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Lord Duveen of Millbank, the most famous art dealer in
history, loved walking. Especially did he love walking
through art galleries and along the Fifty-seventh Streets of
the world. On his walks, he usually had with him a disciple
or an eager customer, whom he would harangue on his favorite
topic—indeed, his only topic: art. The wares he saw
displayed in the windows of competitors often stirred him to
fury. He would pound the sidewalk with his walking stick,
shouting "Rot! Fake! Nonsense!" so loudly that passersby,
whose immediate concerns were remote from Duveen's, would
halt and marvel that a few daubs in a window could arouse
such expletive passion. In his walks through public
galleries, Duveen was less choleric; to be sure, he did not
own the paintings displayed in them, but then neither did
his competitors. This peripatetic method of instruction was
wholly non-Socratic; Duveen did all the talking. He had
everything to tell his pupils; his pupils had nothing to
tell him. Two doughty American aficionados of medieval
armor, Clarence Mackay and William Randolph Hearst, received
ambulatory instruction from Duveen on the minutiae of
ancient jambs, vambraces, and cuirasses. Other pedestrian
companions were Jules Bache, Andrew Mellon, Ramsay
MacDonald, Mrs. Arabella Huntington, and Mrs. Horace E.
Dodge. Actually, Duveen would take a walk with anybody who
was willing to listen and who could afford to satisfy,
someday, the desire he kindled.
In all the years of Duveen's ascendancy, only one companion
on his walks ever reversed Duveen's role. With this
companion, the teacher was the pupil, the haranguer the
haranguee, the oracle the listener. On these very special
walks Duveen's instructor was Bernard Berenson, an American
expatriate who lived, as he lives today, in Italy. Berenson
was no mean walker himself. He was schoolmaster to a little
strolling group of his own, but between the memberships of
the two schools there was a disparity that could be measured
only in light-years. The two schools had only one member in
common—Duveen, master in his own, pupil in the other. Edith
Wharton took walks with Berenson and was inspired to write a
novelette in which the hero, like Berenson, became devoted
to Early Italian art. Another stroller with Berenson was
Marcel Proust; embedded in his great book are many
reflections on art that passed through the fine filter of
Berenson's scholarly mind. Still another fellow-pedestrian
was Sir Kenneth Clark, later the director of the National
Gallery in London and one of the most eminent living writers
and lecturers on art. Another was John Walker, the
distinguished Chief Curator of the National Gallery in
Washington, who still goes to Italy at the drop of a hat to
amble with Berenson. So does Dr. Alfred M. Frankfurter, the
scholarly editor of Art News. Duveen's earliest walks
with Berenson resulted in a notable feat of
transubstantiation. Without moving from I Tatti, his lovely
villa outside Florence, Berenson became the keystone of
Duveen's remarkable career. Duveen acquired Berenson's eye,
marketed his intuitions, grafted onto himself his
instructor's opinions, authority, scholarship, and
conscience.
Berenson, a Bostonian of Lithuanian-Jewish origin, graduated
from Harvard in 1887. A photograph of Berenson at
Harvard—reproduced in Morris Carter's book "Isabella Stewart
Gardner and Fenway Court," which deals with Mrs. Jack
Gardner, the celebrated Boston hostess and art
collector—shows an extraordinarily sensitive and romantic
profile and a superabundance of curly dark locks (they
are locks, not merely hair), reaching to his
braid-bordered coat collar. The photograph reveals intensity
and a hint of flamboyance, suggesting the Orient rather than
the Baltic littoral. Logan Pearsall Smith, who became
Berenson's brother-in-law, remarks in his volume of
reminiscences, "Unforgotten Years," that there were two
intellectuals at Harvard when he was there—George Santayana
and Berenson—and also conveys the idea that he himself did
not have enough intellectual equipment to approach them. At
Harvard, Berenson quickly impressed his elders, if not all
his contemporaries. In a journal that he kept during the
Second World War, while a generous Italian friend was hiding
him, near Florence, from the Germans, and that has been
published in Italy, he records that he found his elderly
professors far more accessible than the undergraduates.
Instinctively, he gravitated to the society of his
mentors—William James, Charles Eliot Norton, Barrett
Wendell, Crawford Howell Toy, and Charles Rockwell Lanman,
the last his professor of Sanskrit. He also became a fixture
at the salons of Mrs. Gardner, who felt in this fervent
undergraduate an incalculable intellectual promise. From the
notoriously volatile Norton, Professor of the History of
Art, he received an affection that had in it a certain
ambivalence, and from Mrs. Gardner an affection that had in
it no ambivalence whatever. It was Berenson who eventually
selected for her the chief masterpieces in the famous
collection at Fenway Court, her home in Boston. Later
generations of Harvard undergraduates had to pay a dollar to
visit Mrs. Gardner's palace on a selected day each year and
view the paintings she had collected on Berenson's advice;
the young Berenson, in his Harvard days, was allowed to come
to see her any time he liked, for nothing.
All her life, the Serpent of the Charles, as Berenson calls
her—or, as he referred to her on one occasion, "Boston's
first pre-cinema star"—indulged herself in a far-flung
genealogical fantasy. She was born Isabella Stewart and she
often made, according to Morris Carter, her official
biographer, the flat statement "that she was descended from
Robert Bruce and counted Mary Stuart among her ancestors."
But she wanted to historicize her Christian name also, and
therefore she came to identify herself with an earlier
patron of the arts, Isabella d'Este. The two genealogies
were scarcely reconcilable, but it is one of the advantages
of fantasy that it aligns the irreconcilable. Even Berenson
encouraged her in this indulgence in mistaken identity; in
one of his letters, he urged her to buy a picture because it
was a portrait of "the greatest and most fascinating lady of
the Renaissance—your worthy precursor and patron
saint—Isabella d'Este, Marchioness of Mantua." Mrs. Gardner
didn't like her ancestress's hand, and wrote Berenson to
that effect. Berenson wrote back that the hand wasn't
"offensive," and added that he wouldn't urge the purchase
solely as a work of art but that it had "potent attraction
as the portrait of Isabella," and Mrs. Gardner made the
purchase.
