to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Berenson's final books included Alberto Sani (1950), Caravaggio (1953), and Piero della Francesca in 1954. Ever the conservative, Berenson disapproved of modern art, viewing it as a decline of form. His 1954 The Arch of Constantine, or, The Decline of Form took the same approach to the famous late classical monument. He died at Villa I Tatti in 1959 and is interred with Mary at a chapel on the grounds of I Tatti. The actress Marisa Berenson (b. 1946) is distantly related to Berenson (the daughter of his second cousin, Robert). His brother-in-law was the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872-1970).
Berenson was the single-most influential art historian in the United States for most of the twentieth century. His writings were so famous that his four major titles, Venetian Painting in America, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting, and Studies in Medieval Painting were referred to as the "four gospels" by many English-speaking art historians. His connoisseurship-approach to art history clarified and solidly attributed much of Italian Renaissance art history, founded on the principles beginning with Karl Friedrich Rumohr through Giovanni Cavalcaselle and ultimately to Morelli. Berenson's method was most clearly stated in his 1902 essay (though written in the 1890's), Rudiments of Connoisseurship. As an historian dedicated to the object (as opposed to documentary art history, iconography, social art history, etc.), he centered the emerging discipline. Berenson's approach focused on determining the authenticity of art works rather than constructing histories in which art was created. His thrust proved particularly useful to art dealers and collectors, with whom Berenson has been criticized for having too close a relationship. Berenson's major books are essentially lists of authenticated paintings by Berenson with introductory essays. He never altered the text in the numerous editions of his books, confident his analysis was comprehensive, despite embarrassments such as his low assessment of Sassetta. Instead, subsequent editions featured his corrections and supplements to his lists of attributions. Haughty and extremely class-conscious, perhaps because of his modest upbringings and American heritage in a European-dominated field, Berenson cultivated feuds; his personal correspondence shows that he viewed contemporary art historians as either "friends" or "enemies." The opposing camps of the traditional British art historians, led by S. Arthur Strong and R. Langton Douglas and the "Berenson-ites," manifested themselves in nasty reviews by one another in the pages of the Burlington Magazine and elsewhere. Berenson had no students per se, but mentored many scholars to various degrees, including the later director of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, John Walker and Harvard professor Sydney J. Freedberg, Clark (director of the National Gallery, London), and John Pope-Hennessey all of whom studied at I Tatti. I Tatti and its contents were willed to Harvard University and are now the Biblioteca Berenson and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Villa I Tatti. His correspondence is housed at the Biblioteca Berenson.
Intellectually, Berenson considered artworks sufficient evidence from which to deduce a biography of the artist. This radical stance, that selfhood and morphology are one, what Gabriele Guercio called "a self within the process of signifcation."
Home Country: Lithuania/United States/Italy
Sources: [the literature on Berenson is legion. See generally, by category:] analysis: Schapiro, Meyer. "Mr. Berenson's Values." Encounter 16 (January 1961): 57-65; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 47, 43 n.84, 45 n. 93; Brown, J. Carter, and Kiel, Hanna. Looking at Pictures with Bernard Berenson. New York: Abrams, 1974; Brown, David Alan. Berenson and the Connoisseurship of Italian