Realities; A Renaissance Life: A Personal View of Bernard Berenson; 22

The following program is a presentation of NET. Presentation of this program made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation and its worldwide affiliates. The program was made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation and its worldwide affiliates. The program was made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation and its worldwide affiliates.

The program was made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation and its worldwide affiliates. I lived here myself for some years, often on in the 20s and then I came back here after the war sometimes for a month at a time. It was a sort of second home to me. There are many more spectacular villas in Italy but none that have played a greater part in the cultural life of Europe and the United States for over half a century. People from all over the world, clever people, stupid people, journalists, GIs in uniform, crack pots, philosophers. They all streamed in through this door and walked rather gingerly up a slippery marble corridor in order to have an audience that's rarely the only way of putting it with Mr. Benson.

Who was he and why was he so famous? A short answer is that he was an art critic but art critics are not normally the subject of legend. There was much more to it than that. Well, before the legend fades and all the people who knew Mr. Benson have followed him into the next world is worth trying to put on record some of the qualities of this extraordinary human being. He was born in 1865 in a small town in Lithuania, the son of a leading Jewish family. As a result of various persecutions his family moved to the United States when he was ten and he was brought up in the old north quarter of Boston where many European immigrants had taken refuge. Well, some clearance has removed his two homes and only the house next door remains as witness of a part of his life that he rarely mentioned.

He was very precocious. He once told me that his mind functioned better when he was twelve than he'd ever did again. The center of his intellectual life was the Boston Public Library. When he could buy or borrow a book he took it to a little canoe which he had discovered at a backwater of the Boston River and their lay reading throughout the whole summer day. His favorite author was Gerta and he formed the secret ambition to become a poet, philosopher and universal man. As he was also strikingly beautiful he attracted the attention of various local ladies who paid for him to go to Harvard. Whatever else in the course of a long life he altered his mind about it wasn't Harvard University. His affection for this great institution never wavered for a moment. He was a student of Oriental Languages and in an application for a traveling fellowship which he didn't get.

He claims that he exiles in the field of Arabic, Syrian, Hebrew and Sanskrit. As for art it is here he says that I feel weakest. He never forgot his early interests and I see him talking to the professor of Hebrew at Oxford quite convincingly. I believe that his claim to know 21 languages was correct and it was a source of embarrassment to those who sat beside him at this lunch table when he suddenly switched from German to Italian or made a long quotation in Arabic. In 1886 a group of friends in Harvard headed by a remarkable detective named Charles Lerzer raised the money for him to go to Europe. He was extremely poor. He told me that he often couldn't get enough to eat and lived on stale bread.

But he managed to make his way to Greece and Italy and what he saw transformed him from a student of comparative languages into a student of the visual arts. No, rather, a man who lived through his eyes and whose ultimate achievement was to abolish all distinctions between art and nature. In 1886 a man who lived through his eyes and whose ultimate achievement was to abolish all distinctions between art and nature was to abolish all distinctions between art and nature. In 1886 a man who lived through his eyes and whose ultimate achievement was to abolish all distinctions between art and nature was to abolish all distinctions between art and nature was to abolish all distinctions between art and nature.

Did you know where the war begins? I do not know whether the war begins or emails get its right because war begins or breaks. . . . .

. When he came to look more closely at Italian painting, he found a degree of confusion that would have been unthinkable in other disciplines. For example, this portrait of a young man, which any modern student of Italian art can see by a painter called Licinio, was called a female doctor of Bologna by George Roney. Only one man, he thought, had applied the kind of scientific tests that had long been current in philology, the Italian scholar Giovanni Morelli. Morelli had come to the conclusion that he tried to determine who painted a picture, documents are often misleading, signature as usual, false, tradition known as the Fairytale. The only reliable evidence was provided by the artist himself in those parts of the picture that he did unconsciously, hands, ears, drapes, and so forth.

