Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson. I Tatti, Florence, 1952.
“If small, lithe tigers could speak, they would have the voice and intelligence of this feline Pole. He has velvet paws and killer talons of steel. He’s let his beard grow to cover up the fact that he is only half a man. His eyes are blue, the better to deceive…. His ambition, which is consuming, is to be recognized as the world’s greatest expert on the Italian primitives; and he achieved his goal about three years ago. He is a dying man, but he’ll go on for a long, long time. He doesn’t do business or accept commissions, but he shares in the profits. ‘Here are 25,000 francs, M. Berenson.’ ‘Merci, Gimpel.”’
This entry from the 1918 diary of the art dealer Rene Gimpel is the best thumbnail sketch of Bernard Berenson yet written. It was a curious fact of cultural life, and perhaps a tribute to the old serpent’s powers of intimidation, that nobody else could deal with him in such terms, catching his epicene grace, deviousness, hypochondria, greed, relentless ambition, and ophidian charm in a few lines. It is now twenty years since Berenson died in 1959, and it seems longer, partly because of the fuzziness and piety of his memorialists, and partly because of his own remoteness from modernist culture. And yet he is still an extraordinarily interesting, even a legendary, creature. Berenson’s success story was one of the most spectacular in the history of art—the poor Jewish boy from a Lithuanian shtetl who became a millionaire dictator of taste; the Harvard scholar who rose, by the end of his life, to be regarded as a latter-day Goethe; the neurasthenic youth who outlived nearly all his contemporaries, dying at the patriarchal age of ninety-four in the elaborately plain Tuscan villa where, for fifty years, dealers, collectors, historians, minor nobility, princes, kings, and politicians had paid assiduous and often slavish court to him. Berenson was one of the wiliest and yet most self-deluded men that ever lived, a great connoisseur, but also a master of opportunism who came to believe in his own fictions.
