Il Bibi

In the vaulted hall of Florence's Palazzo Strozzi, one day last week, art scholars and critics from all over the world were waiting. Through a tiny oaken door stepped a frail, bearded little man, Bernhard Berenson, the world's greatest authority on Italian Renaissance art. Bobbing and nodding his white beard to the ovation, he hurried, with staccato steps, to the center of a long table. There, Italy's Minister of Education Guido Gonella presented him with two bronze medals, one four centuries old, the other struck especially in his honor. After the minister's speech, cheers broke out anew; and "Il Bibi," clutching his gifts in small, gloved hands, bowed and beamed his thanks.

Il Bibi is as much a part of Florence as the Pitti Palace--and, to the art world, as widely known. For almost 50 years "B.B." has been an authority respected above all others. Millionaire collectors have sought him out for merely an approving nod of some new purchase--and paid well for the nod. His theories on tactile values have become a part of the stock in trade of art experts and connoisseurs. His meticulous researches into Italian masters have influenced a whole generation's tourist guides and scholars' volumes.

Pater Rejected. Bernhard Berenson breathes the air of a world long past. Born in Lithuania, of "the Jewish aristocracy, the old gentry," he grew up in Boston, was working his way through Boston University when haughty, wealthy Mrs. Jack Gardner discovered his talents. She helped him through Harvard in return for his advice on her art collection. Then Bernhard went abroad.

He traveled to Oxford, married Logan Pearsall Smith's sister, devoured--and rejected--the theories of Walter Pater. In Florence, he earned a bare living escorting tourists through the galleries until, in 1894, he published his Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, the first of four handy, brilliant guidebooks which netted him enough to buy a lavish 17th Century villa high above the Arno valley.

He has lived at I Tatti ever since. When World War II broke out, friends urged him to leave. He refused: "Rather than give up these cypresses and olive trees and this light, I would lay down my life." Ambassador William Phillips then got a promise from Count Ciano that "Berenson would never be disturbed." Finally, however, the onrush of the Nazis forced him out. After the war, two young partisans, sent by the Committee of National Liberation, found him in hiding and escorted him back to his cypresses and olive trees, his several servants, and the remote, unruffled life he had known before.

Sassetta on the Wall. I Tatti is more a court than a residence. At 83, Il Bibi still begins his day at 6, reading or writing or receiving visitors even before he has left his canopied bed. A fine Sassetta Madonna hangs on the wall. Each morning a vase of fresh flowers is brought to Berenson; and each morning his butler must warm his wrist watch to body temperature, lest Il Bibi jump when he straps it on.

The rest of the day is spent as it began --reading, writing and receiving visitors. At 10 he dresses and goes into his magnificent 40,000-volume library ("It's open to all, even those many who speak ill of me"). Later, there are simple, fastidious luncheons, served on fine Italian embroidered mats; teas, and candlelit dinners. At all these, a rug thrown over his knees (for he is always cold), Il Bibi holds forth in several languages on art or literature or politics. His cutting opinions make their appointed rounds, at other teas and dinners, for days after.

Il Bibi seldom speaks of modern art: "I think nothing of it," says he sternly. "It's merely playing infant, kicking, screaming and smashing, or daubing and kneading with paint and clay. As long as man has two eyes and ears, one set of vital organs, he will tend to return to the classical . . ."

Like Philosopher George Santayana, who was at Harvard with him and who lives in a convent in Rome, Berenson likes his high remoteness from a world which he thinks is becoming more & more authoritarian. "I dread a world state run by biologists and economists ... by whom no life would be tolerated that didn't contribute to an economic purpose . . . Art can offer the surest escape from the tedium of threatening totalitarianism. It mustn't be reckless, freakish, fantastic, but must console and ennoble."

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