Well, it's an intelligent theory. I'm already putting it in a lively, sarcastic way that appealed the young balance. And so, he took the carbon decision of his life to develop Morelli's method of stylistic analysis. He described this moment of decision in a fascinating, very sincere autobiography written over 50 years later. Sitting at a rickety table outside a cafe in Bergamo, he said to a friend, we are the first to have before us no ambition, no expectations, no thought of reward. We should give ourselves to distinguishing between the authentic works of the Italian painter of the 15th and 16th century and those commonly ascribed to him. Here, at Bergamo, handed all the fragrant and romantic values that branch out northwards,

we must not stop to assure that every lotto is a lotto, every cariania, cariania, etc. To this he adds, had vaunting ambition or at least dazzling hopes shrunk. No expectations, no thought of rewards. Well, I'm sure that was true, because all his letters show that the young balancing was an idealist. But, ironically enough, the ability to say who painted what picture was to bring him far greater rewards than he would ever have achieved by being a second girter. One reason was that in 1895 he published an article on an exhibition of initial painters and English collections, a certain, somewhat dogmatically, that very few of them were what they claimed to be. Well, no American collector wanted to be caught out like that.

In the 1890s, rich Americans were just beginning to form those great collections of old masters that we now take for granted, but which in fact are relatively recent. And, before they spent a lot of money on a picture, they naturally wanted to have some sort of guarantee that it was authentic. For various reasons, they came to believe Mr. Berenson's judgments were infallibly correct, and they reached a point that they wouldn't buy an Italian picture without his certificate of authenticity. Another reason was that he'd formed a collection for a famous Boston Herstless Mrs. Gardner. All the works he bought for her are still in her house in Boston, which by the conditions of her will must be left absolutely unchanged,

even down to a bunch of violets, or petty wrinkles, beside her favourite George Erning. It represents perfectly the cultural ambitions of the 1890s, artificial, backward-looking, and contemptible to the modern mind-it, but I find it has great charm, and a feeling with its own time just as genuine as if it were our nouveau. And, of course, it is full of winners. It was opened on 1 January 1903 to the astonishment of our friends and to the music of a favourite composer Schosson. How did Mr. Berenson get these pictures? Well, of course, by being in the thick of the art-dealing world. He knew all the pictures belonged to impoverished Italian aristocrats, and what was even more important,

that belonged to those not at all impoverished members of the English Alpha Classes who preferred money to pictures. How far is his Gardner's taste entered into it? I don't know. Mr. Berenson always said that it took a surgical operation to make her buy a good picture, but I think she must have had a genuine love of art. Well, at this point, I suppose one must face the question whether working for dealers influenced Mr. Berenson's judgment as an expert. I'm quite sure he never yielded to pressure, as so many of his fellow experts did, but I suppose of great pressures will put upon him to treat doubtful pictures optimistically. And, unfortunately, for his reputation, his judgement did genuinely become more catholic and more inclusive during those years.

He became more interested in the artist's invention and less in his execution. The asperity of the early lists is replaced by an almost exaggerated magnanimity. Another thing, not having worked in a gallery, he hadn't seen enough of picture restores, and he didn't realise what marvelous craftsmen they are. Some of the pictures he authenticated, if they were scrupulously cleaned, would look like a map of Polynesia. So the rewards came in, and by 1900 he could afford to rent later to buy this villa. He was also able to make a collection for himself. He bought a number of lovable intimate pictures,

and at least two very great ones. This Madonna and Child, by the many evidenciano, which is surely one of the two most beautiful 15th century pictures in private possession. And, dance theirs, successors and frances. It's one of the greatest religious pictures of the Italian Renaissance. Indeed, I can't think of a more moving image of divine inspiration, even in the painting of the Far East. His brother-in-law, Logan Perswell Smith, always said that he discovered it, on a cart being taken to be broken up, made into a table. Sounds like a legend. But in fact, as I said, I was then completely forgotten, and he hasn't even mentioned in the first edition of Benson's Central Italian painters.

