Word: berenson
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum had raised a shout of joy last January over its purchase of a 15th Century painting of Saint Sebastian. Attributed to Andrea del Castagno, and authenticated by Renaissance Expert Bernard Berenson, it was one of the best pictures the museum had acquired in years...
...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...
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...
...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...
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...