Upon Berenson's graduation from Harvard, a group of his
Boston friends, in an orgy of blind investment, got up a
purse of seven hundred and fifty dollars to send him to
Europe for a year. In that time, they felt, his immense but
vague promise would focus on some specific ambition that
would justify the outlay. His hopes amorphous but high,
Berenson sailed. Unhappily, in the course of the year so did
a number of his benefactors. They kept looking in on him to
see how their investment was going, to try to detect a
hardening of the molten promise into a solid core of
accomplishment. Berenson was a slow solidifier; at the end
of the year, his sponsors felt they had made a bad
investment. At this critical point, Professor Ferdinand
Bocher, the head of the Modern Languages Department at
Harvard, looked in on Berenson in Florence. He was not an
investor but he was a friend; he thought that a year was too
short a time in which to conduct an experiment so gravid
with possibilities. Mrs. Gardner was in Europe at this time,
and Bocher persuaded her to lend Berenson another seven
hundred and fifty dollars. Berenson ultimately repaid this
loan, and, by way of dividend, helped Mrs. Gardner assemble
her collection, which cost her three million dollars. Duveen
later offered her fifteen million for it, and the offer was
refused.
In Berenson's exceptionally impersonal and self-critical
"Sketch for a Self-Portrait," published in this country two
years ago, he mentions his failure to meet the demand for
"output" by the Boston syndicate. Still sensitive to the
stern voice of that unsatisfied demand, he writes:
I could retort to the voice, "All about me, ever since I
left Harvard, it was said that I was loafing, that I was
wasting my best years in mere amusement, that the little
I had published was no proof that I could or did work. I
dared not resist the chance offered of proving that I
could toil and plod and pedantize and bore with the best
of them."
The chance he refers to was the chance to prepare his first
major work, "The Drawings of the Florentine Painters," a
formidable project on which he labored for ten years. He
considers that allowing himself to be "seduced" into doing
it was the greatest error of his life, because the
publication of this classic turned him into "that equivocal
thing," an "expert" on art. The frustration of a writer
manqué is evident on almost every page of "Sketch for a
Self-Portrait." He was eighty when he wrote this book, and
thought he had "nearly emancipated myself from the future
and entirely from the past," but he was still disturbed by
one thing:
One habit I have not yet succeeded in getting rid of:
the inveterate one of feeling that when at home I must
sit at my desk for so long each day to write, not
letters whether of business or of friendship, but
printable stuff, even when there is no idea of
publishing connected with it. If I have failed to do it,
I feel morally hang-doggy and physically unclean.
It is possible that a more cheerful view of Berenson's
seduction could be taken. For nearly half a century, he has
been generally acknowledged the foremost authority on
Italian art of the Renaissance. Many of his pupils and
disciples have become the curators of the major art
galleries of the world. One of them, looking lovingly at a
copy of Berenson's "Italian Painters of the Renaissance,"
recently said to a visitor, "No curator could possibly do
without this." To Berenson's exquisite villa, I Tatti, with
its brilliant collection of pictures and its magnificent
library of books and photographs, come the great figures of
our time and those aspiring to be the great figures of the
future. Berenson, who deplores the fact that he can't say
no, sees most of them. In one of the smaller living rooms at
I Tatti, where luncheon guests are served cocktails and
canapés, there hangs an altarpiece, a gold-framed triptych
by Sassetta, depicting "Saint Francis in Ecstasy" and other
subjects. "You know, this house has a peculiar effect on
people," Berenson said ruefully to one visitor a few months
ago. "It makes them behave as though they were in church."
Nevertheless, the pre-luncheon conversation in this room is
usually gay and secular. Like George Bernard Shaw, Berenson
early came to be known by his initials. Even his wife called
him B. B. Italians affectionately refer to him as Il Bibi.
In the sixty-four years Berenson has lived in Italy—"I
cannot be considered a casual visitor," he once said—he has
produced a succession of books and monographs on Italian art
that are classic works in their field. His contributions to
art scholarship are many and diverse. Having observed, in
his research, that certain groups of paintings that had long
been attributed to well-known masters showed consistent
deviations, Berenson felt they must be the work of other,
unknown artists. He invented for these unknown artists names
that indicated their origins—names like Master of the
Castello Nativity, Master of San Miniato, Alunno di Benozzo,
Alunno di Domenico. "Master," as Berenson uses the word, has
a special meaning. Since the painter of certain works cannot
be identified, Berenson will choose one painting—the "Castello"
Nativity, for example—that seems to him to illustrate most
clearly the style of the painter and then attribute all the
paintings in this style to that artist. "Alunno di" is the
Italian way of saying "pupil of," and Berenson uses the
phrase to designate a painter who is himself unknown byname
but whose style strongly resembles that of a master who is
known.
Two of Berenson's specific creations, Alunno di Domenico and
Amico di Sandro, have interesting biographies. In the case
of the former, Berenson had a satisfaction that must have
come to very few people in the history of scholarship: The
lost birth certificate turned up. After he had invented
Alunno di Domenico, documentary evidence proved that one
artist, Bartolommeo di Giovanni, had indeed painted all the
pictures Berenson had attributed to him. Pygmalion, working
in the dark, suddenly found his Galatea flooded with light.
The history of his other creation, Amico di Sandro, is a
gruesome tale of disinterested infanticide. There was,
Berenson felt, one artist whose style combined the features
of Sandro Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, with a dash of
Ghirlandaio; he wasn't any of these, but he leaned most
heavily toward Botticelli. Berenson christened him Amico di
Sandro and attributed a group of pictures to him. In Amico
di Sandro he created an artist who was more consistent, more
nearly perfect, more distinctive, and more readily
recognizable than any actual artist. This human artifact of
Berenson's was in itself a work of art; it grew in beauty
as, over the years, he increased the man's production. Amico
got better and better. He never had a lapse; he seemed
immune to the declensions that afflict other artists. His
market value in America went up steadily. One of the
greatest American collectors paid altitudinous prices for
him, and blessed Berenson for having created him. But then
Berenson began to disapprove of Amico. His patient and
laborious studies finally persuaded him that Amico was too
good to be true. Nobody, Berenson felt, could be that
good—so consistent, so distinctive. In the strong solution
of Berenson's scholarship, Amico disintegrated. Berenson
divided him into three parts; he gave part of him back to
Botticelli, part to Filippino Lippi, and part to
Ghirlandaio. The effect on the American collector who had
paid so high for Amico was catastrophic. He turned on the
Pygmalion of I Tatti. In the interests of some such vaporish
abstraction as the integrity of scholarship, Berenson had
demolished the finest anonym the collector owned. The
circumstance that if it hadn't been for Berenson, he
couldn't have taken up with Amico in the first place did not
mitigate his anger. He had paid a price for Amico
commensurate with the eminence of Amico's creator. If
Berenson was willing to question the legitimacy of his
offspring, he wasn't; he suffered a paroxysm of
loyalty, and in his anguish he made the categorical
assertion "Berenson is crazy!" The late Amico's pictures
were as lovely as ever, but this did not console him;
Berenson said they were not by Amico. There have been many
instances of somebody's hitting the ceiling because a
picture turned out not to be by the artist who was thought
to have painted it, but this was the first instance of
somebody's hitting the ceiling because a picture turned out
not to be by an artist that it was not by in the first
place. The American collector stuck to Amico, Berenson or no
Berenson. And it is not inconceivable that he will someday
reap the rewards of his loyalty. Documentation came forth to
actualize Alunno di Domenico. Perhaps a similar miracle will
occur in the case of Amico di Sandro.