Later, Mr. Benson wrote a beautiful essay about him, almost the only good thing he wrote during his middle years of money-making expertise. However, his somewhat less severe standards did allow him to achieve one wholly admirable ambition. The formation of a great library, a library on the history of art, and on what is sometimes laughingly described as civilization. This library was the apple of his eye. He spent hours every week looking through booksellers' catalogs. He used to say that he would rather be remembered by it than by anything he had written. It also gave him a lot of pain, because he could ever find the book he wanted, and knew was there, and half the morning would be spent in fruitless rages. Then he would say that he had done far better work when he had only a few books,

and knew where every one of them was. Which was true. Working in the library was the Baroness Anrepp, who knew these rages well. She lives in a nearby house where I lived for two years when I was first married, and she recalls the confusion that arose over a painting by Degas, left detatti, and by the contest shall deny. Yes, it was she. And this had been left to be beat. She said, keep it, keep it. She said, I would have liked to take it down to itati and compare it with the original, and she said, by all means, keep it, and then I shall send for it, and I shall have to take it back. And she went on. She said, anyhow, my chauffeur is following me with the car, and with blue sheets, because I always sleep in blue sheets, and he's carrying them, and he will carry also the picture. Well, this was all right.

This picture remained, we all saw it. It had been put on one of the benches, you know, in the big corridor. And so many people looked at it, I remember, and yet he looked at it, and he said, it's charming, and so did you. You looked at it, and liked it so much. But everybody, in particular, we were very amazed. This chauffeur, with the blue sheets, never turned up. And suddenly a telegram came and said, picture came back. It isn't my picture, part of a young man. I remember what to do, first by the contestant, I, instead of sending back the right picture, every damnly wrong picture has been sent back. And BBC threw himself flat on the floor, you know, and he said, in a house where such things happen, I cannot live any longer, you know. Perhaps this is the right place to say something of Mrs. Benson. Of course, she was not only the target

for a good many of these rages, there she is. But she was also responsible for the expansion of the tatting. She'd taken a fancy to two young English architects, called Geoffrey Scott and Cecil Pinson, and she'd let them loose on the library of the garden. Mr. Benson never liked all these grand volutes at formal staircases, and said that he much preferred a little path beside a stream at the bottom of the garden, out of reach of architectural ambition. Mrs. Benson was a character almost as exceptional as her husband. Her mother was a religious teacher in Philadelphia, Quaker, and an ardent feminist. Her brother was the American writer Logan Piersle Smith, and her sister married Bertrand Russell. Mary Benson, he said, to be a beauty, and Mr. Benson fell in love with her at quite an early age. By the time I knew her, she was very large and unwieldy.

Mr. Benson was small and nimble. On the side of them walking together at the hills, always reminded me of a solicitor's mark out, directing the steps of an elephant. She had a good mind, and as long as Mr. Benson stuck to connoisseurship, she was a real help to him. She wrote in a letter, what a passionate was for us in those days, to whisper to each other a new name for an old thing. We used to wonder if Adam had half as much pleasure in naming the animals as we, from naming these ancient paintings. When Mr. Benson lost interest in naming pictures, she couldn't keep up with him. And later in life, she was interested chiefly in her family, and then children of an earlier marriage because Mr. Benson had their children reserved. However, the business of saying, who painted what,

although it brought Benson wealth and fame, would not have won him immortality unless little books containing lists for authentic pictures had not also contained introductory essays on the nature of Italian painting. And two of these, the ones on the flauntime and the central Italian painters, these ones, are masterpieces. Reading them one can understand for the first time why the young Benson made such an impression on his contemporaries, for one thing they contain extraordinarily accurate and durable judgements. You know, our assessment of old masters is governed by fashion like everything else, posterity is very fickle. But Mr. Benson's evaluations of the painters of the Renaissance have remained practically unchallenged for almost 80 years. And this is because he was not a narrow specialist,

but a true East-Eat, who would compare the Renaissance painters with the best preserved contemporaries. Cezanne, Monet, De Gas, these names appear again and again in his introductions at a date when they'd never been heard of in England. And then in the introductions, he tries to give some reasons why works about effectiveness they do. He'd been a pupil of the American philosopher William James, who was a pioneer of experimental psychology, and Benson had determined to find some explanation for our pleasure and works about, which wasn't very mystical or magical. He found a point of departure in his favorite author, Gerta, who said that works about must be what he called life-enhancing. Benson suggested that one way that they may achieve this is by making us imagine that we have real physical feelings when we look at them.

