painting Berenson had rejected as the "Impossible Antonello." He instructed Mary to write on the same point to J o e Duveen, who had himself been interested in buying the painting. Mary pointed out to him that if the painting had been sold on its own artistic value, it might have been worth only five or six thousand dollars. " T h e extra sixty thousand is due to its being called Antonello." Berenson's exhaustive exposure of the "Impossible Antonello" could not be gainsaid, and his rejection of the attribution finally prevailed. In 1941 the painting was assigned by the museum to Michele da Verona, and subsequently it took its place under that name in the Metropolitan catalogue of European paintings. The Three Essays in Method, which brought together " N i n e Pictures in Search of an Attribution," " A Neglected Altarpiece by Botticelli," and " A Possible and an Impossible Antonello da Messina," was published by the Clarendon Press in a lavishly illustrated quarto volume early in 1927. J o e Duveen sent several copies of the book to Belle Greene to be given to the trustees of the Metropolitan to show them the error of their ways. She also sent copies to Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. [3 52]

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In the preface, dated "Taormina 29 April 1926," Berenson stated his rationale for the use of photographs: "It is pleasant and seemly to be acquainted with original works of art. It is even necessary to know them if one is required to pronounce whether a given picture is an autograph, a studio version, or a contemporary copy. But for the plainer archaeological purpose of determining when and where and by whom a given design was invented, a good reproduction is enough." The purpose of the book, he said, was "to canalize guessing" and "lead the study of art . . . out of the hocus-pocus into the unpicturesque but fruitful fields of fact and calculation, so that critics may ultimately exercise their activities on a line with the astronomer and the chemist, rather than with those of the astrologer and the alchemist." Reviewers of Three Essays acclaimed it as once again demonstrating Berenson's preeminence in his field. The New Statesman declared it "in some ways the most remarkable b o o k " Berenson had written. The Spectator praised the "shrewd, humorous, cogent analysis." T o the Times reviewer it was "the least alarming book on the subject of artistic attributions we have ever read" and it had the "consoling value" of reminding the reader "that purely artistic considerations do not exhaust the interest of painting." In the United States Frank Jewett Mather, J r . , praised it in the Saturday Review of Literature as showing the value of "archaeology" in correcting the "aberrations" of mere connoisseurship. Increasingly Berenson was being sought out by young American art students to w h o m he usually gave the run of his library. He did, however, require a proper deference. In May 1927 the youthful Meyer Schapiro, w h o like Berenson had been brought to the United States as a child from Lithuania by his Jewish parents, put in an appearance, full of brash confidence. As a young socialist bred in the Brownsville ghetto of Brooklyn, Schapiro apparently found it hard to repress his disapproval of the luxury of I Tatti and its aristocratic protocol. The youth's selfassurance amused Berenson and invited irony. It must have seemed a parody of his own youthful pretensions. He described the visit to a friend: "Yesterday a very handsome youth named M . Schapiro sent up his card on which was written Columbia University. . . . It turned out he had been sent by Creswell [the Islamicist] whom he had seen in Cairo and Riefstahl whom he had seen in Constantinople. He is acquainted with the entire personnel of the arts and the entire literature: he has worked years and years on Coptic art and as many again on the local school of Azerbajan; decades he has spent in Spain and Southern France, and as for the remotest corners of Byzantine and Cappadocian art, he has explored, delved and assimilated it all. I put him to the test by showing him my jade libation cup and my little bronze candlestick and he praised [3 5 3 ]

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t h e m and discoursed a b o u t t h e m as s w e e t l y as S o l o m o n did about the h y s s o p in the w a l l . " T h e success o f the Three Essays in Method g a v e a fresh incentive to B e r e n s o n to p u s h o n w i t h the revision and amplification o f his Lists, and he pursued the task w i t h obsessive intensity. Early in June 1927 he rep o r t e d f r o m V e n i c e , " I h a v e o n l y Bellini and S o d o m a t o d o o f all the n o r t h w e s t Italians and o d d s and e n d s . " D u v e e n , understandably, w a s rather w o r r i e d about the implications o f the project for the firm. T h a t B e r e n s o n s o m e t i m e s changed his m i n d about the authorship o f a painting had been a c o n t i n u i n g source o f uneasiness to h i m . T o M a r y , B e r nard assigned the j o b o f c a l m i n g his anxiety. She lectured h i m that w h e n scientists correct mistakes and d o c t o r s revise diagnoses, "their p o w e r to d o so is the measure o f their h o n e s t y and c o m p e t e n c e . B . B . , w h o is passionately honest in his w o r k in Italian pictures, is obliged s o m e t i m e s to alter his o p i n i o n either because he has learned m o r e about the painter or because a picture has been cleaned o r because a p h o t o has g i v e n a w r o n g i m p r e s s i o n . " P r o g r e s s o n the Lists, she explained, w a s necessarily s l o w . B e r e n s o n had spent three m o n t h s ,

for e x a m p l e ,

on T i n t o r e t t o

and

V e r o n e s e alone, for " t h e y had never been carefully and critically studied." Determined

n o t to c o m p r o m i s e

his reputation as a disinterested

scholar, B e r e n s o n remained adamant o n one point: he w o u l d not list pictures in the hands o f dealers. O n c e a painting w e n t to a collector, he w o u l d o n request c o n f i r m an attribution he had made. H e had attributed the Italian pictures in the D u v e e n stock, but he had not regularly done so for other dealers; hence a D u v e e n listing w o u l d appear a mark o f special f a v o r . A l a r m e d , F o w l e s protested that there w e r e a large n u m b e r o f Italian paintings in stock still unsold and that m o s t o f their clients w o u l d consider he had n o t passed the pictures w h i c h w e r e not printed in the Lists. M a r y quieted h i m b y pointing out that since the revised Lists w o u l d not be ready f o r a f e w years, the p r o b l e m need not yet be faced. T h e c o n t r o v e r s y w a s t h e r e u p o n d r o p p e d , and the correspondence and cables r e s u m e d their usual b u r d e n o f opinions o n possible purchases and p r o s p e c t i v e clients. O n e letter attempted to clear u p w h a t had b e c o m e s o m e t h i n g o f a m y s t e r y , the defection o f H e n r y Walters since the end o f the Great W a r . F o w l e s w r o t e that Walters "is entirely in the hands o f S e l i g m a n n & C o m p a n y . . . . T h e y m u s t have concocted all sorts o f stories against all o f u s . " T h e r e had been six m o n t h s o f steady application t o w o r k f o l l o w i n g B e r e n s o n ' s return t o his desk in N o v e m b e r 1926, and n o w w i t h the approach o f s u m m e r he w a s again impatient to travel. His o b j e c t w o u l d be t o visit his r o y a l friend in S w e d e n , C r o w n Prince G u s t a f A d o l f . His [3 $4]

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leisurely itinerary would take him to Vienna, Prague, Dresden, and Berlin, and on the way he would " d o nothing but look at works of art and listen to music." They would travel in their usual well-provisioned style aboard their "mastodonic Lancia car" with Hugh Parry as pilot. In July during a week of gallery going and music in Berlin, an urgent wire came from J o e Duveen. Joe had recently purchased for $2.5 million the Robert H. Benson Collection, described in the New York Times as the most important private collection of Italian art in Europe, the 1 1 4 paintings representing six Italian schools. Duveen had proposed that Berenson accept a fixed sum as compensation instead of the usual 25 percent of the profit on the sale of each picture. Berenson set his fee at 10 percent of the purchase price. Duveen requested a reduction in that figure. Berenson, who had first studied the great collection in the nineties in the company of Herbert Cook, indignantly replied that he could not accept less than the 10 percent. " I shrink with horror from bargaining. The treaty between us with regard to the ' X ' Book is in many ways far [more] favorable to you than it is to me. . . . It involves me in all direct losses. . . . Y o u can make a huge money profit out of the matter, beside all the 'Glory, Kingdom, and Power' that you get out of it." It was becoming apparent that a new arrangement was needed if he were to avoid fresh contention with Sir Joseph, but that would have to wait until he could confer with Louis Levy later that month in Hamburg. Prince Gustaf welcomed the travelers in his usual unceremonious way at his summer home near Stockholm. The pleasant dinner was equally unceremonious, but the presence of the princess and royal nieces from Greece required curtseying from Mary, something " m y stiff old bones do not readily lend themselves t o . " A passionate archaeologist, the prince had "thousands of things to talk about with B . B . , " and when an aide-decamp came in to signal discreetly that it was time for the Berensons to leave, he exclaimed, " O h you can't go yet," and he went on talking about his travels in China, Japan, and India. Though so often a semi-invalid at home, Berenson seemed rejuvenated as they bustled from one entertainment to another. From Stockholm they drove on to Oslo, where a circle of "jolly painters and museum directors took" them "to their bosoms." Late hours and " e x hilarating liquors" were the rule. At dinner with the superintendent of art, the abstemious Berenson was seen to "drink a cocktail, followed by claret at dinner (Chateau Lafitte, 1897) and champagne." They got home at midnight and Bernard rose in the morning no worse for the wear. And the day before, while motor boating among the islands, Nicky and Mary could not believe their eyes when they saw him pour a stiff whiskey and soda "and drink it." [3 5 5]

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The party reached Hamburg in time to meet with Levy on August 19 for preliminary talks about a new contract. Berenson was all nerves, but Mary felt confident of Levy's friendship. When she admitted that they had got a very great deal of money from Duveen, Levy replied, " Y o u can't get too much. B . B . has made the whole reputation and prestige of J o e Duveen." He declared that the old contract was "abominable because it placed Berenson wholly at Joe's mercy." He proposed a new contract giving Berenson a retainer to be paid twice a year and relieving him of sharing losses. As things now stood, he was in effect a secret partner and "liable for the losses and taxes." Mary felt quite in her element in the conference, but, as she described it to Senda, " B . B . is too funny when business is talked. His features fade into what Nicky and I call his Russian steppe expression and he seems thousands of miles a w a y . " She added that they had made their wills, a thing which had weighed much on her mind, for she was "more personal than B . B . " and had less enthusiasm " f o r an Institution." In the course of their business talks the subject of their wills had come up and Bernard, who had hitherto objected to providing for her grandchildren, suddenly "gave way and said Yes he would charge the estate with $2,000 a year to each of my beloved grandchildren. N o words can say what a weight this takes off my mind." Business completed, Mary hastened to England, and Bernard and Nicky joined the Kingsley Porters for a series of excursions in northwestern Germany and Holland hunting medieval monuments and church treasures as well as paintings and drawings in museums and private collections. When the Porters departed for Paris, they left Berenson and Nicky to their note taking in the Dutch museums. The two were joined by Mary in Amsterdam and they all crossed to London from Paris with Duveen and spent three days examining the great collection of early Italian paintings acquired from Robert H. Benson, the merchant banker. Sir Joseph, full of amiability, introduced them to some of his most important clients. According to Mary, Bernard surpassed himself in these interviews, displaying "a depth and width of learning" that even she found surprising and that left Duveen "dumb and amazed." Through the good offices of Lady Colefax the Berensons settled themselves in the comfortable establishment of Lady Horner in Fitzharding Street. Berenson resumed his researches in the print room at the British Museum, where he was soon joined by Kenneth Clark. They went on together to study the drawings at Windsor Castle and at the Ashmolean in Oxford. The chief drain on Berenson's energy proved to be the ceaseless influx of guests at their open house. There were also gatherings

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at other places, one, for instance, at w h i c h Berenson and R o g e r Fry patched up a sort o f truce and another at w h i c h they met A u s t e n C h a m berlain and listened to h i m tell o f his encounter w i t h an affable M u s s o lini, w h o , w h e n he discovered he was visible to the c r o w d outdoors, immediately thrust out his l o w e r j a w and assumed the formidable s c o w l that was his trademark. N e v e r before in England had Berenson attracted so m u c h friendly interest or been s h o w n such professional respect. His n e w b o o k had carried the day for him. L o r d D ' A b e r n o n , chairman o f the R o y a l C o m mission o n National M u s e u m s and Galleries, asked for his v i e w , for use in the commission's report, o n the relative excellence o f British collections and o n the arrangements o f exhibits. T h o u g h too m u c h pressed for time to submit a f o r m a l m e m o r a n d u m , Berenson, ten days later, dispatched a 2,500-word statement giving detailed answers to Lord D ' A b e r n o n ' s questions. " M y impression i s , " he wrote, "that taken all round, for both quality and quantity, y o u have here in L o n d o n i n c o m parably the finest collections in the w o r l d . " S o m e branches o f art, h o w ever, w e r e better represented elsewhere, folk art in Budapest, Vienna, and Scandinavia, for example. England had nothing to compare with the examples in Berlin o f "early Islamitic art" f r o m Meshata and Samara or the "frescoes, textiles and illuminations f r o m Chinese T u r k e s t a n . " B e r lin, Leipzig, M u n i c h , Hildesheim, and H a m b u r g , "taken t o g e t h e r , " had finer ethnological collections, and Paris and the Vatican w e r e richer in Byzantine and Carolingian illuminated manuscripts. " B u t all deductions m a d e , " Berenson concluded, " y o u r collections represent the w h o l e w o r l d ' s art as n o others a n y w h e r e . " In her diligent record o f the people they saw in London, M a r y posted the names o f s o m e 104 individuals and couples, and her list was patently incomplete. M o s t w e r e old friends and acquaintances, like T r e v y , Gaetano Salvemini, A r t h u r W a l e y , D e s m o n d M a c C a r t h y , G r a h a m W a l las, Y u k i Yashiro, Lady C o l e f a x , the William Rothensteins, and Herbert C o o k . S o m e w e r e n e w , like Lady C h o l m o n d e l e y , Lord and Lady L l o y d , A r n o l d Bennett, and E d m o n d Gosse. M u c h as Berenson relished the crush, he became "sadly o v e r t i r e d . " B u t w h e n they crossed to his beloved Paris o n N o v e m b e r 3, 1927, he seemed to d r a w a reviving breath. There C a r l o Placci w a s o n hand. His f o r m e r l o v e Baroness La C a z e greeted him, as did the w i t t y and " b e g u i l ingly u g l y " M a d a m e de Cosse-Brissac. H e met w i t h his Gazette translator, S e y m o u r de Ricci, and the perdurable Salomon Reinach and enj o y e d the challenge o f Paul V a l e r y ' s erudite talk. A r t h u r Sachs and his w i f e called, and fashionable Elsie de W o l f e , n o w Lady M e n d l , brought

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her unfading glitter to their Hotel Beau-Site. Mary's Paris list ran to 126 and included, what seems most to have impressed her, three princesses, five duchesses, one grand duchess, six baronesses, a prince, and a baron. In the mornings Berenson, accompanied regularly by Nicky and Kenneth Clark, worked in the Louvre print room from eleven to one checking the Florentine drawings. " I look forward all the previous afternoon and evening to this w o r k , " he wrote Billie Ivins. He told him also of his enjoyment of high society, of seeing Martha Hyde, Linda Porter, Mrs. Wharton, " m y very beloved Abbe Mugnier, Abel Bonnard and scores of others, chiefly lovely women and scholarly and literary men, all making a noise as if they enjoyed seeing u s . " Edith Wharton had recovered her poise after the recent death of Walter Berry and her salon flourished once more. There the Berensons again met Paul Bourget, " g r o w n very old and m a n g y . " He congratulated them on "living under Mussolini's beneficent rule; 'the first man who has the courage to assert the bankruptcy of universal suffrage,' " a sentiment with which Edith expressed strong agreement. Berenson was of course never free from calls upon his services. An amusing one came from F. Steinmeyer in N e w York, requesting a letter of authentication for a Bellini that Solomon Guggenheim had just bought. Guggenheim feared his family would "make fun of him should the picture not be right. . . . If he had your letter he can proudly show both picture and letter to every one." In a sense, all this stimulating activity was a marking of time while waiting for the new Duveen contract to be drawn up. Weeks passed as the negotiations dragged on. An "excruciating talk" with Fowles on November 24, 1927, seemed to lead nowhere, but on the twenty-ninth the final details of two agreements were worked out, the first settling the claims under the old arrangement and the second providing the terms of the new. The existing agreement for profit sharing would end January 1, 1928; Berenson waived any claim on works of art not sold by that date, and the firm agreed to relieve him of any liability for losses on items returned after that date. The second agreement, dated January 4, 1928, was to run until December 3 1 , 1932. The preamble reflected Berenson's stubborn insistence that his services were those of an independent consultant: "Appreciating your preeminent position as an authority on great Italian pictures . . . we wish to arrange for your retainer for these purposes. While you are to be entirely free and untrammeled in your artistic and scientific judgments, it will be of great value to us to have the benefit of your learning, judgment, advice and general assistance." Under the terms of the agreement Berenson was obligated to supply "upon request" his "unbiassed opin[3 5 8 ]

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ion and certificate as to any Italian picture" acquired by the firm, already owned by it, or being considered with a view to acquisition. For these services Duveen agreed to pay him an annual retainer of £10,000 payable semiannually. In addition Berenson would receive 10 percent of the cost of all purchases made on his recommendation. Duveen also agreed to pay £50,000, as Berenson had requested, for his services in connection with the purchase of the Benson Collection. The new contracts thus promised a divorce from the complicated financial arrangements which the firm often made with collectors. Joe's dilatory habits, however, did not change, and the Berensons' correspondence with Fowles and with Joe himself continued to be interspersed with urgent pleas for prompter payment on account of the arrears under both the old contract and the new. With the negotiations for the new contract finally out of the way, the Berensons and Nicky joined Edith Wharton at Hyeres shortly before the Christmas holiday. After a few days Mary and Nicky departed for I Tatti, leaving Bernard to enjoy "the longest rest in seven years" in the exquisitely furnished house whose luxury and strict daily ritual met his fastidious standards. His sense of comfort could only have been more deeply felt when Mary wrote the day after Christmas of the mishaps at I Tatti—the hot water system that had broken down, the lamps that were starved for electricity, and the bells that refused to ring. Hyeres also offered escape from the sight of Mary doting on her "descendants" who arrived for the holidays and from the Christmas festivities which aroused all his latent dislike for the day. When the holidays were over and the coast was clear Berenson immediately returned, applied himself to the Lists, and appeared to thrive working at "high pressure." As the weeks passed he noted that he had made progress through the Umbrians and the "tangle of the early Perugini." In early March 1928 his particular "torment" was the Giorgione problem. " I accept our canon," he said, "perhaps as much out of inertia as conviction. The 'Concert' must be Giorgione, because it is too great for Titian. . . . The Madrid 'Medici' has too oval a face, etc. and yet both are more Titianesque than most early Titians. So if Giorgiones they are, w e return to our conclusion of forty years ago, namely that he was Titian's sole inspiration until his [Titian's] old age." When he reviewed the completed Lists in the following year, he again bogged down in what he called the "Giorgione quicksand." The rarity—and great value—of paintings attributable to Giorgione had made the quest for his pictures one of the most tantalizing of all to the art trade. Fowles had again inquired concerning Lord Allendale's Adoration of the Shepherds, which the family steadily exhibited as a Gior[359]

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gione, and he sent an enlarged photograph of the painting for study. Still puzzled, Berenson ventured, "Is not the most probable solution that the landscape was put in by Giulio Campagnola and the rest by the youthful Titian?" The opinion evidently discouraged Duveen, and whatever negotiation had begun for the purchase of the painting came to a halt. But the allure of the Giorgione name was hard to resist and Duveen did not lose his interest in the painting. N o matter how scrupulously Berenson did his work for Sir Joseph, rejecting the enthusiastic proposals of paintings almost as often as approving them, to many in the outside world he was seen as Duveen's compliant accessory. Early in 1928 he received a long letter from his cousin Arthur reporting a malicious attack upon him. Arthur had become acquainted with Lord Abdy, who had personally sold a French painting to Jules Bache for $75,000 which Bache now wished to return. The resentful Abdy felt that the Duveens were somehow responsible, and then, seeking another scapegoat, he had gone on to attack Berenson's association with them, citing as evidence of impropriety the recent sale by Duveen to Bache of a Madonna and Child with Saints from the Benson Collection as a Giovanni Bellini. He complained that Berenson had once attributed the painting to Basaiti in his Venetian Painters of 1894 and in his 1916 Venetian Painting in America had suggested that the painting came from the studio of Bellini. N o w he had promoted it to an autograph Giovanni Bellini. T o Lord Abdy, smarting under the loss of his own sale, the return of the painting to its original dignity under the aegis of Duveen seemed highly suspect. His criticism of Berenson was based as much on ignorance as on malice. Berenson had no financial stake in separate sales since the £50,000 award under the new contract covered his services for having expertized all the Italian paintings in the Benson Collection. He maintained the ascription to Bellini in his revised 1957 List. The 1980 catalogue of European paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, to which the Bache Collection was bequeathed, gives the painting to "Giovanni Bellini and Workshop." Arthur warned his cousin that the honorable lord was spreading his slanders to whoever would listen in N e w York. He counseled stoicism: "There is no way of meeting this situation for men in high positions except to do one's duty conscientiously, fully, and to remain completely oblivious to all criticism. The world has unbounded, unlimited faith not only in your judgment but in your integrity. . . . I think it will take much more than the Abdys or the Öffners to pull you d o w n . " There was a certain irony in Arthur's bringing in Offner's name as an enemy of Bernard's. It was true that Richard Offner had deeply offended [360]

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B e r n a r d in 1924 in his article questioning the attribution to C i m a b u e o f the painting w h i c h had been sold t o C a r l H a m i l t o n in 1919. O f f n e r had j u s t recently m a d e h a n d s o m e a m e n d s in his n e w b o o k Studies in Florentine Painting.

His " d e e p e s t d e b t , " he a c k n o w l e d g e d , w a s to " M r . Bernard

B e r e n s o n o f w h o s e a c c o m p l i s h m e n t s e v e r y student o f Italian art, and o f criticism generally, bears reverent recognition. T o his stimulus, to the quality o f his culture, to his penetration, to the accessibility o f his i n c o m parable library, I h a v e o w e d endless profit and inspiration f r o m the early stages o f m y s t u d y . "

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H E winter o f 1928 passed uneventfully with the usual flurry o f society and students. Robert Trevelyan arrived, suddenly affluent after having eked out an existence for many years with the help o f post-obits. T h e death o f his mother, according to report, made him the o w n e r o f six thousand acres and an income o f ten or twelve thousand pounds a year. Bessie, n o w much taken with her sculpture, visited in the spring, and the censorious Mary found her whining voice a trial. Later in the year Rachel and her scholarly husband, Professor Ralph Barton Perry, made their visit. Bernard, increasingly attracted to him, wrote N i c k y that Perry "did everything to draw me out and made me talk, effacing himself." The sensation o f the winter was the visit o f the famous monologist Ruth Draper. "Florence is crazy over her," Bernard informed Mary. Her performance o f " V i v e la France" was so m o v i n g that "there was no applause and not a dry e y e . " A t I Tatti she gave her "Three A g e s " and " T h e Irish Peasant W o m a n " just for Berenson and N i c k y . B y this time Berenson's hope o f training a successor in Kenneth Clark had pretty well dimmed. Clark's marriage had been a disappointment and n o w Jane Clark's pregnancy added a complication. The pair returned to England for the birth o f their son Alan, which occurred April 13, 1929. Clark had taken with him the unfinished manuscript o f a book he had been working on. With Logan's encouragement the witty and gracefully written pages poured forth with a rush, and almost immediately after his son arrived Clark sent o f f the completed manuscript o f The Gothic Revival to his publisher and began thinking o f another book that might deal with the history o f classicism in England. Work on the revision o f Berenson's Drawings, he n o w felt, need occupy only a limited part o f the year. When he returned to Florence later in the year to study [362]

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the drawings at the Uffizi, he found himself more interested in exploring the problems of Leonardo da Vinci than in advancing the revision. T o Mary, with w h o m Clark was on easier terms, he acknowledged that he "loathed the pettifogging business of correcting notes and numbers." She grumbled in frustration, " A l l that he wants out of it is . . . whatever kudos he will get from the association. He has an ingenuous self-centered nature and B . B . needs devotion." Clark seems to have felt under obligation to continue in some way the "collaboration with Berenson," as he referred to it when talking to William G. Constable, the assistant director of the National Gallery. Berenson, frankly recognizing the changed circumstances, wrote to Clark in May 1929 that he had decided to "give up our plan of collaborating on the new edition of the Florentine drawings." He felt he had no right to keep him hanging on " f o r the ever retreating day when I shall be ready" to prepare the new edition. When that day came he would need not a collaborator "but an assistant" who would be at his "beck and call to fetch and carry." It would be absurd to expect him "to leave house and wife and child and friends to devil for a cantankerous old man. . . . I want you to believe, dear Kenneth, that it is to save our friendship that I am giving up our working together. . . . Y o u should devote your gifts for scholarship and your gift for words to a task which will prove one of those contributions to the history of ideas and taste which by their mere existence advance culture." In his reply Clark wrote, " I found the Florentine Drawings a wonderful training and a happy excuse for working with you, but you, I am afraid, must have found it rather an irritant, keeping you from original work. . . . As things are, the time I spent on it was one for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. . . . All the work I do in the history of art will have foundation in what I learned from y o u . " He asked permission to dedicate his book on classicism to Berenson. Following his initial disappointment Berenson took a sympathetic interest in Clark's advancement, as their voluminous correspondence testifies, and it pleased him to regard Clark as one of his former pupils. The two drew closer together as Clark rose in the world with the help of Berenson's recommendations and testimony. Looking back on their early association, Clark once recalled sitting beside Berenson and, while helpfully buttering his toast, hearing him talk to a sympathetic lady in which "the flow of ideas, the range of historical reference, the intellectual curiosity and unexpected human sympathy were certainly beyond those of anyone I have k n o w n . " It was this quality of mind that drew Clark back again and again to I Tatti. After Berenson's death Clark wrote, " I owe him far more than I can say and probably more than I k n o w . " [363]

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In January 1928 Berenson was at work on a short article on the authorship o f the Portrait of a Soldier, which Arthur Sachs had acquired from Agnew's. Appearing in the June 1928 Art in America under the title " T h e Missing Head o f the Glasgow 'Christ and the Adultress,' " the article strikingly illustrated Berenson's remarkable visual memory. Berenson had recalled that the "Soldier" o f the Sachs painting, a half-length portrait of a man, also figured in a Bergamo copy of the Glasgow painting. A comparison o f the photographs of the paintings had then revealed that the Sachs portrait had been cut away from the side of the Glasgow picture. Having made that discovery, Berenson proceeded to contest the traditional attribution of the painting to Giorgione and to name Titian as the author. When Duveen got wind o f Berenson's intention to assign the Sachs painting to Titian, he had Fowles write to ask Berenson to include in the article a discussion of the Titian portraits recently sold to Edsel Ford and Frank P. Wood: " I f you will uphold [Duveen] in this manner it will be o f the greatest assistance to encourage such people to interest themselves further in Italian art." Berenson again declined. The resilient Sir Joseph forgave Berenson's intransigence. A few months later, though he had paid out to Berenson in the first six months of 1928 £25,000 toward the settlement of fees on the Benson Collection and £5,000 for the semiannual retainer, he was full o f optimism and friendly feeling. " Y o u will be glad to hear," he wrote, "that my season in New York finished up very satisfactorily, in fact it was the best season I had ever had by quite forty percent. That success has been mostly with Italian pictures. . . . Personally I am more bullish than ever about Italian art, and need your co-operation more than ever. I simply cannot do without it." His most recent coup had been the purchase of the Niccolini-Cowper Madonna by Raphael from Lady Desborough for a reputed $875,000, the highest price ever paid in the history o f art sales and Si00,000 more than had been paid for the famous Blue Βογ. Berenson acknowledged that on such a "tremendous" purchase he could not fairly claim the agreed-upon 10 percent for his authentication, and he therefore trusted to Joe's "generosity and fairness." It turned out that Joe could not afford to be very generous: a month later he sold the Raphael to Andrew Mellon for a "quite ridiculous" profit o f only 10 percent. The sale, however, did provide "great propaganda." In this season o f prosperity Arthur Sulley too was having his successes. A sale to Otto Kahn yielded Berenson a fee of £2,500 and one of a Greco to another client, £1,200. Sulley was amused to pass on to Berenson word o f a recent stratagem that Sir Joseph was said to have employed:

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" T o prevent any jealousy amongst his clients" he had disposed of four Duccios to four clients at exactly $300,000 apiece. With so much money pouring in, Berenson's dream of establishing an adequate endowment for his "Institute" seemed on the way to reality. In spite of the multitude of expenses to support his establishment at I Tatti, there remained large sums for investment. The great boom market had begun its roaring ascent and Louis Levy held out the assurance of riches. T o the $25,000 sent him to be invested in the stock market, Berenson added another $275,000 before the market crash of October 1929. Berenson feared to give his wife any control over the almost bewildering golden flood, rightly suspecting that she would shower much more of it on her family and needy friends than he would approve. As for his own benefactions and loans to friends and relatives, they were, in his view, always justified and prudent. For her indulgences Mary of course retained control over her own annual income of some £1,500. But over the years by overspending she had accumulated a debt of £900 to her bank, and to her surprise the bank desired repayment, as she finally had to confess to Bernard that winter from Berne. He met her request for funds, but with such reservations that she fretted, " H o w dreadfully suspicious thee gets." More than his suspicion rankled. When in the autumn of 1929 with Levy's help the two executed new wills as a precautionary measure before departing on a tour of the Near East, Bernard insisted on leaving I Tatti and the bulk of his estate to Harvard for his cherished Institute. Mary complained to "Dearest N i c k y , " "I do not see my way to change anything as B . B . does not recognize that I had any share in building up his career, though indeed without me in the beginning he would have drifted and never written a line. . . . Alas that all the money goes into the cursed Institute." This season Sir Joseph hoped to induce his client Jules Bache to form a great collection of Italian pictures. Bache, the American investment banker, was already a prominent collector. Duveen urged Berenson to seek his friendship and educate his tastes. Berenson accepted the chore in a curiously condescending way. " A r t belongs to the kingdom of ideals," he lectured Bache, who had visited him in May 1927, "and ideals quickly degenerate to humbug and humbug slides even more quickly to the land of fraud. . . . Art criticism suffers from being the priesthood of the slimy and slippery realm. I have been trying for forty years to sanitate and rectify this priesthood. . . . If you can trust my honor as well as my judgment I shall be glad to help you. If you are not big enough for that, apply elsewhere." Bache was not put off by this militant ultimatum, and he soon sought the advice of both Bernard and Mary. Within a few

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months B e r e n s o n t h o u g h t it politic to place $ 5 0 , 0 0 0 w i t h h i m f o r investment. T h e relation o f the t w o rather testy m e n ran an eccentric course. T o further B a c h e ' s " e d u c a t i o n , " B e r e n s o n invited h i m to c o m e to Florence, " p u r e o f h e a r t , " in the fall o f 1928. B a c h e , not readily intimidated, replied, " H o w can y o u expect a m a n w h o has been compelled to rub e l b o w s w i t h m o s t o f the art dealers o f civilization and m a n y o f the experts to be 'pure o f heart' o r even almost p u r e ? " H e nevertheless accepted the invitation and presented himself late that s u m m e r at P o g g i o alio Spino. T o B e r e n s o n ' s d i s m a y he w a s principally interested in h a v i n g a catalogue prepared o f the Italian pictures he had already acquired f r o m D u v e e n and in h a v i n g B e r e n s o n authenticate a " B e l l i n i " w h i c h a friend had o f f e r e d h i m . H e explained that it w a s a painting he did not w a n t to accept unless c o n v i n c e d it w a s " b y the m a s t e r , " and " w o r t h y " o f his collection. E a g e r to please B a c h e , Sir J o s e p h had seconded his requests. B e r e n s o n v i g o r o u s l y declined both chores. H e did not forget his c o m m i t m e n t to D u v e e n , h o w e v e r , and pressed B a c h e so energetically to m a k e exclusive use o f the firm that B a c h e protested that o f his f i f t y - s i x pictures, except f o r the French ones b o u g h t f r o m Wildenstein, all but f i v e w e r e b o u g h t f r o m D u v e e n . " I w o n d e r h o w m a n y I w o u l d have to b u y f r o m J o e so that I d o not disappoint y o u ' f r i g h t f u l l y . ' " B e r e n s o n , resenting the gibe, pointed out that he had no special financial interest in J o e ' s sales. Besides J o e " c o u l d sell a c o f f i n to T u t a n k h a m o n , . . . and he w o u l d end b y selling to others w h a t he did not sell to y o u . " T h e dispute w a s patched up after a fashion, and w h e n B a c h e returned to N e w Y o r k he w r o t e that P r o f e s s o r Walter Pach, in a lecture at B a c h e ' s h o m e , " c o n s t a n t l y referred to y o u as practically the only real authority o n early Italian a r t . " B e r e n s o n continued f o r a w h i l e to r e c o m m e n d paintings to B a c h e but w i t h limited success. " W h i l e I share y o u r enthusiasm f o r the early pictures, although hardly pretending to understand t h e m f u l l y , " B a c h e explained, " t h e trouble is that J o e ' s idea o f their value is based entirely on their rarity and his ideas and mine are distinctly at v a r i a n c e . " H e w a s tired o f p a y i n g several hundred percent profit and being laughed at. It w a s characteristic o f D u v e e n ' s hypersanguine temperament that he thought B e r e n s o n ' s conference w i t h B a c h e at C o n s u m a in the autumn o f 1928 had been successful, and he continued to u r g e B e r e n s o n to g r a t i f y B a c h e . In the next y e a r he suggested that B e r e n s o n at least w r i t e a preface to lend its cachet to the B a c h e catalogue prepared b y the firm. B e r e n s o n exploded, " Y o u tormented m e last a u t u m n to 'expertise' a Bellini f o r B a c h e , and n o w y o u w a n t to f o r c e m y hand to do w h a t I refused to d o f o r B a c h e w h e n he w a s h e r e . " A g a i n Sir J o s e p h backed d o w n . [366]

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Berenson never relaxed his guard with Sir Joseph, for he always suspected ulterior motives behind the bluff camaraderie of the man, and he kept on the alert to forestall any effort of Sir Joseph to treat him as an employee. When J o e wired asking him to see a reputed Botticelli that a dealer, Tolentino, wanted to show him, Berenson warned him, " I no longer receive anybody here as the chances of trouble are far too imminent for me to risk them . . . the least of which might be being subpoenaed as a witness. I need not tell you what, if this happened, would be the effect upon my nerves." Fowles immediately replied for Joe that all the members of the firm were being again reminded not to refer "any dealers or picture owners direct" to Berenson. In the midst of his agitated exchanges with the Duveen firm, Berenson learned that the father from w h o m he had inherited his volcanic temper died that summer at the age of eighty-three. The message Bernard wrote to his brother, Abie, did not lack for irony: " I who had for many years little to suffer from the disagreeable side of him, must confess to having had a soft spot in my heart for him. He was very gifted and eloquent and fascinating, but spoilt, inadequately educated and uprooted. I always wondered what would have become of him if he had had my chance." Albert had remained a free thinker to the end, and in accord, it appears, with his wish, his body was cremated. A few months later the Berensons filed copies of their wills with Joseph E. Haven, the American consul in Florence, with instructions that in the event of their deaths they wished to be cremated and to have their ashes deposited in the Allori Cemetery. That stern resolve was to give way at the last to Nicky's sense of religious propriety. Berenson also deposited with Haven a letter explaining his desire to create "an academy where American students can perfect themselves in the history of the arts and especially of the arts which flourished in Italy or fed these arts." It was the first formal statement of his intention to bequeath I Tatti to Harvard. His friends at Harvard, he said, had expressed "their delight with my idea." There was a growing demand in America for teachers of art history and for directors of museums, and nowhere in Europe was there a school where Americans could pursue such studies as distinct from archaeology. He hoped that I Tatti would "fill this gap." His library already included thirty thousand carefully selected volumes and several times that number of photographs, and if he was spared for another ten years, he expected to leave a collection of photographs which might, "on its own ground, be unrivalled." Duveen's triumphant season in 1928 made him more exuberant than ever, and when Mary stopped o f f in London to confer with him after her cure at Bagnoles, he expressed "white hot enthusiasm for our Institute." [367]

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Six weeks later Duveen descended upon I Tatti for a short visit like a god in a whirlwind. He bounced in to Berenson's bedside and "discoursed amiably, loudly and heartily." Mary took him on an exhausting run through the Pitti, the Uffizi, and the Bargello as he called out imperiously before each masterpiece, " N e x t . " Berenson put aside the Lists for a day and drove out to San Sepolcro with him and Mary on a "spree." At San Sepolcro a painter was copying the Piero and volubly expressing his opinions, and J o e went wild with annoyance. Then came lunch. Though the pasta was good, the rest of the meal was mediocre, and Berenson flew into a rage at the proprietor and flung out of the place. Mary recounted that "the only person who liked the row was Joe, w h o said it was worse than any of his r o w s . " The storm passed like a summer shower, and before the evening ended at their mountain lodge near Consuma, Berenson handled Duveen so diplomatically that he promised to settle "all past debts and to endow the Institute very liberally" and even to pay an extra £7,500. In addition he promised to endow two fellowships. Since Bache and another affluent visitor had each promised to endow two, Mary could inform Bernard's mother, " W e have six fellowships already promised (all by Jews!) and can ourselves endow several more." The work on the Lists had called for the most painstaking review of the paintings and their locations. In the course of restudying thousands of photographs in his collection, Berenson discovered that he had photographs of a great many paintings which he was now unable to locate. Collections had been broken up or weeded out, and many paintings had passed through dealers' hands into a kind of limbo, dealers often declining to disclose the identity of a purchaser for fear that critics might dispute the important name under which a painting had been sold. The idea came to him to publish "descriptive studies" of the "missing" or "homeless" pictures in the hope that the owner-collectors might come forward. He paused long enough in the work of verification to prepare an illustrated article on "Missing Pictures of Arcangelo di C o l a . " It appeared in the July 1929 International Studio and was followed by four illustrated articles, published at intervals during the next few years, on "missing" Sienese and Florentine paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. With the demise of International Studio in 1 9 3 1 , the two articles in the Florentine series appeared only in the Italian Dedalo. In these pieces he recalled his first acquaintance with each of the "waifs and strays" and rehearsed and occasionally revised his opinions concerning their attributions and their places in the artistic tradition of their period. Owner-collectors did not rush forward to comply with Berenson's requests, and location of the whereabouts of many of the missing pic[368]

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tures w a s p o s t p o n e d for nearly f o r t y years. In 1971 the art historian D r . H a n n a Kiel, w h o had l o n g been associated w i t h B e r e n s o n , collected the articles in their original E n g l i s h versions in an illustrated v o l u m e called Homeless Paintings of the Renaissance. She had been able to run to g r o u n d m o r e than 250 o f the paintings in m u s e u m s and private collections, leaving 150 or so still w i t h o u t a k n o w n habitation. H e r study also revealed that B e r e n s o n had revised the attribution o f 34 o f the 250 paintings she had succeeded in locating. H o w difficult the determination o f an attribution could be is illustrated in t w o articles in the K i e l collection o n the authorship o f the f a m o u s C o o k t o n d o The Adoration of the Magi, the w o n d e r f u l l y populated r o u n del w i t h the iridescent p e a c o c k o n the m a n g e r , w h i c h B e r e n s o n had e x a m i n e d in the nineties in the collection at R i c h m o n d , Surrey. It had l o n g been attributed b y distinguished authorities to Fra Filippo Lippi, and B e r e n s o n had so identified it in his original Florentine List. In the first o f the articles, titled " F r a A n g e l i c o , Fra Filippo and T h e i r C h r o n o l o g y " and originally published in Italian in the Bolletino d'Arte, he told o f his subsequent m i s g i v i n g s about the attribution: "I s a w t o o m u c h Fra A n g e l i c o in it to be satisfied w i t h the ascription to Filippo Lippi, and t o o m u c h Filippo to let m e assign it to Fra A n g e l i c o . S o I concluded that it m u s t be w o r k d o n e b y the first under the s t r o n g influence o f the s e c o n d . " R e c o n s t r u c t i n g in elaborate detail the c h r o n o l o g i c a l sequence o f Filippo's paintings alongside that o f Fra A n g e l i c o , he n o w deduced that there w a s " r e l a t i v e l y little o f Fra Filippo in the painting. . . . It is a picture designed entirely b y Fra A n g e l i c o in the early forties o f the Q u a t t r o c e n t r o , and finished b y Fra F i l i p p o . " W h e n the article w a s reprinted in Homeless Paintings, the Times called it " t h e best single historical e s s a y " that B e r e n s o n had p r o d u c e d . B u t in spite o f B e r e n s o n ' s i m p r e s s i v e demonstration, the question w a s not laid to rest. S o o n a f t e r w a r d Lionello V e n t u r i published a refutation s u p p o r t ing the attribution to Fra Filippo. B e r e n s o n ' s g o o d friend Pietro T o e s c a , a leading Italian art historian, also held out f o r Filippo in the 1934 Encyclopedia Italiana, and he w a s f o l l o w e d b y other Italian critics. In the second article, titled " P o s t s c r i p t 1949: T h e C o o k T o n d o R e v i s i t e d " and first published in Homeless Paintings, B e r e n s o n returned to his original attribution. H a v i n g g o t r o u n d to r e s t u d y i n g Filippo, he w r o t e , " I can n o l o n g e r descry the t o u c h o f Fra A n g e l i c o ' s hand in the

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m u c h as I still perceive there his unusual i n f l u e n c e . " T u r n i n g to the old charge that he t o o readily c h a n g e d his opinions, he declared, " I never c o u l d understand w h y in the 'exact sciences' the m e t h o d o f trial and error w a s accepted universally and rejected in a pursuit so nebulous, so undisciplined, so difficult to control as the attribution o f w o r k s o f art. . . . If I

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had leisure, I would reconsider every attribution I ever made." In his reconsideration of the tondo, he explained, he had available to him photographs of details and a color plate of the whole sent by Samuel Kress, who had bought the painting in 1947. " I went over the ground again and again and ended with the conviction that but for the probable exception of the women pouring with their children out of Bethlehem to see the arrival of the Magi, no visible part of the picture betrayed Fra Angelico's hand, much as the whole owed to his spirit." Still a doubt seems to have remained, for when Berenson's posthumous List of Florentine paintings was published in 1963, the painting was listed twice, once under the name Fra Angelico ("finished by Filippo Lippi") and once under that of Fra Filippo Lippi ("begun by Fra Angelico"). In Fern Rusk Shapley's catalogue Italian Paintings in the National Gallery of Art, the magnificent picture is given as the joint production of the artists. IN MID-SEPTEMBER of 1928, soon after Joe Duveen's energetic sightseeing "spree" with Bernard and Mary to San Sepolcro, the Berensons set off with Nicky for a two-month archaeological expedition in Turkey. Berenson's interest in Byzantine art as a key element in the evolution of western Mediterranean art had become a preoccupying interest, and this was a journey he had long anticipated. With Istanbul as a base, their first objective was Adrianople, the oriental-looking city near the Bulgarian border, with its half-ruined palace of the early sultans and the magnificent sixteenth-century mosque of Selim II. On their return on the Orient Express they encountered Eric Maclagan, Bernard's old friend from the Victoria and Albert Museum. It was a fortunate meeting, for Maclagan, like Bernard, was a devoted Byzantinist and an ideal companion for visits to the Istanbul mosques. In Santa Sophia the two men, freed of their shoes, reposed in a corner, Bernard "quivering with nervous energy," while the faithful, summoned by the muezzin, knelt under the great cupola and recited their prayers to Allah. T o Henry Coster Berenson wrote that Santa Sophia "is . . . perhaps the most sumptuous building interior I have ever seen. But as a space-effect several mosques of Sinan [sixteenth-century Ottoman architect] and his pupils here and in Adrianople seem far more successful." A creature of habit, Berenson tried to follow his I Tatti routine when he traveled. In the morning in Istanbul he read until time to dress and go out. He returned at one and lunched, napped until three, went out again, and came back exhausted late in the afternoon to read in bed. Dinners were followed by reading aloud, a role that usually fell to Nicky. But for

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ten days Maclagan read from Gibbon to recapture the ancient background. T o Berenson's surprise Gibbon, "the old periwig," struck him this time as "at once too smart, too monotonous, and too mannered," though he still thought his narrative hypnotic. In Istanbul change was everywhere apparent. Under Ataturk a Westernizing social revolution had been initiated in the new republic of Turkey: the Roman alphabet had replaced the Arabic, the fez had become illegal, and the law establishing Islam as the official religion had been revoked. The thronged streets of the city presented a motley spectacle, for the new requirement of European dress had to be met with hurried supplies of secondhand clothes from Europe, often ill matched and ill fitting. The men's caps were worn reversed so that the forehead could touch the ground in prayers. Berenson struck up a cordial friendship with Theron Damon, who was a brother-in-law of the president of Roberts College, and Damon accompanied them on many of their expeditions. Joseph Grew, the American ambassador at the time, with w h o m Berenson had become acquainted at the Paris Peace Conference, was on the point of leaving the city but arranged for the loan of his steam launch to the party for a trip up the Bosporus. With the young Turkish art historian Aga Oglu, the Berenson party crossed to Asia Minor to explore the beginnings of Turkish architecture at Konia in Anatolia, the ancient capital of the Seljuk sultans. The sight of the mosques with their floating domes high overhead recalled to Berenson his early admiration of the Italian Renaissance churches, which had not been deformed by the introduction of the long Gothic nave. Here to his "delight and surprise" he found "the Renaissance ideal realized in a completeness that Brunelleschi and Bramante never imagined." It was the visits to the great mosques that gave him the most satisfying hours. " I shall always see Bernard," Mary wrote to his mother, "his hands clasped tight, stealing round from one pillar to another gazing up in rapture at the cupolaed ceilings of these mosques, quivering with j o y . " The return to Florence was made in slow stages by way of Athens and Salonica and, after crossing the Adriatic, a stopover at Forli to dine with the lovely Pellegrina, now the Marchesa Paulucci de Calboli and mistress of "a hundred-roomed palace." B y the end of November 1928 Bernard was back at his desk at I Tatti at work on the Lists. T o Billie Ivins he wrote, " I am fumbling about with photos and notes and catalogues. H o w long, Ο Lord, how long! Or secretly do I want the task to last forever because I enjoy it and because way down I fear I'm good for nothing else? M a y b e . " Earlier in the month Ivins had defended his interest in aesthetics, and Berenson had told him that when he was young he [371]

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too " a e s t h e t i c i z e d , " but n o w he thought that " w o r r y i n g about aesthetics and reading about it after thirty m a y be due to i m p o t e n c e . " O n c e past " p u b e r t y " people should "learn to modulate the w o r d s , l o o k , l o o k , l o o k ! ! ! " A n d as i f in obedience to his o w n injunction he had already b e g u n to plan an extended visit in the spring to Syria and the British mandate in Palestine to enlarge his vision o f the past. B e r e n s o n passed a restless w i n t e r at I Tatti sustained b y the prospect o f a tour in the spring a m o n g the ancient m o n u m e n t s o f Syria and Palestine, the tour he had had to cut short after his stay in E g y p t in 1 9 2 2 . Research w e n t f o r w a r d f o r the series on homeless paintings, and tinkering w i t h the revised Lists n e v e r let up. U r g e d b y the Y a l e U n i v e r s i t y Press to submit a b o o k f o r publication, he directed M a r y to hunt up his essays on medieval subjects and began readying them f o r publication in the v o l u m e Studies in Medieval Painting, w h i c h w a s issued the f o l l o w i n g year. T h e administration o f Princeton U n i v e r s i t y invited h i m to c o m e o v e r to receive an h o n o r a r y degree. It w a s a tempting o f f e r but B e r e n s o n , nearly s i x t y - f o u r and d o u b t f u l o f his health, recoiled f r o m the thought o f another strenuous transatlantic visit and declined the h o n o r . T h e d e v o t e d menage a trois sailed f o r B e i r u t aboard a ship captained b y a Z i o n i s t and transporting J e w s to Palestine, a circumstance that inevitab l y inspired discussion. T h e B e r e n s o n s ' attitude t o w a r d Z i o n i s m in those days b e f o r e Hitler w a s not sympathetic. M a r y , w h o used to dispute the subject w i t h Z a n g w i l l , pretty w e l l reflected B e r n a r d ' s v i e w o f the " h o m e l a n d " established b y the B a l f o u r Declaration: " I t seems a crazy idea to bring all these i n c o n g r u o u s people to this barren land already inhabited b y hostile A r a b s . " B e r n a r d had been t h o r o u g h l y briefed earlier o n the complexities o f the question b y R o b e r t G r e g and R o n a l d Storrs, both o f w h o m tended to be sympathetic to the A r a b s . T h e B e r e n s o n party arrived at B e i r u t o n A p r i l 3, 1929, and w e r e entertained at lunch b y the French high c o m m i s s i o n e r . F o u r days later, j o i n e d at H a i f a b y M r s . M a r g a r e t C h a n l e r and her c o m p a n i o n B a r b a r a Parrott, they started f o r J e r u s a l e m w i t h " a w h o l e trunkful o f b o o k s " o n the H o l y L a n d — a t r u n k f u l soon to be supplemented b y a large b o x o f b o o k s to a c c o m p a n y t h e m o n their trip into Syria. In J e r u s a l e m , their center f o r visits to archaeological and historical sites, a friend o f B e r e n s o n ' s , " a n A n g l i c i z e d L e v a n t i n e , " b r o u g h t them an invitation to visit the G r a n d M u f t i and to spend an afternoon on the terrace o f the great M o s q u e o f O m a r , the D o m e o f the R o c k . E s c o r t e d b y P r o f e s s o r B a l d i o f the Institute f o r Biblical Studies, they w e r e s h o w n s o m e o f the structures not open to the public. T h e n the G r a n d M u f t i and his suite all in turbans and robes came to meet them in the gardens o f his

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palace. The exotic scene in the westering sunlight reminded Mrs. Chanler of a Carpaccio painting. The sight of the old Jews in their long prayer shawls at the Wailing Wall on the Sabbath seemed to move Berenson deeply, as if carrying him back in sentimental memory more than half a century to his childhood in Lithuania, where on Y o m Kippur he heard the pious cry out, " N e x t year in Jerusalem!" At Hebron, however, the "fearful noise" of the Jews at the wailing wall made him "quite sick at the sight." At the Christian shrines Mary offended Nicky, a rather devout Catholic, by scorning what she called the "pagan forms of worship" in which the faithful kissed sacred stones and venerated relics. T o Nicky they were "childlike and touching manifestations of faith." A t the Blue Mosque, Mary, impartial in her skepticism, reflected, " T h e people I care about do not prostrate themselves in that absurd and revolting attitude with their foreheads on the floor and the less honored part of their persons sticking u p . " They left Tiberias for Damascus on April 26, and by May 3 Berenson was "fairly aching with fatigue" from his industrious visits to the mosques. T o Mary he defended his zeal by saying, " I may never be in Damascus again. I must see all I can." While she rested, he and Nicky accompanied a French architect to see what Mary scoffed at as "some more filthy monuments," resentful of the fascination that they held for Bernard and Nicky. From Damascus they all motored across the trackless desert 150 miles to the oasis of Palmyra, keeping their course by the line of sight of the French watchtowers stationed at long intervals in the desert. Fascinated by the immense complex of ruins, many still awaiting excavation, they took their afternoon tea on the steps of a marble mausoleum and beguiled themselves with the fancy that here a "second Cleopatra," Zenobia, daughter of Antiochus, had once reigned as queen of Palmyra. At a spring outside Palmyra they were amazed to see tens of thousands of camels being watered in orderly fashion on their way to summer pasture. After Mrs. Chanler was obliged to leave for Paris, the Berenson party continued their search for ancient architecture at Antioch, Aleppo, Baalbek, and Kalat-Seman, not reaching Alexandria for the return to Florence until June 1. Berenson arrived at I Tatti "all but broken d o w n , " he reported to Charles Du Bos, "with endless arrears of work, correspondence, and semiprofessional reading." Du Bos's recently published Journal, so rich in literary associations, filled him with regret, he said, for a career " f o r which I still believe I was more fitted than the one I have actually pursued."

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H E Duveen firm continued anxiously to await the publication o f the Lists, for they would record the fortunate collectors who had JL acquired Italian paintings through the firm and add importantly to its prestige. T o Fowles's urgent inquiry o f progress, however, Berenson replied discouragingly a few weeks before leaving for the Holy Land, " M y Lists are far from ready. . . . As a matter o f fact, I expect that even a year hence it will not be too late to admit corrections, and I fervently hope that by that time most o f the Benson pictures and those o f the previous stocks will be tucked away in bona fide collections." There remained in fact a great deal to do on the revision. The fifteenth-century Venetians lay ahead, a task on which Nicky collaborated until mid-July, after their return, while Mary, much to Bernard's relief, was happily dictating the draft o f a book on their recent travels to her new secretary, the young art historian Evelyn Sandberg Vavalä. While Berenson worked away on the Lists, the flow o f inquiries from Fowles continued to distract him with calls upon half-buried recollections o f paintings. Although in his recommendations to the Duveens he more often than not was positive in his acceptance or rejection o f a suggested painter, his decision sometimes was conditional on further study or was left hovering on a borderline. In one such case, however, he was prepared to give the firm the benefit o f the doubt. Fowles had asked him about a reputed Titian, and Berenson replied that he was "not completely convinced it was an autograph," although he "could in conscience now pass it i f need were. But I am not enthusiastic about it. It may be a studio version." When thus put on notice o f Berenson's doubts, Fowles would usually drop the matter. T o Fowles and J o e Duveen, in need o f an unequivocal attribution, Berenson's doubts were annoying. Thus Fowles could write in frustration, [374]

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" O n l y when w e have your latest opinion can we decide whether to buy." One of the most exciting of Fowles's inquiries came in the summer of 1929. He sent a Lumiere Autochrome color photograph of what appeared to be an extraordinary find, the Madonna of Humility by Masaccio, the painter most noted for his realistic frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence and regarded with Giotto as a founder of Italian Renaissance painting. " I am glad you think well of it," Fowles had written, "but I am afraid it will be difficult to make such people as [Mellon] understand its importance." Berenson was so excited by the find that he agreed to publish the painting in Art in America even though it was still in a dealer's hands. " I am so eager to communicate to fellow students the discovery of a Madonna hitherto unknown but manifestly by Masaccio," ran the opening line of the short article, "that I do not hesitate to break the rule of a lifetime." The full-page frontispiece illustration of the painting bore beneath it "Messrs. Duveen Brothers." The discovery was to have a confused sequel. In the flush of discovery Berenson thought the attribution so selfevident that it needed no detailed analysis, confident that " n o one will dispute either the quality of the Madonna here published for the first time, nor its attribution." He included in the article three full-page illustrations of other Madonnas ascribed to Masaccio to illustrate the common origin of the four paintings. The colors of the newly discovered painting were, he admitted, " f o r Masaccio unusually bright and even g a y . " The discovery seemed to demand more than the usual hyperbole. "Here was something," he exclaimed, "which, in essence, was without equivalent since the builders of the Pyramids and the sculptors of the Chephren." When the article was submitted to Sherman for Art in America by Duveen, who had brought it from England, Sherman at first refused publication, explaining that he shared Berenson's objection to publishing pictures in the possession of dealers. In December Belle Greene wrote that she was "finally able to bring Sir Joseph and that awful Sherman together in the publication of your article." (It came out in the February 1930 issue.) She confessed, however, that she had told both Duveen and Sherman that she thought Berenson's "eulogy of Sir Joseph silly and boomerangish." The offending " e u l o g y " declared that if similar rarefies appeared, he would not hesitate to "publish them even if they were in less magnificent keeping than the hands of Messrs. Duveen Brothers." Joe assured her that she was "mistaken as it came spontaneously from [Berenson's] heart." It did prove difficult to convince Mellon of the painting's importance, [375]

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and the Mellon Foundation did not acquire it until 1937. In his Lists Berenson held to his scruple about not including dealers' stocks. The painting did not receive listing until the posthumous volume of 1963, by which time it had long been identified as a Masaccio at the National Gallery in Washington. The picture has turned out to be one of the most puzzling of Mellon's acquisitions. The painting Berenson saw reproduced in the color photograph had in fact been heavily restored for the Duveen firm but so skillfully that Berenson was evidently unaware from the color photo of the extent of the restoration. His attribution to Masaccio, according to the learned discussion in the 1979 Shapley catalogue, was accepted by many scholars during the next decade. In the meantime, while the painting was still unsold it was subjected to further restoration, apparently to give the " t w o figures more Masaccio-like expressions." The result was a botched work of art, and because of the excessive overpainting the picture was finally relegated to storage to await proper cleaning. What has deepened the mystification surrounding the painting has been the discovery in the Duveen files of three photographs of details of the picture after cleaning and before the first Duveen restoration. The photographs show "extensive abrasion and, in places, complete loss of pigment." Enough of the original was visible, however, to persuade Sir John Pope-Hennessy of Masaccio's "hand in the painting." Philip Hendy considered the "ruined" picture authentic and dated it before 1426. The National Gallery of Art now lists the painting as "Attributed to Masac»»

cio. That the tide had set in against extensive restoration was demonstrated at the close of 1929 by a long letter in the Times from Ettore Modigliani, director of the Brera Museum, concerning an exhibition of Italian paintings at Burlington House, in which he scored the "incredible" alterations to which Renaissance paintings had been subjected by maladroit restorers. " T o d a y , " he said, "restoration does not go beyond repairing the actual damage . . . in the background or less important parts of a picture." The Times illustrated his point with a few before-and-after photographs of paintings in the exhibition. It was with reason, therefore, that Fowles wrote to Berenson, "We find today we have to be more and more careful about restoration which I am sure you will agree." Berenson agreed so thoroughly that some months later, when he criticized as hasty and excessive the restorations of a Pesellino, a Botticelli, and a Ghirlandaio, Fowles wrote that the firm was "very upset by B . B . ' s adverse opinion." Madame Heifer had "not been hurried by Sir Joseph in any way. . . . T o the Pesellino and small Ghirlandaio very little was done, with the exception of carefully touching out the bare spots. The [376]

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Botticelli 'Madonna' was a more serious work as the dark blue drapery was in bad condition and folds had to be reconstituted. For this work w e supplied Madame Heifer with all the photographs we could find suitable." IN MIDSUMMER of 1929 Nicky left for a holiday in England with her young nephew, Cecil, stopping off at Cologne to order photographs. Mary soon followed her to England, leaving Bernard up at Consuma, where he entertained "curious Americans, particularly of the seed of Abraham," who approached him as if he were "a miracle-working rabbi of Galicia." The visit of the young art historian Rensselaer Lee made him feel that "one could address one's whole self to him," and Berenson urged him to write of the revival of the taste for the primitifs. Walter Muir Whitehill, another American student who came by for advice, was in the middle of writing his thesis at the Courtauld Institute in London on eleventh-century Spanish architecture. Subsequently he became a muchadmired figure in the cultural life of Boston as director of the Boston Athenaeum and he was a welcome visitor over the years at I Tatti. While Berenson relaxed on the mountain heights at Poggio alio Spino during August, the prospect of endless affluence never seemed brighter. Fowles sent him a gratifying report of the state of his account with the firm. In addition to his retainer of £5,000 due on July 3 1 , the firm owed him £10,000 as a fee on the purchase of thirteen paintings bought since the first of the year. As another £10,000 was already owing, the total for the year was £25,000. Half was to be paid immediately to Baring Brothers and the remainder in October, the firm being "very short at the present moment on account of recent purchases." Welcome word had also come that the Clarendon Press had decided to bring out a popular single-volume edition of his four books on the Italian Renaissance painters to be issued before the planned edition of the revised Lists, and he was asked to supply a revised text immediately. He went to work at once at I Tatti. Though the changes were slight, he found the review " a difficult and painful task." " T h e man who wrote those little volumes," he reflected, "should not have let himself be led astray into picture fancying and expertising. He should have gone on to write the aesthetics and history of all humanistic art. That and that only would have meant success." N o regret rose to the surface more frequently— and vainly—than that one. Preparing the text of The Italian Painters proceeded much more rapidly than Berenson had expected, as had the collecting of the essays for his Yale Studies in Medieval Painting. With both works dispatched to the printers, he went off in mid-September to a holiday at Hyeres that was [377]

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spoiled s o m e w h a t b y an annoying hoax at the villa o f Charles de Noailles adjoining Edith W h a r t o n ' s place. His y o u n g fellow guests on the occasion w e r e Jean C o c t e a u and Georges Riviere. T h e de Noailles had h u n g a w o r k o n the sitting r o o m wall w h i c h they said had been created b y Picasso. Bernard indignantly described it to M a r y , w h o was still in E n gland: " T h i s masterpiece consisted o f a surface about the size and shape o f the L o n d o n Times. N o t too far f r o m the top was a circle o f sepia about five inches in diameter. U n d e r it to the left was a c o l u m n o f small print as if it had been photographed f r o m a newspaper. T o balance this there was fixed w i t h thin headless nails a piece o f ordinary b r o w n sacking. C o c t e a u insisted that this was as complete and satisfactory a w o r k o f art as any Raphael. . . . I tried to m a k e h i m consider the matter in detail and w i t h the least possible irony. It infuriated h i m but he kept pouring out lava torrents o f sheer verbiage that physically o v e r w h e l m e d me. . . . Riviere agreed entirely w i t h C o c t e a u . . . . I had never before been treated as such an o u t s i d e r . " Robert N o r t o n , a fellow guest at Edith Wharton's, tried to persuade h i m that it w a s all a h o a x — a s in fact it w a s — b u t Berenson w o u l d not be convinced. W h e n he later visited the de Noailles, his hostess said she had hidden the " P i c a s s o " and w o u l d not expose it again to his " i n s u l t i n g " eyes. T h e crude m o n t a g e had been made b y Cocteau, w h o resented Berenson's scorn o f abstract painting, and the conspirators had played their roles to the hilt. A f t e r a w e e k at Hyeres Berenson departed for Spain in the c o m p a n y o f M a r y , N i c k y , and C o u n t M o r r a to take up the hunt for candidates for his Lists. T h e m o m e n t they reached Madrid he was o f f to the Prado, carrying his old notes w i t h h i m to compare present impressions w i t h previous ones. Learning o f Italianate paintings in the cathedral at Cuenca to the east o f Madrid, he spent t w o mornings studying them w i t h the aid o f ladders, candles, and a m a g n i f y i n g glass. T h e y w e r e the w o r k o f Ferrando Llanos and Ferrando Y a n e z de la Almedina, w h o , he concluded, w e r e pupils and close f o l l o w e r s o f Leonardo, and he added them to the Lists. M a r y i n f o r m e d her family that he w a s enjoying himself so m u c h that he " f o r g e t s that I ruined his l i f e . " A f t e r M a d r i d the Berenson " c a r a v a n " traveled about f r o m T o l e d o , reaching Valencia, the "Iberian C h i c a g o , " t o w a r d the end o f N o v e m b e r for the International Exposition, their e n j o y m e n t o f it considerably marred w h e n they all fell wretchedly ill. A g a i n Berenson returned to Edith W h a r t o n ' s sheltering r o o f for the Christmas holidays to await the departure o f M a r y ' s numerous family f r o m I Tatti. H e planned to arrive in Florence on January 12, the day M a r y ' s high-spirited grandchildren w e r e to leave. [378]

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Edith Wharton surrendered her guest to the solicitous care of N i c k y , and the t w o travelers got back by mid-January 1930 to an I Tatti purified of children and grandchildren. T h e y found M a r y happily engrossed in the manuscript of her book on their pilgrimage to the H o l y Land, relieved at sixty-six to "shuffle o f f on N i c k y " the exacting w o r k on the Lists. Unlike her, she said, N i c k y was "extremely accurate and painstaki n g . " Rachel, w h o with her husband was visiting Bernard, wrote her mother that N i c k y was " s o merry and warm-hearted and hard working, I pray that B . B . may never have to live without h e r . " N o w thoroughly immersed with Berenson in the Lists, N i c k y turned over her j o b as librarian to her sister, Alda. Hospitable to friends and foreign visitors, if not to Italian residents of Florence, Berenson kept open house so that luncheon, tea time, and dinner broke the day's w o r k with the kind of intellectual talk he craved. One day Count Morra, w h o was n o w like a member of the family, brought up an engaging young friend of his w h o had recently published at the age of twenty-two a highly successful first novel, Gli Indifferenti, under the pseudonym of Alberto Moravia, having prudently abandoned the unmanageable Pincherle Alberto di Carlo e di Teresa de Marsanich. T o the Berensons he seemed a precocious boy. Soon he was turning up "almost every day at teatime . . . an amusing mixture, so mature and yet such a child and so straightforward and passionate in his opinions and ideas." Berenson was so delighted with him that by the end of the year he said he felt "almost as if Moravia was his o w n godchild." He "lacks a sense of h u m o r , " Berenson remarked to Morra, "but instead possesses in the highest degree a sense of the absurdity of things. . . . He perceives reality clearly, and more than anyone else is capable of indignation . . . like a Hebrew prophet—a rare thing in Italy." The spring months of 1930 had brought the usual varied succession of guests in addition to such regular habitues as Logan and T r e v y . There had been the poet laureate J o h n Masefield and the Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, w h o was on his w a y to a conference with Mussolini about the Italian loans. The financial outlook had become uncertain since the disastrous crash of the stock market on " B l a c k Friday" in October. Like President Hoover, Lamont remained optimistic of recovery and no doubt reassured Berenson that his American investments were not in danger. T h e very ominous implications o f the crash seem not to have been sensed. Fowles had written t w o months after the crash, " I suppose the slump on Wall Street has somewhat adversely affected business." Billie Ivins, already white-haired at forty-nine, put in an appearance, only to be lectured b y Berenson on his adolescent and even "pubescent" ideas on aesthetics. T h e best writer on the subject, Santayana, knew [379]

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as m u c h about the matter, B e r e n s o n insisted, " a s o u r ancestors k n e w about the heart o f A f r i c a w h e n it w a s u n c h a r t e d . " Ivins delighted to match heresy w i t h heresy; to the d i s m a y o f his associates at the M e t r o politan M u s e u m he ridiculed the V e n u s o f M i l o as " t h e final e p i t o m e o f all the D u m b Doras—utterly devoid o f thought, emotion, and expression." Guests at the B e r e n s o n table w e r e sometimes trapped in a " G ö t t e r d ä m m e r u n g o f l a n g u a g e s . " O n one occasion the Countess L ü t z o w b r o u g h t the Duchess o f B e a u f o r t and an E n g l i s h friend; they w e r e j o i n e d b y Friedrich Sarre, the G e r m a n m u s e u m curator, and Eustache de L o r e y , the French archaeologist. Sarre k n e w no E n g l i s h and his French w a s as " r o c k y " as M a r y ' s . D e L o r e y spoke no G e r m a n . M a r y rescued the t w o m e n b y taking them o f f to admire B e r n a r d ' s Persian manuscripts m o r e or less in silence. H a r v a r d f o l k w e r e a l w a y s especially w e l c o m e . With P r o f e s s o r G e o r g e H . E d g e l l , then dean o f the S c h o o l o f Architecture, B e r e n s o n could talk o f his plans f o r the I Tatti Institute, w h i c h w a s n o w a subject f o r earnest discussion at the F o g g M u s e u m . It w a s a subject to be discussed also w i t h his cousin L a w r e n c e B e r e n s o n , w h o s e pretty w i f e mitigated f o r M a r y his ardent support o f Z i o n i s m . L a w r e n c e passionately opposed intermarriage, but as he talked o f it w i t h o u t unpleasantness, neither B e r n a r d n o r M a r y protested. Louis L e v y came d o w n to Florence to discuss s o m e o f the c o m p l i c a tions arising f r o m the n e w contract. What w a s o f equal concern to B e r enson w a s the fate o f the large investments L e v y had m a d e f o r him. L e v y tried to assure h i m that they had not been seriously affected b y the panic. B e r e n s o n had not l o o k e d f o r w a r d to L e v y ' s visit. " H e represents b u s i ness and I hate b u s i n e s s , " he w r o t e to N i c k y . " H e w o r s h i p s success and I loathe it. H e entertains e v e r y standard w h i c h displeases m e and enjoys e v e r y prospect w h i c h to m e is vile. H o w e v e r , as he is a bourgeois utile I must m a k e the s u p r e m e s a c r i f i c e . " T h e chief hitch w h i c h had arisen w a s o v e r the settlement o f arrears under the old contract. T h e discussions developed a confusing wilderness o f figures w h i c h led B e r e n s o n to send o f f a long letter to Sir J o s e p h telling o f his shock at learning that instead o f the £ 2 5 , 0 0 0 w h i c h he w a s to receive f o r " a r r e a r a g e s , " the f i r m w i s h e d to deduct £ 7 , 0 0 0 f o r losses. O n c e again he reminded D u v e e n that this sort o f thing w a s a great drain on his intellectual resources, " s e r v i n g in s o m e degree to impair m y m e n tal activities." T h e f i r m ' s delays in carrying out the settlement particularly distressed h i m because they endangered the plan " t o w a r d s w h i c h m y life's a m b i t i o n drives m e and to w h i c h all m y earnings w i l l be dev o t e d . . . to e n d o w m y institution f o r the perpetuation o f scientific and cultivated art s t u d y . " [380]

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B e r n a r d deputized M a r y to meet w i t h L e v y and D u v e e n later in the s u m m e r in Paris to settle up the " D u v e e n b u s i n e s s . " She told N i c k y she w a s " a w f u l l y glad to help B . B . recover his peace o f m i n d , " t h o u g h she disliked the t h o u g h t that " B . B . is to hoard it all up f o r future y a h o o s to c o m e to I T a t t i . " L e v y f o l l o w e d the meeting w i t h M a r y w i t h a d o c u ment to " M y dear J o e " o f m o r e than ten typewritten legal cap pages, generally sympathetic to B e r e n s o n , r e v i e w i n g in detail the state o f accounts. H e also presented the request B e r e n s o n had made f o r additional compensation f o r his admittedly important role in cultivating Jules B a c h e . S o taken to task, Sir J o s e p h d i s g o r g e d £8,000 on the arrears and g a v e his usual assurances f o r the future. T h e sessions in Paris in w h i c h there w a s such tantalizing talk o f the m a n y thousands o f pounds o w e d to B e r n a r d r e v i v e d M a r y ' s sense o f grievance. F r o m H a s l e m e r e she unburdened herself to N i c k y : " W h e n a m a n and a w o m a n h a v e both w o r k e d up to the limit o f their abilities, the r e w a r d s o f their labor should be divided b e t w e e n them, and not c o m e as a l a r g e s s e . " She felt that f o r m a n y years B e r n a r d had cruelly humiliated her " e v e r y time he g a v e the a l l o w a n c e " to her daughters. T h e upshot o f her l o n g and painful recital w a s the suggestion that if B e r n a r d w e r e to put ten thousand lire to her account, it w o u l d raise her income to " s o m e thing o v e r t w o thousand p o u n d s " and she, f o r her part, " w o u l d cease m a k i n g a n y fuss, and you w o u l d not be bothered any more. I should pay e v e r y t h i n g connected w i t h the children, outside o f his yearly a l l o w a n c e " to them. In an emotional f o l l o w - u p letter to N i c k y she protested, " S h o u l d I have w o r k e d and toiled to have a c r o w d o f A m e r i c a n h o o d lums get m o r e a y e a r than the beings I l o v e ? . . . See if y o u can f i x it u p . " S i x w e e k s after the meeting in Paris L e v y sent B e r e n s o n a statement o f securities held in his account. T h e stocks and bonds w h i c h had been purchased f o r $ 4 5 8 , 0 0 0 n o w had a market value o f about $ 3 2 5 , 0 0 0 . T h e decline in the market value o f B e r e n s o n ' s investments, h o w e v e r , had only b e g u n . B y the a u t u m n o f 1 9 3 2 , w h i l e President H o o v e r still hoped f o r prosperity " r o u n d the c o r n e r , " the securities w o u l d fall to one-third and even o n e - f o u r t h their cost. T h e long and successful climb back f r o m the depths o f the D e p r e s s i o n w o u l d not begin until the a u t u m n o f 1 9 3 3 . B y the end o f the s u m m e r o f 1 9 3 0 B e r e n s o n had got the thousands o f entries in his Lists into almost final f o r m . T h e arrival o f Edith Wharton at I Tatti o f f e r e d a respite f r o m minutiae and o f f he sallied w i t h her and N i c k y to m a k e a r o u n d o f visits in T u s c a n y and to exhibit its picturesque landscapes. T h e y called on L a d y Sybil's brilliant daughter, Iris, at La Foce, w h e r e she and her husband, M a r c h e s e A n t o n i o O r i g o , w e r e creating an i m p r e s s i v e estate in a r u n - d o w n region. A s a child in the s h a d o w o f her m o t h e r she had felt shy b e f o r e Berenson. N o w a y o u n g m a t r o n [381]

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and a gifted writer, she was on the way to becoming one of his most perceptive friends. At Count Morra's villa near Cortona they encountered Moravia and the Kenneth Clarks. Jane Clark looked so ill that Berenson invited the Clarks to I Tatti for a rest. Logan, the most regular of annual guests, looked on with amused detachment at the transplanted version of English country house at the villa as if it all might be subject for another volume of his Trivia. " I find it very pleasant here," he wrote to his secretary, Robert Gathorne-Hardy, "in the luxury and splendor of this great Italian villa. Mrs. Wharton is here, and Santayana nearby. We are a little group of not unsuccessful people; old and ill and gay and disenchanted, and our tongues wag as freely I think as any tongues in Europe. The long perspective of elderly people, their wealth of ironic reflections and observations and improper anecdotes does much to compensate them—does indeed, I believe, more than compensate them for the loss of youth and the injuries of time." Before the end of the year the Clarendon Press brought out The Italian Painters of the Renaissance to a flattering reception, all reviewers agreeing on Berenson's preeminence as a connoisseur. As the Nation and Athenaeum put it, "Attributions signed by him are attached to pictures in American collections like the Papal seals which guarantee the authenticity of relics." The universal admiration this edition received is reflected in its translation into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Flemish, Dutch, and Japanese. In the same year that The Italian Painters appeared, the Yale and O x ford University presses issued Studies in Medieval Painting, a handsome quarto volume with 168 illustrations which brought together eight articles originally published between 1 9 1 3 and 1925. The preface reiterated Berenson's thesis that research "proceeds by trial and error and must guard against any assumption of infallibility." Commentaries were supplied to two of the essays. T o " A N e w l y Discovered Cimabue," Berenson added that after its publication Edward Fowles had discovered that Carl Hamilton's triptych formed part of a polyptych of the Artaud de Montor Collection, and though he did not mention that Richard Offner had questioned the Cimabue attribution, he suggested that Pietro Toesca's recent discussion of Giotto in his Storia dell'Arte in Italia provided "hints" which, " i f they were taken u p , " would confirm his attribution. T o the essay dealing with the triptych attributed to Allegretto Nuzi and formerly owned by Carl Hamilton, he offered "a few additions to the early phase of Nuzi's career." Like the " C i m a b u e , " this painting went back to the Duveens and was acquired by Mellon in 1937. In Berenson's posthumous List only the left panel is attributed to Nuzi. The other

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panels, according to the Shapley catalogue, are the work of his collaborator Puccio di Simone. The Studies in Medieval Painting tended to put its reviewers on their mettle. Frank Jewett Mather, J r . , conceded that the essays left their subjects in better order than they were before, and he praised the essay on the Speculum Humanae Sahationis as a "thrilling feat of detective w o r k , " but he disputed the Constantinople origin of the Hamilton and Kahn Byzantine Madonnas, arguing they were indisputably of Italian origin. Edward Jewell in the New York Times agreed with Mather about the Madonnas but concluded that what mattered most was "Berenson's delightful enthusiasm." Roger Fry thought the article on Nuzi "valuable and interesting," but he considered Berenson's conclusions in the other pieces improbable and declared, with irritating condescension, that it was an "ungrateful task" to show the deformation caused by the "provincial isolation" of the Speculum. The reviewer in the International Studio was unreservedly enthusiastic. He praised Berenson's "extraordinary ability to develop even in reference to very second-rate pictures both his archaeological and critical technique," and then went on to observe shrewdly that "one problem in the criticism of art interests Mr; Berenson beyond all others: The decline and recovery of form in the art of visual representation." Berenson must have welcomed that critical perception, for that theme had been sounded by him as far back as 1907 in the conclusion of The North Italian Painters and it underlay his increasing interest in the art history of Mediterranean cultures. A dozen years later it would find expression in The Arch of Constantine, or the Decline of Form.

