Bernard Berenson

Bernard BerensonAuthor(s): Kenneth ClarkSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 102, No. 690 (Sep., 1960), pp. 381-386Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/873081 .

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THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE NUMBER 690 VOLUME CII SEPTEMBER 960

KENNETH CLARK

Bernard Berenson

I CAN imagine no greater honour than the invitation to speak to you in this noble hall,* which seems to stand at the centre of European civilization, on the subject of one who became almost the embodiment of that civilization, Bernard Berenson. Those of you who knew him will agree that he appears in our memories in many different guises - as a talker, a looker, an artist in life and a sage. But today it is surely appropriate that we should celebrate his memory as the unsurpassed student and critic of Italian art. How is it that a man born in Lithuania, and brought up in a poor quarter of Boston achieved this position?

There exists in the archives of Harvard University the application dated 3oth March 1887, which Bernard Berenson made for a travelling fellowship in Europe. He claims that he has excelled in the field of Arabic, Assyrian, Hebrew and Sanskrit, and that his chief aim is to increase the appreciation of Arabic literature. As in Leonardo da Vinci's letter to Ludovico il Moro, art is mentioned only incidentally. In fact Berenson says: 'It is there that I feel weakest. One can study literature after a fashion here [in Harvard], but art not at all'. It is a shock to recall that when Berenson was a young man there were practically no pictures by the great Italians in the United States, a situation which Berenson himself was to do so much - we may sometimes think almost too much - to alter.

He did not get the fellowship, but in the same year friends who recognized his brilliance, financed a journey to Europe. He was extremely poor. Often he could not get enough to eat. But he stayed in Europe for the next seventy years. He went first to Paris, then London, and the pictures in the Louvre and the National Gallery made a deep impres- sion on him. He did not immediately abandon his ambition to combine his learning and his sense of poetry in one com- pendious philosophy; indeed one may say that he never abandoned it, and that this is what gives quality to his latest writing. But in his first year in Europe the visual arts occupied his mind more and more, and all that was needed for him to fix his mind entirely on this study was a means of integrating it with a way of life and an intellectual method. Both of these were waiting for him in Italy. In Italy he found that works of art are not all imprisoned in galleries, but are, so to say, an extension of the surrounding life and landscape; and in Italy he found a scholar who had, as he supposed, elevated the study of art to an intellectual disci- pline - I refer, of course, to Giovanni Morelli.

Readers ofBerenson's Sketch for a SelfPortrait will remember the moment when his vocation first presented itself to him.

Sitting at a rickety table outside a caf6 in the lower town of Bergamo, he suddenly said to his companion that they should devote their entire lives to connoisseurship. 'We are the first to have before us no ambition, no expectation, no thought of reward. We shall give ourselves up to learning, to distinguishing between the authentic works of an Italian painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and those commonly ascribed to him. Here at Bergamo, and in all the fragrant and romantic valleys that branch out northward, we must not stop till we are sure that every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a Cariani, every Previtali a Previtali.' 'To this', he adds 'had vaulting ambition or at least dazzling hopes shrunk.' And indeed it must strike us now as a strange ambition for a brilliant young student of oriental languages. Now that there is substantial agreement about the outline of most of the great Italian painters we forget the confused and misleading picture of their work which in the I88o's was available to even the most diligent and perceptive student. But think of Walter Pater, the writer from whom Berenson, to a large extent, derived his critical standards, and whom he revered all his life. Pater's famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci not only includes the Medusa of the Uffizi as one of the most famous and certain of Leonardo's works; but in a long paragraph devoted to his drawings contrives not to mention a single one which is by Leonardo himself. And do not let it be thought that this is because Pater was a dilet- tante. His Leonardo essay was written in 1868. Thirty years later the critic Miintz published a heavy volume which was supposed to be the authoritative study of Leonardo, and of the drawings illustrated not a single one was authentic. And in this very same year - 1898 - Mr Berenson was writing the Drawings of the Florentine Painters, in which the list of Leonardo's drawings is absolutely accurate and almost complete.