All these feelings ideate its sensations, and he identified several of them. The one he valued most, he called tactile values. Well, it's a sort of high-sounding phrase that becomes fashionable. And in the 1890s, intellectual snobs began to use it, as they do psychoanalytical drag on today, without having a very clear notion of what it meant. But it has a great of truth in it. Because ultimately, our sense of what is real is confirmed by what we can touch. And to stimulate ideate its sensations of touch could well be life-enhancing. I think it is true that one reason why we admire the work of Jotter, the father of Florentine painting, is that he had almost beyond anyone.

The power of making his figures look solid as if one could put one's arms around them. And this achieved not by imitation but by some intense conviction of their solid reality. Benson didn't confine the idea of tactile values to such obviously massive figures. He extended it to the combination of out-time and modeling that we see on this perfume ported by Pollyola, incidentally the only illustration to his first edition of the Florentine Painters. And I think this is convincing too. One where it does feel as if one's fingers were enjoying the torts skin and the modeling of this cheek and neck. Later in the book, Benson identified another source of pleasure, the ideate its sensation of movement, which as he truly said, can be achieved by line, far more vividly than by imitation. He called Botticelli

the greatest artist of linear design that Europe had ever seen. Looking at the wind gods and the birth of Venus, one has no difficulty in agreeing with him. Let me read you a quotation from the Florentine Painters to show how far his theory is and in advance of his time. In fact, the mere subject and even representation in general was so indifferent to Botticelli that he appears almost as if haunted by the idea of communicating the unembodied values of touch and movement. Now there is a way of rendering even tactile values with almost no body, and that is by translating them faithfully as may be into values of movement. For instance, we want to render the roundness of a wrist without the slightest touch by the light or shade. We simply give the movement of the wrist's outline and the movement of the draper is it falls over it

and the roundness is communicated to us almost entirely in terms of movement. But let us go one step further. Take this line that renders the roundness of the wrist or, a more obvious example, the lines that renders the movements of the tossing hair, the fluttering draperies and the dancing waves and the birth of Venus take these lines alone with all their power stimulating our imagination of movement and what do we have? Pure values of movement, abstracted, unconnected with any representation whatever. Then, in his central Italian painters, he identified another very convincing ideated sensation which he called space composition. It is, he said, the art which humanizes the void, making it an enclosed Eden. A domed mansion wherein our higher selves confine on the boat.

In such pictures, how freely one breathes as if a load had just been lifted from one's heart, not quite our contemporary radium. But the truth in that, too, I don't pretend that these ideated sensations provide a complete explanation of why we enjoy pictures. They don't take us all the way, but such progress as we make is on solid ground. They are not simply incantations as is most writing about aesthetics. And one thing I can vouch for that they represent Mr. Berenson's own experience. Looking at pictures with him, one could almost see his frail-nessal body reacting physically to the tactile values of space composition as a work before him. These introductions were written in the 1890s. And so was his greatest work of scholarship the enormous book on the Florentine Drawings

of the Renaissance. All finished before Mr. Berenson moved into his villa. This book is one of the great monuments of Renaissance art history with a closely written text and an amazingly comprehensive catalogue. It is also a feat of endurance. Mr. Berenson used to describe the freezing print room with UFC, the sulky custodians crouched over their little braziers and the secretive directors who wanted to keep all their new discoveries for themselves. The impact of the Mediterranean of Italy in particular turned aesthetic experience into religious faith. And it was here at Montioliveito Marjore near Sienna that Berenson became a Catholic. Although he didn't remain a practicing Catholic for very long, he always retained a Catholic point of view. The next 30 years were given up to saying