[383]

XXXVIII

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TJewOisciple

A T E in the autumn of 1930 there came to I Tatti a young man of twenty-four whose presence would entirely reconcile Berenson to the loss of Kenneth Clark. He was, as Mary described him, a "nice new 'disciple,'John Walker, from Pittsburgh and Harvard." In his memoir, Self-Portrait with Donors, Walker has told how the warmth of Nicky's greeting in the intimidating atmosphere of I Tatti gave him the courage to stay. Walker had made a brilliant record as a student in the fine arts department at Harvard, where he had worked with Kingsley Porter and George Harold Edgell. He had recently received his degree and in company with Lincoln Kirstein and Edward Warburg had run a gallery in Harvard Square to exhibit contemporary art. Paul Sachs of the Fogg Museum strongly recommended him to Berenson. His "charming responsiveness and quick sense of humor" soon endeared him to Berenson, and it was not long before he would call him, like a proud father, "cherubino." His first meeting with Berenson, Walker recalled, was in the library at tea time. Berenson entered "with his quick light step. He was small, wiry, and bald, with a gray pointed beard and beautiful gray eyes." He was "fastidiously dressed as usual in gray, and he had his customary pink carnation in his buttonhole." One of the subjects that came up during the lively conversation was the American skyscraper. Walker vigorously argued that it was the "greatest artistic achievement of the twentieth century"; Berenson insisted that "the towers of San Gimignano gave a more impressive effect of mass and volume than the tallest skyscraper in N e w Y o r k " because there was nothing to give the N e w York buildings scale. T o Walker, who had just been to San Gimignano, the remark came as a revelation, and his courteous agreement "cemented" their friendly

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acquaintance. Berenson loved "a discussion which ended in agreement," as Walker discovered—"agreement that he was right." John Walker, like Kenneth Clark, received no formal instruction from Berenson, but like Clark he achieved a "high level of scholarship" as a "pupil" inspired by Berenson's formidable example. Helped by Berenson's sponsorship, he would one day become director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, paralleling Clark's rise to the directorship of the National Gallery in London. Bernard promptly set him to work on the Lists, and, to educate his taste, Mary employed him to help her choose out "the beautiful pictures among the authentic ones" for a book that she projected on beautiful Italian paintings. Having put young Walker in harness, Berenson departed for the Capuan pleasures of Edith Wharton's villa on the Riviera, gratefully shepherded by Nicky. Cyril Connolly of the New Statesman and his wife, Jean, were in easy reach, as was the novelist Aldous Huxley and his wife, Maria, and both couples were among the guests at Edith's Lucullan dinners. T o Nicky, who returned to I Tatti to share Christmas with her family, Berenson recounted that for Edith's Christmas dinner "there was plum pudding, soupe a I'oignon and other dishes the mere sight of which affected my digestion. Edith and her three cavaliers sang the praise of good food and of the restaurants all over France. . . . I envied them. Why have I lacked the belly and members for a rich animal life?" The only other flaw was that Edith invariably grumbled "over poor B . B . ' s nap." In Bernard's absence Mary had the usual "splendid long visit" from her tribe over the holidays. One of their projects showed the wisdom of Bernard's absence: three of the younger children made a swimming pool of the upper bathroom and soon the water came cascading down the stairs and trickling through the ceiling. They then marched about the villa loudly counting the "Madonnas," locating fifty on one floor alone. With the Christmas festivities ended at I Tatti and the "barbarian" horde of young children returned to England after their aquatic misadventure, Berenson reappeared from Hyeres and, with the Lists substantially out of the way, plunged again into work on the Drawings, which he had put aside after Clark's departure. Walker was proving a resourceful and obliging assistant. Berenson's sister Senda arrived in January of 1931 looking " v e r y handsome in white hair and slender figure." Her husband had died the preceding March. Word of his death had come only a day after Bernard had sent $2,500 to meet medical bills and had offered whatever more might be needed. Sixty-one at the time, Senda was to survive Herbert by a quarter of a century, supported in comfort through the years by her brother Bernard.

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Senda found Mary diverting herself with her biography of Bernard, which so far consisted almost entirely of their early letters. For inspiration she had hung Rothenstein's idealized portrait of him in her bedroom. To Mary the writing was bittersweet nostalgia. She felt that in getting him to become a writer on art, she had done her "work too well." N o w he was "almost too pressed and preoccupied" to listen even to what she was writing about him. And he was "still goaded by the sense of all he wants to learn . . . before his eyes fail him. Time has now become his Arch Enemy—no quotation rises more frequently to his lips than Marvell's lines: 'At my back I ever heard Time's iron [winged] chariot hurrying near. If for the time Mary felt "emancipated" from stress and hurry by her illnesses, she owed much as well to Nicky's willingness to take over the myriad chores of running I Tatti and managing Bernard. Nicky's ambiguous situation must have tried all her diplomacy, for she was the close confidante of both Mary and Bernard. As intermediary and referee she helped keep the peace between them and balanced as well as she could their respective claims on her affections and loyalty. To Bernard she had become the all-important helpmate and the main object of his affections. When she was absent, their letters breathed romance. O f one of hers, "the most tender, the most loving and most convincing expression of affection," he told her, "I shall keep it with me as a talisman for the rest of my days and when I am no more you shall keep it and cherish it as the greatest of my treasures." Later that year when his attentions to Clotilde Marghieri became painfully obvious, he assured her that he and Clotilde wanted nothing more than to be "loving, loyal, mutually stimulating friends and that with your help we soon shall be, I hope. . . . I admit the possibility of a relapse but I don't think it will be anything like so serious as the last." Within a few months, as if to make amends for his air of cerebral detachment, he assured her in a prose echo of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "I do love you with every bit of reality, with every living truth, with every creative impulse, with every productive thought there is in me. I love your looks. . . . I love your devotion, I love your greatness. . . . In short I love you every which way I can." In her account of her forty years with Berenson, Nicky recalled that she had been "told about B.B.'s flirtatious, not to say amorous temperament." Toward the many women, young and old, who cast a spell over him for shorter or longer periods she finally learned, she said, to take an indulgent and often an amused view. When his "absorption" ended, he would leave it to her "to look after his neglected lady love." After his death she conscientiously filed his passionate missives in the I Tatti Archive. Hers to him, with equal scruple, took their place in the archive. [386]

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For him letters were the food of love—as well as of friendship—and nothing was more characteristic of his nature than his recurring plea to a correspondent to write regularly. Life in all of its fugitive vanishings could be caught on the point of a pen and its savor preserved to be relished again in tranquillity. A few months' close application to the revision of the Drawings revived Berenson's passion for travel. B y the end of March 1931 he was back in North Africa, accompanied by Mary and Nicky in the capacious Lancia, well stocked with books on the history and archaeology of Tunisia and Algeria. From Biskra he reported to Trevy, " W e are intoning [Flaubert's] Salambo, but it is as rich and potent as real turtle soup. . . . B y contrast, . . . how delightful and human and childlike and wise is dear old Plutarch, some of whose lives I have been reading here." It was a relief to escape from the incessant Fascist patrioteering in Florence and its lurking menace. In Timgad, he wrote Louis Gillet, he felt in "the presence of the Classical Antique almost as poignantly as in Athens itself, and far more than in Piedmontized Fascisticized Roma. . . . It is for the traces ofthat world . . . that I am exploring the shores of the Mediterranean." In central Tunisia he cheerfully put up with poor food and windowless cubicles in a primitive inn, his only complaint at breakfast that the handle of the milk jug was broken. At Kairouan the profusion of fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-century columns in the great mosque, wrenched from the Roman ruins, suggested to him that anciently the country had been prosperous. T o Henry Coster he conjectured, "It looks as if we shall have to re-write the history of those centuries in the teeth of lying Church Fathers and their parrot-like copyists." T o his royal friend in Sweden he told of the abundance of material for his special studies: " I do not mean Italian art, which in a sense is behind me, but the pathology of form which led from the Antique to the Medieval. Nowhere else does the disease begin so early. . . . Deformations, distortions of early Greek, of Punic, of Hellenistic and of so-called Roman tell the tale." Back in Italy they had a "splendid time" going to Cumae and to the spectacular Doric temples of the pre-Christian era at Paestum, which after two millennia had emerged out of vast mounds of wind-blown sand. Here, nostalgic for the ancient world, Berenson had before him some of its greatest marvels to kindle his historical imagination. In Rome they were joined by Walter Lippmann and his wife, and Roger Sessions, the apostle of music that made no "concessions to beauty," as one of Berenson's friends complained, turned up for tea. John Walker, studying in Rome, told him of his fears that his family meant to "stuff him in an office on a high stool." A few days later that fear was scotched when he learned that they had lost their money. He could therefore stay on at I [387]

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Tatti, and he remained there like a family member for three years. Kenneth Clark had already begun his meteoric rise in the art world with his appointment that year as keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Soon it was time to take refuge from the summer's heat in the heights at Poggio alio Spino, where Berenson, gratefully succumbing to a "vegetable" existence, was visited by Trevy, Morra, Maclagan, and the fascinating Clotilde. Mary took eager flight toward England. It was unfortunate, she lectured Bernard, that it was "only with our minds that w e grasp each other's primary emotions. Y o u have a label 'maternal affection' under which you class my otherwise inexplicable predilection for the society of young savages. I have another label (somewhat more sympathetic) under which I class Clotilde. Only I am glad about her, since she adds to your life, and you, I feel, are not at all glad about the things I care f o r . " Earlier in the summer Edward Fowles had written that Andrew Mellon, their "only client who is interested in Italian art," had been called to London by the German financial crisis and had brought with him his associate David Finley, a lawyer who was said to "take a very great interest in Italian art" and to be a "fervent admirer of B . B . ' s . " The fortyyear-old Finley planned to visit Florence on his honeymoon later in the summer. Duveen wrote a "glowing introduction" for him and asked especially that he be shown the Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel, "as we have one to place." Since Berenson regarded himself as "the worst showman," the task devolved upon Nicky and her sister while Berenson remained at Consuma. Berenson evidently met Finley during his visit and so won his confidence that Finley turned to him for advice when he became director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1938. Duveen's sanguine expectations for a great revival of the art trade had proved as illusory as the prophecies of returning prosperity that emanated from Washington and N e w York. In February of 1931 Fowles had reminded Berenson that "these are hard times" and "things are still very dead." As the year ran on, he reported that clients for Italian pictures were "practically zero." Berenson's semiannual retainer of £5,000 seemed secure, though the checks were becoming more and more difficult to extract. In July Berenson discussed with Mary the allowances to her daughters and concluded, " I am afraid I must reduce their allowances by half." She was relieved that "he hadn't cut them off altogether." Her cheerful acquiescence surprised him and, quick as always to suspect her motive, he wondered to Nicky whether she was keeping quiet about some windfall or whether the allowance that he made her was "so much more than she needs that the rest can go to her daughters." [388]

A NEW

DISCIPLE

There now came a development in the art world that seemed to hold out the promise of prestige and profit to Duveen Brothers and some measure of relief to Berenson from his worries about I Tatti's future, a promise that was to prove illusory. A fresh source of important artistic treasures appeared to open up. The Soviets, desperate to acquire foreign currency, had decided to sell off some of the paintings of the Hermitage Museum and other art treasures. The firms of Knoedler and Colnaghi in concert with the Matthiesen Gallery had begun to act in Mellon's behalf early in the preceding year. Belatedly J o e Duveen decided to enter the frantic competition, and he asked for advice on what the firm should buy. Berenson recommended twenty paintings from Peter von Weiner's German catalogue of the collection. The complicated negotiations among dealers and Soviet officials proved far more labyrinthine than Duveen had anticipated. As he moved deeper into the coil of intrigue in London and Berlin, he decided to travel to Russia with Fowles and Lowengard in August of 1931, accompanied by Nicolas Iljin, the director of the official Antiquariat. In spite of what seemed a cordial reception he returned empty-handed, the Soviets probably fearful of his "love of publicity," as John Walker surmised. O f the Italian paintings starred by Berenson for Duveen, Mellon had already acquired the Botticelli Adoration of the Magi, Raphael's Alba Madonna and Saint George and the Dragon, Titian's Venus with a Minor, and the Perugino Crucifixion. These were five of the twenty-one Hermitage masterpieces Mellon had succeeded in buying between June 1930 and April 1931 for $6,654,000, a "tremendous sum at the time" but afterward recognized as a great bargain. As Walker wrote, the exclusion of J o e Duveen was the "outstanding failure" of his career. For Berenson it meant a lowering of expectations. While Bernard loafed at the mountain pass, Mary broke her stay at Haslemere to confer in Paris with Joe Duveen and his associates over the vexing question of the firm's debts to Berenson. Ignorant of the financial upheaval that would take place in a few weeks, the parties to the conference—Mary, J o e Duveen, Armand Lowengard, Edward Fowles, and Louis Levy—arrived at an amicable settlement. The long-overdue balance on the sale of paintings from the abandoned " X " Book scheme would be lumped with the fees due on the subsequent purchases and a monthly payment of one or two thousand pounds would be made. Berenson had attributed and appraised the sixteen paintings of the Dreyfus Collection which J o e had purchased, and as the total valuation came to nearly £100,000, Berenson had set his fee at £10,000, the 10 percent specified under the contract. J o e insisted on halving it, and Mary urged (as Levy advised) that he agree. [389]

BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

The conference seemed to proceed smoothly. Joe, "cordial and caressing" as usual, said Italian paintings were still "his great card and he needed thee more than ever." He declared that the "£10,000 retainer was the safest investment w e ever made, that it was sure even if he did not sell another Italian for years." He was "full of hope for the future," Mary wrote, "so, I think, we need not w o r r y . " Three weeks later the Bank of England suspended payment in gold, setting off an immediate devaluation of the currency and sending shock waves throughout the world's financial markets. It could be only a matter of time before all other currencies must follow suit. The hopeful settlement with the Duveens became an early casualty. Since most of the money the Berensons lived on was held at Baring Brothers in English pounds, their income dropped by a quarter with the fall of the pound. As for their American investments, the accelerating depression meant the reduction of dividends. It looked as if they would have to get by on onethird of their former outlay. They would have to dismiss the butler and one of the gardeners, Mary informed Bernard's mother, and entertain less. Bernard wrote his brother, Abie, that he had had very serious losses and expected more and was therefore hurrying off a check "that would provide Blessed Mother with a maid for six months more." Again at his desk in October he felt overcome by lassitude as he tried to force himself to prepare an essay on Signorelli and a catalogue of his drawings. His efforts seemed in vain; he could "get up no steam," he told Billie Ivins, but habit at last asserted itself and the thirty-seven-page article on Signorelli's drawings took shape and was published the following spring of 1932 in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. It would eventually find its place in the revised edition of the Florentine Drawings with the explanation that the omission of Signorelli from the original edition was the result of his having taken "too regional a view of art history." One of the more engaging aspects of Berenson's nature was his interest in fostering young talents. At this period he became interested in M a x Ascoli, a young professor of jurisprudence, who like Salvemini had been an outspoken critic of fascism. His writings had been banned and he too had been imprisoned for a short time. When, under constant police surveillance, he decided to seek asylum in America, Berenson gave him an introduction to Judge Learned Hand, who reported a favorable impression of him though not of his mastery of English. Whatever Ascoli's shortcomings in English may have been, he quickly overcame them. T w o years after his arrival in N e w York he joined the graduate faculty of the N e w School for Social Research, and soon he was publishing his idealistic views.of the possibilities of American democracy. Later

[390]

A NEW

DISCIPLE

he became editor and publisher of The Reporter. He kept in friendly touch with Berenson for the next quarter century. Mary had been ill a good deal of time since her return to I Tatti, and in October 1931 she underwent surgery in the hope of putting an end to her chronically painful cystitis. As she now seemed convalescent in her wheelchair, Bernard sought his regular asylum from the Christmas ritual. Long-familiar companions converged on Edith Wharton's retreat—Robert Norton, diplomat, poet, and painter; Gaillard Lapsley, an American medievalist and Cambridge don; and John Hugh Smith, a cultivated English banker. "We tell stories," Berenson recounted to Ivins, " w e discuss books and politics or people, we walk a good deal and in the evening we read aloud together. There is no such company as three men with one woman w h o m they all love without having been or wanting to be her lovers." T o Mary he added a less flattering detail: " W e wrangle, we disagree." He was immensely comfortable in Edith's "paradise." " I have often reproached myself," he continued, " f o r making more fuss over Edith than over other guests. I gather from Elizabeth [the maid] that she in turn is the same over m e . " Berenson seemed somehow to thrive even though beneath all, as he wrote from Hyeres, the "Economic Black Death" was raging. So far, however, he had no cause for serious alarm. Levy had written that he had let go most of the stocks in Berenson's portfolio and had accumulated "a large cash balance with a few of the best securities still held." But in spite of the reassuring statements emanating from the White House, the financial outlook grew steadily grimmer. In March of 1932 came the news that Ivar Kreuger, the highly regarded Swedish "Match K i n g , " had committed suicide in his Paris hotel after returning empty-handed from his consultations with American bankers for money to save his tottering Kreuger-Toll Company. The falling of financial dominoes began with the bankruptcy of a Berlin bank, and before the year was out the incredible tangle of Kreuger's fraudulent financial operations throughout the world was spread out day after day in the press. B y August the firm was adjudged bankrupt in the United States, the billion-dollar empire having shrunk to $88,000,000 of assets and $250,000,000 of debts. Berenson had himself invested almost a million lire in the company, he told Clotilde, and it was "all lost to the last penny." At the current rate of exchange the loss was something less than $50,000, a substantial sum but a relatively minor part of his resources. There were none of the usual festivities for Mary that Christmas of 1931. During Bernard's absence she became seriously ill, and for three

[39i]

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LEGEND

weeks her sister took charge of her with the help of two nurses. After Bernard returned, a disheartening relapse proved the prelude to a nearfatal infection. Toward the end of January "we all but gave her u p , " ran one of his bulletins to Ivins, "and in these days of suffering she has called for me as often as she could breathe, and look happy, and hold my hand." A critical moment came, Mary afterward wrote his mother, when she "heard one doctor say to another, 'She is going,' and I felt happy to go. Then I heard from what seemed a hundred miles away, Bernard's voice crying out, 'Don't desert me, Mary.' . . . There was so much love and despair in his voice that I had to respond to it and I said in my mind, Ί won't desert you' and I held myself back from dying." Once on the mend, though still "a great worry," she found diversion again in rereading and assembling the letters which she and Bernard had exchanged forty years ago, still hopeful of reducing them to a biography. Walter Lippmann, of w h o m she was fond, came down from Geneva, and she had herself wheeled into the library at tea time to visit with him. To Ivins Berenson continued to note progress in his wife's condition. He thought it "a wonderful thing" to have her "on any terms." Mary's dangerous illness brought Bernard up sharply and made him more considerate of her. " H e is very nice this year," she wrote. "We all hold our breath for fear it is too good to be true. But he is never cross, he never fusses about anything, he is full of jokes and jollity." She said too that she had changed her tactics; instead of sneering at him for the defects in his writing, she "looked for the good things first." Her report, if overdrawn as her reports frequently were, nevertheless indicated a change. John Walker's cheerful presence doubtless did much to brighten life for all of them at I Tatti. He was proving "the most talented and delightful pupil we have ever had," Mary asserted, and a great improvement on Kenneth Clark and his ambitious wife, who thought I Tatti a "very small place." In March of 1932, with Mary improved in health, Bernard and Nicky again joined Edith Wharton at Hyeres. Paul Valery was there mumbling his comments at table so that his meaning often had to be guessed. "He was as charming, simple and conversable as in the days before the flood of popularity," Berenson observed. "I got him started on Racine" and he made "an interesting prophecy . . . that a time would come when French classicism . . . would appear as a mere episode of a highly aristocratic and artificial kind." Berenson also had a long talk with Aldous Huxley about D. H. Lawrence "for whom, as you know, he had a cult." Huxley expounded that for Lawrence "sex was cosmic contact." Berenson continued, " O f such contacts as of other carnal contacts cometh satiety in the end." [392]

A NEW

DISCIPLE

During a visit to the Malinowskis nearby, "We talked anthropology of course," he wrote, "and I pumped them hard . . . but the art side of the subject had evidently not attracted much of his attention." Later as he strolled with Bronislaw Malinowski "he began to talk politics. I could scarcely believe my ears. Here was a real live Pole who expressed before he heard my opinion a hatred as great as mine for patriotism, nationalism, dictatorship, messiahs, Pilsudskis, etc. etc. . . . The London School of Economics has indeed performed a miracle. It has completely humanized a Pole." Malinowski, a world expert on primitive societies, had taken his doctorate in his native Krakow and later studied with Edward Westermarck in London and was at the time on the faculty at the University of London. Edith returned with Berenson and Nicky to I Tatti and then went down to Rome, where they later joined her. Meanwhile Mary, who had come down with another disabling infection, departed for Switzerland with Logan to seek medical treatment. It was now clear that chronic invalidism would be her portion. Sightseeing and archaeology kept Berenson busy in Rome. He paid his respects at the Swedish Archaeological Institute, of which his friend Axel Boethius was director, and made a point of meeting the head of the German Institute, Ludwig Curtius, whose recent book in German on Pompeian wall painting he had found engrossing. In the face of the deepening worldwide depression, life continued to go on at I Tatti with little change of pace or luxury, though the letters to Berenson's family tended, as a precaution against extravagance, to emphasize the financial uncertainties. During the early spring of 1932 a succession of regulars like Logan and Trevy and relays of visitors had enlivened the luncheon and dinner hours and provided Bernard with an appreciative audience. Robert Herrick dropped in a few times for lunch, one day with a fellow American novelist, Winston Churchill. Herrick— his cruel satire of Berenson long since forgiven—talked with Edith Wharton about a biography of Henry James that he hoped to do. With a shelf of serious novels to his credit, he had recently retired from his post at the University of Chicago and had spent the winter in Florence with the Churchills in a villa on the south bank of the Arno above the city. Mrs. Peter Cooper Hewitt, now divorced and well on in years, was also on hand, as well as his old friend Carlo Placci. Sometimes there were diversions that called them all down to town, as when Stravinsky conducted his Petrushka. O f a quiet evening Nicky read to Bernard and his sister Bessie from Balzac's Le Cure de Tours. What now preempted the morning working hours was the painstaking revision of the Florentine Drawings. Walker was well settled in as assistant [393]

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in residence. He and Berenson were joined this year in their work by the talented art historian Fern Rusk Shapley, wife ofJohn Shapley, a professor of art at the University of Chicago. Her collaboration led, years later, to her joining the staff of the National Gallery of Art when Walker became its director. Nicky too was enlisted in the revision. Later that summer Bernard wrote to her from Consuma, "I have been doing the Credi drawing and am deeply touched by the way you have prepared the material for me. It was done with love as well as care and competence." Berenson and his devoted assistants were to be engaged in the laborious task for long intervals during the next five years.

[394]

XXXIX

The "Hook of

Revelation

Τ the end of June 1932 Berenson received a distinctly unsettling letter from J o e Duveen in which he stated, as diplomatically as he could, that he was forced to retrench—his business had come to a standstill, his overhead was enormous, and insolvent clients had left him with doubtful claims. " O n account of this condition," he concluded, " I am reluctantly obliged to ask you to discontinue the existing retainer between us, in the hope that by personal conference with you I may be able to make such other arrangement as may be mutually satisfactory." He also said that being short of cash, he was again "obliged to postpone" settling the outstanding old account. Berenson had little choice but to acquiesce. "Although no pill has ever been more charmingly sugared and presented," he replied, "it nevertheless is a bitter pill and I fear I made a w r y face in swallowing it and it has taken me two days to recover my composure." A face-to-face meeting could not be avoided, and the prospect of that meeting hung over the last summer weeks at Consuma. Berenson started for London at the beginning of September 1932, sad to leave the green silences of the forested slopes and dreading "the sordid, nasty encounter with jackals" in Paris. He rejoined Mary in London only to find her once again in the middle of a painful bout of cystitis. Crossing to Paris, he presented himself at the Duveen gallery to learn his unhappy fate. The agreement to which he affixed his signature as of September 6 was to run to December 3 1 , 1933, but with the continuance of the depression it was kept in force until 1936. What was most bitter about the "pill" was that the annual retainer of $50,000 was reduced to a euphemistic "retainer arrangement" to pay him $20,000 annually in quarterly installments made up in part by payments on the firm's debt to him and in part by payments of interest at 6 percent on the balance owed [395]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

him. It was meager comfort that his fee of 10 percent on the cost of the firm's purchases of Italian paintings was to be continued. Berenson took the blow with what fortitude he could muster, but he realized that it jeopardized his dream of transforming I Tatti into a temple of humanism which would perpetuate his ideals. The impending retirement of President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard, who had given his blessing to the project, introduced uncertainty about his successor's attitude toward the bequest. A sticking point had been the adequacy of the endowment Berenson would be able to provide. N o w the drastic reduction in his income left him seriously concerned about his ability to maintain I Tatti and provide an endowment satisfactory to Harvard. His financial situation, though by no means desperate, was sufficiently endangered to call for a contingency plan. His friend Judge Julian Mack suggested the immediate transfer of I Tatti to Harvard with Berenson retaining a life interest. Berenson prudently notified the American ambassador in Rome and the Italian government of his plan to leave I Tatti to Harvard for educational purposes. In November 1932 Count Paliano in the Italian Foreign Office informed an embassy officer that "the Duce was aware and approved of the suggested transfer." The transfer was not made at that time, however, principally, as it was explained to the Italian government by Ambassador Phillips when the plan was revived in 1938, "because of uncertainty in Mr. Berenson's mind as to the intention and general plans of the Fine Arts Department of Harvard." "Uncertainty" was something of a euphemism to describe Berenson's misgivings about the nature of the instruction at the Fogg, misgivings that run like a leitmotif in his letters to Billie Ivins, Dan Thompson, Margaret Barr, and others. That he held to the resolve to leave his estate to Harvard in spite of what he saw as "museum-itis" and other forms of pedantry is a tribute to his expectation that his repeated admonitions might lead to salutary reform—and to his belief in Harvard's preeminence in the university world. Berenson continued on in Paris after the conference with the Duveens, still on call for the firm and still a prickly subject for them, as when Fowles, much taken with a painting he thought by Bellini, tried in vain to get his concurrence. Mary, more or less convalescent, found repose at Haslemere, while he haunted the Louvre or made the rounds of his unsereiner friends ("our kind" of people) like the Gillets and the Du Boses, or joined the congenial circle at Edith Wharton's at her Pavilion C o lombe, a dozen miles north of Paris. " I had forgotten what attractions this Circe of a city had," he remarked to Ivins, "and how caressingly affable and fascinating [were] her daughters of all ages." When he dined [396]

THE

" B O O K

OF

REVELATION

with the literary companion of his Egyptian journey, Philomene de Levis-Mirepoix, he found her " s o subtle, so unreasonable, so fanciful, so deep, so high, and withal so human, so affectionate that it was a j o y . " At the Reinachs' "old Salomon looked like a dying eagle, really beautiful, but very sad, and I fear not resigned." Within a month Reinach, who had done so much to launch Berenson's career in Paris more than thirty years ago, was dead. Berenson called too on Georges Wildenstein. He had had business relations for many years with his father, Nathan, who was now eighty, but his association with Georges had a more intellectual content. Georges had just acquired a new home at 140, rue du Faubourg Saint Honore for the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, which he had bought in 1928 from Theodore Reinach, and he proposed to open it on October 23 with a reception in Berenson's honor. Reestablished at I Tatti by the first of November 1932, Berenson took up again the task of revising sections and filling gaps in the Florentine Drawings. During the year he had published seven articles on the drawings of Alunno di Benozzo [Gozzoli], Signorelli, Benozzo Gozzoli, Pesellino, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticini, and " T o m m a s o . " All of these, together with eight more written in the following couple of years, would be inserted in the revised edition. Leaving Mary to enjoy the company of her twenty-year-old granddaughter Barbara at Christmas, Bernard, accompanied by Nicky, left for Edith's refuge. A t Hyeres the familiar rhythm of life resumed. The company went for long walks, now almost too long for him, he said, for at sixty-seven he found "fatigue drawing its coils tighter and tighter" about him. They diverted themselves by reading aloud George Eliot's Middlemarch. Eliot injected her ideas, Berenson thought, "as if she were the Aldous Huxley of her d a y . " When Nicky departed for her Christmas chores at I Tatti, Berenson reawakened to a keen sense of his dependence on her: " Y o u have no idea how I miss you and how I revel in all your intimate ministrations and how I love you while you serve me. Ah dear, you do all that one mortal can do to make another's life a paradise." T o Clotilde on a different level he poured out his Platonizing musings. In the stormy wind from the sea he felt the "ideated sweep of a life large enough to suit a spirit which feels so cramped in a puny and helpless little body like mine." All his life he felt "mad dogs raging" within him against his thwarted nature. " C a n you not, will you not, join me in trying to find a rock of security in the flux of illusion?" He dreamt of being with her "in the midst of that Virgilian landscape" near Naples, spending night and day with her "talking, dreaming, reading aloud." He

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seemed to intoxicate h i m s e l f w i t h t h o u g h t s o f her, losing h i m s e l f in fancied raptures. T h e need to possess, to empathize c o m p l e t e l y w i t h a person, haunted h i m a l w a y s . It w a s a passion b o t h t o lose and to find h i m s e l f in another and in a sense t o d o m i n a t e the other as an extension o f himself, as w h e n he said to C l o t i l d e , " I h a v e a b o v e and b e y o n d e v e r y t h i n g w a n t e d to get under y o u r skin so as to feel rather than to k n o w w h a t w a s g o i n g o n inside o f y o u . " For all his cerebration, his e n c y c l o p e d i c learning, he w a s first and last a m a n o f feeling. A s he a c k n o w l e d g e d to U m b e r t o M o r r a , w h o had b e g u n a Β o s w e l l i a n j o u r n a l o f B e r e n s o n ' s conversation, " I w a s b o r n for sensual c o n t e m p l a t i o n . I m e a n exactly t h a t — s e n s u a l , v o l u p t u ous; not f o r mathematical c o n t e m p l a t i o n . " A n d to his friend C h a r l e s D u B o s , w h e n discussing C h o d e r l o s de Laclos' Liaisons

Dangereuses,

he

reflected, " A s I g e t o n in years I realize m o r e and m o r e than w h a t saves the soul f r o m hell is h a v i n g a b o d y capable o f feeling v o l u p t e . " In his idealizing fancy v o l u p t u o u s n e s s t o o k o n a spiritual and half-mystical character, t r a n s f o r m i n g sex itself into a kind o f w o r s h i p . B y the m i d d l e o f 1932 B e r e n s o n had the satisfaction o f k n o w i n g that his Lists, a w o r k that had obsessed h i m and his f e l l o w w o r k e r s at I T a t t i for six years, had at last been published b y the C l a r e n d o n Press at O x ford. T i t l e d Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, the 723-page v o l u m e p r o v i d e d " a list o f the principal Artists and their w o r k s w i t h an index o f p l a c e s . " It had been an e n o r m o u s l y c o m p l i c a t e d undertaking, c o m b i n i n g in one greatly a u g m e n t e d alphabetical list the original Lists contained in B e r e n s o n ' s four small v o l u m e s o f the turn o f the century. T h o u g h the early Lists had been corrected and amplified in a n u m b e r o f revised editions m a n y years earlier, the intervening decades o f travel and s t u d y had b r o u g h t a vastly increased array o f paintings w i t h i n B e r e n s o n ' s v i e w . T h e n e w v o l u m e listed his attributions o f s o m e 18,000 paintings o f nearly 350 painters. H e had r e v i e w e d , and in m a n y cases revised, all o f his f o r m e r listings after r e s t u d y i n g the thousands o f p h o t o g r a p h s in his library and, w h e n e v e r possible, the paintings themselves. A n o t h e r q u a r ter century w o u l d elapse b e f o r e the e n o r m o u s l y difficult task o f revision and amplification w o u l d again be undertaken. T h e n e w Lists w e r e c o n c e i v e d w i t h i n a m u c h broader f r a m e w o r k than that o f the original ones. T h e g o a l that B e r e n s o n had p r o p o s e d to his friend E n r i c o C o s t a f o r t y years earlier as they sat at a cafe in B e r g a m o had been t o dedicate their entire lives to connoisseurship " t o distinguish b e t w e e n the authentic w o r k s o f an Italian painter o f the fifteenth and sixteenth c e n t u r y , and those c o m m o n l y ascribed to h i m . " N o w , in his preface, he explained that in his original Lists, m o v e d b y a k i n d o f "dandiacal a e s t h e t i c i s m , " he had included o n l y autograph [398]

paintings.

THE

"BOOK

OF

REVELATION'

Fortified by his "experience of the artist at his highest" and by his long study of the methods of artistic production in the Renaissance, he had come to feel that " o n e may well afford to relax from the earlier severity" and trace an artistic personality to the limits of its influence. He was therefore including "not only pictures which the artists painted with more or less assistance, but such as were turned out in their studios f r o m their designs, and even copies as well, providing they faithfully transcribe lost w o r k s . " T o "distinguish such works from absolutely autograph pictures" he adopted a number of symbols: p. (in part by the artist), g.p. (in great part), 5. (studio), c. (copy), and r. (ruined, repainted, restored). This plan obviously did not create pristine autograph works of hitherto rejected ones, but it did allow the student to observe the r a m i f y ing nature of the artist's w o r k and influence. The paintings attributed to Giovanni Bellini illustrate h o w the Lists had grown. The 1902 third revision of his Venetian Painters listed 40 paintings of Bellini's in fourteen locations. N o w thirty years later 145 autograph pictures were reattributed or newly located, of which 69 were identified as either early or late; in addition 23 were listed that Berenson believed were in great part or in part by Bellini, 6 whose attributions he thought doubtful, 1 5 studio paintings, and 3 significant copies. The fourteen locations had g r o w n to fifty-five. As Berenson's "pupils" had come to speak half-humorously of the original four volumes as the " F o u r Gospels," they quickly baptized the new volume the " B o o k of Revelation." The revelation was offered, however, with a saving grain of salt. Berenson reminded his readers that even the most honored attributions were by their nature provisional, serving as guideposts on the w a y to greater certainty. " M o r e and more w o r k will be required . . . before this task will be adequately accomplished." T h o u g h not widely reviewed, being essentially a reference w o r k , the Italian Pictures received respectful attention in the journals. For the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, for example, the volume was the most noteworthy publication of the year on Italian painting. The critic pointed out that Berenson's "expansionist" principle had been announced in one of his Dedalo articles in 1 9 3 1 on "homeless" Florentine paintings and was opposed by the "contractionism" of Richard Offner in his w o r k on the Florentines. Alfred Nicholson in the Art Bulletin thought Berenson's new "attitude, though obviously dangerous if taken by a lesser authority, fixes many guideposts for future study, meanwhile leaving domains of relative certainty scrupulously surveyed." C . H. Collins Baker in the Burlington Magazine, though somewhat skeptical of Berenson's expansionist principle, called the w o r k " a n impressive achievement of scholar[399]

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ship and o r g a n i z a t i o n and o f i n c o m p a r a b l e u t i l i t y . " T h e r e v i e w w h i c h B e r e n s o n m i g h t h a v e m o s t appreciated, a r e v i e w in the Gazette Beaux-Arts,

des

w h i c h had a l w a y s w e l c o m e d his w r i t i n g s as w e l l as those o f

his w i f e , seems t o h a v e been shunted aside b y other materials. A belated and a p o l o g e t i c "simple compte rendu" in 1934 paid tribute to this precious "t>ade mecum q u ' o n ne saurait estimer au-dessus de sa valeur [ w h o s e value could not be o v e r e s t i m a t e d ] . " E v e n b e f o r e J o e D u v e e n ' s " w a r m e s t c o n g r a t u l a t i o n s " o n the " s c h o l arly and m o n u m e n t a l w o r k " reached B e r e n s o n , F o w l e s protested that several pictures sold b y the f i r m had been o m i t t e d f r o m the Lists, including those o f F. N i c o l a o f P i t t s b u r g h , M r s . A d a m s o f B o s t o n ,

Mr.

Haas o f D e t r o i t , M r . T h o m p s o n o f C h i c a g o , and Messrs. L e h m a n and B l u m e n t h a l o f N e w Y o r k . " I f e a r , " he said, " t h e y w i l l find the o m i s s i o n o f s o m e o f their pictures rather p e c u l i a r . " N i c o l a , c o n c l u d i n g that the o m i s s i o n o f his B o r g o g n o n e indicated that his picture w a s " n o t b y the M a s t e r , " e m p l o y e d the f a m o u s U n t e r m e y e r f i r m to sue D u v e e n .

He

relented o n l y w h e n assured b y B e r e n s o n that " n o m o r e authoritative and admirable w o r k b y B o r g o g n o n e is k n o w n to m e " and that his painting w o u l d be included in the Italian edition. T h e Haas and the T h o m p s o n paintings also gained a d m i s s i o n in the Italian edition. T h e M i n n e a p o l i s Institute o f A r t , t w o o f w h o s e paintings had also been e x c l u d e d , s a w its D a d d i added b u t not its P a l m a V e c c h i o , w h i c h had to w a i t m a n y years f o r inclusion in the revised E n g l i s h edition. Joe had s e c o n d t h o u g h t s h i m s e l f w h e n he realized that n o explanation had been m a d e f o r the o m i s s i o n o f paintings in the hands o f dealers. H e u r g e d B e r e n s o n t o include a note in the Italian edition explaining that o n l y paintings in private and m u s e u m collections w e r e listed; o t h e r w i s e there w o u l d be " a c l o u d " o n the D u v e e n stock. In the brief preface to that edition dated F e b r u a r y 1936, B e r e n s o n explained that the rapid and incessant m i g r a t i o n o f pictures in the hands o f dealers m a d e t h e m inaccessible to students and that they w e r e therefore o m i t t e d . A s paintings w e n t into the hands o f private collectors, the D u v e e n s k e p t after B e r e n s o n to include t h e m in the Italian edition. A n n o y e d at the solicitation, he replied to F o w l e s w i t h rather peevish hauteur that he had already included all the paintings that it seemed p r o p e r to insert, and he w e n t o n t o lecture the f i r m " t h a t the p u r p o s e o f m y catalogue w a s not to guarantee y o u r w a r e s o r that o f any other dealer. Its intention w a s to a v o i d e v e r y t h i n g that smelled o f trade. . . . If I w a s a n x i o u s to include all pictures I a p p r o v e d o f in b o n a fide A m e r i c a n collections it w a s to benefit students rather than . . . furnish guarantees to purchasers. . . . It has never f o r m e d part o f any a g r e e m e n t b e t w e e n the f i r m and m y s e l f that I s h o u l d insert into m y lists e v e r y picture y o u sold. I cannot a l l o w y o u to set u p such a c l a i m . " [400]

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V E N T S moved with startling speed after Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March of 1933. The bank holiday was immediately followed by the abandonment of the gold standard and the depreciation of the currency. Toward the end of March Berenson informed Edith Wharton that Paul Sachs was coming over as an emissary from Harvard to discuss the ways and means of taking over I Tatti " i f it should happen that I can no longer afford to keep it." The pound sterling in which the Berenson funds were kept in London had already declined nearly 40 percent. Following Sachs's visit, Berenson supplied him with a schedule of the annual cost of maintaining I Tatti. The figure, even at that date of low prices, came to approximately $38,000, of which $14,000 accounted for the expenses of the library. Though the matter was only in preliminary negotiation, the planned bequest was reported in a long article in the June 25, 1933, New York Times. I Tatti was described as one of the most beautiful medieval villas in the region and some of its treasures were noted, especially the superb "Baldovinetti" Madonna and Child, the painting which Berenson subsequently attributed to Domenico Veneziano in the Italian edition of the Lists. The Nazis achieved a majority in the Reichstag almost on the day that Roosevelt took office and soon authorized a dictatorship under Adolf Hitler. The depredations of the storm troopers and Brown Shirts against Jews and all political opponents now had virtual governmental sanction. Socialists by the hundreds were rounded up and hustled off unmercifully to concentration camps. One humiliating restriction after another was imposed upon J e w s and their Gentile spouses. That they and their parents may have long been Christians did not save them, and one profession after another was closed to them. The first list of "Jewish" profes[401]

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sors expelled from German universities was published that spring. In one of her weekly letters to Bernard's aged mother, Mary wrote, "We are heartbroken at this terrible streak of brutality that has appeared among them. So many of our friends, too, are rendered destitute—because they belong to the cleverest race in Europe." Relief committees in England, France, and the United States intensified their efforts to place the bewildered victims who succeeded in making their escape. An unprecedented migration of talent began, especially to England and America. A loophole in the stringent American immigration law allowed the entry of scholars and professionals; and to employ some of the teachers from Germany, the N e w School for Social Research in N e w Y o r k formed an Institute for Advanced Study, soon to be called the "University in Exile." It was largely subsidized by Colonel Michael Friedsam. Richard Offner, whose doctorate in art history was from the University of Vienna, was named to head the Institute of Fine Arts which formed part of the "University." It seemed to Berenson all too apparent that the Institute was to become the center in America of a Germanic kind of art history in which primary emphasis would no longer be on the appreciation of art but on the recondite areas of iconography and symbolism. T o his easily excited nature such an emphasis was an abomination to be resisted at all costs, for to him "seeing" the art object was all important, all else was secondary. One of the first German-Jewish scholars whom Offner recruited was the noted Erwin Panofsky. In previous years Panofsky had served as a visiting professor of art history in the United States, dividing his time between Hamburg and N e w York University. Deprived of his professorship at the University of Hamburg in the spring of 1933 while he happened to be in N e w York, he elected to settle in the United States. His elaborate treatise on the influence of Greek symbolism on the art of the Renaissance was one of the signs of the new direction art history would take in America, as was his earlier treatise on ancient art theory. A n example of his "iconographical exegesis" written in collaboration with Fritz Saxl had appeared in English in the Burlington Magazine in 1926. The learned footnotes almost equaled the text. Once settled into dislike of Panofsky, Berenson gibed for years at his influence. With Margaret Barr, the talented wife of Alfred Hamilton Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, he raised the question, after her first visit to I Tatti in the mid-i930s, of how the appreciation of art should be taught, and he told her of his objection to "wonderworking Rabbis and cabalistic spell-binders with all their enticing irrelevancies." Panofsky, he charged, was a "poseur" and "the Hitler of art study," and Professor Charles Morey of Princeton was his Hinden[402]

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burg. Their friendly correspondence crackled a bit as Margaret Barr, who had helped polish the English of Panofsky's published lecture at Princeton, "Classical Mythology in Medieval A r t , " did not hesitate to defend him. When Paul Sachs sent a confidential cable that Harvard was contemplating inviting Panofsky to join the art department and asked for Berenson's opinion, his reply was so "enigmatic" that Sachs wrote it was "quite frankly disturbing, for 'all others' spoke with unvarnished enthusiasm." It was not until 1947 that Panofsky was invited to spend a year at Harvard as the Charles Norton Professor of Art. Panofsky had become Berenson's special bogeyman among the German-Jewish refugees in N e w York who, he was convinced, had done their "utmost" to undermine his reputation in America. Undoubtedly their teaching was opposed to his, but his belief that they campaigned against him would appear to have been the product of his suspiciousness rather than of the fact. As Mary had explained to Roger Fry, suspiciousness was one of the "thorns" in Bernard's character, as was his vehement resentment when others seemed to trespass on the "sacred soil" of his specialty. T o Umberto Morra he rationalized, "It's not that I have a suspicious nature. . . . It is the fruit of my ingenuousness and candor. It is the sense that everyone knows how to deceive me by entering my good graces . . . and then profit from it." That German scholarship in the United States had become excessively technical, Panofsky himself ruefully admitted twenty years later. Looking back upon the course of art history in America, he recalled that the vocabulary of art history which had been employed by German art historians (himself included) had developed into a technical language that was "hard to penetrate." The compulsion, he said, to make themselves clear in English "went a long way to loosen our tongues." H o w different Berenson's approach to art was from that of the refugee scholars comes out in a letter to Billie Ivins on how to teach art appreciation. "In the first place eschew metaphysics [and] mathematics," his prescription read; give "a small stiff dose of psychology and then anything and everything, even sheer anecdotage that will arouse, stimulate, feed and overfeed 'wanting to know,' i.e. curiosity, so that overfed it falls back and ruminates. This rumination in prepared natures will change into contemplation and this will enable the work of art to leave its imprint on the spectator as on a sensitive plate. . . . Lots and lots of 'home reading' of the history, anecdotage and literature backgrounding the work of art to inspire a savage lust to possess it followed by detailed enumeration of all that is notable in the work of art. The hypnotic effect of merely detailed showing is immense and permanent." [403]

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N o t only did he oppose emphasis on iconography and the minutiae of history, he also deplored emphasis on technique. " A b o v e all," he wrote, " d o not interest the poor spectator in technique. That might lead h i m to make messes ä la Roger Fry or N e d Forbes but never to appreciation." Returning to the subject of technique in a letter to Daniel Varney T h o m p s o n , an assistant professor of art at Yale, he declared, " O u r disagreement is about the emphasis. M y contention is that the w o r k of art is first and last an aesthetic p h e n o m e n o n , as such its appeal is the central fact and not the question of h o w it got to be. . . . In short I regard all questions o f ' t e c h n i q u e ' as ancillary to the aesthetic experience." T h e subject haunted him. In another long letter he reflected on the humanizing purpose of the representative arts: "Their business is to teach man h o w to hold himself, h o w to look, what gestures to make, what attitudes to take, etc., etc., all of which react violently on his psychology and tend to m a k e h i m the civilized being w e hope he m a y at some far distant date become. . . . In so far as representation grosso modo achieves these ends it is ART. . . . T o m y ideal history of art all sorts of savants w o u l d bring tribute. . . . T h e del vers into archives would surely be a m o n g them. So w o u l d the student of materials, the chemistry and the technique, etc., etc. But neither singly nor collectively do they constitute a history of art. So talk not to m e of an objective history of art. . . . H o w can you expect the history of man's visions, dreams, aspirations, bellyaches, lusts, despairs, triumphs, asphyxiations, liberation ad infinitum to be written w i t h o u t appraising them. A n d every appraisal is necessarily subjective." T h e subject hit an exposed nerve in Berenson. H e felt the direction the study of art was taking cast a dark shadow on the future of I Tatti in the hands of Harvard. T o y o u n g T h o m p s o n he wrote, " T h e prospect of turning over this garment that I have spun out of m y life, to turn it over to be w o r n by youngsters b r o u g h t u p on the droppings of [Elias Avery] L o w e [author of w o r k s on paleography and ancient codexes] and [Hans] M a c k o w s k y [writer on Michelangelo's symbols] etc., etc., etc. is anything but pleasant." In one letter to Ivins he m o u r n e d that if he could not get a publisher for the revised Florentine Drawings, he might have " t o pay for it all for Panofsky to pilfer and b e f o u l . " For years his u n h a p p y fulminations against the rising menace of " P a n " and his associates rumbled t h r o u g h his letters. THE TUMULTUOUS developments in Germany, though they appeared to threaten the peace of Europe, hardly affected the tempo of life beyond its borders. O f m o r e urgent concern to people like the Berensons was the increasing financial crisis. Bernard felt obliged to turn d o w n Senda's [404]

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request for additional funds. Mary apologized to her for their continuing to live at I Tatti in luxury, explaining that it was unavoidable because Bernard was " s o frail and fastidious" that she felt he could not leave the house "he has built up and loves so passionately." N o r was it possible to abate the hospitality of I Tatti as old and new friends congregated round the luncheon table and sat unwittingly for pen portraits in Berenson's letters. Logan, Berenson told Ivins, "is a rottenripe old sybarite of words . . . of bon mots and good stories." Desmond McCarthy "is less amusing, but far more interesting. . . . He can be deep and wistful and metaphysical and whimsical and tender and irresponsible altogether and all in one of the finest minds I encounter." Otto Klemperer, still director of the Berlin State Opera—in Florence in mid-March to conduct a concert—came up bearing a letter from Roger Sessions. He burst in with volcanic energy, " a huge, vehement, wild-eyed, loudvoiced, very handsome J e w about forty-five, a superb musician, and as jolly and simple as a roistering big b o y . " In the evening he played for them a cantata he had composed on the theme of David and Bathsheba, "thumped the piano and sang all the parts, including the chorus." On June 7 came the news that the Nazis had ousted him from his post. Fortunately, he got away to the United States before the end of the year and became the director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Early that spring Franz Werfel, a Viennese friend of some years' standing, sent Berenson a copy of the Forty Days of Musa Dagh, his powerful novel just published in German. Berenson was stirred by Nicky's reading of the long and harrowing narrative of the Turkish genocide of Armenians during World War I. For forty days a heroic community of Armenians held out against the Turks on a mountain top until they were providentially rescued by a French warship. " I f I except Gobineau," Berenson wrote Werfel, " I know no other writer who can in fiction render the character of a people as you have in your story." Werfel visited I Tatti in May, "such a rococo cherub with just the least touch of J e w in his face. H o w intelligent and sane he was. . . . He chuckled over the burning of his books by the Nazis." His visit had been preceded by that of the distinguished art scholar Adolphe Goldschmidt, successor to Heinrich Wölfflin at the University of Berlin. A leading authority on medieval art, he shared Berenson's antipathy to the excesses of Teutonic culture history. He too philosophized with Berenson over the plight of the J e w s in Germany. He declared, as Berenson was to recall, "it would take a thousand years before the feeling about J e w s as outsiders disappeared entirely." Long after their meeting Berenson reflected that " i f the J e w wants to act as if a non-Jew (as was my case before Hitler) he is still uncanny to others, even to the most civilized and [40s]

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advanced 'gentiles.' " Berenson thought Goldschmidt "a great dear and a sage," a notable exception to the refugee scholars who drowned the work of art in an ocean of pedantic exegesis. Like a professor eager for the advancement of his doctoral students, Berenson took a keen interest in his proteges. The one whose star was rising most rapidly was Kenneth Clark. Not yet thirty, he received a telegram from Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in the early autumn of 1933 offering him the directorship of the National Gallery in London. What particularly pleased Berenson was the statement in the London Times that Clark had "worked for two years with Mr. Bernhard Berenson, at Florence, the authority on Italian art." As Berenson read the account, Clark's work with him was offered "as his chief title" to consideration. When Berenson learned that the post of curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was to become vacant, he urged Paul Sachs to try to get it for John Walker. He pointed out that Walker was as old as Kenneth Clark and had also studied with him for two years. And if not Walker then he proposed Daniel Varney Thompson, for whose advancement he had come to feel a responsibility. Among the many who regarded Berenson as a benign older colleague, if not an actual tutor, no one had been closer than his friend Arthur Kingsley Porter, with w h o m Berenson had roamed about Europe on archaeological quests. Berenson had helped arrange for the publication of his monumental work on Romanesque sculpture in the Pantheon series. Their exchange of letters had been a feast of reason. On July 8 Porter, who had a "love for the rain and mist and the storms of Ireland," was drowned in the Bay of Donegal. The news of his death came on the same day as his last letter. Bernard "wept so he could hardly read" the letter to Mary. Porter had once written to Berenson that he had done many nice things for him "but never anything for which I am more grateful than pushing me into the Spanish Romanesque field once more." Pressured by the demands of life as a Harvard professor, he remarked, " I feel you have found the solution of a problem that is deeply troubling me—how to be gregarious and a scholar when the two things are essentially incompatible—but your way out won't work with unclever me, and I shall have to find another." Most touching of all his tributes was his frank avowal, " I am very fond of you. I wonder if you realize how much so, and how deeply you have influenced my way of looking at things." Later that year Berenson received a letter that brought a second piece of shattering news. It told of the death of his sister Rachel at the age of fifty-three. The news reduced him, he said, " t o a numbness which makes it hard to say anything about her." T o his brother-in-law Ralph Barton [406]

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Perry, he could find no words, "not even halting ones." Replying to condolences f r o m Paul Sachs, he wrote, " T h e r e is nothing to say about death," but for " p o o r Ralph one cannot do too much. I k n o w that y o u will do all that is possible to comfort h i m . " T o his eighty-six-year-old mother he held o f f writing for a month, finally sending what sympathetic words he could manage. THE KING'S list of January I, 1933, announced that Sir Joseph Duveen had been elevated to the peerage as Baron Millbank, a title that enormously pleased him. It was given in recognition of another of his benefactions, the gift of a new wing to the portrait gallery. Duveen thanked the Berensons for their "charming messages," which meant more to him and his wife, he said, "than hundreds of the congratulations" they had received. Whether he was any less disingenuous than Berenson is hard to say. For Berenson the new honor did not raise his opinion of the expansive D u veen or of the trade in which he flourished. Despite the lull in business, requests for opinions continued to come in from Fowles, but there was little progress with long-overdue arrears. The depreciation of the dollar after the abandonment of the gold standard introduced a fresh complication, for it reduced the value of the balance owed. Berenson therefore went up to Vienna with N i c k y in the late summer to meet with Duveen and L e v y in an attempt to get terms that would make up for the loss. The mission "achieved nothing," Bernard ruefully reported to Mary. "Yesterday morning w e were within an ace of a complete break, and that was averted only by suspending discussion. . . . I got more o f an insight than ever before into J . D. He is as innocent and as predatory as any of the big carnivores of the jungle. N o scruples, no remorse, no regrets, no resentment, no friendship, no enmity, no yesterday, no t o m o r r o w . " The imperturbable Duveen gave no hint of any disagreement when, immediately afterward, he wrote to M a r y that he had had a delightful time in Vienna where it had been "such a great pleasure" to see " B . B . and N i c k y . " He also congratulated her on the publication that year of Λ Modern Pilgrimage, her book about their travels in Palestine and Syria, which was being very favorably reviewed. In the months ahead it fell to Fowles to mediate the peace between the evasive Duveen and the importunate Berenson. The drastic reduction of his "retainer" had proved a very bitter pill indeed to Berenson, and he balked at making any further concessions. So when he was asked to give an opinion on the Oppenheim Collection he grimly replied, " Y o u of course are asking m y opinion for the firm and on the usual terms, that is 1 0 % of what y o u pay out on each item. Moreover you are going to keep all that I tell you to yourself and not pass it on to others. I cannot afford [407]

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to give m y opinions gratis. I am sorry to dot m y i's and cross m y t's but henceforth I must let no equivocation o f any kind c o m e between Lord D u v e e n and myself. H e is perfectly free to chuck me and I shall remain on the best o f terms but i f he wants m e to g o o n advising h i m he must make up his mind to pay. I cannot afford to g o o n as I have the last f e w years." H e felt obliged to g o on, nevertheless, and there was no break in his professional counsel. W h e n D u v e e n asked some time later for an opinion on a Portrait of a Man in the Whitney Collection, Berenson duly drafted his c o m m e n t a r y : " P r o b a b l y Raphael although I used to think it Ghirland a i o . " H e requested an x-ray or violet-ray photograph to make sure it was not a Ghirlandaio " f a k e d up to l o o k like a Raphael" b y Elia V o l p i , w h o had o w n e d the picture " t h i r t y - f i v e or so years a g o . " It w a s o b v i o u s that Berenson performed his necessary chores for the f i r m w i t h v e r y little relish and w i t h a sense o f self-abasement. So far as his m a n y correspondents m i g h t k n o w , he was a person o f independent means, for almost n o reference to his distasteful relation to D u v e e n or to any other dealer disfigured his copious letters to his friends. A n d if at last driven to allude to the subject, he did so in the most general w a y , as w h e n he w r o t e to Clotilde, " I have business to attend to on w h i c h m y entire future depends. I simply cannot bear to attend to it, or put pen to paper." Parted f r o m D u v e e n and L e v y , w h o , Bernard said, w e r e at least "first rate tellers o f stories," he and N i c k y embarked on a m o n t h o f sightseeing and visits to old friends like the prince and princess o f T h u m and T a x i s and the faithful A d d i e K a h n , the w i d o w o f O t t o , w h o w a s expected up f r o m Biarritz. T h e y j o u r n e y e d also to Werfel's s u m m e r h o m e w h i c h he and his w i f e , the beautiful A l m a , f o r m e r w i f e o f Walter Gropius and w i d o w o f Gustav Mahler, had established at Breitenstein near Vienna. T h e y found Werfel alone in the cottage, w h e r e after a sumptuous lunch they "talked and t a l k e d . " Werfel was delighted to learn that they had explored the country around A n t i o c h and A l e p p o w h e r e part o f the action o f his novel Forty Days took place. In the forefront, h o w e v e r , w a s the N a z i situation and the g r o w i n g campaign against the Jews in Austria. Werfel was finding it baffling to c o m e to terms w i t h the "culture s h o c k " o f losing his identity as a Viennese. T h e f o l l o w i n g year he and his w i f e fled before the advancing N a z i battalions. A f t e r lengthy tribulation they reached A m e r i c a in 1940 and made their h o m e in California, j o i n i n g the c o l o n y o f displaced writers and artists that included, a m o n g others, T h o m a s M a n n , B r u n o Frank, and B r u n o Walter. F r o m Vienna the travelers crossed into Czechoslovakia to visit the illfated President M a s a r y k , w h o m Berenson had c o m e to k n o w during the [408]

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exciting days in Paris when the Peace Conference of 1 9 1 9 was rearranging the map of Europe. Berenson made no record of the meeting in Prague, but the talk could not have been any more cheerful than that in Vienna, for the Nazi stirrings about the Sudetenland had already begun and it was evident that the Czech Nazi party had illegal links with that in Germany. Military preparations for defense were already under way. Bernard and N i c k y returned to Venice with a sense of relief. It had been ten years since Berenson had paid a " r e a l " visit to Venice, and he found the place overwhelmingly beautiful. " E x c e p t for the space effects of Saint Sofia and its bay sustained on slender porphyry columns," he wrote M a r y , " w e have seen nothing comparable to San M a r c o . " For the first time he was seeing everything "in terms of sheer beauty." Work on the Drawings went steadily forward after Berenson got back to his desk in mid-October. B y Christmas it was time for his customary holiday, especially since Alys was coming out to keep M a r y company. Bernard left them to rejoice in Mary's new hobby of psychoanalysis and made his annual escape to Edith Wharton's villa on the Riviera. With Alys he was never at ease. He thought her "pleasant enough but I always feel with her as with an enemy during a truce. At bottom w e are at war for she is and remains an -ist of every kind, feminist, prohibitionist, philanthropist and she despises me or at least disapproves of me for being such a pagan." As the drum beating had g r o w n louder over Central Europe toward the close of the year, Berenson's Christmas greetings to J u d g e Learned Hand struck an orphic note: " B a b e s and sucklings are getting impatient. They are telegraphing to their various Führers for peremptory declarations . . . to be led in martial array to the conquest of the cosmos." Roosevelt's dramatic leadership in the United States also had its disturbing aspects. From Graz Berenson had responded to a letter from J u d g e Hand: " Y e s , the outlook at home is not pleasant. If the N e w Deal succeeds I should not feel happy over it. I distrust every . . . kind of messiahism. . . . The same impatience is probably the bottom reason for Hitlerism and every kind of fascism and indeed of Bolshevism itself." N o w in his Christmas letter to Hand his thoughts turned homeward: " H o w strange it is that I, w h o lived in America from my eleventh to m y twenty-second year only, . . . feel so much more at home with an American of our kind than with any other biped whatever." In his ninety-third year he would still declare that he did not feel Italian and that he was an American and Boston was his home. Cheering news had arrived that autumn which had strengthened his sense of identity with his " h o m e l a n d . " James Bryant Conant, the newly appointed president of Harvard, thought the idea of an Institute at I Tatti [409]

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was " w o n d e r f u l . " He expressed "the utmost appreciation" of Berenson's generosity and declared he would recommend acceptance by the corporation. Berenson's notion of "advanced humane scholarship," he wrote, agreed with his own administrative objectives. The report which had been submitted to Conant bore the signatures of Berenson's loyal partisans at Harvard: Paul Sachs, Edward W. Forbes, George Harold Edgell, and Ralph Barton Perry. On October 30, 1933, the corporation voted that it was "enthusiastically receptive of Mr. Bernard Berenson's proposal to bequeath his villa and collection to Harvard University," with the reservation, however, that there should be sufficient income from the estate " o r [funds] specifically given for the purpose" to provide for its maintenance. Though the main hurdle—an adequate endowment—had yet to be surmounted, the campaign to assure acceptance of the bequest seemed on the way to success. Even Mary now referred to the establishing of the Institute as a joint undertaking in the preface of A Modern Pilgrimage. Nearly all the books she needed for her research were, she declared, "in our own library which my husband has collected with great care for future students who, as w e hope, will benefit from the 'Institute for Humanistic Studies' which w e mean to found under the auspices of our common university, Harvard."

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H E N he returned from the Riviera in January 1934 Berenson plunged again into the endless complications of the revised Drawings. Every book and article on the drawings of the more than fifty principal artists and their followers that had appeared since the first edition in 1903 had to be scrutinized and their additions to the canon of each artist evaluated. Determined to produce as complete a presentation as possible, he fought his way through treatise after treatise. Most of these were in German, for the history of art as a learned discipline had originated in Germany and had been most systematically developed there. The magnitude of his self-imposed task may well have appalled him. In his original catalogue he had analyzed some 2,800 drawings. He had now to restudy all of them, add more than a thousand, assign each to a place in the text, and set aside a suitable photograph of each for the volume of illustrations. The two chief figures were of course Leonardo and Michelangelo. O f the 363 large quarto pages that would comprise the catalogue volume, 40 would be devoted to Leonardo (with 88 drawings added to the original 251) and 80 to Michelangelo and his school (with 85 drawings added to the original 226). The revision of the chapters on Michelangelo gave the most trouble. Berenson vehemently cursed the German authors for the " b o g of pedantry into which they have brought the subject and the poison mists of interpretation (mostly against him) they have wrapped around it." As the year wore on into autumn, he complained to Billie Ivins that "Panofsky and his tribe" had almost weaned him " f r o m all the studies connected with the so-called art of the last five centuries" and made him "long to get where I shall never hear the names of Panofsky, Popp [Dr. Anny E.], Tolnay [Charles De], Bodmer [Heinrich], etc." When Dan Thompson happened to allude to "followers" of Berenson

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who suffered in the shade while Professor Morey of Princeton and his associate Panofsky "inherit the earth," Berenson erupted: "Pray, who are my followers?. . . Perhaps you have in mind Edgell, or M c C o m b or Offner or who? Rest assured they are no followers of mine. Excellent they are, the last named would heave a ton of bricks at you if he heard you whisper that he is my follower, but after taking from me all they could—and how little it was!—they have gone their own way and it is not my way, not by a great many degrees of the compass. And yet I greatly prefer these gentlemen to certain spell-binders and irrelevancymongers from darkest Judeo-Germany who I understand are threatening to invade Harvard." It did not add to his composure to receive word from Belle Greene a few days later that Morey and Panofsky were to lecture at the Morgan Library on illuminated manuscripts. Overwhelmed with the scholarly minutiae, Berenson began to dream of the liberating book that had haunted his imagination, "the book which will be the cream of my experiences." He had long thought of it as " T h e Decline and Recovery of the Arts," and its vague outlines tantalized and terrified him. Once free of the Drawings, he told Ivins, as his seventy-first year approached, "then will come the ordeal. Shall I still be able to organize and start on the big undertaking I have laid out? If I can I shall enter into a happy old age. If not?" The prolonged scrutiny of Michelangelo's work inevitably produced moments of revulsion. "Pity he survived the Medici Chapel," he remarked to Thompson. "It might have been better had he finished his career with the completion of the Sistine Ceiling. I feel the spell of his later work and cannot get away from it any more than I can from Wagner. M y soul and my mind revolt from both as from something obscenely overpowering. . . . And to these followers of his who try to out-Michelangelo Michelangelo I must devote the best hours of a month in order that my chapters and notes on Mike's drawings may be as free from more misinformation as possible. In scholarship what counts is what one discards." That he was able to avoid the sort of nervous debility that had plagued him as a result of his prolonged struggles with the first edition of the Drawings thirty years earlier was doubtless thanks in part to the initial help he had received from Kenneth Clark, but more especially to the dedicated assistance of John Walker, Nicky Mariano, and Fern Shapley. The work of revision continued on into 1935. In August of 1935 he told Umberto Morra that Michelangelo was his "daily poison." He worked on, he said, "out of bad habit," requiring "the task as hygiene" just as he required his Swedish gymnastics, though he had more faith in the g y m nastics. B y mid-November of 1935 he spoke of putting in the "last [412]

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t o u c h e s . " T h e n he w a s " p l u n g e d into the a g o n y o f c o m i n g to t e r m s " w i t h the C l a r e n d o n Press. " T h e y are so frightened that I . . . a m sorely tempted to tell t h e m to g o to H e a v e n . " In early J a n u a r y 1 9 3 6 he w a s " a b l e to r e l i e v e " the C l a r e n d o n Press w i t h the n e w s that the U n i v e r s i t y o f C h i c a g o Press had " c o m e f o r w a r d " o f f e r i n g all the illustrations he w a n t e d and assuring h i m that they w o u l d not charge m o r e than $ 2 5 f o r the three quarto v o l u m e s . It w a s to be a " w o r k i n g e d i t i o n " such as he had a l w a y s w a n t e d f o r the use o f students. Progress t o w a r d the publication proceeded during 1 9 3 7 w i t h the aid o f a subsidy f r o m the C a r n e g i e C o r p o r a t i o n , and in September 1 9 3 8 the revised Drawings w a s finally published. D u r i n g 1 9 3 4 B e r n a r d , chastened b y M a r y ' s w o r s e n i n g health, so bridled his temper that M a r y i n f o r m e d his m o t h e r in M a y that " n o t once since I w a s taken ill has he lost his temper w i t h m e . " H e r condition seemed genuinely to g i v e h i m anguish, and his anxieties about her failing health ran like a leitmotif t h r o u g h his letters to his friends. Nevertheless her "lamentations o v e r her b o d i l y distress" often seemed to him e x a g gerated. L o n g a f t e r w a r d , w h e n e x t r e m e old age g a v e h i m a keen acquaintance w i t h his o w n b o d i l y pains and weaknesses, he felt remorse at h a v i n g sometimes dismissed her sufferings as i m a g i n a r y . H e r recurring h y p o c h o n d r i a flourished in the soil o f v e r y real physical afflictions, the m o s t recent, she w r o t e C a r l H a m i l t o n , being " g l a n d u l a r b l o o d p o i s o n ing in the g r o i n . " T o Learned H a n d B e r e n s o n lamented, " A l w a y s the same bladder. Y o u w o u l d think it w a s a Z e p p e l i n f r o m the place it took in m y w o r r i e s . " What must h a v e fed B e r n a r d ' s recurring doubts w a s the curiously intermittent character o f her relapses. N i c k y , w h o w a s m u c h in her c o m p a n y , thought her case one o f " m i l d recurrent madness; ' h a p p y ' alternating w i t h depression. . . . If y o u look back on the last three y e a r s , " she pointed out to B e r n a r d , " i t has been like that all the time; a f e w months o f astonishing i m p r o v e m e n t and m u c h better spirits, greater mental e n e r g y and then collapse o f both mental and physical condit i o n s . " Whether bedridden o r not, M a r y busied herself w i t h one literary project after another. A g a i n and again she returned to piecing together long sections o f B e r n a r d ' s early letters t o w a r d c o m p o s i n g his b i o g r a p h y . A t the same time she finished o f f , w i t h the help o f J o h n Walker, her list o f " B e a u t i f u l Italian P i c t u r e s . " She w o r k e d also o n the manuscript o f Across the Mediterranean and helped her daughter K a r i n revise her lectures on psychoanalysis f o r a projected b o o k . In L o n d o n that J u n e M a r y , during her annual visit, dined w i t h L o r d D u v e e n and e n j o y e d being chauffeured to lunch in his i m p o s i n g Rolls R o y c e . She f o u n d h i m unchanged, " b o a s t i n g all o v e r the p l a c e " and [413]

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hostile to Kenneth Clark, now the director of the National Gallery. Evidently Clark could not help showing his condescension to the underbred Duveen, who was a member of his board of trustees. Duveen told Mary that he would see to it that four paintings Clark had just brought back from Italy were turned down by the board to "teach the young man his place." The instruction did not abash Clark, but he recalled that Duveen was often irresistible: "His bravura and impudence were infectious and when he was present everyone behaved as if they had a couple of drinks." After Duveen left the board, Philip Sassoon said, " N o w the meetings will be a bore; like a harlequinade without the clown." Mary lunched with the Clarks and found Kenneth "a queer mixture of arrogance and sensitive humility." Joe was "overwhelmingly cordial" to Mary and parted with three checks, two of which were postdated, totaling $24,000; they covered Berenson's misnamed "retainer" for the year and partial payment of the interest due him. Bernard was not appeased, for he was anxious to retrieve all the unpaid balance. Louis Levy tried to assure him that no investment was more secure than that with the firm. It was necessary only to establish regularity in the payment of the interest. He acknowledged, however, that he was "under some handicap as I am counsel of the debtor. If any impasse, you will need to hire a lawyer." While Berenson immersed himself in scholarship and stimulating converse with friends at I Tatti and up at Consuma during August and September—friends like Eric Maclagan, of the Victoria and Albert Museum; Desmond McCarthy; his widowered brother-in-law, Ralph Barton Perry; and the Walter Lippmanns—the world was relentlessly closing in around him. In Italy the Fascist corporative state had already taken shape. Mussolini instituted military training in all schools in June 1934 and exhorted Italians to become a warlike people. In the same month Hitler ordered the execution in Germany of dissident Nazi Ernest Roehm and of hundreds of his followers as well as of members of the Catholic opposition. Civil war erupted in Austria, and the government mercilessly repressed the Socialists and then turned upon the local Nazis when Dollfuss was assassinated. On October 9 King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseilles by a Croatian separatist along with his host the French foreign minister Berthou. The act thrust upon Prince Paul, Berenson's art-loving friend, the baffling responsibilities of prince-regent for his young nephew. In the onrush of crises Berenson and his friends looked on as helpless bystanders and "seldom touched on events or principles." That autumn one catches glimpses of Berenson at ease in his summer retreat on the mountain. Nicky, who was vacationing with her family on

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the seacoast, pictured him "sitting by a good fire and afterwards putting on all [his] little jackets and shawls and perhaps even those white socks." The autumn days intoxicated him. " A l l visible and most sensible things get more beautiful," he reflected, "as my age increases." Yet, at his back, he felt a sense of growing peril. Mary and he were aging. He felt the need of "a perch," he told Bessie. "If we must abandon I Tatti (which may happen) I should not know what, where, and h o w . " Toward the end of the year Mary was again bedridden, solaced by nightly doses of opiates, and life grew dark about Bernard. Fortunately by Christmas Karin and her daughter Ann arrived to attend Mary, and Bernard was able to join Edith Wharton at Hyeres. Reproached by Clotilde for merely indulging an old habit, he protested: " I come [here] out of affection, loyalty, love of continuity, desire to see Norton and Lapsley and the Noailles, for the adorable landscape and the walks and anything in short except habit." The rendezvous was not altogether idyllic, however, as he confessed to Mary. Gaillard Lapsley was "almost disagreeable" because of "the atmosphere he exhales of being the only repository of decency, gentility, scholarship, and correct thinking." Though recovery still lagged in the United States, the situation there was far more promising than in turbulent Europe, and there were moments when Berenson thought he might have to find refuge in America. The year 1935 opened with a growing crisis in the relations between Italy and Ethiopia. B y October Mussolini ordered his military commander to subjugate the natives, many of whom charged into battle armed only with spears. In France the menacing demonstrations of the Fascist Croix de Feu led to the formation of the Popular Front and the election of Socialist Leon Blum as premier. His rightist enemies soon began to chant, "Better Hitler in Paris than B l u m . " One felt the steady march toward war when in the spring of 1935 Hitler announced the reintroduction of military conscription in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. And before the year was out the adoption of the so-called Nuremberg laws deprived Jews of their rights as citizens. T o protect the so-called purity of German blood, intermarriage was made a criminal offense, and decrees completed the exclusion of J e w s from the official, political, and cultural life of Germany, their complicated provisions tracking part-Jews through all the categories of three-quarters, half, and a quarter. For the time being Berenson seemed to feel no threat in Italy. He had so long thought of himself as a non-Jew, purged by his long-forgotten conversions and subsequent skepticism, that the persecutions in Germany appeared alien to him. Moreover, despite the Rome-Berlin Axis, anti-Semitism continued to be unpopular in Italy. Thus in his references to Jewish refugees Berenson always spoke as a kind of sympathetic Gen[415]

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tile, except when he thought of the miscreants who in his judgment were corrupting art history, especially in that "bouillon de culture, the German-Jew refugee university" in N e w York. Mary was at last able to satisfy her great longing to hold her first greatgrandchild in her arms when her granddaughter Barbara arrived on March 23 with her baby, Roger. Barbara had impulsively married a Finnish sailor the year before in Australia during a long cruise. The marriage quickly ended in divorce. The infant was made at home in a bassinet in Mary's room so that she was able to dote daily to her heart's content. Five days later Bernard and Nicky took leave of this scene of great-grandmotherly bliss and embarked on a six-week expedition to the Barbary coast. He assured his sister Bessie, with what sincerity one can only surmise, that he was "loathe to go on a journey without Mary, but I have little hope that she will ever travel again." In spite of their many quarrels Mary had in fact been his alter ego, a role that Nicky had perhaps not fully mastered, her dependence on him lacking the important sanction of marriage. The stages of their journey were marked by daily letters bearing postmarks from Naples, Palermo, Tripoli, and the historic backcountry, Cyrene, Malta, Syracuse, Messina, Herculaneum, Naples, and the many ancient sites between. For Berenson the trip was an additional survey of the ancient and medieval monuments of Mediterranean art that he hoped to assimilate into his projected magnum opus, " T h e Decline and Recovery of the A r t s . " In Libya the most imposing site was Leptis Magna, "the noblest ruins of the Hellenistic world." As for the vast remains at C y rene, the sight of them gratified a wish that had been inspired by his reading of Pindar as a student at Harvard. Berenson had already been in correspondence with the governor of Libya, Italo Balbo, the Italian air minister who had commanded the armada of seaplanes that visited Chicago during the World's Fair of 1933. At their first meeting Balbo burst upon them with head and shoulders thrust f o r w a r d — " a most faun-like and Dionysiac head, radiant and j o y ous"—and swept them into his study where he kept "the most precious objects that had been discovered in Tripoli." The art and architecture was Hellenistic rather than Roman, he agreed, as the talk coruscated in pell-mell fashion over archaeology and the ethnology of Libya. Balbo seemed "the most life-enhancing creature" Berenson had ever met. At dinner the next day he found him just as "exuberant, talkative, discursive, with endless pet theories of his own about history, and art and politics." Berenson exchanged a number of letters with Balbo until the end of the following year; then Balbo must have come to realize that the

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Fascist authorities did not approve of his acquaintance with an antiFascist American. While still in Tripoli Berenson found there was no escaping the urgent calls upon his services by the Duveens. In great anxiety Fowles wrote of a "dilemma" from which he wished to escape with Berenson's connivance. Baron Thyssen wanted to buy two Dreyfus paintings which he believed were by Cossa, but which Berenson had identified as by Ercole Roberti. The baron did not want Ercole Robertis. Fowles asked whether Berenson would support their sale as Cossas. Berenson's first reaction was to reply, "What you ask me to do I had rather not call by its right name." Then more temperately he wrote, " T h e profiles . . . are not by Cossa. What can I do about it?" Fowles anxiously wired that their client believed the artist was Cossa "because all German experts give this attribution. . . . Should we sell as Cossa would you flatly contradict?" Berenson replied, "Sorry, would have t o . " The paintings eventually entered the Kress Collection and bear the name of Ercole Roberti. Fowles's plea was of course not the first of its sort that Berenson refused to grant nor—at a more critical juncture—the last. At Cyrene Berenson and Nicky had been joined by Henry Coster and his wife. Coster, still another Harvard graduate whom Berenson had taken under his wing, had given up his post as American vice-consul in Florence a few years before. He had married Nicky's friend Byba Giuliani in 1926 and, after inheriting part of his mother's large estate, had settled down in Florence to the life of a scholar. The preface of his learned monograph The Iudicium Quinquevirade, a study of the judicial commission established in A.D. 376, just published by the Medieval Academy of America, acknowledged his indebtedness to Berenson: "His stimulating conversation first roused my interest in this period; his wise and patient guidance has constantly helped me in my study of it." Mary found her own relish for travel so roused by their letters that she immediately projected a book based on them. This task occupied her off and on for a few years. The book, A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast, was finally published in England in 1938 by Constable and Company. The approach of Berenson's seventieth birthday on June 26, 1935, inspired "his English admirers" to express "our indebtedness, our gratitude and our homage" to him in a letter to the editor of the London Times. "It is over forty years since there appeared those four closely packed essays . . . which were a revelation to those of us who were beginning to study and to enjoy the art of the Renaissance, slim predecessors of the two massive volumes on the Drawings of the Florentine Painters of which we are now promised a revised edition." The signers