Something of Berenson's legendary quality may be gathered
from an anecdote in his journal. After his period of hiding
during the war, he had barely settled down again in the
somewhat damaged I Tatti when four young men came to see
him. One was a painter and two were ambitious to be art
critics. When Berenson questioned the fourth, the young man
admitted he had no interest in art. "Why, then, have you
come to see me?" B. B. asked. The young man replied, "Oh, I
just thought that you were a sight one ought to see." And,
indeed, Berenson is. It has been said that he is the epitome
of what the descendants of an immemorial aristocratic line
should look like but unfortunately seldom do. His appearance
may stem from the fact that his background, while certainly
not manorial, was in a sense aristocratic. He has referred
to himself as "a child of the aristocratic and cultural
ghetto;" his ancestors were rabbis. He is small and dresses
with great elegance, and he speaks in a voice that is at
once soft and penetrating. He speaks English like a cultured
foreigner, pronouncing each syllable punctiliously: "When I
was a jun-i-or at Harvard," "pas-sion-ate de-vo-tion." A
highborn Italian friend says that Berenson speaks Italian
the same way; his Italian, this friend maintains, is
straight out of Dante. Once when he lost his temper and
mellifluously berated a Venetian gondolier who had taken him
down the wrong canal, so that he missed a view he had wanted
to see, the lucky boatman thought he was being complimented.
There is no longer in his appearance any hint of
flamboyance; his skin is dead white, almost transparent; his
blue eyes are clear and lively. He has been described by
another of his friends as "a wizard in ivory." One doesn't
quite get from his imposing appearance an impression of
serenity; Berenson is too minutely aware of what is going on
in the world, and too combatively interested in it, for
that. When his face is in repose, there is, at the most, the
suggestion of a fleeting truce between the warring of what
he has called his "many selves."
Not long ago, Berenson journeyed from I Tatti to Venice to
attend the great Bellini Exhibition, in the Doges' Palace.
His name was mentioned on nearly every page of the
catalogue; the text describing the hundred and forty-one
pictures was studded with references to his works, and the
bibliographical index listed eleven books by him. One
morning, Berenson, strolling from his hotel to the palace,
in the company of an American correspondent he had invited
to go along, remarked of Venice, "The richest and most
exquisite artifact in the history of civilization, because
she has been spared by that great and beneficent goddess,
Poverty. For a century, the Venetians have been too poor to
build anything new." As Berenson and the correspondent
walked through the busy, narrow streets, over the gentle
humps of the bridges crossing the little canals, past the
black-and-ash-gray façades of ancient churches that looked
like the intricately decorated frontispieces of medieval
storybooks, the crowds swirled past the small, slowly moving
figure in brown fedora, brown suit, gleaming brown boots.
Berenson kept raising his hat to acquaintances. He spoke of
the dozens of American books and magazine articles he had
been reading. The correspondent suddenly found himself in
the middle of a discussion of Phillips Brooks, the Boston
divine. The corners of Berenson's eyes crinkled. What he was
about to say seemed so funny to him that he stopped dead to
emphasize it. "Do you know," he said, "that when I went to
call upon the Spanish philosopher Unamuno, in Salamanca, and
happened to ask him whom he preferred to read, who his
favorite American author was, he replied, 'Phillips Brooks.
I love the sermons of Phillips Brooks'?" When B. B. had
recovered from his enjoyment of this surprising preference,
he started walking again, and the two men emerged presently
into the great, colonnaded splendor of the Piazza San Marco.
They paused for a moment, as anyone must, even a person to
whom the scene is as familiar as it is to Berenson. The
corners of his eyes crinkled again. "Do you know," he said,
"that one evening, as a petit-bourgeois French couple,
trippers, were coming out of that little street beside San
Marco" he pointed his walking stick—"the man was overheard
to say to his wife, his voice twanging with irritation'
'1 told you there was a square here'?"
Outside the doors of the exhibition, a small group greeted
Berenson—officials of the show, and various dignitaries.
There was much hat lifting and embracing and a flood of
Italian. A man whom Berenson evidently had not seen for a
long time came up and they embraced affectionately. The two
conversed in German, and after a few minutes, the man began
to cry and hastily moved away. Berenson, followed by
everyone else, walked in to the exhibit. The muscles in his
face looked taut. "That was the director of the museum in
Dresden before the war," he told the correspondent. "He
returned to resume his former post, but the Russians came
and carted everything off—all the most beautiful things.
They had no right to them, but they took them. What made my
friend cry was not alone that they took the things off but
that they were so badly packed! I execrate those
people!" A lady came up to him, smiling and breathless.
Berenson greeted her ecstatically and introduced her to the
correspondent. "Miss Freya Stark," Berenson said. "Do you
know her books? No? Then you have missed an enchantment
beyond belief. Of course, you wouldn't know it in her
present conventional dress, but she is a Bedouin. She was
intended by Providence to be a Bedouin." Miss Stark laughed,
and the little procession moved on to the pictures.
Now Berenson went to work with his tools—a flashlight, a
magnifying glass, and, slung over one shoulder, a pair of
opera glasses. Turning on the flashlight, he peered through
the magnifying glass at the dark, aged backgrounds of the
pictures—at a fillet of myrtle around the head of a saint in
one, at the soft contours of the hills behind Vicenza in
another. The torch lit the fading hills. "Exactly what it is
today, isn't it, Freya?" he said, and he and Miss Stark
gazed with delight at an example of the unchanging in a
changing world. "Do you remember the Latin poet who
describes this scene?" Berenson asked her. "You used to know
him." Miss Stark began to recite the pertinent verse, but
after the first two lines he took over and recited the rest.