who painted what and to acquiring the works of art which to this day hang or stand in almost exactly the places and spaces Mr. Berenson thought right for them. Even moving a small object by a couple of inches would cause him genuine distress. I sometimes moved well and a past out of mischief possibly because my sense of space was different. And as he passed, he would move it back unconsciously with a trembling hand. Incidentally, you see how many of these works of Chinese. In the 90s, interested in far eastern art was confined to the Japanese. Mr. Berenson was one of the first collectors of early Chinese art, which shows he was an east-thead and not just an expert. Music During these thirty years, BB, as everybody called him, even those who did not know him, wrote

with the one exception I've mentioned, practically nothing but will stand rereading. Even his practice of creating artistic personalities on the basis of style alone, which it seems so exciting in the 1890s, led him astray, and the most famous of these creations, called by the charming name Amikudi Sandro, meaning the friend of Botticelli, had to be liquidated. And he knew it. As early as 1901, he wrote, I see how fruitless and interest is the history of art, and how worthless and undertaking is that of determining who painted whatsoever

it be. I see now how valueless all such matters are in the life of the Spirit. Yet he went on doing it and doing practically nothing else for forty years. I wonder if he wrote in his autobiography, I have never regarded myself as other than a failure. This sense of failure, a guilty sense, makes me squirm when I hear myself spoken of as a successful man. But these years were not entirely wasted because Mr. Berenson talked. And through talk, he made himself into a work of art. A very complex, sometimes rather questionable, but infinitely fascinating work of art. Alas, you can't hear Mr. Berenson talking. You can't even hear the sound of his voice because he would never let it be recorded. He wouldn't even speak

on the telephone. And when he was given the freedom of the city of Florence, he refused to make a speech, he just bowed and was a group. I must confess that I found B.V.s talk to a group, a luncheon, much less interesting than when it was addressed to a single companion preferably on a walk in the hills. Every day, at about four o'clock, he would take a car up to a point behind the villa and walk down and rejoin it. And he went on doing this up to the age of nineteen, ninety-two even. And he was sure footed as a mountain goat. How he loved those walks. They all have special names, the names of old friends who had introduced them to him. And he never tired of stopping at certain corners and rapsodizing over the views. Recalling one of many walks, she had with Mr. Berenson, is a distinguished writer

and historian, Aris O'Rigo, who knew him since she was five. I remember on one of them after we scrambled up a steep hill of Sites and Pine Trees, reaching a view of a very of a sieve. And suddenly, B.V. stopped looking as fixed as a pointer who was just sighted as his bird. Look, he said, for the little farmhouse below us with psychoses behind that little bath cot. He said, look, a booster. It was the first time that it occurred to me to look at landscape in terms of art. Yes, he was a marvellous observer of nature. And

he was much more sympathetic when he was away from the rather stifling atmosphere of itati. I think we'd all agree that in the 1920s, at the height of his prosperity, B.V. was a bit too grand. He often said that he wished only to be loved. He wrote his autobiography, I am baffled on the person or group I am with swatts my impulse to embrace them and the radiance of my good will. Well, it may be true, but he went a funny way about it. As you remember, he never came down to all the guests who assembled and then there would be a sort of royal hush. He would walk around formally extending a small dry hand. It was a little like an 18th century court. But then, when I traveled with him, it was entirely different. Because in order to see something that he thought might add to his stock of

ideas, he'd put up with anything. Look at every case in the most tedious museum, listen patiently to the most crashing ball. He wasn't at all dependent on luxury as his critics to sometimes pretend. I remember being with them both. You all were in a small little town near Siena. You may remember it's a little town walled in, you know, near Siena. And there is a church in the sort of town, a gallery with a few pictures in it. And I remember we went in and there we were sitting Mary and I and Phoebe and Nikki went around to look