Well, if that was the predicament of so fine a critic as Pater, it certainly was worth someone's while to bring a little more critical acumen to bear on problems of attribution. But, you may ask, was this not being done already by less volatile spirits than the youthful Berenson - in fact by Cavalcaselle? Many of us would consider his History of Italian Painting the foundation of all our knowledge. Never- theless one can understand why Berenson reacted against that famous work and sometimes spoke of it with distaste. It was entirely without a sense of method, it showed no distinction of mind and owing to the collaboration of Mr Crowe, it was written in a style worthy of the Great Exhibition.

The intelligence and the sense of method which were so painfully lacking in Crowe and Cavalcaselle were exactly what characterized Giovanni Morelli; and it was, therefore, natural that the young Berenson, who was brimming over with intelligence, and who had derived from William James

* The address which follows was given in Italian on 7th May of this year, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. In the actual speech I omitted one or two passages which seemed inappropriate to a non-specialist audience, and these have been put back in the present text.

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the notion that a physiological method could be applied to things of the mind, should have taken him as his master. Moreover, Morelli's whole approach - his aristocratic inde-

pendence, his love of teasing museum directors, his Socratic

professions of ignorance - were all entirely sympathetic to Berenson and had I think a permanent influence on his conversational style. I may add that Mr Berenson never knew him, and only set eyes on him two or three times.

The method with which Berenson determined to winnow the rustic churches of the Veneto and the upper Adige is described in a paper on the rudiments of connoisseurship written in I894 - that is to say at the same time that he was

compiling the lists of the Venetian painters and preparing the Lorenzo Lotto. The first point he makes is that the only real evidence of who painted a picture lies in the picture itself. Documents, traditions, signatures can be shown over and over again to be completely misleading. Nothing is certain except quality and style. As Berenson says: 'All that remains of an event in general history is the account of it in a document or a tradition; but in the history of art, the work of art is the event.' The other conclusion of his essay on method is that it is in those parts of a picture where the artist works unthinkingly or relies on his own formulation that he is most likely to reveal his personality. Thus the best tests of authenticity are the ears, the hands, the folds of

drapery. This, of course, was the Morellian method, and

Morelli, who had been trained as a physiologist, carried it to great lengths. To many of you these two propositions will be very familiar, but I repeat them now because the so- called science of connoisseurship has receded so far into the distance that it is hard to imagine a time when it seemed a new and invigorating mental exercise. Yet such it undoubtedly was, and appearing in the form of Berenson's confident, destructive articles, produced in the I89O's a complete revolu- tion. In particular his lists of authentic pictures, by their laconic finality, attained an air of almost magical prestige. No argument; no explanation or apology; just a name.

Mr Berenson's own procedure when considering a picture rather added to this feeling of magic. He used to tap the front of the picture with a delicate finger and then listen

intently as if expecting an almost inaudible voice to speak to him. Then after a long pause he would pronounce a name. I hardly ever knew him explain or give his reasons - quite rightly, because they would have been full of complexities and imponderables. And of course he tapped the picture in order to find out if the panel was in good condition or if the canvas had been relined. All the same I can well understand

why people without his visual memory and rapid processes of deduction thought there must be some trick. 'I soon discovered', he said, 'that I ranked with fortune tellers, chiromantists, astrologers - and not even with the self- deluded of these, but with the deliberate charlatans.'

That, of course, was written in a moment of depression. In fact the prestige of the early lists, and of Berensonian connoisseurship in general, was overwhelming. For almost thirty years this particular branch of scholarship - the giving of names - had a prestige similar to that of textual criticism in philological studies. And just as the greatness of a Bentley or a Housman does not reside in the correctness of their textual emendations, but rather in some combination of elegance of mind and far-reaching scholarship, so the value of Berenson's

early lists is not invalidated by the fact that a very large number of his hypotheses have proved to be incorrect - often by Berenson himself.