On the great triptychs and some of the other altarpieces,
Berenson trained his opera glasses. Before No. 80—"Il Cristo
Morto Sorretto da Angeli"—he stopped. The catalogue
contained a reference to what Berenson had said about the
painting in 1894, but he was as moved as if he were seeing
it for the first time. The picture shows Christ seated, the
head fallen against the right shoulder, the eyes closed.
Four lovely cherubs are supporting him. One of the cherubs
stands partly behind the Christ, so that only his small legs
and tiny torso are visible. "The audacity of Bellini!" said
Berenson. "What a dazzling innovator he was to allow that
child's head to remain invisible! And look—look at these
adorable children! Look at their faces! They know that
Christ has suffered; they are aware of it without
understanding it. They know that they ought to be
sympathetic, and they are doing their best. What they are
really longing for is to be off by themselves. And you know
that in a few minutes, when they are away from the tragic
figure, they will be laughing and playing happily. They
really can't wait." B. B. stopped speaking. He stood in
silence, drinking in the picture, and so did his group, for
whom it had become a symbol of the chasm between the
innocence of childhood and the agony of living. "And to
think that this glorious picture is kept hidden away in
Rimini, where, of course, no one ever sees it," he said as
he moved off. He found quick comfort in one panel of a
nearby altarpiece—a Church father in a heavily brocaded
robe, one hand holding a staff, the other resting on his
knee. "See the weight of that hand!" Berenson
exclaimed. "And the weight of that brocade!
You must feel a muscular reaction. If you don't feel it
physically, it's mere illustration." The correspondent did
indeed feel the two weights. There percolated into his mind
a dim notion of what Berenson's famous "tactile values" are.
B. B. moved on, then stopped, his flashlight and glass
focussed on a small, dark picture. "This Bellini is not
a Bellini," he said at once, without even turning around
to see whether he was overheard. "But it's very well worth
looking at." The correspondent looked at it, but with the
feeling that he was wasting his time. An American in the
group was writing a biography of Bellini. "Please, B. B.,"
he said now, "will you come and look at this predella. I am
not at all sure . . ." B. B. darted across the room,
examined it, and was sure. The group drifted on through the
exhibition rooms. Berenson linked arms with the
correspondent and said, "Now I should like you to see a most
wonderful thing, a work of sublime genius, a picture of the
greatest spirit ever produced. Its significance is—if you
will forgive me—cosmic. If people looked at it with sympathy
and understanding—if everyone did they would find salvation
in it. It would be the salvation of all of us." They halted
before No. 44, "Il Salvatore Benedicente," lent by the
Louvre—a Christ, three-quarter length. The right hand is
raised, the lips are parted, the left hand clasps a Bible.
The habiliment is brown, rent to show the breast. The eyes
are pale blue. At this picture Berenson stared a long time,
saying nothing at all.
At lunch that day in the dining room of his hotel, Berenson,
surrounded by eight or ten friends, was in high spirits,
despite the strenuous morning he had put in at the Doges'
Palace. He said that after living for many years in
cherished obscurity he had begun to receive fan letters from
America. An excerpt from his "Sketch for a Self-Portrait"
had appeared, with photographs, in an American magazine, and
this had started the flow. He was forced to conclude that
this magazine was read almost exclusively in hairdressing
parlors, he said, for many of the letters began, "While
having my hair done today, I happened to read your
fascinating . . ." Berenson had evolved a picture of rows of
ladies under aluminum helmets absorbing simultaneously his
transient, rueful octogenarian reflections and their
permanents. One of the lunch guests, the curator John
Walker, whom Berenson refers to as his "pet biped," was
gravely quoted by another guest, an earnest young man, as
having said that no person should be engaged for even a
minor post in a museum unless he was thoroughly familiar
with Berenson's "Italian Painters of the Renaissance." B.
B.'s eyes lit with humorous malice. He turned to his pet
biped. "Do you swear them in?" be asked. "You should swear
them in, the way they do Presidents and Supreme Court
Justices in the United States." He jumped to his feet, put
one hand on an imaginary "Italian Painters of the
Renaissance," and raised the other. "I solemnly swear not to
offer an opinion on any Italian picture between 1201 and
1699 without having duly mastered . . ." He kept improvising
until the whole thing was dissolved in self-mockery.
Of all the important American collectors, Berenson admired
Henry Clay Frick the most, it appeared. For one thing, he
had a beautiful head. And although Berenson never found much
to admire in the furnishings and pictures in Frick's
Pittsburgh mansion, he was warm in his praise for the French
art in the Frick Collection in New York. He told a story
about Frick. The American collectors of Frick's era, he
said, often felt guilty about paying such vast sums for
their pictures, and Frick was no exception. Frick had bought
Velásquez's "Philip IV of Spain" for around four hundred
thousand dollars. Learning that Philip IV had paid Velásquez
the equivalent of six hundred dollars for it, Frick made an
elaborate computation to find out what six hundred dollars
at six-per-cent interest compounded semi-annually from 1645
to 1910 would come to, and found, to his joy, that he had
got the picture for less than nothing.
Then Berenson recalled a similar story about H. E.
Huntington. A friend of Huntington's had once said he was
shocked that a sensible man would pay six hundred and twenty
thousand dollars for one picture. He was referring to
Gainsborough's "The Blue Boy," which Huntington had bought
from Duveen. Huntington, who knew there was no use trying to
explain the delights of collecting to a nonbeliever, tried
to justify his purchase on economic grounds; he figured out
a way of reducing the price he had paid after he had paid
it. "Listen," he said. "I've bought 'em for five hundred,
for five thousand, for a hundred and fifty thousand. The one
I paid six-twenty for is the greatest in the world. When you
average 'em all up, the price of each isn't bad."
These stories led Berenson to enlarge on the vagaries of
collectors and patrons of art. On the whole, he thought the
twentieth-century ones an improvement over the historic
ones. He said some harsh words about Isabella d'Este, and
spoke as resentfully of her shameful treatment of Mantegna
as if the indignity the painter suffered had occurred only a
few days before. He circled around to that later Isabella,
Mrs. Jack Gardner, whose vivacity and charm were, he said,
unforgettable. "But you know that after her husband died—he
was the dearest fellow in the world—Mrs. Jack made a great
discovery," Berenson said. "She discovered that things cost
money. Mrs. Leland Stanford made the same discovery after
her husband died, and then she lived like a starveling.