at the pictures and which were sacred pictures had to go into the lists and the others were not and so on. And then the priest appeared. And he began to speak about one of these pictures and said, well, this was attributed to such a painter and to such a painter. And then came Ilberenzone and said, it was neither the one nor the other. And so he saw that we all began to laugh. And then we said, yes, Ilberenzone, he is Ilberenzone. Oh, the poor man, he was so frightened. And he said, heaven, I could have said, what heavens, what I might have said, is not knowing. One of the reasons of one enjoyed Bebe's company on his travels was that confronted with

history, he would talk about history. It's a pity that that talk was never recorded or filmed because it showed his powers at their best. He had a prodigious memory, unimpaired up to the age of 80 and he had the gift of relating incidents to each other and viewing them all in the light of a single consistent philosophy. He saw historical events in proportion which may be one reason why his Jewish critics attack him for not being sufficiently one of themselves. As a matter of fact, he never played down his Jewish ancestry. He loved to praise the poetic genius of the Old Testament prophets and he could quote them in the original Hebrew, which is more than some of his critics can do. But he hated nationalism in all its forms and he had no use for provincialism. He really deserved that old fashioned title

a citizen of the world. Throughout the greater part of the war, he stayed on at E. Tati. But he had to go into hiding after the Allied landing in Italy in 1943. Staying in the villa of a friend, the San Marino ambassador to the Vatican, who had diplomatic immunity. He, like the prodigal son, came to himself, having no smart people to talk to, he wrote. Although these books are rather chaotic and digressive, I believe they are the best things he ever did and they give an idea why we all admire him so much. His sketch for a self-portrait is an astonishing out to an Englishman, sometimes rather an embarrassing piece of what he himself called self-dredging. And his aesthetics and history really is a gold mine of wisdom.

Most every sentence makes one pause. One often starts by disagreeing violently and then I think he'd over one realizes that BB has seen through some fashionable opinion of which one is oneself the dupe. Here's an example of his way of thought. The truth is that no thinking can be done without fictions. Not even the law where exactly is so imperative can get on without the notorious legal fictions. Yet there is nothing more dangerous than to mistake these unavoidable verbalisms, these verbal myths for entities of experience. How a passage like this brings back to his friends the character of BB's talk. John Walker, who was for many years the director of the National Gallery in Washington,

was one of the men who knew him best. We met again recently in New York and had a happy afternoon talking about our old friend. Johnny, I never known how did you first come to be associated with BB and the Taty? Well, it would really very largely do to you. BB had found you a most marvelous associate and been extremely happy having you at Etaughty and then suddenly to quote BB, you betrayed him and got married and went off to the Asmolian Museum. The rumors at Etaughty were that you were such a marvelous representative of Oxford. BB had changed his mind and that it would go to Oxford and not to Harvard. So the two directors of the Farben Museum got together and said we've got to get a representative of theirs as fast as possible and as Kenneth Clark is there, there's a vacancy. Don't you think would be a good idea if you went over there? Well, I said I didn't know whether I'd like BB, I'd never seen him and I'll never forget the first day when he came into the living room. You remember how really dapper he was and always had a carnation, he's

buttonhole and a very delicate, very sensitive face, a little beard. I remember the whole thing he thought was yesterday and we were all having tea. We've had a life at Etaughty, we've had a very realistic and this was tea time. So he sat down and he began talking to me and all the dubious voice because he wasn't all that enthusiastic about the graduates that had been sent from the Farben Museum. But in any case, he touched on American architecture, asked me what I thought of it. I said I think it's the most creative art in the world today. Nonsense, he said. American buildings really look like models of buildings. They don't amount to anything. There's more mass and more volume in the towers of San Germano than there are in all the skyscrapers in New York. I must say coming into New York and both subsequently, I have looked at them. They do look like models of buildings. There's no sense at all. Anyhow, I was outraged by this. I had had a little gallery at Harvard and we had a civilized Buckminster Fuller and I was a disciple of the Corps of UCA and so I fought violently about this and it lasted all through tea and then we went into his library

