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Tactile values & significant form
The donnee of his work was that the value of painting lay in its ability to enhance self-consciousness, by means of intense increments of experience—flashes of vision and delight. These moments were to Berenson, as to anyone fortunate enough to have them, all but indescribable. Like his passionate delight in nature, they came close to mystical experience. They disclosed the “It-ness” of which he often spoke—the irreducible, self-manifesting essence of reality.
Nevertheless Berenson felt obliged to give this oceanic pleasure of the eye, the goal of the aesthete’s quest, the trappings of a system. Hence the awkward formulations of his critical writing—“tactile values,” “ideated sensations” and the rest. The idea of “tactile values” as expounded by Berenson sounded impressive but was merely a slogan: it was to illusion what Clive Bell’s idea of “significant form” was to abstraction. It derived from a crude physiological notion of how the brain interprets space and passes that interpretation to the body. All it stood for, if analyzed, was a convincing impression of three-dimensionality. Nevertheless Berenson insisted on applying this concept as a touchstone, quite mechanically, as though it were an arguable guide to quality in art. At the same time he despised iconographical studies as mere ground work at best and, at worst, a threat to his interests: hence his loathing of Erwin Panofsky, and of the kind of work that Panofsky and his Warburg Institute colleagues pursued.
What impressed Berenson’s admirers, the court of I Tatti, was his formidable certezza. It is the very quality that now makes him seem such a period figure, so remote, and in some ways so difficult to understand. He created the role of the waspish pontiff, and took it with him; few modern art historians would want to fill it again, and probably none has the devouring energy to do so. It costs too much to maintain, and the payment is not made in money but in suppleness of thought.
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.