Mrs. Jack, when she came to Europe in later years and
returned to the hotels where she had lavishly stayed as the
Dollar Princess, asked for the cheapest rooms. On one visit
to America, thirty years ago, my wife and I were her guests,
and at dinner the first night there was scarcely enough to
eat. We thought, Well, we are going to the theatre, and when
we get back, there will be supper. There was no supper.
After we'd gone upstairs to our rooms, Mary and I felt
hunger pangs. We couldn't get to sleep, and we stole
downstairs to the kitchen to forage in the icebox. In that
immense repository we found two dog biscuits!" Berenson
touched on the racial influxes that had transformed the
character of New England entirely since his day, made some
inquiries about the recent acquisitions of the Nelson
Gallery of Art, in Kansas City, and then went up to his room
to take a nap.
Berenson first saw Duveen in London, in 1906. Lady Sassoon,
the wife of Sir Edward Albert Sassoon and mother of Sir
Philip Sassoon, and a devoted friend of Berenson—he refers
to her as "the noblest of the Rothschild women"—urged him to
go to the Duveen London gallery. Duveen, then thirty-seven,
had just bought the Hainauer Collection, and Lady Sassoon
wanted Berenson to look at some of the pieces. On her
promise that she would not introduce him, he consented. One
of the pictures Berenson looked at was first-rate, and he
decided to try to buy it for Mrs. Gardner. "I'll pay you a
hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it," he said, without
preliminaries, to Duveen. Duveen turned to Lady Sassoon.
"This fellow knows too much," he said, smiling. Berenson and
Lady Sassoon left the gallery without Berenson's having been
introduced and without Duveen's having either accepted or
rejected the offer. Mrs. Gardner never got the picture. It
went to a favorite client of Duveen's for about three
hundred thousand dollars. Berenson had unwittingly put a
ceiling price on the picture, and Duveen used it as a floor.
Though Berenson had not been introduced, Duveen had guessed
who the visitor was, and their encounter was to have an
enormous effect on Berenson's future. Duveen, more definite
about his aims than Berenson—after all, truth and beauty are
imponderables, offering their pursuer a good deal of
latitude—and, in the worldly sense, much shrewder, seems to
have had a suspicion of what Berenson's visit could mean to
him; Berenson obviously had none. When Berenson left Duveen
without having met him, he didn't expect he'd ever have to
see him again. He was wrong. Not long afterward, Duveen
sought out Berenson. This time they met. Duveen asked
Berenson to become his paid adviser on Italian pictures.
Berenson would authenticate pictures for him and would tell
him what pictures he considered worth buying. Duveen would
give him an annual retaining fee and a commission on sales.
Berenson accepted, on condition that he should have nothing
whatever to do with the selling. Duveen was perfectly
satisfied; after all, when it came to selling pictures, he
didn't need anybody's help. This arrangement was to continue
for thirty years, and was to bring Berenson an affluence
unprecedented in the world of scholarship.
Duveen had the practical man's contempt for the scholar.
"Berenson may know what's authentic, but only I know what
will sell," Duveen would say, laughing. Or he would say, "If
I were to follow Berenson, I would have a basementful of
wonderful masterpieces that no one would buy." From Duveen's
point of view, Berenson had a limitation: He didn't care in
the least what would sell; he was interested solely in what
was beautiful. And between Berenson's aesthetic standards
and the standards of Duveen's American customers there was a
considerable gap. Duveen's principal clients were aging men,
and they liked bright colors, they liked opulence, they
liked youth and beauty; they wanted to be cheered up.
Viewing Duveen's wares in his Fifth Avenue gallery, they
constituted a kind of collector's baldhead row. Frick would
buy any picture of the first rank that was authoritatively
certified, but Mellon had to like a picture. Mellon wanted a
picture to be not only first-rank but attractive, and this
made him a special problem for Duveen, because some of
Berenson's recommendations were just first-rank. That is one
reason Duveen put a high value on his selection from
Berenson's selection.
For a long time, there hung in Duveen's London office a
superb Masaccio that he had bought only because B. B. was
enthusiastic about it. Duveen felt that his clients wouldn't
like it very much. The picture was sombre. Duveen had some
of his major customers in for a look at it and exercised his
panegyrics on it. They didn't work. A picture that wouldn't
respond to Duveen's enthusiasm became in Duveen's eyes a
picture that was too gross for civilized society. As it
stayed on and on in his office, he gradually conceived for
it an aversion that amounted to hatred. One day, feeling
that he couldn't stand the unwanted guest a minute longer,
he summoned his chief assistant, Bertram Boggis. "Get me an
axe 1" he said. "I want to chop up this picture." "Don't
chop it up, Joe," Boggis said. "B. B. likes it." Duveen
forced himself to look at something more salable, to keep
from destroying the masterpiece. Eventually, the adviser to
an important collector, who had come upon a description of
the picture in one of B. B.'s books, got his client to buy
it.
That was as near as Berenson ever came to actually selling a
picture. He once gave one away, however, under somewhat
spectacular circumstances. A big New York copra man who was
a collector of consequence was about to make a business trip
to the South Seas when he was told that Berenson was coming
to the United States to catalogue a collection of Italian
paintings and would be in New York for a month or so. "Why
doesn't he stay in my apartment?" he inquired of his
informant. "It's all staffed, and I'll be going away just as
he gets here." Berenson spent the month there, and felt so
grateful to his host, whom he had never met, that he wrote
to his wife asking her to send the copra man one of his
pictures as a present—something "really nice." The catalogue
finished, Berenson sailed for home. On his first evening
back, he had a reunion with his pictures. "Where is the
little Domenico Veneziano?" he asked his wife. "Oh," said
Mrs. Berenson, "you told me to send a nice picture to your
friend in New York, and I sent him that." When Berenson had
recovered from the impact of his wife's obedience, he said,
"I asked you to send him something nice. I didn't ask you to
send him my very favorite." Copra took a slump, and
Berenson's New York host sold his pictures. The Domenico
Veneziano was bought by Samuel B. Kress for four hundred and
fifty thousand dollars. Berenson's claim that he paid the
highest month's rent in the annals of New York real estate
may well be justified. His rent payment now hangs in the
National Gallery in Washington.