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were C . F. Bell, Laurence Binyon, Kenneth Clark, William G. Constable, Herbert Cook, Campbell Dodgson, George Hill, A. W. Hind, C. J . Holmes, D. S. MacColl, Eric Maclagan, Eugenie Strong, and Robert Witt. On seeing the letter Lord Duveen immediately wrote, "[I] add my affectionate appreciation and our warmest birthday greetings." Georges Wildenstein's weekly Beaux-Arts, not to be outdone by the Times, carried an eloquent tribute to Berenson: thanks to Berenson's discernment, the "infallibilite de sa memoire visuelle," the "profondeur de son intelligence esthetique," and the "sürete" of his taste, " w e are in possession of a body of doctrine to facilitate our judgments and our studies." The tribute was signed by Julien Cain, D. David Weill, Henri Focillon, Louis Gillet, Louis Hautecoeur, Paul Jamot, Seymour de Ricci, Rene Schneider, Henri Verne, and Georges Wildenstein. The letter in the Times touched off a flood of congratulatory messages. One of the most touching came from the aged English art historian Robert Hobard Cust, who had left Florence a quarter of a century earlier: " I expect that you have long forgotten the very existence of so very insignificant a person as myself; but I retain a very clear memory of very many kindnesses shown to me by you and by Mrs. Berenson in days very long ago; and I feel impelled to add my somewhat thin and squeaky voice to the world-wide chorus of congratulations." From William Rothenstein there was a gracious letter that put Berenson "in a glow of affection, of gratitude, and of e n v y , " for Rothenstein, then busy with his autobiography, had spoken of his friendship with Toulouse-Lautrec. The letter drew a reply which showed that Berenson's appreciation of art went far beyond his "parish." "For you knew Toulouse-Lautrec as a man. I adore him as an artist. N o modern has got upon canvas the breath of the passing moment as he had, and with such elegance as well as sureness." At almost the same time that Berenson was receiving these tributes, Gillet's translation of his Italian Painters appeared in a single volume under the title Les Peintres Italiens de la Renaissance and was reported to be selling "like hotcakes" at the Paris exhibition. The Gazette des BeauxArts welcomed it as one of the rare masterpieces "de la critique moderne," which, though not convincing at every point, always supplies "un riche aliment ä la discussion." In the same season an Italian version of the essays came out in Emilio Cecchi's translation. Only the Venetian Painters had appeared earlier in Italian. In thanking his brother, Abie, for his birthday greetings, Bernard wrote that he hoped yet to realize part of the program of work he had in mind. Though he was far from strong and full of aches and pains, he was still "fairly nimble" on his "pins." Clearly age had begun its inexorable [418]

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exactions. He told Bessie of having gone to an aurist because his "ears had begun to sing" with the disharmonies of tinnitus. Growing deafness would come later in his litany of old age. Sensitive to the losses with which age tightened its imprisonment, he often reflected that no one had really recorded the almost imperceptible invasions of the bodily fortress. The subject was to run like a somber theme through his own diaries in his older age. It was fifteen years since he had last seen his mother, who was now eighty-nine, and he particularly welcomed word from Henry Coster, who had stopped off in Boston to call on her. Coster's account was "charming and vivid," and Berenson acknowledged, " Y e s I owe her a great deal, in fact all the zest and even the gayety and a certain ease of throwing off care which now that I am seventy I realize I possess more than most people. The ravening curiosity both in breadth and depth I get from my father. It would be hard to exaggerate what he and his friends did for me when I was in my eleventh year." Bernard's pleasure in the flood of recognition that came to him was considerably marred by the fact that Mary's health had taken a turn for the worse. Having developed a tuberculous ulcer, she went up to Vienna in July 1935 with Logan and Alys, taking with her for correction the proofs for her book Across the Mediterranean. During her ensuing four months in the hospital, her letters, relentlessly filled with clinical details, were of a sort to lacerate Bernard's sensibilities. She wrote of acute pain from the "20,000 pounds' worth" of radium inserted in her. At times she thought she was having a nervous breakdown or dying. She suggested leaving her body for medical study: "It would be less bothersome than sending it to Florence. . . . I should like to think of being useful instead of a nuisance." There had been grim humor in her report of the medical examination by a team of five doctors. They peered with mirrors "into the confusion and wreckage of 'Clapham Junction' " and all exclaimed in German, " 'Very beautiful! remarkable.' Thee could not be happier over a recently cleaned Titian." In a moment of deepest depression she toyed with the thought of suicide. " I often wish I had died before I put all this worry on thee," she wrote. " I daresay I shall do it if I really cannot get well, but I have put temptation aside for the present." The continued delay in finding a publisher for the revised Drawings inevitably induced Berenson to give another polish to the innumerable details of the elephantine work. In June Bernard and Nicky were reportedly "again up to their necks in that slough of despond." N o w while Mary languished in Vienna the pair put aside the manuscript and, accompanied by Morra, ran up to Venice for three weeks to attend the Titian

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exhibition. John Walker had accompanied them to Rimini, where they were all briefly joined by the French diplomat Jacques Truelle for visits to the art gallery of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino and the treasures of Byzantine mosaics at Ravenna. Walker and Truelle left the party at Ravenna, and Berenson and his companions arrived at Venice by October io. Nicky had brought along the 1932 Lists for correction, though Berenson insisted he was "beyond all that" and wanted "only to enjoy himself." Enjoy himself he did. On one occasion a "literary friend," Paola Drigo, a "big masterly w o m a n , " carried him off alone to her home on the mainland. Venice itself was inexhaustible. It "remains the greatest artifact of our race," he affirmed to Coster. "The individual works of art, the masterpieces of Titian even are comparatively negligible. And yet, how I did enjoy them." He lyricized to Dan Thompson, "I am rioting in the sensually idyllic, in the heroically voluptuous ideations that Venice alone conveys and never so well as through Titian." Morra, busy with his recording of Berenson's talk, noted his remark, "Seeing canvases by Tintoretto I find verses from Keats coming to mind. And is not the resemblance of subject matter—autumnal nature, golden sunsets, heavenly flights and triumphs . . . the same voice of the spirit. . . . Literary and humanistic studies, not technical practice, are what prepare one for a taste and understanding for pictures. Whoever has read many of the classics is far advanced in a world of figurations and myths which of necessity transform themselves into images." Mary rejoined Bernard late in September 1935 somewhat improved in health. It was "most enchanting," she recorded, "to get back to Bernard's delightful talk, like an oasis after four waterless months in the desert." Autumn merged into winter, with Berenson relishing the transformations in the Tuscan landscape and sky as a rapt spectator of the artistry of nature. The stream of visitors abated and work in the library went on with fewer interruptions. In his study each morning he diligently penned his replies to the letters which flooded in from correspondents in Europe and America. His correspondence had become the major literary activity of his life and by this date deflected much of his intellectual energy from sustained application upon the great work on the history of art that he projected. Berenson's pleasure in the exchange of letters with proteges like Billie Ivins and Dan Thompson grew in spite of their resistance to his instruction. He seemed in fact to relish their intransigence as a chance to embroider his own opinions. When Ivins feared he had been too outspoken, Berenson replied, " Y o u can say anything to me. I may tease you for it but love you all the more." Young Thompson at the moment was pre[420]

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paring his book The Materials of Medieval Painting for publication by the Yale University Press. He invited Berenson to supply a foreword to the book. Berenson declined in a spirited letter in which he declared, " T o my ideal history of art all sorts of servants would be summoned to help . . . but neither singly [nor] collectively would they constitute a history of art." He concluded, however, with the admission that if he had time, "there is nothing about all the ancillary aids to the understanding of a work of art that I should not try to master." Thompson boldly prefixed his book with this message as a foreword, and then in his preface he engagingly wrote, "This volume is designed for those who care for what my dearest enemy calls 'the cookery of art.' " In the course of their animated discussion Thompson suggested that art was a luxury, "that perhaps man can do without it." " Y e s , " Berenson retorted, " s o did Peter Schlemihl fancy he could sell his shadow. . . . But art is more than man's shadow. B y art I mean all the activities that have tended to humanize that most terrible of all earth's creatures, the featherless biped, M a n . " The affectionate interchange with Thompson was to go on for another twenty years, with Berenson ever insisting on the primacy of the art object in and of itself as the aim of art teaching. He had a high opinion of Thompson's abilities, and he never ceased lamenting the younger man's failure to make his mark in the academic world. T o Berenson's regret, the Fogg passed him by. In 1980 Thompson was again "an unsupported student" eager to track to Portugal "Chaucer's 'greyn of Portyngale' which 'gave the scarlet to Solomon's Temple and the purple to Byzantium and the red to the robes of Cardinals.' " His quest ended tragically in a traffic accident on a street in Madrid. With Edith Wharton, after so long an intimacy, the main concern of their correspondence was becoming the date of the much-hoped-for next meeting at Hyeres or I Tatti. T o the political-minded Henry Coster he wrote of the "euphoristic hell that Italy now seems to be." Judge Learned Hand was another favorite with whom to share the concerns of daily life. On one occasion he urged him to give a helping hand to his novelist friend Alberto Moravia, who was due in N e w York. During these years, Berenson kept his finger on the pulse of museum life with frequent interchanges with directors like Edward Waldo Forbes and Paul Sachs at the Fogg, William G. Constable at the Courtauld Institute, Kenneth Clark at the National Gallery, Charles Francis Bell at the Ashmolean Museum, Eric Maclagan at the Victoria and Albert Museum, William Milliken at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and art historians Pietro Toesca and Adolfo and Leonello Venturi. It was an epistolary world that between the wars included personages as varied as Carl Axel Boethius; [421]

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Gustaf Adolf, the crown prince of Sweden; Prince Paul of Yugoslavia; Emilio Cecchi; Royal Cortissoz; Walter Lippmann; Mario Praz; and many, many others, including numerous intellectual "lady loves." Business correspondence was now largely left to Nicky, as it had once been to Mary. Her work as an intermediary was now so well recognized that Edward Fowles frequently addressed his inquiries directly to her. When after Berenson's death Nicky made an inventory of his correspondence—personal and professional—her list included the names of more than 1,200 persons whose letters had been preserved. Those of a great many other correspondents had manifestly not been kept. The end of 1935 found Edith Wharton ill, and for the first time in many years Bernard endured the Christmas holidays at I Tatti in the company of Mary and her great-grandchild. He tinkered once more with the corrections of the Drawings, which he had been telling friends was practically finished, and he succumbed to the charm of the fifteenmonth-old infant, whom he allowed to crawl over him in his bed in the morning and frolic on his stomach. "This is doing well from the expresident of the King Herod C l u b , " Mary commented to his mother. The year-end financial statement from the Duveen firm brought little comfort. At $147,000 the unpaid balance due Berenson stood at almost exactly the same figure as at the end of 1934. What was worse, the firm now insisted that the rate of interest was 5 percent; Berenson had understood that the 6 percent figure stipulated in the 1932 agreement remained in effect. The contract, which had been renewed annually, would again expire on December 31, 1936. Word from Joe's nephew Armand Lowengard that "things are getting better in America" could only have added to Berenson's discontent. MUCH as Berenson may have enjoyed Mary's great-grandchild, the charms of the nursery could not hold him for long nor could the sight of the invalid Mary. In February 1936 he and Nicky went off to visit Edith, who was convalescing at Hyeres. There he walked with Edith up and down the terrace "redolent with violets, so amusing in their variety, some so prim and so w i l d . " She read to them from The Buccaneers, the novel that her death would leave unfinished. He read Santayana's The Last Puritan and felt it almost as if it were his own autobiography. The minute details of Cambridge, Boston, and Oxford recreated his own existence and the people could be paralleled out of his own acquaintance: "Peter Seiden with Dr. Bigelow, Caleb Wetherby with Henry Adams, etc., etc. The talk too is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone." During the visit Bernard received word that his brother, Abie, had died following surgery. He reflected that though Abie's life had been [422]

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gray, its dreariness had been relieved by his adoration for their mother. From his cousin Arthur he soon learned that it had also been brightened by a long-standing romance with a Boston woman. Bessie proposed that a modest annual sum be established for her support. At the end of the two-week holiday he faced the return to " M u s solinia." The conquest of Ethiopia by the Italian army, in which the poison gas of World War I had been effectively employed, was now sure and Mussolini's annexation of Abyssinia impended. Emperor Haile Selassie's eloquent appeal at the League of Nations fell upon deaf ears. " I think you can imagine," Bernard wrote Bessie, "what I feel about what is going on. . . . I gnash my teeth when I think how much the House of Morgan had to do with putting that arch-gangster in the saddle, when, after the Matteotti affair, he was so nearly unhorsed." But return could not be deferred. Business was getting better and had to be attended to. Fowles asked whether there were "any pictures in private hands in Italy worthy of our house, that could possibly be negotiated." The outlook seemed so promising that he strongly advised Berenson not to think of giving up I Tatti, at least " f o r the moment." The calls on Berenson's expertise multiplied. One request concerned the Wesendonck Madonna and Child in a Landscape by Bellini, which he had once regarded as a studio copy but which he now gave to the master himself. Fowles, pleased that Berenson liked the picture, said he would do his best to have it skillfully restored. When he sent a photograph of it after restoration, Berenson objected that the Madonna's face was "too sleek and eyelids hard." Fowles agreed that the "line of the eyelids is a little bit hard and we have softened it a little." Samuel Kress acquired the painting from Duveen three years later, and it now reposes in the National Gallery of Art ascribed to "Giovanni Bellini (and Assistant)." One troublesome chore concerned a Botticelli Madonna and Child owned by the Corsini Gallery. Its exportation had been refused by the authorities, though with the hint that payment of a million-lire export tax might help. At Fowles's urging, Berenson sought the advice of his friend Senator U g o Ojetti and then reported that a "reasonable" offer would probably meet with success. It was important, however, that no lawyers or middlemen be employed. The exportation was allowed for a payment of $40,000 (330,000 lire), double what Joe had wanted to give. The painting was acquired by the Mellon Foundation in 1937. With the arrival of Mary's daughter Ray and Ray's daughter, Barbara, early in March Berenson decided to seek a more stimulating environment in Rome. There for three weeks with Nicky's help he could begin his "book on the Decline and Recovery." On his return to I Tatti he told Bessie he did only a little writing each day but enjoyed "that little . . . I [423]

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am again out in the blue, and not pinned down entomologically to a microscopic subject." The writing, however, only whetted his appetite for more archaeology, and two months later he set off with Nicky on "a wonderful spree" into the Yugoslav interior to see "inaccessible monasteries." In their absence Mary felt sufficiently recovered to journey once again to her daughter Ray's "Mudhouse" at Haslemere. For the passionate traveler the journeying into the Yugoslav interior was pure adventure; much of the seventeen hundred kilometers of their wanderings through the mountains and wild gorges of central Yugoslavia was off the beaten path of tourists. They slept at "Cetinje, at Decane, at Novi Pazar, at Sarajevo, and at Mostar, in monasteries and gendarmeries," and got as far south as Prizren. The jagged circle of their motor tour brought them back to Dubrovnik, where Bernard looked up appreciatively to the "silver grey bastions and soft pink roofs" of the city. "The sea horizon is a Giorgione," he told Edith, and the stretch of seacoast "incomparably more of a garden of Eden than any bit of the French or Italian Riviera." If the dramatic scenery was a revelation, the art equally dazzled. The medieval frescoes at Gracanica were among the finest in Serbia. More than a thousand frescoes decorated the walls of the lovely monastery near Pec. The monumental figures on the walls of the church of Sopacani near Novi Pazar bore a kinship with the paintings of Giotto and Duccio. Mosques as well as churches exhibited the art of the remote past as at Mostar, whose twenty-four mosques showed the interfusion of Turkish, Orthodox, and Byzantine art resting like archaeological layers upon the towns. For Berenson the visual record was a vast palimpsest to be deciphered for his new book. Serious study ended with a day at Prince Paul's country place at the resort center of Lake Bled north of Trieste, which the sightseers reached after their drive north along the coast and through Zagreb. Thrust into the cockpit of the Balkans, the prince regent had to deal with perils on his vulnerable frontiers as well as among the fractious nationalities that made up his own country. "Hearing him talk for hours together," Berenson told Coster, "did one's heart good. He took such a European and human view of politics and as Regent he has a certain power; he may just possibly help avert or at least defer the threatening horrors." N o t one to pass heedlessly through Europe, he and Nicky proceeded to Salzburg for an "orgy . . . of music, people, and food." Encountering young John Pope-Hennessy there, "the budding or rather dawning new grand lama of British art criticism," Berenson informed Margaret Barr, "I vented my usual outburst against your God Pan and he looked grieved and softly and silently vanished away." To rest his "old bones" after the debauch of Salzburg, he departed for Grusbach in Czechoslovakia to [424]

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spend ten days at the country place of his "beloved hostess" the Countess Biba Khuen Belasi and her husband, Count Carl. "We wrangle hours together, for they are Nazi-minded," he wrote. "I listened with them to the world's news according to the dispensation of Hitler. . . . A queer world has resulted from the efforts to make it safe for democracy—safe for the dregs and the big bubbles that take shape out of the scum." After hunting out "late Roman things" at Speyer, Worms, Mayence, and Trier, the travelers headed for Rotterdam to take in an important exhibition of Old Masters. They reached London by the end of the first week of September for the meeting with J o e Duveen that Berenson had been postponing for months. Duveen had been anxious to see him because a very valuable new client, Samuel Kress, needed to be cultivated. Fowles had written that Kress's recent purchases "show him to be a serious collector and likely to be the greatest we have ever had for Italian art." When informed that Kress wished to see him during the summer, Berenson, still smarting from his experience with Jules Bache, had replied, "In keeping Mr. Bache safe for Duveen I have earned the vindictive hatred of all and sundry." That Kress might become "the greatest buyer of Italian art" was a fact "that does not personally interest me unless my financial relations with the firm are greatly altered to my advantage." The conference with Duveen resulted in a new contract which was to run from January I, 1937, to December 3 1 , 1938. Berenson's annual compensation was increased from $20,000 to $40,000, and Duveen agreed to liquidate the outstanding debt of nearly $150,000 in two yearly payments. The contract contained the proviso that either party might terminate the agreement on December 3 1 , 1937, if due notice was given on or before September 30. It also provided that Berenson was to have "no claim whatsoever for commissions or fees on purchases or sales." The contract, in spite of the increase in the so-called retainer, was hardly one with which Berenson could have been happy, because the firm could make unlimited calls upon his services—business admittedly being very much on the upswing—with no comparable increase in his compensation. Its chief advantage for Berenson was that the long-outstanding debt to him would at last be liquidated. T o Mary's practiced eye Duveen, though "bragging and blustering as if he were in perfect health," was "very, very ill," and she discovered that he had undergone a colostomy. She did not think he could live much longer. He did survive for nearly three more years and, according to Sam Behrman, "his last words, addressed to his nurse, were, 'Well, I fooled 'em for five years.' After much socializing and gallery-going during the September weeks

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in London, the Berenson menage crossed to Paris, where the semiinvalid Mary was grateful to be waited upon by the angelic Nicky. Her condition worsening, she went on to Florence, leaving Bernard in high good form in the city, which he found "friendly, pleasant, and restful." It was not until late November that he reappeared at I Tatti. The hieratic routine of life quickly reestablished itself, though first he had to plow through the great " m u c k " of publications that had accumulated in his absence of three months, books and periodicals, "foul smelling German-Jewish among them," as he gratuitously needled Margaret Barr. The clock of his energy had begun to point toward evening, he told her. He found himself dozing off often when he tried to read, and the fifty words he had managed to write, after a morning's work at his desk, had to be erased the next day. Afternoon naps had long been a necessity, though he sprang up from them with amazingly undiminished vigor eager for human society. The increasing international tension had greatly reduced the number of English and American visitors, and Berenson had to fall back more and more on his Italian friends, sometimes five or six during the course of a day. He found them "more interesting and congenial" than he had formerly thought. The "patriotic w a r " enthusiasts of course avoided I Tatti. For inside information he could count on Ojetti, who, as a liberal senator and journalist, had his finger on the Italian pulse. A new young Italian luminary came on the scene at this time, Arturo Loria—poet, essayist, and journalist—and began a long intimacy as a kind of foster son. A few favorite house guests continued to come. Edith Wharton arrived for a fortnight's stay carrying with her the novel on which she still hopefully worked. Although she appeared in "excellent f o r m " for her seventy-four years, her health was seriously impaired. Neither of the two old friends foresaw that they would not meet again. Clotilde also came from Naples to cheer him. Before 1936 was out John Walker, who had just married Lady Margaret Drummond, daughter of the British ambassador at Rome, arrived to show his bride. Rather to his surprise Berenson learned soon afterward from a correspondent that he was being considered as a candidate for the "Mellon S h o w " in Washington. Andrew Mellon had announced plans to build a national gallery and donate his art collection to it. If a species of peace and order clung to I Tatti, the prospect in the outside world grew ever more menacing. The gospel of nonintervention in Spain, piously adhered to by England, France, and the United States, was openly flouted by Italy and Germany, who supplied arms and troops to rebel Generalissimo Franco. Madrid was under siege. Earlier in the year Hitler had unilaterally denounced the Locarno Pact and sent his [426]

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troops into the Rhineland and the Ruhr. Then in November 1936 Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact as part of the proposed war against Russian communism. Defensive measures were belatedly begun in England with the ordering of the production of gas masks for the civilian population. B y Christmas the subjugation of Abyssinia by the Italian army was declared "virtually complete." Meanwhile the violent Nazi demonstrations in Austria foreshadowed the imminent absorption of that country by Nazi Germany, a move that in fact took place the following April without resistance. In Germany the enforcement of the barbarous Nuremberg laws proceeded with harshest severity. T o further punish dissent, the Nazi regime announced in early December that Thomas Mann and ninety other German citizens had been officially deprived of German nationality. There was ample cause for Bernard to write to his sister Bessie, " T h e prospects are so dreadful that once I saw a certain comfort out of their sheer horror. One said to oneself it is impossible that even Nazis should be so desperate as to pull the world down about their ears. One hopes that their fighting forces know that if it comes to war . . . they shall have nothing left but eyes to weep with."

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X L II

The Allendale Nativity

A

S E N S E of urgency took possession of Berenson with the approach of 1937. For too long he had harbored the feeling of "arrested development" that marked his thirty-year association with Joe Duveen. The new book, he hoped, would be his carte de visite to posterity. He turned down Edith Wharton's "dear enticing invitation" to make his usual holiday visit, explaining that he at last had begun to produce and "must stick at it now until I come to a stop." He was writing on matters that really count, "whether they get printed or not," for he had the "illusion of pulling things out of the depths." It was not that he scorned his past achievements. He carefully enumerated them in his 1937 report to the secretary of his Harvard class on its fiftieth anniversary. He was bequeathing I Tatti to Harvard; he had published a significant array of books and articles; "directly and indirectly" he had been responsible for pictures in the Gardner, Johnson, Widener, and Walters collections; and "most of the other Italian paintings" in public or private collections had gone to America with his "visa on their passport." But those achievements were behind him. It was the future that was important, for he ended his report, " I am now at work on a book that will sum up my conclusions about art and its history." T o a similar request from the secretary of the Boston University Class of 1887, of which he had been named an honorary member, he responded with a revealing warmth of feeling: "Dear Companions of the Dawn, you asked me at the twilight of life to tell you what success has meant for me. I fear you mean worldly success. If that is so, it has meant means for travelling, for buying books, for gathering friends under my own roof, to have access to libraries and private collections and to be treated like a tolerably respectable passenger on the ship of life. . . . Real success I have enjoyed, but secretly as it were. I count success as freedom [428]

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to live according to one's nature, to be free to exercise one's better function. . . . Because I have been able on the whole to remain a free man, I count myself as having had a fairly successful career. Recognition means little. H o n o u r s I have seldom had and never sought. I have no degrees or title. I have remained for fifty years a student and I wish for m o r e years to w o r k as a student in the field of art." Doubtless this idealizing retrospect was sincere, as most sentimental idealizing tends to be. A n d like most it could not help being less than frank. His f r e e d o m had c o m e at a price that he never ceased to regret, for it had been f r e e d o m intertwined with b o n d a g e — b o n d a g e to the art trade, to dealers like Duveen w h o thrived in its corruption, and to rich barbarians of culture. As for fame and recognition, he seemed, at least while this ideal vision of himself filled his mind, to forget the ambition that had launched h i m on his career as an art expert w h e n he and Enrico Costa had sat in the square at B e r g a m o nearly fifty years ago. H e had cherished his reputation as a connoisseur with a fierce tenacity. H e w o u l d be at the head of his profession t h o u g h the heavens fell, as he would soon insist to Lord Duveen himself. T h e creative afflatus kept h i m at his desk mornings at I Tatti as the days lengthened into spring, and, as he deprecated to Edith Wharton, he w r o t e as m a n y as a hundred w o r d s a day. T h e elegant ritual of luncheon, tea, and dinner in which a succession of visitors and house guests played their civilized roles seemed to hold the ugliness of the outside world at bay. Politics had become an obsession, and Berenson's contempt for the " D u c k , " as the household referred to II Duce, inspired his passionate rhetoric. Echoes of it were b o u n d to reach Fascist ears in t o w n , but as an important American he still remained out of reach. T h e n e w b o o k went f o r w a r d f r o m the intimations with which he had concluded The North Italian Painters thirty years before. T o Morra he explained, "I a m seeking to demonstrate that after any period of great artistic maturity there follows a period of impoverishment, of barbarization, of decadence, which always repeats the same f o r m s of involution: the enlargement, stiffening and geometricization of c o n t o u r s . " M u c h as he deplored what he thought were the mistaken emphases at the Fogg on the technical aspects of art study, he eagerly received the y o u t h f u l art historians w h o were sent to h i m for guidance in their w o r k , and with them as with Ivins and T h o m p s o n he proselytized, with a similar lack of success, for his view of the main responsibilities of art history. A fresh recruit appeared early in the year, sent by Paul Sachs, a y o u n g m a n of twenty-three, Sydney Freedberg, w h o was to become one of his most loyal supporters. Berenson f o u n d h i m "remarkably responsive" to his probing queries, t h o u g h prudently reserved on matters of [429]

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art, no doubt aware of his host's sharp tongue and of his antipathy to the "skyscraper pedantry" the refugee art historians were popularizing in academia. Freedberg became a distinguished professor of art at Harvard and later chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It was in 1937 also that Margaret Barr recommended to his hospitality Agnes Mongan, with whom he had been in correspondence for a number of years. As a curator at the Fogg Museum she was to become one of Berenson's most appreciated allies for the next twenty years. The imminent opening of the third Florence " M a g g i o , " the monthlong music festival in May that drew visitors from all over Europe, was a signal to Berenson to put down his pen and flee the "pitiless" telephoned importunities of old friends arriving in town for a day or two and insistent on seeing him. Laden with the usual baggage of books and tea things, he started for Brindisi with Nicky to take ship to Cyprus. Mary took herself off to the seacoast at Viareggio, "after rooking £400 out of m e , " he wryly commented to Edith Wharton, " f o r a month's cure afterward" at Vienna. En route to Brindisi Bernard and Nicky stopped off at Rome for a dinner with the director of the American Academy, Chester Aldrich; " H a r r y " James, Henry James's nephew; and Morgan partner Thomas Lamont, who was in Rome to have what he discreetly described to the press as " a purely courtesy" audience with Mussolini. The two aesthetic travelers could only have been relieved to escape the wartime atmosphere of Rome, where the newspapers celebrated the heroic exploits of the hundreds of wounded Italian soldiers invalided home from Generalissimo Franco's battlefields in Spain. The threatening international situation received an oddly macabre emphasis before the summer was out: an Italian insurance company offered gas masks as premiums with its policies. The three weeks in Cyprus and the stay in Rhodes displayed Berenson again as an indefatigable sightseer of ruins and scenery. At Famagusta he thought that the Byzantine church of St. Barnabas must have in its best days rivaled St. Mark's in Venice. He felt himself living "in a dreamland, in a fairy world, in perpetual ecstasy except when in the earliest morning hours sand flies pungently" recalled him "to the flesh and its sufferings." So he passed his time, he confided to Bessie, "to drink in sensations . . . and to muse and day dream." At the other end of the Mediterranean German dive bombers swept down upon Guernica, the "holy city" of the Basques, to test the efficacy of the new technique, but the news was so garbled that its epochal significance was lost in the press. On his return home he found waiting for him an appealing request from twenty-three-year-old Benedict Nicolson to come to Florence to [430]

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s t u d y Italian p a i n t i n g u n d e r his g u i d a n c e , a p o s s i b i l i t y B e r e n s o n h a d s u g g e s t e d earlier in t h e y e a r in a talk w i t h his father, d i p l o m a t H a r o l d N i c o l s o n . T h a t a u t u m n he w e l c o m e d t h e n e w disciple, w h o c a m e f r o m w o r k i n g at the N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y in L o n d o n as an attache u n d e r K e n n e t h C l a r k . I m p r e s s e d b y B e n ' s sensitive d i s c e r n m e n t , B e r e n s o n sent h i m in t h e f o l l o w i n g y e a r t o s t u d y at t h e F o g g . T h e i n t i m a c y that had then b e g u n t o d e v e l o p b e t w e e n t h e m e n d u r e d t o the e n d o f B e r e n s o n ' s life. A f t e r s e r v i c e in t h e B r i t i s h a r m y d u r i n g W o r l d W a r II, N i c o l s o n t u r n e d t o w r i t i n g o n art a n d s o o n b e c a m e the e d i t o r o f the p r e s t i g i o u s

Burlington

Magazine. O n B e r n a r d ' s r e t u r n M a r y , l o n g r e c o n c i l e d to the c o n g e n i a l role o f w i f e e m e r i t u s , b e t o o k her b a f f l i n g a i l m e n t s t o H a s l e m e r e , w h e r e in the b o s o m o f h e r f a m i l y she c o u l d i n d u l g e t h e m w i t h f e w e r q u a l m s . A s the s u m m e r s l o w l y passed she d i v e r t e d B e r n a r d w i t h f r e q u e n t r e p o r t s o f the m y s t e r i o u s v a g a r i e s o f her c o n d i t i o n . H e r pains, she said, s e e m e d t o h a v e p a r a l y z e d her brain b u t t h e y h a d set free her s o u l in a w a y she c o u l d n o t describe. It w a s as i f her s o u l " h a d c r o s s e d the b o r d e r a n d b e g u n t o taste t h e j o y s o f the n e x t l i f e . " T h e litany w a s o n e he h a d heard b e f o r e , and he d u t i f u l l y r e s p o n d e d i n his d i a r y letters w i t h e x p r e s s i o n s o f a f f e c t i o n a n d c o n c e r n . It w a s as i f each h a d settled into roles f r o m w h i c h l o n g habit b a r r e d e v e n the t h o u g h t o f escape. I n c r e a s i n g l y the links b e t w e e n I T a t t i a n d H a r v a r d s t r e n g t h e n e d . P r o fessors E d g e l l a n d F o r b e s c a m e o n i n f o r m a l m i s s i o n s t o s t u d y the p o s sibilities o f the place a n d t o b e s t u d i e d as critically b y B e r e n s o n . O n e can o n l y i m a g i n e t h e v i v a c i t y a n d bite w i t h w h i c h B e r e n s o n m u s t h a v e l a u n c h e d his attack that s u m m e r in M o r r a ' s h e a r i n g o n the " b a s t a r d i z a t i o n a n d g e o m e t r i c i z a t i o n " o f " ' n o n - o b j e c t i v e art' as t h e y call it in N e w Y o r k . " T h i s passion, w h i c h is " b o t h s n o b b i s h a n d g e n u i n e , o n the part o f the p u b l i c , " h e said, " g i v e s m e a g l i m p s e o f the raptures w i t h w h i c h e v e n the p e o p l e m o s t g r e a t l y e n d o w e d w i t h taste m u s t h a v e a d m i r e d b a r b a r i a n art o b j e c t s w h e n the last fires o f A l e x a n d r i a n art h a d g o n e o u t a n d these p e o p l e w e r e a l r e a d y satiated b y the c l u m s y a t t e m p t s p r o d u c e d out o f the decadence o f R o m e . " In late s u m m e r o f 1937 B e r e n s o n retreated t o P o g g i o alio S p i n o as h a b i t r e q u i r e d , i m m e r s e d at t h e b r e a k o f d a y in C h a t e a u b r i a n d ' s

Memoirs

o r a b o o k b y K a f k a a n d later w a n d e r i n g o v e r the m o u n t a i n s i d e i n t o x icated b y t h e c l o u d - d a p p l e d s k y a n d the h a z e - s h r o u d e d f o r e s t vistas o f b e e c h a n d pine d o t t e d w i t h islands o f g h o s t l y birches. L e a r n e d H a n d a n d S y b i l C o l e f a x d r o v e u p f r o m F l o r e n c e f o r l u n c h e o n , and W a l t e r L i p p m a n n , f r e s h f r o m the success o f his Good

Society,

c a m e to tell o f his

s o u n d i n g s a m o n g leaders in L o n d o n , Paris, and G e n e v a . " T h e situation is n o t b r i l l i a n t , " B e r e n s o n c o n c l u d e d . [431]

world

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One day in August the shattering news came that Edith Wharton, the most treasured of his literary friends, had quietly died at her villa near Paris in the lingering wake of a stroke a few months earlier. The news came when his own vigor had begun to run low. He felt himself on the brink of a nervous collapse. " A great mass of the iceberg of life" on which he lived "broke off and plunged into the abyss," he mourned to Dan Thompson. Edith Wharton carried with her "a great part of my past and no little of the present. All that a woman who was neither wife nor mistress could be to a man she has been to me for a good thirty years." T o Nicky he wrote that he felt "numb and dumb and as if my bodily temperature had lowered to the freezing point." Her death seemed but another sign of the "crumbling" of his universe. A very different breach with the past impended, one, however, that would prove to be a kind of liberation. The first stirrings had begun in May when the expert chores which he was increasingly called upon to perform for Duveen were interrupted with a seemingly innocent query conveyed by Fowles from Duveen: " T o w h o m do you attribute the small Allendale picture? His impression is that years ago you used to call it 'Early Titian.' " The reference was of course to the Allendale Nativity, later called The Adoration of the Shepherds. J o e Duveen immediately followed Fowles's letter with a telegraphic inquiry. Luxuriating at that moment in Cyprus, Berenson saw no urgency in the matter, not even when Duveen sent a second telegram setting out the arguments for attributing the painting to Giorgione. A few days later Duveen cabled again, "Anxiously waiting reply my wire." Berenson finally cabled, "In all probability early Titian." What Berenson did not know at the moment was that Duveen was on the point of purchasing the picture, having in view its sale to either Mellon or Kress at an enormous price. The painting had been exhibited as a Giorgione as recently as 1930 at the Royal Academy, and as far back as 1924 Duveen had begun to dream of engineering the sale of such a valuable rarity. The matter hung fire during the rest of the summer of 1937 while Fowles, as Duveen's intermediary, began to negotiate a new contract with Berenson that would replace the contract due to expire December 31, 1938, with an agreement providing more favorable terms for the discontented Berenson. When on August 3 Fowles informed Berenson that the terms of the " n e w arrangement" were in the main acceptable to Duveen, he included the disturbing proposal that he bring the Allendale painting up to Poggio alio Spino, "as certain details depend upon whether you will be able to make this picture a desirable acquisition." The thought of a disagreeable debate with Fowles was more than Berenson was willing to face, and he immediately protested, with some color of truth, " I am in a bad way. If I

[432]

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don't take the greatest care I shall have a complete breakdown. In my present state I must not see anyone on business, not even you, no matter how pressing. Still less am I in condition to go into a question so supremely delicate as the authorship of the Allendale 'Nativity.' " He suggested also that he was considering giving up his connection with the firm. That threat appears to have alarmed Fowles, and, addressing himself to Nicky in a letter dated August 13, 1937, he argued that though Berenson had once told him he could live in a quiet way "without working," he believed it would "entail many restrictions on his present style of living and certainly would entail worries as to the placing of funds." He pointed out that there had been a great improvement in the firm's business and that he " w o u l d like to see B . B . benefitting therefrom as well as ourselves." He conceded that the matter of the Allendale picture might cause him a little worry and rashly went on to say that there was no need to be nervous about it, as "all other so-called critics have accepted it as Giorgione, and if we don't buy it, the Mellon Trust will acquire it themselves direct. . . . I realize this kind of business upsets B . B . ' s exceptionally high strung nature, but really there is no need to worry in such case where we have everyone else with u s . " He could hardly have made a less prudent suggestion, especially as in his next letter, dated September 3, he declared to Nicky that he had had no intention "in any way to force B . B . ' s opinion on the picture" but had inferred, when he talked with him at Perugia, that he did not wish to express an opinion until the terms of the new contract had been agreed upon. Hence he thought that if his "opinion on the picture was favorable to us, it should be included in the new arrangement." Fowles now had to confess to Nicky that the mire was deeper than Berenson knew. Duveen had decided to go ahead with the purchase because competitors were in the market and he had therefore acquired the picture " f o r a very large sum . . . one of the largest prices we have ever paid for an Italian picture; not a Catena, nor even a Titian price, but a Giorgione price. . . . The present position is that having purchased this picture as a Giorgione, we must sell it as Giorgione even if B . B . does not uphold this attribution." Fowles did not mention that the negotiation for the purchase had been concluded almost a month before, on August 5. Furious at the affront to his authority, Berenson dictated an indignant rebuttal, sent over Nicky's signature, denying that the opinions of the critics were "as universal as you imagine." He cited George M . Richter's recent Giorgio da Castelfranco, published with "the full authority of the University of Chicago," in which Richter spoke of the picture as a "copy of an original perhaps, but only perhaps by Giorgione." And he pointed [433]

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out that Duncan Phillips, who was "much looked up to as an authority by the best people in Washington and N e w York," had declared that it was "designed but not executed by Giorgione." Warming to his grievance, Berenson continued, "Lord Duveen has always flattered him into feeling that for him, Lord Duveen, and for his clients, there was only one authority, his, B.B.'s." He "does not choose to climb down at the end of his career from that height and submit to the opinion of critics whose competence he respects no more now than he and Lord Duveen and Lord Duveen's clients have respected hitherto. If therefore Lord Duveen insists on selling the Allendale picture as a Giorgione, on his own authority or on that of other critics, B.B. no longer sees any reason for retaining his position as the advisor of Lord Duveen. It would be utterly below his self-respect, let alone his dignity, to be kept on as a pet, and not as an unquestioned authority. Lord Duveen . . . leaves B.B. no alternative but to offer his resignation." Hoping to overcome Berenson's resistance, Fowles came back with the information that Richter had seen the painting in July and had now certified that having "examined the picture I feel convinced that it must be attributed to Giorgione himself." Richter's sudden and private volteface at the very time when his book on Giorgione was out for review must have roused Berenson's suspicion that Duveen's aggressive salesmanship had won a convert. Evidently also known to Fowles, though not to Berenson, was the fact that Georg Gronau had also changed his long-held opinion that the author was an anonymous artist close to Catena and Giorgione to the conviction that he was Giorgione himself. Berenson was adamant. He declared he would not "be a member or at best the president" of a committee of critics, and if the firm would not agree to take "his advice only in the purchase of Italian pictures," he must insist on handing in his resignation. Still hoping to persuade Berenson to change his mind, Fowles came on from Paris late in September, bringing the cleaned painting with him. He was at Consuma all day on his arrival and, Berenson wrote Mary, "left me a total wreck. He is coming in tomorrow, after which I hope I may never see him again—not on business at least. My regret is that I did not quit four years ago when Sir Joseph treated me as he did then." Still hot in his memory was his fruitless interview with Sir Joseph in Vienna at the time of the currency crisis. Fowles's mission was not made easier for Berenson by the fact that his normal state of nerves was exacerbated by ill health that would shortly require his spending two months in Vienna for medical treatment. The rejection of his authority could only have brought to the surface all Berenson's dislike of Duveen's personality and business methods. He [434]

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would demean himself no further. On September 24 Fowles cabled Duveen, "Gronau says undoubted marvellous typical Giorgione. Bernard insists Titian, so have accepted resignation." In October, after Fowles had requested that Berenson "expose his attribution of the Allendale picture" on one of the photographs he had left with him, Berenson dictated the following defiant offer: "If Lord Duveen is ready to accept B . B . ' s attribution of the Allendale picture and to start a new arrangement on the terms of $50,000 a year and 5% on all purchases . . . B . B . will send Lord Duveen a letter giving him the reasons why the Allendale picture is more than vaguely Giorgionesque . . . but by no less an artist than Titian himself. If the offer was sent, it was not accepted. Personal relations between Berenson and Duveen came to an abrupt end. In the remaining months of the year Fowles amicably continued to ask Berenson's opinion of paintings offered to the firm, and Berenson as amicably supplied them. In a friendly letter to Berenson in December Levy wrote of the probable liquidation of Duveen Brothers, and in January 1938 he urged Berenson to keep his "mind open so as to pass fair judgment" upon the offer he believed would come from the reorganized firm. Berenson felt that he would have to be assured that his word was law and be offered financial compensation that would make it worth his while "to replunge into the mephitic atmosphere which it seems impossible to avoid breathing the moment one has any relation to art dealing." In his January letter Levy also reported on the success of the Bache Museum, of which he was a busy trustee. The Allendale negotiation, carried on in two continents and involving a number of participants, inevitably led to conflicting accounts. A dramatic version by Sam Behrman tells of Duveen's hurrying over to England, buying the painting, and hurrying back to America to show it to Andrew Mellon. Mellon, "enraptured" by Duveen's spellbinding presentation, had nevertheless the presence of mind to ask " 'What does B . B . say?' . . . 'Never mind about that,' Duveen replied sharply, Ί say it's Giorgione. Everybody says it's Giorgione. And there isn't a doubt in the world that B . B . will say it's a Giorgione.' " When Berenson's certificate failed to materialize, he returned it to Duveen. " Ί don't want another Titian,' he said sourly. 'Find me a Giorgione.' " The eighty-two-year-old Mellon became seriously ill late in June 1937 and until his death on August 27 was confined in his daughter's home at Southampton, Long Island. Duveen, who had been in N e w York, returned to England to be present at the May 12 coronation of George VI. In August he was at San Vitell on the Continent taking a cure. The story of Duveen's urgent transatlantic mission would seem to have been [435]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF

A

LEGEND

a m o n g t h e a p o c r y p h a s u p p l i e d y e a r s later to B e h r m a n b y L o u i s L e v y , w h o w a s a great admirer o f D u v e e n ' s resourcefulness. D u v e e n did n o t sail to N e w Y o r k until A u g u s t 29. A s J o h n W a l k e r recalled the c i r c u m s t a n c e s , he w a s w i t h

Berenson

w h e n a t e l e g r a m a r r i v e d f r o m J o e D u v e e n a n n o u n c i n g the p u r c h a s e o f t h e A l l e n d a l e Nativity

" f o r 60,000 g u i n e a s " ($300,000 at the time). B e -

r e n s o n said, " I f j o e D u v e e n p a i d that m u c h f o r the p i c t u r e , he m u s t t h i n k it is b y G i o r g i o n e , and it isn't. It's b y T i t i a n . O b v i o u s l y , h e t h i n k s h e can sell a G i o r g i o n e to M r . M e l l o n , w h e r e a s h e can't sell a T i t i a n . H e is capable o f p r e t e n d i n g I t o o t h i n k t h e p i c t u r e b y G i o r g i o n e . . . . Please w r i t e his s o n [Paul], w h o is a f r i e n d o f y o u r s , and tell h i m m y o p i n i o n , so there can b e n o q u e s t i o n . ' " W a l k e r a f t e r w a r d learned f r o m D a v i d F i n l e y that " t h e p i c t u r e h a d n e v e r b e e n o f f e r e d t o M r . M e l l o n , " D u v e e n h a v i n g i n t e n d e d it f o r S a m u e l K r e s s . D u v e e n m a y n e v e r h a v e m a d e a f o r m a l o f f e r t o M e l l o n , b u t f o r a t i m e at least h e h a d h o p e d t o interest h i m in the p a i n t i n g . H e p r o b a b l y k n e w that D u n c a n Phillips, o n e o f the trustees o f the M e l l o n E d u c a t i o n a l a n d C h a r i t a b l e T r u s t , h a d u r g e d its a c q u i s i t i o n f o r " t h e W a s h i n g t o n A r t G a l l e r y " i n spite o f his r e s e r v a t i o n s a b o u t it. M e l l o n ' s death i n A u g u s t m a d e it all t h e m o r e u r g e n t to m a i n t a i n the G i o r g i o n e a t t r i b u t i o n in o r d e r t o o b t a i n a " G i o r g i o n e p r i c e " f r o m K r e s s , a n d it e x p l a i n s F o w l e s ' s e a g e r p u r s u i t o f B e r e n s o n d u r i n g S e p t e m b e r . It w a s n o t until D e c e m b e r 1 1 , 1937, that L o r d A l l e n d a l e ' s sale o f the Nativity

r e c e i v e d p u b l i c n o t i c e . O n that date t h e p a i n t i n g w a s r e p r o d u c e d

in the L o n d o n Times,

a n d M a u r i c e B r o c k w e l l w a s q u o t e d as s a y i n g that

it h a d b e e n s o l d " p r i v a t e l y . " N e i t h e r the p u r c h a s e r n o r the date o f the sale w a s r e v e a l e d . In 1938 D u v e e n , a r m e d w i t h G e o r g G r o n a u ' s f a v o r able o p i n i o n p u b l i s h e d in Art in America,

s o l d it t o S a m u e l K r e s s as a

G i o r g i o n e f o r an u n d i s c l o s e d s u m . T h e p u r c h a s e w a s to be k e p t secret until r e v e a l e d w i t h suitable f a n f a r e at the i n a u g u r a t i o n o f the N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y i n 1939. K r e s s s w o r e the d i r e c t o r , D a v i d F i n l e y , a n d his c h i e f c u r a t o r , J o h n W a l k e r , t o s e c r e c y . T o their a s t o n i s h m e n t the Nativity

was

d i s p l a y e d " i n t h e w i n d o w o f the K r e s s s t o r e o n F i f t h A v e n u e t o celebrate Christmas." T h e d e b a t e o v e r the a u t h o r s h i p o f the p a i n t i n g w a s n o t stilled, t h o u g h an i n c r e a s i n g n u m b e r o f critics c a m e t o share G r o n a u ' s o p i n i o n . T w e n t y y e a r s later i n his 1 9 5 7 list o f t h e " V e n e t i a n S c h o o l , " B e r e n s o n m o d i f i e d his o p i n i o n a n d a t t r i b u t e d t h e p a i n t i n g in part to G i o r g i o n e w i t h " V i r g i n and Landscape p r o b a b l y finished b y T i t i a n . " T h e 1979 Shapley catalogue o f t h e N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y o f A r t , n o w c a l l i n g the p a i n t i n g The Adoration the Shepherds,

of

accepts the a s c r i p t i o n t o G i o r g i o n e , at t h e s a m e t i m e listing

a m o n g five dissenters P r o f e s s o r S. J. F r e e d b e r g , w h o o p t e d f o r early T i t i a n in his 1 9 7 1 Painting in Italy, 1500-1600,

[436]

a n d Ellis W a t e r h o u s e , w h o ,

THE

A L L E N D A L E

NATIVITY

in his Glasgow lecture in 1973, disregarding Berenson's altered opinion, declared, " I agree with Berenson that Titian must be responsible for the picture." Ironically, in the midst of Berenson's dispute with Fowles and Duveen, Samuel Kress came up to Consuma to keep the appointment which Sir Joseph had proposed the year before. Bernard reported to Mary that bachelor Kress drove up in his private car accompanied by "a femme du monde . . . a well-groomed hard lady of fashion, who was obviously running Kress. . . . In the course of our talk, Kress turned out to be the easiest of rich men to deal with." It was his "clever and attractive" companion, as John Walker has noted, who had "brilliantly" devised for Kress the hobby of collecting Italian art and in the 1920s had put him in touch with the recently ennobled Florentine collector and dealer Count Contini Bonacossi of Florence, from whom he made hundreds of purchases. The friendly acquaintance between Kress and Berenson begun with their meeting continued for many years and drew in his brother Rush. Shortly afterward Kress sent photographs of the paintings in his collection for Berenson's attributions, a noncommercial chore that Berenson was always willing to perform for private collectors and curators since he thereby increased his own great study collection. Amusingly enough, Walker was present while Berenson was examining the photographs and was able to astonish Kress with the accuracy of his attributions when Kress showed him the paintings in their shadow boxes in his two-story penthouse in N e w York. Berenson went up to Vienna for medical treatment in the late autumn. During a two-month stay he passed much of his time in frequent consultation with the famous laryngologist Dr. Heinrich von Neumann in the treatment of his "hereditary catarrh" and "four hours a d a y " with a dentist who looked after his abscessed teeth and initiated him into the humiliating ordeal of old age—being fitted with false teeth. He was spending, he said, more than $5,000 on medical fees. Fortunately there were agreeable distractions of an evening. He sat through five hours of Parsifal without "a moment of boredom." And after a performance of Beethoven's Missa Solemtiis he renewed acquaintance with the conductor, Bruno Walter, and his Jewish wife. He felt especially at home with Franz Werfel, w h o m he loved, he told Senda, "almost as much as I love Walter Lippmann, or Prince Paul, or Johnnie Walker. He is a man appealing, eloquent, deep, and human, and so tender . . . a deeply religious person, though practising no cult and not satisfied with my Nirvana." He thought him after Thomas Mann "the finest writer in German now living." He visited also with his "very great friends, Count and Countess Carl Khuen Belasi," but their approval of [437]

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fascism considerably tempered his pleasure and finally was not to be borne. It was while he was in Vienna that he learned of his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. T h e news came in a letter f r o m his cousin Arthur enclosing a clipping f r o m the New York HeraldTribune. T h e h o n o r gave them all a chance, Arthur said, to bask in reflected glory. Arthur was disappointed, however, that Harvard had yet to bestow recognition on him. Still deeply resentful of Sir Joseph's "betrayal," Berenson sent f r o m Vienna to Royal Cortissoz a defense of his attribution to Titian of the Allendale painting: " Y o u are acquainted of course with the Allendale picture, one of the most fascinating Giorgionesque pictures ever painted. T h e problem of h o w to attribute it has preoccupied m e for many years. I naturally left n o n a m e untried. Finally, some ten or twelve years ago, the light dawned u p o n me, and I began to see that it must be Titian's, perhaps his earliest w o r k , but only half out of the egg, the other half still in the Giorgionesque f o r m u l a — t h e landscape, namely. Recently I have seen the picture again and was in raptures over its enchantment and beauty. A n d yet the longer I looked, the more and more I saw in it the emerging art of Titian. It is m y deepest conviction that this attribution will ultimately win t h r o u g h . " Cortissoz had recently reviewed the Richter and Phillips books on Giorgione in the New York Herald-Tribune. N o w , in "Giorgione A g a i n , " inspired by Berenson's letter, he returned to the problem and quoted the passage f r o m Berenson's letter describing h o w he had arrived at the attribution to Titian. Berenson w r o t e also to Duncan Phillips. "I am convinced," he said, "that I could persuade you that though the Allendale picture is as Giorgionesque as you please, it has no touch of Giorgione's o w n hand. . . . M y proofs? T h e y are in m y o w n head . . . [and] cannot easily go into words, for they come f r o m that sixth sense, the result of fifty years' experience w h o s e p r o m p t i n g s are incommunicable." H e then " b u t tressed" that intuition with five pages of detailed analysis, concluding, "If w e wish to confine ourselves to what will be universally accepted, let it be 'School of Giorgione,' or, as I hope will in the long run win through, 'Titian E[arly].' " When Cortissoz sent h i m a copy of his article "Giorgione A g a i n , " Berenson cabled his gratitude and followed the cable with a long letter reporting that Phillips had explained to h i m that since the Mellon Trust already had at least three Titians, it w o u l d be difficult to persuade t h e m to get another. " T h e r e f o r e he wanted to drag in the n a m e of Giorgione s o m e h o w . " In effect he had asked Berenson's consent to "present the picture as by G i o r g i o n e — n o matter h o w little Giorgione—and Titian." [438]

THE

ALLENDALE

NATIVITY

A week later, while still brooding over the matter, he again wrote to Cortissoz, enclosing a copy of his response to Phillips and explaining that he had written him with the "hope of turning him away from the idea that the Allendale picture was 'somehow' in the Pickwickian sense vaguely Giorgione's—nowhere in particular but all-overish as it were." In the last days of December 1937 Fowles sent the wish that his new leisure would permit Berenson to devote his time and energies to his "Great T a s k , " the book that would be the summing up of his career. He felt confident, he wrote, that "our future relations, which have all these years been so cordial—thanks to your sincerity and impartiality—will continue . . . friendly and beneficial to us both." Change was already in the air. Louis Levy wrote that Berenson's request to have the remainder of his claims paid to him fitted in with "the plan of liquidation." The liquidation would take place in May when the firm's charter expired, and Duveen, because of his declining health, would become an employee of the new corporation. The payment arrived in February and at last closed his old account with the firm. Official announcement of his resignation having been delayed, the accounting department had deposited a $10,000 retainer fee in March of 1938 at Baring Brothers. The refund was duly arranged. Lord Duveen died in N e w York in May 1939, a victim of cancer. What Berenson's private feelings were appear to have gone unrecorded. One can surmise that they may have been as ambiguous as those of "a famous rival dealer" who said, "We miss him, but we are glad that he has gone." He sent a letter to Fowles, who replied, " I very much appreciated your beautiful letter of sympathy. It was really very painful for me to see that wonderful vitality and exuberance which we all appreciated so much gradually fade away. Armand and myself hope to continue on the same lines of business and it will not be easy at the commencement as business is very poor everywhere." Berenson's sense of grievance against Sir Joseph ran deep and he never forgave him or Levy. As a very old man he wrote in his diary, " I f Duveen abetted by his lawyer had played fair by me I should have at least double the capital I now have. I should be able to endow I Tatti as I hoped to do instead of leaving it perhaps a mere library and not the lay monastery for leisurely culture that I dreamt o f . " Negotiations for the acquisition of the Duveen firm by Armand L o w engard, Edward Fowles, and Bertram Boggis began by May 24, 1938, and the purchase was completed before the end of the year. B y 1958 Fowles had bought out his associates. Six years later, at the age of seventy-nine, he sold the entire collection in the gallery, valued at fifteen million dollars, to the Norton Simon Foundation, together with the fivestory mansion in which it was housed. [439]

X L III

The Drawings Revisited

T

H E "Great T a s k , " the book on decline and recovery in art, grew more formidable as its compass widened, and Berenson's pen flagged; he reread what he had written, and though there were passages that seemed to say what he wanted, he felt unable to go on. " M y wife is tearing it all to pieces," he told Dan Thompson. "She is amazing. Here she is too ill, poor dear, to do anything but play patience and read detective novels. Yet she pounces on my manuscript as she used to do in her past and most ferocious years, so in the course of demolition displays a mental energy, acumen, and subtlety, simply amazing." As for his own health, he ruefully wrote his mother, " I have become a barometer, but a suffering one and I ache in all my bones when it is cold and damp. Just now I ache dreadfully in my false teeth." When he rescued his manuscript from Mary, he returned to "dribbling out every day a few lines. . . . I dare not re-read. I dare not reflect,—I write putting down what passes through my head." N o longer obliged to render opinions on potential acquisitions for Duveen, he found himself almost burdened with freedom as he sought to marshal his reflections on art. Patently on the defensive for his view of art study, he tended to lose himself in prolegomena. The fragment of manuscript which survives from 1938 shows him returning to the thesis with which he concluded The North Italian Painters of the Renaissance in 1907, where in a final section, " T h e Decline of A r t , " he had theorized that Italy was the only country where the figure arts, especially in painting, had passed "through all the phases from the imbecile to the sublime . . . and back to a condition" of "essential barbarism." What marked the stages of decline and recovery was the absence or presence of the "ideated sensations" which communicate "a direct effect of life-enhancement." [440]

THE

DRAWINGS

REVISITED

D e c l i n e a n d r e c o v e r y in t h e f i g u r e arts, he n o w b e l i e v e d , w a s a u n i v e r sal p r o c e s s , b u t h e p r o p o s e d t o l i m i t his s t u d y t o " t h e t w e l v e h u n d r e d y e a r s o r so o f E u r o p e a n art, e x t e n d i n g f r o m C o n s t a n t i n e t h e G r e a t t o C h a r l e s V " b e c a u s e t h e h i s t o r y o f t h a t p e r i o d w a s " m o r e g e n e r o u s in the q u a n t i t y as w e l l as t h e q u a l i t y o f the materials o f f e r e d . " T h e plan o f the b o o k , as h e e n v i s i o n e d it, called f o r the s t u d y o f the f o l l o w i n g e l e m e n t s o f t h e " o v e r w h e l m i n g l y a n t h r o p o m o r p h i c " art o f t h o s e t w e l v e h u n d r e d years: " i .

A n a t o m y , 2. P r o p o r t i o n , 3. M o d e l l i n g , 4. F u n c t i o n a l line,

c o n t o u r s , 5. T a c t i l e v a l u e s , 6. D r a p e r i e s , 7. A c t i o n , m o v e m e n t , gestures, c o m m u n i c a t i o n o f e n e r g y , 8. L i f e l i k e n e s s , 9. E x p r e s s i o n o f head, face a n d f i g u r e , 10. P e r s p e c t i v e , space, 1 1 . C o m p o s i t i o n , 12. C o l o r . " A s h e s l o w l y p r o c e e d e d w i t h the w r i t i n g , he felt m o r e and m o r e d r i v e n t o e x p l o r e the aesthetic, ethical, and historical p r e m i s e s w h i c h lay b a c k o f his analysis. W h a t i n d e e d w a s A r t , t o w h i c h he had d e v o t e d his life? W h a t w e r e its h u m a n i s t i c values? W h a t h a d m o t i v a t e d his a v i d s t u d y o f ancient art f o r s o m a n y y e a r s a n d inspired his w a n d e r i n g s a m o n g the ruins o f E g y p t a n d the N e a r East? T h e s e w e r e reflections that pressed insistently f o r e x p l o r a t i o n . T h e c h a l l e n g e to t u r n i n w a r d , t o m a k e a s e a r c h i n g e x a m i n a t i o n o f his o w n a p p r o a c h t o art h i s t o r y ,

doubtless

resulted f r o m w h a t he s a w as a d e c a d e n t m o v e m e n t in art h i s t o r y , the o n e e s p o u s e d b y P a n o f s k y and his c o l l e a g u e s . E q u a l l y d e e p in his c o n s c i o u s n e s s w a s his a n i m u s against t h e m o v e m e n t s in c o n t e m p o r a r y art, the cults o f p r i m i t i v i s m ,

o f c u b i s m and s u r r e a l i s m ,

o f abstract and

n o n o b j e c t i v e art. H i s d i s c u r s i v e e s s a y s trespassed o n each o t h e r each t i m e he r e t u r n e d to his d e s k . T h u s the d i s c u s s i o n o f the A r c h o f C o n s t a n t i n e as the p a r a d i g m o f d e v e l o p m e n t w i t h w h i c h h e b e g a n the first essay g a v e w a y t o the d i s c u s s i o n o f " a e s t h e t i c s , ethics, a n d h i s t o r y " that w a s to p r e o c c u p y h i m until late i n 1 9 4 1 . H e h a d t u r n e d aside t o that discussion, h e a f t e r w a r d w r o t e , w i t h the idea o f w r i t i n g " l i t t l e m o r e than a p r e f a c e t o a b o o k o n ' D e c l i n e a n d R e c o v e r y in the F i g u r e A r t s , ' " b u t the t h i n g ran a w a y w i t h his i m p a t i e n t t h o u g h t s a n d the p r e f a c e b e c a m e a b o o k , Aesthetics

and

History in the Visual Arts, p u b l i s h e d in 1948. A s h e s t r u g g l e d at his d e s k h e d r e w s t r e n g t h f r o m h a v i n g

young

p e o p l e w i t h i n reach. U m b e r t o M o r r a , J o h n n i e W a l k e r , a n d the Italian w r i t e r G u g l i e l m o A l b e r t i all h a d the r u n o f I T a t t i , h e said, as i f t h e y w e r e his sons. H e felt his m i n d w a s still k e e n a n d z e s t f u l , l o o k i n g w a s a rapture, a n d r e a d i n g " a v o l u p t u o u s d e l i g h t . " P h i l i p H o f e r , a f e l l o w b o o k c o l l e c t o r , c a m e b y w i t h his w i f e . A n assistant d i r e c t o r o f the M o r g a n L i b r a r y , H o f e r w a s a b o u t t o take u p his duties as c u r a t o r o f the D e p a r t m e n t o f Prints a n d G r a p h i c A r t s at the H a r v a r d L i b r a r y . T h e i r talk b r o u g h t t o m i n d a g a i n the d e s p e r a t e p l i g h t o f the " r e f u - J e w s , " as B e r e n -

[441]

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son called them with misplaced wit. "Poor dears, the Austrian contingent is even more pitiful than the Ρ roosien one. They may have Jewish noses and souls but their minds are super-German and that to me and not their Jewishness makes them a public danger. Germanmindedness, voilä I'etinemil" T o Margaret Barr, Berenson had referred to the Allendale-Duveen Nativity as having been "baptized Giorgione by all the German-Jews writing on A r t . " Having found a scapegoat, he had hunted for opportunities to load on its patient back whatever self-hatred lingered in his consciousness. When he was told that the directorship of the new Mellon gallery was still up in the air, he grumbled, " I suppose they will end by putting J e w s in all places and I look forward to learning that by act of Congress all lectures, lessons, articles, books, etc., etc. dealing with art shall have to be delivered in Yiddish." Again his prejudice played him false, for the Yiddish speech which had been common in the Russian Pale of Settlement where he had spent his childhood was precisely the dialect that educated German J e w s usually avoided in favor of the purest German. Like many another emancipated J e w , Berenson seemed to feel the need to emphasize his distance from the imagined stereotype, and, to keep himself free, he felt a special duty to reprove the malefactors of his race. The matter was never far from his thoughts, and it seemed to rise to the surface each time he made the acquaintance of a fellow J e w . In a curious way he thought of himself as a kind of honorary Gentile whenever he appraised the many gifted Jews whom he counted as friends. They too had escaped into the larger world of culture and refinement. During that past summer he told Mary of being visited by one of his cousins and a friend. " T h e y seemed," he said, "to live all but in a ghetto, having no sentiment, let alone affection for Judaism and next-to-no acquaintance with it, yet a certain race-consciousness is forced upon them, and they are not happy over it." An ingredient in his dislike of German J e w s was that most of them flaunted their German nationality and culture, unlike the Jews of his own ancestry who lived as aliens in their native lands of Eastern Europe and sought asylum in America. He scorned them as " 1 5 0 % Germans" and felt their plight under Hitler was in a sense the result of their overweening pride. And so in the irrational calculus of his prejudices, he went his complicated way carefully distinguishing between unsereiner and those outside the Pale. His hatred of ghettoization fueled his dislike of Zionism. Thus when Mary's granddaughter Barbara married Wolf Halpern, a J e w , he sent a wedding present check with the qualification, " I should be happier if I felt sure there was no Sionistic bee buzzing in her bonnet."

[442]

THE

DRAWINGS

REVISITED

From Cyprus he had written Mary that the Jerusalem, on which he had sailed, had been carrying "several hundred German-speaking and ever so German-looking Jews to the land of their very remote and exceedingly putative fathers." He had pondered what still seemed a strange anomaly: J e w s "are neither a religion nor a nation nor a race any more, whatever they may have been at one time. . . . I wish one could define what they are, and why so attractive and repellent, repellent chiefly." When Hitler entered Vienna without resistance and proclaimed union with Germany, Berenson wrote his mother early in April 1938 that he was worried about his friends in Vienna because the Boches had jailed Dr. Heinrich von Neumann, his laryngologist, and he had been released only through the intervention of the Duke of Windsor. Jews, he told her, were being made to clean the streets of Vienna, and with sure prescience he added, "That is a mild beginning." But once again his ill-suppressed antipathies as a Lithuanian J e w burst out. " I remember," he continued, " h o w fanatically pro-Prussian Austrian-Jews used to be and all the German ones of course." N o r was there ever absent from his mind the memory of the snobbery he had endured as a Lithuanian immigrant in Boston in the company of German Jews. Outraged by the proscription of Dr. von Neumann, Berenson turned for help to his friend Myron Taylor, who had chaired the Evian Conference and was an officer of the International Commission on Political Refugees. Taylor reported that at sixty-five the doctor would be hard to place in an American medical school because that was the retirement age at the universities. Time was indeed against the celebrated physician. He died the following year in the United States, where he had come to work with the American-Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. When the musical Maggio impended, trunks had again to be painstakingly packed, a box of books selected, and an itinerary and hotel reservations arranged by Nicky. Then the two Ishmaelites of art were off again, this time to Asia Minor. Again Mary followed the maternal gleam to Ray's "Mudhouse" at Haslemere, where pain, mystic visions, and thoughts of suicide filled her days. Fortunately Berenson got away in time to miss the military display put on by the Fascist administration of Florence on May 9, 1938, to celebrate the meeting there of " A x i s " partners Hitler, Mussolini, Ribbentrop, and Ciano. Nicky's sister, Alda, left in charge at I Tatti, reported that Hortense Serristori sat between Hitler and Ribbentrop at the gala dinner at the Palazzo Riccardi. Berenson's friend Friedrich Kriegbaum, the head of the German Institute and a secret anti-Nazi, had the disagreeable task of taking the Führer on a breakneck tour of the artistic monuments of the city. Hitler expressed admiration for the Ponte Vecchio but could not be [4+3]

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interested in the architecturally far m o r e important Ponte Trinita, the bridge on w h o s e artistic merits Kriegbaum was the leading authority. It was the Ponte Trinita that was subsequently dynamited by the retreating Germans while the Ponte Vecchio was spared. O n the w a y to Smyrna the Lloyd ship Triestine stopped at Rhodes, then an Italian possession, and the passengers went ashore to sightsee. As Berenson and N i c k y were returning to the ship in the late afternoon, they were mystified to see the shops being closed and flags hung out. T h e mystery was cleared up at dinner w h e n their waiter brought in for dessert "a h u g e chocolate cake decorated with a swastika in spun sugar." Asked to explain the reason for the embellishment, the waiter said in Italian, "Because to-day the Fuehrer arrives in Italy." Unable to contain his disgust, Berenson exclaimed in a shrill voice that it was a day of shame. T h e ship's purser at an adjoining table turned crimson, covered his ears, and left the table, "obviously in a rage." Nicky, fearful of the consequences, hurried after him. As he angrily paced back and forth on the deck, she shrewdly asked him whether his father was happy with what was going on in Italy. "As a matter of fact," he replied, " h e hates it all." That concession was all she needed. " Y o u cannot expect these older men g r o w n u p in a liberal tradition to approve the Fascist regime." T h e n she told him of Berenson's long devotion to Italian culture. As a result of her tact Berenson and the mollified purser had a friendly talk, and Berenson later sent him a copy of Cecchi's translation of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. At Smyrna Berenson was joined by his old friend the British diplomat Sir Robert Greg. T h r o u g h his influence and that of the British consul general they obtained "a car, a driver, a truck, a Greek cook, tents, fieldbeds, provisions" and t w o Turkish boys for "all the rough w o r k , " and were off on a camping trip which thoroughly satisfied Berenson's " n o m a d i c instincts." H e w r o t e to his mother that they were to visit places " w h o s e names have been ringing in m y ears ever since school days, Sardis, Ephesus, Miletus, etc. etc. . . . We have already been to P e r g a m u m than which there is nothing grander and m o r e beautiful." H e also took the opportunity to ask her to tell his sister Bessie that he had read most of Faulkner, that he liked Pylon, and that "she ought to read Sanctuary and Light in August." Age had not d i m m e d his liking for novels and he kept abreast of t h e m in English, French, German, and Italian. C a m p i n g in the back country reduced the party to rather primitive expedients: the limited supply of water had to be boiled and wayside shrubbery or ditches " m a d e the necessary retirements quite easy." In the mornings N i c k y w o u l d first go into " B . B . ' s little tent and find him generally awake with a white knitted cap on his head and ready for a cup [444]

THE DRAWINGS

REVISITED

of tea." The change from the ordered luxury of I Tatti to the regimen of the camp seemed, oddly enough, to have invigorated him. He had had a wonderful time, he said, in Lydia, Caria, and their Greek cities, "scarcely one sight meeting our eyes that Hammurabi or Sesostris might not have seen," the ruins "beggaring for splendor everything one sees in Italy." B y comparison " R o m e in its greatest moment must have looked small and provincial." It was a journey that would swing his imagination into ever-widening circles when he returned to his manuscript on decline and recovery in art. On their way back they stopped for a day at Istanbul, and Berenson wrote to Louis Gillet of his shock at the signs of neglect and decay in Santa Sophia. "This noblest temple in Christendom, this house of prayer and uplifting of the soul to God under no matter what appellation, this space which has been filled with the audible yearnings of millions of hearts, has been reduced to a garish, shabby, empty, 'Muze.' " He urged Gillet as a distinguished publicist to write to the president of the new Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, to restore the edifice to worship, "whether to Mohammed or Christ." They returned to Italy on June 12, 1938, Berenson's mind filled with what he had traveled for, "sublime scenery and grand ruins, what fifty years of intensive art study have trained me to enjoy." He would now stay put for a while to digest what he had seen and " w o r k on the book," so far as his duties as perpetual host permitted. One agreeable chore occupied him during a visit from Worth Ryder, a professor of art at the University of California at Berkeley, who had come to Florence seeking an art historian for his department. Berenson, whose antennae picked up all the scholarly vibrations in Florence, invited Walter Horn, a postgraduate student of Romanesque sculpture who was then studying the architecture of the Baptistery of San Giovanni, to dine with the visitor. " I witnessed," Horn recalled, "the unusual spectacle of someone at the table of Bernard Berenson—who usually absorbed all the possible conversation—captivating the party with stories of the Wild West." That Horn had been a devoted student of Erwin Panofsky in Hamburg did not seem to chill his friendly reception. At Ryder's suggestion Horn emigrated to America. Panofsky, then in N e w York, arranged a few lectures for him that led to his being taken on at Berkeley. What he afterward said of Panofsky's lectures throws some light on Berenson's antipathy for the man's approach to art. " H e would come into the classroom," Horn wrote, "never looked at the class, [and] opened the manuscript which he had carefully worked out at his desk at home. He never spoke a free word in the four or five years I studied with him, except of course in seminars." [445]

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· THE

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Soon it was time for Berenson to seek the mountain heights. The house at Poggio alio Spino in which the Berensons had taken refuge from the summer's heat for fourteen summers had been sold earlier in the year. A charming replacement, Casa al Dono, had been found isolated on a wooded slope some distance from Vallombrosa, a place he had once seen many years earlier with Lady Sybil. It had formerly been owned by the wife of the Marchese Peruzzi, daughter of the American sculptor William Wetmore Story, whose studio in Rome had been a great gathering place for American intellectuals. Story had in fact died in the comfortably rambling fieldstone house. Bernard reported to Mary that the sitting rooms were spacious and very comfortable, a large dining room was below the sitting rooms, and his bedroom was "perfect." There were two guest rooms. The stone exterior impressed him as very forbidding, but it was pleasantly surrounded by chestnut trees. Nicky and Alda had hunted up the old house in the spring, and Berenson rented it for the season. T w o years later he encouraged Nicky to buy it with the small capital he had once given her, thus ensuring that it would not get into his estate. An apple orchard and some sloping farmland lay below the house and the woods in back invited leisurely strolls. The view, though less impressive than that from the heights at Poggio alio Spino, had its own grandeur, carrying the eye down the long valleys to the Arno at Pontassieve and finally upward across the hills of Florence to the distant ridges of the Carraras. Less than an hour's drive from Florence, Casa al Dono was to prove easily accessible to guests. Within a couple of days of their settling in, Addie Kahn and Ralph Barton Perry turned up and the talk ran on the Soviet Union, where political purges and military preparations were taking place. Immediately afterward the archaeologist Doro Levi and his wife came up for a few days. Their visit was spoiled by an official telegram that canceled Levi's participation in an archaeological expedition to Greece. A few days later he was dismissed from his chair at the University of Cagliari as a result of the recently adopted anti-Jewish laws. Margaret Barr, fetched by the Berenson car from Florence, was another guest that summer. Conforming to the formal routine that always marked life at I Tatti, she came to dinner in a flimsy evening dress, giving her, Berenson thought, "something Chinese-Japanese in her look." She told of the activities of the Works Projects Administration in the United States in giving relief to artists and theater people, Berenson much more skeptical of its value than she. It was while Berenson was at Casa al Dono that a cablegram arrived announcing that his mother had died at the age of ninety-one. "For a

[446]

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while," he told his sisters, " I remained stunned. Recovering, I realized that we can but rejoice that having reached such an age she disappeared suddenly, peacefully, in full possession of her faculties." The news came at a moment when the European crisis seemed about to erupt in war over the Nazi demands on Czechoslovakia for the surrender of the Sudetenland. Lawrence Berenson came to report progress in the negotiation to secure Harvard's acceptance of I Tatti and thus justify its protection as an educational institution, and all their talk was shadowed by the expectation that war might break out within a few weeks. The incendiary charges and countercharges exchanged among the powers great and little blackened the press day after day as they jockeyed for assurances of support from one another in the face of Hitler's threats. Reports and rumor of military mobilizations as well as of continued outrages by Nazi storm troopers filled the air. In view of the precariousness of the situation, Bernard wired Mary, who was still in England, that she had better go directly to Switzerland. Alarmed at the possibility of being there alone, Mary replied that if things remained as they were in Central Europe she would come home by October i, but if Bernard went to Geneva she would join him there. B y that date Neville Chamberlain had gone to Munich, umbrella in hand, submitted to Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland, and returned to London pleased to announce he had achieved "peace in our time." Everyone drew a breath of doubtful relief, and a peace of sorts descended upon Europe while rearmament was desperately accelerated in France and England. The danger of imminent war being over, Berenson returned to I Tatti. The illusory peace did not change the plight of Berenson's Jewish acquaintances who were trying to escape from occupied Austria. While Mary was still in England, he told her that her Viennese dentist, Dr. Steinreit, had appealed for help in getting permission to work in England, and he asked her to call on Ray and Alys for help. She should assure them "that this is the very last case we shall put before them." He also sought assistance for Hugo Breitner, a former Austrian cabinet minister and authority on public housing. Breitner had fled to the United States in 1934 at the time that Chancellor Dollfus established a Fascist clerical dictatorship. When Berenson appealed on his behalf to Felix Frankfurter, who was then on the law faculty at Harvard, Frankfurter replied, " H o w characteristic of you to break your—or rather our—long stretch of silence . . . with concern over a fellow human being in distress." He had intervened, he wrote, where he thought he could arouse the most active interest in Breitner, whose attainments were already known to him. He added that the current Czechoslovak crisis vividly

[447]

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recalled "those wonderful talks" that " y o u made possible for me with Benes and yourself" back in 1918. Efforts in Breitner's behalf led to his appointment to the Claremont College graduate faculty in 1939. While living thus at I Tatti in the delusively quiet eye of the hurricane that raged over Europe, Berenson received his author's copies of the three impressive volumes of the revised edition of the Drawings of the Florentine Painters. They were published in September 1938 by the University of Chicago Press and issued at the projected price of $25. The first volume contained the liberally annotated text, the second the muchexpanded catalogue, and the third a gratifying thousand illustrations. The cost of publication was shared by the university's art department and the Carnegie Corporation. It was not a sumptuous publication like its folio-sized predecessor, but for the art student it was an edition that was a great deal more accessible. The notes to the Drawings were liberally studded with his agreements and disagreements with the Teutonic scholars through whose tomes he and Nicky had diligently plodded, but what he gave with one hand he tended to take back with the other. He had to admit that they had made important contributions. He said, for example, that Dr. Anny E. Popp's "sumptuous volume" on the Medici Chapel, published in 1922, was "valuable for its reproductions, amusing in its reconstruction and teeming with suggestions" and that Dr. Popp had "occasional flashes of insight illuminating the obscure chronology of Michelangelo's drawings." And he conceded she had corrected his Michelangelo chronology. But he elaborately justified his earlier attribution of certain drawings to an assistant of Michelangelo w h o m he had chosen to name "Andrea di Michelangelo" against her ascription of them to Antonio Mini. In the same vein he said he regarded Karl Frey's monumental work on the drawings of Michelangelo as "indispensable" but warned users of it that the illustrations were "untrustworthy" and protested that Frey "in his text seldom quotes me correctly." The three volumes of the Drawings reflected the maturing and revision of many of Berenson's judgments. One of the most important alterations occurs in his treatment of Verrocchio: he replaced an entire chapter with an article he had published in 1933 in which he set forth his view of the correct relation among Verrocchio, Leonardo, and Lorenzo di Credi and indicated a significant number of changes of attributions. With disarming frankness he explained that the chapter he was replacing was written fully thirty years ago, "when I had not yet found myself and could defend conclusions the more vehemently the less they were my own, taking refuge in hypercriticism from timidity and uncertainty." Among works which he had once attributed to Verrocchio and now gave to [448]

THE

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REVISITED

L e o n a r d o w e r e t h e F l o r e n c e Annunciation, Bend,

t h e L i e c h t e n s t e i n Ginevra

de'

a n d t h e M u n i c h a n d B e n o i s M a d o n n a s . In the g e n e r a l i n t r o d u c t i o n

t o t h e first v o l u m e h e w a r n e d that in the m a t t e r o f attributions

"the

u l t i m a t e appeal is t o o u r f e e l i n g . F r o m that r e s p o n s i b i l i t y , n o m e c h a n i c a l test, n o m a t e r i a l c o n s i d e r a t i o n , n o p e e r i n g i n l o o k i n g glasses, m a g i c a l o r n o t , can save u s . " T w e l v e o f t h e f i f t e e n articles o n the d r a w i n g s o f v a r i o u s F l o r e n t i n e painters w h i c h B e r e n s o n p u b l i s h e d b e t w e e n 1932 and 1935 w e n t i n t o his r e v i s e d t e x t a n d t h e r e m a i n i n g three i n t o the a p p e n d i x e s . T h e e x t e n s i v e n e w n o t e s , a d d e d i n b r a c k e t s , p r o v i d e d a r u n n i n g c o m m e n t a r y o n his m a n y c h a n g e s o f o p i n i o n as w e l l as a c r i t i q u e o f the j u d g m e n t s o f later w r i t e r s . H e d i d n o t , after all his a n x i o u s r e c o n s i d e r a t i o n o f it, r e w r i t e the c h a p t e r o n M i c h e l a n g e l o , t h o u g h h e a d d e d a p r e f a t o r y w a r n i n g t o the reader o n the uncertainties in w h i c h the s u b j e c t w a s m i r e d . H e i n c l u d e d in his d i s c u s s i o n o f t h e f o l l o w e r s o f M i c h e l a n g e l o a s e c t i o n o n R a f f a e l l o da M o n t e l u p o b e c a u s e , he e x p l a i n e d , n o o t h e r artist, e x c e p t S e b a s t i a n o del P i o m b o ,

" w a s the a u t h o r o f so m a n y d r a w i n g s still ascribed t o

Michelangelo." P e r h a p s the m o s t h e a r t w a r m i n g letter o f c o n g r a t u l a t i o n to c o m e t o B e r e n s o n u p o n p u b l i c a t i o n o f the Drawings

w a s the o n e f r o m K e n n e t h

C l a r k . " I t is w i t h a real p a n g o f e m o t i o n , " he w r o t e , " t h a t I h a v e u n p a c k e d a n d o p e n e d t h e v o l u m e s o f the F l o r e n t i n e D r a w i n g s . T h e y are i n t i m a t e l y c o n n e c t e d w i t h t h e w h o l e o f m y life: w i t h m y early a m b i t i o n s a n d m y first a p p r e n t i c e s h i p , and also w i t h a g o o d m a n y regrets at the later c o u r s e o f m y career. F o r all these reasons I n e e d n ' t tell y o u h o w t o u c h e d I a m b y y o u r r e f e r e n c e to m e in the i n t r o d u c t i o n [preface]; a n d I a m a l m o s t e q u a l l y d e l i g h t e d b y w h a t y o u say a b o u t m y W i n d s o r C a t a l o g u e [Drawings

of Leonardo] in y o u r s e c o n d v o l u m e . T h e w o r k I d i d o n

the L e o n a r d o s w a s the direct f u l f i l l m e n t o f m y a p p r e n t i c e w o r k f o r y o u a n d so is m y best c o n t r i b u t i o n t o y o u r g r e a t w o r k . " In citing C l a r k ' s Catalogue

of the Drawings

of Leonardo

da Vinci

in the Collection

of

His

Majesty the King at Windsor Castle B e r e n s o n h a d n o t e d that the " i n t r o d u c t i o n is i n f o r m i n g a n d d e l i g h t f u l and the c a t a l o g u e all that a c a t a l o g u e s h o u l d b e . " C l a r k s p o k e also o f his r e c e n t visit t o I T a t t i . H e e n j o y e d it, h e said, as " a p e r i o d o f t r a n q u i l l i t y a n d rational d i s c o u r s e . M u c h as I e n j o y e d t h e l a n d s c a p e a n d the l i b r a r y , it w a s y o u r c o m p a n y , dear B . B . , w h i c h w a s the real j o y o f o u r visit. . . . T h e r e w a s a flow o f reason a n d l e a r n i n g c o m b i n e d w i t h a g e n i a l w a r m t h w h i c h m a d e m e feel I w a s l i v i n g i n a g o l d e n a g e o f c u l t u r e , a sunset o f culture n o d o u b t , b u t n o n e the less b e a u t i f u l f o r t h a t . " A s an A m e r i c a n p u b l i c a t i o n the r e v i s e d Drawings

s o m e h o w escaped

r e v i e w i n b o t h E n g l a n d a n d F r a n c e — p o s s i b l y r e v i e w c o p i e s did n o t g o

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abroad—but it was enthusiastically noticed in art journals in the United States. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., reviewing it in the Art Bulletin, pointed out that the 1903 edition had effected the first "wholesale purge" of the subject and was "perhaps the most important book on Italian art that has appeared since the twentieth century opened," marking "the tardy coming of age o f . . . one whom w e had supposed to be only a connoisseur." A. Hyatt Mayor in the Magazine of Art found the new portions "even more charmingly written than the old ones" and the revision of the text "most interesting where Berenson's admirable candor has allowed his early opinion to be printed beside his present reservations or flat contradiction." Royal Cortissoz' long review in the New York Herald-Tribune illustrated the intellectual riches of the volumes with telling passages of Berenson's "clairvoyant" analyses. "What unifies the entire w o r k , " he said, "is Berenson's central flame of ardor and devotion, his rich store of knowledge and his sheer critical genius." A tribute in Time magazine accompanied by Berenson's portrait described him as the "greatest living connoisseur of Italian art" whose . . . life has been such a courtship of opportunity by intelligence as only the Melting Pot is supposed to produce." Berenson was now at work, the reviewer reported, on a book "which art scholars regard as about the most monumental thing since Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." The passage of years confirmed the high opinion of the work. In 1955 Adrian Stokes declared in his Michelangelo that Berenson "brought order to Michelangelo studies." In 1968 an Italian version of the Drawings was issued, prepared by Berenson's gifted disciple Luisa Vertova Nicolson, with the assistance of Nicky Mariano. In 1970 the University of Chicago Press reprinted its volumes in a "Collector's Edition." The London Economist, using a comparison that would have gratified Berenson, assured its readers that "the memory of Renaissance painting owes more" to Berenson "than to any other man since Vasari."