I said that there was a flaw in the doctrine that the work of art in itself should be the sole basis of connoisseurship. It is, of course, that there must be some fixed points to which a name is attached, and this name can only be provided by documents and signatures. To ignore such signposts and proceed entirely on internal evidence may sometimes suc- ceed - as it did for example, in the case of Alunno di Domenico, whose name, Bartolomeo di Giovanni, was afterwards discovered; but more often it ends badly. as in the outstanding example of Amico di Sandro. This was the most ambitious of all Berenson's 'artistic personalities', and as you will remember he ended by disintegrating into Botticelli of the '8o's and early Filippino. A similar fate over- took Alvise Vivarini, Polidoro Lanziani, and several others. And yet the creation of these Pirandellian figures performed a useful function in criticism; in fact certain phases of art history, for example the relationship of Filippino to Botticelli, could hardly have been clarified without them. And how often those of us who still privately practise the art of connoisseurship (for there has long ceased to be a public demand for it), lament the loss of these convenient cards of identity. How useful Alvise was for those Bellinesque portraits now transferred to Jacometto; how satisfactory when we could pronounce the name of Polidoro Lanziani before a whole group of Venetian paintings done in the 1530's. To embark on a long inconclusive explanation is far less satisfactory.

The early lists were the production of idealistic youth. They were, as Berenson later pointed out, too exclusive: dandaical aestheticism, he called it. They did not allow for an off-day. They took no cognizance of studio practice. Actually the most serious result of this idealism was one which the author never quite admitted, his lack of interest in the physical condition of pictures. If there was one thing that bored the young Berenson more than documents it was technique; and although he learnt to be much more careful in these matters, to the end of his days he never had quite enough respect for the skill of restorers. Perhaps nobody who hasn't worked in a gallery can realize how much that one sees exhibited is the work of these gifted and self-effacing craftsmen. The young student from Harvard had never visited a restorer's workshop, and so he could put as the only illustration to his Venetian Painters the Hampton Court Shepherd, which, if all later repaint were removed, would be a very faint shadow indeed. I may add that I was with him when he came to look at it again for the later lists. A long silence was broken by Mrs Berenson saying to him 'Bernard, we must have been in love'.

As everybody knows, the success of the lists, and of the

accompanying essays in the science of connoisseurship, especially that on the New Gallery Exhibition of I894, led to a great change in Berenson's material circumstances. His destructive comments on famous and valuable old masters

had so greatly alarmed collectors and dealers alike that there was nothing for it but to persuade this terrible poacher to turn game-keeper. People sometimes say that his decision to work for dealers had a crucial effect on his intellectual

development. Berenson himself placed the crisis of his life in these years, but related it to a different event, the decision

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to write The Drawings of the Florentine Painters. There may be an element of what (I believe) psychologists call substitution in the tone of regret in which he always referred to that great work; but no doubt he was right, looking back on his life, in seeing this as the moment when he might have followed one of two paths: the path opened up by the introductions to the Florentine and Central Italian volumes, the path, that is to say, of philosophic criticism and appreciation; or the path opened up by the lists. And it is important to notice that Berenson's reason for choosing the latter was not material gain (for the choice preceded, by some years, his decision to work for dealers) but the feeling that scholarship was a more respectable and serious-looking occupation than criticism. 'I dared not resist the chance offered me of proving that I could toil and plod and pedantize and bore with the best of them.'

I have called the Florentine Drawings a 'great work', and it deserves that epithet on many counts: for its sheer bulk, for its originality, for the quantity of penetrating criticism which it contains and for the way in which its judgements have stood up to sixty years of scrutiny. No large systematic study of old master drawings had ever been written before, and no one had thought, in the words of the title, of criticiz- ing and studying them as 'documents in The History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art'. Consider the mere physical difficulties of coping with this mass of material, and persuad- ing the custodian of the freezing print room of the Uffizi to leave his scaldino and rummage in the dark for another portfolio. Mr Berenson often said that it was those winters in the Gabinetto di Disegni which accounted for the row of shawls and coats which struck every visitor to I Tatti. But through it all his eye never lost its sharpness and really the only judgements which required revision were those in the section on Michelangelo which, paradoxically enough, contains the best criticism in the book.

