Word: berensons
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...since 1904 has there been a proper survey of Sienese Renaissance painting outside Siena. Not even the enthusiasms of Bernard Berenson and his heir Pope-Hennessy could give a Sienese artist like Sassetta the popularity of a Florentine like Botticelli. Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence...
...this way, of course, but not every one of them commands the interest of strangers. In these letters, Wharton does. And for the rest of the time, she is an incisive guide through the glories and vicissitudes of her own amazing life. She knew everyone, from Henry James, Bernard Berenson and Teddy Roosevelt to Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Kenneth Clark. She usually remained mute about her generosities with money and time, but the helpful annotating of Biographer Lewis and his wife Nancy fills in many gaps. She read extensively and exhaustively in a number of languages; in one letter...
...Berenson conducted himself with what he called an "invincible passion for independence." This is not to say he achieved it. Colin Simpson's Artful Partners concedes that B.B.'s spirit may have been willing but that his flesh was weak. The evidence is incriminating: a secret 1912 contract with Duveen that reads like a textbook on conflict of interest, and a clandestine "X ledger," which details the artful partners' profits, losses and restoration expenses. There are also numerous examples that suggest Berenson relaxed his standards or changed his mind to accommodate Duveen and his brothers, who, as Simpson writes, were...
...second and concluding volume of Ernest Samuels' biography of the connoisseur presents a larger, more complex picture. Berenson's scholarship is treated with greater respect than in Simpson's jolly romp through the mud. Samuels ascribes the controversial changes of attributions to advancements in knowledge and techniques, and points out that Berenson usually covered himself by stressing the tentative nature of his craft. Duveen is brushed in as a necessary evil that his aging colleague came to regret. "I cannot tell you," Berenson wrote to his wife Mary, "what loathing all that part of my past and present inspires...
...books seems remote from history. Mellons, Fricks, Altmans and Rockefellers vie for Giorgiones, Titians, Bellinis and Botticellis, while offstage monarchies disintegrate, nation-states aggressively come of age, and men are pulped in the trenches. There is a certain amount of glee in reading about rich innocents abroad who retained Berenson as an art consultant without knowing the extent of his ties to Duveen and other dealers. If the "squillionaires," as Berenson called them, did not always get what they paid for, they at least got royal treatment...