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X LIV

Toward the Abyss H E satisfaction Berenson may have felt at having finally put the revised Drawings behind him was obscured by his anxieties about the future of I Tatti in an increasingly destabilized Europe. After Munich he sardonically commented, " S o Hitler's house will not only be painted pink [on maps] but it will be enlarged thanks to Clemenceau, Poincare, Lloyd George, and Wilson." With growing fatalism he declared that even if Italy went in with Germany, he would prefer to stay on his Tuscan hillside. At the same time he acknowledged to Paul Sachs that "the rising tide of anti-Semitism may reach me and sweep me out of Italy." For the first time anti-Semitism had a personal implication. Under pressure from Hitler's Germany, Italy had recently adopted laws restricting the ownership of property by J e w s of Italian nationality and, as an embassy subordinate cabled Ambassador William Phillips, who was absent in Washington, there was a possibility that "provisions of a similar nature may be extended to foreigners of Jewish origin owning property in Italy." The cable continued, " A f t e r discussing the matter with Berenson it was thought that you may wish to talk over with the authorities of Harvard University the suggestion that the Corporation might take over the property at the present time and permit Mr. Berenson to keep a life tenancy." Ambassador Phillips wrote to the Italian Foreign Minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, to learn whether the proposed transfer, which had been approved back in 1932, might still take place. Ciano replied in March 1939 that there would be no obstacle to the transfer. John Walker interviewed President James Bryant Conant in C a m bridge and came away with the impression that "some such scheme could be worked out." Thus reassured, Berenson sent an itemized statement to Sachs showing that $40,000 a year would be needed to run I [451]

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Tatti and meet his private expenses. He said he would have no objection to Harvard's taking over his American investments for the purpose, provided that he would be assigned "the same income I have n o w , " as he no longer earned anything, having "ceased relations with Duveen." He also forwarded to Sachs a copy of his will, drawn up in 1928, which provided a substantial number of generous annuities to his multiple dependents. The discussions moved along without any serious hitch, but alarming European events moved faster. Madrid fell at the end of March 1939 and a triumphant Franco joined the company of Fascist dictators. With Spain secured among his friends, Hitler was free to turn his talents to other ventures in aggression. Flouting his previous assurances, he invaded the remainder of Czechoslovakia, and Mussolini, not to be outdone by his German colleague, occupied Albania in April, making the Adriatic an Italian lake. In May 1939 Italy and Germany signed a mutual defense pact. On the other side of the globe Japan, having driven Chiang Kai-shek to Chungking, was attempting to consolidate its position in China and was making friendly overtures to Germany. There was reason for Berenson to fear that Harvard had become "lukewarm and perhaps frightened" by the rapid march of events. "They may not like the responsibility in this historical horizon," as he put it to Philip Hofer in April, "and they may not see much advantage. O f course I think differently. M y library and my place could and should form an ideal centre for the mature and really intellectual study of the whole Past of A r t . " Even if war were to come, it should be borne in mind "that French, Spanish, and German institutions have weathered wars and centuries." Despite the assurances of the Italian government, Harvard seemed to temporize, but at last on July 6 William Claflin, treasurer of Harvard, sent on a document that he and Berenson's cousin Lawrence had drafted in which Berenson agreed to convey I Tatti to Harvard subject to the life tenancy of himself and Mary, together with $700,000 in securities— "substantially my entire means of support"—as an endowment to provide up to $20,000 for the upkeep of I Tatti and $20,000 a year as an annuity to Berenson. H o w far money could be made to go at that date can be gleaned from the statement of expenses Berenson prepared. The yearly flood of books and periodicals and binding came to $5,000. The librarian (Alda) and two secretaries accounted for $4,000. Egbert Anrep's salary as general manager was $1,000. The farm manager got $450. Taxes on the whole estate amounted to $750. Lawrence, who understood Bernard's hopes for his Institute, saw to it that the document included a statement of Bernard's vision of the future

[452]

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of I Tatti. The statement read in part: " M y primary purpose in making this gift . . . is to further, under the supervision of the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard, research and education in Italian art and in the Mediterranean culture as centered in Italy and focused in Greco-RomanByzantine-Italian art, along the lines to which I have devoted my life . . . to provide facilities . . . for those who wish to study art visually rather than the technique of its creation. . . . I do not mean it to be a work-shop for the petty and parochial study of Italian art. . . . I should wish these students to have the privilege of dividing their time between travel and residence at I Tatti." Once submitted to Harvard, the proposal had to be reviewed by the corporation. In the interval Berenson occupied himself with his usual pursuits. His life was lived with the same kind of fatalistic acceptance that villagers have on the slopes of Mount Etna. Americans flocked to Europe until late summer; neutral Italy and Switzerland remained completely accessible through 1939. All sorts of interesting visitors had ushered in the year. William Milliken, the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, was an early visitor. Arthur McComb, a Harvard graduate and gifted art critic, came and vanished "like a ghostly apparition." Kenneth Clark, now an important figure in the international museum world, came down with his wife for "a good visit" for the first time in years. Berenson wrote his sisters, " I feel proud of him as my pupil." John Walker was still based in Rome as assistant director and professor in charge of fine arts at the American Academy, and his schedule permitted frequent visits to I Tatti. He had been in Rome for four years, occupied in part with the agreeable task of taking the Prix de Rome fellows about Italy in a bus and talking to them about art and architecture. N o w on August ι he was to take up his new duties as an executive officer and chief curator of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Berenson enjoined him to write once a week. Gossip of the American art world—especially gossip about the F o g g — continued to come in from Berenson's well-disciplined correspondents. Possessed by his maggot, he taunted Mrs. Barr that Wilhelm Koehler, professor of fine arts at Harvard, was getting more and more things into his own hands "just as if he were a J e w and not a mere German." From Ben Nicholson, now at the Fogg, he received refreshing word: " I cannot describe to you how happy I am to be in Cambridge." Although Ben did not quite hit it off with Professor Sachs, he admired him immensely, and as for Edward Waldo Forbes, he thought him "one of the most honest persons" he had ever met. Ben's father, a member of Parliament, who was busy lecturing in the United States on "peace with honor," sent Berenson an excerpt from one of his son's letters with the thought that it [453]

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might cheer him "to learn at this gloomy season how affectionate is the loyalty which you inspire in the y o u n g . " Ben, in referring to the danger that the Fascists might interfere with B . B . ' s peace of mind and property, had written, " I f they dare to touch B . B . I should rise as a mother protects her son. There is a quality about I Tatti which I hold sacred and inviolable. If violated it is a sin against G o d . " His connection with Duveen severed, Berenson prudently kept in touch with his old friend Georges Wildenstein, who was displacing the Duveen firm as the most important dealer in Old Masters, and some sort of informal arrangement seems to have arisen between them. From time to time Wildenstein sent photographs to Berenson for his expert opinion. In January of 1939, for example, he sought his opinion concerning an "admirable" Lorenzo Monaco. Wildenstein was now becoming the most resourceful and daring of the dealers, making his discreet purchases with a scholarly assurance denied to Lord Duveen. His Gazette des Beaux-Arts had a commanding position in the field, and it was supplemented by his Beaux-Arts weekly, the paper in which he had celebrated Berenson's seventieth birthday. The war that would drive him to exile in the United States was still many months away and seemed so improbable that when it did come, he failed to send off his valuable Paris stock to N e w York, as Fowles and his partners managed to do. Berenson's anxieties about the future of I Tatti and the incessant assault upon his nerves of the steady stream of frightening news in the press and radio were not congenial to spinning out words at his desk. Late in March he went to Rome with Nicky to spend his forenoons in the Vatican, "whose treasures," he said, "absorb me as if I had never seen them before." The rest of each day he gave over to seeing friends and friends of friends and people from the British and American embassies. Visiting with the head of the French Roman school in magnificent apartments of the Palazzo Veronese, he thought it an enviable parallel for what he wished I Tatti to become. " B u t it will be yet a while," he remarked to Mary, "before America can furnish scholars like Carcopino and students framed like these young Froggies." His enjoyment in Rome of friends and associations of a lifetime made the thought of possibly having to give up his life in Italy almost unbearable in spite of the "background of every kind of anxiety, private as well as public." In the late spring Berenson returned briefly to Rome hoping to keep in touch with the embassy about the fate of I Tatti. T o remain within call he went down to Naples with Nicky and looked in on Benedetto Croce. There he passed his seventy-fourth birthday and the retrospect did not please him, as he confessed to Billie Ivins: " I say 'Yes' to all that has happened—all except my own meannesses. . . . I wake up at times all red [454]

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all o v e r recalling s o m e . . . . B u t w h a t I a m n o w is I fear nothing to be p r o u d o f . " Watching C r o c e surrounded b y his w i f e and children and busily g i v i n g orders to his secretaries, the i m a g e o f a f o r c e f u l and p r o ductive personality, he felt a painful contrast. " T h e r e w a s an exact c o n t e m p o r a r y , w h o has lived a n o r m a l biological life, produced s o m e thirty v o l u m e s o f t h o u g h t and scholarship, and still, as he assures me, w o r k s as hard and w i t h as little fatigue as ever. What a m I beside h i m — a sterile, self-indulgent old m a n congratulated on l o o k i n g so y o u n g and being so amusing." T h e m o o d o f disenchantment w a s not easy to shake o f f . It had been fostered, even p r o v o k e d , b y his insatiable passion f o r b o o k s , those i n numerable v o l u m e s o f scholarship and imagination in a score o f fields w h i c h he read o r w h i c h w e r e read to h i m , each a challenge to m a k e a notable contribution o f his o w n . His expertise and w r i t i n g on Italian art seemed increasingly a mistake and one m u c h too late to be corrected. It w a s not the first time that he had regretted the chains he had fastened to his spirit, but in C r o c e ' s presence he felt their chafing m o r e keenly than ever. It w a s this sense o f failure that he w o u l d one day try to exorcize in the confessional pages o f his Sketch for a Self-Portrait. In N a p l e s the t w o travelers revisited the m u s e u m to study the marbles and bronzes w h i c h B e r e n s o n had v i e w e d so m a n y times in the past half century. It distressed h i m that they no l o n g e r seemed familiar. In the gallery he tried to m e m o r i z e the P o m p e i a n paintings. A t P o m p e i i he w a s a n n o y e d b y the overrestoration. T h e o n l y painting still in situ that w a s really satisfactory, he w r o t e M a r y , w a s the " n u d e in the Diana and A c t a e o n , about w h i c h y o u and I raved in the presence o f the u n c o m prehending E u g e n i e [Strong], f o u r decades a g o . " N o t h i n g significant d e v e l o p i n g at R o m e , he w e n t north again, alighting at I Tatti f o r a f e w w e e k s in the early s u m m e r . T h e r e he learned that one o f his rescue e f f o r t s had prospered. N i c h o l a s T o l l , the archaeologistdirector o f the K o n d a k o v Institute in Prague, w r o t e that he had m a n a g e d to transfer the principal center o f the institute to B e l g r a d e , w h e r e Prince Paul had taken it under his protection. T h e Paris Herald brought h i m another piece o f g o o d n e w s : S a m u e l K r e s s had definitely m a d e his great gift to the N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y o f A r t . " I a m truly d e l i g h t e d , " B e r e n s o n i n f o r m e d J o h n Walker, " a n d I don't care a f i g about his insistence o n attributing the Allendale N a t i v i t y to ' G i o r g i o t t o ' and the G o l d m a n M a d o n n a to G i o t t o - n o . . . . H a p p i l y pictures s u r v i v e attributions." B e r e n s o n m i g h t often c o m p l a i n o f fatigue and the fragility o f his health, but he w a s unable to stay f o r long in any one place during this year o f m u l t i p l y i n g anxieties. T h u s he set o f f again in J u l y 1 9 3 9 to see the remarkable exhibition at G e n e v a o f pictures rescued f r o m the P r a d o [455]

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before the advance of Franco's rebels. " A l l the Velasquez are at the s h o w , " he wrote to Mary at Haslemere, "and hold their own more than ever, the Grecos less than ever." The great drawback at Geneva was that the crowds prevented a suitably long look at any one picture. Fowles, with whom he continued to exchange friendly letters, promised to tell him how the Spanish art treasures had been spirited out through the initiative of painter Jose Maria Sert, Lord Duveen, and David Weil, assisted by the directors of the French national gallery. Prince Paul, who was also at the exhibition, believed a general European conflict was inevitable, and he made a point of urging Berenson not to return to Italy. Berenson was not to be dissuaded. On his leisurely return Berenson spent a few days at Don Guido Cagnola's luxurious villa near Varese and then paused at I Tatti only long enough to collect his impedimenta for his regular stay up at Casa al Dono. Letters concerning the planned transfer to Harvard had continued to fly back and forth. One had suggested that since his proposed annuities would require additional capital of $200,000, he should sell some of his works of art. Disturbed by the painful suggestion, he protested, " I can do no such thing in my lifetime." The array of annuities in Berenson's will which were to be a charge upon the proposed gift must have seriously disturbed the Harvard officials, who could foresee a lengthy and troublesome administration of the estate. Lawrence Berenson was thus obliged to come over from the United States to work out the terms of still another arrangement. The plan for a transfer was now made contingent upon the raising of a fund of a few hundred thousand dollars to take care of the annuities. A new will executed at the same time bequeathed the estate to Harvard. The result was that I Tatti was not to be handed over to Harvard at once and possibly not even in Berenson's lifetime. On the thirtieth of August, two days before the blitzkrieg, Berenson wrote Walker, "Perhaps even as I write the dogs of war are loose." Life on the heights among the pines came to an abrupt end upon the outbreak of war. The storm signals had gone up on August 2 1 , when Moscow announced the signing of a nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany. On September 1 the German Luftwaffe, which had tested its divebombing technique in Spain, swarmed into the Polish skies, while below the flame-throwing tanks roared across the border and the world beheld the fantastic spectacle of Polish cavalry overwhelmed by the onrushing armor. T w o days later Great Britian and France, uncomfortably bound by their treaties, declared war on Germany. For the moment Italy, busy with its imperial role in Albania and Ethiopia, professed neutrality. Gasoline became the first casualty in Italy. Private cars were ordered [456]

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off the roads after September 3. Berenson hurried down to I Tatti, where the unnatural silence, beautiful and serene, seemed to him like the calm in the center of a hurricane. "I try to be resigned," he said, "and half succeed." With his Fiat immobilized, he summoned a public taxi to take him into the hills for his daily downhill stroll, until the restriction on gasoline was partly lifted a month later. Mary, in England, was at least out of material danger. Bernard heard of no one in Florence who wanted to "join the Boches" except the rabid anti-Semite Senator Giuseppi della Gherardesca and his flock who congregated at Doney's fashionable tearoom. As the spiritual head of the Italian anti-Semite party, Gherardesca, the former podestä of Florence, kept a malignant eye upon Berenson, whose anti-Fascist sentiments were well known to the Florentine Blackshirts. The shortage of gasoline was soon followed by shortages of tea and coffee, and a shortage of winter fuel loomed, but actual privation was still far in the future. The exodus of foreigners began, and by midSeptember only thirty-eight Americans were left in Florence. Samuel Kress came up to I Tatti a number of times during the autumn and talked about his donation to the Mellon gallery "and all its implications." Knowing of Walker's particular interest, Berenson wrote him that Kress "is kindly, affectionate, brotherly, but still full of suspicion in the wrong place and utterly gullible with foreigners." Berenson had in mind especially Kress's attachment to Count Contini Bonacossi, from w h o m Kress had already bought a large number of paintings. "I mentioned that the Cook collection was for sale and he recoiled as if I was assaulting him." The military campaign in Poland took scarcely a month, and the mortuary peace of Warsaw descended while Germany and the Soviet Union arranged the partition of Poland. Once again Europe enjoyed a breathing spell, and travelers in the still neutral countries attended to their usual chores. Berenson went up to Venice at the end of September to see the Veronese exhibition and to say farewell to his old friend Addie Kahn, who was about to sail to Egypt. The exhibition, which he thought "better than its reputation," confirmed his conviction that Veronese was "one of the few greatest painters of all time." During his stay in Venice he encountered by merest chance a fellow expatriate w h o m he had not seen for years, an elderly man concentratedly enjoying his food at a nearby table. It was George Santayana, his face and figure broadened out since Berenson had last seen him. They met on two occasions and each promptly recorded his doubtful pleasure in the reunions. Berenson looked him up at the Danieli Hotel and found him peering at a book through a magnifying glass. "We talked for an hour and a half chiefly about himself," he told Mary. "The impression he [457]

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makes is of a man quite satisfied with himself and what his peculiar way of life has brought him. In fact, he spoke of himself in the historical present. He laughed a great deal, but nearly always with a snigger, particularly when telling about his most intimate friends. . . . He is half deaf and nearly blind, but finds ample compensation in his own private universe. I remember telling him more than thirty years ago that, like the god of Epicurus, he was careless of mankind." T o Mrs. Crawford T o y of Cambridge, whose husband had taught Berenson Arabic, Santayana reported that they had had one good talk "but the second (and last) already flagged and made me feel how little sympathy there is at bottom between people who don't like each other but like the same 'subjects' or have similar professions. . . . Berenson surprised me by talking with juvenile enthusiasm about 'art' (as if we were still in the 1890s). . . . In order to keep up the game with B . B . , however, I mentioned the constant pleasure I take in the light of Venice. 'Yes,' said he, 'they were wonderful at catching those effects, due to the reflected light of the lagoon in the atmosphere. Paolo Veronese was supreme in rendering them.' I thought of Titian and Tiepolo, but said nothing, because I don't really know or care who painted or who saw those harmonies most perfectly. What I care about are the harmonies themselves. . . . It is lucky for B . B . , in one sense, that he keeps the old flame alive; but I can't help feeling that it was lighted and is kept going by forced draught, by social and intellectual ambition, and by professional pedantry." A few months later, describing the encounter to Learned Hand, who had known Santayana at Harvard, Berenson added a few touches to the record: " I told him Hutch Hapgood spoke affectionately of him in his, Hutch's, autobiography. He denied his acquaintance. . . . As for myself, he asked what I was doing in Venice. I told him I was looking at the pictures. O h , I thought they had done all they could to advance you along the line of your ambitions.' " When Bernard repeated this slur to Mary, he wondered whether it expressed Santayana's view of him "as an individual or his idea of what men work for. . . . I started the subject of Charles [Augustus] Strong [an old friend of Santayana's] and he belched back that they had fallen out over Franco, that [he] himself was not really a Fascist but that his patriotism as a Spaniard could not tolerate Strong's scepticism. . . . I was rather surprised that he went out of his way to praise such an impudent petty charlatan as Ezra Pound." From Venice Berenson and Nicky took a side trip to Prince Paul's castle Berdo at Kranj in northern Slovenia. The official reports coming in of the military efficiency of the Germans in overrunning Poland cast a gloom upon the otherwise delightful visit. Uncertainty was in the air. As [458]

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B e r e n s o n w r o t e W a l k e r , " U n t i l the D u c k g o e s to his b a l c o n y and shakes the c o s m o s w i t h his thunder n o b o d y , I daresay least o f all HE, w i l l k n o w w h a t Italy is g o i n g to d o

T h e Gherardesci and the A n t i n o r i and

their k i t h and kin . . . are for standing shoulder to shoulder w i t h Stalin and Hitler. . . . T h e rest o f the p e o p l e loathe the G e r m a n s . " M a r y returned f r o m E n g l a n d in O c t o b e r 1939 after a considerable s t r u g g l e to obtain w a r t i m e transit d o c u m e n t s . F e w visitors n o w filled the guest r o o m s at I Tatti, and B e r e n s o n tried o n c e again to " k n o c k into s h a p e " his neglected manuscript. A n d once again he f o u n d it possible " t o scribble, b u t not to c o m p o s e . " H e w a s reading almost e x c l u s i v e l y about the f o u r t h and fifth centuries, " b e c a u s e m y w o r k is n o w in that period, but also for the startling parallels w i t h o u r t i m e s . " T h e one w r i t i n g that continued to flow in an u n d i m i n i s h e d stream f r o m his pen as i f his life indeed depended o n it w e r e his letters. T h e y reached out like lifelines that safely suspended h i m w i t h i n the charmed circle o f friends and acquaintances. W a l k e r , w h o w a s n o w deep in his w o r k at the N a t i o n a l Gallery o f A r t , w a s finding that assigning attributions to paintings w a s likely to pit h i m against B e r e n s o n . H e w a s s o o n sending h i m queries that included occasional points o f disagreement, t h o u g h w o r r i e d that B e r e n s o n m i g h t resent his p r e s u m p t i o n . In one o f his earliest letters r e v i e w i n g a n u m b e r o f paintings in the M e l l o n C o l l e c t i o n he suggested, for instance, that a Saint Paul that B e r e n s o n had attributed to D a d d i w h e n D u v e e n sold it to Mellon was

more properly

"School of Giotto."

Berenson

replied,

" P l e a s e be [as] assured as it is possible for h u m a n nature to be that I h a v e g o t b e y o n d caring f o r prestige in connection w i t h attributions.

You

could not c o n c e i v a b l y o f f e n d m e b y rejecting all o f mine. S o y o u need not hesitate to reject m y attribution o f the Saint Paul to D a d d i . " H e i m m e d i a t e l y qualified the license, h o w e v e r , saying that t h o u g h it t o o k h i m at least ten years to c o m e to his decision, it n o w seemed o b v i o u s to h i m . " B u t i f the f i g u r e itself is not manifestly D a d d i to y o u r eyes, the k n e e l i n g figure in the predella s h o u l d open the same e y e s . " T h o u g h in the 1941 Preliminary Catalogue of Paintings and Sculpture the painting w a s g i v e n to " F o l l o w e r o f G i o t t o , " B e r e n s o n ' s ascription to D a d d i w a s afterw a r d adopted. W a l k e r ' s inquiry about the " C a s t a g n o " that B e r e n s o n had tried to obtain f o r M r s . G a r d n e r in 1907, at the t i m e D u v e e n sold it to M o r g a n , d r e w a l e n g t h y analysis. In 1937 after M o r g a n ' s death M e l l o n had acquired it as a C a s t a g n o . B e r e n s o n explained that the C a s t a g n o attribution had been o n his sole authority but that he had a f t e r w a r d seen his error and had g i v e n the painting to P o l l a i u o l o in his 1932 Lists. H e w e n t back o n his attribution, he said, " b e c a u s e I ended b y seeing that the contours

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were too enveloping, the modelling too searching for Castagno." " C o n noisseurship is an art not a science," he concluded. Near the end of his life Berenson returned to the Castagno attribution, the attribution that had been maintained at the National Gallery of Art. As the war fever in Italy intensified and guns took priority over butter, Berenson began to burden his letters to America with pleas for tea and coffee. On one to Walker, Nicky annotated, " C o f f e e is more urgently needed than tea at present!" Fowles wrote from N e w York that Kress "had done all he possibly could to ensure your general comfort during these exceptional times." He also reported that Armand Lowengard had joined his regiment, presumably at the still undisturbed Maginot Line, and having become partially paralyzed from exposure, had been invalided back to Paris, where he carried on the much-diminished business at the Duveen Gallery in Paris with the residue of stock. The more valuable objects of art had been shipped to America. For all Berenson's resolution to stick out the deepening crisis in Italy, he busied himself with exploring alternatives, including possible residence in Switzerland. Ambassador Phillips came for a weekend in midNovember to go over the situation, and a week later Bernard and Nicky descended again upon Rome, hungry for the latest political news. They divided their time between diplomatic and artistic circles and made repeated visits to the Vatican galleries. They returned to an altered Florence. A great many of Berenson's Italian friends, caught up in the patriotic fervor of the Duce's imperial vision or fearful of being branded anti-Fascists, stopped coming to I Tatti. " O u r world is reduced," Berenson informed Henry Coster, who had left for the United States. There was "scarcely a sign of the 'High-life' " which "meets daily at Doney's to hear G. Gherardesca read out passages from divers books tending to prove that J e w s are 'sub-human' and must be wiped out." Berenson was comforted to learn that his friend Doro Levi, who had taken refuge in America and on whose behalf he had been active, was to give a lecture series at Harvard. Berenson was one of the persons financing the series. At the moment Levi was at Princeton, where Berenson thought he was too much with his "fellow refu-Jews in their concentration camp" at the university. Levi was to hold lectureships but not appointments at both Princeton and Harvard until 1945. After the war he returned to Europe to become director of the Italian archaeological school at Athens. Berenson's world at the opening of 1940 was indeed reduced, but far greater isolation was in store for him. The tightening net still had a few openings and, despite delays, letters still got through. Among his English friends the absence hardest to bear was probably that of Trevy, who [460]

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for m o r e than f o r t y years had been o n e o f the m o s t w e l c o m e of guests and o n e of the m o s t patient critics of B e r e n s o n ' s prose. In default of himself he sent a c o p y o f The Abinger Chronicle that featured a l o n g p o e m " T o B e r n h a r d B e r e n s o n . " It e n d e d w i t h the lines: But most I wish myself with you Dear friend, amid those cypress-wooded hills that mount Beyond Vincigliata and quarried Ceceri To where by San d e m e n t e we so often have seen Tuscany spread its grave and gracious landscape out From Vallombrosa to the far Carraran peaks. A vision of enchantment, a delight more deep Than ever elsewhere spirit or sense may hope to know. As n o n c o m b a t a n t s A m e r i c a n s could still travel. O n e n e w c o m e r w h o m a d e a favorable impression o n Berenson t u r n e d out to be R o b e r t B e r enson, o n e of his A m e r i c a n second cousins. O n l y t w e n t y - s i x , R o b e r t was the E u r o p e a n representative o f the Grace Lines and already an i m p o r t a n t figure in the shipping industry. H i s next visit to I Tatti, f o u r years later, w o u l d be as aide-de-camp o f General M a r k Clark. A m o n g the f e w other callers that season w e r e Natalie Barney and her l o n g t i m e lover R o m a i n e B r o o k s . T h e y had taken u p residence in Florence in the Via San L e o n a r d o for the d u r a t i o n o f the w a r . Natalie, n o w a venerable sixty-three, still h a d traces o f the beautiful poet w h o had once b e w i t c h e d h i m . She was still " t h e E m p r e s s o f L e s b o s , " he declared to Clotilde, " s o e n c h a n t i n g that I f o r g i v e myself for having been so m u c h in love w i t h her m o r e than t w e n t y - s i x years ago. A n d she w o u l d have returned m y flame had I n o t b e e n — a s she discovered to her h o r r o r — a m a l e . " M y r o n T a y l o r , President Roosevelt's personal representative to the Vatican w i t h the rank o f ambassador, had a villa in the vicinity of Florence and c o n t i n u e d to be a w e l c o m e guest at the B e r e n s o n table. A m b a s sador Phillips and his w i f e c a m e f o r a stay in the depopulated spring season and w e r e s o o n f o l l o w e d b y Walter L i p p m a n n , w h o , recently divorced and n o w m a r r i e d to H e l e n A r m s t r o n g , was m a k i n g a last reconnaissance w i t h H e l e n in E u r o p e . His visit w a s f o l l o w e d b y that of D o r o t h y T h o m p s o n , a n e w s p a p e r c o l u m n i s t w h o s e crusade against fascism in the New York Herald-Tribune and o n the radio had earned her the title o f "First Lady o f A m e r i c a n j o u r n a l i s m . " H a n d s o m e and vitally f e m i n i n e at forty-seven, she s w e p t in u p o n Berenson w i t h a certain brashness, as she a f t e r w a r d r e m i n d e d h i m , j u s t u p f r o m her interview in R o m e w i t h P o p e Pius XII. W i t h o u t her saying so the p o p e had noted she was a Protestant. " W h y ? Because I d i d n ' t kiss y o u r r i n g ? " she had asked. " N o , " he replied, "because y o u have such faith in the limitless p o w e r of [461]

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the Catholic Church." The pope may have seemed timorous to her, but to Berenson it was evident that his disapproval of the Axis policies gave heart to the anti-Fascists. While life at I Tatti turned more and more inward, the world outside moved steadily toward the abyss. The Russo-Finnish War ran its bloody course among the pines and deep snow of Finland until Finland surrendered on March 6, 1940. In April the German armies overran Denmark and, with the help of the fifth-column quislings, began the conquest of Norway. In quick succession Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium fell to the blitzkrieg of swift-moving armor and parachute troops. B y mid-May the much-vaunted Maginot Line had been flanked. The British Expeditionary Force was soon pinned against the sea at Dunkirk, and in the last days of the month a motley flotilla of boats from across the Channel rescued more than 300,000 British soldiers. Outmaneuvered and sliced through by the columns of tanks and pelted by dive bombers, the French armies disintegrated and the French government retreated to Vichy. The moment was ripe for Mussolini, who on June 10 declared war on France and England. On June 22 the Vichy government signed the humiliating armistice with the Axis powers. Carlo Placci, ever the patriot, welcomed Italy's entry, rejoicing at what territories Italy would get out of the war, and he stopped coming to I Tatti to avoid the anti-Fascist taint of that household. U g o Ojetti was another habitue who decided that absence was the better part of valor. It was rumored in Florence that Berenson was a dangerous foreign agent, and one day two carabinieri showed up wanting to know where the Florentine Drawings had been printed in Italy, apparently on the theory that the printer was disloyal. Mary managed to fob them off. On the day that Italy declared war Hugh Parry, the Berenson's chauffeur, and Elizabeth Percival, Mary's maid, both of whom were British citizens, left I Tatti in an attempt to reach England. Parry was captured and interned in France. Elizabeth, who was also captured, escaped from a camp near the Swiss frontier and made her way to England. The situation seemed so menacing to Alda that while Berenson and Nicky were off in Rome, she made tentative reservations on the Rex for the Berensons to sail to America. In Rome Nicky tried to get a visa for Switzerland, an eminent Italian doctor having certified that she was indispensable to the health of the Berensons. The Swiss consular officer denied the request, declaring that since she was an Italian citizen, " n o effort of yours will get you a visa." Ambassador Phillips sent for Berenson and urged him to remain in Italy, assuring him that no American over sixty would be disturbed " n o matter what happens." Berenson told his sisters that he agreed "with our A m [462]

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bassador" that it was his duty "to keep watch over I Tatti . . . besides I have so identified myself with my library that without it I could exist but not continue to live." Moreover, i f h e returned home as "a prodigal," he doubted he could survive his reception, and i f h e did, he feared he would be reduced to odd jobs for which he had no heart. He did not mention that he was resolved not to abandon Nicky in any circumstances. Relieved by Phillips' counsel, Berenson peacefully passed the time in Rome seeing Greek and Roman antiquities with his friend Professor Rhys Carpenter. One day the Countess Volpi, with whom Berenson had become acquainted in Venice, invited him to join her and her financier husband at lunch. Their fellow guest was the ill-fated General Italo Balbo, w h o m Berenson had enjoyed meeting in Tripoli five years before. It quickly became evident that Mussolini was not admired by the company: Balbo openly deplored II Duce's war policy. Still governor of Tripolitania, Balbo was convinced that the colony could not now be held, and he had advised the Duce that the women and children should be evacuated. The Berensons were not surprised to learn a few weeks later that Balbo's airplane was "accidentally" shot down by Italian gunners. During Bernard's absence in Rome, Mary was undergoing what she called a "rejuvenation," thanks to the presence of a trio of remarkably stimulating guests, the young Russian composer Igor Markevitch, his talented wife, Kyra Nijinsky, and their enchanting little boy, "Funtyki." Together with the Russian pianist Nikita Magaloff, they were providing her with "a marvellously new cure . . . youth and music." A succession of lively evening parties attracted the attention of the police, and Bernard, alarmed, cautioned her, "I do not have the money to support lodgers and feed so many house guests. . . . I only warn you not to overspend your energies and our resources." It was a needful caution, for they were now wholly dependent upon their American investments. In the unsettled state of affairs Bernard had prudently arranged to have funds remitted to him through the Swiss banking firm of Lombard Odier & Cie. To comfort Mary at being deprived of her regular summer visit to Haslemere, Bernard persuaded her to go to Fiumetto on the seashore near Viareggio, where she might be near her "pets" the Markevitches. While she was there Nicky brought the news that her favorite daughter, Ray, had died of heart failure during an operation. Bernard commented to his sisters, "She took it wonderfully like the grand heroic person she can be." In her diary Mary wrote, "I have had the most perfect daughter for fifty-two years, and I must be grateful for it." Bernard offered to join her at once, but she was resolute to bear her grief alone. [463]

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In A u g u s t she w a s reunited w i t h Bernard and N i c k y at V a l l o m b r o s a . N e v e r had the solitude o f the forested slopes at C a s a al D o n o been so c o m p l e t e nor the contrast b e t w e e n its serenity and the t u r m o i l o f the w o r l d outside so great as in that late s u m m e r o f 1940. B u t for " t h e horrors g o i n g o n at ever shorter d i s t a n c e , " B e r e n s o n had never e n j o y e d the " l i g h t and c o l o r " o f the place as m u c h as then. F r o m time to t i m e he busied h i m s e l f p u t t i n g the "last t o u c h e s " to the essay that he had b e g u n to call " A p p r o a c h to A r t H i s t o r y " and that he n o w s a w as an i n t r o d u c tion to the m a g n u m o p u s o n D e c l i n e and R e c o v e r y . A r m a n d L o w e n g a r d assured h i m it w a s " a great i d e a " to publish it first. " I t w i l l m a k e the art student a v i d l y l o o k f o r w a r d to the m o n u m e n t a l w o r k itself." " L a s t t o u c h e s " w a s as a l w a y s a e u p h e m i s m for additions that m i g h t g o o n for years. H e w o u l d " c o m p l e t e " the l o n g essay in the a u t u m n o f 1941, return to it the f o l l o w i n g year, p r u n i n g and filling it out, w o r k o n it again in 1946, and finally revise it in the s u m m e r o f 1947 after s u b m i t t i n g it to T r e v y for helpful suggestions regarding his prose. It w a s published in 1948 titled Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, and an Italian translation b y M a r i o Praz appeared in the same year.

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Travels into Self Ν U N U S U A L quiet settled d o w n upon I Tatti in the autumn o f 1940. English and continental friends and acquaintances were cut o f f or were in flight from the Nazis, and Berenson found himself increasingly isolated in Fascist Italy. Mail from the United States came rapidly but only if sent by Pan American clipper planes. O n e correspondence that continued was that with Edward Fowles, w h o had made a timely departure from Paris. Berenson's anxious inquiries to him brought long accounts o f the upheavals in the art world, especially in Paris. Under the n e w order in occupied France the Rothschilds had been efficiently plundered and deprived o f French citizenship. "Seligmanns, Durand-Ruels, and all the picture dealers received visits and were relieved o f their valuable possessions." A n officer, twelve men, and t w o vans called at Duveen Brothers and, finding that the valuable pictures had been removed, asked where they had been moved to. T o l d they were in N e w Y o r k , "they asked the whereabouts o f Lord Duveen. Receiving the reply that he was, to all expectations, in heaven, they finally . . . retired." Fowles also reported that Georges Wildenstein had been turned back at the Spanish frontier. Fowles shared Berenson's feeling that their paths might cross again. " A f t e r all," he wrote, " w e have done more business than anyone else in the art w o r l d . " He pointed out, however, that prices would have to be cut in v i e w o f changing conditions: "Government through taxation is quite a partner in our business t o d a y . " He rejected Berenson's proposal o f an annual retainer, suggesting instead that he be paid a fee for each consultation in advance o f any sale. The matter remained unsettled for several months. Berenson proposed that Fowles confer with his cousin Lawrence in N e w Y o r k ; Fowles responded that he did not think it w o u l d be helpful to draw a lawyer into their discussion. Berenson, hating the

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t h o u g h t o f the inevitable chaffering o v e r each transaction, concluded that he w o u l d h a v e to turn e l s e w h e r e w h e n the time w a s ripe. T h a t a u t u m n t w o notable events occurred in Italy, o n l y one o f w h i c h could have pleased B e r e n s o n . T h e first w a s a gala reunion o f II D u c e and Hitler in Florence o n O c t o b e r 28, o n l y hours after Mussolini's legions had b e g u n their m u c h - v a u n t e d attack on Greece. A t the railroad station, as the t w o strutting dictators bade each other farewell, a military truck b r o u g h t u p II D u c e ' s present to Hitler, the h u g e decorative triptych The Plague in Florence painted b y the Austrian Hans M a k a r t , a painting w h i c h Hitler c o v e t e d for his n e w gallery in Linz. II D u c e had c o n v e n i e n t l y confiscated the thing. T h e director o f the G e r m a n Institute, Friedrich K r i e g b a u m , m a n a g e d to absent h i m s e l f f r o m the degrading spectacle b y p a y i n g a visit to Berenson. Hitler's gratitude m u s t h a v e been short-lived, for II D u c e ' s hurriedly i m p r o v i s e d attack o n G r e e c e p r o v e d an appalling disaster. W i t h i n a f e w days the Italians w e r e f o r c e d to retreat, w i t h a loss o f 24,000 dead and 87,000 w o u n d e d and missing in action. O n l y the intervention o f Hitler's armies rescued the operation. T h e ensuing dependence o n G e r m a n strate g y u n d e r m i n e d popular respect for the Fascist r e g i m e and deepened the w i d e s p r e a d fear and dislike o f G e r m a n y . Mussolini w a s h i m s e l f reported as saying that he had b e c o m e the " t a i l - l i g h t " o f the A x i s p o w e r s . T h e second event, u n d o u b t e d l y w e l c o m e d b y Berenson as an a u g u r y o f v i c t o r y , t o o k place in N o v e m b e r w h e n British warplanes caught a portion o f the Italian fleet at T a r a n t o and torpedoed seven ships, including three battleships. Perhaps this feat o f British arms g a v e Berenson r e n e w e d h o p e for the future. A t any rate he started on a n e w project, a semiautobiographical b o o k that he w o u l d call Sketch for a Self-Portrait.

In

N o v e m b e r o f 1940, w i t h f e w guests to d r a w h i m out in talk, he b e g a n in a sense to c o n v e r s e w i t h himself. T h e ink that w a s in h i m that used " t o flow out as f r o m rivers o f Paradise" searched for fresh outlets. " T h e itch to w r i t e is s t r o n g e n o u g h , " he said, " t o m a k e m e u n c o m f o r t a b l e w h e n I pass a day . . . w i t h o u t putting d o w n s o m e t h i n g in black and w h i t e . " H e had been t h i n k i n g o f his old friends H e n r y A d a m s and Edith W h a r ton, b o t h o f w h o m had r e v i e w e d their lives, A d a m s in The Education of Henry Adams and E d i t h W h a r t o n in A Backward Glance. A d a m s particularly had tried to define his role in the w o r l d and to explain w h y , t h o u g h apparently successful, his career had seemed to h i m a failure. T h a t t h e m e o f failure struck a responsive chord in Berenson, and as he put d o w n his reminiscences and reflections f r o m day to day he tried to answer the question o f w h y w i t h his G o e t h e l i k e aspirations he had lost his w a y . W h o and w h a t w a s he really, he seemed to ask himself. A l l the egocentric concerns w h i c h had colored his letters, all the intense self-contemplation [466]

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which had marked his progress through life, came to the surface now for critical inspection. He began the book on November 14, 1940, at I Tatti and finished it, as he noted, on July 25, 1941. The short epilogue to his "glimpses into m y s e l f " was set down in August 1945. When the book was published in 1949 and widely reviewed, Berenson felt inclined to belittle it as having been "tossed off lightly between siesta and tea." At the time of writing, however, he did not want for moral and philosophical earnestness as he probed his psychological traits, habits of mind, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies. "This self—what is it?" Berenson mused. "For about seventy years, I have been asking myself that question. Can one frame an idea of one's own personality, map it out, make a picture of it that is in any measure convincing to an inquiring and fairly honest mind? In my case it has not been possible." Nevertheless, in this outpouring of opinions about himself and others and about many of the significant events of his life he produced an extraordinary and wide-ranging apologia. Taking the " w r o n g turn" as a young man when he "swerved from purely intellectual pursuits to one like the archaeological study of art" had given him the "troublesome reputation as an 'expert.' " True, it brought "material advantages," the means to travel, to build up a notable library, but the "spiritual loss was great" and left him with a sense of failure that made him squirm when he heard himself spoken of as "a successful man." Why had he not made more of himself? Like his friend Henry Adams in The Education, who tried to fix the causes of his imagined "failure," he held a similar inquest over the obstacles that had denied him the highest achievement. There had been his "intemperate lust for reading, which has not diminished but grown with the years." Travel likewise had "debauched" him. He had also wasted too much time establishing himself as a "monsieur," an aristocratic man of the world. His fragile health had limited his energy " f o r sustained effort." Nevertheless, there still rankled in his memory, after more than a half century, Charles Eliot Norton's remark to Barrett Wendell: "Berenson has more ambition than ability." Adams had said that self-depreciation was his vice. Perhaps as much could be said of Berenson. In pages of unabashed introspection Berenson explored the "illusions" by which he had lived, the weaknesses he felt in himself, and the criticisms that had been levied against him. His ideal had been to be wholly unselfish, yet he saw in his need for love, affection, and friendship a kind of cannibalism, an "unavoidable selfishness without which animal life could not continue," a cannibalism which made "use of anything alive, especially of our own species, and particularly any member of our own [467]

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culture g r o u p . . . with no regard for their private interest and the c o m m o n good of us all. . . . It is hard to reason myself out of the fear," he reflected, "that I am merely an affectionate, caressing creature, satisfying a need almost psychological, rather than a person with a heart." H e had been charged with paying too m u c h attention to w o m e n . In his defense he said, " M y kind of person turns to w o m e n , surrounds himself with w o m e n , appeals to w o m e n , not in the first place and perhaps not at all for reasons of sex . . . but for the one deciding reason that w o m e n , especially certain society w o m e n , are m o r e receptive, m o r e appreciative, and consequently m o r e stimulating." H e recalled the "doubts, hesitations and despairs" about his writing. Was it not because he had been born to talk and not to write, " t o converse," in fact, "rather than talk and then only with stimulating interlocutors"? H e could scarcely recall w h e n he had not deplored the inadequacy of w o r d s to communicate what he felt, or thought, or even k n e w . As a result he always "scribbled" with the idea of helping himself to find out w h a t he was thinking, addressing himself to an "internal interlocutor," and had not disciplined himself to marshal his arguments "in the most effective, the m o s t persuasive and most memorable w a y . " It was the inner self to which his introspection kept returning in his voyage of self-discovery, as in his meditations on his philosophical and religious beliefs. N o passage in the Sketch so thoroughly exhibits the aesthetic core of the " h u m a n i s m " which he professed as his attitude toward Christianity and the Church. H e looked back with homesickness, he said, on the "magical w o r l d " created by Israel, Greece, and Rome, a w o r l d to whose myths and rituals he could not return "any more than one m a y creep back into one's mother's w o m b . So I regard myself as a Christianity graduate in the sense in which I am a college graduate." T h o u g h there was m u c h on the theological and institutional side of the H o l y C h u r c h which was distasteful, though as a historical entity it had been "subject to the frailties, greeds, and lust of the individuals w h o t h r o u g h the ages have composed it," it was for him " h u m a n i ty's grandest, completest and most beautiful achievement." Shorn of its theology, its m y t h , and its ritual, the C h u r c h remained the mother and nurse of art. As a graduate of both Judaism and Christianity, he felt, he was still the religious person he had always been, "concentrated and intensified" in his faith: "Faith in IT, and faith in h u m a n i t y . " "IT," he explained, is "every experience that is ultimate, valued for its o w n sake, IT is the m o m e n t to which like Goethe one can say, 'Stay, stay, thou art so fair,' except that he had not asked such epiphanies to linger because he k n e w they w o u l d be followed b y others as beautiful. For his first thirty years, [468]

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he said, " a l m o s t e v e r y t h i n g that meant anything w a s IT." T h e n he w a s pushed out o f E d e n to j o i n m e n and w o m e n w h o " w e r e inevitably doing something f o r the sake o f s o m e t h i n g e l s e . " B u t n o w at long last he has returned to his " l o n g interrupted iTness"; experience and age have enriched it w i t h " a n awareness, an understanding, a gratitude, a j o y " not open to the y o u n g . T o extract f r o m the chaotic succession o f events in the c o m m o n day " w h a t w a s w h o l e s o m e and sweet, w h a t sustained and fed the s p i r i t , " to live life " a s a s a c r a m e n t , " w a s to m a k e o f life itself a w o r k o f art. His w a s the enlightened E p i c u r e a n i s m that Pater had taught him, and he had clung to it w i t h tenacity throughout his life. Its influence is implicit in all the analyses and observations o f Sketch for a Self-Portrait. A n d in the epilogue he held to his faith, his hope to keep his " p e r c e p t i o n and j u d g m e n t , to be supplied w i t h creature c o m f o r t s and to g o on taking interest in events, e n j o y i n g b o o k s , enjoying art and music, but a b o v e all enjoying nature and p e o p l e . " S o o n after B e r e n s o n started w r i t i n g the Sketch he began a c o m p a n i o n enterprise, a diary initially recording his thoughts and impressions as a person isolated in w a r t i m e Italy. T h e first entry b o r e the date J a n u a r y I, 1 9 4 1 . T h e last entry w o u l d be dated A p r i l 1 5 , 1958. When w o r d came to h i m on J a n u a r y 1 4 , 1 9 4 1 , that his old and estranged c o m p a n i o n C a r l o Placci had died at the age o f eighty, he turned to his diary to inscribe a long reminiscence. For ten days he l o o k e d back on the half century of their close and sometimes troubled friendship. B e r e n s o n felt bitter that Placci had a v o i d e d I Tatti f o l l o w i n g Italy's declaration o f w a r o n France the preceding J u n e , especially because Placci's social existence had been so deeply rooted in French and E n g l i s h society. " Y e t w h a t other conduct could I h a v e expected o f C a r l o Placci!" he reflected. " H e w a s so completely socialized that death itself m i g h t h a v e seemed preferable to being b o y c o t t e d b y the people in w h o s e midst he w a s l i v i n g . " It w a s Placci w h o had opened up Florence to h i m in the early years o f their friendship, and he freely a c k n o w l e d g e d the social debts he o w e d h i m , but he also recalled Placci's illiberal and time-serving political opinions o v e r w h i c h they had quarreled. H e r e m e m b e r e d h i m as an a m u s i n g and w i t t y c o m p a n i o n on m a n y j o u r n e y s w h o yet could be sarcastic and disobliging. A m o n g his virtues w a s the fact that he w a s an accomplished "dilettante in m u s i c and a tolerable pianist" and man o f letters. B u t the final impression that the desultory essay c o n v e y e d w a s that " d e a r C a r l o P l a c c i " w a s , as B e r e n s o n " s a w him, put u p w i t h h i m , l o v e d h i m , and to a limited extent k n e w h i m , " an essentially superficial person. L i f e w e n t o n almost serenely during the spring and s u m m e r o f 1 9 4 1 [469]

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while the ink flowed rapidly f r o m Berenson's pen. A few old friends did overcome the travel barriers, principally a m o n g them Walter Lippmann and his wife, w h o b r o u g h t w o r d of "pre-belligerent" America. A n e w acquaintance was James Joyce's brother Stanislaus, w h o had come with his wife f r o m Trieste, w h e r e he had lived for thirty-five years, to wait out the war in Florence. Berenson befriended him, and Joyce w r o t e in gratitude: "If I have been able to live here I o w e it chiefly to your introductions to influential people and for many other kindnesses." H e sent Berenson a manuscript copy of his brother's poems that had at one time been sent around to editors. T h e pages, he said, were stained because the manuscript had been "knocking about for forty years, and the last p o e m of ' C h a m b e r Music' is missing because he had not yet decided to include it." Berenson's daily stint of writing alternated with "orgies of reading," especially at the retreat in the Vallombrosa forest. Nicky read aloud in German, French, Italian, and English, all the "table d'höte languages," as he once called them. M a n y of the books were chosen because they dealt with the "transition f r o m Antiquity to the Middle Ages." T o Edith de Gasparin, a French intellectual with w h o m he frequently corresponded, he recommended Thierry and Boissier's Fin du Paganisme; Michaud's Histoire des Croissades, "a masterpiece of erudition, humanity, and style"; and R o m a n o Guardini's Dostoieuski, a German w o r k and "inexpensive." In August he reported to J o h n Walker that he had been "officially assured that w e shall be left in peace at I T a t t i . " There had been a worrisome m o m e n t in early s u m m e r w h e n an order came f r o m Rome, inspired by the infamous Gherardesca, to expel Berenson f r o m I Tatti because of his dangerous proximity to the castle of Vincigliata, where British prisoners were quartered. Vice-Consul Washburn alerted A m bassador Phillips, w h o effectively protested to Foreign Minister Ciano. T h e order was canceled. His seeming influence inspired the satiric c o m ment of an Italian writer w h o was quoted in the Times Literary Supplement as saying that Italy had a triumvirate, "II Duce, II Re, II B . B . " Despite Berenson's expectation of solitude on the mountainside, the place proved a magnet for congenial friends. T h e scholarly Friedrich Kriegbaum of the German Institute enjoyed the bracing anti-Fascist atmosphere, as did the Swiss art historian Martin Bodmer, w h o came u p to talk. Berenson was most charmed by the Markevitches. Husband and wife came alternately because w h e n they were together their artistic temperaments tended to explode. T h e twenty-nine-year-old Igor, thoughtful, widely read, and eloquent, completely endeared himself to Berenson. As for the little self-possessed boy, w h o had become Mary's

[470]

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INTO

SELF

and Nicky's darling, Berenson thought him the "most gifted little boy I ever imagined as well as the most companionable." Mario Praz, Italian professor of literature at the University of Florence, came up to visit one Sunday in July. Berenson and Praz were to see much of each other after the war when Praz undertook the Italian translation of Aesthetics and History. Praz recalled that first visit in his memoir, The House of Life. " T h e gratings over the ground floor windows at Casa al Dono contributed," he wrote, "to the severe, monastic, and at the same time agreeable look of the house. . . . On the lawn, under the sun umbrella, one might well have been in Surrey. . . . B . B . was wearing an immaculate cream-colored suit, with a pink carnation in his button-hole, and after tea he walked with us along a delightful path under the side of the hill, where there were sweet peas, violets, and strawberries. . . . We talked of Pater, of the revelation that Imaginary Portraits had been to Berenson as a young man, of the banquets Pater gave to his friends, following a solemn ritual, in which everything had to be perfect and appropriate." The one mention of the war to disturb their genial conversation was Berenson's allusion to the report of the destruction in the blitz of Henry James's house at Rye. "It was so difficult to think of the impermanence of things in the solemn, kindly atmosphere of Casa al D o n o , " Praz reflected. " B u t this feeling of a world caught at the moment when it was settling into a supreme attitude of untenable exquisiteness—was not this also the feeling which one caught in the villa of Marius the Epicurean at Luni, Marius who had also lived in an epoch when the foundations of civilization were tottering?" With the onset of winter the chief problem at I Tatti was the shortage of fuel. The library had to go unheated, but the living areas remained warm and the books migrated back and forth to Berenson's study. As late as December 5, 1941, Mary was able to write to Bessie that Bernard "has an unlimited supply of younger friends who come to sit at his feet and really, I've never, never seen him, never heard him more instructive or more brilliant." T w o days later the wireless brought the news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the entry of the United States into the war. On December 9 an article appeared in the Rome review Vita Italiana by a friend of Senator Gherardesca charging that Berenson's art studies were merely a blind for his work as a political agent and that he deserved to be put in a concentration camp at forced labor. On the following day Ciano, who from the beginning had "wanted no war at all," sent a telegram to the police headquarters in Florence giving orders that the Berensons were

[+71]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF

A

LEGEND

n o t t o b e m o l e s t e d . Later that d a y M u s s o l i n i issued the d e c l a r a t i o n o f w a r against the U n i t e d States, a n d a g r o u p o f fanatical Fascists i m m e d i a t e l y s t o r m e d i n t o t h e F l o r e n c e p o l i c e h e a d q u a r t e r s to d e m a n d

Berenson's

arrest. T h e u n s y m p a t h e t i c assistant p o l i c e c h i e f i n f u r i a t e d the

fire-eating

d e l e g a t i o n b y w a v i n g C i a n o ' s t e l e g r a m b e f o r e their e y e s . B a l k e d o f their p r e y , t h e y left b r e a t h i n g v e n g e a n c e against C i a n o . T r y i n g t o u n d e r s t a n d G h e r a r d e s c a ' s zeal in l e a d i n g the cabal against h i m , B e r e n s o n recalled that the F l o r e n t i n e h a d b e e n the c o m m i s s i o n e r o f F l o r e n c e w h e n h e h a d r e f u s e d , u n d e r the threat o f c o n d e m n a t i o n p r o c e e d i n g s , t o sell t h e strip o f land n e e d e d t o w i d e n the r o a d , the strip that later, r e p e n t a n t , h e h a d g i v e n to the c i t y . H e a s s u m e d that the p a t r i o t i c c o m m i s s i o n e r h a d n e v e r f o r g i v e n h i m . T h e c h i e f c h a r g e against h i m n o w , he said, w a s that h e w a s " d e b a u c h i n g the s n o w - w h i t e l a m b s o f his f o l d " so that " i n s t e a d o f b e i n g i n c u l c a t e d w i t h the t e a c h i n g s o f H i t l e r a n d Rosenberg

they

may

imbibe

the

'Judeo-demo-plutocratic'

milk

of

humaneness." B e r e n s o n b e g a n the n e w y e a r o f 1942, as he w r o t e in the d i a r y , " a s a civilian p r i s o n e r , in this Italy w h e r e I h a v e resided f o r

fifty-four

years.

. . . O f all the i m p r o b a b i l i t i e s that c o u l d h a v e b e e n s u g g e s t e d w h e n I first t r o d its earth in S e p t e m b e r 1888 n o n e w o u l d h a v e s e e m e d m o r e fantastic than that in m y l i f e t i m e Italy w o u l d b e at w a r w i t h the U n i t e d States. . . . Y e t here w e are and h e r e I a m . . . despite o r d e r s f r o m W a s h i n g t o n , p r a y e r s o f f r i e n d s at h o m e , a n d the w a r n i n g s , the u r g e n t a d v i c e o f p e o p l e d e v o t e d to us h e r e . " S e t t i n g aside the m a t e r i a l c o n s i d e r a t i o n s f o r his r e m a i n i n g in Italy, he n o t e d three " s p i r i t u a l " reasons f o r s t a y i n g : h e h a d b e c o m e so i d e n t i f i e d w i t h t h e " h u m a n i z e d m a j o r i t y o f Italians" that he c o u l d n o t b r i n g h i m s e l f t o desert t h e m in this t r y i n g t i m e ; i f he left Italy h e m i g h t b e o b l i g e d t o s e r v e against it (this he t h o u g h t t h e d e t e r m i n i n g factor); a n d he w a s filled w i t h c u r i o s i t y to see w h e t h e r the Italian p e o p l e w o u l d treat h i m (as h e b e l i e v e d t h e y w o u l d ) " a s h u m a n e l y as p o s s i b l e . " F o r h i m as an o f f i c i a l e n e m y

alien, life b e c a m e i n c r e a s i n g l y

cir-

c u m s c r i b e d . A d v a n c i n g a g e t o o w a s t a k i n g its toll. H i s daily w a l k s w e r e s h o r t e n e d , t h o u g h his l y r i c a l r e s p o n s e t o t h e T u s c a n l a n d s c a p e at each turn o f the r o a d w a s u n d i m i n i s h e d . S o m e t i m e s o n his w a l k s h e e n c o u n tered a c o n t i n g e n t o f tall B r i t i s h p r i s o n e r s s h e p h e r d e d b y their d i m i n u tive captors, b u t all c o n v e r s e w a s f o r b i d d e n . O f t e n h e n o w c h o s e f o r his w a l k s the b o s k y paths a r o u n d the s e c l u d e d l a g h e t t o a b o v e I T a t t i w h e r e M a r y h a d o n c e d i s p o r t e d h e r s e l f in the s h a d e d p o o l w i t h G e r t r u d e Stein a n d o t h e r w o m e n friends. M a r y , n o w l o n g inactive, had settled i n t o the life o f a s e m i - i n v a l i d a n d passed her d a y s w o r k i n g o n a b i o g r a p h y o f her daughter Ray. B e r e n s o n ' s w r i t i n g — t h e Sketch for a Self-Portrait [472]

and the d i a r y — w a s ,

TRAVELS

INTO

SELF

next to his insatiable reading, his chief literary employment. In the diary he penned soliloquies often touched off by the book at hand. As he put down Herodotus, for example, he wrote that he was impressed by the striking parallel between "the present war and the war with Persia": the Persians sought to impose their new order over all of Asia as the Nazis desired to dominate Europe. He also began to keep a journal record of his reading, in which he scrupulously noted his reactions to the books he read or listened to each day. The extraordinary scope of that record struck him afterward as being sufficiently arresting to warrant publication of the entries for 1942, a task which he undertook in his ninetyfourth year in a volume ironically titled One Year's Reading for Fun. Day after day, without a break, Berenson went adventuring among the books in his library. " I read," he explained, "in the first place to feed a ravenous curiosity not unlike the thirst of Miinchausen's horse, insatiable because the rear half had been shot away, and there was nothing to retain what poured through his mouth. Then I read for sheer entertainment: verse, prose, narrative of all kinds. . . . Finally I read books that, as I peruse them, stimulate my own thinking, interrupted by much woolgathering, musing, and sheer idling." The daily records of his reading are generally brief, rarely more than a hundred words. The entry for January 4 is typical of the hundreds that followed: "4 January, Glanced as usual at the Vatican sacristy sheet known as Osservatore Romano, and at Deutsche Allgemeine. Mary read aloud political article in November Atlantic—the last we shall see for the 'duration.' Mary again after dinner, Ranke on papacy at turn of the eighteenth century. Nicky, more Tarle, still Russian campaign. B y m y self many pages of Suarez's Briand, about Briand's visit to Washington. French seem incapable of understanding anything Anglo-Saxon. Nothing more remote from what I know of A. J . Balfour or [Charles Evans] Hughes than Suarez's attempt to characterize them." So the entries in his diary and his journal run their antiphonal way, the one tracking the ceaseless course of his introspection, the other carefully inventorying the print on which he fed and the innumerable writings they called to mind. In June of 1942 when the American embassy staff was about to leave Italy, the charge telegraphed the Berensons to join them. Berenson declined, insisting that their age and health stood in the way and pointing out that neither Mary's nurse nor Nicky would be permitted to accompany them. Though Berenson's decision had earlier been approved by Ambassador Phillips, it apparently earned the charge's animosity, for Berenson's reputedly ample dossier in the State Department is said to contain, among other unflattering accusations, the charge of both "premature anti-Fascism" and collaboration. [473]

BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

The war had moved a frightening step closer to I Tatti when decrees of March 4 and 24 subjected the property of enemy aliens to so-called sequestration. Thanks to the intervention of Carlotta Orlando, daughter of the e x - p r i m e minister Vittorio Orlando, the sequestrator assigned to I Tatti was a friendly anti-Fascist, Marchese Filippo Serlupi Crescenzi, a wealthy Italian lawyer and art collector, w h o had diplomatic rights as ambassador of San Marino to the Holy See. O n June 18 Marchese Serlupi completed the obligatory inventory of all the Berenson possessions at I Tatti. The document, prepared with the assistance of "Signorina Elisabetta Mariano," ran to nearly seventy pages. It was witnessed by Dr. Giovanni Poggi, superintendent of the Florence Gallery, by the Berensons' attorney Mario Alberto Carocci, and by the estate manager, Geremia Gioffredi. The inventory presents a remarkable overview of the treasures which the Berensons had accumulated. O f the nearly 125 paintings on the walls of the rooms and corridors, all but three or four were of the Italian Renaissance. Shelved in the five rooms of the library and scattered about in Berenson's study, Nicky's office, and elsewhere throughout the thirty rooms of the villa were more than 34,000 volumes catalogued in 127 bound registers. The photographic archives contained approximately 95,000 items. Distributed about the rambling villa were ten Chinese sculptures as well as sculptures f r o m Egypt, Siam, Indo-China, and Japan. Apparently overlooked—or already secreted—were the priceless Persian manuscripts. Every piece of furniture, modern and antique, every pot and pan, and every piece of silverware found a place in the interminable lists. The inventory of the grounds, of the garage, and of the chapel and villino was equally thorough. The marble or plaster statues in the gardens were identified and all the vases counted. More than forty varieties of ornamental plants and flowers were listed—59 dwarf lemon trees, 40 poinsettias, 240 azaleas, and so on. The project undoubtedly occupied days. In her recollection of the affair Nicky declared Berenson endured it all with philosophic resignation. With the inventory completed, Marchese Serlupi retired to his o w n extensive estate on the hillside at Careggi above the city, and the Berensons remained unmolested except for one day in July when the police made a routine search of the house in pursuit of some British officers w h o had escaped f r o m Castello Vincigliata with the rumored help of Berenson. As a military precaution the house telephone was cut off, but thanks to Marchese Serlupi's protest it was reinstalled in the estate manager's house. When Nicky, w h o had been advised to thank the prefect of police personally, went d o w n to his office in Florence, he reminded her

[474]

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loudly that Berenson was an enemy alien, but at the door, out of earshot of his subordinates, he softly whispered he would try to protect I Tatti. An alarm of a different sort disturbed Berenson when he applied in August for an extension of his American passport through the American consulate in Switzerland. He received word that under Section 404 of the Nationality Act of 1940 he would lose his citizenship because he was an alien-born citizen who had been out of the United States for more than the statutory five years. He got word to his cousin Lawrence in N e w York, who immediately contacted the State Department. Lawrence was soon able to notify him that a law signed by President Roosevelt on October 9 postponed the effective date of the draconian Section 404 until October 14, 1944. As a result the Berensons were able to obtain another six-month extension of their passports through the Swiss consul in Florence. Although they were granted official permission to go up to Casa al Dono toward the end of the summer, Nicky was warned that permission to return to I Tatti might be denied. As Berenson put it to Walker in a letter enclosed in one sent by Professor Jirmounski from Lisbon, through "the usual stupid enemy we were tricked out of going up to the mountains." He implored Walker to try to send detailed news of himself, his family, his work, their friends in common, and of "what is going on in the art w o r l d . " The clandestine channels of communication proved largely ineffective. Letters had not altogether stopped with French intimates like the litterateur Jean Rouvier or Edith de Gasparin. They had of course to pass through German censorship, and the crabbed handwriting impelled the censor to request they be typewritten. Berenson's long letters, written in English and marked "In Englische spräche," could do little more than inquire about common friends and comment on his reading. T o Rouvier, for instance, he told of his fascination with Kierkegaard's Journal, "suggestive, stimulating, enigmatical, and maddening." T o Edith de Gasparin, he recommended that she try to get Trollope's novels. He told her that he had already devoured the whole series of political novels as well as the Chronicles of Barset. Her letters, he said, were so "suggestive and stimulating" that he feared he would exhaust time, paper, and "the amiable censor's patience" if he did justice to them. The local Fascist! continued their campaign against Berenson, and early in October they filed a new denunciation against I Tatti with the usual charge of entertaining suspicious characters. The worried prefect of police cautioned Nicky that they must stop all contact with their friends. As a precaution Nicky gave him a list of the inoffensive visitors and

[475]

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· THE

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OF A

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students who had been there. She also sent a report of Senator Gherardesca's hostile activities against Berenson to the Swiss charge in Rome, "in case something more grave affects him." In November of 1942 the strident boasts of the Fascists were suddenly muted in Florence and the atmosphere changed. Passing through the library where the radio was kept out of hearing, Nicky turned it on on Sunday morning November 8 and learned that the Allies had successfully landed in Algeria. It seemed to mark the turning point of the war, for in the preceding month General Bernard Montgomery had routed R o m mel's "Afrika C o r p s " at El Alamein west of Alexandria and the relentless pursuit of the German and Italian legions had already begun. T o Italians generally it was becoming clear that Hitler had used their country as an instrument in his own grandiose scheme of conquest. The disillusioned Ciano recorded in his diaries that Italy had been deceived again and again as to Hitler's intentions. In defiance of the proscription, Italian friends began to come up to I Tatti as pessimistic rumors about the course of the war began to circulate. Confined to his ivory tower, Berenson lost himself in his books and the receptive pages of his diary while Mary more and more relived the past in memory, ministered to by her nurses. Little Funtyki continued to delight both Berensons. While his parents were away they celebrated his sixth birthday, giving him his "heart's desire, a magnificent helmet, a gun with a folding bayonet, a sword in its scabbard and a belt." Proudly arrayed in this panoply, he marched down the road, but when some soldiers called out, " Y o u are one of us and must come with u s , " the little fellow promptly discarded his military trappings. The temperamental Markevitches were now living in the villino, their domestic quarrels only too obvious to their hosts. In the brilliant Igor, however, Berenson found the intellectual companionship he needed. The landing of the Allies in Sicily on July 10, 1943, signaled what seemed the beginning of the end. Nine days later Mussolini, desperate for help, met with Hitler at Feltre, but the situation was beyond remedy. Conspiracies to overthrow his government were already afoot among his close associates, including his son-in-law Ciano. In the crisis posed by the invasion of Sicily and an allied air attack on Rome, the conspirators called for a meeting of the Gran Consiglio. On the night of July 24 Count Dino Grandi, who carried a live grenade on his person in case of an "emergency," moved a vote of no confidence in Mussolini. It passed by a vote of nineteen to seven. B y morning the king had named General Pietro Badoglio prime minister, and Mussolini was arrested as he left the king's residence and taken into protective custody. People everywhere rushed into the streets to express their j o y f u l relief. Berenson's barber, [476]

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SELF

"drunk with happiness," came up from Florence to tell him " h o w people embraced in the streets without knowing each other." A great procession formed singing the songs of the Risorgimento, and crowds shouted for the end of the war. The rejoicing proved premature. The war went on, and it was not long before the die-hard Fascists came out from hiding to take their bloody revenge under Nazi auspices, especially against the Partisans and their suspected friends. The Fascists' leader, Captain Mario Caritä, head of the Office of Political Investigation, now began, in the words of David Tutaev, "his wholesale repressions, ceaseless interrogations, all of which were accompanied with the most degrading brutality and humiliations." At his headquarters in the Villa Triste on the Via U g o Foscolo, "Padre Ildefonso played Neapolitan songs and Schubert's Unfinished Symphony on the phonograph to drown out the cries of the tortured." It was not until September 3, 1943, that General Badoglio negotiated a preliminary armistice with the Allies and fled to Allied-controlled southern Italy. B y that time the German armored columns had overrun northern and central Italy and the hated ally had become the much more hated occupying power. Mussolini, confined in a hotel in the Gran Sasso, was daringly rescued on September 12 by German paratroopers and installed in the north by the Germans as dictator of occupied Italy. In the south the king as sovereign declared war on Germany and Fascist Italy, and the protracted and costly advance of the Allies against bitter German resistance began. Orlando's daughter had already hiked down from Campilioni to I Tatti to warn that if the Germans seized control and restored the Fascists, Berenson as an American, a well-known anti-Fascist, and a j e w would be treated as "enemy number one." When the radio announced the full armistice on September 8, Nicky decided to get the advice of the sequestrator, Marchese Serlupi. The full seriousness of Berenson's danger became apparent to her the following morning when she alighted from the bus at the Piazza San Marco. Military vehicles filled with German officers had just arrived before the Italian military headquarters to take over control. Marchese Serlupi offered refuge in Le Fontenelle, his villa high above the Medici palace of Careggi and about three miles north of the Arno, confident that the Germans would respect the diplomatic immunity symbolized by the white and yellow papal flag which flew above the villa. He gathered up Berenson and Nicky and they left at once, telling Mary only that they would be in touch with her and would return as soon as possible.

