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2.THE BERENSONS INTELLECTUALS AND ART CRITICS
From Mary Berenson Diaries Villa I Tatti Harvard University Centre for Renaissance Studies Florence
The diaries that Mary Berenson (1864–1945) kept from 1879 until 1937 are preserved in the Berenson Library and Archive at Villa I Tatti, Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. In them, Mary recorded the travels she undertook with her second husband Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) to visit museums, churches and private collections. She also took notes on books, music and the people they met.
The correspondence between Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, enlightened collector and founder of the Isabella Stweart Gardner Museum in Boston, modelled on the style of the Venetian Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, she lived in and so greatly loved, is also for critical importance and interest. When Isabella Stewart Gardner agreed to sponsor the career of the aspiring young Bernard, neither dreamed that together they would build one of their country’s most impressive private collections of Italian Renaissance painting. Their letters exchange over four decades therefore offers a vivid portrait of their passionate interests, their perennial travels, and their liaisons with artists and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, including Wharton, Lippmann, Bernhardt, Sargent and Santayana. Mary Berenson becomes a correspondent after 1901.
East of Florence on the road to Settignano lies the village of Ponte a Mensola and on a small hill is the sixteen century Villa I Tatti. In a small chapel erected in the seventeenth century in front of the villa, two simple tomb slabs can be found. They are so inscribed: ‘Mary Berenson, born Philadelphia USA, 14 February 1864, died Settignano, March 29 1945’ and ‘Bernard Berenson, born Biturmansk, Lithuania, 26 June 1865, died Settignano, 6 October 1959’. Indeed, the conjunctions of the lives of these two extraordinary people constitutes a fascinating chapter in the intellectual history of American presence in Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Berenson was the son of a poor Jewish family, emigrés to America from the Russian Pale in Lithuania. An enfant prodige, he progressed through the public schools of Boston a year at the Boston University and the last three of his college education at Harvard. Supported on a European fellowship by friends who were interested in him, he absorbed philosophy and aesthetics in Paris and Oxford, and found his vocation for the connoisseurship of Italy Art in his first visit to Italy in the Spring 1888.