DICTIONARY OF ART HISTORIANS
A Biographical Dictionary of Historic Scholars, Museum Professionals and Academic Historians of Art
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né Bernhard Valvrojenski
Date born: 1865
Place born: Butrimonys [Butrymanz] (Vilna), Lithuania
Date died: 1959
Place died: Settignano, Florence, Italy (Villa I Tatti)
Influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance employing connoisseurship; consultant to the major American museums and collectors in the early 20th century. Berenson was born to Albert (originally Alter) Valvrojenski and Julia (originally Eudice) Mickleshanski (Valvrojenski). His father emigrated to Boston from Lithuania with his family in 1875, changing their family name to "Berenson." Bernard Berenson was educated at the Latin School, Boston. A Jew by birth, he converted to Christianity and was baptized in 1885. He attended Harvard University, where he studied under Charles Eliot Norton, graduating with a B. A. in 1887. Berenson's classmates at Harvard included the other future men of cultural importance, including the cultural philosopher George Santayana (1863-1952), the art collector Charles A. Loeser (1864-1928) (both of whom Berenson tutored), the philosopher William James (1842-1910). Through his connections with Norton he met the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). Berenson used an initial trip to Europe, financed by Mrs Gardner and others, to educate himself in literature (he intended on becoming a novelist and critic). However his contact with original works of art in Europe changed his mind resolving to someday live in Italy and be a scholar of Italian art. He moved to Oxford, England, where he became part of the circle of the collector esthete Edward Perry "Ned" Warren (1860-1928). At Oxford he encountered another influential Renaissance scholar, Herbert Horne. Through Horne, Berenson met the art historian Jean Paul Richter. Richter urged Berenson to read the writings of Giovanni Morelli, who tremendously influenced Berenson's method. In 1889, he met the famous connoisseur/art historian Giovanni Cavalcasselle and began publishing various studies on art, using the connoisseurship approach to art based upon the writings of Morelli. 1890 was a watershed year for Berenson. He met Morelli personally (and the young art historian Adolfo Venturi, also present that day); in England he met a married woman, Mary Smith Costelloe, who subsequently left her husband and small children the following year to follow Berenson; he also began dealing in art, scouting pictures for Richter, the London dealer Otto Gutekunst (ca. 1865-after 1939) and Warren. Berenson acquired his first works as a dealer/facilitator (Impressionist works and a Piero di Cosimo) for his friend, the British collector James Burke, in 1892. His book Venetian Painters, largely a rewrite of Mary Berenson's notes, appeared in 1894. The book, tracing the history of Venetian painting over four centuries, became the first in a series of four studies on Italian schools (painting styles). Berenson stated his method in an 1894 essay, "The Rudiments of Connoisseurship (A Fragment)," which later appeared in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, Second Series of 1902. His brand of connoisseurship (so-called "scientific") was most clearly employed with the then unknown Venetian painter, Lorenzo Lotto, in Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism (1894); it became Berenson's manifesto of Morellian analysis. Berenson was purchasing for the American banker Theodore M. Davis as well as Mrs Gardner, acquiring pictures for the latter based upon a percentage of the total cost. The second of his Italian-school treatments, Florentine Painters, appeared in 1896, a clearer treatise of author's theory of the painterly analysis. Berenson used his critical eye to group paintings according to how he considered the artist handled, for example, surface texture (which Berenson called "tactile imagination") or the weight and volume which the painted