[477]

X LVI

The Teace of Le Tontanelle

M

A R Y was not told of Bernard and Nicky's destination for fear that she would unthinkingly reveal it to any inquirer. Nicky's sister, Alda, was left in charge of I Tatti, and the bedridden Mary remained in the special care of her maid and nurses. With the help of Giovanni Poggi, the superintendent of art in Florence who had assisted at the inventory, and of Friedrich Kriegbaum, the more valuable paintings and sculptures were taken up to Le Fontanelle or sent down to Alda's apartment on the Borgo San Jacapo, where they were carefully walled up. As a precaution the photographs of these objects were removed from the local archives and the sequestrator's inventory retyped to omit them. The remaining paintings were spread out to hide the vacant places on the walls. As for the library, some volumes were partly walled up at I Tatti, and 20,000 volumes, together with the photograph collection, were secreted at the Quarto, the great villa on the slopes of Mount Morello near Le Fontanelle belonging to Serlupi's mother-inlaw, Baroness Kiki Ritter de Zahony. Berenson, who occasionally lunched there during his confinement at Le Fontanelle, described it as "that huge Noah's ark, haunted by the ghosts of Demidoffs and Leuchtenbergs, of Thiers, and of Princesse Mathilde." It made him happy to pass some hours there "in the midst of proportions, colors, chairs, tables, pictures, the most livable with, that have ever been seen." Other portions of the I Tatti library were deposited with their friend Giannino Marchig, the painter and restorer. What remained at I Tatti was strategically distributed on the much-lightened shelves. The notable library at Le Fontanelle with its impressive collection of incunabula gave assurance that Berenson would not lack books to challenge thought. There had been good reason to secrete the paintings. For some time

[478]

THE

PEACE

OF

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H e r m a n n G o e r i n g ' s " a r t b u y e r s " had been busily on the p r o w l f o r v u l nerable collections. E v e n as early as the spring o f 1 9 4 2 one o f them, B e r e n s o n n o w learned, had m a d e inquiries o f K r i e g b a u m about the art collection o f the f a m o u s B e r n a r d Berenson. K r i e g b a u m assured h i m that " t h e r e w e r e n o paintings except o f C a t h o l i c subjects, and no b o o k s o f m o r e than local i n t e r e s t . " N o w the Gestapo had established a headquarters in Florence, and the G e r m a n consul G e r h a r d W o l f f w a s asked w h e r e the f a m o u s B e r e n s o n could be f o u n d . W o l f f , a secret anti-Nazi, replied that he had fled to P o r t u g a l via the Vatican. W h e n one day there arrived in Florence one o f Hitler's " p e r s o n a l art b u y e r s , " the consul w a s obliged to a c c o m p a n y this " f o r m e r Berlin carpet s e l l e r , " H e r r S e p p A n g e r e r , o n his tours. Greatly impressed by C o u n t B o n a c o s s i ' s collection, he turned to the count and said, " W h a t a pity y o u ' r e not a J e w ! " B o t h W o l f f and the count looked puzzled. H e r r A n g e r e r " d r e w a hairy f i n g e r across his throat, saying: 'If y o u w e r e a J e w , w e w o u l d d o j u s t that! A n d all the paintings w o u l d be o u r s . ' " T h e consul anxiously s u m m o n e d N i c k y to w a r n her that B e r e n s o n should not be f o u n d at I Tatti. H e w a s relieved to learn that he w a s already in hiding. Later W o l f f came up to L e Fontanelle to assure N i c k y that he w o u l d d o all he could to protect the contents o f I Tatti. It did not take M a r y l o n g to discover that B e r n a r d had g o n e s o m e w h e r e into hiding. What all h o p e d w o u l d be a short stay, to be ended w i t h the early arrival o f the A l l i e d troops, settled into months o f w a i t i n g as the battle lines crept n o r t h w a r d f r o m one heavily defended position to another. A f f e c t i o n a t e letters w e n t back and forth between I Tatti and L e Fontanelle. B e r n a r d told " D a r l i n g M a r y " that he w a s resting and, to t h r o w her o f f the track, e n j o y i n g a " c o m p l e t e change of scene, o f climate, o f voices and o f t a l k . " F o r her part she w r o t e disconsolately o f her presentiments that she m i g h t n e v e r see h i m again. In one o f her depressed m o o d s she lamented, " I see that I have been a horrible p e r s o n , " and, as frequently before, she told o f w i s h i n g she could " f a d e out o f the m e m o r y o f e v e r y o n e — m y o w n , first o f a l l . " She had had m u c h pain, but D r . C a p e c c h i had assured her that her " v i t a l p r o cesses" w e r e all right. H a v i n g fallen out o f bed, unable to reach the bell " f o r nearly an h o u r , " she had n o w e n g a g e d a night nurse. F o r diversion she w a s reading aloud to A l d a f r o m M a c a u l a y ' s History, finding it "better than a score o f n o v e l s . " B e r n a r d i n f o r m e d her that he w a s i m m e r s e d in B y z a n t i n e history " s o as to be able to find m y w a y w h e n I attempt to w r i t e about its a r t . " W e " t a k e t w o w a l k s daily in this enchanting Riviera w i t h its lush flora, eat well, and spend m u c h time resting. . . . I arrange the day v e r y m u c h as I

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did at h o m e . I begin it before seven and soon after eight Nick and I breakfast together. . . . I a m lazy and let myself d r i f t . " T h e allusion to the "enchanting Riviera" n o doubt deceived Mary, but for Berenson it had a kind of truth, for in his diary he w r o t e that the place was sheltered f r o m the n o r t h wind by M o n t e Vecchio and hence enjoyed "a climate like the m o r e sheltered parts of the French Riviera. T h e trees, olive, oak, ilex, pine, cypress, and mimosa, take the most shapely and romantic aspects. E v e r y w h e r e they cluster as in a Titian." There was a "sweep of s k y " that he missed at his o w n house and he grew "ecstatic over the sunsets." T h e grounds "as they climb the hillside are spaced with grassy terraces which are almost as soft and springy as English lawns. . . . A b o v e the house, the well-wooded hill rises sharply to a flat top crowned by a towered f a r m h o u s e . " Berenson made no entry in his diary for six weeks after his arrival in his macchia [hiding place] de luxe nor did he touch books that he had " o n the stocks." T h e reason, he said, was that for m o r e than t w o years he had not left I Tatti, except to see his dentist. It was as if he had gone to a "distant and softer land" and had "collapsed, not nervously, but physically." So he spent the days "strolling gently on these charming slopes, chatting, reading and being read t o " until the itch for activity began to trouble him, first for serious reading, then for research, and finally for writing. After three m o n t h s N i c k y sent a long report to M a r y telling h o w they spent their days in their place of refuge. Fortunately for B.B., w h o was extremely sensitive to cold, there was an electric heater in his r o o m . Nicky w o u l d check the o u t d o o r temperature each day to see whether it was w a r m enough for h i m to emerge. After their m o r n i n g walk " B . B . goes on with his writing until lunch time and I either do some typing, copying out the innumerable notes he has gradually assembled in connection with his w o r k , or I have some mending or washing to d o . " At meal times he enjoyed "things he w o u l d never eat at h o m e . . . thick minestroni or beans or bruciate—roasted chestnuts." U n m e n t i o n e d was the fact, for it might have been too revealing, that there was ample r o o m for walks within the fenced estate itself. A serpentine road climbed up the hillside f r o m the gatekeeper's lodge for about a half mile to the extensive terrace with its stone balustrades which overlooked all Florence lying in the distance below. T h e Serlupis' compassion gathered in a few other refugees to w h o m they gave shelter. O n e was a dissident officer unwilling to serve under the Fascists. Another was "a very corpulent Monsignore whose reasons for keeping out of the w a y " were " n o t quite clear." Cultivated and h u m o r o u s l y entertaining, he provided a good deal of f u n to the c o m [480]

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pany. When those t w o left, their places were taken by a "youngish couple," the duke and duchess of Ancona, and their seven-month-old baby. N i c k y in her letters to M a r y carefully avoided identifying their hosts. N o r did she mention the Jewish refugees w h o had been given asylum at the Villa Quarto by Baroness Ritter de Zahony, Marchese Serlupi's mother-in-law, w h o had joined them at Le Fontanelle. In one of the letters that passed between Le Fontanelle and I Tatti, Bernard told M a r y of the diary he was keeping "not so much of events as of reflections," which she might one day want to read. In its pages he rehearsed the political rumors that came to him, all confusing and contradictory, all raising unanswerable questions about the actions of the Allies, the Germans, and the Italians. He philosophized, for example, that "international affairs will be placed on a better footing when it is understood that there is no w a y of punishing a people for the crimes of its rulers. . . . There is no more suicidal doctrine than what has prevailed in m y lifetime—the notion that no one has the right to interfere with the internal affairs of another country." The fact was that intervention had actually been practiced constantly. The evil was to put it off, thus "letting troubles pile u p . " Serlupi's wife, Marchesa Gilberta, w h o was much younger than her husband, was an attractive and extraordinarily poised individual, notable for her tact and ingenuity. With the war drawing ever closer to Florence, she managed to lay in ample supplies of food and other necessities. T o conceal Berenson's identity she informed all her servants that he was "Monsieur le B a r o n , " a title which stuck even after the war. Her husband instructed a friendly Italian policeman stationed at I Tatti to inform all callers that Berenson had gone to Portugal. That " n e w s " was soon afterward broadcast on the Italian radio. Serlupi also circulated the rumor that Berenson was actually an Aryan, "the illegitimate son of a Russian Grand D u k e , " and Consul Wolff sent this enlightening information in an aide-memoire to the German ambassador. A m o n g the incidents which Berenson recorded in his diary was a piece of tragic irony that occurred on September 25, 1943. He happened to look up at a squadron of Allied bombers veering over Florence. It was the first aerial attack. The bombs fell in the direction of the railroad yards. One, however, landed in the outskirts of San Domenico on the house of the Viennese connoisseur Leo Planiscig while Friedrich Kriegbaum was a visitor there. Planiscig dashed to the cellar when the air raid siren sounded, but Kriegbaum continued to "sip his vermouth," evidently trusting to his luck, having survived t w o terrible air raids in Germany. He died under a wall of books and debris. " H e was one of the most thoroughly humanized and cultured individuals of m y acquain[481]

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tance," Berenson w r o t e in his diary, "gentle, tender, incapable o f evil, and was doing nothing but g o o d . " Berenson afterward learned that the Nazis had ordered K r i e g b a u m o n September 9 to have the library o f the German Institute packed and sent to G e r m a n y . A s reported in D a v i d T u t a e v ' s The Man Who Saved Florence, the German consul, pleading there w a s n o time to pack, arranged to have D r . P o g g i take the place under his protection. D r . Hanna Kiel, an art historian and anti-Nazi refugee f r o m G e r m a n y w h o was a friend o f K r i e g b a u m , w a s left to lock up the institute and deliver the consul's private papers for safekeeping to the Swiss consul. D r . Kiel subsequently met Berenson and became a lifelong habitue o f I Tatti and an editor and German translator o f his w o r k s . C o n s u l W o l f f recalled meeting Berenson at the Villa Q u a r t o : " a small grave, bearded man stooping under a heavy blanket, w h i c h was c o n stantly slipping o f f his shoulders," w i t h w h o m he "perambulated s l o w l y about the g a r d e n s . " T h e y conversed amicably, chiefly about German literature. Berenson w a s to write in the epilogue o f his published w a r diary, " U n f o r g e t t a b l e proofs o f friendship were given me b y the G e r man C o n s u l , Gerhard W o l f f , and b y the assistant chief, n o w chief o f police, Virgilia Soldani B e n z i . " W h e n information came f r o m C o n s u l W o l f f that Jews were being rounded up in R o m e and shipped in cattle cars to G e r m a n y b y the Gestapo, the report set Berenson to thinking o f the irrationality o f the anti-Semitism that treated J e w s as an alien people in a nation's midst. T h e truth, he reflected, w a s that, except for a small percentage, "Jews are exactly like other people o f the same class e v e r y w h e r e . " Hence Hitler's belief in the w o r l d " o m n i p o t e n c e o f the J e w s " was " a belief so absurd that it c o m f o r t e d m e . " His racial policy was a fatal mistake. H e w a s wasting energy " u p o n helpless J e w s instead o f concentrating upon dangerously determined enemies . . . and could not possibly w i n the war. . . . I am confident that the majority o f j e w s w o u l d have been g o o d Nazis in G e r m a n y if they had been allowed to b e , " Berenson reasoned in a diary entry. "Far f r o m being internationalists, the great majority o f assimilated, bourgeois J e w s tend to be nationalists in the aggrandizing annexationist sense o f the w o r d . " In the support o f this opinion he called to mind the "Jew Disraeli w h o invented British imperialism," and L e o p o l d o Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, w h o had involved Italy in the Balkans. In France "the three Reinachs w e r e rabid patriots." A n d in Italy w i t h rare exceptions bourgeois Jews had been Fascists, "and some o f them ardent and active o n e s . " Illogical as the persecution o f the Jews might be, it was nevertheless a painful fact o f contemporary existence, and n o w that he found himself [482]

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intimately affected by it, the subject gave him no peace. Wasn't there a salutary lesson to be drawn from the Nazi horror? The more he thought of it, the more he felt the quixotic need to give his advice, to deliver a sermon to his "fellow scapegoats" in the United States. It was thus that in May of 1944 he began " a small b o o k " that he thought of titling an "Epistle to the Americanized Hebrews" or " A Letter to American J e w r y . " In it he recurred to his conversation with Dr. von Neumann. Jews were "fellow whipping boys, or even the fellow victims of the first line of defence against the disinherited and discontented." "Perhaps," he argued, "if the German Jews had mingled with the humbler layers of their fellow-countrymen, it would not have been so easy to subject them to the cannibal treatment they have suffered. The German J e w s might reply that they had no proletarians. That is not the case in America." Therefore, since jealousy and envy remained motives of conduct, he urged, " D o not stir it up. Even if you were as innocent as the angels you could not escape its venom, and you are far from that. . . . It is the irresponsible wealth, as well as the arrogance in the high ranks of J e w r y , that led to the periodical persecutions and massacres of the putative descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; spiritual wealth more even than material, is apt to rouse secret resentment. . . . So you whom Hitler has for years to come reduced to being a thing apart, a stranger in your land, cannot be too modest, too unassuming, too discreet." He rejected as parochial the agitation for the return ofJ e w s to a Zionist state in which only Hebrew was employed. Such a new Zion, he feared, would be just another ghettoized member of the nationalistic ghettos of the world. During the months at Le Fontanelle one earnest political homily after another filled pages of the diary. Pondering the aspirations of the contending Allied and Axis powers, he asked himself, "When w e have thoroughly beaten them how should we treat the Germans? If I had my way it would be either as convalescents or as incurables. The latter I should segregate, isolate, and see to it that they did no mischief, whether by word or deed. . . . I repeat what I have said more than once: that there is no way of punishing a people, even if we had a right to. . . . We could have stopped Hitler in time, as w e easily could have stopped Mussolini, if w e [had] wanted to. So I question whether, in justice, w e have any right to punish those Germans who could not help submitting to force that we had allowed to grow overwhelming and irresistible." Like animated table talk the diary entries veered freely from one topic to another. Berenson descanted on the Wagnerian cult of the irrational by the Nazis as a parallel of the Freudian freeing of the subconscious in the individual. " T h e immediate result is an excited interest in what goes on beneath the belt to the exclusion of the head and members." He recorded [483]

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his dream of "depoliticizing nationality." Yet he wrote of blushing " w i t h pride and satisfaction" one evening in December when his host "came out with a panegyric of Franklin Roosevelt." O f the racial theories of the Nazis, he remarked that a "claim for racial purity can be made in good faith only by those w h o k n o w no history and forget human nature." The outcry against the Allied destruction of Monte Cassino he called "cynical propaganda," for "the buildings and decorations were no earlier than of the seventeenth century and in no way remarkable for that period. . . . What connoisseur would dream of placing it beside the Escorial or [the ancient Austrian monasteries o f ] Sankt Florian or Melk!" In spite of the occasional Allied air raids in the vicinity and the frightening detonations of shell bursts that reverberated among the hills, life pursued its intellectualized course at Le Fontanelle. Day after day, week after week, Berenson recorded the eddies of his introspection, incessantly taking his intellectual temperature. Pen in hand he tried to pin d o w n the ephemera that flitted through his mind trailing their clouds of associations. Apergus, impressions of persons and places, reminiscences of the distant past, opinions of here and hereafter crowded his pages, often setting off a train of erudite historical associations. The incessant j o u r nalizing proved an instrument of self-discovery, of becoming in the E m e r sonian sense. More and more, during the isolation of the war years, his thought turned inward upon the potential self as he doggedly explored its complex geography. T h e exploration of that self was to become the principal occupation of the rest of his life. As the Anreps could move about freely, having the double credentials of German and Italian, the private letters between Bernard and Mary went back and forth with some regularity. Mary, fretting against her inactivity and able, she said, to w o r k an hour a day, offered to edit whatever manuscript he was working on. H e tactfully explained it had to be first put in order. For useful occupation he urged her to collect the photographs, documents, and memorabilia of her life, everything she wished to preserve. The materials would be safe at I Tatti. Her offspring, he suggested, had no permanent seat in England. " T h e Institute I hope to found at I Tatti may last for generations, centuries even. Sooner or later somebody among the students w h o will frequent it will take it into his head to write up the kind of life [which was] lived at I Tatti when it was a private h o m e . " She dutifully followed his advice. Mary's condition ran its usual course of alternating despair and relative euphoria. Having difficulty holding a pen, she engaged a secretary to typewrite her letters. At a particularly low m o m e n t she dictated a letter to Nicky telling her that she was dying and her doctors refused to give her medicines that might kill her. "I think of y o u , " she said, "with the [484]

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deepest love. If I die in time I hope you will marry B . B . " She added, perhaps with unintended ambiguity, " Y o u will have my deep sympathy." Nicky thanked her for her "beautiful letter" but responded that she did not think she and B . B . would ever marry. "Surely everybody would find my living near him and for him perfectly natural. So why should w e change?" Another day in a buoyant mood Mary informed Bernard that she was dictating her autobiography. Bernard, glad to learn of this distraction, urged her to let her memory "loose." " A s for me, if you speak of me at all, let it be a figure in YOUR life. Make it all as egocentric as you spontaneously feel." B y this time the retreating Germans, though always "correct," had taken over most of I Tatti, which had first been occupied by Italian officers, and Mary was carried up in a chair by four soldiers to Nicky's apartment on the top floor. Thanks to the tact and to the proficiency in German of Nicky's sister, Alda, and her husband, Egbert, and to the business connections in Berlin of their son, Cecil, the succession of Wehrmacht officers and men, numbering a few hundred, behaved correctly and did little damage. One of the latest visitors at I Tatti was Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, commander of the German armies in Italy. As the Allied forces moved closer, the relative security of the Florentine villas was increasingly threatened, Le Fontanelle far more seriously than I Tatti because it lay directly in the path of the German retreat. Interspersed now among comments in the diary on the books being enjoyed and speculations on the parallels between the distant past and the harrowing present were increasing entries concerning the situation of the refugees on the exposed hillside. " T h e terrace of this villa," Berenson wrote, "facing the heights, hills, and mountains that environ the vale of Florence southward and westward, is like the dress circle of a theater, Florence itself being the orchestra and the hills beyond the stage. From this dress circle by moonlight yesterday July 3 1 , 1944, we enjoyed—not in a physiological but in the aesthetic sense of the verb—a marvellous spectacle accompanied with appropriate music . . . the growl, the rumble, the roll of cannon that sounded antiphonal. . . . A distant mountain flamed up like Vesuvius." The days passed with more and more thunderous explosions as the Germans dynamited factories, power plants, and roads to delay the A l lied advance. Around the first of August the evacuation of the neighborhood of the Arno was ordered, for the bridges and the neighboring buildings had been mined. Only the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge for which Hitler had once expressed a preference, was to be spared. The tremendous explosions on August 3 and 4 left mountains of rubble and in them Ammanati's graceful masterpiece, the bridge of Santa Trinita, vanished [48s]

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along with the other doomed bridges. Its destruction by the Germans was the most heartbreaking architectural loss suffered by the Florentines. Among the houses along the Arno that fell in ruins was the one the Anreps occupied in the Borgo San Jacapo in which many of Berenson's paintings had been hidden. In October, when Florence was finally cleared of the Germans and the ruins penetrated, an overoptimistic report told him that all but two of the paintings had been found, though several were severely damaged. The official report of the Monuments and Fine Arts and Archives Subcommission was less reassuring: thirty-one paintings had been recovered from the dynamited building, seven had been completely destroyed, and fifteen badly damaged. Both Berenson and Nicky kept full diaries of the final month under fire. The German paratroopers posted about the villa had gun emplacements above and below the villa, and these drew increasing Allied fire. Nicky's dramatic narrative was printed as an appendix to her Forty Years with Berenson; Berenson's, more personal and philosophical, formed part of the selections from his diary published as Rumor and Reflection, covering the war years from January I, 1941, to November 12, 1944. As the fighting intensified, there were fewer opportunities to sit out on the terrace. Intense bombardments showered shrapnel and often made sleep impossible at night. Toward the end as many as ten of the residents were sometimes forced to huddle like "moles" in the darkness in a thickwalled corridor or in two small rooms cut into the hillside rock. Nicky exercised her diplomatic talents to smooth their relations with the German paratroopers who came and went on the grounds and patronized the kitchen. Berenson soon had to settle down "to short commons in the way of baths—the waterworks had been dynamited leaving the villa dependent on a single well—[and] on the light of a single candle or oil lamp." Although the villa was not a military target, it was so close to the German gun emplacements that an occasional American shell burst came its way. " A s w e were finishing luncheon yesterday," one diary entry recorded, "a missile came through the window, passed between me and my hostess, and hit the wall opposite. It was the splinter of a shell which had burst near the kitchen door." Soon the shelling came closer. It was more than Berenson's patriotism could tolerate, and he sent a request through an Italian Partisan to tell the American gunnery officer that his battery was firing on Bernard Berenson. The young officer replied, "Nuts! Who's Berenson?" That night the battery redoubled its attentions. One day in late August, after having picnicked in the relative security of the library, Nicky and Berenson decided to return there to continue [486]

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with their reading o f Shelley's Prometheus. Suddenly they heard an "ominous rattle, clatter and swish." They started up and on reaching the drawing room Berenson "saw gliding along the shut window blinds what I should have taken for hissing snakes if I had not recognized they were splinters o f shell." They dashed for shelter. The shelling o f the villa with small projectiles continued "a full half hour." With a certain literary relish Berenson described the damage. The place looked like an antique shop that "was hastily being demolished. Thick layers o f plaster over everything. . . . The furniture damaged: here a leg gone, there a desk torn asunder, a chair punched through, books lying about bitten off at the edges, while frail glass flower vases remained untouched. In the library not only the glass in the clerestory windows gone but chairs, tables, rugs, folio volumes thrown here and there as by a hurricane." In his bedroom "besides broken windows, little damage. A bit o f shrapnel went through a silk jacket, and lodged in the trousers that were folded over the same hanger." On the terrace "marble tables and balustrades were in fragments, the ground pitted with shells." After that shelling they "were all kept indoors more tightly than ever." The noise o f battle increased in fury, but it did not prevent Berenson from completing his third or fourth rereading of Shelley's Prometheus, though he again found it to be "a solemn bore." August 30 was "the worst day yet," the cannonading more terrifying than ever. " T h e house trembled, shook, and rattled." For twenty-four hours the whole group, shepherded by the Serlupis, crouched in the oval shelter carved out o f the rock. On the morning o f the thirty-first the curtain o f fire crept up the hillside as the last German paratroopers withdrew and the guns fell silent. A band o f Partisans surprised some belated stragglers on the terrace and shot one who tried to escape. Two terrifying weeks had passed since the Allied troops had entered Florence. The Germans took up prepared positions on the so-called Gothic line which crossed Italy some distance north of Florence, and they were not forced into a general retreat until the following April. A species of peace descended on Florence, punctuated by occasional German air raids. Friends trooped up on September i, 1944, to congratulate Berenson on surviving his ordeal. Professor Colacicchi o f the Accademia di Belle Arte came, also Arturo Loria, the Swiss consul and his wife, and others. Igor Markevitch brought word that Mary seemed no worse than she had been. A few Partisan fighters came by, and a Major Sampson, head of the Allied Office for Displaced Persons, called to offer assistance. Inquiries, o f course, had begun to pour in concerning Berenson's safety and whereabouts, for he had dropped out o f sight for an entire year, and there were fears that he had not survived. One anxious inquiry from his friend the [487]

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c r o w n prince o f S w e d e n had in fact reached h i m the preceding spring. O f f e r e d the use o f the diplomatic pouch, Berenson had been able to assure Prince G u s t a f that he w a s w e l l and pleasantly situated. H e had brought along " e n o u g h b o o k s o f m y o w n treating o f subjects connected w i t h m y w o r k " and " t h e days rush b y w i t h astonishing v e l o c i t y . " O n the afternoon o f September 2 M a j o r Sampson sent an armored car to take Berenson to I Tatti. O n the w a y d o w n they stopped near the U f f i z i and Berenson w a l k e d over to the Ponte V e c c h i o to v i e w the devastation. " T h e piles o f ruins," he noted, were "heaped high as in eighteenth century drawings o f the R o m a n c o m p a g n a . " A t I Tatti he f o u n d M a r y in sorry straits, n o w entirely bedridden. " S h e was suffering spasms o f acute pain, and her speech w a s c l o g g e d . " T h e stray shells and the concussion f r o m the A m e r i c a n artillery emplacements in the adjoining fields had done no damage, he optimistically thought, that " $ s , o o o w o u l d not repair." M o s t o f the w i n d o w s w e r e gone and the fattore's house w a s smashed. B u t he carried a w a y "a disastrous i m p r e s s i o n , " chiefly because o f the "squalor, filth, [and] disorder" in the immediate vicinity, " a combination o f city refuse heaps, automobile cemetery, and g y p s y c a m p . " T h e r e was n o c o o k , he learned, since there was little f o o d o n hand. T h e r e were at least t w e l v e persons to feed, he reported to his cousin Lawrence, and he listed their needs o f " h a m s , flour, cereals and other i t e m s , " t h o u g h , he added, " I m a y be crying for the m o o n . " H e returned immediately to Le Fontanelle to wait for I Tatti to be made habitable. A t Le Fontanelle one o f his first callers was the thirtyyear-old art historian Frederick Hartt, then a second lieutenant in the U n i t e d States A r m y A i r C o r p s . Hartt had already begun his difficult and dangerous j o b as head o f the Fine A r t s C o m m i s s i o n for the Fifth A r m y , surveying damaged m o n u m e n t s and recovering art w h i c h had been hidden a w a y for protection. A n art student in Florence, he had called on Berenson before the w a r and had had to endure the scornful criticism o f t w o teachers w h o m he admired, Richard O f f n e r and M e y e r Schapiro. N o w at the pitiful sight o f the frail figure w h o w a r m l y w e l c o m e d him, his lingering resentment vanished. F r o m that m o m e n t Berenson became, as he said, one o f his cherished " m o n u m e n t s . " In his official report o f the visit he w r o t e that Le Fontanelle had been "perforated w i t h at least thirty shell holes o f small calibre" and that he f o u n d Berenson in a " w e a k and s o m e w h a t shocked c o n d i t i o n . " A f e w days after his return to Le Fontanelle Berenson was delighted to receive a visit f r o m " a tall well-made, rather So era tic-faced y o u n g s t e r " w h o m he recognized as R o b e r t Berenson, the second cousin w h o had visited h i m j u s t before the w a r . A n infantry captain, Robert w a s aide-de[488]

THE

PEACE

OF

LE

FONTANELLE

camp o f General Mark Clark. Bernard recorded that his wife was the "daughter o f the most fashionable dressmaker in Paris, the Italian Schiaparelli." Cousin Robert sent a report to John Walker in Washington o f a dinner with B . B . and "his extremely rich friends." They were attended by "three flunkies all dressed up," but the elegantly served repast consisted only o f "miserable bean soup" and a main course o f creamed potatoes. He therefore planned to go up to I Tatti shortly with General Clark and bring "a 'formidable' dinner." He wrote also of driving up to I Tatti to see Mary and finding her "just about alive," somewhat incoherent, but "still as sweet and lovely-looking in her tired old age." Robert continued to keep in touch with Berenson from his business headquarters in Paris. In the "ultra-smart society o f which he was a favorite," he passed as Berenson's nephew. The "uncle" took pleasure in Robert's success in the shipping world, where he became a partner of Aristotle Onassis and rose to prominence in international finance. Their friendship suffered a slight strain at one period when Robert sought advice on how Onassis might dispose of some paintings which he held as security for a loan. It might have been even more embarrassing to Berenson had he lived to the day when Robert's daughter Marissa was displayed in Playboy magazine and inaccurately described as Berenson's grandniece. Time magazine, even more egregiously, called her his granddaughter. The excitement o f the Liberation with its stream o f well-wishers evidently proved too much for the seventy-nine-year-old Berenson. He came down with a violent dysentery, his body, he said, "turned into a drain, a sewer." When he recovered ten days later, he poured out in his diary his pent-up reflections on the postwar political settlement. The Germans should not be treated "vindictively or with short-sighted selfishness but with reason and even humanity." The Nazi leaders, however, should be punished severely and all their loot either restored or replaced by equivalents, though, recalling the disillusioning aftermath of World War I, he opposed money reparations. East Prussia ought to go to Poland, if Poznan were relinquished. As for Italy, "I hope we shall be easy with her and do nothing to offend her pride as a nation." Regional autonomies ought to be promoted and the Italians should be tactfully encouraged "to stop training their young to be rhetoricians, forensic orators . . . and rapt admirers of verbal performances." Parliamentary government should be reestablished not only in Italy but in all lands, including Spain, where free speech and a free press "have been silenced by tyrannies in panic fear." A "Danubian Confederation" and a similar confederation o f the Scandinavian countries and Finland should be estab[489]

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lished. The six-and-a-half-page entry concluded with a dream he had had "again and again" since his "earliest maturity," the dream that language groups should cease being identified with states. " I f that depoliticizing of nationalities could be achieved, we could encourage each language group to cherish its own individuality . . . thus enriching the rest of us." Berenson returned to I Tatti on September 23, 1944, like a traveler who had been away on a strangely accidented voyage where perforce he had been free of the burdens and responsibilities of home. He had tried to "pierce the f o g " that had isolated him, he told Lawrence, but "it was made impenetrable by censorship all round." N o w the complex machinery of existence of which he was the prime motor began to turn again. At the sight of the broken garden walls and the scorched and trampled fields he "sank into a pool of despair" but revived when the "dear Anreps" and the servants led him into the house, where everything had been restored "in a most magical fashion." Bookshelves were filled again and objects of art reassembled in their familiar places. That night he sank gratefully into his own bed, his head and shoulders comfortably supported by familiar pillows. On the morrow he would wake to a whole new set of responsibilities.

[490]

28. Edith Wharton, ig25

2g. Edith Wharton's estate at Hyeres

30. Clotilde Marghieri

. Giorgione, T h e Adoration of the Shepherds (Allendale Nativity,)

32. Berenson, 1948

JJ. Nicky,

Berenson,

Carlo Placci, and Walter

34. Berenson and John

Walker,

1945

Lippmann

35. Berenson and Katherine

Dunham

3d. Berenson and Harry Truman, 1956

37- Berenson at Venice exhibition,

1953

39. Facade of I Tatti today

X L V II

Tatriarch

of

T

Tlorence

H E Tuscan Committee of National Liberation had organized " a clandestine local government" to take over the administration as soon as the Germans were driven out, and normal existence slowly returned to the stricken city during the late autumn and winter of 1945. For Berenson his accustomed walks on the woodland paths near I Tatti had to be deferred until the German mines could be removed. There were shortages of food and fuel for a time, and Berenson lamented that they had been "ever so much better o f f " in hiding—except for the month under fire—than since the "liberation." Fortunately conditions steadily improved. A small car feebly running on methane gas could be used to bring up provisions, and parcels of food sent by friends in America helped enliven the diet. B y the end of winter electric power was restored and the evil-smelling oil lamps could be discarded. Mary's health showed no improvement and she was confined entirely to her room. Ben Nicholson, who had come up in his British uniform and listened to her "small frail voice," reported that "she looked more ill than I had ever remembered her," although her conversation was "as sparkling and sharp as ever." In December a correspondent of the New York Times, Herbert L. Matthews, interviewed Berenson about the salvage work to be done in Florence. In the course of their conversation Berenson deflated a story which had been circulating that four Partisans died trying to save the Santa Trinita bridge. Matthews' report also included an account of Frederick Hartt's "thrilling task of supervising" the rescue of art works and the repair of German vandalism. H o w dangerous that task was close to the battle lines Hartt was to tell in the moving narrative Florentine Art under Fire (1949). One can imagine with what anguished interest Beren-

[491]

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son queried young Hartt each time he returned from a devastated village in Tuscany. While working in Florence Hartt took refuge at I Tatti every Monday for much-needed rest. He recalled being impressed by the servants' devotion to Berenson and by the fact that Berenson could be an amiable listener in a conversation. The art critic's youthful energy and keen intelligence impressed the older man. "Such a meritorious creature," Berenson exclaimed of him in the following year to Margaret Barr. He did "il grosso del lavoro in saving buildings and works of art in Central Italy as well as bringing back those the Nazis carried o f f . " Settled once again in his familiar study, surrounded by his books and works of art and with the exquisite Madonna and Child of Domenico Veneziano back in its place above the mantel, Berenson eagerly took up the accumulated manuscripts written during the war years of enforced retirement. Once again the magnum opus, "Decline and Recovery," was set aside. He hoped to publish first a volume of selections from his wartime diary that he would call Rumor and Reflection. In the epilogue to it written in September of 1945 he declared he was glad he had withstood persuasion and pressure to return to the United States. B y remaining in Italy during the war, he had come to learn the deeper nature of the Italian people. Nowhere else had he "encountered like generosity and selfsacrifice. . . . Despite alarms and excursions, nobody in any situation gave me a w a y . " Gratefully, as though in an author's acknowledgments, he listed the persons who had helped him—the Serlupis, Gerhard Wolff, Virgil Benzi (the assistant chief of police), the late Friedrich Kriegbaum, Ludwig Heydenreich, the family of ex-prime minister Orlando, Countess Marina Volpi, Count Vittorio Cini, Count Alfonso Gaetani (former prefect of Florence), Carlo Steinhaiislin, Achille Malavasi (chief of the press bureau), the art superintendent Giovanni Poggi, and Giannino Marchig, who had supervised the packing and transport of his treasures. And finally he told of his great debt to the Anreps, to his agent Geremia Gioffreddi, and to the servants and the peasants on I Tatti farms. All had vindicated his decision to remain in Italy. Given the imposing array of protectors, it was little wonder that there were cynics in the American State Department who thought he had led a suspiciously charmed life. During the winter Mary "gradually faded a w a y , " as Bernard told Trevy, and as the spring sun began to rise "the end was peaceful." She died on March 23, 1945, at the age of eighty-one. In his diary two days later he reminisced: " I recall the zest and urge my Mary—dead not yet three times twenty-four hours—and I had in discovering pictures in village churches all over Italy . . . and our childlike j o y in attributing [492]

PATRIARCH

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FLORENCE

them to their painters. She and I were pioneers, and our attributions have become part of art-historical pooled capital. . . . We are among the very few 'who fished the murex up.' " Mary had wished to be cremated, but Nicky talked her out of it "on a favorable day" a few weeks before her death, arguing that "the feelings of these humble people around you, the respect for what is sacred to them, are more important than your personal whims." Though the freethinking Mary acquiesced in the compassionate hypocrisy, her longstanding wish had hardly been a whim. " A l l right," she had replied, " I leave it to you. Y o u can dispose of my body in the way you consider the right one, but perhaps later on, at night time, you could dig out my bones and burn them." The Catholic ritual took place, and Mary's body was temporarily buried up at Settignano. A year later a memorial mass took place in the church of San Martino a Mensola, and Berenson took a certain pleasure in it. " T h e older I get," he afterward wrote, "the more easily do I succumb, do I melt to Catholic ritual." Mary's coffin would later be placed beside Bernard's in the chapel at I Tatti, after he too had surrendered the " w h i m " he had expressed so many years before in his letter to the American consul. The psychic burden of Mary's prolonged illness, with its daily sickroom visiting, was now gone. The staff of nurses had departed, carrying with them the depressing aura of mortality. Suddenly he was freed from a whole world of anxiety and from a routine of worried submission to Mary's vagaries. But he would never succeed in freeing his memory of the conviction that except for their first years together, Mary had "thought first of her offspring, then of her lover, and then if then" of him. Berenson's relation to Nicky was regularized after a fashion by Mary's death. He was determined that Nicky should now be received "as if she were my w i f e . " As he soon afterward explained to Paul Sachs, " I f i t were not going to complicate matters with regard to Harvard and if it were not ridiculous for a man of 81 plus 5 months to marry or if she preferred it I should make her my w i f e . " With the opening of this new epoch in his life, Nicky brought a fresh energy in support of his ambitious program of publication. Where Mary had so often firmly pointed out his literary shortcomings, Nicky, much more the diplomat, exerted her influence with patient and self-effacing good humor. He reported to Margaret Barr that she "types my manuscripts, discusses my prose, she keeps house, plans affairs and charities, smooths down malcontents, receives troops of callers, arranges all social matters, walks with me, etc., etc., etc. At times she looks worried and bedraggled . . . all is dedicated to my all absorbingness." When he asked her how she would occupy herself [493]

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BERENSON

· THE MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

w h e n he w a s g o n e , she a n s w e r e d quite simply that she w o u l d write about him. Frail as he w a s and o f t e n complaining o f fatigue and aches and pains, he w a s n o w s w e p t b y a w a v e o f ambition. T h e o v e r t h r o w of the Fascist r e g i m e in Florence freed h i m f r o m the t w e n t y - y e a r o p p r o b r i u m w h i c h he had borne as an anti-Fascist, and he w a s accepted as one o f the most distinguished o f Florentines. It w a s as if he had been reborn and given a fresh identity. H e had scarcely settled d o w n again at I Tatti w h e n he w a s made president o f a special c o m m i s s i o n f o r the restoration o f artistic buildings and m o n u m e n t s d a m a g e d in the w a r . His opinions w e r e sought after as an elder statesman o f Florence, and he made his debut in that role in A p r i l 1945, contributing to the first issue o f the n e w l y f o u n d e d r e v i e w II Ponte an article titled " C o m e ricostruire la Firenze d e m o l i t a ? " in w h i c h he u r g e d restoring the d y n a m i t e d river-bank structures to their f o r m e r historic appearance to maintain the architectural h a r m o n y o f Florence. Modernization could be internal as in ancient buildings elsewhere. T h e rebuilding o f the Santa Trinita exactly as it had been b e f o r e its destruction, w i t h its subtle curves and i v o r y l i k e patina, should be the k e y to that restoration. W h e n the French consul C o u n t R e y n a l d de S i m o n y suggested that it m i g h t be a g o o d idea, the w a r in E u r o p e having ended on M a y 8 and peace h a v i n g j u s t been established between Italy and France, to sponsor an exhibition o f French art o w n e d in Florence, B e r e n s o n seized u p o n the idea w i t h alacrity and agreed to w r i t e the preface to the catalogue. T o the consul fell the j o b o f r o u n d i n g up the paintings and compiling the catalogue f o r the exhibition, scheduled to open at the Pitti Palace on J u n e 2 7 , 1945. N i c k y sat up nights revising p r o o f s in English, French, and Italian o f not only the preface but the text o f the catalogue as well. T h o u g h the preface o f m o r e than f i v e thousand w o r d s had to be c o m pleted in nine d a y s — t o a l l o w time f o r the translations—Berenson w r o t e w i t h zestful and perceptive discrimination o f the w o r k s o f m a n y o f the 1 2 0 artists represented in the exhibition, his urbane c o m m e n t a r y displaying an i m p r e s s i v e familiarity w i t h the w o r k s o f artists f r o m the French Primitives to M o d i g l i a n i . Writing w i t h " a n e y e " to the Italian public w h o " w e r e m o r e touchy than a femme enceinte," he tactfully began b y saying that Italian art exercised such a dominating attraction in Italy that one easily f o r g o t that there existed other schools o f art. Italian art had, he declared, influenced French painters f r o m the beginning o f the fourteenth century, and traces o f that influence could be detected in pictures in the exhibition. In C e z a n n e and R e n o i r , f o r e x a m p l e , there were, if not actual recollections o f , certainly parallels to the early Italian centuries, and W a t teau s h o w e d debts to V e r o n e s e , Titian, and Rubens. [494]

PATRIARCH

OF

FLORENCE

His lively survey of the centuries concluded with a warning against n e w heresies. Had the " i s m s " of the past sixty years, he queried— "impressionism, pointillism, ism after i s m " — i n any permanent w a y refreshed, embellished life or proposed ends that might lead to lifeenhancing art? Cezanne, Renoir, and their fellows had brought art up to the wall on which was written, " T h e y shall not pass." T h e y had captured tone, light, ephemeral tints which already had begun to fade. T h e pilgrimage o f art into the future w o u l d demand patience and humility. Berenson had obviously enjoyed returning to his metier after the year's confinement at Le Fontanelle, looking at pictures again with a practiced eye and seeing them in all their subtle relationships. A n d at the opening of the exhibition people crowded about him as at a personal reception and showered him with congratulations, perhaps as much for h a v ing survived the G e r m a n occupation as for helping to launch the exhibition. H e had emerged f r o m the w a r years with a keen hunger to resume his place in the w o r l d at the center o f his w e b of associations. As one of his correspondents remarked, " Y o u r appetite for people is wonderful. I admire it without quite understanding i t . " Berenson tried to explain that appetite to himself. " I often wonder at m y being so ready to make new acquaintances, and h o w eager I am for new friends, new loves. Mere animal need for novelty plays a great part of course. Y e t there may be something else, the possibility that a new friend, a new love m a y reveal a new facet, a new side, a new angle of ourselves to ourselves." T h e summer of 1945 brought a variety of interesting visitors, some in time for Berenson's eightieth birthday on J u n e 26. M a n y were connected in one w a y or another with the military, and the end of the w a r in Europe lent an almost festive air to their visits. Berenson was particularly delighted to meet the poet Peter Viereck, w h o was a sergeant in the psychological warfare branch of the Fifth A r m y . Viereck was happy to escape " a r m y togetherness" in the quiet-gardens at I Tatti, where he could w o r k on his first book o f poems, Terror and Decorum. A f t e r surviving many rejections, the v o l u m e w o n the Pulitzer Prize in 1949. Berenson had been much impressed by Viereck's Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, which M a r i o Praz had lent him, and he liked his poetry and encouraged him to publish. Another satisfying visitor was Alan Moorehead, an Australian w a r correspondent of the Daily Express whose dispatches f r o m the Far East, the Mediterranean, and northwest Europe had been widely acclaimed. Berenson already k n e w his books Mediterranean Front and End in Africa. Moorehead, " k n o w i n g n o t h i n g , " as he said o f himself, " o f painting or architecture, or indeed o f half the subjects which were discussed so easily and in so many different languages in that elaborate and platonic h o u s e , " [495]

BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

nevertheless hit it off agreeably with his host f r o m the start. After the rugged hardships of the battle areas, he found it peculiarly refreshing the m o r n i n g after his arrival to be awakened by the butler, who, with " t h e r m o m e t e r in h a n d , " had c o m e to run his m o r n i n g bath. T h e breakfast tray arrived " w i t h its little posy of flowers and copies of II Corriere della Sera, the Züricher Zeitung and the London Times, only t w o days o l d . " Before tea time he had his "initiatory w a l k " through the gardens, " B e r enson chatting all the w a y and the guests trailing behind him as polite, as self-conscious and as gracious as the figures in a Japanese p r i n t . " Soon afterward Moorehead settled at San D o m e n i c o di Fiesole with his wife, and during the few years they remained in the vicinity he was a frequent I Tatti visitor. H e found Berenson always immaculately dressed, the customary flower in his lapel, carefully parceling out his energy according to a precise daily schedule with its o w n unvarying canonical hours of luncheon at one, tea at five-thirty, dinner at eight. But if there was monastic precision, the monastery conformed to the character of Rabelais' secular abbey of Theleme, devoted as it was to the " c o n viviality of friendship and good living." Instead of prayers at matins and lauds, Berenson holed up in his study with his books, his letters, and his diary. If the w o r l d outside was an untidy chaos, irrational and unpredictable, he could at least impose rational order and artistic s y m m e t r y upon his daily life. Berenson and Moorehead did not always agree on political questions. Early in their relation Berenson remarked, " S o you believe that the mass of the people can be educated. Universal suffrage is rubbish. W h y then not give domestic animals the vote?" His " E d w a r d i a n quaintness" was hardly to be disputed; yet the sympathetic currents that ran between the older and the younger man, the "instinctive liking," the shared intellectual tastes, the inexhaustible riches of Berenson's m e m o r y w o n the y o u n g m a n to him. " H e gave m e all he c o u l d , " Moorehead wrote, "and as a result he became the foster father I so badly needed." W o r d of Berenson's remarkable survival as an American and as a J e w in enemy territory had quickly spread a m o n g the troops as they advanced to the Gothic line, and he was soon writing of "the uniformed youngsters w h o come to inspect m e as a m o n u m e n t . " Once, w h e n he learned that one of the military pilgrims had no interest in art, he queried, " W h y then did you come to see me?" T h e y o u n g m a n replied, " O h , I j u s t t h o u g h t you were a sight to see." Curiosity about Berenson had spread not only a m o n g Americans but a m o n g the British Eighth A r m y on the Americans' eastern flank. Eric Linklater, a British writer at General Alexander's headquarters, one day heard some of the officers w o n d e r i n g w h o and what was the "eighty or ninety-year-old" Berenson [496]

PATRIARCH

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o f w h o m they w e r e hearing. His w i d e s p r e a d f a m e suggested to Linklater " t h a t M r . B e r e n s o n w a s s o m e t h i n g m o r e than a critic: that he w a s a creator, f o r he had created a l e g e n d . " Linklater determined to see f o r himself the subject o f the " l e g e n d . " H e had pictured h i m " a s a tall and aged leonine m a n , " and w h e n o p p o r t u nity came after the liberation o f Venice, he w a s surprised to encounter " a little tiny man, m o r e the genial f o x than roaring lion, spruce and g r e y , so formally and neatly dressed that he looked like a miniature banker in Wall S t r e e t . " B e r e n s o n greeted h i m w i t h the w a r n i n g , " I refuse to be h e r o i s e d . " T h e truth w a s , he said, " t h a t I spent one o f the pleasantest years o f m y life in c o n c e a l m e n t . " W h e n he told o f the reading he had done in his year o f hiding, Linklater asked, " A n d y o u w e r e able to read H o m e r and G o e t h e w i t h G e r m a n s all a r o u n d ? " " W h a t else w a s there to d o ? " B e r e n s o n replied. Impressed b y the great library, Linklater praised the " c o l l e c t i o n . " B e r e n s o n interposed, " N o , no. Y o u mustn't say that! I have n e v e r collected b o o k s . . . . T h i s is a w o r k i n g l i b r a r y . " A s f o r his passion f o r reading, " A t m y age b o o k s trouble a m a n — a m a n like m e — as w o m e n do w h e n y o u are t w e n t y . " B u t w h a t m o s t troubled him, he admitted, w a s the s w i f t flight o f time, and he told Linklater the fantasy that n o w often came to h i m , the w i s h that he could stand on a street corner in Florence like a b e g g a r and hold out his hat f o r gifts o f t i m e — and to suit the action to the w o r d s , he held out his hat. J o h n Walker had c o m e o v e r to E u r o p e f r o m Washington in a semiofficial capacity and B e r e n s o n had a h e a r t - w a r m i n g reunion w i t h him. A s chief curator at the N a t i o n a l G a l l e r y o f A r t , Walker w a s in a position to a n s w e r his m e n t o r ' s passionately eager questions about the state o f the A m e r i c a n art w o r l d . What important acquisitions had c o m e to the m u s e u m s during the years o f B e r e n s o n ' s isolation? What w e r e the n e w b o o k s ? W h o w e r e the n e w lights in art? Five years o f ignorance had to be m a d e up. W a l k e r and D a v i d Finley, director o f the gallery, had had a hand in the f o r m a t i o n o f the A l l i e d arts c o m m i s s i o n f o r the liberated and the conquered countries, and Walker had written inviting B e r e n s o n ' s counsel. B e r e n s o n suggested " e x t r e m e caution in depriving nations o f their art t r e a s u r e s . " Restitution should o f course be insisted on, but in u r g i n g an equivalent f o r a destroyed painting, he w o u l d not require " a Botticelli f o r a Botticelli but a G e r m a n or D u t c h picture o f the same (if possible) spiritual v a l u e . " With the reestablishment o f postal service in 1945, letters began to pour in, especially f r o m A m e r i c a n friends, ending the silence o f nearly f i v e years. His letters, stubbornly hand-written and decreasingly legible, issued in a steady stream during the m o r n i n g hours he reserved f o r them as he reclined in bed. O n e link after another w a s cordially reestablished. [497]

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A letter to Belle Greene, n o w a w o m a n o f s i x t y - t w o , " d e e p l y m o v e d " her to reminisce, " W e k n e w a grand time and lived a grand l i f e . " J u d g e Learned H a n d admired the " s t o i c s t r e a k " that enabled h i m to carry on during his "incredible experiences under N a z i d o m i n a t i o n . " H e sent a lengthy account o f the A m e r i c a n participation in the w a r on the h o m e front. B r u n o Walter w r o t e that at nearly seventy it w a s too late to transplant himself " a n o t h e r t i m e , " m u c h as he had once w i s h e d to settle near Florence after the w a r . A m e r i c a , w h e r e " i t is g o o d to l i v e , " had received h i m w i t h " o p e n h e a r t . " H e sent affectionate greetings f r o m f e l l o w C a l i f o r n i a n s Franz and A l m a Werfel. Within a f e w months W e r fel, w h o s e Song of Bernadette and Jacobowsky and the Colonel had made h i m f a m o u s , died after a lingering illness. Closest to B e r e n s o n ' s heart w e r e the developments at the F o g g M u s e u m and the negotiations w h i c h had been resumed w i t h H a r v a r d concerning the future o f I Tatti. Still disturbed " b y the w a y art studies w e r e g o i n g at h o m e " and assuming that the n e w head o f the F o g g w o u l d eventually " d i r e c t and c o n t r o l " the I Tatti Institute, he hoped, he told Paul Sachs, that the person chosen w o u l d have a G r e c o - R o m a n R e n a i s s a n c e - F r a n c o - G e r m a n - E n g l i s h training and " z u m Schauen geboren [be born to s e e ] , " and that he w o u l d be " g e n e r o u s l y interested in present as well as p a s t . " In J u l y B e r e n s o n w e n t to Siena f o r f o u r days. It w a s his first outing in f o u r years, and he " w a l k e d about in e c s t a s y " in the sun-drenched C a m p o dominated b y the b r o w n i s h - r e d shaft o f the T o r r e del M a n g i a . A t last he fully tasted f r e e d o m . With the surrender o f j a p a n on A u g u s t 1 5 , 1945, the e x o d u s o f A l l i e d troops f r o m Florence became a general retreat and life resumed its civilian character, t h o u g h shortages o f necessities persisted. F o r the first time since the early days o f the w a r B e r e n s o n w a s able to spend the end o f the s u m m e r up at Casa al D o n o , w h e r e he could recapture, as he said, the peaceful and m o n o t o n o u s isolation he had experienced during the first months at L e Fontanelle. H e and N i c k y took up w i t h them f o r revision the manuscripts o f three b o o k s — t h e autobiographical m u s i n g s that w o u l d b e c o m e Sketch for a Self-Portrait, the draft o f Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, and the manuscript o f Rumor and Reflection. His cousin L a w r e n c e c a m e to C a s a al D o n o in September to prepare a n e w w i l l c o v e r i n g his Italian property. T h e main provision, as before, w a s the bequest o f I Tatti f o r an institution to be k n o w n as " T h e H a r v a r d Institute f o r the S t u d y o f Italian A r t and C u l t u r e . " T h e w i l l incorporated m u c h o f the language o f the proposal drafted in 1939, including the statement that it w a s B e r e n s o n ' s " p r i m a r y p u r p o s e " to further "research and education in Italian art and in the Mediterranean w o r l d . " It recorded [498]

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Berenson's hope that Elizabeth Mariano would be retained as librarian and her sister, Baronessa Alda, as assistant librarian. Elisabeth Mariano was named as one of two executors, the other to be chosen from among John Walker, Paul Sachs, Lawrence Berenson, Philip Hofer, and Ralph Barton Perry. Among other provisions were a number of encumbering personal bequests. This will was to stand until in his eighty-ninth year Berenson substantially modified these bequests. During his visit Lawrence, a committed Zionist, insisted on seeing Bernard's "Letter to the American J e w s , " about which Bernard had written him. He was "peremptory in his advice not to publish it." U n willing to give up the project, Bernard turned over the manuscript to him for correction. Lawrence found much to question in the emotional homily, being far more keenly aware of the sensitivity of American J e w s to such patronizing advice at a time when the appalling extent of the Holocaust was being revealed. He perceived too that Bernard had insensibly absorbed during his long life among European Gentiles many of the stereotypes of the anti-Semites. He deferentially noted lapses and inconsistencies in the "Letter." " I do not believe," he wrote, "that you have lost your Jewish belief in an intellectual aristocracy and the hereditary yearning for learning. Here you are not an assimilationist. . . . Y o u accept the best in Jewish thought and the beauty of Christianity. . . . Most of the Zionists are almost aggressively emancipated, I fancy, from traditional Jewish rites and beliefs. Their ideal seems to be a totalitarian nationalism utterly different from the regime of the ghetto." Though Lawrence tactfully agreed with the cautionary drift of the essay, in the end his veto prevailed. Lawrence's advocacy did leave its mark, and not long afterward Bernard wrote in his diary, " I am a convert not to Zionism but to the necessity of finding a place for the J e w , not only safe from the heritage of Hitler but from his own gnawing frustration and inferiority complex." The Zionist question, however, was not easily dismissed from mind. With the founding of the State of Israel three years later in 1948, he accepted the fate of "Hitler J e w " thrust upon him, and though a "graduate" of both Judaism and Christianity, he approved of the new nation and even hoped that one day it might rule an empire from the Nile to the Euphrates. Another guest at Casa al Dono that summer was Luisa Vertova, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Giacomo Vertova, the Italian philosopher and educator. She had studied art history at the University of Florence, but when the museums were emptied at the outbreak of the war she turned to Greek drama and was graduated in 1942. She first became acquainted with Berenson in 1943 while he was "sequestrated" at I Tatti. A victim of wartime privation, she found refuge after the Liberation in [499]

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the B e r e n s o n h o u s e h o l d , w h e r e she regained her health. For a short t i m e thereafter she w o r k e d as a secretary for the editor o f a Florence n e w s p a per f o u n d e d b y the A l l i e d M i l i t a r y G o v e r n m e n t . T h e n , returning to her art studies as a " p u p i l " o f Berenson, she s o o n b e c a m e one o f his m o s t valuable research assistants and translators. A t Casa al D o n o the w a l k s t h r o u g h the fragrant pine w o o d s h i g h a b o v e the valley o f the A r n o reasserted their captivating charm, so that B e r e n s o n p r o l o n g e d his stay to late September w h e n a N o v e m b e r chill w a s already in the air. N o t yet prepared to settle d o w n for the winter at I Tatti, he seized the chance to travel to V e n i c e p r o v i d e d b y the exhibition " F i v e C e n t u r i e s o f V e n e t i a n P a i n t i n g . " For safekeeping during the w a r , m a n y o f the paintings in the exhibition had been b r o u g h t to V e n i c e f r o m the churches and m u s e u m s o f V i c e n z a , R o v i g o , Padua, and T r e v i s o , and all could n o w be seen in o n e place for the first and doubtless the last time. B e r e n s o n w e n t f o r f i v e days and stayed for fifteen, o v e r w h e l m e d b y the " c o l o r , the light, the reflections and reflections o f reflections b e t w e e n sea and s k y , palaces and c a n a l s . " A f t e r l o n g absence the sunshine,

the

sounds, the edibles and wearables displayed, the " j e ne sais q u o i " o f the place w e n t to his head " a n d fifty years d r o p p e d a w a y . " M o r e perhaps than any other city V e n i c e e p i t o m i z e d for h i m the aesthetic riches o f Italy. A s he a g e d he could n o t get his fill o f the dream city. H e w a s to return to it season after season e v e n into his enfeebled ninety-second year. O n e satisfying chore awaited h i m o n his return f r o m V e n i c e , the reissuing o f his small b o o k o n Sassetta. A c h i l l e M a l a v a s i w a s translating it into Italian for publication in Florence. A l t h o u g h it w a s still regarded as the best short account o f Sassetta, the n e w edition needed to consider the w o r k that had been d o n e o n the artist since B e r e n s o n ' s pioneer study w a s first published in the Burlington Magazine in 1903. Besides the i n e v i table revisions o f attributions, the liberally illustrated v o l u m e included paintings w h i c h had c o m e to light since 1903, paintings such as the authentic masterpiece in the D e t r o i t m u s e u m — t h e Way to Calvary. A g r e e a b l y e m p l o y e d in his w r i t i n g tasks, in catching u p w i t h the w e l c o m e m o u n d s o f correspondence, and in r e s u m i n g the social e x i s tence w h i c h for h i m w a s the main theater o f life, B e r e n s o n felt free for a time o f sordid concerns. B u t m u c h as he had detested i n v o l v e m e n t in the art trade, the t i m e w a s a p p r o a c h i n g w h e n he w o u l d again be o b l i g e d to play a part in it. T h e r e h u n g o v e r h i m the necessity o f a u g m e n t i n g the capital f o r the e n d o w m e n t o f his Institute. His A m e r i c a n investments, t h o u g h they had flourished during the w a r years and w e r e n o w a p p r o x imating o n e million dollars, w e r e o b v i o u s l y inadequate in the face o f p o s t w a r inflation t o carry o u t all the obligations o f his will. H e appears to [500]

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h a v e shared his anxieties w i t h his old friend G e o r g e s Wildenstein, w h o had successfully established his art gallery in N e w Y o r k in 1 9 4 2 and had there continued his publication o f the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The firm w a s prospering greatly after the w a r and b e c o m i n g a dominant international institution. B y the end o f 1 9 4 5 s o m e sort o f arrangement w a s w o r k e d out between the t w o old colleagues f o r B e r e n s o n to serve as the f i r m ' s expert on Italian Renaissance paintings. H e w a s to be paid w h e t h e r m a n y or f e w pictures w e r e sold. T h e flood o f photographs seems to have begun fairly soon, as the fortunes m a d e in the w a r could n o w be spent on the collection o f objects o f art and i m p o v e r i s h e d E u r o p e a n s could once again, as after W o r l d W a r I, recoup s o m e o f their losses b y selling their artistic treasures. B e r e n s o n ' s usual practice w a s to j o t d o w n his opinion on the backs o f the p h o t o g r a p h s sent b y Wildenstein. O n occasion he dictated his attributions to N i c k y . T h e great burst o f activity on the resumption o f his association in 1946 is reflected in the substantial fees paid to h i m in that year, a s u m a m o u n t i n g to $ 7 2 , 5 0 0 . T h e arrangement w a s formalized in 1947; he w o u l d be paid a regular retainer o f $50,000 a year in quarterly installments, a retainer that continued to be paid into B e r e n s o n ' s ninetyfifth—and last—year. His relations w i t h Wildenstein w e r e o f a quite different order f r o m those he had had w i t h L o r d D u v e e n . Wildenstein w a s a f e l l o w scholar w h o s e interest in art far transcended his vocation as a dealer. His son Daniel, w h o w a s to succeed h i m as director o f the f i r m , recalls that once w h e n his father and B e r e n s o n w e r e together, they lost themselves in a discussion on art instead o f talking about the business matter that had b r o u g h t them together. " G e o r g e s is the last dealer in this w o r l d , " B e r e n son r e m a r k e d to Daniel one time; " a f t e r h i m there w i l l only be picturebrokers." Secrecy being a virtue prized in the art trade, the f i r m ' s letters to B e r e n s o n w e r e recalled after his death and hence the exact extent o f B e r e n s o n ' s services remains " c o n f i d e n t i a l . " T h a t it w a s v e r y considerable and valuable to the f i r m can be seen f r o m the materials available in the I Tatti A r c h i v e . T h e incomplete records indicate, f o r e x a m p l e , that B e r e n s o n w a s asked to identify nearly 70 paintings in 1 9 5 1 , about n o in 1 9 5 2 , s o m e 55 in 1 9 5 3 , about 90 in 1954, about 1 2 5 in 1 9 5 5 , a p p r o x i mately 90 in 1 9 5 6 , 65 in 1 9 5 7 , about 25 in 1 9 5 8 , and 1 1 in the first half o f 1959, the year o f B e r e n s o n ' s death. In fact, as late as J u l y 1 2 o f t h a t year, able to w r i t e o n l y w i t h the u t m o s t difficulty, he instructed N i c k y to put d o w n o n the back o f a p h o t o g r a p h o f a Madonna and Child with St. John, " P o s s i b l y autograph but too t h o r o u g h l y repainted to say f o r certain." His laconic notations often s i m p l y c o n f i r m an attribution; dismiss a p i c [501]

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ture as " F a k e , " "Perhaps a Fake," or "Forgery"; correct an attribution— "Bernardo Daddi—More likely Allegretto Nuzi"; or add a qualification—"With—but not—Perugino," "Close to but not Perugino himself," "So-called Bellini probably forgery." O f an alleged Pontormo, he ventured, "Probably a Flemish painter who worked in Florence around 1 5 5 6 . " Occasionally a longer commentary was needed, as in the case of a reputed Lo Spagna: "School of Perugino. Composition derived from Raphael's Sposalizio. Close to Lo Spagna but scarcely an autograph." In one telegram he cautioned, " N o t good enough for Francesco, probably Giacomo Francia." It appears that Berenson supplied an opinion to the firm on approximately seven hundred paintings and earned $700,000 in thirteen and a half years, to the considerable enhancement of the endowment for I Tatti. Berenson also developed a closer relation with Count Contini Bonacossi after the war, having come to his defense when he was charged with collaboration with one of Goering's agents who had requisitioned paintings in Italy. Contini supplied about 550 Italian paintings to Samuel Kress and the Kress Foundation before and after World War II. Kress, who very much appreciated Berenson's defense of Contini "during the long period of strain," encouraged the two to work together on his acquisitions. Contini persuaded Berenson after the war to make a considerable number of attributions for paintings that were sold to Kress and presumably paid him for his services. Although the vicissitudes of the war years had dimmed Berenson's interest in connoisseurship, the old compulsion returned and he wrote, "When I am put before paintings to attribute I am like the war-horse who smells powder and hears the trumpet call."

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X LV III

At Home in the House of Life

T

H E new and liberal arrangement with Georges Wildenstein helped somewhat to relieve Berenson's anxieties about the financial future, and he resumed with obvious relish his literary activities. More than ever before he felt his true vocation was that of a writer. From time to time he punctuated his letters and his diary with severe injunctions to himself. He was "heavy with things to say," or he had "a dreadful urge to write." He dreamt of a book "that would justify my having lived." N o image was too violent for his desire. He felt it a physical compulsion to "print what is in me to excrete and never discuss the feces." In another figure he said, "I am like an habitual drunkard, I cannot leave off and still try to write." Impatient of fame, he hoped even at eighty-five to do two more books; "then I should get rid of part of the feeling that I have lived to no purpose." He must write and publish because he owed the world "more than I can conceivably repay." The stimulus was more than internal. Rehabilitated as a patriotic antiFascist, he found his writings in demand by Italians. He opened his campaign with the publication of his portrait sketch of Carlo Placci in the 1946 May and June issues of II Mondo. The translation was by Arturo Loria, the talented essayist and journalist who had become devoted to him. The English version appeared in June in Cyril Connolly's Horizon. In Florence the sketch produced something of a scandal among Placci's friends, and three of them, " w o m e n and fellow citizens," published a protest in II Mondo against the "almost libellous" portrait. Berenson defended his candor in a later issue. He suggested that instead of condemning him, the protesters should publish their own view of Placci. T o Billie Ivins he had reported early in the year that he was returning to his "swan-croak" on questions of "Aesthetics-Ethics-and-History" which he had written at the beginning of the war. It was, he said, "the [503]

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Gospels according to St. B e r n a r d . " O n rereading it he w a s pleased that " i t reads s m o o t h l y and the contents are w o r t h r e a d i n g . " T h i s t o o c o m f o r t i n g appraisal yielded to second thoughts as he w e n t f r o m one "last r e v i s e " to another. N i c k y , he said, w a s " i n despair" o v e r it, " f i n d i n g it so h a p h a z a r d " and " l a c k i n g in serrated l o g i c . " Nevertheless, b y the end o f the year M a r i o Praz had b e g u n to translate Aesthetics and History into Italian. A t the same time G u g l i e l m o degli Alberti w a s p r e paring the Italian version o f Rumor and Reflection, and a R o m a n publisher even talked o f b r i n g i n g out t w o or three v o l u m e s o f B e r e n s o n ' s early essays. " I n s h o r t , " B e r e n s o n w r o t e to M a r g a r e t B a r r , " I am being discovered h e r e . " A l r e a d y D e l T u r c o o f Florence had under w a y an Italian translation b y R a f f a e l l o Franchi o f his 1926 Three Essays in Method, the v o l u m e to include also t w o other early essays. Publication f o l l o w e d in 1947. Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts made its debut in 1948, the original version published b y Pantheon in N e w Y o r k and Praz's Italian translation b y Electa in M i l a n . B e r e n s o n h o p e d that it w o u l d s e r v e — i f life permitted—as a preface to his long-meditated volumes on decline and r e c o v e r y in the visual arts. In the introduction to Aesthetics and History Berenson acknowledged that his pages w e r e "anything but systematic and scientific." T h e y were " a pellmell o f stray thoughts, desultory thinking aloud, generalizations, r e m iniscences, c o n f e s s i o n s , " but they had one thing to r e c o m m e n d them: " T h e y exhibit the cross section . . . o f a m i n d that f o r a half century and m o r e has been dwelling u p o n art p r o b l e m s o f m a n y kinds, not o n l y historical but aesthetical." T h o u g h B e r e n s o n ' s passion f o r sermonizing about the proper w a y to study art did frequently lead h i m d o w n distracting bypaths, the essay is far f r o m being a " p e l l - m e l l o f stray t h o u g h t s . " A principal theme is that, contrary to current heresies, there are artistic standards o f value; there is " a relative absolute in art w h i c h is determined b y our p s y c h o p h y s i o l o g i c a l condition and mental m a k e - u p . " H e had enunciated the standards f o r the visual arts in his f o u r small v o l u m e s on the Italian painters o f the Renaissance in w h i c h he had theorized that great art, w o r k i n g t h r o u g h "ideated sensations," produces " a direct e f fect of l i f e - e n h a n c e m e n t " and that in " f i g u r e painting . . . the principal if not the sole sources o f life-enhancement are Tactile Values, M o v e m e n t and Space C o m p o s i t i o n , " that is to say, "ideated sensations o f contact, o f texture, o f w e i g h t , o f support, o f e n e r g y , and o f union w i t h one's surr o u n d i n g s . " In Aesthetics and History he restated the theory in almost the same terms. H e added the requirement o f "spiritual s i g n i f i c a n c e , " w h i c h he defined as a variant o f the element in a painting perceived through w h a t he had c o m e to call " a sense o f q u a l i t y . " H e explained that "ideated sensations . . . are those that exist only in the imagination, are produced [504]

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b y the capacity o f the object to m a k e us realize its entity and live its life. . . . W h a t the artist has to d o is to oblige the spectator to feel as if he w e r e the object r e p r e s e n t e d . " T h e first d u t y o f the critic and historian o f art, therefore, is to e n j o y the w o r k o f art "intuitively and s p o n t a n e o u s l y . " O n l y after that has been experienced is he "called u p o n to analyze and i n t e r p r e t . " It was this injunction, the critical i m p o r t a n c e o f " s e e i n g , " that he had urged u p o n students, in season and out, and it had been the t h e m e of his r u n n i n g debate w i t h Ivins. Scholarly i n q u i r y concerning the artist, his technical m e t h o d s , or his w o r k as an aspect of the history of culture should be s u b o r d i n a t e d to the direct experience of the w o r k of art itself. In the second part o f the essay he t u r n e d to the historical determinants of the subject m a t t e r of art, of w h a t he chose to call "illustration" as distinct f r o m " d e c o r a t i o n , " his t e r m for the f o r m a l elements. H e r e in rich and allusive detail, d r a w i n g u p o n his encyclopedic k n o w l e d g e of history and archaeology, he sketched the centrifugal d e v e l o p m e n t of the visual arts of the M e d i t e r r a n e a n a n d Atlantic peoples f r o m the earliest E g y p t i a n s to " t h e continued glories of French painting d o w n to Degas and C e z a n n e . " Keenly a w a r e o f the rising v o g u e o f avant-garde and n o n o b j e c t i v e art, he w a r n e d that " a r t history should n o t dwell t o o m u c h o n w a v e s o f fashion, w i n d s of doctrine, or the m a u n d e r i n g s of p r i m i t i v ism, b u t should pick out the m o s t life-enhancing m o m e n t s , " those w h i c h , reflecting the heritage of Hellenism, s o u g h t to " h u m a n i z e " m a n kind. T h e b o o k was a sustained p o l e m i c in defense of his critical standards, and it attracted w i d e s p r e a d attention in A m e r i c a and E n g l a n d and o n the C o n t i n e n t . For the m o s t part critics accepted the discursive character o f the b o o k as a given, for the a u t h o r had himself admitted the i m p e a c h m e n t . T h e r e w e r e those w h o , like Professor F r a n k J e w e t t M a t h e r , J r . , in the Magazine of Art, t h o u g h t " t h e outline of an esthetic and a directive for the historian o f art . . . captivating for its variety and e n e r g y " and a "tirade against the antihumanists o f a Carlylese scope and v e h e m e n c e . " T h e Saturday Review of Literature described it as "a thrilling and persuasive discussion," an " a p o l o g i a o f a great h u m a n i s t " o f " t r a n s c e n d e n t i m p o r t a n c e " at a t i m e w h e n " d i s c o u r a g e d and baffled art critics are resigned to unintelligibility as the price o f f r e e d o m in the a r t s . " A w r i t e r in the Times Literary Supplement, while n o t w h o l l y agreeing w i t h B e r e n s o n ' s analysis, characterized the essay as a " m a g n i f i c e n t assessment of those values w h i c h m i g h t yet preserve the visual arts in h e a l t h . " For the "second Renaissance" w h i c h m a y e m e r g e f r o m the chaotic nature o f c o n t e m p o rary art, " M r . B e r e n s o n is acting as a magnificent J o h n the B a p t i s t . " T h o u g h the b o o k had its admirers, it could n o t stem the w a v e of the [505]

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future. Even his t w o most distinguished "pupils," J o h n Walker and Sir Kenneth Clark, felt the need to qualify their praise. B o t h saw the essay as essentially a personal credo. Walker, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, called it the brilliant "soliloquy of a great connoisseur on w h y certain beautiful objects had for h i m a deep and exhilarating m e a n i n g . " Clark, in the Burlington Magazine, described it appreciatively as "a simulacrum" of Berenson's talk, which " f o r the first time . . . will convey to posterity his extraordinary p o w e r s . " H e went on to say that the limitations of the "doctrine of ideated sensations" were "far narrower than the boundaries of M r . Berenson's experience" and to note that Berenson's essentially physiological theory of tactile values owed more to William James and Henri Bergson than to Hellenistic tradition, but he concluded that the author's >> powers of appreciation "greatly and gloriously outrun his theones. There was n o lack of dissenting voices, of those w h o in one degree or another shared Lincoln Kirstein's view that the book was "the mirror of a mandarin rather than the edifice of a philosopher." Kirstein thought it a "book of cultural memoirs, discursive, crotchety, studded with charming aperqus . . . neither carefully written nor edited." T h o u g h Clement Greenberg in the New York Times deplored Berenson's "high-handed philistinism t o w a r d contemporary a r t , " he conceded that he " o w n s one of the finest sensibilities ever applied to the study of art." In his article " H o m a g e to Bernard Berenson" in Horizon, R a y m o n d M o r t i m e r criticized Berenson for applying too narrowly his definition of "art as an instrument for humanizing m a n k i n d " with the result that he put c o n t e m porary art under a violent ban, alienating " m a n y a m o n g his juniors w h o otherwise m i g h t have become his most congenial admirers." H e admitted, however, that o w i n g in part to Berenson's "nefarious influence," he had had " t o m o d i f y " his o w n view of aesthetics, and that along with Berenson he found " o m i n o u s the coincidence between the taste for the art of savage peoples and the lapse of Europe into savagery." Professor H e n r y D . Aiken of Harvard faulted the writing as "opinionated and often c o n f u s e d , " and went on to make a c o m m e n t which revealed that gossip had already distorted Berenson's refusal to leave Italy at the outbreak of the war: " O n e may perhaps question the sincerity of a m a n w h o for m a n y years resided voluntarily in fascist Italy and is n o w belatedly concerned about the dangers of totalitarianism to the integrity of the artist." In Commentary Meyer Schapiro suggested that Berenson's hostility to contemporary art put h i m in bad company. " A m i d s t the general decline of our age," he wrote, "three powerful, ruthless men, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, have repudiated m o d e r n art and exoticism. What a terrible [506]

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thing to recall to M r . B e r e n s o n w h o w a s b o r n in Vilna and w h o regards art as 'the surest escape f r o m the tedium o f threatening totalitarianism.' " Schapiro's w i t w a s tempted b y B e r e n s o n ' s p r o n o u n c e m e n t that " t h e nude erect and frontal has t h r o u g h all the ages . . . been the chief concern o f the art o f visual representation." " N o t h i n g is so capable o f stimulating our tactile s e n s e , " Schapiro slyly suggested, " a s the i m a g e o f the nude h u m a n b o d y , and the frontal m o s t o f a l l . " H e admitted, h o w e v e r , that " h a p p i l y " B e r e n s o n ' s "ideas about art are not altogether so f o r b i d d i n g l y classical and reactionary as w o u l d a p p e a r " f r o m the passages he had " m a l i c i o u s l y " excerpted. " T a c t i l e v a l u e s , " he pointed out, w a s in fact an advanced idea in the 1890s but one that present-day classicists w o u l d reject. H e conceded that w h a t B e r e n s o n had to say " a b o u t his experience o f quality and his insight into the accomplishment o f an artist is v e r y often striking and reveals in fulsomeness and f o r c e o f statement a strong personality, s o v e r e i g n in its f i e l d . " T h e extraordinary interest the b o o k aroused must h a v e gratified B e r enson and reassured h i m that even though bypassed in s o m e quarters and contradicted in others, he w a s still a f o r c e to be reckoned with. His mature convictions had been posted on the d o o r o f the w o r l d , and, an optimist to the last, he could hope that they m i g h t prevail. T h e w a r t i m e w r i t i n g w h i c h e v o k e d a response in far w i d e r circles w a s the Sketch for a Self-Portrait, published in 1949 simultaneously in L o n d o n and N e w Y o r k , and, in Loria's translation, in Milan. B e r e n s o n sent o f f copies o f his " g l i m p s e s into that chaos . . . w e are accustomed to call s e l f " to a great m a n y friends and acquaintances as t h o u g h they w e r e personal letters. A s N i c k y carefully noted, 1 0 1 copies o f the A m e r i c a n edition w e r e g i v e n a w a y , 85 o f the E n g l i s h edition and 69 o f the Italian. O n e o f the first to respond w a s H a r o l d N i c o l s o n , w h o felt it a " j o y " to encounter an a u t o b i o g r a p h y " w h i c h really did manage to face the m i r r o r . " H e said that " t h e b o o k w a s w i d e l y talked about and I have not heard a single w o r d w h i c h is not one o f delighted respect f o r i t . " T h e patrician N i c o l s o n w a s one o f those w h o , though not an " e n e m y f r i e n d , " yet had s o m e w h a t ambivalent feelings t o w a r d h i m . C o m m i s sioned to r e v i e w the Sketch, he had confided to his diary, " I do m y r e v i e w o f B e r n a r d B e r e n s o n ' s Sketch for a Self-Portrait. H e r e again I h a v e the conflict b e t w e e n sincerity and g o o d feeling. H e asks himself w h y he had not been able to inspire in others the confidence and affection he feels f o r them. O f course the a n s w e r is that he debauched his talent to m a k e m o n e y and that he w a s hard and selfish to his contemporaries. B u t he w a s g o o d to y o u n g people and he did teach them all a zest f o r beauty. H o w can I insult a m a n o f e i g h t y - f i v e . . . . R a y m o n d M o r t i m e r in such a quandary w o u l d not r e v i e w the b o o k at a l l . " [507]

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C o n t r a r y to N i c o l s o n ' s prediction, M o r t i m e r w a s in no such quandary. In his article " H o m a g e to B e r n a r d B e r e n s o n , " in w h i c h he discussed the Sketch as well as the Aesthetics and History, he called the Sketch an " e n t h r a l l i n g " b o o k . H e w a s v e x e d , h o w e v e r , at B e r e n s o n ' s c o m plaints that he had " d w i n d l e d into an expert on p a i n t i n g . " Was it " a fine h u m i l i t y " or amour-propre that m a d e " h i m f a n c y himself so m u c h superior to all that he has a c h i e v e d " ? T h e " t w o w a r r i n g states o f m i n d , " he surmised, " a r e here a l l i e d . " A s f o r B e r e n s o n ' s groans o f not being liked, they needed to be severely discounted. " N o one w i t h u n c o m m o n gifts can use these w i t h o u t m a k i n g enemies a m o n g those w h o are lazy, c l u m s y or plain d u l l . " In the New York Times J o h n Walker spoke o f the Sketch as " a n intellectual a u t o b i o g r a p h y o f the greatest living critic o f Italian painting and one o f the m o s t brilliant conversationalists." Ferris Greenslet m o r e m o d e r ately observed, " T h e ' h o m u n c u l u s ' that emerges is a fascinating creature at once sensitive and s h r e w d , affectionate and cynical, a realist and a m y s t i c , " an estimate that B e r e n s o n said he preferred to Walker's " f l a t t e r y . " T h e New Yorker noted that the m e m o i r w a s b y a m a n passionately concerned w i t h his o w n personality, but conceded that " o n e has the feeling o f h a v i n g listened to the illuminating chatter o f one o f the f e w s u r v i v i n g completely civilized m e n . " In L o n d o n Punch spoke o f the Sketch as the " s u p e r b fruition o f B e r e n s o n ' s old a g e " ; the Spectator called it " a serious and in the p r o f o u n d e s t sense, a civilized b o o k " ; and the Times prophesied that w h e n the time came to place h i m , " M r . B e r e n s o n w i l l be a m o n g the Paters, the Wincklemanns, and the L e s s i n g s . " M e y e r Schapiro, in his r e v i e w of Aesthetics and History in Commentary, also r e v i e w e d the Sketch. O f the latter he w r o t e that it w a s " a beautiful picture o f old a g e " containing " s o m e o f the finest pages o f B e r e n s o n ' s p r o s e . " B u t then he continued: " P e r h a p s the spiritual shallowness o f the culture-conscious social milieu in w h i c h he thrived, a milieu searching f o r a lost paradise o f beauty and nobility . . . w a s responsible f o r the stagnation o f B e r e n s o n ' s v i r t u o s o thought. . . . H e has made his o w n life a w o r k o f art inspired b y a Victorian esthetic conception, a true flower o f Pater's ideal. B u t w e sense in it a finickiness and s n o b b e r y , a m o r a l blindness to large regions o f life . . . w h i c h have cut o f f this great student f r o m i m p o r t a n t sources o f i n s i g h t . " A FLURRY o f anxiety s w e p t the household during the s u m m e r o f 1946. T h e l a w requiring repatriation o f A m e r i c a n citizens o f f o r e i g n birth except those w i t h sufficient grounds f o r e x e m p t i o n w a s expected to take effect on O c t o b e r 1. In s o m e desperation N i c k y w r o t e f o r help to Walter L i p p m a n n and Paul Sachs because the M y r o n T a y l o r s w e r e n o w saying [508]