According to Berenson, Duveen himself was an artist of a
sort; he got an artist's pleasure out of the tremendous
sales he negotiated, and out of his role as purveyor to the
most powerful men in the world. He got pleasure, too, out of
clowning. His attitude toward people like Berenson and his
following might, Berenson says, be epitomized as something
like this: "Now, look here, I am not one of you, nor am I
even ambitious to be one of you. I am aware that I don't
rate your society, but we have to be together for other
reasons, and since I have the gift of clowning, the least I
can do is amuse you. That is my passport; that is my price
of admission." Mrs. Berenson liked Duveen immensely; she
found his vitality and exuberance irresistible. So did
Berenson when Duveen was on the premises. There was
something about Duveen—"a Chaplinesque quality," Berenson
calls it—that captivated him. But as soon as Duveen was
gone, Berenson couldn't bear the thought of him. Berenson,
who has always divided people into the "life-enhancing" and
the "life-diminishing," was reluctantly forced to put Duveen
in the first group. Once, after Duveen had made a flying
visit to I Tatti, Mrs. Berenson said, "Oh, Joe is wonderful.
He's like champagne!" "More like gin," grumbled B. B.
There are a number of Duveen anecdotes in the Berenson
memory. While travelling through Central Europe in search of
pictures after the First World War, Duveen stopped at a
frontier town and, since no one was allowed to carry more
than a limited amount of money across the border, stuffed a
wad of bills into his hat. As his visa was being stamped, he
saw a friend standing nearby, and raised the hat. All the
money fell out. It was confiscated, and Duveen had to borrow
from the friend to whom he had been so polite. Another time,
when Duveen was in conference in his London office with an
assistant named A. E. Bowles, someone brought in an English
magazine that contained an article telling how Duveen ran
his business. The writer revealed a surprising intimacy with
the mechanics of the enterprise. Duveen turned on Bowles in
fury. "How did this fellow come to know all this?" he
screamed. "He must have listened to you talk, Lord Duveen,"
said Bowles deferentially. When Duveen's daughter was a very
little girl, the family went to Dieppe for a holiday. Duveen
took the child to the beach. She dipped her foot in the sea
and found the water too cold, so she wouldn't go in. Duveen
collected some sticks and borrowed a teakettle, built a fire
on the beach, heated some water till it steamed, and poured
it into the sea. His daughter then went in without a
whimper.
In the ferociously competitive jungle of the art dealers'
world, Duveen was an insatiable tiger who saw no reason he
shouldn't devour everything in sight. "The difference you
have created in the price of first-rate pictures and
third-rate pictures is so vast," Berenson once said to him,
"that you'll drive people into buying the third-rate rather
than pay the fabulous sums your monopoly enables you to
exact." But Duveen's prices went on spiralling. He believed
in keeping the market up, and he kept it up; it collapsed
only after he died. Yet, says Berenson, Duveen's
"life-enhancing" artist's quality made him "a lamb and an
angel" compared to some of his competitors. "He would make
you pay outrageously," says B. B., "he would exact the last
possible penny in a deal, and then would spend thousands of
dollars on you with the most openhanded generosity."
The welding of the personalities of Berenson and Duveen, a
welding for which the cold facts of existence were wholly
responsible, was an odd one. Duveen, bold and headlong and
driving, was the figurehead of a ship that carried as its
sole passenger, in its solitary cabin, one of the most
civilized and sensitive men in the world. Duveen, who
couldn't stand owning only a part of anything, regarded
Berenson as his property—the last thing on earth Berenson
wanted to be. When, from time to time, Berenson
authenticated a picture for a rival dealer, Duveen felt
betrayed. Duveen had said to Mellon, and to Kress, and to
Frick, and to Bache, and to Benjamin Altman, and to Joseph
E. Widener, and to H. E. Huntington, "Never buy an Italian
picture without a Berenson approval! Never!" He implied that
such a policy would protect the purchaser of an Italian
picture from everyone in the world—including himself. This
was simply good business on Duveen's part. He had almost a
monopoly on the supply of Old Masters, and he thought he had
a monopoly on Berenson. Berenson had come to be Duveen's
hallmark. As Duveen became more successful, he also became
more totalitarian. He was convinced that a masterpiece must
be sold only through him, that any rival was a poacher on
his special preserve. Berenson argued with Duveen that if
other professionals bought and sold great pictures, they
would in the end help Duveen, for they would expand the
market. It was no use. Duveen persisted in regarding
Berenson's authentication of other dealers' holdings as a
breach of contract, though no contract had ever existed
between them.
Still another matter troubled Duveen. He found Berenson as
circumspect about expressing an opinion as his American
clients were about spending their money. Duveen relied on
flair, Berenson on science and what he called his "sense of
antecedent probability." In Europe, Duveen and Berenson went
to museums and exhibitions and private showings together. On
a visit to a museum in Munich, Berenson saw much to
deliberate over, but it was hard for Duveen to take an
interest in pictures he knew he could never buy. He kept
crying out, when B. B. paused at length before a painting,
"Next! Next!" Berenson, wielding his flashlight, focussing
his opera glasses, refused to be hurried; Duveen's
exhortations only slowed down his tempo. And B. B.'s
attitude toward pictures that Duveen could acquire
was even more annoying. Duveen would try to bully him into
enthusiasm; Berenson wouldn't be bullied. "This is
marvellous, B. B.! Marvellous!" Duveen would exclaim when he
saw something that looked especially salable. Already
phrases he could use while displaying it in the private
showroom of his Fifth Avenue gallery were taking shape in
his mind; he saw his little circle of American customers
listening, enthralled. "It's not marvellous, Joe," B. B.
would say quietly, killing at a stroke a lucrative fantasy.
When B. B. did admit that he thought a painting was
marvellous, the painting was apt to be a very dark one, and
Duveen worried about his American clients' love of bright
colors. "Why is this picture marvellous, B. B.?" he
would ask brusquely. "I don't think it's marvellous at all."
It was Duveen's method of saying that he wasn't going to buy
the painting, and it was also his method of getting an
education. He was usually eager to draw Berenson out, so
that possibly he himself might one day be able to discover
the marvellous in a picture—provided it was painted in
bright colors. And he had another motive; he wanted to be
able to judge pictures that were outside Berenson's
province. B. B. has always said, "I will not baptize outside
my parish," which is Italian painting from the thirteenth to
the seventeenth century. But Duveen's parish was the
universe, and by expressing his opinions to Berenson he
goaded his counsellor into expressing his. Duveen
used the tips he got this way when buying pictures of other
schools or other centuries, when he had no B. B. to guide
him.
