Word: berensons
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After his death, two years later, only specialists continued to study his art, and they saw little in him but concessions to the better-liked painters of his time. Not until 1895 did Boston's Bernard Berenson make his own reputation as an art critic by remaking Lotto's as an artist...
Chastity & Chuckles. Far from being a follower, argued Berenson, Lotto was "a personal painter at a time when personality was fast getting to be of less account than conformity." Berenson praised his humor as so delicate that in the Triumph of Chastity (opposite, top), it escapes attention. True, Aphrodite and the scared little Eros "are fleeing before the fury of a female who evidently personifies Mrs. Grundy, but their innocent looks betray their belief that she has been seized by a sudden and unaccountable madness, for which they are in no way responsible...
...neither supremely original nor supremely powerful," Berenson concluded, "Lotto was at the least representative . . . of a very interesting minority." With delicate portraits, such as that of the young scholar (opposite, bottom), he "opens our eyes to the existence, in a time and in a country supposed to be wholly devoted to carnality and carnage, of gentle, sensitive people, who must have had many of our own social and ethical ideas, and been as much revolted by the crimes happening in their midst as we are by the horrors and scandals bursting out frequently among ourselves...
...bulky, overweight (5 ft. 11 in., 200 Ibs. plus) man with a saturnine eye and a well-established reputation for earthy humor. Taylor's friend, the famed old art critic Bernard Berenson, tells a story of Taylor in a New York elevator when a young woman passenger was pinched by the elevator boy. She shrieked. "I am pleased to note," said Taylor instantly and impassively, "that there is at least something still done by hand here...
Always Interested. In Italy, Muriel had her first son, Paul Jr. In Italy, too, she fell under the spell of the gilded intellectual and artistic set of pre-1914 Europe-Art Critic Bernard Berenson. Violinist Albert Spalding, Actress Eleonora Duse, Dilettante Mabel Dodge, and John Reed, who later glorified the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World, and now lies buried beneath the Kremlin wall...