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that Berenson had played "a double g a m e " during the war. It was feared that the State Department m a y have been told that he was a kind of "collaborationist." Besides, ever since his refusal to return to the United States he had had a "mauvaise presse" at the State Department. T o his cousin Lawrence, w h o was preparing his appeal for exemption, Bernard sent off a long statement detailing the reasons w h y he should be allowed to retain his citizenship while remaining in Italy: his great services to American collections of Italian paintings; his substantial investments in the United States; his intention of leaving I Tatti to Harvard; and, most important, his dependence on Nicky and his valet because of his frailty. T h e American cultural attache in Rome, Professor Charles Rufus M o r e y of Princeton, put in his plea, reporting that he had recently visited Berenson and f o u n d him "frail and adhering strictly to a regim e n . " Fortunately Berenson had friends in court, former undersecretary of state Sumner Welles and f o r m e r ambassador to Italy William Phillips, whose sympathetic views were k n o w n to the head of the Passport Division. O n July 8 Lawrence cabled Nicky that the State Department had granted an exemption based on Bernard's advanced age and health. T h e State D e p a r t m e n t concession came, however, with the grudging c o m ment, " M r . Berenson could have given a better account of himself." Whether this statement reflected a belief that he had been a species of collaborationist remains a secret of his dossier, which despite the Freed o m of Information Act remains inaccessible. Thanks to the ministrations of Nicky and of his devoted valet-maid E m m a , Berenson managed to travel with considerable facility. Early in July there were several diverting days in Siena, where his "joy . . . in seeing O l d Masters again, enjoying their qualities, appraising their character, deciding their authorship," made him feel "as if connoisseurship is still the activity that suits m e b e s t . " But the tumultuous Palio, "the national o r g y " that j a m m e d the piazza with sixty or seventy thousand " b i - p e d s " — o n e of his favorite epithets—seemed overlong. Besides, he believed the horse race was seldom w o n by merit alone, but "always by intrigue, bribery, and corruption—quite in the open h o w e v e r . " T h e fifteenth-century costumes looked to him like forgeries of his old acquaintance Frederico Ioni, and he was pleased to discover that in fact "this Sienese scoundrel did design most, and the triumphal car as well." Berenson's political interests were increasingly focused on what seemed to h i m the dangerous threat f r o m the East, the threat f r o m the Soviet U n i o n . T h e widespread talk in the United States for cooperative understanding with Russia, as expressed by Senator Claude Pepper, Harold Ickes, and various labor leaders, seemed to h i m mistaken. And to his great dismay he learned that his socialist friend U m b e r t o Morra [509]

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wrote for the Communist papers. T o Hugh Trevor-Roper, the brilliant young historian at Oxford with whom he had begun a lively correspondence, he wrote that Morra "has been almost a son in this house for over twenty-five years. . . . N o w it turns out he is an active, impenetrable, impermeable fellow traveller." Berenson's distaste for communism had become his chief political obsession. The Soviet Union, he wrote to Margaret Barr, "is probably the greatest threat to all WE hold dear that civilization has ever had to face." He feared that the "Stalinites will soon be on the Atlantic." " I confess," he told Henry Coster, " I prefer the Nazis—despite everything." In Berenson's view Nazism had been an aberration, a violent but passing disease that could not blight the immense contributions of German culture, the heritage of Goethe and Schiller in which his own deepest aspirations were rooted. His "great fear and dread" was totalitarianism. The Catholic church, being itself totalitarian, seemed best able to resist the Soviet variety, but its "unswerving purpose of reducing the whole of mankind to its Paraguayan slavery" would "in the long run surely be worse than Soviet totalitarianism." In the face of political and philosophical dilemmas he found himself circling back and forth, tugged in contradictory directions. " I am in fact," he admitted to Edith de Gasparin, "a mystic with one foot in the Acropolis and the other in the Temple of Jerusalem." Perplexed though he was by the menacing political and social outlook, his mystical humanism would not allow him to yield to pessimism. He scorned the nihilistic "wail of despair" coming out of France from the Existentialist cult gathered around Jean-Paul Sartre and the gospel of his L'Etre et neant (Being and Nothingness) and Albert Camus and his Le Mythe de Sisyphe. "Why not rather admit," he insisted in his diary, "that there is a formative energy in our make-up that drives us to the formation of a society with its hierarchies, its morals, its imperatives, its arts, its sciences, its religions all tending to make a House of Life in which we each may find a home? It is essentially William James's 'will to believe'— to believe that we can build, to improve, to adorn, a ship which is carrying us from eternity to eternity propelled by a Power we cannot know, but about purposes we need not despair. In short even though life be a vale of tears it is one in which it is pleasant to weep." The succession of writers and guests in 1946 now began to rise to the flood that would continue during most of the remaining years of his life, stimulating and delighting him even as it brought exhaustion. General Mark Clark came to Italy to decorate the Partisans. In a conversation with him Berenson conceded that only war would stop the Soviets, but after that what? Clark was followed by Walter Lippmann and his wife, [510]

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and this time talk ran on the g r o w i n g specter of Italian c o m m u n i s m . With the critic Alfred Frankfurter and David Finley, director of the National Gallery of Art, there was m u c h satisfying talk of the art world. J o h n Pope-Hennessy, of the Victoria and Albert M u s e u m , resumed his visit to pore over photographs with his elderly friend. At Casa al D o n o Addie Kahn, n o w seventy, challenged h i m with her frank sympathy for the Soviets and the Arabs, and the t w o old friends agreed to disagree. For four days they were enchanted by R u t h Draper and the sparkling impersonations she gave each evening. For four weeks the Serlupis enjoyed the hospitality of the Berenson menage on the mountainside. T h e much-traveled Arabist Freya Stark, w h o was n o w a twice-a-year habitue, put in an appearance, and with her Berenson shared his appreciation of older Arab culture. If advancing years limited Berenson's avid explorations on foot, there were still the resources of the auto, and he made full use of them. His manuscripts could wait but not his wanderlust. Driven out of Vallombrosa at last by the cold, he decided to wander about to Siena, Pisa, and Milan and reach Venice in time for the exhibition of O l d Masters. In Venice he visited the Italian financier C o u n t Vittorio Cini at his palace filled with paintings and sculpture. When Cini was Mussolini's finance minister, it was he w h o had extended a protecting arm over Berenson. Having voted in the Council of Ministers to oust Mussolini, he had been tried by the short-lived Fascist republic and sentenced to Dachau, but in the chaos of those last days he found refuge in a hospital near Padua and threw financial support to the Partisans. Berenson found him a " h a n d some, fascinating man, vigorous and with a certain radiance that enchants m e . " In his b o o m i n g voice he protested Berenson's earnest objection that the evidence in the N u r e m b e r g trials was "faked u p " and that the proceedings were illegal. At the exhibition Berenson found that he could not view paintings unmolested. "Fellow students" came by to discuss his "authoritative j u d g m e n t , " and soon a crowd of onlookers w o u l d fall in behind them to listen as he peered at the paintings with his magnifying glass. H e returned to I Tatti and another orgy of reading. Arthur Koestler's Thieves in the Night inspired indignation at the "British perfidy" in "separating off Transjordania and allowing no Jews to settle there." Palestine was m u c h in the press during that violent year. Britain as the mandate p o w e r had severely restricted Jewish immigration, using its warships to intercept immigrants. T h e Irgun and the Stern Gang responded with terrorist raids on British military posts. At the same time clashes with the Arabs multiplied and the whole area was rent with disorder. "Decidedly Britain is betting on the w r o n g h o r s e , " Berenson [511]

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reflected. " T h e J e w is now ready to till the soil and shed blood, and it will make him master of the Arab w o r l d " unless Britain interferes " o r the Soviets take up the Arab cause." From a sympathetic reading of Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy he turned to the stories of Kafka and from those to Kierkegaard's Angoisse. So the reading went on with untiring relish. Ivins sent him his new book, Art and Geometry, and Berenson "gulped it down at a draft." " S o m e of it stuck in my throat. . . and some gave me heartburn. . . . All the same it is beautifully wicked and elegantly wrongheaded." As usual he and Ivins were at loggerheads and seemed to enjoy the argument. His diary for 1946 comments on more than seventy books that challenged his appraisal, an extraordinarily wide range from the Book of J o b to Madame de Stael's Sur l'Allemagne and Heinrich Wölfflin's Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte, with excursions to Richard Halliburton's Sam Slick and Edmund Wilson's Wound and the Bow, all to be stored up in his still unimpaired memory to lend a grace to conversation. The buying of books, he felt, had "become a disease" for which happily there was no treatment, and year by year the forty thousand prewar volumes continued their march toward the final fifty thousand. Sometimes he felt that the library was his greatest achievement. In the spring of 1947 Berenson went down once again to Rome after an absence of seven years. Roman society was cordial and he enjoyed being coddled and flattered. At a gathering where he met with Count Carlo Sforza, the minister of foreign affairs, he was comforted to find himself treated as an equal. Stephen Spender and his wife were in Rome and Berenson took them on a sightseeing tour, but the poet disappointed him. " F r o m Spender I got no response, although I poured out my ointment box of epithets. If he were not an Englishman I should have thought him insensitive to visible things." Spender seems to have carried away an agreeable impression, for when he became coeditor of Encounter he asked Berenson to contribute a piece on his acquaintance with Matisse. Berenson sent on the article, "Encounters with Matisse," and received Spender's enthusiastic praise, but for some reason it was not published and Berenson prudently salvaged it in his 1958 Essays in Appreciation. A German version appeared in Der Monat in July 1959. The concluding sentence of the article suggests that Berenson's distaste for contemporary art was not wholly undiscriminating: " M y conclusion about Matisse is that in the neck-and-neck race with Picasso for the highest place in the art of the last fifty years he ended by coming in second." Slowly and reluctantly Berenson gave ground to old age, lamenting his various infirmities but determined to hold to his course. As he ap[512]

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proached his eighty-third year, his afternoon naps claimed more hours, but once up he seemed as sprightly as ever. Sensitive to cold, he shielded his bald head with the ever-present fedora. T h e cashmere shawl about his shoulders became a permanent accessory and w o u l d at last " s e r v e " as a shroud in the grave. Seated on the terrace, he covered his thin knees with a lap robe. He felt the "machine going to pieces," but the methodically ordered regimen kept it going at a seemly pace. O n his birthday the modest feast challenged his rebellious digestion and he mused, "Instead of clubbing the overaged to death, w e n o w feast them into the g r a v e . " Y e t he could not live without his congenial table companions. Thinking o f Percy Lubbock living solitary in his villas since the death of Lady Sybil, w h o m he had married after her divorce f r o m G e o f f r e y Scott, Berenson half envied his "capacity for being alone." For himself he needed "the stimulus and caresses of w o m e n and the talk of real m e n . " His desire for new acquaintances g r e w with the years, and he cast his invitations upon the waters of talent hoping to bring in richer fare. For example, in 1947, m o v e d b y R o s a m o n d N i n a Lehmann's Ballad and the Source, he sent her a " f a n letter" and invited her to visit him. She promptly accepted and brought with her her lover the poet Cecil D a y Lewis. T h o u g h D a y - L e w i s did not relish Berenson's admiration of Rosamond, he was aware that his o w n love affair with her could not last. He later dedicated a long elegy to her, its setting I Tatti among "these statues, groves, books, bibelots, masterpieces." Once begun, the letters between Berenson and R o s a m o n d flowed without break f o r ten years. Her frequent visits enchanted him: in his ninety-third year he was to write, " R o s a m o n d Lehmann arrived yesterday to stay a week. . . . As magnificently beautiful as ever, even if a trifle stouter. O n l y her eyes have the rusty look o f age. [She was then f i f t y six.] Wonderfully, harmoniously grand features, dazzling white hair, beautiful throat and arms untouched by years. I k n o w nobody so lifeenhancing." T h e " I Tatti b u s , " manned again b y H u g h Parry, had n o w gone back in service to meet the train and bring up the unending procession o f guests. If Berenson sometimes dreamed of quiet repose, feeling that N i c k y and his friends overestimated his strength, N i c k y understood his lurking restlessness and, as his alter ego, diligently arranged for visitors and planned extended excursions if only to ascertain whether a church did or did not continue to exist. Thus in the autumn of 1947, reluctantly taking leave of his aerie at Vallombrosa, he and N i c k y started o f f on a giro by motorcar to Rimini to inspect the famous Malatesta T e m p l e for whose restoration Rush Kress had recently given $50,000. T h e y drove back across the Apennines [513]

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to B o l o g n a to scout the paintings at the Pinacoteca Nationale, then p r o ceeded to the aged D o n G u i d o C a g n o l a ' s great Villa Gazzada a b o v e L a k e C o m o f o r a f e w d a y s ' respite. With D o n G u i d o they sought out the n e w l y discovered p r e - O t t o n i a n frescoes in the ancient church o f Santa M a r i a Foris Portas at the ruins o f Castelseprio. Determined to scrutinize the unique frescoes at close range, B e r e n s o n climbed up to them on a shaky ladder. D o n G u i d o , not to be outdone b y his y o u n g e r c o n t e m p o rary, also clambered up f o r a look. O n the road again they w e n t d o w n to the B r e r a in M i l a n to v i e w the recently uncrated altarpiece b y Piero della Francesca, w h o s e tridimensional figures stood out in " a matchless w a y . " T h e recent v o g u e f o r that painter had inspired B e r e n s o n to plan an essay w h i c h w o u l d s h o w that the v o g u e w a s due to a great extent " t o a need f o r j u s t i f y i n g " a parallel cult f o r Cezanne's similar " u n f e e l i n g n e s s and i n e x p r e s s i v e n e s s . " It w a s as a result o f this perception that he subsequently published in Italian in 1 9 5 0 and in E n g l i s h in 1 9 5 4 a little b o o k , Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art, in w h i c h , w i t h m u c h learning, he traced the history o f portraiture to s h o w that all notable f i g u r e artists " h a v e been ineloquent, unappealing, unalluring, u n g e s t i c u l a t i n g , " and purely " e x i s t e n t i a l . " What linked Piero to C e z a n n e w a s that he w a s " a l m o s t as i n d i f f e r e n t " to physical beauty as Cezanne. B o t h w e r e m o r e aware " o f bulk and w e i g h t than o f l o o k s . " T h e b o o k ' s insights w e r e presented, as the New Yorker said, w i t h " u r b a n i t y , scholarship and occasional h u m o r " ; the Times Literary Supplement praised the b o o k as " a brilliant exposition o f the technique o f style a n a l y s i s . " M o t o r i n g south f r o m M i l a n , the travelers descended to G e n o a , to picturesque P o r t o f i n o , and thence to Lerici, b e l o w La Spezia, to visit L u b b o c k in his "palace o f d e l i g h t . " R e t u r n i n g , they lingered f o r a f e w days in the pine w o o d s o f V i a r e g g i o , then circled back f o r a day at Lucca, w h e r e B e r e n s o n " w o r s h i p p e d the cathedral w i t h its sumptuous black and w h i t e , " reaching I Tatti after t w o w e e k s ' absence. Within a w e e k he w a s o f f again f o r Arezzo, Assisi, and R o m e . D u r i n g the month in R o m e he g a v e himself up to familiar pleasures: " m o o n i n g , " as he said, on the Palatine Hills, e n j o y i n g H i g h M a s s and the C a r a v a g g i o s at San L u i g i dei Francesi, studying again the paintings at the Farnesina, and taking R a y m o n d M o r t i m e r o f the New Statesman and A m b a s s a d o r J a m e s D u n n and his w i f e o n sightseeing excursions. While in R o m e he w a s sought out f o r an interview b y a rising y o u n g A m e r i c a n critic, A l f r e d Kazin. Kazin had missed h i m earlier in the year at I Tatti, w h e r e he had been s h o w n about the villa b y the aging Leo Stein, w h o w a s w o r k i n g in the library. In his j o u r n a l Kazin said o f the villa that B e r e n s o n had " s h a p e d the w h o l e w i t h an inflexible exactness o f taste that [514]

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is just a little chilling." T h e impression carried over to their meeting at " t h e grand Hotel Hassler." Berenson rather liked his visitor "as a h u m a n being" and laconically noted, " H e seemed intelligent." A half century younger than Berenson, Kazin appraised h i m with the unsentimental eye of a N e w York J e w w h o was familiar with his legend and reputation. H e did not approve the way Berenson distanced himself f r o m other Jews. Nevertheless, as a conscientious reporter he d r e w a telling portrait of the man. H e saw him, he wrote, as "an old courtier in his beautiful clothes, every inch of h i m engraved fine into an instrument for aesthetic responsiveness and intelligence. H e spoke English with such purity and beauty of diction, blandly delivering himself of words, one by one, that he m i g h t have been putting freshly cracked walnuts into m y hand. . . . R e m e m b e r i n g his extraordinary library, one had a picture of him at I Tatti as another Voltaire at Ferney, a kind of European intelligence office—yet subtly r e m o t e f r o m the pressure of events." T h e y talked of H e n r y Miller, w h o s e Tropic of Cancer Berenson had just read. Berenson s o m e h o w gave h i m the impression that he was familiar with all of Miller's w o r k s and detested them. (Tropic of Cancer was in fact the first book of Miller's he had read, and he had written in his diary that t h o u g h it was " t h e most indecent, most scatalogical book I ever waded t h r o u g h , " it was not "the dirtiest" because it was "saved by something genuinely Dionysiac.") O f Kafka Berenson had remarked, " T h e r e is a very small light of reason burning in the world. M r . Kafka tried to put it o u t . " Kazin was surprised at the w a y in which Berenson looked up to Santayana, rejecting "the faintest criticism of the great m a n . " Berenson admitted, however, he had not yet read his memoirs, Nicky having advised h i m not to, saying " h e w o u l d be too distressed." Long afterward, w h e n Kazin published his o w n memoir, New York Jew, he salvaged a striking vignette of his last sight of the imperious aesthete. Berenson was standing on the hill above the Spanish Steps watching the sunset. " A y o u n g American, excited to recognize him, walked over in a babble of enthusiasm. Berenson coldly waved h i m away: ' Y o u n g man! You're standing in the way of the sunset!' "

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L D age for Berenson was a harvest time of human associations, the seeds of which he had prudently sowed year in and year out in his innumerable letters to correspondents far and near. Though I Tatti may have become a kind of tourist attraction, what counted for him was the large circle of friends and acquaintances which had made I Tatti, as one of them wrote, the "great cosmopolitan clearing house of world intelligence." Among the many notable guests who put in an appearance during the spring "season" of 1948, guests whom Berenson greatly enjoyed though he protested they were killing him, were persons like Robert GathorneHardy, who read aloud his account of Logan Pearsall Smith, whose "passionate apprentice" he had been. (Logan had died in 1946.) Arthur Koestler and his wife were guests. Koestler, his "features not Jewish . . . perhaps a touch of g y p s y , " was full of talk about telepathy. Henry Moore dropped in for lunch, "still provincial in clothes and accent, but one of the most appreciative persons I ever took through the house." Yet his sculpture "is so revoltingly remote from what I feel about art. . . . Why does this so sensitive, so honest-minded man produce such horrors of distortion, misinformation, and abstraction?" As the assemblages grew, for sometimes there would be a dozen guests for tea or dinner, Berenson's entrance upon the company became a little ceremony. Nicky would gather the company in the sitting room for Berenson's descent from his quarters. There would be a hush as he made a quick entry into the room. His departures, equally carefully timed, freed him from the customary round of farewells. Thinking about the hush that came "over visitors who see me for the first time," he could not "overcome a feeling of absurdity." It was "all so comic." It was also unavoidably dramatic and to many would seem deliberately staged. An[516]

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other ritual, which became necessary because his impaired hearing made general conversation difficult, was to seat a favored guest close beside his armchair. Berenson w o u l d place his hand u p o n the guest's arm or knee in tactile as well as vocal communication, all the more agreeable if the guest were a pretty w o m a n . It was during this lively social season that there appeared on the scene the exotically beautiful Katherine D u n h a m , w h o was making her first tour of E u r o p e with her company of negro dancers. Brought to I Tatti for luncheon by Serge Tolstoy, the grandson of the novelist, she made a p r o f o u n d impression on her host. After receiving a graduate degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, she had made a study of West Indian dances, and n o w at forty she had an international reputation as a dancer and an actress, having already appeared in Broadway musicals and m o t i o n pictures. Her book Les Danses d'Haiti was about to appear. Lithe and graceful, she danced with kinetic energy. O f f the stage she could be demurely seductive. She and Berenson became fast friends, and she was to say that with Robert Hutchins and Erich F r o m m he was one of the three persons w h o helped shape her life. Berenson basked in her admiration and liked nothing better than to have her sit on the rug close beside his chair. H e t h o u g h t her a fascinating creature and highly cultivated. T o his beloved Clotilde he exclaimed, " W h a t a body! Beautiful as a bronze statue!" O n e afternoon in N o v e m b e r M a r y H e m i n g w a y , w h o had been staying with Alan and Lucy Moorehead in Fiesole, drove d o w n with t h e m and J. B. Priestley and Lionel Fielden for tea at I Tatti. Nicky chatted with M a r y and then sent her out to call in Berenson, w h o was strolling a m o n g the trees. M a r y found her "fragile h o s t , " as she recalled, "a fashion plate in his citified faultless blue suit, grey fedora, and grey suede gloves." She introduced herself and told h i m tea was ready. " W h a t n u m b e r are y o u ? " he asked. "Sir, do you n u m b e r guests?" she queried. " W i f e , " he explained. She told Berenson she was n u m b e r four. H o w had Ernest " m a n a g e d to get t h r o u g h so m a n y wives?" he asked. There was " n o simple a n s w e r , " she replied. " O f course Ernest is a man of tremendous energy and exuberance." Berenson seized the cue, " D o e s he d e m onstrate those characteristics in bed?" Neither stayed for an answer. When the guests departed Berenson called her back: " Y o u may not leave until you give m e a kiss." His eighty-three-year-old lips, she r e m e m bered, were "still full and sensuous. I gave h i m what I hoped was a generous kiss." Berenson was no stranger to H e m i n g w a y ' s literary or marital exploits. H e had read his novels and had already begun an intimate and extensive correspondence with Martha Gellhorn, wife n u m b e r three, whose [517]

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b o a s t — " W h a t splendid pen pals w e a r e " — c o u l d soon apply to B e r e n son's e x c h a n g e w i t h H e m i n g w a y . A f t e r M a r y ' s visit Berenson sent copies o f his Sketch for a Self-Portrait and Aesthetics and History to the H e m i n g w a y s in C u b a . H e m i n g w a y replied, " Y o u w r i t e v e r y well ' G e n eral,' " and M a r y added, " I am finding y o u r Aesthetics and History as stimulating as m y favorite c h a m p a g n e . " Ernest soon took over the c o r respondence in his exuberant and unbuttoned p r o s e — m i s s p e l l i n g , p r o fanity, and a l l — a n d the delighted B e r e n s o n did w h a t he could to keep the confidences, w a r t i m e reminiscences, r o u g h - h e w n fantasies, outrageous anecdotes, and u n o r t h o d o x opinions flowing. O n e o f the m a n y lurid ones ran, " P i c a s s o is a g o o d friend o f mine but he w o u l d sign and sell his laundry lists or used c o n d o m s if there w a s a b u y e r . " H e m i n g w a y w a r m e d to B e r e n s o n ' s solicitous interest in him and s a w in h i m a potential father o r brother, " i f y o u ever wanted to father a really bad b o y . " T h e r e w e r e at times a pathetic dependence upon B e r e n s o n ' s attention, and a b o y i s h assertion. A f t e r he w a s severely burned in a brush fire in A f r i c a , he sent B e r e n s o n a large and rather h o r r i f y i n g p h o t o g r a p h o f his terribly burned left hand. When B e r e n s o n later queried h i m about the reputed s y m b o l i s m in The Old Man and the Sea, H e m i n g w a y assured h i m , " T h e r e isn't any s y m b o l ism. T h e sea is the sea. T h e old m a n is an old man. T h e b o y is a b o y and the fish is a fish. . . . A l l the s y m b o l i s m that people say is s h i t . " T h e n he diffidently asked B e r e n s o n to w r i t e a f e w sentences about the b o o k " t h a t could be quoted b y Scribner's. Y o u are the o n l y critic that I respect and if y o u really liked the b o o k it w o u l d j o l t s o m e people I do not r e s p e c t . " In the Scribner's advertisement B e r e n s o n ' s tribute led all seven endorsements. " H e m i n g w a y ' s Old Man and the Sea," B e r e n s o n w r o t e , " i s an idyll o f the sea as sea, as u n - B y r o n i c and un-Melvillian as H o m e r ' s himself and c o m m u n i c a t e d in a prose as calm and compelling as H o m e r ' s verse. N o real artist symbolizes or allegorizes—and H e m i n g w a y is a real artist—but e v e r y real w o r k o f art exhales s y m b o l s and allegories. S o does this short but not small m a s t e r p i e c e . " When in 1 9 5 4 H e m i n g w a y promised to visit him, B e r e n s o n felt " a certain dread to seeing and k n o w i n g h i m in the flesh. . . . His letters seemed written w h e n he w a s not quite sober, rambling and affectionate. I fear he m a y turn out too animal, too o v e r w h e l m i n g l y masculine, too B o h e m i a n . H e m a y expect m e to drink and guzzle w i t h h i m . " H e m i n g w a y , then in Venice, t o o k sick, and the opportunity to meet n e v e r came again. H e too felt apprehensive at the thought o f a meeting. H e had earlier written to B e r e n s o n , " I a m too shy to c o m e and I hate to g o a n y w h e r e in an etat de manifeste i n f e r i o r i t y . " L o n g letters continued to pass b e t w e e n them until t w o years b e f o r e

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Berenson's death. In 1954 w h e n H e m i n g w a y had just been awarded the N o b e l Prize and was interviewed in C u b a by long-distance telephone, he told the journalist Harvey Breit, "I w o u l d have been h a p p y — h a p p i e r — today if the prize had gone to that beautiful writer Isak Dinesen, or to Bernard Berenson, w h o has devoted a lifetime to the most lucid and best writing on painting that has been p r o d u c e d . " Early in January 1949 Sturges Riddle, the Episcopal rector in Florence, b r o u g h t u p to I Tatti another American novelist, the sixty-four-year-old Sinclair Lewis, accompanied by his companion Mrs. Powers. Berenson found Lewis " m o r e presentable" than he expected, for w o r d of his guest's "hard drinking and slovenly w a y s " had preceded him. What caught his searching attention was not Lewis's ravaged complexion but his "fine blue eyes and tolerable pronunciation." Berenson had kept abreast of his immensely successful novels. Lewis's companion, w h o years before had looked on indulgently at her pretty daughter's romantic affair with the middle-aged novelist, had stepped into her place after the y o u n g w o m a n ' s marriage. While Nicky looked after her, Lewis and Berenson found c o m m o n g r o u n d in their passion for " m o n g r e l " w o r d coinages like Berenson's "metafuzzical," " R e f u - J e w s , " and " A n g r y - S a x o n s . " Their first meeting featured a lively exchange on the state of the novel in the United States. T h e y agreed in their admiration for Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren. Berenson, h o w ever, insisted that Edith Wharton's Ethan Fronte was only a short story; Lewis considered it a novel and her masterpiece. Lewis came up once a week to I Tatti during his t w o - m o n t h stay in Florence. T h e following year w h e n he returned to Florence other distractions occupied him, and in spite of cordial invitations he visited only twice. His decline had g r o w n more tragically marked, and at the end of 1950 he died in R o m e abandoned by friends, the diagnosis "acute delirium t r e m e n s . " Berenson took a good deal of pride in the variety of his notable guests. "Billy Rose one d a y , " he exulted to Ivins, "Katherine D u n h a m another and a third Georges B o n n e t . " T h e irresponsible Billy Rose, one of the " C l o w n s in chief" of N e w York, impressed h i m as the "quintessence of cleverness." D u n h a m arrived attired "like an Egyptian q u e e n . " Later w h e n he saw her performance in R o m e he wrote, "It wakes up and brings to life in one even like myself the sleeping dogs of almost prehuman dreads, aversions, aberrations, appeals." Peggy Guggenheim, w h o had become notable for her eccentricities, paid her court on the same day as Katherine D u n h a m . She was, Berenson thought, "silly but not stupid, a good sort despite her financial freedom to do what she likes." When he asked her what she was going to do with her large avant-garde collection of art, to his m o c k horror she impishly replied she would leave it to him. [519]

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G e o r g e s B o n n e t , the French f o r e i g n minister w h o m he had despised as an accomplice o f N e v i l l e C h a m b e r l a i n in appeasing Hitler, n o w m a d e " a kindly, f r a n k i m p r e s s i o n . " G u y de Rothschild, head o f the French branch o f the b a n k i n g house, came to dinner, " s l i m , alert, keen, intellig e n t , " descended " f r o m the best branch o f the f a m i l y , so that his g o o d qualities are less s u r p r i s i n g . " T h e visit led B e r e n s o n to ask himself w h y he preferred " u p p e r - c l a s s " to " m i d d l e - c l a s s p e o p l e . " H e thought it w a s not " s n o b b e r y " o n his part but rather that " t h e y are ever so m u c h m o r e apt to be enjoyable w o r k s o f art in t h e m s e l v e s " and therefore " l i f e enhancing." T h e " c l e a r i n g house f o r w o r l d intelligence" sometimes effected striking conjunctions as w h e n , late in the spring, the y o u n g and liberal British political e c o n o m i s t B a r b a r a W a r d and P r o f e s s o r J a m e s B u r n h a m o f N e w Y o r k U n i v e r s i t y , conservative author o f the controversial Managerial Revolution, clashed head on. W a r d w a s f o r e i g n editor o f the Economist. B e r e n s o n f o u n d her " s w e e t l y reasonable" t o w a r d B u r n h a m ' s conservative v i e w s , t h o u g h w h e n B u r n h a m " p l i e d her w i t h sceptical questions about the British g o v e r n m e n t she w a r m e d to pepperiness, and betrayed a capacity f o r f a n a t i c i s m . " B e r e n s o n w a s less interested in the debate, h o w e v e r , than in W a r d ' s personality. Walking in the garden f o r an hour and a half, they had " h o o k e d almost i n s t a n t l y . " She impressed h i m as " a miracle o f intelligence, scholarship, and g i f t o f expression. . . . What a sport in the biological s e n s e ! " B y the spring o f 1948 the steady influx o f books, n e w and old, that streamed into the library had b e g u n to o v e r f l o w the shelves, and there w a s no sign o f letup. F e w days passed f o r B e r e n s o n w i t h o u t his poring o v e r b o o k catalogues. It w a s clear that m o r e space w o u l d be needed. O n c e again he called in C e c i l Pinsent to d r a w up plans f o r a n e w w i n g w h i c h w o u l d contain perhaps a half-dozen small r o o m s on t w o floors. It w a s at this time also that Pinsent t r a n s f o r m e d the small settecento r o o m on the g r o u n d floor across f r o m the dining r o o m , w h i c h he and Scott had made stiff w i t h stucco decorations, into an elegant little library o f French b o o k s , m a n y o f them presentation copies. T h e r o o m came to serve as an intimate dining r o o m in the last f e w years o f B e r e n s o n ' s life w h e n he could no l o n g e r preside at the hospitable table in the f o r m a l dining r o o m . A t the end o f M a y 1948 B e r e n s o n directed his w a y to the V e n i c e Biennale b y a leisurely and circuitous route that permitted h i m to l o o k once m o r e at f a v o r i t e churches and w o r k s o f art in B o l o g n a , in Padua w i t h its noble " j e w e l - l i k e " Giottos, and in M a s e r , w h e r e as a w e l c o m e guest he could absorb the V e r o n e s e frescoes. A s a l w a y s , Venice w a s an intoxication, but n o w , j o i n e d to the mainland b y a three-mile bridge, it

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had lost for him something of the almost "sacred" vision that he used to behold when arriving by boat. The Biennale was being revived as the most important of all international art exhibitions. John Rothenstein, director of the Tate Gallery, told Berenson that the British Council had voted "to show our greatest master, Turner, together with our most widely admired modern master, Henry Moore." When Rothenstein, who had come to Venice as "commissario" for the council, called at the Hotel Europa, Berenson could hardly wait to express himself on the new trend in art: "The two most destructive personalities in European art today," he declared, "are Picasso and Moore: Picasso consciously destructive, and Moore unconsciously. . . . If Picasso and Moore are meaningful, then the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Florentines, the Venetians, the Netherlanders are not." In the same vein he wrote to Hugh Trevor-Roper that the contemporary sculptures and paintings at the exhibition did not "come at all under the category of art," but they fascinated him "by their impudence, their absurdity, their unconsciousness." During a tour of the Biennale with Rothenstein, Berenson showed his delight in the Turners. Among the Impressionists he praised ToulouseLautrec "as among the greatest draughtsmen: his line draws blood," and he analyzed "with fine discernment" the qualities of Manet. Scorning Henry Moore's creations, he declared, "If I could read them as abstract forms, then I'd caress them as I'd caress women but their pretended references to natural forms repels me." Rothenstein, a member of the international jury, recorded that though a couple of members almost came to blows during some of the deliberations, Moore received the first prize in sculpture without dispute. Peggy Guggenheim had her ultramodern things on exhibit, and Berenson made a point of calling on her. She told him that she had studied his books and they had meant much to her. Looking about at her Moores, Klees, and Picassos, Berenson responded, "Then why do you go in for this?" Primed for the question, she explained that she could not afford Old Masters and besides considered it a duty to "protect the art of one's time." He replied, "You should have come to me, my dear, I would have found you bargains." Among her paintings, he did like the works of Max Ernst, though he thought them too sexual, and he liked the Jackson Pollocks "as tapestries." While he was in Venice Berenson renewed acquaintance with the Princess Aspasia of Greece at the palace of Count Giuseppi Volpi. The once lovely creature was now "bony, almost scrawny, anxious-looking, and like all fallen royalty . . . still expecting recognition, yet afraid." It

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was during this trip also that he met Prince Alphons Clary-Aldringen, an Austrian aristocrat. Alphons tells of the meeting in his memoirs, recounting how at a fashionable tea their hostess led Berenson to an armchair, "where he sat as if on a throne, receiving guests, one after another just as in an audience." The prince took "an instant liking" to Nicky. Though she was then sixty-one "and a little plump," he thought it immediately obvious that she must "once have been enchanting." At the gathering a young man who made the mistake of addressing Berenson as "Professor" was icily rebuffed. He returned with an offering of cake and now tried "Maestro." The rebuff was even colder. Berenson never escaped from these honorific titles. Letters from the director of the Louvre always began " C h e r maitre," as did those from Marc Chagall and others. Berenson hurried back from Venice to "receive a houseful of guests," as he put it, "coming up from Rome to inaugurate the baptistery doors," which had been restored to their pristine beauty. There were, however, more important reasons for his presence in Florence. A few days after his return the mayor of Florence conferred on him the freedom of the city as an honorary citizen. Then, on the eve of his eighty-third birthday, which brought a flood of congratulatory messages, he "dressed in blue" and drove down to the Palazzo Strozzi to be honored by the Italian government at an international meeting of art historians and critics for his services to Italian art. There were speeches in his honor by the professor of fine arts at Pisa University and by the superintendent of fine arts of the Province of Florence. The minister of public instruction, the noted jurist Guido Gonella, presented him with two bronze medals. One, specially struck in Berenson's honor, bore his profile on one side and on the other the legend " A Bernardo Berenson / II Primo Convego / Internazionale Per Le Arti Figurative / Firenze Giugno, 1948." The other, nearly five hundred years old, by Matteo de' Pasti, had been found at Rimini in a wall of the Malatesta Temple damaged during the Allied bombardment. An engaging fantasy published in the Nazione of Florence reported that when the temple was bombed, the artists of the Renaissance flew down from heaven and handed to a member of the crowd a book " b y one who loves us as few others do. His name is Berenson." They said, " G o and find him. . . . Without his genius and his zeal, no one could write of us as he has written. He has revealed us to ourselves." Despite the distractions of guests, travels, and honors, Berenson reserved time at his desk or in bed during 1948 and 1949 for his writing. He busied himself with two essays, he said, out of a planned four. What all of these were went unrecorded. One of them, the small book Seeing and [522]

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Knowing, reached print in 1951 in Luisa Vertova's translation and in London in 1953 in the original English. The English edition, embellished with eighty-eight illustrations, was dedicated " T o the Memory of Belle Greene, Soul of the Morgan Library." She had died in 1950. Seeing and Knowing had its origin in a visual revelation Berenson experienced at the end of the Palio in Siena when "the sun had just set and the afterglow flushed from the red palaces" and he saw streaming into the piazza what looked like a floral canopy but what he knew was in fact the multicolored crowd of human beings. It was the most vivid of the experiences through which he had discovered the contradiction between what one sees and what one knows. His survey in Seeing and Knowing of the successive conventions by means of which artists have effected a compromise "between retinal vision and conceptual looking" led him to prophesy that the "anarchic" heresies of "so-called" abstract art which reject any rational compromise between seeing and knowing would inevitably pass away and be replaced by "sculpture and painting as arts based on the human nude as the essential and vital factor in figure representation." In the "polyglot etymological puns and soap bubbles" of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, he wrote, the words at least have some "trace of meaning," but "the lines, dots, squares and circles, and other geometrical diagrams" of abstract painting "were related to each other only in the executant's impenetrable selfhood." Among illustrations exhibiting the conventions of representative art he included Picasso's lifelike drawing of Vollard and, on the opposite page, as an example of Picasso's "frivolously intellectualistic" distortion, a geometrical sketch of 1938 titled " W o m a n . " The essay drew critical outrage at Berenson's lapse "into something close to sheer vituperation." It was "little more than a statement of Berenson's prejudices," wrote one critic. Only his friend the painter George Biddle, in the New York Times, had a kind word to say: it had always been his " o w n credo" that "great art must retain a wholesome balance between seeing and knowing." One political event of 1948 that deeply stirred Berenson was the proclamation of the new state of Israel. The event became one of the subjects of a spirited interchange with Trevor-Roper, whose brilliantly successful Last Days of Hitler, published the year before, furnished an appropriate background. The terrorism that preceded the founding of the new nation was disturbing. Berenson commented, "I fear it is the Stern gangsters who will have monuments put up to them"; but then he added, "no people reaches statehood except through blood, filth, and terror. If you read such remarks about J e w s in Poland and the Warsaw ghetto as appeared in the Spectator you understand why all of them from Zentraleurop [523]

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want Palestine no matter on what terms. And now that a j e w is ready to dig the soil, fight and die nothing will stop him unfortunately and unhappily. O n the other hand he may establish a power that England may regret having embittered as she has Ireland." In his diary he protested against the "Spectator-minded Anglo-Saxon" who was indignant that the Jews were violently dispossessing the Arabs. " H o w did his Celtic, Saxon, Jute, Danish, Norse ancestors come to England? As suppliants begging to be admitted (as indeed the Jews in Palestine for decades)? They came with fire and sword sparing no one. And how about America?" When some years later his friend Stewart Perowne, the English Orientalist, hoped that when the fate of Israel was decided, the Jews would return to their spiritual mission, Berenson protested that they were human like the rest of mankind: "Why should they only be perpetually subject to persecution, to discrimination, to legalized or administrative annoyance, and—wholesale extermination as practised a few years ago by the Nazis?" In the years that followed, Berenson increasingly reconciled himself to the Jewish identity which at last had been thrust upon him. When he came to read Kafka's "minutely detailed self-awareness" in his diaries, he wondered whether such "narcissism" exhibited in the case also of Bergson, Proust, and his own self was not really due "to our Jewish origins. Hunted, always insecure, our ancestors must have developed unusual gifts of inner as well as outer observation, which nowadays turns us into psychologists, scientists, novelists, critics." He came to feel himself "a typical 'Talmud Jew,' " his chief pursuit "learning"—that "and brooding, dreaming, yearning, longing. . . . Only my Talmud now ignores Jewish learning and is concerned with everything that is human." He recalled that the N e w England education which he had eagerly embraced had so obliterated "the fantastically concentrated ghetto world" of his childhood "that it took Hitler and perhaps old age to revive it, bring it back to my daily divagations." The Holocaust had "made a place of security for the remainder imperative." Moreover, he saw Israel as bringing civilization to the Mideast, replacing the bedouin who had "scarcely put foot on the lowest rung of civilization." After three thousand years the Jews were "still creative," whereas the Arab was "nowhere." Israel, he believed, could be made "a bulwark of Western humanity and security." Berenson perceived himself as a Jew who had made his way in a pervasively hostile world rife with anti-Semitism. Being "intelligent, quicker, abler," Jews "cross the interests or vanity of gentiles, and are resented accordingly—the way Roger Fry resented my authority in Bond Street, and as good as declared war against me if I did not leave [524]

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London to him." But being a Jew, as Berenson was aware, was an immensely complicated affair, as complicated as least as being a Christian among a multitude of sects and social classes. For Berenson, as for many another Jew, there were more diverse and hostile tribes among Jews than ever populated Judea, from the secular atheist to the ultraorthodox Hasid. He reserved his chief disapproval for one that his imagination created, the German-Jewish art historians, and up to the end of his life he warned John Walker to keep clear of them. If his discriminations were often unreasonable as he surveyed his fellow Jew or "fellow scapegoat," his appreciation of being part of their larger fellowship was genuine. When Baroness Germaine de Rothschild told him of the fortunate recovery of a grandchild, he responded, "We Israelites are fabulously vital." As a nonagenarian he wrote, "I am more and more amazed to discover how seldom I meet an interesting thinker, scholar, or writer who does not turn out to be a Jew, half-Jew, or quarter-Jew." That he could number himself in their company now gave him a good deal of satisfaction. There was a peculiar pleasure in recalling his long-buried self: " H o w easy and warm the atmosphere between born Jews like Isaiah Berlin, Lewis Namier, myself, Bela Horowitz, when we drop the mask of being goyim and return to Yiddish reminiscences, and Yiddish stories and witticisms." His belated recovery of the Jewish identity that had been "obliterated" in his youth did not displace the manifold other identities which flourished side by side in his complex personality. N o r did it make any easier his dogged effort to unravel the puzzling contradictions of his elusive "self" as he probed his consciousness for a page in his diary.

[525]

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of the Inn

E R E N S O N ' S ambivalent conceptions o f his o w n nature w e r e illustrated w h e n Life magazine featured h i m in the A p r i l

n,

1949, issue not l o n g after Time had b r o u g h t h i m w o r l d w i d e

notice on the occasion o f his h o n o r s f r o m the Italian g o v e r n m e n t .

Life

dispatched a c r e w to p h o t o g r a p h h i m in his d o m a i n , and he e n j o y e d seeing the v a r y i n g p h o t o g r a p h i c revelations o f his personality. Y e t w h e n he philosophized about h i m s e l f o f an early m o r n i n g w i t h a w r i t i n g board o n his knees, he paradoxically t h o u g h t o f h i m s e l f as a v e r y private person. T h e f u l l - p a g e p h o t o g r a p h in Life o f h i m seated at his desk, w i t h copies o f the de l u x e Italian edition o f Aesthetics and History spread out before h i m , depicted a h a n d s o m e and distinguished-looking aristocrat, a strong, c a l m g r a y b e a r d w h o s e penetrating and philosophic gaze permitted n o evasion. H e had w e l c o m e d the p h o t o g r a p h e r and his c r e w , but the story w h i c h accompanied the p h o t o g r a p h s did not please h i m . It began b y saying that he had established " a n O l y m p i a n reputation as an art e x p e r t " and had m a d e " a m i n t o f m o n e y out o f it as w e l l . " H e lived in " a n elegant villa suitably r e m o t e f r o m the w o r l d ' s v u l g a r i t i e s . " T h e w r i t e r s p o k e o f his " p u n c t i l i o u s and fastidious daily l i f e " under N i c k y ' s " w a t c h f u l supervis i o n . " A succinct account o f his b e g i n n i n g s under the patronage o f M r s . Gardner asserted that his interest in art " c a m e suddenly and

flamboy-

a n t l y . " T h e characterization could hardly h a v e been m o r e o f f e n s i v e to his v i e w o f himself. H e protested to W a l k e r that the article w a s " d i s g u s t i n g , " adding, " I have n e v e r s o u g h t notoriety and n o w that in a petty w a y it has c o m e it is in the m o s t s h o d d y v u l g a r w a y . I m u s t deserve it I s u p p o s e . " T h a t he had s o u g h t f a m e as a w r i t e r o n art w a s quite another matter. B e r e n s o n ' s d i s c o v e r y b y Time and Life r e m o v e d the last shred o f his [526]

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scanty privacy. He n o w became an international personality to be sought out by the merely curious and the tuft-hunter. O n the w a y to his bath he would sometimes be startled by the sight of visitors being conducted through a corridor by a secretary to view the Primitives on the wall and he felt he had become merely part of the exhibit. One result of the increased publicity was that he became good " c o p y , " and guests from time to time published appreciative articles on I Tatti and its venerable master. The Life article made him the object of fan letters. There was already under w a y a project that would introduce him to a more sophisticated audience. The successful B r o a d w a y playwright Samuel Behrman had been at w o r k for several years, during intervals of dramaturgy, on a series of articles for the New Yorker magazine on Joseph Duveen. Louis L e v y had written a memoir of Duveen some years earlier in which, as Belle Greene told Berenson, he made him out to be the "unrecognized son of the Father and the Holy G h o s t . " L e v y lent Behrman the " m a r moreal panegyric," and Behrman so effectively satirized it to William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, that Shawn challenged him to do a "Profile." Behrman soon discovered Berenson's pivotal position in Duveen's career, and Shawn suggested that an entire article in the series be devoted to Berenson. Walker, with w h o m Behrman had become friendly when digging away in the archives of the National Gallery of Art, proposed to Berenson that he talk with Behrman when they could all be in Venice for the Bellini exhibition in June of 1949. Berenson approved the idea. He was anxious to meet the writer of J o e Duveen's life, he said, "and put him straight" about his connection " w i t h his lordship," for there was " a fatal tendency" in what was written about himself " t o get everything wrong, and what is worse, v u l g a r . " With much trepidation Behrman met Berenson at lunch on the terrace of the Europa Hotel in Venice. He was so impressed and excited by his encounter with this "tiny J o v e " that, as he wrote to Paul Sachs in the fall, he didn't " k n o w what the Hell" he was eating. The fifty-eight-year-old Behrman added that he wished he "could have sat at his feet twenty years ago. I feel that m y life would have been immeasurably enriched had I been able to do s o . " At one of their interviews Berenson, indisposed, was in bed with just his head visible. " H e looked gigantic," Behrman recalled. "Certainly his looks were extraordinary . . . transcendent. The sentences rippled f r o m him at once casual and lapidary." One memorable sentence that Behrman was obliged to omit on the lawyers' advice ran thus: " D u v e e n was at the center of a vast, circular nexus of corruption that reached f r o m the lowliest employee of the British Museum, [527]

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right up to the K i n g . " Twenty years later, in his People in a Diary, he felt free to include it. Shocked by what he was learning of Duveen's methods, Behrman wondered how Berenson kept himself "free of centripetal suction." Many years afterward Kenneth Clark, apparently inspired by Behrman's metaphor, depicted Berenson for the British Broadcasting Corporation as being " o n the highest pinnacle of the mountain of corruption; he didn't do anything positively dishonest, but he couldn't get d o w n . " What that "nexus of corruption" was Behrman vividly described in the Andrew Mellon section of the New Yorker "Profile." Duveen knew the enormously persuasive power of money shrewdly spent upon the domestic staffs of prospective clients or upon benefactions to a museum director with a too-limited budget. He built an informal network of spies, in effect a system of commercial espionage, to enable him to be the first to learn of the whereabouts of a painting to be bought or sold or the whereabouts of a purchaser to be intercepted in his travels. Though Berenson had declined to play a role in that sordid system, the knowledge that he had contributed to the success of the system by his eloquent "certificates" and had greatly profited from it had long weighed on his conscience. It was an experience that he tried to erase from memory. The name " D u v e e n " rarely appears in his diary, and when it does he merely mentions him as an "art broker" who affected him "negatively, if at all." Another vivid characterization that Behrman was not permitted to publish reflected the singular impression he had received of " B . B . " " D u veen was like the captain of a pirate ship, bearing in its solitary cabin the prisoner he had abducted, and he the most sensitive and civilized consciousness in the w o r l d . " After Behrman returned to N e w York he wrote to Nicky of his plan "to write along about Duveen for a good space . . . and then launch into B . B . (I can't wait to launch!) and to show that the whole tremendous edifice of sales, taste and so on, were all based on one perception, and one intelligence, and two eyes, all residing in Florence, Italy." Behrman sent the draft of his article on Berenson to him and incorporated his corrections. A large part of the article depicted Berenson's walks about Venice during the days of the Bellini exhibition at the Doges' Palace. The sprightly oracle moved slowly through the crowds, a diminutive figure in "brown fedora, brown suit, gleaming walking stick and brown boots," frequently "raising his hat to passing acquaintances." At the entrance of the Doges' Palace after "much hat lifting and embracing," he talked briefly with a German who began to weep and moved off. Berenson, his face grimly set, explained that the man was the director of the Dresden museum. " 'He returned to his former post but the Russians [528]

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c a m e and carted e v e r y t h i n g off. . . . W h a t m a d e m y friend cry w a s not alone that they t o o k the things o f f but that they were so badly packed!'

"

A s the little procession m o v e d about, Freya Stark came u p and B e r e n son " g r e e t e d her ecstatically," j o k i n g to a c o m p a n i o n that " s h e w a s intended b y P r o v i d e n c e to be a B e d o u i n . " T h e n before the pictures he " w e n t to w o r k w i t h his t o o l s — a

flashlight,

a m a g n i f y i n g glass, and

slung o v e r one shoulder, a pair o f opera glasses." W h e n his torch "cast a light o n the hills behind V i c e n z a " depicted in one painting, he remarked, " ' E x a c t l y w h a t it is t o d a y , isn't it Freya?' " H e asked her w h e t h e r she r e m e m b e r e d the Latin p o e t w h o described the scene. She began to recite the verses and B e r e n s o n " t o o k o v e r and recited the r e s t . " B e f o r e another picture, The Dead Christ Supported by Angels, in w h i c h o n l y part o f one o f the cherubs w a s visible, he e x c l a i m e d , " ' T h e audacity o f Bellini! W h a t a dazzling i n n o v a t o r he w a s to a l l o w that child's head to remain invisible! A n d l o o k — l o o k at those adorable children. L o o k at their faces! T h e y k n o w they o u g h t to be s y m p a t h e t i c . ' " B e f o r e a nearby altarpiece o f a C h u r c h father in a h e a v i l y b r o c a d e d robe grasping a staff, he b r o k e out, " 'See the weight o f t h a t hand! A n d the weight o f the brocade!' " B e f o r e another painting the flashlight s w e p t across he declared w i t h o u t hesitation, " ' T h i s Bellini is not a Bellini!' " T h e little g r o u p then stood b e f o r e a painting f r o m the L o u v r e , Christ Blessing.

" A t this picture Berenson

stared a l o n g time, s a y i n g n o t h i n g at a l l . " IN THE spring o f 1949 B e r e n s o n reported to W a l k e r the arrival o f a fresh contingent o f curators w h i c h included A l p h e u s H y a t t M a y o r , curator o f prints at the M e t r o p o l i t a n M u s e u m o f A r t , and H e n r y Sayles Francis, curator o f paintings and prints at the C l e v e l a n d M u s e u m o f A r t . B e r e n son listened raptly to talk " t e e m i n g w i t h m u s e u m g o s s i p . " H e counseled M a y o r and Francis and their f e l l o w curators in person and b y letters o n attributions, and they in turn sent p h o t o g r a p h s o f n e w acquisitions o f Italian paintings for his e v e r - g r o w i n g p h o t o g r a p h collection. W i t h their help and that o f dealers he kept track for his Lists o f the c h a n g i n g locations o f paintings as private collections w e r e b r o k e n up and sold. O n e especially interesting c h a n g e o f location had occurrcd, as G e r m a i n S e l i g m a n i n f o r m e d h i m . T h e f i r m had j u s t agreed to sell to the Kress F o u n d a t i o n a M a n t e g n a Portrait of a Man w h i c h B e r e n s o n had expertized for G e r m a i n ' s cousin G e o r g e s b e f o r e the w a r . It j o i n e d the Kress C o l l e c tion at the N a t i o n a l Gallery o f A r t , and G e r m a i n , in appreciation o f B e r e n s o n ' s l o n g past services, sent a check f o r $16,000 as compensation. B y this time a substantial correspondence had arisen w i t h Samuel Kress and his brother R u s h . B e r e n s o n had n o w received a list o f queries f r o m the elder Kress, w h o w a s particularly concerned about the attribu[529]

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tions o f t w o important paintings in his collection. O n e o f these w a s the C o o k t o n d o Adoration of the Magi. It w a s this inquiry that p r o m p t e d B e r e n s o n to w r i t e the " P o s t s c r i p t 1949: T h e C o o k T o n d o R e v i s i t e d , " w h i c h H a n n a K i e l published in Homeless Paintings together w i t h his 1 9 3 2 Bollettino d'Arte article " F r a A n g e l i c o , Fra Filippo and T h e i r Chronology." T h e other painting about w h i c h Kress inquired w a s the Allendale Nativity, purchased as a G i o r g i o n e in 1938 f r o m D u v e e n after B e r e n s o n b r o k e w i t h the f i r m . B e r e n s o n told K r e s s that he had had the picture in his study t w e l v e years ago, " a n d short o f having it again under m y eye, no further photos could help m e . " What w a s to h a v e an i m p o r t a n t bearing o n B e r e n s o n ' s o w n w o r k w a s Kress's request f o r advice concerning the publication p r o g r a m that the foundation w a s undertaking. B e r e n s o n u r g e d the foundation to " p u b l i s h b o o k s that in the present state o f anarchy c o m m e r c i a l - m i n d e d publishers d o not dare to p r i n t . " " I , f o r o n e , " he assured Kress, " a m ready to f o r e g o any profits on w h a t y o u w i l l bring o u t . " O f his o w n w o r k s he suggested as a starter A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend, a w o r k that w a s particularly dear to him, and an essay o f his on the " A d o r a t i o n o f the M a g i , " f o r w h i c h he said a thousand copies in English and f i v e hundred in Italian w o u l d be sufficient since the essay w o u l d appeal only to specialists. N e i t h e r o f these suggestions w a s taken up. His second proposal, a n e w illustrated edition o f his Italian Painters of the Renaissance, p r o v e d m o r e attractive. H e had already sent on to K r e s s a c o p y o f the Italian third edition, w h i c h had c o m e out in the preceding year. A s BERENSON r e v i e w e d the passing w e e k s in the autumn o f 1949 " t h e mental l a n d s c a p e " seemed " d u l l and d i m . " Guests m a d e their w a y up to C a s a al D o n a as usual, but he felt he " c o u l d no longer participate in controversial t a l k , " so that at times he f o u n d himself in the strange position o f a silent bystander. Sure relief, h o w e v e r , lay in travel and sightseeing. A t the Vatican galleries in R o m e w i t h the archaeologist Gisela Richter, daughter o f J e a n Paul Richter, he w a s almost as m u c h diverted studying the faces o f tourists as reexamining his " o l d sticks and s t o n e s " on the walls. A t N a p l e s he clambered about P o m p e i i w i t h the archaeologist A m e d e o M a i u r i . H e passed a f e w days w i t h his " o d a l i s q u e " Clotilde at her l u x u r i o u s villa, La Quiete, and got back to I Tatti on O c t o b e r 20 in time to w e l c o m e the L i p p m a n n s . Philip H o f e r , the H a r v a r d bibliographer and b o o k collector, w h o had been his guest in the villino f o r six w e e k s , had been succeeded there b y D e r e k Hill, the y o u n g E n g l i s h painter w h o s e intimate companionship B e r e n s o n w a s to enjoy f o r the next f e w years w h i l e Hill painted the T u s c a n landscape.

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T h e guest r o o m s o f I Tatti continued to be filled as if he w e r e " k e e p i n g a boarding house w i t h free meals and l o d g i n g s . " It w a s " e x c e s s i v e but not u n p l e a s a n t . " C o u n t C o n t i n i B o n a c o s s i , w i t h w h o m he w a s n o w quite friendly, came up to see h i m and p r o v o c a t i v e l y announced he had sixty paintings to s h o w h i m . B e r e n s o n " c o a x e d a bit and w a s s h o w n s o m e t w e n t y . T h e rest no doubt all intended f o r K r e s s , his one and only buyer. S o be prepared f o r the b e s t , " he told Walker, w h o advised the K r e s s Foundation. Since Pichetto, the restorer at the National Gallery o f A r t , had died, K r e s s urged B e r e n s o n to get together w i t h Contini to r e c o m m e n d a successor. M a r i o M o d e s t i n i , C o n t i n i ' s restorer, w a s persuaded to accept the post and w a s soon expressing horror at Pichetto's ο verrestorations. B e r e n s o n ' s free " b o a r d i n g h o u s e " w a s a salon in almost continuous session w h o s e " T h u r s d a y s " w e r e held e v e r y day. A l f r e d Frankfurter came to report on the current A m e r i c a n taste in art. A x e l Boethius, the eminent S w e d i s h archaeologist, n o w rector o f G o t e b e r g U n i v e r s i t y , w h o m B e r e n s o n had not seen f o r t w e n t y years, r e n e w e d his visits, s o m e times in the c o m p a n y o f his f e l l o w archaeologist C r o w n Prince Gustaf. A n o t h e r returnee w a s Percy L u b b o c k , w h o s e Edith Wharton had c o m e out t w o years earlier. T h e t w o m e n talked o f long-dead H e n r y J a m e s , w h o s e letters L u b b o c k had published in 1920. B e r e n s o n s a w m u c h that year o f the " a l w a y s delightful causeur" H a r o l d A c t o n and the devoted A r t u r o Loria, o n w h o m he increasingly relied as a translator. H u g h T r e v o r - R o p e r c a m e f o r a stay and dazzled h i m w i t h his grasp o f history and current politics, and he listened w i t h keen pleasure to the O x f o r d don's intimate tales o f academic politics. A s the years fled b y , time g r e w m o r e precious. B e r e n s o n w a s n o w nearing e i g h t y - f i v e , and despite "endless cossetting each d a y " and E m m a ' s " f r i c t i o n s , inhalations, attentions to nose, to g u m s , to throat, to e a r s , " he kept hearing the sound o f the distant d r u m . W o u l d he be alive next y e a r — o r even on the m o r r o w ? H e felt himself a voice c r y i n g in the wilderness o f an irrational and heedless w o r l d , and whether he w o u l d be listened to or not he w a s determined to speak out, to h a v e his say w h i l e he still had breath, to hurry his doctrine into print while there was still time. T h e diary o f his w a r years, ready since 1945, w a s still unpublished. " S i c k o f approaching cap in hand on m y knees to A n g r y - S a x o n p u b l i s h e r s , " he had turned to an Italian publisher, and the v o l u m e w a s b r o u g h t out in the beginning o f 1 9 5 0 in an Italian v e r s i o n — E c h i e Riflessiotti—translated b y his friend C o u n t G u g l i e l m o degli Alberti. A t least Italians w h o had l i v e d t h r o u g h those f o u r years w i t h h i m , years o f Fascismo, w a r f a r e , and privation, w o u l d find his pages r e w a r d i n g . T h e p u b lisher's faith w a s supported b y f a v o r a b l e r e v i e w s . [531]

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In April 1950 Luisa Vertova's Italian version of Piero delta Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art appeared as a small book. It was followed by Alberto Sani: An Artist Out of His Time, published by the Electa Press in a copiously illustrated folio volume with texts in both English and Italian. Sponsored by the Associazione Italo-Americana in honor of Berenson's eighty-fifth birthday, the volume had the distinction of being the only work by Berenson on a living artist. The subject had been proposed to him by painter-publisher Dario Neri, who had "discovered" the strangely talented wood carver whose sculptures closely resembled those on the fagades of medieval cathedrals. The fifty-four-year-old Neri, who had founded the Electa Press after the war, had taken a warm interest in the elderly Berenson. As captain of his section of Siena for the Palio, he had taken Berenson in his charge for the event, and it was he who had introduced Berenson to the wood sculptor at Campriano. A short illustrated article in the Burlington Magazine on Zanobi Machiavelli showed that Berenson had lost neither his courage in revising his own attributions nor his readiness to revise those of others. The occasion for reviewing the artist's oeuvre seems to have been the recent sale in N e w York of a painting as a Fra Filippo which, though done "under Fra Filippo's overpowering influence," Berenson believed should be assigned to Machiavelli. Among other paintings he now attributed to Machiavelli were the Hurd Madonna, formerly given to Filippo Lippi, and a painting he had once, with some misgiving, attributed to Pesellino. Machiavelli might be a minor painter, but by scraping away the "barnacles," the paintings mistakenly attributed to the master in whose studio the painter worked, one restored "the pure outline of an artistic personality." It was now ten years since Berenson had begun keeping his diary, and the daily entries had become for him "almost as necessary as eating and drinking, certainly as much as love-making was in the past." With doubtful conviction he added, "It might cheer me now for the loss of virility by being reminded of all the mistresses I had in the past." The daily entries may have become, as he later said, a form of "personal discipline," but they also allowed him to savor with a keener relish the ever-dissolving flow of thought and sensation. The flight of time could be stayed for a contemplative moment. In the closely written and almost illegible pages, he kept his eye on the posterity to whom he would bequeath the record of his aging sensibility. Introspective to a fault, he compiled a self-searching document of sharp perceptions and bland banalities, of unabashed contradictions, of snobbery and humility, of sensual and erotic fantasies, of humanist aspirations, of all the complexities of life that defied synthesis and deepened the riddle of self. If he [532]

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recorded the continuance of his capacity for the enjoyment of art and nature, for the aesthetic raptures that were enhanced by their precariousness, he also recorded with uninhibited scruple the stages of physical decline, the disgusting vagaries of bladder and bowels, the increasing number of all-too-human frailties. The prospective reader was not to be cheated of the unmitigated truth. Long ago his friend Ralph Curtis had chided him for his devotion to women. The diary of his old age showed no slackening in that devotion. The recurring entries confirm what the cult of youth crudely disparages, the capacity of the elderly for romantic love and sexual passion. In her volume Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir would one day draw appreciatively upon these reflections. Time and again Berenson returned to the tantalizing subject. It was the charm of women that they remained "adolescent-minded through all ages." At eighty-three he remarked, " G i v e me an aspiring and admiring woman to crank me up for talk." What sentient male—of any age—would not feel the force of his admission at eighty-five, " M y mind when vacuous dwells a good deal on women and always with a faint erotic tinge"? He still dreamt of "fair w o m e n " as the " w o l f dreams of the lamb." It was only "in the very last few years," he wrote at eighty-eight, that he had "gradually become more and more aware of how sex dominates us . . . no matter how tucked away. . . . Do we ever meet a [woman] for the first time without asking ourselves whether we would want to go to bed with her?" Though it was long since the wish could be father to the deed, the tactile sense lived on in his caresses, and sometimes disconcerted the prudish whom he touched with his cold hand. As a nonagenerian, Berenson recorded, "I still would like to caress all the young women who attract m e . " The aged Bernard Shaw once stated what was in the main true of Berenson. "In permanence and seriousness my consummated love affairs count for nothing besides the ones that were either unconsummated or ended by discarding that relation." Like Shaw, Berenson was often "a male amorist but only on paper." His letters to women were frequently, he admitted, "caressing, coddling, even amorous," so much so that it would seem he was "making love to a number of ladies, all of canonical age and at the same time." He was satisfied that "they are as aware of the game as I am and repay me in the same coinage." The thousands of letters—preserved in the I Tatti Archive—which he received from scores of women friends and "pen pals" during his long life exhibit every degree of the romantic love and friendship which he celebrated. IN MAY of 1950, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino impending, Berenson decided to relive past pleasures by a tour of France, the country that he [53 3]

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had not seen since before World War II. A paradoxical reason for travel, he confessed, was to get away from "all the reminders of what I want to do, but shall not." The car was finally loaded with its piles of oldfashioned luggage, a box of books, and the inevitable tea things and he, Nicky, and the indispensable Emma set out on May 16 on a leisurely tenday drive to Paris with the imperturbable Parry in the driver's seat. " O l d Paris," he exulted after he settled himself in the Prince de Galles Hotel for a month's stay, "is more of a whore than ever—more alluring." Literary people "make flattering declarations." Arthur Koestler impressed him as a stimulating talker, though "a deeply convinced supernaturalist." He retraced the way, on June 8, to the Villa Trianon, where AngloAmerican society used to congregate, and found his aged contemporary Elsie de Wolfe, the only survivor of the fashionable "Trinity" who had once lived there. The refurnished house was more exquisite than ever, but Elsie looked "scarcely alive, a skeleton with a head fantastically dressed up, a pair of dark eyes into which all life has retreated and concentrated, as if for a last, a supreme effort." She seemed wild with excitement to embrace him. Fighting off death with a certain elan, she entertained visitors almost to the end. A month after his visit, her secretary-companion replied to Berenson's inquiry with word that she was dying. Her death came on July 12. In his abbreviated daily walks, Berenson found Paris more "delightful than ever, mostly because the visible is on a human scale." It was a relief to get " a w a y from Italy's petty problems" and its "provincial citizens." His French friends welcomed him as at a homecoming after his fourteen years' absence. He made the rounds to Jean Rouvier, the writerdiplomat, met with Count Reynald de Simony, and dined with Marie Laure de Noailles, the writer who had been part of Edith Wharton's circle. He found Jean Cocteau flourishing as poet-dramatist and filmmaker, whose Enfants Terribles and Orphee had just been screened. At afternoon teas at the Louis Gillets he met Nancy Mitford and Sylvia Thompson. It was a pleasure to see again the fascinating Philomene de Levis-Mirepoix, whom he took to dinner. She seemed more human, more stimulating, more vibrant than ever. Kenneth Clark and Ben Nicolson came over from England, bringing news of the British art world from their posts at its center. He had a cheering visit also with Derek Hill, his former neighbor in the Villino Corbignano, and he spent a pleasant hour with Sumner Welles. In the Salle des Sept Maitres at the Louvre, where he was seated in state, the director, Georges Salles, an old friend and admirer, presented him to department heads and trustees, and he reciprocated their "flattering phrases" as gracefully as he could. He haunted the museums with [534]

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undiminished appetite and even spent days at the " u p - t o - d a t e " exhibits, b y w a y o f discipline. T h o u g h less shocked than he had expected, he could not help exclaiming to M a r g a r e t B a r r , " W h a t a reversion o f values and w h a t a helot revolt against draughtsmanship. Serves them right,, them w h o admire t h e m . " A t the L o u v r e he l o o k e d at medieval sculpture in the c o m p a n y o f the noted art historian M a r c e l A u b e r t . His greatest delight, h o w e v e r , w a s to r o a m the aisles o f a bookstore, his fingers itching to pick u p e v e r y b o o k he s a w . H e w o u l d h a v e liked to " b u y and send h o m e half the s h o p . " H e visited f o r a f e w days at the Chateau de St. Firmin near Chantilly as the guest o f Sir A l f r e d D u f f C o o p e r and L a d y Diana. His old L o n d o n friend L a d y S y b i l C o l e f a x , one o f his favorite correspondents, n o w e i g h t y - o n e and desperately ill, insisted o n c o m i n g over to see h i m and even accompanied all o f them to v i e w the paintings at Chantilly. She s u r v i v e d the visit b y o n l y a f e w months. F r o m Paris the sentimental travelers loitered d o w n to the cathedrals o f Chartres and B o u r g e s . T h e y d r o v e o n to G r e n o b l e and D i g n e , B e r e n s o n visiting old confreres o r sightseeing f r o m the c a r — n o t , as long ago, " p o k i n g " his nose " i n t o e v e r y a l l e y . " A t N i c e he called on his " c o n t e m p o r a r y " Matisse, w h o seemed " h i g h l y satisfied w i t h h i m s e l f " and " v e r y different f r o m the anxious, half-starved, apostolic peasant" B e r e n s o n had first met. Matisse seemed sure that his w o r k in the chapel at V e n c e w o u l d be his masterpiece. H e talked o f the Steins and o f the visit he had once m a d e to I Tatti. Berenson came a w a y unimpressed b y the t w o " v e r y b u m p y " sculptures in the studio. B e r e n s o n had carried w i t h h i m to N i c e a letter he had received in Paris f r o m M a l l y D i e n e m a n n , the h i g h l y intellectual w i d o w o f a G e r m a n rabbi w h o had died in Israel shortly after his release f r o m a concentration c a m p in 1939. She w a s n o w living in C h i c a g o , and, h a v i n g been greatly m o v e d by his Sketch for a Self-Portrait, she had begun a correspondence w i t h h i m in 1949. In the course o f their interchange she had challenged his a d m i r a tion f o r Christianity. " Y o u speak o f G o d and the l o v e o f G o d , " he w r o t e in reply to her letter, " b u t I use a different v o c a b u l a r y . In the cathedrals o f Chartres and B o u r g e s I felt exalted, transfigured, and could not but be deeply grateful to the inspiration w h i c h produced them. N o m e t a p h y s ical or historical considerations can contradict the visual, the verbal, the musical art. A n d none as m u c h as w h a t Christianity has created and revealed and t h r o u g h its daily ritual continues revealing. S o I a m happy to find G o d sub specie o f Christ, the V i r g i n , the Saints and f o r m e they are TRUTHS w i t h o u t being FACTS. . . . I feel at h o m e in e v e r y house o f prayer." In spite o f M r s . D i e n e m a n n ' s great admiration f o r him, his arguments [ 5 3 5]

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did not persuade her, and their friendly debate went on in letter after letter. In one he acknowledged that the Old Testament "grows on me and I never tire of reading it—all but the revolting Leviticus." He countered her objections to his view of Christianity with an ingenious reversal. " A s for Jesus and Peter and Paul," he wrote, "it is time that we Jews claimed them as the most determining individuals in our history. Christianity is only detribalizedJudaism." Subsequently, on a visit to St. Peter's in Rome, he touched again on the theme: "What a triumph for the Jewish race that a Galilean peasant should have as his putative sepulchre this grandest ever put up by the White Race!" He told of seeing a good deal of the "highly cultivated" Katherine Dunham in Rome. It was tragic, he wrote, that she was discriminated against at home because of her color, and added, " W e J e w s know the horror of being looked down upon by our inferiors everywhere." Berenson's debates with Mrs. Dienemann continued for ten years. He urged her to visit I Tatti. She came in 1951 and again a few years later in the course of her travels to Israel. In one of their conversations she asked him why he, a world-famous person, had offered hospitality to her, a person of little importance. He told her he had "collected samples" ever since his youth and she promised to be a particularly interesting one. Observing his life at I Tatti, she came to feel that he could not bear to be alone. She felt too that the methodical schedule of his life gave him a sense of stability and security. When she had spoken of the tidiness of his surroundings, he had declared that it helped him avoid getting lost.

EXCEPT for a visit to the Sodoma exhibition in Siena, which confirmed the high opinion he had originally had of that "delightful" figure of the High Renaissance, the summer of 1950 after his return from Paris passed without notable event. He kept his " i n n " open at I Tatti and later in the summer and fall at Vallombrosa. Martha Gellhorn teased him, " Y o u run the only great house in existence on a W . C . T . U . basis." It was true that whiskey was absent, but not wine and "low-voltage" aperitifs. Characteristically, he deprecated his popularity. People came to see "the monument," he declared, " o f which I am the keeper living in the porter's lodge." The American writer Elizabeth Hard wick, one of his visitors that year, observed that "Berenson's nature destined him to be an inn-keeper." It seemed to her that his "absorbing inclination" was the simple fear of missing someone, "almost as if these countless visitors and travelers had a secret the exile pitifully wished to discover." She found him "marvelously vivacious and, in more than one respect, inspiring." His great age, [536]

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she felt, was "an achievement, the same as his books, bought with a good deal of anguish and hard w o r k . " There was no want of friends who took the hour's drive up through Pontassieve and the tortuous lane through the pine forest to Casa al Dono. Among them were Harold Edgell and William Milliken, director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Berenson scoffed at Milliken's admiration for "mere scholars"; an art historian, he declared, " w h o is not a connoisseur is like a pointer without a nose." On a "glorious hot day" Harold Nicolson and his wife, Vita, came up to spend the night. They found Luisa Vertova there, the young woman who, a few years later, was to marry their son Ben. When Berenson talked about Rilke, whom he had been reading, Vita broke in, " H e must have been a small man." " N o t in the least," responded the diminutive Berenson, "he was my size." Driven out of the "paradise" of Vallombrosa by the steadily falling temperature, Berenson took to the road again to immerse himself, while life remained, in the sights and sounds of Rome. On the way the travelers paused at Assisi, where the princes of the Church had come, resplendent in their scarlet robes, for the Feast of Saint Francis. The crowds lining the parapets looked to him as decorative as a Veronese painting. Everywhere in and about Rome he hungrily retraced his way, staring intently at the familiar sights as if they were newly revealed to him. Viewing the dome of St. Peter's "looming out of the grey-blue mist" at dawn, he vowed he could spend all day "looking, looking, looking." He again refused "the offer of a 'private audience' with the Pope," as there would be no real chance of "glimpsing the private person behind the public myth. What profit would it be to him, or to me?" Far more rewarding were the carvings of the antique fragments at San Lorenzo outside the walls and the excavations of the vast ruins of Palestrina viewed in the company of an American archaeologist. Berenson attended an exhibition of drawings by Seurat and decided that the artist's "whole bag of tricks" consisted "rather like Carriere's . . . of picking objects out of a mist." One day he mounted to the church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli on the Capitoline Hill, where fervent pilgrims worshiped the much-bedizened little statue of the infant Jesus. As an amateur archaeologist he recognized the ancient doll-like effigy as identical with the infant Osiris; it appealed, he said, to the "child in m e . " That he should be susceptible led him to reflect that the psychology of religious worship was still an unexplored terrain. DURING 1950 Berenson was able to apply himself to one of the projects he had mapped out in 1948, a deflation of the rising vogue of Caravag[537]

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g i o . T h e h i g h l y personal m o n o g r a p h finally t o o k shape and, impatient to have it published, he o f f e r e d it to the Electa Press w h e n A m e r i c a n and British publishers held off. D e d i c a t e d to the m e m o r y o f the Italian art critic A l d o de Rinaldis, it c a m e o u t in 1951, translated b y Luisa V e r t o v a . In 1953 the original version w a s issued b y C h a p m a n and Hall in L o n d o n . B y then the small b o o k c o m p e t e d w i t h R o g e r H i n k s ' s much-praised academic study, a kind o f w o r k that w a s anathema to Berenson. H i n k s ironically c o n c e d e d that B e r e n s o n ' s b o o k m i g h t be read " w i t h a m u s e m e n t and p r o f i t . " In Caravaggio, His Incongruity and His Fame B e r e n s o n , d r a w i n g on sixty years o f s t u d y and reflection, t o o k the reader b y the hand to adventure t h r o u g h the w o r k s o f the artist. A g a i n s t the current admiring claim o f C a r a v a g g i o ' s m o d e r n i t y he issued his dissenting opinion: "In e v e r y w a y C a r a v a g g i o m a k e s o n one like m y s e l f the impression o f an early C i n quecento V e n e t i a n o u t o f his time, out o f his place a n d — o u t o f his t e c h n i q u e . " T h e recent craze for C a r a v a g g i o w a s , he believed, based not o n the " q u a l i t y " o f his w o r k but o n his r o m a n t i c temperament. T h e cultist nature o f the v o g u e led B e r e n s o n into uninhibited d i gressions against the " G e r m a n - m i n d e d a u t h o r s " for w h o m a " w o r k o f art is o n l y a s p r i n g b o a r d f r o m w h i c h to p l u n g e into turbid depths o f the subumbilical subconscious or to rise w i t h leaden w i n g s into an e m p y r e a n w h e n c e they b r i n g d o w n theories, pseudo-histories, misinterpretations, romances, occult t h e o l o g i e s , " and so on. His invective ranged o v e r the f u n c t i o n o f eclecticism, the m e a n i n g o f the " b a r o q u e , " the nature o f " m a n n e r i s m , " and the question o f value in art. H e w a s particularly v e h e m e n t in his attack o n the efforts to associate C a r a v a g g i o w i t h the baroque, insisting that C a r a v a g g i o " d e s e r v e d to be regarded as the m o s t anti-baroque artist o f the X V I I c e n t u r y . " R e v i e w s o f B e r e n s o n ' s p e p p e r y j u d g m e n t s w e r e naturally

mixed.