On one occasion, the two men collided head on over a
painting within Berenson's parish. Berenson had come to this
country to catalogue the Italian paintings in P. A. B.
Widener's collection. A supper party was given in B. B.'s
honor by a New York banker and his wife, who were well-known
collectors. His hosts were bubbling with enthusiasm for a
Botticelli they had just acquired, and they made haste to
lead Berenson to it. He inspected it. "This is no
Botticelli," he said. "Where did you get it?" "We got it
from Duveen," said his host. "And he's coming to supper,
too." Duveen arrived, and was brought before the picture and
confronted with Berenson's disturbing denial. "Who told you
this was a Botticelli?" asked Berenson gently. Duveen foamed
authorities. "Nevertheless, it is not a Botticelli," B. B.
said. Duveen at once offered to take the picture back and
refund the money. The supper party was not a notable
success.
Later, in the nineteen-thirties, Berenson disappointed
Duveen in much more serious circumstances. He refused to
certify that a picture Duveen was about to sell Mellon as a
Giorgione was a Giorgione. Berenson insisted that it was a
Titian. There was a violent quarrel between the two men, and
this ended their friendship and their business association.
Among art dealers, the difference between Giorgione and
Titian is immense; that is, the difference between what you
can sell a Titian for and what you can sell a Giorgione for
is immense. Titian lived to be ninety-nine and was a hard
worker, so his output was colossal. Giorgione, who was
Titian's master and friend, died young, so there are very
few Giorgiones. When a familiar itch in his fingers told
Duveen that he was about to put them on a highly regarded
painting reputed to be by Giorgione—"The Adoration of the
Shepherds," owned by Viscount Allendale—he was wild with
excitement. He went to Mellon, who had plenty of Titian but
was hungry for Giorgiones, and whipped up his enthusiasm.
Then he sailed for England, pried the almost unexceptionable
Giorgione away from the Viscount for half a million dollars,
and came right back with it. Duveen was aware that B. B.'s
still but not small voice had once said that the Allendale
painting was a Titian. He felt confident, however, that
Berenson by now saw this picture as he, Duveen, saw it.
Berenson had been known to change his mind; once, testifying
in one of the many lawsuits in which Duveen was the
defendant, he had reversed an opinion. When the plaintiff's
counsel pounced on this reversal, Berenson said
imperturbably, "I never stick to a mistake." Duveen, in his
incorrigible optimism, was certain Berenson would say that
the Allendale was at least partly—that was all Duveen
needed—by Giorgione. Berenson was in Cyprus when he received
a long cable from Duveen asking him to admit that the
picture he was about to sell to Mellon was indeed a
Giorgione. B. B. cabled an indignant refusal. When he
returned to Florence, one of Duveen's European
representatives, accompanied by the picture itself, called
upon him and repeated Duveen's request. Berenson studied it
carefully for several days and came to the same conclusion
as before; namely, that it was an early Titian.
There is a story that news of the perpetual dispute over
whether certain pictures were painted by Giorgione or Titian
reached Heaven itself and disturbed the friendly relations
between the two artists. Titian and Giorgione, who on earth
had been so cordial, began to argue fiercely over the
authorship of one masterpiece. Titian said that the picture
couldn't possibly have been painted by the older ghost, that
he had been dead for forty years when he, Titian, finished
it. Giorgione pointed to brush strokes that, he flattered
himself, only he could have executed. There seemed only one
reasonable way of resolving the argument. "We'll ask
Berenson," they said, with one voice. The decision is still
in abeyance, pending the arrival of B. B. But Duveen
couldn't wait that long for a decision on the Allendale.
Already he was gently ushering Mellon through the silken
portieres of his salesmanship. Duveen beautifully ensconced
the Giorgione/Titian all by itself, perched on an easel and
reverently lighted, in a small, velvet-hung room in the
Duveen palace on Fifth Avenue. When Duveen showed a major
client one picture at a time, as he liked to do, he
displayed the single picture with the same solicitude David
Belasco employed in displaying his stars. Sometimes, Duveen
would begin by telling the client that he had just got
something wonderful for him. He would press a button to
signal Boggis that it was time to bring in the something
wonderful and put it on an easel. Other times, he would lead
his client into the velvet-hung room, where the thoughtfully
lighted masterwork awaited him. Mellon had been
completely—or almost completely—sold on the picture in
advance, and when he finally sat before it, under the spell
of a second Duveen paean, he was enraptured. Duveen wanted
three-quarters of a million dollars for it, and Mellon knew
that when you were buying a Giorgione you couldn't decently
quibble about price. At this ticklish point, Duveen's own
special pedagogical method recoiled on him. Mellon, to
demonstrate how well he retained what Duveen had taught him,
alluded to Lesson No. 1. "What does B. B. say?" he asked.
"Never mind about that," Duveen replied sharply. "I
say it's a Giorgione. Everybody says it's a
Giorgione. And there isn't a doubt in the world that B. B.
will say it's a Giorgione!" Reassured, Mellon took the
picture home. But B. B. didn't say it was a Giorgione. In
fact, not long afterward, he wrote a letter to Royal
Cortissoz, the art critic of the New York Herald Tribune,
in which he said:
You are acquainted, of course, with the Allendale
picture, one of the most fascinating Giorgionesque
pictures ever painted. The problem of how to attribute
it has preoccupied me for many years. 1 naturally left
no name untried. Finally, some ten or twelve years ago,
the light dawned upon me, and I began to see that it
must be Titian's, perhaps his earliest work, but only
half out of the egg, the other half still in the
Giorgione formula—the landscape, namely. Recently I have
seen the picture again and was in raptures over its
enchantment and beauty. Yet the longer I looked the more
and more I saw in it the emerging art of Titian. It is
my deepest conviction that this attribution will
ultimately win through.
When Berenson's certificate failed to materialize, Mellon
returned the picture to Duveen. "I don't want another
Titian," he said sourly. "Find me a Giorgione." The deal was
off, and so, in no time at all, was the business arrangement
of so many years' standing between Duveen and Berenson.