The Florentine Drawings was finished in 1897, but did not appear till 1903, owing to the machinations of Dr Bode, who would not allow the illustrations printed by the German state printing press to be released. I may add in parenthesis that the relations of Berenson and Bode continued for about thirty years to be that of Pope and Emperor in the thirteenth century: on the whole the Pope had the best of it, and ended by giving the Emperor absolution. There followed fifteen years during which Berenson greatly enlarged his range of knowledge - how greatly can be judged by a single fact, that the original Central Italian lists do not contain the name of Sassetta, and such of his works as are included appear under the name of Sano di Pietro. He began to pay far more atten- tion to chronology, as one can see, for example, in his Venetian Paintings in America. The original method was less rigorously applied, but the word still held some magic for him and appears in the title of a work Three Essays in Method which, personally, I think the least satisfactory of his books.

During these years collectors, dealers and students of art history were all clamouring for revised lists, and I don't see how Mr Berenson could have refused them. It must have been galling for him to see the old ones, with all their mistakes and omissions, quoted as his opinions. Almost every day he would receive corrections which he himself had made twenty years earlier. The revised lists were inevitable. But of course they were much less fun than the old ones. Instead

of being a touchstone of quality they had to be all inclusive. Instead of being a sharp weapon used to assault an inert mass of tradition, they themselves became the mass, the canon, the object of assault. And then instead of the fragrant valleys north of Bergamo the work had to be done from photographs. Those photographs! They were like a plague of flies which descended on I Tatti, driving everybody mad. You will remember that the old brown silver prints were on very thin paper which curls up at sight. Mrs Berenson stuck them down with paste on to pieces of cardboard, but the paste fermented and the photographs got a disease, which infected all the other photographs, and they had all to be put in the sun to cure them, and then of course they all curled up again - and so it went on.

When I first stayed at I Tatti in the early 192o's, the revision of the lists was in full swing, and I must say that the atmosphere was very far from the tranquil, frugal, hope- ful aestheticism which must have prevailed in Fiesole when the first edition of the Italian Painters was being prepared. Young ladies ran hysterically from room to room, and every few minutes Mr Berenson would emerge like Jehovah from his study and ask for a photograph which was invariably missing. I was often reminded of Yeats's lines:

'I saw a staring Virgin stand Where holy Dionysus died'.

The lists were done in the end: but alas, it was too late. By I932 the prestige of connoisseurship had declined. The new fashion for iconographical studies was already in the ascendent. And although it is a vulgar error to associate the science of connoisseurship with the art market, the fact remains that it derived some of its force, as all forms of art and scholarship do, from the fact that it was needed: needed, I mean, by the big, wicked world. It is difficult for anyone who was not concerned to imagine the mania for 'attribu- tions' which flourished in the inflationary 20's. It was like the railway mania of the 1 840's - or, to take a closer parallel, it was like the trade in relics in the fourteenth century. Certificates of attribution were the means of keeping in affluence quite a large proportion of the priesthood of art. In this hierarchy Mr Berenson was, as I have said, the Pope. Like the Holy Father he was himself entirely above suspicion, and his pronouncements were accepted as infallible. All this collapsed with the 1930 slump. And by the time rich people were willing to pay high prices for pictures again, their eyes fell on the brighter, more accessible, and, by and large, more authentic works of the Impressionists. This meant that by the time the revised lists appeared, everyone (and scholars are not immune from social change) had lost just that extra eagerness which we bring to a subject which offers great material rewards.

But this does not affect their permanent value. It takes, I think, a little imagination to realize what an extraordinary achievement the small volume of the Italian Pictures of the Renaissance is. Open it at random. You will probably find yourself confronted with the name of a painter - let us say Paolo Farinati - which suggests a fairly vague mental picture. You will find a list of about xoo works in village churches, in galleries, in private collections all over the world. Every one of those works Berenson had seen, and they had formed a clear image of Farinati in his mind, so that he could apply it instantly in going round a collection.