and continued. Well, that was the way I discovered afterwards, really, to get BB's affection was to fight back against any ideas that he put forward. And then subsequently to admit that he was right. That was very important. Well, I must say that's an extraordinary achievement. And I never learnt it. All those years, I don't think I ever fought with him. If I found that he was saying what seemed to me completely wrong or something I didn't believe in, I just shut up and went on buttering toast and handing it right. But didn't you find that one, he didn't teach anything, he wanted the teacher at all. What, did you learnt indirectly, you learnt from his conversation and you learnt by using his library? I don't think, whenever learnt much about the history of art from him because he very seldom talked about the history of art. Yes, it wasn't a subject that he was really interested in, though. It's gutting, though. At lunch, he talked about politics. Well, I know to understand anything to do with politics and so I just sat there gusling. And when

one went through a walk on the hills and he talked about nature, and that was marvelous. And then in the evening, he would talk about the history of ideas and the correlation of similar historical phenomena all over the world and showing this immense girth, like grass, both the whole process of civilization and the growing up of societies and the decadence of societies. And that was marvelous. And that is where I learnt. Yes. Yes. Most of what I got out of B.P. Yes, I agree with you. I think of the general ideas that he put forth, but you and I both played that game of conversation. You had to throw in the right question. You had to show enthusiasm for certain ideas. You had to develop it. You never could let the ball fall. It was a very strenuous game. Quite a strenuous game. I tell you what he influenced me very much. I came out of the London of the Bloomsbury world. I was a friend of the Straitsys. I applied Bell, of course, a great friend Roger Fry. Now

those were very clever people, but they were looking back on it a little parochew and in red. And they were absolutely dogmatic. Now, listening to B.B. I got, or one can only call, a Catholic notion of European culture. Yes. And of course, he was at a certain point actually a convert to Catholicism, wasn't he? Yes, he was indeed. But it was landscape that he found his relation in. And that goes back to his very earliest days. I remember he talked to me about how much he loved the landscape around Boston where he grew up. He knew every hill, every day, every pond, the thoreau knew. He used to walk to Concord and to Beverly. And he always remained really more impressed, perhaps, by that New England scenery than he even was by Tuscany. And I know you'll agree with me that in the end, it was this wonderful sponsor of the nature that was the most touching and endearing thing

about B.B. I quite agree. And it was also the basis of his whole aesthetic theory. He really believed that art existed to teach you how to use your eyes to look at nature. This was the beginning and the end of his belief. And it had a curious consequence in another way. We all see with the eyes of art generation. B.B. couldn't sympathize with contemporary art. For a very simple reason, he couldn't understand how an abstraction could teach him anything about nature. This alienated him from the young, which was unfortunate. Yes. But he'd never realized that an artist, let's say, like Rothko, could train a viewer's eye to see the blending of light at sunset, those marvellous bands of color, which appear in the sky occasionally. And though he could feel the tactile values in a sky by seizam

because seizam belonged to his generation, he never could make the leap into an appreciation of contemporary art. After the war, B.B. became quite benevolent. And I must add, he was exceedingly kind to me. He let me stay tea-tati, often for months at a time. And then, of course, there was another reason why after the war, the atmosphere of the tea-tati became so much sunnier, Nicky Mariano, the sister of Baroness Anrepp, whom we've already seen. I ought to explain that she was a lady, half-bolt, half-near-polleton, who had been introduced into e-tati by Mrs. Berenson for complex personal reasons in about the year 1919. She was given the post of Librarian, for which she had no qualifications at all, although she afterwards became quite a good scholar. She was the main spring of the whole place. And became, in effect,