E v e n the l o y a l B e n N i c o l s o n disarmingly suggested that B e r e n s o n ' s v i e w " m u s t be taken in the light-hearted spirit in w h i c h it is w r i t t e n . " T h e Apollo leniently r e m a r k e d that B e r e n s o n ' s procedure o f saying " a n y thing that c o m e s into his h e a d " w a s " p a l p a b l y w o r t h w h i l e w h e r e a head such as his is the source o f instruction and delectation." T h e

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similarly t h o u g h t the m o n o g r a p h a " m o s a i c o f brilliant thoughts and m u s i n g s . " Walter Pach agreed w i t h B e r e n s o n that mere

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should g i v e w a y t o the r e c o g n i t i o n o f artistic quality. C l e a r l y evident to all w a s that time had not w e a k e n e d B e r e n s o n ' s aesthetic passions nor diminished the v i g o r o f his rhetoric.

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E R E N S O N resented the unwillingness of English and American publishers to take his volume of selections from his war diary despite the attention Time and Life had given him. Hence, when in the spring of 1951 M a x Schuster of the firm of Simon and Schuster came to lunch and asked him whether he had a manuscript available, Berenson grumbled, " O n l y my war diary and nobody wants that." Schuster asked to be allowed to take it to his hotel. The next day he phoned to say that he had hardly slept, hurrying from one diary entry to another. " I will not only publish it," he said, " I will make a best seller of it." It was astounding, he thought, that the book had had to wait for him. "What is the matter with American publishers," he wrote to Richard Simon, "if they can't tune in on a notable, noble, and gloriously yea-saying humanistic work like this?" It happened that almost simultaneously Constable in London agreed to bring out a British edition in a shortened version. N o longer sought after by English and American journals, Berenson directed his busy pen in 1951 to Italian and French publications. One article, " T h e Importance of Fashion in the Dating of Pictures," appeared as the introduction to the catalogue of the Turin exhibition, La Moda in Cinque Secoli di Pittura. In another article in La Revue des Arts he conjectured that a Giorgionesque Sacred Conversation, given to Sebastiano del Piombo, should be assigned to Domenico Mancini. In his youth he had admired it as Giorgione's. The " g a m e " of attribution had obviously lost none of its fascination for him. Inspired by the forthcoming exhibition of the paintings of Tiepolo in Venice, he contributed to another French periodical an article on the painter about whom he had once expressed reservations. N o w , " o w i n g to a maturer judgment and to a much wider

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and more penetrating acquaintance with his w o r k s , " he concluded that Tiepolo was "the greatest painter Italy had had since Tintoretto." Having had his say, he took refuge in Ischia off the bay of Naples to minister to the hay fever which had been exhausting him. A fortnight sufficed to improve him, and in the early summer he departed for Turin to archaeologize the great Egyptian collection. From there he moved on to Milan to pass a critical eye over the Caravaggio show and then came to rest in his beloved Venice for two weeks of absorption in the paintings of Tiepolo. The usual two months at Vallombrosa followed. This year the guests were fewer. Among them were his sisters Senda and Bessie, much mellowed by age. One day, after the robust ninety-one-year-old Vittorio Orlando, w h o m he had met at the Peace Conference, lunched with him, he wailed, " H e still addresses audiences o f t e n thousands, runs Sicily, has a voice in everything in Italy, dines out every evening . . . why can't I be like that?" The pace of life went more slowly for him and the periods of dozing grew longer. Late in the season hay fever again assailed him, and he returned to Ischia for a spell. In September of 1951 Berenson was able to tell his cousin Lawrence that the Phaidon Press was to publish a sumptuously illustrated new edition of his Italian Painters of the Renaissance. The Kress Foundation had granted a subsidy of $15,000 for the edition, and Bela Horowitz, the directing spirit of the Phaidon Press, who had been introduced to Berenson by Kenneth Clark, had become Berenson's enthusiastic advocate. Kenneth Clark and his wife came for "a longish stay" at I Tatti in the autumn and were followed for ten days by Judge Learned Hand, with whom Berenson enjoyed "reminiscences of Harvard, Boston, and N e w York to the full." Sometimes the crush of guests at luncheon, tea, and dinner overwhelmed him and half the time, he said, he did not know who they were nor, with his impaired hearing, could he understand what they were saying. He was becoming the victim of his own gregariousness. Whatever the distractions at home or abroad, there was no letup in the chief activity that held together the multitudinous threads of his existence. As he reclined in bed of a morning, he scrawled away at his immense private correspondence. Berenson had an uncanny ability to keep before him the identity of each correspondent and the matrix of associations surrounding each. He knew the importance of regular and frequent letters in keeping a friendship alive, and he made a point himself of always replying promptly. A characteristic entreaty, as to Peter Viereck, ran, " M a k e time to write and tell me about your private self." If Viereck's responses seemed to slacken, he could plead, even at eightyseven, " I fear you are too busy to write to me, but I am eager for news of

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all of you, not only yourself, but wife and children, and I want to know what you are publishing besides what you send me. Are you lecturing? What chances of my seeing you soon?" Assured of a sympathetic hearing, correspondents often confided the most intimate details of their loves and marriages, of their successes and failures, of births and miscarriages, of the raising of their children and the planning of their lives, of their innermost thoughts and feelings. For many he became a sort of father confessor, and he filed away their revelations as he hoped they would treasure his. T o his dying day he could not forgive Belle Greene for having destroyed the hundreds of letters he had written to her. She had been "part and parcel" of himself " f o r twenty years," he confided to William Milliken in 1951, the year after her death. He recalled that in the first years of their ardent friendship, he "wrote to her nearly every day—all destroyed." It seemed to him a kind of homicide. If by his correspondence he daily kept himself oriented in his kaleidoscopic social and professional world, in his diary he frequently logged his bearings in the inner world of his consciousness. "Self-curious," he studied himself as in a mirror and recorded his reactions to the world about him with the same intense detachment that he might take toward a painting. There was a quixotic, sometimes embarrassing candor in his self-communings with the private B . B . In these confessional pages, with only a distant posterity to restrain him, he could doff the role of grand seigneur to exhibit the all-too-human "biped" who wore his robe of state. The diary served other purposes as well. It became a kind of literary savings bank in which were deposited the reflections and reminiscences that surged incessantly through his mind and which he now turned to account for his new occupation as a columnist for the Corriere della Sera. Several years earlier he had extracted his long reminiscence on Carlo Placci for publication in II Mondo and in Horizon. He began in 1952, at the age of eighty-eight, to select excerpts from the diary for a series of columns in the Milan newspaper, alternating them with essays on his reading or on matters of taste and art. The long, often argumentative double columns, faithfully translated almost to the last by Arturo Loria, appeared over Berenson's signature in the Corriere until the very last month of his life. FRIENDS and acquaintances dispatched fresh contingents of art students to work in the library and possibly converse with its guiding spirit. Encountering the young men at work among his treasured volumes, he had a comforting foretaste of what his Institute might become. He reported [541]

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to Billie Ivins in January of 1952 that there were six young men present, three from Harvard and Yale and three from Oxford. He thought the Oxford trio abler and more knowledgeable. "Hosts from over the seas" continued to stream through the house, among them friends and acquaintances who spanned the whole gamut of intimacy. What was remarkable was how quickly mere acquaintance often blossomed into comradeship. His relations with two members of the Biddle family followed this course. After World War II Berenson became acquainted with Francis Biddle and his wife, Katherine, a poet. Francis had been attorney general under President Franklin Roosevelt and had served as a judge in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The two men shared the Harvard tie and soon became "close friends," according to Francis, though they differed strongly in political philosophy. Francis' brother George, an artist who had accompanied the American troops in the Mediterranean campaigns, had recently published the volume Artist at War, illustrated with some of his paintings. Berenson read it and wrote to Francis that he was eager to meet its author, and early in 1952 George Biddle came to I Tatti with his wife, Helene, a sculptor. His first impression was somewhat critical. He was surprised by Berenson's "small stature and look of fragility." " Y e t one senses," he wrote in his diary, "the desire to dominate and something of a showman." He found Berenson outspoken and opinionative, and rather too ready to disapprove. When their talk turned to Santayana, whose portrait Biddle had painted, Berenson declared, " H e is completely without warmth or feeling," but of Santayana's Life of Reason he conceded, " Y e s , that is a great book." In June when Berenson and Nicky were on their way to study architecture in Apulia, they stopped off for a night at the George Biddies' at Amalfi, and in the autumn the Biddies spent a night at Casa al Dono. Berenson "lay in front of the open fire," Biddle recorded in his diary, "covered by a white shawl, fragile, slightly deaf, his beautifully modulated voice so low that it was difficult to hear him. At times a gentle Satanic expression." They talked especially of Italy and of the Italians, who, Berenson thought, were now unfriendly to America. Berenson seemed to enjoy being called an "old pessimist"; "he loves to appear farouche," observed Biddle. From these beginnings sprang a cordial correspondence, Biddle speaking up for the claims of the modern in art and Berenson expressing fears that "what used to be called 'fine arts' may have to wait until we have passed through a dark age." In 1959 Biddle, on learning of "dear B . B . ' s " death, was put in mind of Berenson's generous remark about Arthur Schlesinger, J r . , " I shall always be grateful to that young man for his Age [542]

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of Jackson." It inspired Biddle to write in his diary, " I shall always be grateful to that old man for his zest for life, his appetite for ideas and his love for human beings." In the same season of 1952 John Walker sent on a pair of ornamental visitors, young and pretty Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier. They met him as he came out of the ilex wood at I Tatti, and as soon as they had sat down he began to speak to them of love. " N e v e r follow your senses. Marry someone who will constantly stimulate y o u . " Most of their conversation was about "life-enhancing and life-diminishing" people and the need to avoid the latter. They thought him a sage, "a kind of god-like creature, in the way he doesn't fit in with the hurly-burly pattern of our present w o r l d . " Jacqueline became one of his fans and continued to send him artlessly gossipy letters for several years after her marriage to Jack Kennedy, whom she had met later in 1952 while working as an inquiring photographer for the Washington Times-Herald. When she and Kennedy were married in September of 1953, Berenson cabled his good wishes to the pair. A peculiarly notable addition to the roster of visitors in 1952 was Jfean] Paul Getty, the sixty-two-year-old oil billionaire and art collector who some years before had founded the Getty Museum at Malibu in California. Reputed to be the world's richest man, he had already formed a notable collection of paintings and objects of art. Eager to meet Berenson, whose authority he greatly respected, he welcomed an invitation to tea one day while he was in Florence with the writer Ethel Vane, who was collaborating with him on a book about his collection. A young library assistant escorted Getty and his companion through the rooms and corridors of I Tatti, Getty glancing "longingly at the fine pictures and art objects adorning both corridors and staircases." At tea time Berenson seated himself in his usual corner of the settee near the fireplace and the guests ranged themselves closely about him. T o Getty, "the unostentatious luxury, the atmosphere of culture, the prevailing harmony were soul satisfying." Berenson's mind, he thought, "is like quicksilver, yet he has all the serenity of the historian." T o Ethel Vane, "that slightly arrogant set of the head, the chiselled bone-structure of the face and those beautiful hands were an artist's delight." Later when Getty talked of the visit, he declared, " I Tatti and Bernard Berenson are an event and a privilege I shall always remember. I have never been more impressed in my life." During the following four years Getty became an appreciative correspondent. He and Berenson exchanged photographs of antique sculptures and shared opinions on art. The acquaintance, however, had a curious sequel. The pale, stern-faced Getty, besieged by thousands of [543]

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suppliants, had grown extraordinarily frugal. In his great mansion near London, he installed a pay telephone to save his guests, as he explained, from embarrassment. On Berenson's death in 1959 he sent a check for S500 to the fund for I Tatti. Nicky, shocked by the meager gesture, returned the check. When he died sixteen years later, his museum was the most richly endowed art museum on the planet, and his foundation has since provided generous subventions to the photo archive at I Tatti. THE BRITISH edition of selections from the war diary—Rumor and Reflection—came out in June to respectful reviews and " A n Appreciation by Sir John Squire" in Punch. When the enlarged volume appeared in the United States in October of 1952, the reviews poured in not only from the big cities "but the hinterland as well." The delighted Schuster reported that a third printing was already under way so that sixteen thousand copies would be in print before the end of November. The enterprising publishers had included a postcard in each copy inviting reactions. They were "extremely enthusiastic," Schuster wrote in his glowing report; " h o w heartening to see so noble and high-minded a book become a best-seller." The remarkable popularity of the book, pleasing as it was, awoke in Berenson something of a sense of grievance. He complained to Viereck that his "hard w o n efforts at enlightening the public in art" had left him "obscure in the windy corridors of criticism." Fortunately, he had the satisfaction later in the year of learning that the new edition of his Italian Painters of the Renaissance, subsidized by Kress, had been hugely successful. " T h e whole printing," he was told, "sold out in England absolutely in a week." The many favorable reviews assured him of his preeminence as an art-historian. The Apollo declared, for example, "There is no more consequential piece of aesthetic law-giving in our time," and in the same vein the reviewer for Art News said, "Berenson's immensely creative sensitivity to an artist's accomplishments within the context and framework of his epoch—his remarkable sense of 'artistic pleasure' . . . remains as freshly illuminating and infectious as ever." The art historian John Pope-Hennessy in the Times Literary Supplement called the book "the best, incomparably the best, introduction in any language to any school of painting." A German translation of the edition prepared by Hanna Kiel was published simultaneously by Phaidon in Zurich. B y the end of the year another manuscript found its way into print, the small book that had lain fallow for a dozen years or more, The Arch of Constantine, or the Decline of Form. Translated by Luisa Vertova, it came out under the imprint of the Electa Press of Milan. Emilio Cecchi promptly recommended it in a two-column review in the Corriere delta [544]

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Sera. The epilogue, which Berenson wrote while nursing his hay fever in Ischia in May, explained that the essay was to have served "as the first chapter of a voluminous work on Decline and Recovery in the Figure Arts." Though it dealt with "the progressive decay of the Ancient World," he was offering it "in the light of the present anarchy in artistic standards as a contribution to the study of the Decline in the Figure Arts in all times." Chapman and Hall published the book two years later. Early in 1953 Bernard and Nicky began still another project, "recasting" the Lotto, perhaps to anticipate the Lotto exhibition that was to be held in Venice the next year. He had last corrected it fifty years ago. He returned to the task during the summer in quiet hours at Vallombrosa. Issued by the Phaidon Press in 1956, the "recasting" had required only minor changes, but the volume was far more comprehensively illustrated, the four hundred illustrations, which included newly located paintings, being six times the number in the first edition. Reviewing the record of 1952 on December 31, Berenson sadly reflected, "These 'successes' mean little or nothing, for I know that they are not the fruit of the year's functioning. . . . [They are] due to garnering and 'selling' the past—not to creative w o r k . " There was, as he acknowledged to himself, another reason for discontent, the fact that his lifelong dream of establishing "a home of culture" at I Tatti was in jeopardy. Word had recently come that Harvard might reject his legacy. Though he felt that that untoward development could be more easily borne than the loss of creative power, the "unexpected b l o w " to his dream added a deeper chill to the winter as he thought how "zestfully" he had built up his library for "future Harvard scholars." He "kept waking at nights with a cold sweat," worrying what he should do if Harvard refused. The suspense ended on February 17, 1953, when Lawrence cabled that Harvard had agreed to accept the legacy. At long last Berenson could be confident that the dream which had taken form a half century earlier when Mrs. Gardner showed him through the palatial museum that she planned to leave to Boston would become a reality. He learned that the negotiation had not been an easy one for his friends at Harvard. The university's commitments to far-flung research facilities had strained financial resources, and inflation had taken its toll. The cogent report submitted by the Fogg Museum director, John Coolidge, appears to have finally convinced the Harvard Corporation. The person whose help proved crucial, according to Coolidge, was Sydney Freedberg, who had himself done research at I Tatti under Berenson's eye. Once assured of the acceptance, Berenson wrote to Lawrence from Sicily, where he was on tour with Nicky, " I have recommendations to make to Harvard with regard to my hopes for the future of I Tatti, but nothing to go into my [545]

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w i l l . " His suggestions w e r e not c o m m i t t e d to paper until three years later. E a c h y e a r the wheels seemed to turn faster at I Tatti, taxing to the utmost N i c k y ' s inspired m a n a g e m e n t o f the household and its fastidious and exigent host. A t the height o f the spring " s e a s o n " o f 1 9 5 3 B e r e n s o n cheerfully reported, " W e h a v e three sets o f visitors a day, as well as friends w h o s t a y . " M a r k Schorer, w h o w a s collecting materials on Sinclair L e w i s ' s last days in Italy f o r his b i o g r a p h y , came b y a n u m b e r o f times w i t h his w i f e f o r w h a t w a s to g i v e h i m " t h e brightest o f our recollections o f a fantastically h a p p y y e a r . " A m o n g the regulars w e r e the Walter L i p p m a n n s and Prince Paul o f Y u g o s l a v i a . L i p p m a n n , to B e r e n son's eye, seemed a " r a t h e r G e r m a n type, scarcely anything J e w i s h . " B e r e n s o n discussed heredity w i t h Prince Paul, w h o surprised h i m w i t h the suggestion that K a i s e r Wilhelm's m e g a l o m a n i a came f r o m his C o b u r g ancestry and not f r o m the Hohenzollerns. In M a y B e r e n s o n set o f f f o r a m o t o r tour o f Sicily w h i c h began at Messina and ended at P a l e r m o . His diary o f the j o u r n e y yielded a succession o f eight richly observant columns in the Corriere della Sera, later republished in the v o l u m e Viaggio in Sicilia. Goethe's praise f r o m Faust " Z u m Schauen geboren [I a m born to s e e ] , " he w r o t e in his diary, should be put on his tombstone. " I l o v e to l o o k , to see, to identify m y s e l f w i t h a v i e w , to feel at one w i t h i t . " O n c e m o r e he s a v o r e d on his aesthetic palate the w o n d e r s o f T a o r m i n a , Syracuse, A g r i g e n t o , Segesta, Palermo, and the great archaeological sites in between. Still astonishingly nimble, he clambered about h a l l o w e d ruins and b r o o d e d o v e r magical frescoes. O n his return to N a p l e s after a m o n t h in Sicily, he j o i n e d a pair o f archaeologists to study the excavations o f " a great watering place o f the time of N e r o . " H e then w e n t up to R o m e determined to take in the Picasso exhibition. T h a t s u m m e r there w a s launched the m o s t elaborate publishing v e n ture o f B e r e n s o n ' s career. B e l a H o r o w i t z w a n t e d to f o l l o w up the success o f the Phaidon edition o f the Italian Painters of the Renaissance w i t h a series o f richly illustrated catalogues based on B e r e n s o n ' s f a m o u s Lists o f 1 9 3 2 . H e secured B e r e n s o n ' s reluctant blessing f o r the project, and on J u l y 1 7 , 1 9 5 3 , a f o r m a l m e m o r a n d u m proposing it w a s signed by h i m and b y Berenson, J o h n Walker, and N i c k y M a r i a n o . B e r e n s o n then applied to the K r e s s Foundation f o r a " s u b v e n t i o n " o f $60,000 f o r a projected f o u r v o l u m e s , little anticipating that the m o n u m e n t a l undertaking w o u l d eventually require seven quarto v o l u m e s and ten years to complete. T h e foundation agreed to support the venture. W o r k o n the series began w i t h the Venetian school, thus paralleling the first o f B e r e n s o n ' s " F o u r G o s p e l s , " the Venetian Painters o f 1894. [546]

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Berenson's part in the work was to be much restricted by his failing strength and frequently interrupted by sightseeing, attendance at exhibitions, and other publishing activities. As he explained in the preface to the Venetian School four years later, "This catalogue could not have been prepared without the constant helpfulness of Nicky Mariano and the assistance of Luisa Vertova Nicholson and William Mostyn-Owen. . . . The learning, the consultation of printed sources, the so-called 'literature' is all due to them. On the other hand, I am responsible for the attributions." Mostyn-Owen, an assiduous young English art scholar, had been recommended to Berenson by Rosamond Lehmann. It was not until the autumn that Berenson was able to write to Lawrence from Vallombrosa that he and Nicky were deep in the new catalogue "and both enjoying it. We wish we were not interrupted and could work ten hours a day as of yore." He was amused "to recapture some of the excitement it was to hit (as I fancied) on the right attribution. I still enjoy the game, and occasionally feel triumphant over seeing clearer and deeper than ever before—in this small plot that for sixty-five years I have been tending." The regular autumn sojourn at Casa al Dono in 1953 moved at a slow pace. "Talk I still d o , " he reported to Margaret Barr, "but my walks are reduced to toddles down the hill, and I spend most of the so-called waking hours, resting, dozing, sleeping." Ralph Barton Perry, now a professor emeritus at Harvard, came for a month and the time passed in long reminiscences. Robert Gathorne-Hardy—"Nicky's pet"—came "to babble and to botanize." Poet, novelist, and onetime secretary-inresidence to Logan, Gathorne-Hardy had published a beautifully illustrated book on wildflowers. A really challenging guest at Casa al Dono must have been Clement Greenberg, a leading American art critic whose books Sunealist Painting, Miro, and Henri Matisse reflected a remarkable catholicity of taste. He and Berenson shared at least one important criterion: "What counts first and last in art is quality," Greenberg asserted in a lecture at Yale. A n influential advocate of modern as well as avant-garde art, Greenberg could not shake Berenson's antipathies. Nonetheless, he regarded Berenson as "one of America's most signal contributions to European culture" and believed "that the future will value him more as a critic than as an attributor." Where he disagreed with him, he said, he always found "something worth disagreeing about." And he found his own "understanding and awareness, not only of single works of art, but of a whole age of art sharpened by his words." In Venice in November 1953 for the Lotto exhibition, Berenson spent two weeks reliving the days of his youth when, with the "fervor of a pilgrim," he had hunted year after year for Lotto's work in the remotest [547]

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churches "regardless of w i n d and rain, cold and d i s c o m f o r t . " N o w seeing Lotto's "surviving o u t p u t " in one place, the paintings wrenched f r o m their homes, they seemed "shivering, naked against chilly gray b a c k g r o u n d s . " There came back to him the m a n y adventures he had had on the road, the amusing h u m a n contacts and the meetings with local scholars, one of w h o m had lent h i m the recently discovered diary of Lotto. Berenson proudly recalled in his Corriere column that t h o u g h he had adored Lotto, he never so lost his "sense of values as to equate h i m with Titian or T i n t o r e t t o . " F r o m Venice the travelers proceeded to Milan, where, during one forenoon, he visited the refectory of the Dominican convent on whose wall Leonardo da Vinci had painted The Last Supper. Still another restoration of the slowly deteriorating mural painting was being attempted. Berenson climbed up on the scaffolding to j o i n the restorer M a u r o Pelliccioli and was s h o w n h o w the w o r k was being carried on with "strong magnifying glasses, and under p o w e r f u l reflectors." It was, he thought, like looking at the individual tesserae of a mosaic. When he descended and viewed the painting at a distance, the figures that loomed " o u t of a mist" gave h i m " t h e impression of a faded c h r o m o . " His adverse opinion of the figures had not changed since his iconoclastic essay on Leonardo m o r e than thirty-five years ago. And, as before, he reflected, " W h y such villainous types!" Having inspected the progress of the w o r k on Leonardo's masterpiece, he departed for R o m e for a couple of weeks to study illuminated m a n u scripts which had been collected at the Palazzo Venezia f r o m all the Italian libraries. H e did not k n o w h o w he managed, he w r o t e Ivins; "several times a d a y " he felt he was " b l o w i n g his nose for the last t i m e . " Middle East miniatures had once been a h o b b y of his, his small and valuable collection reflecting his early study of Arabic and his delight in the Arabian Nights. N o w after " t w e n t y visits" to the exhibition, he carried away "only a vague feeling of h o w m u c h there is to study. T o master t h e m artistically and philologically w o u l d take a lifetime." Revisiting the church of San Pietro in Vincoli, he fell to reconsidering the horns on Michelangelo's Moses and n o w speculated that perhaps Moses actually did have great protuberances on his forehead. "If that could be assumed," he theorized, "it w o u l d point to the historicity of M o s e s . " Revisiting the Sistine Chapel, he could not get over the " p o o r impression" made on h i m by the frescoes, "the ceiling stark, gloomy, and the Last J u d g m e n t darker and gloomier by f a r . " His enthusiastic c o m m e n t a r y on the illuminated-manuscript exhibition r o o m filled one of his contributions in the Corriere della Sera. Because the inauguration had been unexpectedly postponed, he had been [548]

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"allowed," he said, "to turn the pages of the codices . . . at my own pace and leisure." The following month, in a column titled "Exhibitionitis," he insisted he was not opposed to exhibitions on principle: "living artists must have fairs." However, the dangers of shipping about fragile Old Masters alarmed him. He told of a Deposition he had once looked for at Montpellier only to learn that when taken down to be sent to an Antwerp exhibition, "it had burst into pieces." "And what about those who make a pilgrimage to see a masterpiece and find its shrine empty?" While still in Rome he found time to write up his impressions of the Leonardo restoration and its relation to the whole controversial subject of the restoration of paintings. The piece, which appeared in November 1953 in the Corriere della Sera, found a place in the Manchester Guardian the following April and in the Art News Annual in 1955. The present-day French experts, Berenson observed, favored a minimum of treatment, whereas the Germans attempted to "bring the picture back" to its original state. The expensive scientific aids that had come into use were of little value, he believed, "unless there is a gifted and experienced eye to direct them," and for such a one " a penknife, a razor, a drop of turpentine will suffice," as Pelliccioli was demonstrating in Milan. Recalling, no doubt, the remarkable work of Cavenaghi, Berenson declared that "an Italian painting should never be put at the mercy of any craftsman not Italian, or at least trained in Italy." Rome still had social resources for him, though time had diminished his roster of Italian hosts. As a world capital, it drew distinguished visitors to the embassies to which Berenson had entree. In his encounter with Henry R. Luce of Time, husband of the American ambassador Clare Boothe Luce, he held forth on a favorite topic, the superiority of the Greeks. Luce thereupon shrewdly quizzed him on Alexander the Great, leading Berenson to reflect that he would have made a better ambassador than his wife. Walter Lippmann showed up on one of his international reconnaissances and the two spent "delightful hours together." Memories of his conversations with Lippmann must have lingered in Berenson's mind when he returned to I Tatti and on the last day of the year looked back on its chief political events. The most dangerous development, as he saw it, was Senator Joseph McCarthy's "reign of terror." The death of Stalin in bed had disappointed him: he had "hoped he would end on the scaffold." He deplored the "pumped u p " hysteria in Italy for the return of Trieste. Finally, he pilloried the French government for its failure to make friends with Germany. His concern with political developments in the Western world, which had begun with World War I, had continued, but now with the distancing of years he viewed the gathering chaos with a certain resignation. [549]

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E R E N S O N had long ago acknowledged to Charles D u Bos that he had "a good human desire for 'fame,' " but he wished it to be "unanecdotic" and "impersonal." Fame had come to him, but it was n o w being overshadowed by his "celebrity" as a phenomenon around w h o m legends already clustered. T h e stream o f visitors to I Tatti took back to England and America their varied impressions o f the exquisitely ordered existence o f the intellectual kingdom o f I Tatti and its aristocratic ruler, w h o , in old age, had arisen out o f the ashes o f the war like a phoenix. A writer in the New York Times hailed him as a prophet w h o foresaw the perils that n o w confronted the Western world. When Santayana had died in 1952, an editor o f the New York Times discussed the remarkable intellectual achievements o f the t w o men as a reproach o f the little most people achieve with their minds. A t the close o f 1953 the psychologist Martin Gumpert published an article identifying " T e n W h o K n o w the Secret o f O l d A g e " ; the group included, besides Berenson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Abraham Flexner, Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham, Learned Hand, Konrad Adenauer, Arturo Toscanini, Bertrand Russell, and Bernard Baruch. Obviously Berenson's life was ripe for exploitation, and when he returned from R o m e in December 1953 he was confronted with a disconcerting request from Mark Longman o f Longmans Green & C o m p a n y . He was asked to approve their inviting Sylvia Sprigge, a former war correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, to write "a personal portrait" o f him as a kind o f pendant to his o w n Sketch for a Self-Portrait. Berenson drew back in alarm. He had enjoyed the deference that had been paid to him and the many friendships that his prominence had brought, but had recoiled fastidiously from the journalistic prying that inevitably accompanied it. [550]

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B e r e n s o n had met S p r i g g e in 1945 w h e n she had c o m e up f r o m R o m e . She w a s then f o r t y - t w o . A n able linguist in French, G e r m a n , and Italian, she had m a d e a reputation as a n e w s p a p e r correspondent and as a translator o f Italian w o r k s . B e r e n s o n e n j o y e d her attentions and they became friends. A frequent guest thereafter at I Tatti, she studied her host w i t h affectionate curiosity. Whether she o r L o n g m a n conceived the idea o f the b o o k is not clear; but, as she told N i c k y , " o n c e I get g o i n g I don't g i v e u p e a s i l y . " She finally obtained B e r e n s o n ' s reluctant consent to a " p o r trait" o r " p r o f i l e . " " W h y d o I w r i g g l e and toss at the idea o f being b i o g r a p h i e d ? " B e r e n son asked himself in the confessional o f his diary. " I s it o n l y because there are so m a n y big and little episodes I w i s h forgotten? O f course I have m u c h behind m e that I hate to recall, and hope w i l l not be r e m e m bered against me. E v e r y kind o f lächete, meanness, pettiness, cowardice, equivocal business conduct (due m o r e to ignorance and the ethics o f art dealers than to m y o w n nature), humiliations, furtiveness, ostrichism, etc. Y e s , all these and m o r e and w o r s e that rise and denounce m e in the hours o f the night w h e n I a m not quite a w a k e , and defenseless against all the nastiness that an uncontrolled m i n d churns up f r o m the f o u l depths o f m e m o r y . H o w passionately one wants to forget! N o — n o t these only o r chiefly. I dread h a v i n g m y life written as 'the success s t o r y , ' as it is b o u n d to be, seeing that economically and socially I had to m a k e m y w a y f r o m nothing at all. Y e s , economically and socially, but I never f r o m the earliest d a w n o f consciousness felt proletarian or inferior to the highest class a n y w h e r e . " B e r e n s o n feared the journalist in S y l v i a S p r i g g e , believing that it w a s " i m p o s s i b l e f o r her to conceive o f m y life except as a v u l g a r success s t o r y . " T h o u g h the projected b o o k w a s a l w a y s discussed as a " p o r t r a i t , " S p r i g g e privately s a w her task as a full b i o g r a p h y , and she proceeded to collect w h a t materials she could. M e a n w h i l e , L o n g m a n seems to h a v e b e g g e d out o f the project, and it w a s taken o v e r b y William Collins. T h e f i r m ' s literary adviser acquiesced in B e r e n s o n and N i c k y ' s insistence that the b o o k be approached " f r o m the point o f v i e w o f the personal relations h i p " o f S p r i g g e ' s eleven-year friendship, but pointed out at the Lame time that it w o u l d h a v e to h a v e a " b r o a d e r " scope in spite o f B e r e n s o n ' s " s t r o n g v i e w s about the use she m i g h t m a k e o f his childhood and youth." A l a r m e d to learn that S p r i g g e planned to g o to the U n i t e d States to " l o o k things u p , " B e r e n s o n reminded her that he had given "reluctant c o n s e n t " o n l y f o r a profile or portrait and f o r that no research should be required. H e pointed out that others, like B e h r m a n , had w a n t e d to d o a b i o g r a p h y but had accepted his " n o . " H e also explained that no one w a s [551]

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to see his papers during his life and that after his death Nicky Mariano would have complete control of them. He had not realized, he said, that without consulting him she had already been looking at some of Mary's papers (her attempted " L i f e " of Berenson). In spite of his objections Sprigge went ahead with her plan to visit Boston and Cambridge. William G. Constable, director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and a longtime friend and correspondent of Berenson, informed "Dearest N i c k y " that Sprigge had interviewed him and also Berenson's brother-in-law Ralph Barton Perry. Neither he nor Perry thought her proposed memoir was "entirely a good idea." Constable wrote that he had been extremely discreet "with Sprigge, who had 'not made things easy.' " She had told him, he said, that Berenson had in fact given her much help with the book. As for Nicky's opposition, she said Alda had told her that Nicky's "real preoccupation was lest Kenneth's rumored book and my book should clear the field and leave her both without B . B . and without a book to write about B . B . " Collins also backed out of the project, and Sprigge placed the book with Allen & Unwin, who brought it out in i960, the year following Berenson's death. Nicky did not approve of it, for it was, as they had all feared it would be, a biography rather than a profile and was "full of errors." It was only after she had finished the manuscript of her own memoir, Forty Years with Berenson, that Nicky urged the present writer to consider doing Berenson's biography and assured him unrestricted access to all his papers, including those still in her possession. At the same time that Sprigge was pressing Berenson to consent to her book, he was being "persecuted," as he said, " b y the editor of [a] book telling what prominent persons the world over believe. T o be put in five hundred w o r d s . " The editor, Raymond Gram Swing, was collecting "personal philosophies" to be first broadcast on the radio on Edward R. Murrow's popular program "This I Believe." One volume had already appeared, sounding an ironic counterpoint to the sordid inquisition into beliefs that Senator Joseph McCarthy was then conducting. Berenson succumbed to the invitation and joined a select company of eighty contemporaries that included novelists, poets, publicists, politicians, and business leaders—from Ralph Bunche and Harold Stassen to Adlai Stevenson and Harry Truman, and from Leonard Bernstein to Ralph Barton Perry. Berenson was puzzled at first how to respond. " I believe one thing one moment and another another." He soon settled on affirmation. " A l though I am in old age and perhaps at its last moments," he wrote, " I accept life as it is, for worse or for better—accept it, love it, rejoice in it. . . . M y faith consists in the certainty that life is worth living, life on its [552]

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own terms." But affirmation seemed inadequate without a frame of reference, and he turned back to his Sketch for a Self-Portrait and quoted verbatim the passage in which he emphasized his debt to Christianity, his faith in "IT and faith in humanity." Late in 1953 Berenson suffered an accident which added to the discomforts of advancing age. He and Nicky had driven by jeep to a ruined chapel near Castel del Poggio. He got out of the jeep and ordered Parry to drive on a short distance. Nicky pulled open a door to retrieve a scarf for him and the heavy door swung out, knocking him over the fourteenfoot escarpment of a ravine. He rolled over and over, ending up against a boulder. He appeared not to be seriously injured, but he suffered a good deal of discomfort. Shortly afterward he wrote Lawrence, " I could be well if the aches and pains in spine and ribs would stop." They finally moderated, but the litany of daily "aches, pains, heats, coughs, sneezes, etc." continued to lend a sobering coloring to the passing days. His grim recordings chart the implacable inroads of age. He feared "a change for the worse is taking place in my b o d y . " There were "moments of extreme and sudden collapse" that obliged him to sit down until he recovered. At a visit to the dentist he had "four teeth yanked out" while his doctor felt his pulse and Emma bathed his head and hands with alcohol. "Dentist's brutal assault," he wrote. "Horrid night. Swollen lips, gums . . . still bleeding." Gases oppressed his chest "almost any night, and often enough in the daytime. Have I ever been free from aches and pains?" While Berenson was recovering from his tumble down the roadside, the journalist Cyrus Lee Sulzberger came by in February 1954 on his European rounds for an interview, and in his personal diary he recorded his impressions of his host: " H e is extraordinary-looking, very small and frail, neat and erect, dapper with a pointed beard; rather handsome, and resembles a figure out of a Henry James book with a definitely Bostonian-cut suit and a flower in his buttonhole. His accent and his manner are exceedingly courtly. He has a curious habit when he meets someone of standing off on one side and examining him carefully as if he were a painting. His vocabulary is rather old-fashioned and he is a definite snob, continually referring to people as 'well born' or the opposite. . . . One of his favorite hobbies is to try and befuddle and embarrass pretty young women with impertinent questions." Declining health and energy did not diminish Berenson's eagerness for new friendships. One of the most gratifying was that with the young science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who was being acclaimed for transforming that genre into serious literature. Berenson had read an article by him in the Nation in which he vigorously defended the value of science [553]

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fiction as a means of depicting the implications for good and evil of the progress of science and invention. What especially caught his eye was Bradbury's declaration, " I very much enjoy, I relish writing science fiction." For him, Bradbury wrote, " f u n was the handmaiden, if not the progenitor, of the arts." This perception so chimed in with Berenson's own notion about creativity that he sent Bradbury a "fan letter" saying that it was the first time he had "encountered the statement by an artist in any field, that to work creatively he must put flesh into it, and enjoy it as a lark, or as a fascinating adventure." He ended with a cordial invitation to Bradbury to visit I Tatti. Bradbury was able to report that John Huston had engaged him to write a scenario for Moby Dick and that he would therefore be coming to Europe in the spring. Bradbury and his wife arrived in April, the thirty-three-year-old Bradbury looking like a football player and towering over his host. One day at lunch, after Berenson had read Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, he said he had been fascinated by the finale in which the " B o o k People" memorized the books to save them from the "Burners." " Y o u could do a sequel," he suggested, "when the Book People are called in to recite their memorized books and remember them all wrong. . . . Think of it! Crime and Punishment remembered by a fool. Machiavelli's Prince mouthed by a numb-skull. Moby Dick recited by an alcoholic cripple. . . . What fun, what variations, what satire. Write it d o w n . " After the screenplay of Moby Dick was finished, the Bradburys again visited Berenson, this time at Vallombrosa, and Bradbury reported the j o y f u l reunion in his article in Horizon. " T h e old teasings, the gentle arguments," he wrote, bombarded him "before, during, and after lunch, and took up again after a very long siesta, at late afternoon tea." At their parting Berenson admonished him, "When you go to museums, only stay for an hour at a time! Don't exhaust the body so as to exhaust the eye and tire the mind." His young friend embraced the trembling body and said, " O h , B . B . I always w i l l . " It was as his "everlasting son," Bradbury afterward said, that he would remember him. Berenson returned to Venice after the Bradburys departed in the spring of 1954 in order to restudy the Venetian painters for the projected volume in the Phaidon series. The Venetian masters had been "like a religious experience" at his first sight of them in 1888, and even after seventy years of familiarity something of that feeling remained. For two months he haunted the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the Gallerie dell'Accademia, the Scuola Grande di San Marco, and the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. He thought Tintoretto's paintings at San Rocco com-

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pared favorably with Rembrandt's for "interpretation and craftsmanship." At the opera house in Venice he heard the pianist Walter Gieseking play Beethoven, and as the unearthly murmur of the crowd rose "like the muted roar of breakers on a rocky shore," he wished he could have paralleled his Seeing and Knowing with a Hearing and Knowing. "More and more," he reflected, " I become aware of how much antecedent knowing was injected into seeing, hearing, and smelling as well." He attended a high mass at St. Mark's conducted by Cardinal Spellman and was "carried away by the performance. . . . All my senses, sight and sound, were ravished and my mind as well." He was still in Venice on his eighty-ninth birthday, and cables and telegrams poured in from well-wishers in America and Europe. Members of the Institute for the Study of Venetian Art met after dinner to drink his health, while he lost himself in thought like a bystander. "Why can I never feel that I belong?" he pondered. Introspection drew an invisible wall about him so that no matter how assiduously he sought company, the inner self seemed somehow to feel extinction in the multitude. With the extensive new wing of the library completed in 1954, I Tatti took on increasingly the aspect of a scholarly institute. Earlier in the year some thirty members of a European "cultural union" descended upon Berenson to visit the library. One of them, Jean Wahl of the Sorbonne, pleased him with word that Henri Bergson often spoke of him. But so large a group oppressed him. He enjoyed more the arrival in the autumn of the "flower of what is best in art-historians" who daily frequented the library—Frederick Hartt, Richard Offner, Margaret Rickert, and two Guggenheim fellows beginning their year abroad, Charles Seymour and Berenson's old acquaintance Sydney Freedberg. Yet even they left him unsatisfied. " N o t one of them," he lamented to Ivins, "has any notion of placing the hypnotizing object of his 'research' in a universal scheme of things, of what it all meant through the ages, what it should mean n o w . " His friendly association with the scholarly Offner, whose learned criticism of his attributions had once irked him, showed the mellowing effect of old age, of Berenson's growing willingness to let bygones be bygones. As one whose writings now reached the widest international audience, he could afford to be indulgent. He still had a caustic tongue for intellectual pretenders, however, and he sometimes jumped too readily to an untenable conclusion. Discussing music one day with a group in the salon, he launched out in a characteristically perverse fashion, asserting that there were only two composers of any importance, Wagner and one

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other. A young guest burst out indignantly, " B . B . , you don't know what you are talking about. Y o u don't know anything about music and ought to keep such opinions quiet." While the rest of the group stood stunned by this blasphemy, Berenson quietly yielded: " Y o u are quite right. I don't know anything about music and I'll keep quiet on the subject." Such graceful concessions may have been rare, but they did occur. Callers studied their host with varying degrees of sympathy, fitting the legends that had grown up around him to the reality they found at I Tatti. One friend, somewhat put off by Berenson's heterodox pronouncements, would finally conclude that he was "lovable but not likeable." A far warmer estimate was that of Ralph Barton Perry, whose wife, Berenson's sister Rachel, had died twenty years before. N o w at eighty-one Perry wrote, " I want you to realize what your fraternity and kindness have meant to me and what, in fact, it has meant to me for many years to own you for a brother. . . . 'In law' means nothing as applied to Rachel's family. This applies peculiarly to you, who are closer to me than my blood brother, as much as I love him. It is an uncalculated, simple affection, mingled from my point of view with moral and intellectual admiration." One of the more interesting visitors in the fall of 1954 was the Russianborn painter Marc Chagall, who came up to I Tatti with his wife. Neither looked Jewish to Berenson's critical eye, yet, to his wonderment, Chagall painted "nothing but ghetto life." This struck him as an anomaly. It led to the curious assessment that in his own face and features he could trace "a Germanic something." Berenson relished Chagall's simplicity and candor, and the sixty-seven-year-old painter carried back to France a cordial impression of their meeting. He regretted only one thing, he wrote to "Cher Maitre," not to have known Berenson earlier. He thought that contact and talk with him would have helped him in his life and his work where he often was a little puzzled to know where he was. During 1954 Berenson varied his work on the Venetian catalogue with a number of essays in his columns in the Corriere della Sera. One, "Wishful Attribution," dealt with the "universal tendency to ascribe a given work of art to the greatest artist to whom wishful thinking and excited imagination can ascribe it." In another, "For Whom A r t , " he sought to rescue art from the obscurantism of pedantic critics. In still another article he commented on the Guido Reni exhibition in Bologna, which he attended in September. He conceded Reni's achievements as an "illustrator" and praised the admirable arrangement of the exhibition. He too had once admired Reni but had concluded that he could no longer be [556]

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regarded "among the great" because his paintings woefully lacked tactile energy. The current interest in him was, he contended, an example of the tendency of the young toward faddish enthusiasms in art. As part of his preparation for the revised catalogues to be published by Phaidon, he now dispatched his assistant Luisa Vertova on a long visit to America to check the Italian Old Masters in the collections there. Her researches carried her as far as San Francisco, where she was entertained by Berenson's friend the diplomat-financier James Zellerbach. William Milliken reported from Cleveland that he went round the museum several times with her and thought her "an extremely able and knowing person," one with "a first-rate eye." Among the I Tatti guests in the spring of 1955 was Samuel Behrman, whose Duveen was being featured in the local bookstalls in an Italian version. Four years had passed since his rapturous and admiring interviews with Berenson in Venice. The luxury of the elaborately ordered existence at I Tatti, where host and guests still dressed for dinner, seemed to his playwright's eye like something out of one of his Broadway successes; at least he so reproduced the scene when long afterward he described the weekend in his People in a Diary. There were guests at every meal, and when Behrman asked Nicky how Berenson stood it, she replied that though he railed at the succession of visitors, once, when she had tried to ration them, he confessed that he missed them. At dinner Berenson "volleyed the conversation through three languages, French, Italian and German, with occasional dips into Latin." At an animated luncheon with Peter Viereck and his wife, for which Nicky had arranged a " N e w England boiled dinner," Berenson was "in wonderful f o r m . " Harold Acton, just back from Paris and full of admiration for Manet's sensational Olympia, joined the guests at dinner. Earlier, walking in the garden, Behrman and his host had compared notes on their boyhood memories. Though there had been few if any Jewish observances in the Berenson household after the family's emigration to America, Berenson astonished his guest with his knowledge of Jewish lore and its antecedents in Minoan civilization. It was at this time, on the eve of his ninetieth birthday, that Oxford University offered him the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters. The belated offer revived his grievance against the British establishment, which had so long excluded him. "Had it come years ago," he thought, " h o w I should have rejoiced." N o w he could only think of the words in which to "couch my refusal." Besides, to accept would require his participating in the elaborate ceremony, the very thought of which exhausted and frightened him. He sent off his regrets and then, to escape the double peril of the May music festival and the threatening celebra[557]

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tion of his birthday, set off with Nicky on a two-month archaeological tour. Their itinerary would take them by leisurely stages to Tripoli and Calabria. Rejecting the advice of his "air-minded" friends, he took the express train to Reggio Calabria, only to discover that stumbling and pushing his way through six or seven crowded and swaying cars to the dining car was an ordeal for which he was no longer fitted. At Tripoli as the distinguished guest of the Countess Anna Cicogna, the attractive younger daughter of the Italian financier Count Giuseppi Volpi, he was whisked away from the quay to her picturesque villa while Nicky attended to the customs formalities. Days passed agreeably enough, what with walking in the garden, reading or being read to, "chatting, dreaming, [and] watching the sunset from the roof terrace." Accompanied by the superintendent of monuments, Ernesto Caffarelli, he revisited the imposing reconstructed theater at Sabratha. Too tired to tour all the ruins, as he had twenty years earlier, he contented himself with the dazzling mosaics and portrait busts in the museum. Elaborate arrangements were made for him to spend four days at the great Roman ruins at Leptis Magna, where, with Caffarelli as guide, he rode through the vast area on a "kind of pushcart" on rails propelled by four workmen. In Calabria he archaeologized for ten days with obliging friends, studying sites from Reggio to Cosenza and beyond and dutifully recording in his diary his impressions of churches, tombs, mosaics, and scenic views. His notes on the art and monuments soon appeared in a series of columns in the Corriere della Sera. They were a loving fusion of past and present sightseeing and learned recollection, as when he wrote of being "stirred almost to tears" at Cosenza at the Ponte Alarico as he recalled from his boyhood the romantic German verses by August Platen on the burial of the heroic Alaric in the bed of the stream. Though he had not read up for the tour of Calabria, his many years of study had left a vivid trail of historical associations and vestiges of the writings of half a dozen authors, including Norman Douglas, whose Old Calabria he had read and reread. The columns earned him the Italian Cenide Art Criticism Prize for articles on Calabria, a prize of 100,000 lire ($150). With undiminished zest he continued on to Naples for an appreciative hour among the antiquities of the museum and then to Rome, where he spent several days making his usual rounds. At the Borghese Gallery the photographer David Seymour caught a striking view of him contemplating Canova's reclining figure of Napoleon's sister. It and the Bernini sculptures—the David, the Apollo and Daphne, and the Rape of Persephone—seemed to him more illustrative than plastic"; both sculptors, [558]

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he thought, "sin by lack of grip." O f the paintings at the Borghese only Correggio's Danae now gave him "complete satisfaction," and at the Capitoline Museum there were few works he could enjoy on "purely artistic grounds." He now needed, he said, the sauce of historical knowledge before he could in most cases abandon himself "to unadulterated enjoyment to the point of ecstasy." He reached Assisi in time to celebrate his ninetieth birthday there on June 26 by reexamining the great frescoes of the basilica. He doubtless felt a certain appropriateness in his presence at the shrine of Saint Francis on that day, for at I Tatti for more than half a century he had daily lived with the great Sassetta painting of the saint. Francis of Assisi was the saint he most admired, and he had expressed his profound reverence for him long ago in his articles on the Franciscan legend. While at Assisi Berenson received a touching greeting from Luisa Vertova, his gifted assistant: " I love you so much, dearest B . B . , that I selfishly hope you will, during your journey, devote a minute's thought to the girl who blossomed up under your wings, whom you took up starved, eager and full of curiosity." Among friends at Assisi, he encountered his former disciple F. Mason Perkins, now eighty-one. Long resident there, where he had become a devout Catholic, he died within a few months of their meeting. In honor of Berenson's birthday the July 4 Newsweek featured an illustrated article captioned " B . B . The Last Aesthete." It told how Berenson traveled accompanied by Nicky; by Emma, his cook and nurse; and by Parry, his Welsh chauffeur. "Each day his huge black Fiat limousine, vintage 1938, rolled up to one stopping place after another precisely on schedule." Crammed into the vehicle were fourteen pieces of "oldfashioned luggage" and the shawls and paraphernalia to keep the alwayscold Berenson warm. " T h e world honored him," the account continued, "as a great art critic, a cataloguing canonist who has made his name as inseparable from the study of Italian Renaissance painting as Blackstone's is from the English common law. . . . [He is] one of the world's few remaining symbols of the cultivated humanist. . . . He is probably the world's last great aesthete."

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I R T H D A Y gifts of books stacked high and a formidable accumulation of birthday letters and telegrams greeted Berenson on his return to I Tatti. Perhaps the most eloquent tribute was Francis Henry Taylor's affectionate panegyric that was published as a letter, " T o Bernard Berenson on his Ninetieth Birthday," in the July Atlantic Monthly. Taylor, who had recently retired as director of the Metropolitan, had come to I Tatti early in April 1955 on special assignment for editor Edward Weeks. "Dear B i B i , " Taylor wrote, "Since I personally owe you my eternal thanks for your influence upon my philosophical development, I write you this open letter as a means of expressing that gratitude." What he had found "so stimulating" was Berenson's "broader humanism." What must have especially pleased Berenson was the reference to his probity: " T h e salesrooms . . . could not have survived without you and your celebrated lists," he wrote, "a circumstance which had made venality such an easy and undeserved reproach on the lips of your natural enemies, the purveyors of the spurious." In England Benedict Nicolson dedicated the July issue of the Burlington Magazine to Berenson, and in an editorial he particularly emphasized the great importance of the early essays. He did note, with reference to Berenson's distaste for contemporary art, that "no one under fifty can see completely eye to eye with him"; what was important, however, was Berenson's "rare gift for converting into words an enthusiasm for shapes, and the retaining, in the process of conversion, a firm grasp on the shapes that are actually there." One communication had a particular poignancy: it promised to relieve one of his great anxieties about the future of his Institute, how to provide for the financing of fellowships. As a birthday present, a Bernard Berenson Fellowship Fund Committee had been organized, with John [560]

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Coolidge as secretary and the following Harvard people as members: Lawrence Berenson, Edward W. Forbes, Philip Hofer, R. Keith Kane, Millard Meiss, Agnes Mongan, Ralph Barton Perry, PaulJ. Sachs, Harrison Tweed, and John Walker. It was estimated that the cost of maintaining a student for travel and study abroad for one year would be approximately $2,500 to $3,000. His chief Italian publisher, Electa Editrice of Milan, honored him by publishing Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson, a chronological bibliography of his books and articles. Berenson's assistant William Mostyn-Owen had been engaged to prepare the volume. Printed on fine paper, each of the seventy-four pages on a separate sheet, the edition consisted of one thousand numbered copies for distribution to friends and well-wishers. It exhibited Berenson's record of publication from his first article in the Harvard Monthly in 1886 to the latest column in the May 25, 1955, Corriere della Sera, a span of nearly seventy years. The list included twentyseven books plus many translations and more than two hundred articles in English, French, and Italian. Before his death four years later he would publish revisions and translations of a few more volumes and add to the thirty columns already published twenty additional essay columns in the Corriere della Sera. Impressive as the publishing record was, Berenson continued to feel the sense of failure that had so strongly colored his Sketch for a SelfPortrait. What he had aspired to be and was not did not comfort him. " I have failed in my mission," he exclaimed to his cousin Lawrence. " I should have been a poet, a novelist, an essayist and not an art historian and—horribile dictu—an expert." He seemed almost to luxuriate in his regrets as if there were still time to reform, writing to " M y eher Billie Ivins, I am passing through a dirty slough of despair about my career, my present production, and the future of I Tatti." With the pressure of that future upon him, there was no escaping his duties to the Wildenstein firm as the photographs poured in on him for his expert opinion. The " a g o n y " of his ninetieth birthday, as he characterized it to Edith de Gasparin, was soon alleviated by the arrival of old friends like Martin Birnbaum and Harold Nicolson and the resumption of work with his assistants on the final details of the catalogue of Venetian painters. Birnbaum, once an art dealer, had afterward roamed the world for ethnological and artistic research and at last had settled down as a writer on art and artists. Belle Greene had introduced him to Berenson before World War I when he was in Berlin to arrange an exhibition of Persian art. Despite their warm dispute over the provenance of a Persian manuscript, a dispute well-flavored with Berenson's caustic wit, they had remained in friendly contact through more than forty years. Birnbaum, now sev[56i]

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enty-seven, was astonished to find Berenson, at ninety, "as alert and gay as ever." He found his flashes of erudition in his talk of aesthetics and philosophy fascinating, and when he left, he felt that his host's "spirit had refreshed and aroused his o w n . " Although Berenson religiously spent hours in daily naps, he constantly amazed observers by his vitality. "There was nothing feeble about him," wrote Cecil Beaton, the famous British photographer who had come by to photograph him. " H e seemed alert and filled with great strength and agility. His mouth recalled a shark, his eyes were pale, his skin a fine vellum parchment." Beaton felt a charismatic quality in the aristocratic old man who "seemed almost a mystical moral to our shortsighted pragmatism." Nicolson, his wife, Vita, and their son, Benjamin, arrived early in August 1955 for Ben's marriage to Luisa Vertova and were put up at I Tatti. The ceremony took place in Florence in the customary Sala di Matrimonio of the Palazzo Vecchio with the old councilor arrayed in evening tails and black tie and patriotic cummerbund. Neither Berenson, who was at Casa al Dono, nor the ailing father of the bride was able to attend. After the ceremony the Nicolsons drove up to Vallombrosa to visit Berenson and found him looking even smaller than formerly and "as frail as an egg-shell." He seemed "seriously deaf" but as "alert and waspish as ever." Berenson was delighted to learn how much he and Nicolson agreed about people and events, "e.g., Munich, and about the peacemaking organizations of U N O , etc., so busy bustling and buzzing today." N o sooner was Berenson recovered from an attack of bronchial fever than he embarked in mid-September with all his "aches and pains" in his vintage automobile for the last days of the Giorgione exhibition at the Ducal Palace in Venice. The international exhibition of Giorgione and the Giorgionesque displayed an array of paintings brought together from all over the world, of which thirty-five were assigned to Giorgione himself. The Allendale Nativity was shown as the joint work of Giorgione and Titian, with the central group attributed to Giorgione, William Suida being cited, however, as giving the painting to the young Titian. Berenson discovered that he was himself part of the spectacle at the Ducal Palace. A n American painter asked to shake his hand; a young woman wanted his autograph; a class of students wished to be photographed with him. More exciting was his meeting with Mary McCarthy, who was at work on her book on Venice. Known in the United States as "our best-looking authoress," she was, at forty-three, a striking personality. She had paid her satiric respects to American universities in [562]

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The Groves of Academe, and her most recent novel, A Charmed Life, had earned the dubious characterization "intellectual brilliance w i t h o u t heart." A f t e r his departure she w r o t e to h i m that being in his c o m p a n y w a s " o n e o f the unexpected rewards o f having c o m e here and undertaken this preposterous task. T h a n k s to y o u r Lotto and other writings, I've had the loan o f y o u r eyes h e r e . " While Berenson was in Venice he talked w i t h A n d r e Visson, the R u s sian-born political writer for the Reader's Digest w h o had visited I Tatti in 1947 w i t h his w i f e . A f t e r briefing Berenson on the disturbing international situation, he passed on a pleasanter piece o f information, that Isaiah Berlin had opened his A u g u s t e C o m t e M e m o r i a l Trust lecture w i t h a quotation f r o m Rumor and Reflection. In that b o o k Berenson had protested against the mistaken doctrine o f the "inevitability o f events and the M o l o c h still devouring us today, 'historical inevitability,' " and Berlin had made this affirmation the theme o f his address in w h i c h he argued for " t h e existence o f a limited but nevertheless real area o f h u m a n f r e e d o m . " W h e n L i p p m a n n w r o t e that the University o f C h i c a g o had awarded h i m an honorary degree, Berenson w a s able to reply, " B o a s t for boast, I can o u t d o y o u altogether; o n the 4th o f this m o n t h [ N o v e m b e r 1955] I was given an honorary degree at the S o r b o n n e , " the e u l o g y being delivered b y Le D o y e n R e n o u v i n . T h e document j o i n e d his already sizable collection o f awards, medals, and certificates o f appointment to learned societies in E u r o p e and America. O n his return f r o m V e n i c e Berenson became increasingly aware o f difficulty in hearing. Like fellow sufferers e v e r y w h e r e , he learned to "smile and nod a p p r o v a l " and to shake his head as if hearing. "I suit m y responses to the faces," he w r o t e , " a n d not to the w o r d s o f people w h o talk to m e . " H e w a s safe, h o w e v e r , in a tete-ä-tete, and N i c k y always steered a responsive guest to the sofa beside him. In spite o f g r o w i n g physical disability, Berenson continued to w e l c o m e a heterogeneous succession o f visitors. A l l he could offer in his o w n justification, he said, w a s "that like all higher animals I prefer the presence o f m y kind to solitude and silence." T h a t autumn he particularly enjoyed the presence o f His M a j e s t y G u s t a f A d o l f V I , king o f Sweden, as a house guest. G u s t a f had ascended to the throne in 1950. N o w seventy-three, he roused Berenson's " u t m o s t e n v y . N o t because he is a k i n g on a throne, nor that he has all the advantages o f his position. . . . I e n v y h i m for boyishly enjoying as a 'lark' e v e r y t h i n g he has to do, all the inspections, all the receptions, all the speechifying, all the listening, all the deciding . . . and all the ceremonial o f a k i n g o n a throne. A n d he enjoys d i g g i n g at fresh excavations, and is indefatigable at sight-seeing and discussing w o r k s o f art unsignalled. . . . W h a t can life offer m o r e than that?" [563]

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On Christmas Eve Berenson suddenly became dangerously ill. He later recorded in his diary the scene at his bedside. He had caught Dr. Capecchi's "desperate look" toward Nicky and the attendants and, amused at the efforts of all to hide their despair, he had said, " I f you think I am dying, tell me so, for I have various matters to attend to before I die." They all denied their fears, but he afterward learned that Dr. Capecchi had given him up and had asked what arrangements had been made for administering the last sacraments. The crisis passed as quickly as it had come on, and the rhythm of life returned to the usual meticulous regimen, with Berenson checking with his assistants the final touches to the manuscript of the catalogue of the Venetian painters. The coldest winter in eighty years came to Tuscany with a fierce tramonta blowing and the Arno sheeted in ice. Snow blocked the familiar paths on the Fiesole hillsides, and Berenson, again confined to his bed, received callers at his bedside, their presence strictly rationed by Nicky. She gamely kept at her post though barely recovered from a broken ankle she had suffered while accompanying Berenson on one of his abbreviated walks. Like a medical chart, his diary recorded the progress of his ailments. " I have been living the life of an invalid," he wrote on February 2, 1956, "preoccupied with bladder and intestines, doctor once and even twice a day, thermometer to take temperature every hour or so, high fever at times, potions, pills, tablets every half hour." Weeks of antibiotics made him cry out, " O Death where is thy sting, Ο grave thy victory." If not for Nicky, he said, he would have done away with himself. T o Ivins he wrote, " I have had two calls to dine with the gods. Churlishly I refused and they reacted by making me deathly sick." A visitor brought to his bedside copies of his letters to Henry Adams during the early years of the century. Berenson's laconic comment, "Quite interesting." Only a short time before, he had reread Adams' letters to him. He thought their pessimistic "outpourings" about Adams' associates had been addressed to him because he was "an outsider." It somewhat annoyed him that Adams had never addressed him as " 'Dear Berenson,' and of course not as ' B . B . ' " He little knew how few even of Adams' familiars presumed to call him " H e n r y . " T o his interviewer, Berenson spoke of his admiration for Adams as a writer and fellow aesthete. He avowed himself a "disciple" of Adams, who, he said, had fostered his interest in the medieval architecture of France. THE BURDEN of the years grew heavier. Berenson complained that "huge stretches of memory have sunk into oblivion, like icebergs in the warm ocean." Names eluded him and even his own attributions began "to lack validity, because I forget how I made them." Fortunately the dark [564]

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moods did not last, and when he worked free of them he wrote or dictated his columns and attributions with unimpaired opinionativeness. Walking up and down on the terrace in the spring, he "felt something soft, caressing in the air, and a smell and taste as of a nosegay in my nostrils and on my lips." Word arrived that John Walker had been chosen to succeed David Finley as director of the National Gallery of Art. Though he had been hoping that Walker would be the first director of the I Tatti Institute, the news was deeply gratifying. " O f course you must accept," he wrote. "Directing the National Gallery is a far more important task than directing I Tatti." During the spring of 1956 the artist Petro Annigoni, w h o m Berenson had known since 1947, came to do a pen-and-ink sketch of him. He and Berenson shared "to a great extent, the same feelings about the excesses of modern art," and Berenson had strongly seconded him in his campaign against "the reckless cleaning of Old Master paintings." When the sketch was completed, Berenson looked quizzically at it and said, "In this portrait I am impressive, a personality to be taken seriously. Other people . . . have taken me seriously. I never." The sketch commanded a full page in the August Connoisseur. In it Berenson, almost as large as life, looks out gravely into the unfathomable distance, the bearded face burdened with thought. While Annigoni was at work on the sketch, Van Wyck Brooks and his wife, Gladys, were invited for a four-day stay, a visit described in her book If Strangers Meet. They arrived from Rome one afternoon just in time for tea. The guests stood conversing in the living room, and Berenson suddenly appeared as "noiselessly but inevitably, as a shadow moves along a wall." T o Gladys Brooks, the slim, diminutive figure seemed to lack "any corporeal dimension." The Brookses stayed on for more engrossing talk after the others left and, though seated on either side of their host, had to speak "clearly and distinctly" to make themselves heard. Suddenly, at 7:30 Berenson, without a word, took his leave. He reappeared at the dinner table precisely at 8:00 in dinner jacket and black tie. Mrs. Brooks was impressed by the flattering amenities of I Tatti. " O u r small Fiat was taken from us, to reappear washed and polished, our clothes were unpacked and pressed and shoes polished." In their comfortable suite of rooms, "the blinds were closed at evening and fresh flowers were brought in the morning. Breakfast we ate in our little sitting room beneath walls hung with gold brocade, and holding small treasures of painting by Nattier and Pietro Longhi, the Venetian." The Brookses observed how their aged host thriftily rationed the hours of each day. His great enemy was cold, and when he sat receiving, [565]

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" l i k e another Voltaire, the p i l g r i m s f r o m all the w o r l d w h o filled the house at lunch, tea, and d i n n e r , " he held a h o t - w a t e r bottle o n his knees beneath a plaid rug. T h e talk ranged w i d e l y , a v o i d i n g abstraction and " m e t a f u s s i c s , " for B e r e n s o n seized a l w a y s u p o n the concrete w h e t h e r o f science fiction, international trade, o r the R i s o r g i m e n t o . T o m a k e a point he q u o t e d O v i d or a line f r o m G e r m a n p o e t r y . Each day at 12:30 the B r o o k s e s j o i n e d B e r e n s o n to drive u p the hillside f o r a distant v i e w o f Florence and to begin a stroll d o w n w a r d . O n e day B e r e n s o n u n l o c k e d the gate o n the road a b o v e I T a t t i and t o o k t h e m t h r o u g h the o v e r g r o w n path to the p o o l in the g r o t t o w h e r e stood the turret and classical t e m p l e w h i c h Q u e e n Victoria had once visited. B e r enson explained that the p o o l filled the old quarry w h e r e D o n a t e l l o had obtained " t h e pietra serena" for his sculptures. A w a r m s y m p a t h y for H a r v a r d and the N e w E n g l a n d past united B e r e n s o n and B r o o k s . B r o o k s , at s e v e n t y , w i t h a great shelf o f b o o k s o n the varieties o f A m e r i c a n experience behind him, could share w i t h B e r enson the latter's pleasure in " D o y o u r e m e m b e r . . . ?" Intellectually they had c o m e out o f the same m a t r i x w i t h a similar fastidiousness. Later, w h e n B r o o k s sent h i m a c o p y o f Scenes and Portraits, B e r e n s o n remarked, " H o w m u c h o f it could enter into m y o w n a u t o b i o g r a p h y ! " H a l f the names w e r e o f p e o p l e he had k n o w n or k n o w n about. Letters frequently passed b e t w e e n t h e m until B e r e n s o n could n o l o n g e r h o l d a pen in hand. In that year, 1958, B r o o k s sent h i m The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760-1915.

O n e o f its chapters dealt

w i t h B e r e n s o n , and the v o l u m e bore the dedication: " T o Bernard B e r e n son w i t h a f f e c t i o n . " O n c e back at his desk, B e r e n s o n r e s u m e d the congenial w o r k o f the Kress-financed catalogues. W i t h the revision o f the Venetians substantially out o f the w a y b y A p r i l 1956, he m o v e d o n to r e v i e w the attributions o f the Florentines in the 1936 Italian edition o f the Lists, l e a v i n g his staff to check the printed sources in the library and assemble the p h o t o graphs. H e w a s to continue to w o r k sporadically o n the Florentine attributions for t w o m o r e years until sight and strength failed h i m . T h e c o m p l e t i o n o f the Florentine Lists w a s entrusted b y N i c k y to M i c h a e l Rinehart, a y o u n g art historian trained at H a r v a r d , w h o b e g a n his assignm e n t at I T a t t i in S e p t e m b e r 1959 shortly b e f o r e Berenson's death. Luisa V e r t o v a N i c o l s o n selected the 1,478 illustrations, a l t h o u g h she did not agree w i t h m a n y o f Rinehart's changes o f attribution. In 1963 the e x tremely c o m p l i c a t e d task o f revising the Lists o f the Central and N o r t h Italian schools fell to Luisa N i c o l s o n , as w e l l as the difficult j o b o f d e ciphering B e r e n s o n ' s corrective m e m o r a n d a . T h e revised catalogue o f the Venetians c a m e o u t in 1957 and " a d d e d 68 [566]

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n e w Lists to the 80 old o n e s . " T h e 1,333 illustrations filled most o f the t w o substantial quarto v o l u m e s . T h e t w o v o l u m e s o f the Florentine school, issued p o s t h u m o u s l y in 1963, added " 2 4 n e w Lists" to the 77 old ones. A s for the Central and N o r t h Italian schools, more than 50 n e w Lists supplemented the previous array o f 200 in the 1936 edition. T h i s concluding catalogue w a s finally published in 1968, the entire first v o l u m e listing the artists, the second and third presenting 1,988 illustrations. A fresh honor agreeably interrupted the carefully p r o g r a m m e d spring days o f 1956. A s a result o f the initiative o f Professor Roberto Longhi, the A c a d e m i c Senate o f the U n i v e r s i t y o f Florence voted to award Berenson the honorary degree o f D o c t o r o f Letters and Philosophy. Because o f Berenson's advanced years and recent ill health, the ceremony took place in the library o f I Tatti. T h e rector o f the university " m a d e a beautiful speech" that was " f r e e , " in Berenson's opinion, " f r o m rhetoric and adulation, yet highly appreciative, cordial, almost familiarly affectionate." T h e assembled c o m p a n y received copies o f a lengthy Latin poem, w r i t ten b y H u g o Henricus Paoli, w h i c h paid high tribute " A d Bernardum Berenson, Athenai Florentini, D o c t o r e m Honoris C a u s a . " If L o n g h i had an ulterior m o t i v e for proposing the honor, as a Berenson protege has intimated, Berenson s h o w e d no awareness o f it even though he half-humorously regarded L o n g h i as his " a r c h - a d v e r s a r y . " L o n g h i is said to have been anxious to conciliate Berenson, w h o had begun to replace h i m as a principal adviser o f C o n t i n i Bonacossi in his dealings w i t h the Kresses. It seems rather improbable, h o w e v e r , that L o n g h i had m u c h reason to fear his ninety-one-year-old rival. In any event, the t w o m e n " m e t v e r y naturally and cordially like old friends." A d v e r s a r y or not, Berenson considered L o n g h i " t h e most gifted a m o n g Italian art historians and critics." Berenson journalized that t h o u g h the occasion had been delightful, " i t does not change m y feeling o f failure, o f inadequacy, o f i n c o m p e t e n c e . " T h e insistent repetition o f such entries in his diary suggests that he must have been aware o f a certain hollowness in his protestations. He m a y have w i s h e d — e v e n h o p e d — f o r preeminence as a writer and thinker but he also was keenly aware o f the limitations o f his talent. A further sign o f the esteem o f Italians for Berenson came soon after the honor f r o m the University o f Florence w h e n on M a y 22 President Giovanni Gronchi conferred on " P r o f e s s o r " Bernard Berenson the honor o f Cavalier o f the Great C r o s s o f the O r d e r o f Merit o f the Republic o f Italy. M a r y M c C a r t h y put in her appearance in the spring, and Berenson readily yielded to her energetic c h a r m — a n d adulation. R e s u m i n g his favorite role o f cicerone o f nature as o f art, he took her " t o Gricigliano, back b y Sieci along the A r n o , T u s c a n y at its most enchanting m o m e n t , a [567]

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w o n d e r and a j o y for m y e y e . " B u t , he noted, " M a r y scarcely o p e n e d her eyes to all this b e a u t y " ; y e t he felt sure she w o u l d w r i t e about it and be e v o c a t i v e , f o r " t h e a c c o m p l i s h e d w r i t e r need n o t f e e l . " She later sent h i m a c o p y o f her Venice Observed,

eager for his approval, but he felt

o b l i g e d t o be critical. She thanked h i m for his ''gentle rap on the k n u c k l e s , " but o n l o n g e r reflection declared, " Y o u are w r o n g , I think, about the V e n i c e b o o k . I d o n ' t p r o p o s e to put it behind m e or turn o v e r a n e w leaf. O n the c o n t r a r y , I feel quite p r o u d o f i t . " T h e i r lively e x c h a n g e o f n e w s and opinions continued at frequent intervals. H e u n d o u b t e d l y f o u n d her sardonic frankness o f expression a diverting n o v e l t y . In one o f her letters she recalled w i t h a certain relish h a v i n g let B e r e n s o n and N i c k y read f r o m The Group, the n o v e l about "8 Vassar g i r l s " o n w h i c h she w a s w o r k i n g , the chapter w h i c h b e g a n w i t h the arresting c o m m a n d , " G e t y o u r s e l f a p e s s a r y . " W h e n she returned to Florence the f o l l o w i n g year for the research that w o u l d lead to her Stones of Florence,

B e r e n s o n put her up at I T a t t i for s o m e days. " I cannot

understand her literary v a l u e s , " he told the E n g l i s h publisher and w r i t e r H a m i s h H a m i l t o n . " I m e n t i o n t h e m o n l y , as her historical and artistical notions are beneath m y respect. For instance, she despises Steinbeck, particularly his Grapes of Wrath, w h i c h seems t o m e the m o s t i m p o r t a n t thing d o n e in A m e r i c a since Main Street. So w e quarrel kittenishly all the time. She is indeed d a m n e d a t t r a c t i v e . " A far m o r e tractable visitor f o l l o w e d o n M a r y M c C a r t h y ' s heels in the spring o f 1956 a m o n g the usual returnees. B e r e n s o n had received a letter in M a r c h f r o m E d w a r d A s h l e y B a y n e , an e c o n o m i s t w i t h the A m e r i c a n Universities Field S t a f f in R o m e , asking w h e t h e r ex-President H a r r y T r u m a n , w h o w a s t o u r i n g E u r o p e , m i g h t visit h i m . B e r e n s o n

im-

mediately sent an invitation to T r u m a n , w h o had told B a y n e that it had been " a l o n g - h e l d a m b i t i o n to meet B e r e n s o n . " T r u m a n arrived w i t h his w i f e , Bess, and three m e m b e r s o f their party f o r a l u n c h e o n that ran o n until three. Recalling the occasion, he w r o t e , " M y secretary still b e m o a n s the fact that he had n o pencil or pad to record y o u r e p i g r a m s at l u n c h e o n that day. W h e n the f i v e o f us returned to the h o t e l w e c o u l d r e m e m b e r o n l y three o f t h e m a c c u r a t e l y . " D u r i n g the l u n c h e o n B e r e n s o n had asked, " W h e n can w e meet t o m o r r o w ? " T r u m a n said, " I rise early, y o u k n o w . " H e w o u l d be taking his seven o ' c l o c k w a l k along the A r n o , but " I could be here at n i n e . " " S p l e n d i d , " replied B e r e n s o n . T r u m a n k e p t the a p p o i n t m e n t and the talk w e n t o n for the rest o f the m o r n i n g . A t tea that a f t e r n o o n B e r e n s o n w a s asked his impression o f his distinguished guest. W i t h careful deliberation he said, " I have been talking w i t h o n e o f the great historians o f the w o r l d ! " H e sent a clipping o f a [568]

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p h o t o g r a p h o f T r u m a n and h i m s e l f to his cousin L a w r e n c e , r e m a r k i n g , " I w a s enchanted w i t h the almost naive simplicity and s h r e w d candor o f m y guest. I rarely e n j o y e d meeting anyone as I did h i m . " In his diary he w r o t e his impression o f the s e v e n t y - t w o - y e a r - o l d T r u m a n , " a s u n spoiled b y h i g h o f f i c e as if he had got n o further than alderman o f Independence, M i s s o u r i . In m y long life I h a v e never met an individual w i t h w h o m I so instantly felt at h o m e . . . . R e a d y to touch on any subject, no matter h o w personal. . . . If the T r u m a n miracle can still occur, w e need not fear even the [Joseph] M c C a r t h y s . " T h e b i o g r a p h e r M e r l e M i l l e r asked T r u m a n about the visit and got this reply: " W e j u s t had to l o o k h i m up. H e w a s the best in his line, and if I ' v e learned one thing in life, it's that y o u h a v e to p a y attention to w h a t the experts say. . . . O l d B e r e n s o n w a s one o f the nicest f e l l o w s I've ever met, and he t o o k us all o v e r the house and explained to us w h a t to look f o r in a painting. A n d w h e n w e g o t to those m u s e u m s in Florence and elsewhere, w e k n e w a little about it. . . . H e w a s really a remarkable f e l l o w , and I w i s h I'd got to k n o w h i m b e t t e r . " W h e n at the end o f the y e a r T r u m a n w r o t e to B e r e n s o n and recalled his pleasant visit to I Tatti, he penned a postscript: " I w i s h the P o w e r s - t h a t - b e w o u l d listen, think, and m o c k at things as y o u h a v e ! " A m o n g the n u m e r o u s p i l g r i m s w h o f o l l o w e d during the s u m m e r , there c a m e one f r o m a w o r l d quite different f r o m the T r u m a n s ' . O n J u n e 30, 1 9 5 6 , the a g i n g Somerset M a u g h a m appeared, accompanied b y the m i d d l e - a g e d A l a n Searle, w h o w a s " t h e nanny o f his second c h i l d h o o d . " T h e h i g h l y successful p l a y w r i g h t and novelist had also b e c o m e a " l i v i n g l e g e n d . " H e too had built a pleasure d o m e to w h i c h pilgrims made their w a y — t h e Villa M a u r e s q u e at C a p Ferrat o n the Riviera. B e r e n s o n recorded in his diary, a "lined, w r i n k l e d face, senile m o u t h , kindly expression (or is it o f m e r e resignation?). S t a m m e r e d . U t t e r l y u n a f f e c t e d . " T h e y talked o f w r i t i n g , but to the o m n i v o r o u s B e r e n s o n M a u g h a m did not s e e m " a u courant w i t h up-to-date novelists": he deplored the p r e v a lence o f fornication in fiction, disliked Faulkner, and k n e w nothing o f M a r y M c C a r t h y . B e r e n s o n t o o k the pair t h r o u g h his collection o f P r i m i tives, but M a u g h a m , w h o s e o w n considerable collection ran to I m p r e s sionists and Postimpressionists, " s h o w e d a fantastic absence o f feeling f o r visual a r t . " H i s c o m p a n i o n , B e r e n s o n thought, " h a d better taste and m o r e genuine i n t e r e s t , " but " a l l in all, Somerset M a u g h a m is a g o o d talker." T h e pair returned a f e w days later f o r m o r e literary talk, and they w e r e j o i n e d b y H a r o l d A c t o n and A r t u r o Loria. B e r e n s o n argued that great fiction creates characters so distinctive that they seem to exist apart f r o m the b o o k in w h i c h they appear, and he cited the B i b l e figures o f D a v i d , [569]

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Saul, and Samuel. Maugham protested that it would be difficult to "find twenty such creations in the whole of European literature." The discussion flagged as Maugham was tired "and began to stammer." N o r was it possible for Maugham to shine in the presence of Loria and "such a soloist as Harold Acton." Berenson whispered to Acton, "The poor old thing's worn out." Acton could hardly keep a straight face. The arrival of several members of the Harvard Glee Club delighted the old alumnus. Nicky persuaded the young men to give Berenson a private concert, and afterward she brought them up, one by one, during lemonade on the terrace to meet "the little bearded figure wrapped in a shawl." Young John Carter Brown, who one day was to become director of the National Gallery of Art, was one of them. Brown, who had just graduated from Harvard, told Berenson he planned to prepare for a museum career by first taking a business course and then going on to graduate art study. Berenson bridled at this unaesthetic approach, but then, to Brown's amazement, he urged the young man to come back to I Tatti to study. Brown did return the following year and worked intensively under Berenson's direction. "You must look, look, and look, until you are blind with looking," Berenson admonished him, "and out of blindness will come illumination."