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Now multiply this by 300, for that is the number of painters listed in the volume, and remember that all these images had to be clear and usable. And each judgement not only involved a feat of memory, but was often a piece of condensed criticism. It meant saying 'given the character and capaci- ties of this particular artist, this is the kind of picture he might have painted.' All this must be kept in mind when we find ourselves questioning, as we inevitably do, certain of the judgements; or when specialists in one particular artist point to occasional mistakes.

This remarkable achievement was to some extent the result of an unusually good memory, not only for visual impressions, but for facts and dates. But one remembers most vividly, and so to say, creatively, things which have moved one: and the first reason why Berenson's lists have a quality which no other compilation of the kind has achieved (I am thinking for example of van Marle's volumes) is that pictures moved him. The lists are a record of his responses to the quality of the pictures he had seen, and ultimately it was this responsiveness which decided all his judgements. He came more and more to distrust arguments in favour of an attribution, and maintained that real conclusions were always arrived at instinctively. 'In the beginning was the guess.' On the other hand, he didn't like it when other people did this (what he called the basta vedersi school) and, to be fair, his own conclusions were always examined methodically after they had been reached.

In the 1932 edition the essays on Renaissance painting were, for the first time, issued in a volume separate from the lists of authentic pictures. This was obviously a convenience to the student and the tourist, but it diminished and even falsified Berenson's achievement. The point of the first lists was that they were an index of quality, an evaluation: and this was supplemented by the evaluations in the essays. These remain, after sixty-five years, remarkably convincing - and I do not think this means simply that we still agree with them. There are points of disagreement. I think we should all be disposed to rate Uccello and Pietro Lorenzetti higher than he does. But the reasons for his low opinion of these painters are in themselves interesting. He under-rated Uccello because, influenced by Vasarian tradition, he asso- ciated him with science and naturalism. To condemn a Renaissance painter in the I890's for his naturalism is sur-

prising and impressive. And after perceptive praise of the Lorenzetti, he writes that 'Pietro could sink to the rubbish of his Passion scenes at Assisi, when he carries Duccio's themes to the utmost pitch of frantic feeling. Form, movement, composition - even depth and significance - have been sacrificed to the most obvious and easy emotion. A like anarchy has seldom again overtaken an Italian master, even of the Bolognese school. To find its parallel you must go to Spain and to certain Germans.' Well, one may not agree with this judgement (although I think there is much truth in it), but one must admit that to keep one's critical faculties so rebelliously alive in spite of the holy hypnotism of Assisi, was a remarkable feat.

But such sudden shocks of disagreement are rare. In general we find ourselves assenting almost too easily. We take his evaluations for granted until we remember the accepted values of the 90's. For example the unquestioned supremacy of Ghirlandajo - thought to be Sophoclean

climax of the Quattrocento - an evaluation which you will find not only in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but in the ordinary encyclopedia article right up to 910o. That is firmly put on one side. 'Not a spark of genius.' 'The painter for the superior philistine.' And in contrast, Botticelli, whom Pater had included so diffidently, so apologetically, in the Renais- sance, Botticelli is rated by Mr Berenson as 'the greatest artist of linear design that Europe has ever had'.

Even more remarkable than his evaluation of Botticelli, who had, after all, been highly praised by Ruskin, was the place he gave to Piero della Francesca, whose work is never mentioned by Ruskin at all. Piero plays no more than an historical role in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, yet Berenson puts him with Giotto and Masaccio as one of the three or four greatest artists of the Quattrocento, and recognizes his affini- ties with early Greek sculpture and VelAzquez.

This comparison suggests one of the ways in which Berenson's approach to the old masters differs so markedly from that of his contemporaries, not only Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but Bode, Mtintz or Frizzoni. He had far wider terms of reference. He was not confined to the groove of his own period. Already his mind was ranging back to Egyptian art, and dwelling with fascination on the problem which was to absorb his last thirty years, the declining art of Hellenism; and most striking of all when viewed historically, his pages are full of references to contemporary French painting. Signorelli is compared to Daumier, the early drawings of Leonardo, most justly, to those of Degas; and in the middle of a passage on Umbrian landscape is this sentence: 'In spite of the exquisite modelling of C6zanne, who gives the sky its tactile values as Michelangelo has given them to the human figure, in spite of Monet's communication of the

very pulse beat of the sun's warmth over fields and trees, we are still waiting for a real art of landscape.' That was written in 1896, and you see that Berenson has recognized what we have only recognized quite recently, the two decisive figures in late nineteenth-century painting.