Having the picture accepted as a Giorgione became a matter
of prestige for Duveen; he felt he simply had to sell the
Allendale, and as a Giorgione. He could have pointed out in
self-defense that B. B.'s opinions on Giorgiones were not
upheld by all authorities. Mrs. Gardner, for example, had
bought on his recommendation a "Christ Bearing the Cross"
that he said was a Giorgione, but Sir Philip Hendy, the art
scholar (now director of the National Gallery in London),
stated forthrightly in a catalogue he prepared for the
Gardner Collection that it was really a Palma Vecchio. The
portrait of Ariosto now in the Altman Collection, at the
Metropolitan, had been certified by B. B. as a Giorgione,
but the Metropolitan held it to be either a Giorgione or a
Titian. Captain R. Langton Douglas, an eminent British
authority, got into the argument over "The Adoration of the
Shepherds" by declaring that Berenson had once attributed
the Allendale to Catena—so how could he now so firmly state
that it was a Titian? All these facts Duveen knew, but,
passionately as he wanted Giorgione to have painted that
particular picture, he did not wish to pass his information
along to Mellon. By doing so, he would cast doubt on the
authenticity of the Italian paintings that B. B. had
certified and that he had sold on the strength of B. B.'s
reputation for infallibility. Moreover, Duveen was not
really daunted. The infallible Berenson might fail him, but
not his own salesmanship. He was confident that he would
sell the picture, and that it would end up in the projected
National Gallery in Washington. When the right moment came,
he chose Kress as the conduit. The picture now hangs there,
and the label below it says that it is by Giorgione. The
controversy is no longer important. The picture is a great
one, whoever painted it. To those who see it in the National
Gallery, the battle over its authorship means as little as
the Shakespeare vs. Bacon argument means to an audience at
"Hamlet."
Neither Duveen nor Berenson was ever quite the same after
the breakup. Duveen never recovered from the separation;
Berenson never recovered from the association. How deep a
mark it made on Berenson is revealed in his "Sketch for a
Self-Portrait," in which Duveen is never mentioned.
Berenson, with his exquisite sensibility, his infinite
intellectual curiosity and delicately distilled culture,
whose life, it has been said is itself a work of art,
confesses to having misspent it. Above all, it is having
become an art expert that he berates himself for. "In
any other field, an expert means a man who knows something
about his subject," he once said to a friend. "In any field
except the field of art." In his writings, he has referred
to his intense sense of guilt, which is due, he says, "to a
double dose of Hebraism, an original Jewish one and, piled
tower-high above it, a New England Puritan one." He
considers the careers he might have had and regrets that
"accident rather than an invincible tropism" made him become
an art expert. This accident led to the accident of his
association with Duveen, and the atmosphere generated by
that association has been abrasive to his spirit. For his
singular authority, and for its emoluments, Berenson paid
what he regards as a high price:
I soon discovered that I ranked with fortune-tellers,
chiromancists, astrologers, and not even with the
self-deluded of these, but rather with the deliberate
charlatans. At first I was supposed to have invented a
trick by which one could infallibly tell the authorship
of an Italian picture. A famous writer on the
Renaissance, Vernon Lee, thought it was close and even
mean of me not to let her share the secret. Finally it
degenerated into a widespread belief that if only I
could be approached the right way I could order this or
that American millionaire to pay thousands upon
thousands and hundreds of thousands for any daub that I
was bribed by the seller to attribute to a great master.
. . . Needless to say that every person I would not
receive, every owner whose picture I would not ascribe
to Raphael or Michelangelo, or Giorgione, Titian or
Tintoretto, etc. etc., turned into an enemy.
Again:
I took the wrong turn when I swerved from more purely
intellectual pursuits to one like the archaeological
study of art, gaining thereby a troublesome reputation
as an "expert." My only excuse is, if the comparison is
not blasphemous, that like Saint Paul with his
tent-making and Spinoza with his glass-polishing, I too
needed a means of livelihood. . . . Those men of genius
were not hampered in their careers by their trades. Mine
took up what creative talent there was in me, with the
result that this trade made my reputation and the rest
of me scarcely counted. The spiritual loss was great and
in consequence 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" and as having made "a success of my
life."
In his will, the recently widowed Berenson, who is
childless, has left everything—his beautiful estate, his
library of books and photographs, his collection of
pictures, and his money—to his alma mater, Harvard. It is a
tremendous legacy, and for the last ten years the trustees
of the university have been working on plans for its use.
Not only Harvard men but promising students from other
colleges will he encouraged to carry on their studies on one
of the loveliest estates in Italy. The books, photographs,
and pictures it has taken Berenson more than half a century
to collect will be at their disposal. I Tatti may become
Harvard's most important cultural outpost. Of his estate,
Berenson has written:
When the house was at long last furnished and the works
of art in their place, it did not occur to me that I was
in possession of more than could be gathered by any
student taking advantage of his acquired knowledge and
exercised taste. It took the scattering of most private
collections all over Europe to make me realize that mine
was one of the best remaining.
The library at I Tatti is, like Berenson himself, a sight to
see. It has a cool, ordered beauty. Recently, an American
young man who was paying a call on Berenson sampled some of
the volumes and found that inserted in them were reviews of
the books, in all the European languages, clipped at the
time they were published. It is a living library, because
these are the books that have educated B. B. Berenson
himself speaks of his library with tenderness. "The
gathering of these books is the only thing I have
accomplished in my life which gives me real satisfaction,"
he said to his visitor. "If a young man with moderate
equipment were to spend four years in this library, he would
emerge a cultivated gentleman." The visitor, suddenly nipped
by temptation, asked his host for a quick definition of
"moderate equipment." "Oh," said Berenson lightly, like one
who is diffident about dwelling on the obvious, "a fluent
knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Latin,
and Sanskrit, and some Hebrew, because the books are in all
these tongues." The American, who had only English, which
Berenson hadn't even mentioned, decided to become a
cultivated gentleman by a less exigent process.
Sitting in his library, Berenson, at eighty-six, is happy in
the knowledge that it is to be kept together for the benefit
of the students who will come after him. Probably those who
go there will pursue their studies with more tranquillity
than their benefactor did, for he was never very far from
the arena of art dealing, and that arena seethes with spite,
envy, and searing hatred. As he sat there through the years,
examining his photographs of paintings, reading his books,
and savoring the aesthetic pleasures provided by the Masters
on his walls, and as he took his walks, winter and summer,
at dawn and sunset on the hills overlooking Florence,
Berenson, with all his spiritual alertness, must have
detested the scents and stridencies of the jungle overseas,
and the sound of the padded prowlings of the insatiable
tiger who beat about in it, using his eyes, his sensibility,
and his name.
(This is the fourth of a series of articles on Lord
Duveen.) |
