Word: berensons
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...Bernard Berenson...
...great "B.B." had been failing for more than a year. Visitors to his exquisite villa near Florence reported that he seemed curled up on himself, listless, sere, like an autumn leaf in the boisterous wind of death. Last week Berenson's surviving sister, his doctor and his longtime companion, Nicky Mariano, were at the bedside, trying to ease the ancient connoisseur through a painful throat infection. Smoothing his pillow, Nicky asked if Berenson was all right. Unable to reply, Berenson nodded and drifted off to sleep, and death...
Ascetic in Reverse. He had been one of the world's best talkers, in all the major tongues of the West. Whistler's butterfly with the scorpion tail perfectly described Berenson's conversation: light, colorful, quick, acid. His books (Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Rumor and Reflection, etc.) are comparatively second-drawer Berenson, but they will live. They reveal an elaborate, prickly mind, of melancholy cast. Berenson's chief object was to lose himself in what he saw and liked. Brought up on Walter Pater and inspired by Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard, he practiced...
...Berenson's kind of sacrifice required a lot of money. It meant extensive travel to look at art: it meant building an art library of close to 50,000 volumes together with a now priceless art collection. It required many servants, researchers, a Tuscan villa with a vast formal garden in which to "taste the air." Hearing that he had his watch warmed to body temperature by the butler every morning before he strapped it on his wrist, impatient folk inclined to dismiss Berenson as a lucky hedonist. But he was really an ascetic in reverse who worked untiringly...
...understand," Pusey continued, "that he has left his estate and a major part of his personal property to the University. We are deeply grateful." It seems certain that long and involved negotiations will be made by the University with Berenson's executors before direct University administration will begin...