The other factor that gives the lists their exceptional authority is, as I have said, that they were accompanied by a fresh and vigorous aesthetic philosophy. Re-reading the introductions to the Florentine and Central Italian Painters it is

surprising how much space is taken up with the statement of aesthetic principles. Most of us remember the pages on tactile values, but forget that there are similar disquisitions on naturalism, on movement, on the visual image, on illus-

tration, on the impersonality of art, on space-composition. Even in the North Italian Painters, which sometimes has the

weary and distracted tone of an afterthought, there are admirable disquisitions on the influence of the antique, and on prettiness in art. There is no doubt that Berenson attached

great importance to these statements of critical principles, and he often lamented, both in his conversation and in the Sketch for a Self Portrait, that he had not carried this sort of criticism far further. 'I cannot rid myself' he says, 'of the insistent inner voice that keeps whispering and at times

hissing "you should not have competed with the learned nor let yourself become that equivocal thing, an 'expert'. You should have developed and clarified your notions about the

enjoyment of the work of art. These notions were your own.

They were exhalations of your vital experience."' How far was this inner voice justified? How valuable were those

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'notions', as he calls them, and how fruitfully could they have been applied?

I believe that as they stand in the prefaces, they have great value. Like so much of Berenson's thought they go back to Goethe, to whom I believe the term 'life enhancing' is due; and although he says that they contain no echo of what he had heard or what he had read, I think they must owe something to Hildebrand's Problem of Form (1893), which in turn was inspired by the correspondence of Conrad Fiedler and Hans von Marees. But where Berenson was strikingly original was in developing the theory that the life-enhancing effect of works of art is due to what he called 'ideated sensa- tions' experienced through an unconscious self-identification. It was the first, and remains the only, de-mysticized aesthetic to command respect (because a sexual aesthetic is really too incomplete to be worth considering). Compared to it the 'plastic sequences' of Roger Fry and the 'significant form' of Mr Clive Bell are pure mysticism - not to say incantation. And even the more respectable aesthetic theories of the past - for example those based on laws of proportion - end up in magic, although we may agree that the magic of numbers is a very ancient and honourable one. In three of its applications, tactile values, movement and space-composition, I find that the aesthetic of the ideated sensation really works, and is a most valuable basis for criticism. And if we feel that Berenson under-rates the value of illustration (as, for example, in his slighting references to Bruegel), we must remember the popu- lar instinct, especially in England, is to think of art solely in those terms. As he pointed out forty years later, he was writing for 'a public accustomed under the influence of Rio, Ruskin, Lindsay and the pre-Raphaelites, to see little in painting but illustration'. His contention that changes of taste are changes of visual imagery, because this reflects the objects of our daily interest or desire; whereas the non- illustrative element in art, being dependent on our bodily responses, is far more stable, is I think true and valuable; but in 1895 it was a shock, and it is not surprising that, as he said, 'the public took no notice of reservations or attenu- ations, and remember only that part of my theory which was startling'. Incidentally, one of the great drawbacks of this passage in the Central Italian Painters is that he could not find a satisfactory name for the non-illustrational element. He called it, you may remember, 'decoration': a most unhappy piece of terminology, because that word has different and precise associations from which it cannot now be separated.

Berenson's theory was, as I say, a revolutionary doctrine in

I895, and strangely enough it can be applied to the revolutionary art of today which Mr Berenson himself disliked. For example, Mr Henry Moore's statements about sculpture are in fact amplifications of the doctrines of tactile values and space composition, although they are related to organic life in general, rather than to the human figure alone. And what other justification for tachist art can there be except that of the ideated sensation? No doubt Berenson was right in thinking that his theories would stretch far further than the application he had given them in the Florentine and Central Italian Painters.