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E R E N S O N had intended to leave I Tatti during the Maggio to enjoy the repose of Ischia, but it became clear that leaving Florence was beyond his strength. He therefore "dedicated what little energy" he could still summon up to renewing his acquaintance "with the inexhaustible art treasures of Florence" and to "discovering" his "present relations to them." His friends in charge of the Uffizi and the Pitti permitted him to enter the galleries on days when they were closed to the public and he was spared "the hustling crowd, yelled at by guides." U g o Procacci of the superintendent's office showed him the remarkable work being done in the Boboli Gardens workshop cleaning and restoring Uccello's detached frescoes the Deluge and Noah's Drunkenness, in which "the astonishing effect of perspective" was now "clearly visible." He was glad to see that the paintings at the Pitti were still arranged in the "old-fashioned" way just as he had first seen them seventy years earlier. Half of the Uffizi, however, had been completely "theatralized" as if the paintings were being auctioned off. He thought the effect "startling and fetching" but hardly aesthetic, for the greatest paintings "talk not with storm . . . but with a still small voice." At the Palazzo Vecchio the Loeser bequest of paintings seemed well displayed but less interesting than he had recalled. At the invitation of the head of an Italian tourist agency, Berenson and Nicky were taken up to the Belvedere Fort above the Pitti Palace to see the work of restoration that would in 1958 open the place to tourists and art shows. From that airy vantage point he could look down upon Florence and its environs, he said, as in a fifteenth-century miniature. The increased traffic in the streets frightened him, especially when he was obliged to cross a street. It was a relief to escape into the quiet cloisters of Santa Maria Novella, San Lorenzo, and the Badia. [571]

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E v e r y w h e r e he f o u n d i m p r o v e m e n t in the lighting, but unfortunately it b r o u g h t to v i e w the "deterioration, dust and dirt almost t o o h a r s h l y . " A t the O p e r a del D u o m o he w a s again m o v e d b y the c h a r m i n g sculptural quality o f Luca della R o b b i a ' s Cantoria w i t h its children b l o w i n g t r u m pets w i t h p u f f e d o u t cheeks. D o n a t e l l o ' s Cantoria,

b y contrast, l o o k e d

like " t h e w o r k o f a painter using clay o r stone or b r o n z e instead o f pencil or p i g m e n t . " T h e m e m o r y - h a u n t e d reflections f o u n d their w a y into his diary and appeared o n O c t o b e r 14, 1956, in Loria's translation in t w o l o n g c o l u m n s in the Corriere della Sera titled " R i v i s t a n d o F i r e n z e . " H u g h T r e v o r - R o p e r rallied B e r e n s o n o n his prevalence in the n e w s . T h e Times n o t o n l y had carried a p h o t o g r a p h o f h i m and N i c k y at the B e l v e d e r e Fort b u t earlier in the s u m m e r had d e v o t e d the first p a g e and all o f the second o f the Literary Supplement to a s y m p a t h e t i c r e v i e w o f his career o n the occasion o f the recently issued b i b l i o g r a p h y . T r e v o r - R o p e r even reported seeing a p h o t o g r a p h o f B e r e n s o n in a n e w s p a p e r f r o m faro f f M e x i c o . In addition, a r e v i e w b y Francis H e n r y T a y l o r o f the revised Lotto in the New York Times in July praised B e r e n s o n not o n l y as " a great d e t e c t i v e " but also as h a v i n g the " g r e a t e r g i f t o f p e r c e p t i o n . " B e r e n s o n w a s again in the n e w s w h e n he protested in his c o l u m n and b y letter a plan to send f o r t y o f the choicest masterpieces o f the Florentine m u s e u m s to be exhibited at the M e t r o p o l i t a n and the N a t i o n a l G a l lery o f A r t . T h e Italian g o v e r n m e n t had p r o p o s e d the exhibition as a goodwill

gesture,

and the roster o f a r t i s t s — M i c h e l a n g e l o ,

Cellini,

D o n a t e l l o , Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, a m o n g o t h e r s — p r o m i s e d a sensational experience for A m e r i c a n s . B e r e n s o n ' s letter to the press w a r n e d that old masterpieces b e c a m e m o r e and m o r e valuable w i t h the passage o f time and that the sea air w a s b o u n d to h a r m t h e m . It helped intensify the s t o r m o f protest against the loan that had erupted in Florence. F o u r Florentine artists barricaded themselves in a turret o f the Palazzo V e c c h i o and s h o w e r e d d o w n leaflets, and the m a y o r p r o m i s e d t h e m bread, w a t e r , blankets, and a confessor. In the end the authorities at R o m e

were

o b l i g e d to back d o w n and the e x h i b i t i o n w a s called o f f . B e r e n s o n had cabled his objections to J o h n W a l k e r o f the N a t i o n a l Gallery

and James J.

Rorimer

o f the

Metropolitan.

Rorimer

had

countered that t h e y had n o t been in a position to refuse the Italian g o v ernment's o f f e r , but that b o t h he and W a l k e r had i n f o r m e d the State D e p a r t m e n t they w o u l d n o t object to its w i t h d r a w a l . R o r i m e r teased B e r e n s o n , " W o u l d y o u prefer g o i n g o n the Andrea Doria o r w o u l d y o u prefer the Italian airliner w h i c h had an u n h a p p y fate last n i g h t ? " T h e great n e w Italian ocean liner, the Andrea Doria, had recently g o n e to the b o t t o m o n July 26 o f f Massachusetts after colliding w i t h the

Stockholm.

T h e sense that t i m e w a s r u n n i n g o u t o n h i m increasingly p r e o c c u p i e d [572]

TOWARD

A "HUMANISTIC

PRIESTHOOD

Berenson as he reflected o n the fate o f I Tatti as a Harvard institution. D e a n M c G e o r g e B u n d y came over for a conference that seemed to reassure h i m for a time, but still not at ease about the matter he decided to put d o w n in w r i t i n g his ideas for the future o f the institution as he had been contemplating doing for s o m e time. T h e piece, titled " T h e Future o f I T a t t i , " substantially repeated the suggestions contained in his 1945 will, in w h i c h he had declared, " M y ideal is that they [the fellows] should b e c o m e ripe humanists and not mere teachers o f facts about the arts." H e w o u l d w i s h fellowships established, he n o w w r o t e , that w o u l d " p r o v i d e leisure and tranquility to sixteen or m o r e promising students." H e r e c o m m e n d e d that each fellowship run for four years to give the f e l l o w leisure to mature. T o ensure continuity, the appointments o u g h t to be rotated, four added each year to a first four. Fellows should be recruited f r o m the U n i t e d States, Canada, England, Sweden, N o r w a y , D e n m a r k , and the Netherlands. (France and G e r m a n y w e r e not included because those countries already had institutions in Florence.) T h e y should be persons " w h o s e attitude t o w a r d art and literature and thought . . . [was] not merely archaeological. . . but psychological and empirical, founded on direct and l o v i n g contact w i t h the w o r k o f art and not on b o o k learning." H e " w o u l d like the fellows o f I Tatti to . . . take as models Goethe and Winckelman, Ruskin and Pater, Burckhardt and Wölfflin, rather than mere antiquarians or mere attributors o f the type o f Cavalcaselle, B o d m e r and their l i k e s . " T h o u g h Berenson hoped to fix the character o f his institution as a kind o f aesthetic and humanistic priesthood to counter the prevailing heresies o f historicism and i c o n o g r a p h y a m o n g art critics and historians, he seems, at times, to have realized that his scheme was m o r e visionary than practical. T o his cousin Lawrence he referred to his prepared statement as " M y D r e a m for the Future o f I T a t t i . " While he w o u l d have liked to tie the hands o f his successors, he soon came to realize that the knot m i g h t c o m e undone. T h e press had recently reported that the Portuguese g o v ernment had ruled that a majority o f the trustees o f the Gulbenkian Foundation to be set up in Portugal must be Portuguese citizens. A s a result o f the ruling, Lord Radcliffe, w h o m Gulbenkian, as a naturalized British subject, had named as executor, resigned. Berenson w r o t e to Walker that the Gulbenkian case is " a g o o d lesson for m e — i f I need one! I have n o illusions w h a t in every probability will happen to I Tatti, once I am out o f the w a y ! " Seductive as his scheme m a y have been, Berenson's ideal l o o k e d back too far into the past to Walter Pater's aestheticism to attract the n e w breed o f scholarly art critics and historians. T h e historical problems that P a n o f s k y , Schapiro, and O f f n e r had opened up to the serious student o f [573]

B E R N A R D

B E R E N S O N

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

art made a return to emphasis on purely aesthetic values a too-parochial enterprise. It was to be a major achievement of successive directors of I Tatti to somehow reconcile Berenson's dream with actuality. Berenson affixed his signature to the document embodying his vision on August 18, 1956, at Vallombrosa, and he asked Charles B. Wrightsman, who was visiting him, to sign it as a witness. Wrightsman, the multimillionaire president of the Standard Oil Company of Kansas and an important art collector, appears to have been introduced to Berenson's circle by Walker, and Berenson had been encouraged by the interest he had shown in establishing the fellowship fund with Walker's help. If Wrightsman "puts himself into realizing my ideas for the future of I Tatti," Berenson assured his cousin Lawrence, "he can and will put it through." The life annuities for Berenson's dependents included in his 1945 will and 1954 codicil continued to be a cause for concern to Harvard. It became obvious that some of these would have to be eliminated to reduce the prospective drain upon the estate. As a result a new codicil converted annuities to Mary's descendants to bequests of $10,000 each. For Nicky there would be an annuity of $7,000 and a place of residence on the estate for life. Casa al Dono at Vallombrosa, of course, already belonged to her. She was also granted Berenson's copyrights and named executor of his Italian will, for which service she was afterward paid $30,000. In spite of the reduction of annuities a sticking point remained, the probable inadequacy of Berenson's endowment to cover the program of fellowships he envisioned. The matter clouded the progress of the final arrangements with Harvard and thus opened the way immediately after Berenson's death for Wrightsman to suggest that he would supply the needed endowment provided I Tatti was transferred to the joint aegis of N e w York University and the Metropolitan Museum, of which institutions he was a trustee. The thought of such a possible change in the disposition of I Tatti alarmed Nicky, as it did Lawrence Berenson. Nicky felt it was their duty as executors "to carry out B . B . ' s will as it is worded" and "let the Harvard people muddle through as best they can." The contretemps passed and Wrightsman dropped out of the picture. Though the estate yielded less than two million dollars in endowment, Harvard justified Nicky's and Lawrence's faith in its ability to "muddle through." Since Berenson's death in 1959 the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies has been successfully developed under gifted directors. The library has grown and its quarters substantially increased. The program of fellowships has been supported by an increasing number of contributors. [574]

TOWARD

A "HUMANISTIC

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THE AUTUMN chill of 1956 drove Berenson from Vallombrosa, and this time he traveled north through the mountains to Bologna for a week at the great international Carracci exhibition. It was as a severe judge that he passed his week in Bologna, for the exhibition challenged his disdain for the w o r k of the family of artists w h o had initiated the baroque style. In the North Italians he had cited the Carracci as figures in the "decline of art" that succeeded "the classic masters." T h e tremendous popular success of the exhibition, with many thousands crowding into the galleries to see the 1 1 5 canvases and 250 sketches, seemed almost a personal affront to his judgment. Hadn't Ruskin dispatched the family's work as "the scum of Titian"? In his account in the Corriere della Sera he attempted to set the record straight. He pointed out that the Carracci "had held the field for generations," especially at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but had dropped from view for more than a hundred years. N o w "loving admiration" was being bestowed upon them with "drums and trumpets" in their home town; they were being honored as natives of Bologna as Guido Reni had been two years earlier. The hanging of the paintings, he conceded, "could scarcely be surpassed," the drawings were shown " i n exemplary fashion," and there was " m u c h that is admirable in single w o r k s , " such as the Butcher's Shop, the Martyrdom of Sant' Angelo, the Holy Family Crossing the Nile, and Love in Lethe. He insisted, nevertheless, on the basic weaknesses of the Carracci: " I cannot stomach their lack of proportion between one figure and another, their false religious sentiment, their pedantry, their conventional and lifeless drawing and no less conventional painting." It was a characteristically splenetic outburst against an exhibition that seemed to him the unfortunate product of narrow historical research, but the tide was running against his authority. Time magazine, in a highly favorable review of the exhibition titled "Triumphal C o m e b a c k , " quoted Walter Friedländer's judgment that the Carracci ceilings of the Farnese were "second only to Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling." Time also pointed out that "the greatest holdout of them all [Berenson], w h o once dismissed the whole school as 'worthless' [and] still refuses to place the Carracci 'among the greatest painters' . . . cheered Annibale's 'Butcher Shop,' " saying, " Ί do not recall elsewhere, movement, gesture or expressions so real and lifelike.' " The Connoisseur commented that "whatever the intrinsic merit o f the Carracci, their works are of the greatest historical importance," to which Berenson must have grumbled, " B u t y o u have reversed the values." When he returned from Bologna, Berenson heard the news that the Israeli forces had overwhelmed the Egyptians in the Sinai and had [575]

BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

reached to w i t h i n t w e n t y miles o f the Suez Canal. " I w a s t h r i l l e d , " he exulted, " b y the Israeli attack o n the ridiculous troops o f the lunatic s u b h u m a n E g y p t i a n s . " A s he had at the t i m e o f the 1948 w a r , he felt a curious surge o f patriotism f o r Israel. " T h e complaint made b y even the m o s t friendly disposed g e n t i l e s , " he r e m a r k e d to the Baroness Liliane de Rothschild, " h a s been that J e w s w o u l d neither till the soil nor fight. T h e p r o o f to the c o n t r a r y , g i v e n b y the Israelis, is perhaps the m o s t i m p o r tant revaluation o f J e w r y that has happened in m y time. It is the p r i m e reason w h y w e s h o u l d not o n l y be p r o u d o f Israel b u t g i v e it s u p p o r t . " In an o d d l y personal w a y B e r e n s o n had c o m e to feel h i m s e l f an apologist f o r the J e w s . A s a y o u n g m a n he had m o v e d b y preference in a social w o r l d in w h i c h , he believed, J e w s w e r e resented for being " m o r e intelligent, quicker, abler" than others. N o w , he m u s e d , as i f thinking o f his o w n experience, the J e w as a j e w " m a y be pushing, indiscreet, and a snob, but surely that is the fault o f a w o r l d w h i c h persists in b o y c o t t i n g , ostracizing h i m , so that he n e v e r feels at h o m e , is n e v e r w h o l l y acc e p t e d . " In his diary he protested, " W h e r e is there another p e o p l e w h o has p r o d u c e d unceasingly f o r 3,000 years individuals o f genius, creators in e v e r y field requiring use o f mind, as J e w s h a v e ? " B e r e n s o n occupied the paradoxical position o f b e l i e v i n g in assimilation and at the same time believing that the w o r l d needed the leavening influence o f the J e w . T h e troubling contradiction faced secular J e w s e v e r y w h e r e . Y e t that these beliefs could subsist t o g e t h e r suggests that the heart, as Pascal noted, has its o w n singular logic. THE FINAL touches o n the v o l u m e s o f the Venetian s c h o o l occupied the last m o n t h s o f 1956 and the early m o n t h s o f 1957. In D e c e m b e r Luisa sent a sample o f the title p a g e f r o m the P h a i d o n o f f i c e in L o n d o n for his approval. P r e o c c u p i e d w i t h the Lists, he had g i v e n u p for the time being the l u x u r y o f c o n t r i b u t i n g a c o l u m n to the Coniere delta Sera. B y June he w a s able to put his signature to the preface. His idea, he said, had been " t o represent e v e r y phase o f each artistic personality and o f its f o l l o w e r s and their f o l l o w e r s so as to persuade us that it is the inferior painter and n o t a G i o t t o , a M i c h e l a n g e l o , a Bellini, a G i o r g i o n e , a Titian, a T i n toretto, w h o is responsible f o r the inferior p r o d u c t i o n . " T h i s e x p a n s i o n ist idea had m a r k e d his departure, as he explained in the 1932 preface, f r o m the "dandiacal aestheticism" that had p r o d u c e d the "earlier severi t y " o f his Lists. T h e artist a m o n g the Venetians w h o m o s t challenged h i m appears to h a v e been G i o r g i o n e , w h o s e w i d e influence he had hitherto neglected. H e n o w a b u n d a n t l y m a d e u p f o r this neglect. In 1932 he had cautiously listed t w e n t y paintings as b y G i o r g i o n e , adding o n l y three to the 1894 [576]

TOWARD

A " H U M A N I S T I C

PRIESTHOOD

List. The new roster listed forty-two, including the Allendale Nativity as completed by Titian and the Glasgow Christ and the Adultress, which he had once given to Titian. He also finally admitted into the canon the Benson Holy Family, which he had assigned to Catena when it was exhibited in the N e w Gallery in 1894. When he reflected on the whole problem of attributions in the privacy of his diary, he decided that "most of the mistakes I have made in my career as attributor of pictures have been due to a far too narrow and dogmatic concept of the painter." He had "rectified" that mistake as concerned Giorgione, but now that he had begun to work on the Florentines, he was finding "the Giotto nut. . . hard to crack." Still struggling with the question, he wrote that though Giotto was "a central figure in universal art history," he "yet remains a problem, and to me an insoluble one, more than any other in my range of continuous study." He left sufficient notes and memoranda, however, for Nicky and her associates to include in the posthumous Florentine School a few additional works in scattered collections and to particularize more fully the frescoes at Assisi, Santa Croce, the Peruzzi Chapel, and the Arena Chapel in Padua, as well as the works of his followers. The publication of the Venetian School in 1957 was greeted as "an outstanding artistic event," the lavish number of plates being seen as of especial value to the student. Vittorio Moschini praised the two quarto volumes in the Burlington, though he questioned Berenson's depreciation of recent Venetian studies, and Berenson's friend Germain Bazin of the Louvre warmly welcomed the work in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. The most searching scrutiny of the volumes appeared in a long review article in the Art Bulletin. The author, Erika Tietze-Conrat, was the learned collaborator and widow of the famed Viennese art historian Hans Tietze, whom Berenson had known when he was director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Victims of the Nazis, the husband and wife had emigrated to the United States in 1938 to join the community of refugee German-Jewish art historians. Alluding to Berenson's contempt for iconographical studies, Madame Tietze-Conrat declared, "There is an abyss between us which can never be bridged." She pointed out a number of errors in the captions to paintings which could have been avoided had Berenson paid attention to iconographical research, and she faulted him for "subjectively" limiting his choice of "followers and their followers." Her criticism, she concluded, was "directed against what Berenson omitted rather than what he did." If the heavily documented article had been brought to his attention when it appeared in December of 1958, he would doubtless have agreed that the abyss between them was unbridgeable. [577]

BERNARD

BERENSON

· THE

MAKING

OF A

LEGEND

EVERY MORNING, p r o p p e d u p in bed, B e r e n s o n c o m p u l s i v e l y addressed h i m s e l f t o his diary. " W h y do I still g o o n ? " he asked himself, and p r o m p t l y a n s w e r e d , " I w r i t e as I dress for dinner, as a matter o f personal discipline." H e felt that the ordered ritual o f the day g a v e h i m the illusion that he w a s "still p a y i n g f o r m y berth and board o n the Ship o f L i f e . " W r i t i n g w a s as w e l l a c o n t i n u i n g effort at self-discovery and " s e l f l i b e r a t i o n . " A w a r e o f posterity peering o v e r his shoulder, he w a s determ i n e d to c o n f r o n t , e v e n affront, the w o r l d w i t h his being, his identity, his opinions. Y e t he could not o v e r c o m e the feeling o f helplessness o f the bystander assailed b y political events. "Passionately e x c i t e d " b y the m e n a c i n g state o f w o r l d affairs, he w i s h e d he could stop reading the newspapers and " w i t h d r a w to the C l a s s i c s " instead o f " w a s t i n g strength in k i c k i n g against the p r i c k s . " H e k n e w it w a s a futile w i s h , for he eagerly savored the glimpses o f the inner coil o f events that his correspondents supplied h i m . N o r could he g i v e u p the pleasure o f c o m p a r i n g notes w i t h Walter L i p p m a n n and sharing w i t h h i m the brilliant diatribes against official b u n g l i n g that enlivened T r e v o r - R o p e r ' s n e w s - p a c k e d letters. H e still " m a d e a b r a v e s h o w " w h e n he j o i n e d c o m p a n y , he assured H a m i s h H a m i l t o n , b u t the rest o f the t w e n t y - f o u r hours w e r e scarcely c o m f o r t a b l e . In spite o f his extraordinary recuperative p o w e r , the intervals o f being free " f r o m a feeling o f bloatedness, f r o m stabbing aches and pains a n y w h e r e , f r o m nausea and a disgusting taste in his m o u t h , f r o m difficulties w i t h bladder and intestine," s l o w l y g r e w shorter. " S h a l l I e n d , " he w o n d e r e d , " h a p p y in m y b o w e l s and satisfied, all else o f the infinitely detailed universe f o r g o t t e n ? " His introspections p r o b e d deep into his past as the outer w o r l d receded, and he tried t o find the determining influences in his life as i f he w e r e researching another artistic personality. E m e r s o n , he t h o u g h t , had taught h i m the i m p o r t a n c e o f " b e c o m i n g , o f being rather than d o i n g . " Dante's

Vita Nuova

had conditioned his idealistic "adolescent feeling

t o w a r d w o m e n " and still p l a y e d " a great p a r t " in his life. W i t h so little future to be counted on, the past l o o m e d ever larger in t h o u g h t , and the paths not taken ever m o r e tantalizing. T h u s , he w a s quite ready to talk w h e n Francis H e n r y T a y l o r c a m e o v e r , in A p r i l 1957, to i n t e r v i e w h i m for an article for the Atlantic

Monthly.

H e received T a y l o r " a t his bedside e v e r y m o r n i n g p r o m p t l y at nine o'clock and expatiated upon the history o f his life, his satisfactions and his disappointments." H e licked his spiritual wounds, T a y l o r reported, in the "deep and absorbing intimacies o f our morning conversations," rehearsing, as he had so often done before, the theme o f his Sketch for a Self-Portrait, the "sense o f f a i l u r e , " o f the " w r o n g t u r n i n g , " w h i c h he had been seduced [578]

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to make as "an expert." Taylor felt the paradoxical contrast, at first, between "the almost ascetic quality" of Berenson's mind, his fastidious ideality, "and the sybaritic luxury of its setting," but talk with Berenson soon convinced him that there was no hypocrisy: "the compulsion for physical beauty and comfort" had "dominated and complemented his spiritual life." T o a degree Berenson took comfort, Taylor perceived, in his repentance for what now seemed wasted opportunities, relishing in pensive fantasy the Goethean triumphs that he might have had. Taylor's sympathetic review of Berenson's long career pointed to his extraordinary service to the study and appreciation of Italian Renaissance art, to the building of a great library of 50,000 volumes, and to the creation of a center for humanistic studies. " S o great a gift to the cause of humanism would of itself be enough to justify the pretensions of a more meager intellect," he wrote. " B u t in this case we have the art together with the artifact." The fragile Berenson continued to hold court with old-fashioned courtesy and undiminished intellectual verve, jotting down afterward his uninhibited impressions of his visitors. Irving Stone and his wife, Jean, who were busy with research on Michelangelo, appeared to him wholly ignorant of Italian " o r any other foreign language." They had, he thought, "no sense of the past, yet will end by producing a vastly popular book that will be, at the same time, a caricature of the present way of teaching and writing about the art of the past." When The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Novel of Michelangelo came out in 1961 and headed the list of "Best Sellers in Fiction," the San Francisco Chronicle called it "a feat of showmanship as well as a work of fiction." A little later in the spring of 1957, John Steinbeck came to luncheon. He seemed to have "to work hard to give utterance to words," curiously "parallel to Silone," the Italian novelist, and, like him, not at ease. Berenson told him of his admiration of his Grapes of Wrath. Privately, he feared "that like Faulkner, like Hemingway, he has come to the end of his tether, has written himself out and does not know what next." Steinbeck, stirred by the counsel Berenson proffered, afterward wrote, " B y some magical formula, compounded of example and clean clear thinking, you made for me at once a medicine and a cloak of fine mail. One does not thank the doctor who saves one's life, but it is natural to be grateful that he exists and practices." Lewis Mumford, the historian of American culture, came up with his wife to pay his respects. N o w sixtytwo, Mumford told Berenson that his "very being gives us courage to embrace the coming years with grace, almost eagerness. T o behold your own spirit burning so purely and brightly still, gave a new meaning to Pater's old figure: 'a hard gem-like flame.' " [579]

BERNARD

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· THE

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LEGEND

In contrast to Mumford's reverential demeanor was the gay warmth of a visit from Vivien Leigh and Lawrence Olivier. Berenson felt very much in their element. There was no need to play the sage. "Vivien looked remarkably herself," he reported to Hamish Hamilton. " N o t a wrinkle on her throat and her eyes more beautiful than ever. Larry is such a charmer, so warming, so handsome as well. We talked, we chatted, we laughed as if we had seen each other all along and not seven and more years since we last met." Mary McCarthy, who was staying at I Tatti for a few days, joined them all at lunch. O n returning to London, Vivien Leigh sent him souvenirs that she had picked up in Yugoslavia during their "exciting and fascinating tour." The "happiest memory," she added, was being at I Tatti with him. One of his visitors roused Berenson to defend his favorite rationalization that Catholicism was essentially "detribalized Judaism" and had made Judaism obsolete. His adversary was Dore Schary, the prominent Hollywood producer and playwright, who was a practicing Jew. On his return to America Schary wrote that he "was ready to enter the lists again at any time to resume our discussion about Judaism and Catholicism." Professor Kenneth Murdock arrived with his wife on a kind of reconnaissance at the urging of President Nathan Pusey of Harvard. Dean McGeorge Bundy had strongly recommended him to Berenson as a leading member of the faculty, a specialist in American literature, and the recent administrator of the Program in General Education. When Berenson somewhat patronizingly remarked, "I suppose you are seeing everything you can in all the galleries," Murdock frankly admitted that they had each searched the books on Italian paintings published by Skira to make up their lists of what to see and had then combined them. He also said they were especially interested in Antonello da Messina and Fra Angelico and a certain sculptor. Berenson approved the painters as masters, but scornfully dismissed the sculptor. Mrs. Murdock, not one to be easily patronized, thought him impudent but held her tongue. At tea, however, she sat beside him and he put his cold hand on hers and held it throughout a pleasant conversation. O n Pusey's behalf, Murdock canvassed Berenson's plans for the future of I Tatti, and Berenson pressed upon him the desirability of keeping I Tatti independent of the Fogg. Murdock, w h o was on the eve of retirement, was evidently being considered for the post of director of Berenson's Institute when it should come to Harvard. What impression he made upon Berenson at the time went unrecorded. He did subsequently accept the position and become the first director of I Tatti under its new name, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

[580]

L V

Λ

Ji Scene from Rembrandt

η

H E Tuscan spring o f 1957 had again worked its wonders, and Berenson felt fit for yet one more giro, the one that was to prove his last. It was a tour o f professional duty enhanced, as always, by pure pleasure. T h e palace o f the Capodimonte on the heights overlooking Naples had just been restored as a great public art museum, and Berenson entrained for Naples to make his inspection. A s the palace had until recent years been the property o f the duke o f Aosta, a friend o f Berenson's, he doubtless came by invitation for a private viewing in the company o f the art historian Bruno Molaioli, a member o f the Fine Arts Service. T h e contents o f the Galleria Nazionale had just been transferred to the palace. T h e tasteful arrangement and modern lighting delighted him. "I was speechless with admiration," Berenson wrote, "and every preconception against it, and I had many, vanished so completely that I cannot recall t h e m . " A t the Museo Nazionale della Ceramica, n o w housed in the Villa Floridiana, where he had once been a frequent guest, he luxuriated in the antique "treasures o f silver, gold, crystal, glass, ceramics." T h e "invention, the variety" took his breath away. "I panted with eagerness to indulge m y appetite for t h e m , " he wrote, " t o live with them until I had memorized every o n e . " B y comparison, " w h a t has been done in the West since is crude and heavy and unimaginative." His one regret was that he could not dart about Naples, as when he was young, ferreting out "this and that church or cloister, or gallery." T o be on the m o v e again seemed to restore him. His infirmities were forgotten, and once again he became a quivering sensorium whose eyes caressed the objects o f contemplation. From Naples he went up to Rome. A m o n g the antiquities in the Museo delle Terme he felt " h o w freely I breathe in the midst o f all that is exhibited here." His appetite for

[581]

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"Antique sculpture" now seemed to him greater than " f o r any other phase of European art." In the flush of this perception of the beauty of "great originals," he reflected that his taste in painting had finally changed from Old Masters to the French Impressionists. "Minor Trecento painters, mere artisans, bore m e . " He wondered " h o w much of Italian painting" would affect him if he "were not interested in attributing and dating them." With his friend Count Vittorio Cini, Berenson traveled to the Villa di Papa Giulio, now a museum of pre-Roman antiquities. Berenson said little as they lingered before the sculptures that caught his interest, but his example had its effect upon his companion. As they left the museum, Cini said that seeing with him had made him feel as if he were seeing not with his own eyes but with Berenson's. Still in pursuit of the marvels of antiquity, Berenson proceeded to the Pantheon. Nothing anywhere else, he thought, was "comparable to its grandeur, to its splendor." He believed the Pantheon had left its mark upon architecture down to "the fifth or sixth century A.D." He reached Assisi in his automobile in time to celebrate another birthday there, his ninety-second. Once again he scanned the frescoes in hopeless quest of a solution to the Giotto "problem." Months later, as he studied photographs of the Santa Croce frescoes, he exclaimed, "I feel baffled and humiliated, and ready to say 'Enjoy him' and leave the problems to others." The strain of travel had evidently been too much for him, and soon after his return, while out walking one day, he suddenly collapsed, feeling that his "spine was ready to double up like a pocket-knife" and "his shoulders to separate from each other." Some workmen aided him, and he was put to bed. The seizure passed, but it was a grim indication not only that skeletal atrophy—osteoporosis—was well advanced but that more painful episodes were in store for him as a consequence of his tumble down the ravine two and a half years earlier. Life and work resumed up at Vallombrosa at a still more modest pace, but there was no lessening of his pleasure in the scenic drives in the hills with their " T i n toretto twilight colors." Yehudi Menuhin and his wife, Diana, came down from Gstaad to stay with him for a few days on the forested mountain slope. At forty-one, the violinist was himself a worldwide legend, his recitals keeping him almost constantly on the move from one music center to another. Menuhin and his wife, a former ballet dancer and actress, had visited Berenson in 1952 on their return from India, and they had promptly taken their place among his favorite younger friends. Menuhin's very name was a challenge to Berenson's buried [582]

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memories—"Yehudi," the J e w . His early childhood had been much more pious than Berenson's; his earliest language had been Hebrew in the immigrant household in America. He had toured the death camps in Germany after the war and was an ardent Zionist. T o Berenson, he was an inexhaustible resource for conversation. " Y e h u d i , " he observed, "is the sort of person I could wish to have access to every d a y . " He described him as "beautifully built, complexion pale ivory, characteristically Russian. Angelic temper and talk. Quiet, modest, keen nevertheless not only in music." He thought the "pirouetting" Diana "moreJewish-looking" than her husband. Menuhin played Bach for Berenson, "a j o y to hear." It was the sort of private concert that would be repeated again and again on subsequent visits when he occupied the Villino Corbignano. At I Tatti the stream of guests steadily narrowed under Nicky's benign watchfulness. His old friend the Countess Serristori ranked high among the privileged. When she came to tea one day at his bedside, he was envious of the "lucky creature" who, at eighty-six, "still sees and hears normally and digests well." After sixty years of friendship, their political disagreements long since ignored, they could sit beside each other communing "without saying a w o r d . " When Nicky read aloud to them from Joseph Mardrus' French version of the Arabian Nights, the countess was in ecstasy and they fell to reminiscing how they had enjoyed the volumes when they first began to appear in 1898. In November King Gustaf Adolf was also a cheering presence. Berenson took him into the library, which he now rarely visited himself, to show him a volume about which he had inquired. One of Berenson's most appreciative guests, Gustaf found their conversations opened "new lines of thought" for him, whether they talked of art or ventured "along channels of philosophical lines." He felt that was especially the case when they did not quite agree and proceeded to debate: "What a stimulant a debate like that can be between friends." If conversation did not falter, writing did. There were times now when Berenson felt humiliated that because of age and a sense of isolation he could not write about current matters, "let alone remote ones." The recent death of Arturo Loria, who had been a sort of collaborator on the columns for the Corriere delta Sera, had cut another cable to life. But the "creative lust" to write would not down. "This impotence," Berenson declared, " I cannot resign myself to, although I am never troubled by my sexual impotence." Thoughts whirled through his head, but, he complained, " I cannot bring them to book. I cannot resist reading dailies, weeklies, monthlies, trying to keep abreast (if superficially) with what is being done in all fields accessible to my intelligence." There was, of course, always the escape with Nicky to a few hours' [583]

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w o r k on the endless Florentine Lists, but the need to w r i t e f o r print g a v e h i m no rest. H e f o u n d a successor translator to Loria, and again his signature appeared at the b o t t o m o f his occasional c o l u m n s in the M i l a n n e w s p a p e r , t h o u g h his g r o w i n g enfeeblement required increasing help f r o m the devoted staff that ministered to him. Inquiries continued to c o m e in f r o m curators around the w o r l d . For s o m e years B e r e n s o n had replied to them t h r o u g h N i c k y and m o r e recently t h r o u g h William M o s t y n - O w e n . O f an alleged Botticelli, f o r e x a m p l e , N i c k y i n f o r m e d a curator, " M r . B e r e n s o n has c o m e to the conclusion that the M a d o n n a belongs into his 'great part' g r o u p . " Later, to an inquiry concerning a reputed B a r t o l o m m e o di G i o v a n n i , M o s t y n O w e n w r o t e , " F o r the time being at any rate M r . B e r e n s o n is sticking to his attribution to G r a n a c c i . " T h e r e w a s no letup as w e l l in the p r o f e s sional inquiries f r o m the Wildenstein f i r m on the photographs they sent to B e r e n s o n f o r attribution. T h e painful deterioration o f his spine steadily progressed so that he at last had to g i v e up the pleasure o f replying to his personal correspondents in his o w n hand. A s he explained in a typewritten letter to H a m i s h H a m i l t o n in m i d - J a n u a r y o f 1958, " M y hand has been and remains too w o b b l y to be legible, even b y an expert o f m y w r i t i n g like y o u . " For s o m e time he continued to hope, t h o u g h in vain, that he w o u l d return to his pen. H e did struggle on until m i d - A p r i l 1958 to keep his diary w i t h no apparent diminution o f mental e n e r g y or self-awareness. In the v e r y last entry w h i c h N i c k y w a s able to decipher, he l o o k e d back u p o n his life w i t h R h a d a m a n t h i n e severity: " S o m u c h in m y past that I hate to e v o k e . Short o f violence, I h a v e been capable o f e v e r y sin, e v e r y misdemeanor, e v e r y crime. With h o r r o r I think w h a t I should h a v e b e c o m e if I lived the life o f an ill-paid p r o f e s s o r , or struggling writer, h o w rebellious, if I had not lived a life devoted to great art and the aristocratically p y r a m i d a l structure o f society that it serves, or w o r s e still if I had remained in the all but proletarian condition I lived as a J e w i s h i m m i g r a n t lad in B o s t o n . S o I remain skeptical about m y personality. It really seems to h a v e reached its present integration in the last t w e n t y years, w i t h the w i d e and far vision I n o w e n j o y , w i t h tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner, expecting little and trying to be grateful f o r that, the serenity f o r w h i c h I am n o w admired. B u t I keep hearing the Furies, and never f o r g e t t h e m . " H e w a s ending, he said, " a s a m y t h w h o s e saga I can scarcely recognize as h a v i n g any resemblance to m y deep d o w n s e l f . " T o the reporter and the p h o t o g r a p h e r w h o c a m e f r o m Life magazine f o r an article to be called " E x p e r t O u t l i v i n g H i s L e g e n d , " he said m o c k seriously, " I keep reading stories about B e r n a r d B e r e n s o n and I w o n d e r w h o is this person g o i n g

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around w i t h m y n a m e . " H e posed at his desk for one o f the photos, his features d r a w n and sharpened b y age. In another p h o t o , D r . A l b e r t o C a p e c c h i is s h o w n s a y i n g g o o d - b y after his regular m o r n i n g visit. " A l l the a r t s , " B e r e n s o n is q u o t e d as s a y i n g , " m u s t singly and together create a h u m a n i z e d society and its masterpiece, free m a n . " A s the r e o p e n i n g o f the Santa Trinita b r i d g e approached, B e r e n s o n again b e c a m e g o o d c o p y . In O c t o b e r 1956 Newsweek

had reported the

progress o n the reconstruction o f the f a m o u s span, n o t i n g that sixty million lire (196,000) had been collected b y an international c o m m i t t e e " h e a d e d b y the venerable art critic Bernard B e r e n s o n . " In the f o l l o w i n g M a r c h the New York Times said that the w o r k w a s nearly c o m p l e t e and that, thanks to the c o m m i t t e e w h i c h B e r e n s o n led, the b r i d g e w a s b e i n g restored e x a c t l y as it had been. T h e Italian press hailed the c o m i n g event w i t h l o n g accounts o f the tragic destruction b y the retreating G e r m a n s . O n e account w a s a c c o m p a n i e d b y B e r e n s o n ' s recollections o f the b r i d g e as he first saw it f r o m his w i n d o w h i g h u p a b o v e the A r n o nearly seventy years earlier and o f his h o r r o r in A u g u s t o f 1944 w h e n he gazed u p o n its ruins. O n M a r c h 16, 1958, the architectural masterpiece o f A m m a n a t i , w h i c h had first spanned the A r n o in 1569, w a s s o l e m n l y opened to traffic. In his dedicatory address the Italian p r i m e minister, A d o n e Z o l i , praised B e r e n son's " c r u s a d e " for the restoration o f the b r i d g e " w h e r e it w a s and h o w it w a s . " T h e New

York Times captioned its story " R e c o n s t r u c t i o n o f

B e a u t i f u l B r i d g e a T r i u m p h f o r B e r e n s o n at 9 2 , " his ninety-third birthday b e i n g three m o n t h s a w a y , and illustrated it w i t h a p h o t o g r a p h o f h i m . A n a c c o m p a n y i n g editorial declared, " T h e w o r l d has o w e d m u c h to M r . B e r e n s o n f o r a l o n g time. It is peculiarly h a p p y circumstance that has enabled h i m t o dramatize a lifetime o f service to the best in the arts in this crusade for an old b r i d g e . " M a r y M c C a r t h y t h o u g h t it " c h a r m i n g that the Times s h o u l d have run y o u r p h o t o g r a p h instead o f the b r i d g e ' s . " It r e m i n d e d her " o f the t i m e that E d m u n d W i l s o n , lecturing o n J o y c e , w a s asked to a u t o g r a p h Ulysses."

A marble plaque o n the fagade o f the

Palazzo dei Padri delle M i s s i o n i , the edifice o v e r l o o k i n g the south end o f the bridge, identifies B e r n a r d o B e r e n s o n as presiding o v e r the COMITATO PER LA RECOSTRUZIONE DEL PONTE and lists the names o f the m a j o r donors and collaborators. O N FAVORABLE days d u r i n g the early spring o f 1958 B e r e n s o n w o u l d suddenly be quite his o w n self again. H e still m a n a g e d to c o m e d o w n t w i c e a day to see a friend or t w o and t o take a f e w steps in the garden w h e n the sun w a s shining. B r o n c h i a l and bladder complications set h i m

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back for a while, and his spine gave him "a bad time," but he hoped with Nicky and Mostyn-Owen's help " t o get on with the Florentine Painters." He tried a brace, but it was torture and he gave it up. A third crippling attack of pain came in mid-April. The process of decalcification "extended to his ribs" and was accompanied by intense pains. As a result, for the remaining months of life he led the constricted life of an invalid, never far distant from his bed nor from Nicky or Emma's watchful eyes. There was no decline, however, in his interest in what was going on in the art world, and he continued to ask eagerly for photographs to add to his vast collection. Nor did he lose track of the comings and goings of his numerous correspondents. When thanking the Baroness Liliane de Rothschild, who had sent him a clipping of a news story telling of Proust's curious interest in Berenson's private fortune, he reported that her mother, on a recent visit, had kept him "spellbound" with her reminiscences. He asked the baroness as a favor to send him the illustrated catalogues of the Modigliani and Japanese exhibitions in Paris. Letters from scores of correspondents continued to pour in to his listening post, brimful of personal news and gossip. His dictated replies went forth as animated and opinionated as ever. T o a report from Margaret Barr, he scornfully exclaimed, "What a shameless humbug the Detroit Leonardo is. It takes my breath away to try to believe that anybody could think that a great master, no matter how young, could have perpetrated such an absurdity." Writers like Mary McCarthy lavishly briefed him on the London literary scene and his friends there. The secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences notified him he had been elected one of the fellows. His picture duly appeared in the New York Times along with those of the nine others, including his friend Van Wyck Brooks. Sir Isaiah Berlin, who had visited him on his way out to Israel, sent him a lengthy and moving account in which he described the striking contrast at the bungled Naples embarkation between the self-controlled behavior of the Israelis and the screaming hysteria of the American Jews. He reported how greatly impressed he was by what he saw in Israel in spite of the occasional annoying reminders of the laws of Leviticus. Lewis Namier, whom he had encountered there, was "walking on air" at the sight of the enormous improvement since his visit in 1936. Deeply stirred by Berlin's eloquent narrative, Berenson replied, "I cannot exaggerate my interest in Israel. It preoccupies me almost as much as Namier who, by the way, is the most Jew-haunted person of my acquaintance, but I fear Israel will enjoy a very short life as a Mission state, not only that its zest will inevitably diminish, but that it will end like a smaller Lebanon, dominated by its rabbis." [586]

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Through these months of slow decline Berenson stoically continued, after a fashion, to follow his habitual routine, though breaking off more and more frequently to rest. In the summer, at Vallombrosa, he philosophically submitted to being moved about in a wheelchair to enjoy the much-loved vistas of the Val d'Arno that swept westward below him. When Ben Nicolson came for a brief visit, Berenson enthusiastically approved his plan for a book on the rediscovery of the Primitives. But Nicolson came away saddened by the shrunken figure so "pathetically dressed . . . slumped in a chair, just now and then coming to life, but when he did so, with the sharpness of a man in his prime with all his mental faculties alert." A highlight of the summer was the visit of Adlai Stevenson, who was on his way back from his Authors' League mission to the Soviet Union. He had come down to Florence for a week of "sightseeing, wining, dining, and w o r k , " the work consisting of a long talk with Prime Minister Amintore Fanfani that he duly reported to the State Department. In his notes of his luncheon meeting with Berenson at Casa al Dono, Stevenson jotted down: "Caustic about Eisenhower—Chairman of Charm School—distrusts generals and military heroes. . . . Politics and govt., much more. Delightful talk about Harvard, Education— 'Intellectuals of the world—unite'—very feeble—93. Tended by famous Nicky Mariano and his sister [Elizabeth] from Santa Barbara." Berenson had proposed "Intellectuals of the world—unite" as a slogan for Stevenson's next campaign. After receiving a note from Berenson addressing him as "Pres. C a n d . , " Stevenson hastened to offer a correction: "an everlasting ' E x . ' " Having been prepared for the "beauty and pictures" of I Tatti, Stevenson later wrote, they did not surprise him, " b u t " — a n d this must have greatly pleased Berenson—"the library did! I should like to go there for an uninterrupted month and graze and measure my ignorance and reflect on what one man did." While at Vallombrosa, Berenson dictated a short "Author's Foreword" to his 1942 commentaries on his reading. The book, One Year's Reading for Fun, was published in the year following his death, elaborately footnoted by David Biller with the research assistance of Hanna Kiel and with an introduction by John Walker dated July 1959. In spite of his growing enfeeblement, Berenson held to his resolve to seek "print." With Nicky's help he brought out early in 1958 a selection in English of twenty articles which he had published between 1945 and 1956, ten of them having first appeared in Italian as columns in the Corriere della Sera. The volume, Essays in Appreciation, enlivened with 1 1 7 pages of illustrations, carried a dedication to " T h e Memory of Arturo Loria." Charles Poore in the New York Times welcomed it as showing [587]

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"an increasing zest for all sorts of life and every form of art." He described the author as "an impressive and entertaining monument in a perpetual renaissance." More astonishing t}ian this gathering together of work from the past was the fact that he continued to send lengthy two-column articles to the Corriere della Sera either dictated to Nicky or compiled in part by her. One published November 18, 1958, on the letters of Ruskin to Norton reviewed his appreciative rereading of the significant works of Ruskin and Pater. Three weeks later he discussed Goethe and the Romantics based on his reading of Frau Ricarda Huch's volume on the subject. Early in January 1959 his subject was the dialogues of Plato, and he praised the good sense and courage of Benjamin Jowett's 230-page introductory analysis of The Republic. Ceaselessly active, his mind retraced the myriad paths of his reading and experience as he made up in reflection what was denied him in physical activity. Every few weeks during the first half of 1959 he would harvest his observations. La Bruyere's Characters put him in mind of the differences in the administration of criminal law. In another piece he spoke of the fascination of historical writing which had been first inspired by his reading of the Old Testament as a boy of ten. In a critical review of the historical theories of Guglielmo Ferrero, he concluded that all authority decays and finally collapses like the one-hoss shay of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Van Wyck Brooks's Flowering of New England led to an exploration of nineteenth-century America and the European associations of George Ticknor and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Reflecting on their world, he declared he owed to Emerson a great part of his intellectual values, his hopes and his fears, and not a little of his prejudices. When momentarily short of ideas for these columns, he had recourse to passages from his diary of early 1957—a miscellany of objections to Jungian psychoanalysis, of considerations of the varied representations of the human figure, of his responses to his reading of Dumas. He speculated on the influence of Nietzsche on D'Annunzio and told of his reading of Kierkegaard and his pleasure in the exchange of letters between Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Georg. After a silence of a few months, during which the space that the columns occasionally occupied was filled by Alberto Moravia, Emilio Cecchi, Giovanni Papini, and other regular contributors, he supplied in August a piece compiled from undated pages from his diary. The learnedly discursive columns continued intermittently during Berenson's ninety-fifth year. Whatever energy remained in him he invested in this enterprise, rescuing from his diary and from unpublished manuscripts passages of self-scrutiny and of intellectual excursions [588]

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among the scholarly tomes in his library. His last contribution of miscellany, "Pagine di Diario," under the heading "L'Ultimo Scritto Di Berenson," would appear on October n , 1959, five days after his death. In a headnote to this "last writing" of Berenson, the newspaper's "special correspondent" declared that the great critic had to the very end retained perfect control of his "mental faculties and the brilliance of his extraordinary genius." The two long columns exhibited a characteristic melange of reflections. One on Florence Nightingale was retrieved from a dozen years earlier. Another, from 1950, was adapted to suit his ninetyfifth year: " I wonder what the B . B . of twenty-five would think of the B . B . of ninety-four? Would he be too awestruck to approach him or would he prefer not to bother about a conceited, spoilt, egotistical old man? The B . B . of twenty-five was both too shy and too proud to approach famous men. . . . What use could they have for him and why should he bore them and expose himself?" Berenson left his question hanging. Memory had indeed failed him. Whatever shyness he had had he had overcome as a Harvard student in the presence of prominent professors and leading Bostonians. Forgotten was his attempt at Oxford to meet Walter Pater and his successful meeting in Rome with the great art historian Giovanni Cavalcaselle. Nor had there been any shyness in his association with art historians like Morelli, Frizzoni, and Richter in Italy. The passages in this last column were the reflections of a survivor into the time, as he said, of "a new king who knew not Joseph." For him "the great age" had been the nineteenth century, "the age of Bismarck, Arnold, and the Goncourts." And he addressed to the present age with fresh emphasis the ideas that were central to his creed. " M y chief desire," he wrote, "when I look at something is to enjoy what I see. I have the impression that to most historians of art the question of the enjoyment of the quality of the work of art does not have much importance." As for his frequent use of terms like "humanism," he explained, he meant by them any literary activity that made for the humanization of man. Humanization was the "faculty to put oneself in the skin, the heart, even the muscles of another, ideally to react in a sense like the other." The absence of that imaginative power was "the source of all cruelty and atrocity." In art that imaginative power corresponded to Einfühlung, empathy, "the ability consciously and unconsciously to feel and experience the object contemplated as one feels the relaxing of one's arm, hand, and feet." Thus across the more than sixty years that had passed since his Florentine Painters, he asserted the final implications of "tactile values." " T o become as old as I a m , " Berenson once observed, "is not an adventure to be recommended." Immobile for most of his last year, his [589]

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wasted and diminished frame was easily carried down from his room by a young nurse as if he were a babe in arms. Huddled in a deep armchair, he would take his meals in the small French library and, wearing "his burgundy-red velvet dressing gown and cap," receive a guest or two. Toward the end of 1958 the Walter Lippmanns had descended upon him fresh from their recent interview with Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Though he had given up reading the newspapers, Berenson was so full of the subject—the Soviet Union being his principal bete noire—that he talked with them as one an courant with the latest developments. Propped up in bed where he worked, however short the stint, he was still capable of prodigies of recollection. When his assistants preparing the notes for One Year's Reading for Fun could not locate the source of a Matthew Arnold essay on Wordsworth, "his eyes lit up," and he explained it was not an essay but the introduction to a collection of Wordsworth's poems. When Nicky inquired about the source of a quotation " f r o m an obscure late Latin poet," he directed her to the section of the book containing it and carefully described the book's binding. Another "auspicious" day produced a couple of pages of dictation on the career of D'Annunzio and his relations with him. These were united with what he had written on D'Annunzio in his diary eleven years earlier and were published in the Corriere della Sera on March 24, 1959. In March, moved doubtless by gratitude for all the courtesies which had been shown him through the years by the superintendent of the Uffizi, he gave the museum one of the chief treasures of his collection, the lovely Madonna and Child by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. The painting was the important missing central panel of the reconstructed triptych from San Procolo. Berenson had made his first gift to the Uffizi, an Adoration of the Shepherds, in 1914. In spite of failing eyesight, he continued during spurts of energy in that final summer to review problems of attributions on photographs of the Florentine painters. Inquiries also still came in for confirmation or correction of attributions from the Wildenstein firm. One of his assistants of long ago, Fern Shapley, who was working on the catalogue of the Kress Collection at the National Gallery of Art, inquired about a portrait of Francesco Gonzaga which he had attributed to Cossa when it was in the Quincy Shaw Collection. He now gave it to Baldassare d'Este of the Ferrarese school. He looked with "a wistful expression" at the new books that Nicky showed him, saying of one, " I used to know a great deal about this subject, but now I cannot coordinate things any longer." He listened gratefully to Nicky's reading of "timeless" books like the Bible, Don Quixote, the Decameron, Mardrus' translation of The Thousand and One

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Nights, the favorite novels of Trollope and Thackeray. Vanity Fair was the last book to be read to him. What conflicting memories must have welled up in him when he heard those last lines, " A h ' Vanitas Vanitatum.' Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? or, having it, is satisfied?" On his ninety-fourth birthday, June 26, 1959, he was cheered by the arrival of old friends like John Walker and his daughter Gillian; Henry Francis, curator of paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art, and his wife; Freya Stark; and the faithful Umberto Morra. McGeorge Bundy was also on hand and brightened the occasion for Berenson by assuring him that Harvard would "do its utmost to fulfill his wishes." He was taken up to Casa al Dono for the last time that summer, bringing with him "the photographic material for all the great Quatrocento Florentines." He pored over them for some twenty minutes each day, "lingering over his favorite pictures and making small corrections" in the Lists. In fair weather he would sit in his wheelchair warmly wrapped, gazing through his dark glasses at the wooded slopes and the shimmering sunsets. One day Dr. Capecchi, who was mourning the recent death of his wife, plaintively asked Berenson, " Y o u do believe, don't you, that I shall see my Elena again, that w e shall be reunited in a better world?" The best that Berenson could muster by way of comfort was to say, "Dear friend, you certainly deserve to be granted such happiness, but I cannot help wondering whether many husbands might not want to be assured the contrary." While Berenson was still at Casa al Dono in early September, a little wound in his mouth became infected and did not yield to treatment. The swelling spread to his throat and in spite of treatment soon terribly deformed the lower part of his face. Taken back to I Tatti, he was still able to be brought down for his meals, though his speech was much impaired. It was evident that he could not long survive, and his sister Bessie was summoned from Santa Barbara. Fearing that Berenson would die of suffocation, the doctor administered a powerful antibiotic, Vulca I-Cina, on October 4. The antibiotic began to take effect, but the shock to his system was too great. The ensuing fever seemed to clear his mind and he tried vainly to speak, but not even Nicky could understand him. On the morning of October 6 she knelt beside his bed and told him that Dr. Capecchi was "anxious about saving his soul." She knew that Berenson did not have that theological anxiety, but she was concerned, as she had been when Mary died, that no hurt be given the pious feelings of the women who had devotedly nursed him or those of the members of the I Tatti community who respected [591]

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and loved h i m as their patriarch. She asked to be allowed to call the parish priest to administer the sacraments. Attentive to her words, he mutely nodded his head. T h e end came quietly that night, the village priest of San Martino a Mensola having earlier performed the last rites. T h e silent sufferer passed almost imperceptibly f r o m sleep to death. T h e doctor had his hand over the dying m a n ' s heart, " t o feel its last beat." In the dimly lit r o o m those w h o had been closest to h i m stood in sorrowful attention, his sister Bessie; N i c k y and her sister, Alda; Geremia Giofreddi and his daughter, Fiorella; E m m a and the night nurse; and all the house servants. "It could have been a scene f r o m R e m b r a n d t , " Alda reflected. By chance the first person to be notified of his death was King Gustaf of Sweden. H e had telephoned f r o m Bresciano to announce his forthcoming visit and, learning of Berenson's grave condition, had telephoned again. T h e telegram that was sent to him, according to the report in the press, told h i m that he " w o u l d never again find his friend in the Villa I T a t t i . " Condolences flooded in f r o m all over the world. T h e y included personal messages f r o m Antonio Segni, the prime minister of Italy, and f r o m Pope J o h n XXIII, w h o m he had met at a cultural conference in Venice. U n d e r a banner headline, " H e will be remembered as a Great Italian," in the Corriere della Sera, his friend Emilio Cecchi, one of Italy's leading literary figures, filled most of a page with an account of Berenson's development and a eulogy of his m a n y achievements and his intellectual courage. Cecchi concluded that Berenson had m u c h to teach regarding the intellectual servility and dispersion of the present time. Berenson lay in state in a walnut coffin lined with white silk on the great fifteenth-century table in the large library. Tall candles burned near the bier. Seated or standing close by were workers just come in f r o m the olive groves and "the most h u m b l e characters of his c o u r t , " the maid servants in black dresses and white aprons and the other members of the domestic staff. T o o small n o w for his clothes, Berenson was wrapped in an ivory-white cashmere shawl that covered his head and the lower part of his ravaged face and was folded along his body. O n e could barely make out the thin ivory profile and the little white beard. T h e long delicate fingers were at last bereft of touch. A "magnificent Sienese cross" lay u p o n his body. T o one observer he looked like a medieval saint. All day long hundreds of mourners filed by the small monklike figure, "artists, scholars, public authorities." A m o n g the first was the prefect of Florence, w h o b r o u g h t the condolences of Giovanni Gronchi, the president of the republic. T h e former queen mother of Rumania, a fond [592]

Ά

SCENE

FROM

REMBRANDT'

neighbor to w h o m Berenson had given, as a kind of bequest, a little painting of the Madonna, paid homage accompanied by the duchess of Aosta. Lamps were placed along the path leading f r o m the gate to light the way for the pilgrimage that went on into the night. Late the following afternoon the casket, covered with oak leaves and roses, was carried on the shoulders of the I Tatti workmen. At the head of the procession that w o u n d its way up to the little church of San Martino for the funeral was a company of hooded monks of the Misericordia, walking with lighted torches behind a great black cross bordered in gold. In their white capes they had a spectral appearance in the failing afternoon light. Behind them marched the Florentine footmen in red, an honor guard of arm bearers in medieval helms and with halberds in hand. They were followed by a long row of children f r o m the M e n sola school, each carrying a flower. After them came the seminarians f r o m Fiesole and then a group of nuns in their white wimples and black veils. Princes, diplomats, intellectuals, people of the countryside paced slowly in the cortege that stretched for nearly half a mile f r o m the door of I Tatti. Contadini dropped their hoes in the olive groves and came down the hill to the roadside to watch, shielding their eyes against the setting sun. The scene, wrote an observer, looked like a thirteenthcentury Sienese painting. A m o n g the many notables identified by the reporter for the Nazione were Elena of Rumania, Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and his wife, Ambassador James Dunn, the Marchese Serlupi Crescenzi, Count Vittorio Cini, Count Contini Bonacossi, Roberto Longhi, Clotilde Marghieri, and Professor Jean Falloth representing the Sorbonne. The parish priest pronounced the benediction over the casket in the center of the little cinquecento church, the solemn scene graced by the paintings of Taddeo Gaddi, Zanobi Machiavelli, and Neri di Bicci. As the church was only large enough to receive the chief dignitaries, the others crowded the square before the portals. From within came the deep sonorities of the canto gregoriano chanted by the seminarians. T o Berenson, w h o had not been anxious about "salvation" and w h o scoffed at Catholic theology, the Renaissance p o m p would nevertheless have been singularly gratifying. Had he not lived, in a sense, like a Renaissance prince in his little domain? as the reporter for the Corriere della Sera observed. Berenson had obviously long forgotten the instructions he gave to the American consul, during World War I, that his body be cremated, and he had not left any w o r d as to where he should be buried. He had once said to Nicky on a journey, "Remember, if I should die on this trip, I do not want m y earthly remains to be trundled about. Wherever I die, there let [593]

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LEGEND

me be buried." She fulfilled his wish more literally, perhaps, than he had anticipated. She obtained permission from the authorities to inter him in the I Tatti chapel close to the house itself. So when the coffin was brought down from the church, it was reverently placed before the chapel door. Later, Mary's coffin would be brought down from Settignano and she would be buried beside him. It was as if the stage were being set for the playing out of one of Berenson's romantic fantasies: "If one can conceive of life after death," he had once written, "I would like to be the protective spirit of my home and my library. I would like to live in it and make use of it as the archangels did in one of the short stories of Anatole France." Berenson's astral spirit may not be hovering protectively about his beloved I Tatti, but his influence upon the character of the place remains indelible and pervasive.

[594]

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY NOTES INDEX

Selected bibliography Manuscript Collections and Archives Archives o f American Art, Washington, D . C . Berenson Archive, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti, Florence Bryn Mawr College Library Dumbarton Oaks Archives, Washington, D . C . Fogg Museum Archives Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives Barbara Strachey Halpern, Oxford, England Robert and Hannah Smith family papers Harvard University Archives Harvard University, Houghton Library Richard Berenson collection Library o f Congress Manuscript Division Louvre Museum Archives Massachusetts Historical Society Metropolitan Museum o f Art National Archives, Washington, D . C . Luisa Vertova Nicolson collection Bernard B. Perry collection, Bloomington, Indiana Ralph Barton Perry, J r . , collection, San Rafael, California Philadelphia Museum o f Art John G. Johnson collection Peter Viereck collection University o f Virginia, Alderman Library, Manuscripts Department Mrs. Arthur Wagner, Chicago Mally Dienemann collection John Walker collection T h e Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore Yale University, Beinecke Rare B o o k and Manuscript Library Yale University, Sterling Memorial Library

The Writings of Bernard Berenson,

1904-1969

All of Berenson's writings, whether books or articles, were composed in E n glish. Some made their first appearance in Italian or French translation as indicated in the Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson prepared by William M o s t y n - O w e n and published by Electa Editrice in Milan in 1955 and complete to that date. T h e Bibliografia also lists the various other translations—in Dutch, German, Swedish, and Spanish—and reprints of Berenson's books. His Viaggio in Sicilia, published in 1955, has not appeared in the original English, except for portions included in The Passionate Sightseer. After 1955, translations, especially of the collected edition of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, appeared in Italian, French, German, Russian, and Japanese. This bibliography is adapted f r o m and supplements that of William M o s t y n - O w e n .

BOOKS The North Italian Painters of the Renaissance. N e w York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1907. A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend. London: J. M . Dent & Sons, 1909. Catalogue of a Collection of Paintings and Some Art Objects. Vol. 1, Italian Paintings. Philadelphia: J o h n Graver Johnson, 1913. Pictures in the Collection of P. A. B. Widener at Lynnewood Hall, Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. Vol. 3, Early Italian and Spanish School. Philadelphia: private edition, 1916. The Study and Criticism of Italian Art. Third Series. London: George Bell & Sons, 1916. Venetian Painting in America: The Fifteenth Century. N e w York: Frederick Sherman, 1916. Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting. N e w York: Frederick Sherman, 1918. Three Essays in Method. O x f o r d : Clarendon Press, 1926. " A Catalogue of Paintings in the Collection of Michael Friedsam." N e w York: Metropolitan M u s e u m of Art, proof sheets only, 1929. The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. O x f o r d : Clarendon Press, 1930. N e w edition. London: Phaidon Press, 1952. Studies in Medieval Painting. N e w Haven: Yale University Press; O x f o r d : O x f o r d University Press, 1930. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance. O x f o r d : Clarendon Press, 1932. Drawings of the Florentine Painters. 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938. Diary, 1945-1946. Unpublished typescript. Preface to the Catalogue of the Exhibition of French Paintings in Florence. Florence: Pitti Palace, 1945. Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts. N e w York: Pantheon, 1948. Sketch for a Self-Portrait. London: Constable; N e w York: Pantheon, 1949. [598]

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Alberto Sani: An Artist out of His Time. Florence: Electa, 1950. Rumor and Reflection, 1941-1944. London: Constable; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. Caravaggio, His Incongruity and His Fame. London: Chapman & Hall, 1953. Seeing and Knowing. London: Chapman & Hall, 1953. The Arch of Constantine or the Decline of Form. London: Chapman & Hall, 1954. Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art. London: Chapman & Hall, 1954. Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: Venetian School. 2 vols. New York and London: Phaidon Press, 1957. Essays in Appreciation. London: Chapman & Hall, 1958. One Year's Reading for Fun: 1942. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, i960. The Passionate Sightseer. London: Thames; New York: Simon and Schuster, i960. The Bernard Berenson Treasury, 1887-195S. Ed. Hanna Kiel. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1962. The Selected Letters of Bernard Berenson. Ed. A. K. McComb. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. Sunset and Twilight. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963. Conversations with Berenson. Recorded by Umberto Morra. Trans, from the Italian by Florence Hammond. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Homeless Paintings of the Renaissance. Ed. Hanna Kiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969. ARTICLES The following abbreviations are used to indicate the collection in which an article subsequently appeared in the original English: ESSP EA HPR SMP SCIA TEM VPA DFP

Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting, 1918 Essays in Appreciation, 1958 Homeless Paintings of the Renaissance, 1969 Studies in Medieval Painting, 1930 Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Third Series, 1916 Three Essays in Method, 1926 Venetian Painting in America: Fifteenth Century, 1916 Drawings of the Florentine Painters, 1938

"The Arundel Club." The Nation, 78 (Feb. 18, 1904), 129. "The Donna Laura Minghetti Leonardo." The Nation, 78 (March 17, 1904), 210. "Scoperte e primizie artistiche: Sassetta." Rassegna d'Arte, 4 (Aug. 1904), 125-126. "Altre opere del Sassetta." Rassegna d'Arte, 4 (Sept. 1904). "Cozzarelli, Neroccio, Cavazzola, Gentile da Fabriano, Puligo, Cariani, Tiziano, Pierino del Vaga." Rassegna d'Arte, 4 (Oct. 1904), 156-158. "Due quadri inediti a Staggia." Rassegna d'Arte, 5 (Jan. 1905), 9 - 1 1 . "Un'altra replica per il Pollaiuolo a Staggia." II Marzocco, 10 (Feb. 26, 1905), 3-4· "Una Annunciazione del Pesellino." Rassegna d'Arte, 5 (March 1905), 42-43. "The Lotto Portrait." The Nation, 80 (June 22, 1905), 501. [599]

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"Tesori artistici di un villaggio dilapidate della Provincia di Grosseto." Rassegna d'Arte, 5 (July 1905), 102-103. "Corrieri artistici: C a r p i — u n dipinto del Catena." Rassegna d'Arte, 5 (Oct. 1905), 158. " D u e ritratti fiorentini del quattrocento." Rassegna d'Arte, 5 (Dec. 1905), 177-179. " L e pitture italiane nella raccolta Y e r k e s . " Rassegna d'Arte, 6 (March 1906), 3338.

" L e Portrait Raphaelesque de Montpellier." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 49 (March 1907), 208-212. " U n a nuova pittura di Gerolamo da C r e m o n a . " Rassegna d'Arte, 7 (March 1907), 33-35·

"Gerolamo di Giovanni da C a m e r i n o . " Rassegna d'Arte, 7 (Sept. 1907), 129-135. "La scoperta di un dipinto di Masaccio." Rassegna d'Arte, 7 (Sept. 1907), 139. "Scoperte e primizie artistiche: Gerolamo di Giovanni da C a m e r i n o . " Rassegna d'Arte, 7 (Oct. 1907), 155. " G i o t t o . " Rassegna d'Arte, 8 (March 1908), 45. "La Madonna pisana di Masaccio." Rassegna d'Arte, 8 (May 1908), 81-85. " D e Gustibus" (letter on Matisse). The Nation, 87 ( N o v . 12, 1908), 461. " U n nuovo Lorenzo M o n a c o . " Rivtsta d'Arte, 6 (Jan.-Feb. 1909), 3 - 6 . " A Nativity and Adoration o f the School o f Pietro Cavallini in the Collection of John G. Johnson." Art in America, 1 (Jan. 1913), 17-24. [SMP] " U n e Madone d'Antonello da Messina." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 55 (March 1913), 189-203. [SCIA] " N o t e su Pietro e Antonio da Messina." Rassegna d'Arte, 13 (April 1913), 57-59. "La 'SainteJustine' de la collection Bagatti-Valsecchi ä M i l a n . " Gazette des BeauxArts, 55 (June 1913), 461-479. [SCIA] "Les Quatres Triptyques Bellinesques de l'eglise de la Carita a Venise." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 55 (Sept. 1913), 191-202. [SCIA] "Venetian Paintings in the United States." Part I, "Caterino and Others; Giovanni and Antonio da M u r a n o . " Art in America, 3 (Feb.1915), 43-55. Part II, " T h e Vivarini and Crivelli," 3 (April 1915), 104-119. Part III, " A n tonello da Messina and Derivatives," 3 (June 1915), 1 4 1 - 1 7 3 . Part IV, " T h e Bellini," 4 (Dec. 1915), 3 - 2 1 . [ V P A ] " U n a versione tedesca di un dipinto perduto del Mantegna." Rassegna d'Arte Antica, 2 (April 1915), 73. " N i c o l a di Maestro Antonio d ' A n c o n a . " Rassegna d'Arte Antica, 2 (Aug. 1915), 165-174. "L'enigma della 'Gloria di S. Orsola' del Carpaccio." Rassegna d'Arte Antica, 3 (Jan. 1916), 1 - 8 . [SCIA] "Venetian Paintings in the United States." Part V , " T h e Autograph Paintings of Giovanni Bellini." Art in America, 4 (Feb. 1916), 61-84. Part VI, " M r . Frick's 'St. Francis,' " 4 (April 1916), 1 3 3 - 1 4 1 . [ V P A ] " U n altro quadro di Giovanni de A g o s t i n o . " Rassegna d'Arte Antica, 3 (April 1916), 73-74· " A Madonna by Giovanni Bellini Recently Acquired by Mr. Willys." Art in America, 4 (June 1916), 204-207. [ V P A ] [600]

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" U n a Madonna Carpaccesca a Berlino." Rassegna d'Arte Antica, 3 (June 1916), 123-129. [SCIA] " T h e Annunciation by Masolino." Art in America, 4 (Oct. 1916), 3 0 5 - 3 1 1 . " U n a testa di Pellegrino di S. Daniele . . . a Berlino." Rassegna d'Arte Antica, 3 ( N o v . - D e c . 1916), 2 7 5 - 2 7 9 . " A Madonna by Giovanni Bellini Recently Acquired by Mr. Philip Lehman." Art in America, 5 (Dec. 1916), 3 - 5 . [ V P A ] " D u e nuovi dipinti di Lippo V a n n i . " Rassegna d'Arte Antica, 4 (May-June 1917), 9 7 - 1 0 0 . [ESSP] "Ugolino-Lorenzetti." Parts I, II. Art in America, 5, 6 (Oct., Dec. 1917), 2 5 9 275, 25-52.. " A n 'Assumption of the Virgin' by Turino Vanni at B a y e u x . " Revue Archeologique, 6 (1917). 2 3 1 - 2 3 3 . " A Cassone Front at Le Havre by Girolamo da C r e m o n a . " Revue Archeologique, 6 (1917), 369-373· [ESSP] " E i n e Wiener Madonna und Antonellos Altarbild von S. Cassiano." Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 34 (1917), 5 - 5 2 . " A Sienese Little Master in N e w Y o r k and Elsewhere (Cola Di Petruccioli)." Art in America, 6 (Feb. 1918), 69-82. [ESSP] " A N e w 'Mantegna' for America." Art in America, 6 (April 1918), 1 2 7 - 1 2 8 . " U n Plateau de mariage ferrarais au Musee de B o s t o n . " Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 59 (Oct.-Dec. 1918), 447-466. [ESSP] " A N e w l y Discovered C i m a b u e . " Art in America, 8 (Oct. 1920), 2 5 1 - 2 7 1 . [SMP] " D u e dipinti del decimosecondo secolo venuti da Constantinopoli." Dedalo, 2 (Oct. 1921), 285-304. [SMP] " A Botticelli Portrait in the Collection of M r . Carl W. Hamilton." Art in America, 10 (Dec. 1921), 26-30. "Prime opere di Allegretto N u z i . " Bollettino d'Arte, 1 (Jan. 1922), 297-309. [SMP] " A Panel by Roberto Oderisi." Art in America, 1 1 (Feb. 1923), 69-76. " U n a predella di Masolino nel Museo Ingres a Montauban." Dedalo, 3 (March 1923). 6 3 3 - 6 3 5 · " U n possibile Antonello da Messina ed uno impossibile." Dedalo, 4 (June 1923), 3-65. [TEM] " U n Antiphonaire avec miniatures par Lippo V a n n i . " Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 66 (May 1924), 2 5 7 - 2 8 5 . [SMP] " A n Annunciation by Botticelli." Art in America, 1 2 (June 1924), 1 8 0 - 1 8 9 . " U n Botticelli dimenticato." Dedalo, 5 (June 1924), 1 7 - 4 1 • [ T E M ] " N o v e pitture in cerca di un'attribuzione." Parts I—III. Dedalo, 5 (March, April, M a y 1925), 6 0 1 - 6 4 2 , 688-722, 745-775. [ T E M ] " D u e illustratori italiani dello Speculum Humanae Salvationis." Parts I, II. Bollettino d'Arte, 5 (Jan., Feb. 1926), 289-320, 3 5 3 - 3 8 4 . [SMP] " U n Portrait de Titien ä Budapest." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 68 (March 1926), 153-162. " U n a santa di Antonello da Messina e la pala di San Cassiano." Dedalo, 6 (March 1926), 630-658.

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"An Early Signorelli in Boston." Art in America, 14 (April 1926), 105-117. "Notes on Tuscan Painters of the Trecento in the Städel Institut at Frankfurt." Städel-Jahrbuch, 5 (1926), 3-28. [SMP] "While on Tintoretto." In Festschrift fiir Max J. Friedländer. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1927. " T h e Missing Head of the Glasgow 'Christ and the Adultress.' " Art in America, 16 (June 1928), 147-154. "Missing Pictures by Arcangelo di Cola." International Studio, 93 (July 1929), 2 1 25· "Quadri senza casa: Arcangelo da Camerino." Dedalo, 10 (Aug. 1929), 133-142. [HPR, 13-20] "A N e w Masaccio." Art in America, 18 (Feb. 1930), 45-53. "Quadri senza casa: II trecento senese. Parts I, II. Dedalo, 11 (Oct., N o v . 1930), 263-284, 328-362. "Missing Pictures of the Sienese Trecento." Parts I-IV. International Studio, 97 (Oct., N o v . , Dec. 1930), 3 1 - 3 5 , 27-32, 67-71; 98 (Jan. 1931), 29-35. "Missing Pictures of Fifteenth Century Siena." Parts I—III. International Studio, 98 (Feb., March, April 1931), 24-29, 37-41, 17-22. "Quadri senza casa: II quattrocento senese." Parts I, II. Dedalo, 11 (March, April 1931). 627-646, 735-767· [HPR, 49-76] "Quadri senza casa: II trecento fiorentino." Parts I—III. Dedalo, 11 (July, Aug., N o v . 1931). 957-988, 1039-1073, 1286-1318. [HPR, 77-154] "I disegni di Alunno di Benozzo." Bollettino d'Arte, 25 (Jan. 1932), 293-306. [DFP, 11-13] "Quadri senza casa: II trecento fiorentino." Parts IV, V. Dedalo, 12 (Jan., March 1932), 5-34. 173-193· [HPR, 77-154] "Les Dessins de Signorelli." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 74 (Jan.-June 1932), 1 7 3 210. [DFP, 30-45] "Due ο tre disegni di Benozzo." L'Arte, 2 (March 1932), 90-103. [DFP, 328330] "Quadri senza casa: II quatrocento fiorentino." Parts I—III. Dedalo, 12 (July, Sept., N o v . 1932), 512-541, 665-702, 819-853. [HPR, 155-198] " U n Dessin de Botticini au Musee du Louvre." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 74 (JulyDec. 1932), 275-278. [DFP, 72-73] "Fra' Angelico, Fra'Filippo e la cronologia." Bollettino d'Arte, 26 (Aug. 1932), 4966. [HPR, 199-242] "Alcuni disegni che si ricollegano nella Trinitä del Pesellino." L'Arte, 5 (Sept. 1932), 357-377· [DFP, 88-92] "Three Drawings by Fra' Filippo Lippi." Old Master Drawings, 7 (Sept. 1932), 16-18. [DFP 83, 84] "Disegni inediti di 'Tommaso.' " Rivista d'Arte, 14 (1932), 249-262. [DFP, 7879] " N o v a Ghirlandajana." L'Arte 3 (May 1933), 165-184. [DFP, 340-342] "Ristudiando i disegni di Cosimo Rosselli." Bollettino d'Arte, 26 (June 1933), 537-547· [DFP, 146-150]

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

" N o u v e a u x dessins de Signorelli." Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 75 (July-Dec. 1933), 279-293· [DFP, 30-45] "Verrocchio e Leonardo, Leonardo e C r e d i . " Parts I, II. Bollettino d'Arte, 27 ( N o v . , Dec. 1933), 193-214, 241-264. [DFP, 49-68] "Filippino's Designs for a Death of Meleager." Old Master Drawings, 8 (Dec. 1933). 32-33· " T r e disegni di Giovan Battista utili da Faenza." Rivista d'Arte, 15 (1933), 2 1 - 3 3 . [DFP, 69-70] "Andrea di Michelangiolo e Antonio M i n i . " L'Arte, 4 (July 1935), 243-283. [DFP, 357-367] "I disegni diRaffaello da M o n t e l u p o . " Bo//effwo