B. B.

During the last 40 years few names have acquired such a golden resonance in the world of art as that of Bernard Berenson, greatest living connoisseur of Italian art. Dealers like the millionaire Duveens have hung like schoolboys on his opinion, and among critics of art Berenson's place is securely Olympian. But if most people think of him at all, they think of him as vaguely European and probably dead, whereas actually he has just produced something new.

Bernard Berenson is a frail, spirited, punctilious greybeard of 73 and a U. S. citizen. His life has been such a courtship of opportunity by intelligence as only the Melting Pot is supposed to produce, and in fact it produced him. His family were Jewish immigrants from Lithuania who settled in Boston soon after the Civil War. They were poor but they thirsted for culture, and young Berenson worked himself through Boston University with an eye to a literary career. The beautiful and dashing Mrs. Jack Gardner, then engaged in setting Boston on its ear, discovered his brilliance and helped him get a degree from Harvard ('87). Interested by her in art, he was aided by her to go to Europe.

At Oxford Bernard Berenson met Trivialist Logan Pearsall Smith and his sister, Mary Logan Smith Costelloe, whom he later married. In Italy he found the land and the loveliness he had been looking for. He supported himself in Florence by taking tourists through art galleries at one lira per head, in mortal terror of being knifed by one of the local guides. In 1894 Berenson published Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, the first of four compact little books each of which furnished a Baedeker guide to principal masterworks and graceful, serious essays in handily numbered paragraphs on the artists of each great Italian school. To U. S. boarding school girls abroad in well-chaperoned quest of charm, these became standard vade mecums. In 1900 prospering Mr. Berenson bought a villa near Florence and settled there for life.

Cloistered in his 40 acres of cypress, fir and formal garden, with the delicate profile of the Apennines behind and the valley of the Arno below, Bernard Berenson applied his gifts of lucidity and feeling to the unsolved problems of Italian art. One of his earliest and most famous feats was the creation of a hypothetical Florentine artist, Amico di Sandro (Friend of Botticelli) to account for various pictures then attributed to Pollaiuolo, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli and others. Rich dealers and collectors sought the advice of "B. B." on doubtful pictures. They paid him well for it--so well that Berenson became rich. In the 40 rooms of the Villa I Tatti he collected a profusion of fine Renaissance furniture and paintings.

As a critic, Berenson conquered an early affection for Walter Pater by standing for hours in front of Leonardo's Mona Lisa, repeating Pater's famous rhapsody until he perceived that it did not make sense. He resolved to be a morphological critic (student of forms), making his points from what was observable on the canvas and not in his imagination. This procedure led Berenson to his major theory: the importance of "tactile values" in art and the supremacy of the Florentines in achieving them. Naive tourists have consequently stood before masterpieces in the Florence Academy waiting for their palms to tingle, and some critics have unkindly laid on Berenson responsibility for later "abstract" jargon. Such persons are not invited to the courtly teas, the candlelit dinners and the beautiful conversation at the Villa I Tatti.

As a classical scholar Berenson is one of the elect who can converse in the language of Plato. As a host he holds sway in whatever European language the occasion demands. By many a guest Berenson is remembered as standing at the fireplace with his long, fine face agleam. forming memorably waspish sentences about his contemporaries. Promptly at eleven he retires; promptly at 7:30 he awakes. He will neither answer the telephone nor speak through it, and he never works on the typewriter. He is now engaged on a book to be called The Rediscovery of the Lost Arts of Design which art scholars regard as about the most monumental thing since Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Classic embodiment of Bernard Berenson's method is his Drawings of the Florentine Painters, published in two massive volumes in 1903. Art book of the spring is certainly an entirely new edition of this work just issued with Berenson 's latest thoughts and more than 1,000 instead of 190 reproductions.* Drawings are a simpler, more spontaneous and more intimate form of art than paintings, and these drawings are remarkable. Scarcely less remarkable is the clarity and caressing exactitude with which each unsigned sketch has been newly analyzed--often with new results--and assigned to its proper master. Even in such matters as Amico di Sandro, his once beloved creation, Berenson's urbanity is equal to his enlightenment:

"Many years later I returned to the subject . . . and it did not take me long to realize that Amico di Sandro was a myth, that he had been, but was no longer, a useful hypothesis and that he should therefore be disintegrated and the remains restored to the artists from whom they had been taken. ... I confess to a certain regret in suppressing this delightful, if mythical, personality. ... I should prefer [anyway] to consider . . . artists as discarnate torchbearers, with no civic existence whatever."

*University of Chicago Press -- 3 vols. ($25).

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