Should he then have spent his life, as he himself several times suggests, in extending and applying these principles? I think it was a wise instinct which prevented him from doing so. Berenson was not a philosopher in the limited or

professional sense of the word. His thoughts were not controlled by logic; his mind, which could accommodate such a multitude of concrete impressions, was hostile to abstrac- tions; and he had a corresponding mistrust of systems. 'Every attempt at a system', he said, 'is made at the expense of facts, fancies, suggestions and ideas that clamour for notice like the denizens of Dante's Inferno. I can never get their cries out of my ears.' Could he have continued with the same kind of intensive critical examination of Italian art? Here the difficulty was, I think, that the prefaces had said too much in too small a space. In a way it is their strength: it is this which has kept them alive for sixty-five years. But the price of such concentration was that he could not go back over the same ground. He could not undertake a fuller and more leisurely critical survey of Italian art without feeling that he was repeating himself. The lists, on the other hand, were continually expanding; and so the essays published between 1903 and I940 are not criticism, but connoisseur-

ship - footnotes to the lists. And yet the lists bored him. Indeed I doubt if he would

have stuck to them had it not been for Mrs Berenson, whose mind had not evolved at the same rate as her husband's, and whose strong, pragmatic commonsense saw them as a job that had to be done. How often have I seen them in a gallery together, he delighting in the azure distance in some Bellinesque Madonna, she insisting on a conclusion as to its authorship.

All the time he cherished certain dreams of escape. The one which took most concrete form in his mind was a critical and philosophical survey of one of the great crises of art history, the decline of classical and rise of medieval art. He collected material for this book from about 1910o to 194o. It was to this end that he undertook his journeys and accu- mulated his library, and in many ways it seemed a subject ideally suited to his genius. His learning, his memory, his unrivalled power of relating incidents remote from one another and of drawing analogies - in a word his historical wisdom - could all have been united and controlled by his aesthetic principles. But the book was never written. All that remains is the fragment on the arch of Constantine, and the brilliant suggestions in the last chapters on Aesthetics and History. And what, we may ask, prevented it?

One answer, frequently given, is that he could not write. I have often heard it suggested that this was because English was not his native language. But this, I am sure, is a mistake. He could not remember a time when he did not speak English, and although a formidable linguist, he did not know a word of Yiddish - the language of his parents. It is true, however, that he never had a sure grasp of English idiom or of the rhythm of an English sentence. His style was peculiar. And he had the misfortune to be surrounded by stylists. His closest friend, R. C. Trevelyan, wrote an admirable classic English; his brother-in-law, Logan Pearsall Smith, was a master of fine writing. Mrs Berenson wrote a normal straightforward English prose. The young Berenson with his flowing locks and drooping eyelashes, wrote in a sort of Disraelian style, which offended the pure taste of his three closest associates. 'You have no idea what Bernard's style was like', Mrs Berenson used to say, 'Logan had to take him in hand. Trevy had to rewrite practically the whole book.' Can it be wondered that when Mr Berenson took up

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his pen he felt somewhat inhibited by the thought of these eager critics breathing down his neck; or that certain pages, for example the section at the end of the North Italian Painters, called the Decline of Art, read as if they had been put through a mangle and starched by a very severe laundry. And the proof of this is, that when this formidable trio were no longer behind him, his natural style appeared; and was by no means a bad one. The Self-portrait is, in a way, a well written book, with a fresh, vivid, idiosyncratic use of lan-

guage. The miniature portrait of Carlo Placci in Rumour and

Reflection is a masterpiece. It is revealing, and rather touching, that he wrote most naturally when he knew that his work wasn't going to appear in English, but in the admirable Italian of his friend Loria.