the second Mrs. Berenson, because Mrs. Berenson died in 1945, after being out of action for many years. Everyone who went to e-tati loved her, and no one loved her more than Mr. Berenson. He writes of her as the necessity for service, the happiness of my life. When she's weighed up for a few days, he says that the house is like a wheel of sand, from which the wheel has been taken away. She works with me, he votes, she thinks with me, she reads as I do,

and she feels as I do. However, half-face, I've been looking at it for 40 years. And every day, I find it. Her way, beyond the first day, there's no damn mevitan life. And Nicky gives me infinite more than I deserve. Almost makes me believe that I do deserve it. Yes, he felt it most deeply. But this didn't prevent him from having innumerable flirtations with other ladies. Up to the age of 85, he seems to have been irresistible. He wrote about ten love letters a day, between six and eight in the morning. It's a depressing form of literature at the best of times. He had a curious faculty that when a beautiful woman came to see him at the tattoo, if she only came once or twice, he would immediately start

writing her passionate love letters. This happened to a great many of my friends. And they were all astonished to find, because they owned each other. They all astonished to find these same love letters, coming pouring in. Some of them came towards three times, and that perhaps was understandable. But one of them, no longer alive or lost vividly, I think he only saw twice when he went on writing the vividly. For years, you know. He would begin a correspondence, a sort of love correspondence with a person he had never seen. And he thought these letters were so enchanting, and that was enough for him to go on writing to them. Because in the last years, he really spent his mornings writing. Right. And that was his. Yes, the rest was too tiring. He was very sad that he couldn't really work. So the only work he did was to write his letters. They were short and passionate, like that. He was very fond of the Queen of Romania. You know, Helen. He was very fond

of her, and he sometimes she came and she would walk with him. And then he was delighted. In his eighties, the land of his travels faded. He went to see again, but first there's a minute of everything you have at best. And then silence itself and surroundings. And then in his 88th year, the moment came when he felt that all the beauty he needed to see was at his own door. Not only in the distant landscapes he saw on his drives, but on the people he met, from he saw as statues in movement. And above all, in his own garden, every morning he said, he found enough beauty there to suffice for the whole day. And he used to say, too, each morning, I woke by wonder where my eyes were yesterday. Could one say that BB's fame passed through four phases. First from 1890 to 1900, the

brilliant young man whose criticism, destructive and constructive earned him famous and admiration. Second from 1930, the all-powerful expert and social lion. Third from 1932 to 1940, a sort of retirement. Almost forgotten as a writer, much less in demand as an expert. And then, after the war, an extraordinary rebirth as a legend and a sage. In the 1930s, his Italian painters had sold only seven copies in four years. But in 1952, a new edition immediately sold 60,000. And hundreds of pilgrims made their way to eatati, not just duchesses and art dealers, but all sorts, including, of course, a lot of old friends, like Yehuli Menuin

and Walter Lippmann. And, often, is the whole Umberto Marra, the Italian writer whose liberal views had made him BB's closest friend in the year of the fascism. Eatati had a character outside of time. And this has been preserved because it now belongs to the University of Harvard, his own university, which, with extraordinary tact, has managed to keep its original atmosphere while adding the conveniences of a modern institution. I think that BB rather enjoyed his apotheosis. One of the nice things about him was that, in spite of all his disillusioning experiences and his vast knowledge of history, with all the grounds for pessimism, which that provides, he never became a pessimist. He was incurably hopeful. He was always prepared to think that a goose was a swan, and by God, he saw enough geese to put a strain on his credurity. The fact is that he loved life. When he was

very old, almost 90, he said, I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passes by to drop their unused minutes into it. And if he loved people no less, he loved nature even more. He completely transcended, in his own experience, the distinction between art and nature, which had dominated, and bedeviled, aesthetic theory in his lifetime. And perhaps the right place to take leave of him is not in front of a familiar picture, but in front of one of those works of nature that he found inexhaustibly life-enhancing, like the old tree, which was the object of one of his walks. What a sense of life and movement. What tactile values. And beyond it, what space composition. Presentation of this program made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation, and its

worldwide affiliates.