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Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur By Ernest Samuels Harvard University Press, 475 pp„ $15 Bernard Berenson was many things: a Lithuanian-born Jew who grew up in a near-slum of Boston to become an aesthete, and who nearly succeeded in making a work of art out of his own life; a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting who did much to perfect the uncertain skill of attribution, and whose lists of who painted and drew what are still basic tools for scholars in this field; a taste-maker who guided American millionaires to the masterpieces which have made our museums the envy of Europe; a middleman who combed the byways of Italy, France, Germany, and England to authenticate the pictures these millionaires bought, making a tidy personal fortune in the process; an art collector of wide-ranging sensibility who bequeathed his villa in Florence, I Tatti, as well as his pictures and enormous art library, to Harvard; a writer whose ideas on the nature of beauty and on art appreciation have dated, but whose luminous old-age musings have enchanted all kinds of readers ever since they were published in the1950s. Anticlimactically, he was also a relative of this reviewer.

A listing of Berenson’s friends and acquaintances would include most of the Beautiful People of his day (he died in 1959, at the age of 94), from Bertrand Russell (at one time his brother-in-law) and Oscar Wilde to Henry Adams (Berenson was one of the few Jews that notorious antisemite could stomach), Benedetto Croce, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Israel Zangwill, Harry Truman. Many of them contributed to the Berenson legend. After the war he became so much of an institution that not to have at least been invited to tea at I Tatti stamped you as a Europe-on-$5-a-day tourist.

RB

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Ruth Berenson

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Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur By Ernest Samuels Harvard University Press, 475 pp„ $15 Bernard Berenson was many things: a Lithuanian-born Jew who grew up in a near-slum of Boston to become an aesthete, and who nearly succeeded in making a work of art out of his own life; a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting who did much to perfect the uncertain skill of attribution, and whose lists of who painted and drew what are still basic tools for scholars in this field; a taste-maker who guided American millionaires to the masterpieces which have made our museums the envy of Europe; a middleman who combed the byways of Italy, France, Germany, and England to authenticate the pictures these millionaires bought, making a tidy personal fortune in the process; an art collector of wide-ranging sensibility who bequeathed his villa in Florence, I Tatti, as well as his pictures and enormous art library, to Harvard; a writer whose ideas on the nature of beauty and on art appreciation have dated, but whose luminous old-age musings have enchanted all kinds of readers ever since they were published in the1950s. Anticlimactically, he was also a relative of this reviewer.

A listing of Berenson’s friends and acquaintances would include most of the Beautiful People of his day (he died in 1959, at the age of 94), from Bertrand Russell (at one time his brother-in-law) and Oscar Wilde to Henry Adams (Berenson was one of the few Jews that notorious antisemite could stomach), Benedetto Croce, Leo and Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Israel Zangwill, Harry Truman. Many of them contributed to the Berenson legend. After the war he became so much of an institution that not to have at least been invited to tea at I Tatti stamped you as a Europe-on-$5-a-day tourist.