The reason why Berenson never wrote the great book that was in him is that his powers came more and more to be controlled by his immediate responses. He became a sort of sublime improvisatore, playing with his vast learning accord-

ing to the happy chance of the moment. He treated knowledge and ideas as the bards treated legend and poetic imagery, as

part of an inexhaustible reservoir to be drawn upon for the

delight of his audience; and he had a half-conscious feeling that to fix facts and ideas on a printed page was to deprive them of their life. At most they could be allowed to show themselves in those marvellous digressions and asides which illuminate so many pages of Aesthetics and History and Rumour and Reflection. Such a procedure is rare in the modern world; it is hard for us to believe that the Iliad or the Bagavad Gita was originally spoken from memory. But in the history of man, this has been the classic form of teaching, especially in those teachings of the East, where Berenson's first interests

lay. But he differed from Homer and the author of the

Bagavad Gita in one important respect, and that was his

response to his surroundings. The bardic recitals take place on a stage as bare of scenery as that of antique sculpture; but Berenson was the child of Rousseau - the Rousseau of the

RIveries d'un Promeneur Solitaire. Only his walks, fortunately for many of us, were not solitary. Anyone who has had the privilege of accompanying Mr Berenson on his walks in the garden of I Tatti or in the hills behind Vincigliata, will, I believe, agree that it was then that he was most entirely himself, because it was then that his powers of perception, of memory and of co-ordinating intelligence were all brought into harmony. His mind was continually enriched by what he saw and not distracted by what he heard. And what he saw was the countryside and the country people of Italy.

I began by saying that he was drawn to Italian art because he felt it to be an extension of Italian life. In his first resolu- tion to devote his life to connoisseurship, the fragrant valleys north of Bergamo are as important to him as the Lotto's and Cariani's he will find hidden there; and in the course of life they became more so. Italy, which at first had charmed him by its beauty and the abundance of its art, came in the end to be the centre of his moral being as well, and so in the truest sense his own country. Paradoxically, the realization of this only came to him clearly in 1942 when Italy declared war on the United States; and those of you who have read his Rumour and Reflection will remember the moving pages in which he decides to stay on in this country, despite all the

possible risks and hardships involved. He gives three reasons, that he felt so identified with the deeply humanized people of Italy that he could not face deserting them; that if he left he could not avoid 'serving against this Italy which I love so much'; and finally he wanted to round off his acquain- tance with the Italian people by seeing how well he would be treated. He was not mistaken. When the war was over he felt himself even more closely linked with the Italian

people, and the town which he had loved for so many years showed in return its admiration for him. This citizen of the world became a Citizen of Florence. It was the one honour ever bestowed upon him which really touched his heart.

PHOEBE POOL

The Picasso Exhibition:

the most important four Rooms

HERE is God's plenty. Picasso and Mr Penrose have provided us with an original and outstanding exhibition; and with a rich experience, similar to first visiting Paris or

reading some of the poems of Auden in the 'thirties. These

analogies are chosen deliberately because the pictures seem so deeply related to contemporary experience. It was not for

nothing that most of young Picasso's friends, Apollinaire, Jarry, Salmon, Kahnweiler, Sabartes, Max Jacob seem to have felt as he did that there was something special about the new century and that they should bring to birth a

dynamic new kind of art worthy of its heroic possibilities. Sabartes, one of Picasso's closest friends, wrote later: 'We are living in a time when everything remains to be done'x and Apollinaire in Zone: 'A la fin tu es las de ce monde ancien . .. Tu en as assez de vivre dans l'antiquiti grecque et romaine.'

Earlier, two close friends of Picasso, poets, and children like him of the Catalan 'modernismo', that fin-de-sidcle movement in Barcelona whose effect on Picasso's art was so last-

ing, wrote of the 'gran excelsior' of the twentieth century and described the same feeling even more explicitly.'

The kind of spiritual exploration revealed in the first

rooms, which Lawrence Gowing brilliantly describes as

'defending the spirit of painting against its eye', makes Picasso's early work more important than that of the Nabis and the Fauves, and in some ways even that of Manet's

generation. Picasso would never have written as Manet did in 1867, to the effect that he had 'no pretentions either to

x See my previous article in THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE [May 1959], PP. 176-82, which treats the literary and intellectual background of Picasso's art in more detail.

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